Afro-Nicaraguan Autonomy as a Social Practice: Post-Recognition Politics and the Repressive State

• In Event: Reframing Autonomy: Decolonizing Practice in Indigenous and Afrodescendant Communities

Abstract

Afro-descendant people from the Rama-Kriol Territory in southeastern Nicaragua won formal recognition of their ancestral lands from the Sandinista state in 2009. Recognition afforded an attenuated administrative autonomy as community people continued to live under counter-narcotics military occupation and the state still routinely intervened in local affairs via new systems of autonomous territorial government. Moreover, communities quickly discovered that they were still vulnerable to dispossession when the state joined forces with a Chinese infrastructure firm to develop the Nicaraguan Interoceanic Grand Canal on their lands in 2013. As a result, post-recognition communities have been living under a state of siege brought on by a militarized state in league with transnational capital. As the crisis in Nicaragua devolves into intensified state violence and repression, community people have expressed their support for the opposition movement in part due to the false promise of formal multicultural recognition.
This paper examines why autonomous activism remains such a vital political force for Afro-Nicaraguans from Monkey Point despite the violent and disabling forces that besiege the community. I focus on the shared values and practices of daily life that support autonomous mobilization and how they persist over time. In these everyday spheres of self-valorization, community people draw on a reservoir of political knowledge and oppositional subjectivity grounded in a black diasporic experience and cultural practice. I argue that much of the radical potential behind autonomous politics stems from these intimate spheres of social life, which remain peripheral in most studies of multicultural politics.

Author

• Jennifer Goett, Michigan State University