Coloniality within a Revolutionary Project: Historizing the 1980 Nicaraguan Literacy Campaign.

• In Event: The hidden side of emancipation: Historicizing well-intentioned educational projects.

Abstract

1. Objectives
The study focuses on how four former literacy teachers (brigadistas) and militants of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) grappled with being protagonists of a homogenizing, albeit discursively emancipatory, project. The study examines how the Nicaraguan Literacy Campaign in 1980 (the Crusade), while rooted in liberation, also replicated colonial hierarchies, centering on a Western, ahistorical view of knowledge, power, and the political subject.

2. Theoretical Framework
The research draws on social movement learning theory (Foley, 1999; Choudry, 2015), sociocultural theories of literacy (Scribner, 1984; Vygotsky, 1978), and social pragmatism (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Mische, 2022). It also engages with the concept of cultural framing (Williams, 1977; Wertsch, 2008) and collective memory to analyze how revolutionary narratives shape identity as public intellectuals and forms of public pedagogy (Giroux, 2004; Holford, 1995). The discussion of these theories conceptualizes struggle as a reflective process that allows individuals to understand the contradictory logics with which they undertake their actions, draw lessons from these tensions, and reframe the narratives that make meaning of their past experiences.

3. Methods and Data Sources
The study combines narrative inquiry, oral history, and critical discourse analysis. Abductive reasoning (Timmermans & Tavory, 2022) guided the iterative analysis. Data include semi-structured interviews with four ex-brigadistas (three rounds each) and multimodal archival artifacts such as government pamphlets, literacy booklets, and songs from the Crusade. These materials were drawn from public and private archives and analyzed through content and image analysis to reveal the emotional and ideological framing of literacy work.

4. Findings
The Crusade's materials, such as hymns, images, and literacy booklets, portrayed the brigadistas as heroic bearers of light tasked with eradicating “incultura” among peasants. The Crusade’s framing of “incultura” and “darkness” to signal ignorance delegitimized alternative epistemologies, oral traditions, and campesino worldviews. Through the “liberation through literacy” narrative, the Crusade became a homogenizing project, centered on one form of knowledge (alphabetic literacy) and one version of political subjecthood (the revolutionary, literate citizen). The narratives within this framework shaped the young brigadistas' experiences as they tried to embody the values of the Revolution and their role as “bearers of the light.” In doing so, they faced the contradiction of teaching literacy from a position of power while also learning from the campesinos how to deconstruct the same colonial logic and hierarchies underlying the Crusade. The struggles inherent in these contradictions would later become sources of knowledge that informed their views on education and also reframed and challenged the FSLN’s reified narratives.

5. Significance
This study contributes to the literature on social movement learning, lifelong learning, and the sociology of memory by highlighting how emancipatory projects, such as the Crusade, often rely on colonial logics to legitimize homogeneous nation-state politics through education. The study also highlights the pedagogical power of individual and collective struggle as a source of reflection to challenge refied narratives of such projects and a source of lifelong transformative learning to sustain democratic values.

Author

• Rafael Meza Duriez, University of California - Berkeley