CSOs reflecting culture: Nicaraguan Creole cultural resilience and its parallels in community resilience

• In Event: Resilient voices: gender, race, and place across the African diaspora

Proposal

Intro: Relevance to CIES and the African Diaspora SIG
Maintaining a diversity of cultures is important to the holistic education of youth. Engaging culture in education supports diversity and important ways of knowing that are absent from formal, state-sponsored education. In this paper, cultural resilience of Afro-descendant Creoles in Nicaragua is mirrored by youth-serving civil society organizations (CSOs) in the community; the parallel represents a potential model for increased engagement of culture in schools in order to better serve marginalized groups.
In this paper and presentation, I propose to study the sustainability of culture and link it to a paradigm that has not yet built its niche in the study of comparative and international education: cultural resilience. Systems and bureaucracies are adept at invisibilizing non-dominant cultures and marginalizing their peoples, even when official policies seek the opposite. I will present a context where official policy suggests Afro-descendant empowerment while implementation and practice in schools falls short. Within this context, however, there are CSOs that mirror the structures of cultural resilience that are evidenced by Afro-descendants and engage parallels for community resilience. These paired resiliencies support sustainability of culture and community (Author, 2018). The analysis of these comparisons will suggest potential for education systems to continue the process of mirroring culture in order to better engage youth who ware currently marginalized from the curricula and practices in education.

Research questions and theoretical framework.
This analysis builds on two research questions with a shared theoretical framework.
RQ1:What is the foundation of Creole cultural resilience for youth in Bluefields?
RQ2: In what ways do local organizations and advocates support the formation and development of community resilience?

Across academic disciplines, resilience is presented as a process that is seen over time with three features. First, there are capacities within the system or individual; these are developed intentionally to foster resilience or the result of normal development. The second feature necessary for resilience is a challenge. The challenge presents a vulnerability, it creates a threat to disrupt normal functioning and may impact multiple components of the system or individual. And, finally, resilience requires adaptation in response to the challenge. This adaptation draws on resources present in the first feature and responds to the challenge of the second (Buikstra et al., 2010; Crane, 2010; Masten, 2001; Ungar, 2012; Wilson, 2013; Zautra, Hall, & Murray, 2008). This paper relies on cultural resilience and community resilience as a foundation. The analysis centers around links between the two in the case of Bluefields, Nicaragua.
I draw on a concept of cultural resilience that connects human geography and youth development in indigenous contexts. Rotarangi and Stephenson focus establish ties between the Māori community’s culture and their land, “The term “cultural resilience” has emerged to refer to this continuity of a co-constituted set of long-term relationships between the cultural identity of a people and the set of social-ecological relationships within which this identity was founded.” (2014, p. 27). Afro-descendant Creoles in Bluefields, Nicaragua is similarly tied to the Caribbean Coast. Likewise, in seeking to understand resilience among aboriginal youth, Fleming and Ledogar (2008) draw on Healey’s (2006) findings from Bolivia that emphasize cultural resilience and community as linked to one another. These scholars identify cultural resilience as, “the capacity of a distinct community or cultural system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to retain key elements of structure and identity that preserve its distinctness.” (Healey, 2006 in Fleming & Ledogar, 2008, p. 3). Thus, the cultural resilience that I refer to in this paper shares previously-identified characteristics: cultural identity with ties to geographic and social history and distinction from dominant cultures, even following adaptations.
As with cultural resilience, community resilience researchers are drawn from many disciplines. Magis (2010) offers a definition of community resilience that supports this analysis by linking community resilience to individuals and to local resources:
Community resilience is the existence, development, and engagement of community resources by community members to thrive in an environment characterized by change, uncertainty, unpredictability, and surprise. Members of resilient communities intentionally develop personal and collective capacity that they engage to respond to and influence change, to sustain and renew the community, and to develop new trajectories for the communities’ future. (Magis, 2010, p. 402)
According to Magis (2010) and others (see, for example, Berkes & Ross, 2013; Brennan, 2006; Chaskin, 2008), community resilience is an active pursuit of engaging extant resources. In this paper, the findings that respond to the second research question (RQ2) highlight these actions as well as the resources that they require. The RQ2 findings are parallels of Creole cultural components. For example, just as Creole cultural resilience is manifested through networks of caretaking, so the CSOs that serve youth in Bluefields also meet their social and capital needs through networks. Further parallels will be presented and analyzed with regard to their meaning for other systems in Bluefields and beyond.

Contributions to the field
As indicated (above), this study builds upon the work of scholars in diverse fields. Although the wellbeing of marginalized, indigenous youth has been studied through the lens of cultural resilience, the focus has not yet been applied to linguistically distinct, marginalized Afro-descendant youth. Nor have other researchers extended community resilience studies with a focus on culture and youth to the context of Latin America and the Caribbean. As Creoles in Bluefields face systemic oppression and invizibilization in school systems, sustainability of their culture is at stake. This paper builds on the findings of a critical ethnography and links organizations in Bluefields to the cultural resilience of Afro-descendant Creoles. The goal of these projects is to build findings that can be shared with the community, in the interest of their sustainable, socially just development, particularly with regard to the expansion and implementation of extant policy that honors indigenous and Afro-descendant people.

Author

• Erica B. Sausner, Penn State University