Eric Canin, Ph.D.

Department of Anthropology

California State University, Fullerton

ecanin@fullerton.edu

Draft manuscript Feb. 12, 2001, for Anthropology 305:

Do not cite or quote without permission of the author

 

            MINGÜITO, MANAGUA’S LITTLE SAINT:

CHRISTIAN BASE COMMUNITIES AND POPULAR RELIGION IN URBAN NICARAGUA

 

Santo Domingo de Guzman

El Cacique Mayor (Indian Chief)

Santo Domingo Festival

Myths appear to us as timeless stories, their mythic power and lessons seeming to apply to the present as they did to the past.  Similarly, rituals appear as ever repetitive actions, reassuring us that stability exists at the core of our changing lives and the external world.  But do these appearances point to a central core of meaning at the heart of myth and ritual, or are they managed by a power system in an effort to instill “faith” in that very system; does religion arise from truth or power?  This paper will not so much resolve this question as look at a ritual, a saint’s festival, and the myth of how it originated, in historical context.  The Santo Domingo fiesta is a ritual of rebellion against the social order, but I intend to show its relation to actual rebellion against the social order, the Sandinista Revolution.  In turn, I intend to show how various dominant political and religious actors have attempted to control and use the ritual for their own ends, and how participants in the fiesta have resisted these attempts at appropriation.

            From the 1979 revolution that overthrew the dictatorship of Anastacio Somoza to the present, Nicaragua has been undergoing profound change.  This change has not been unidirectional, as the fortunes of the poor have deteriorated after a brief improvement in the wake of the revolutionary triumph, and as political power has shifted from Sandinista socialism to Violeta Chamorro’s neo-liberalism to Arnoldo Alemán’s return, in tempered form, to the strong-armed authoritarianism of the past.

            Amidst these changes, the inhabitants of the capital city Managua, a vast majority of whom identify themselves as Catholics, look toward their religion as a source of solace, refuge, explanation, or social action.  Unlike other revolutionary regimes inspired by Marxism, the Sandinista government during the 1980s did not seek to curtail popular religious expression despite incidents and tensions with the institutional Catholic Church.  Indeed, the Sandinistas not only tolerated religious worship, rituals and celebrations, they even promoted such events as an annual contest of altars dedicated to the Virgin Mary’s Immaculate Conception.

            This apparent collaboration between religion and revolution owes partly to the fact that many Sandinistas regarded themselves as Christians, and moreover, three ministerial posts were held by Catholic priests.  Many Nicaraguans became revolutionaries through their participation in Christian base communities (comunidades eclesiales de base, CEBs).  These small groups began in 1966 in response to the Catholic Church’s historic shift from support for the status quo to an “option for the poor” and concern for social justice.  They took up the call to promote social, political and economic development at the local level.  During the insurrection leading to the 1979 revolution, several CEBs supported the political overthrow of the dictatorship and during the 1980s, participated in the reconstruction of Nicaragua literacy, health, nutrition, and economic credit programs.  CEBs, priests, religious institutes and foreign activists together make up the “Church of the poor,” a religious movement within the Catholic Church.  More than merely coordinate these development efforts, this movement has sought to forge participatory democracy in the hierarchical Catholic Church as well as build a revolution where Christian ideals of community service, brotherhood, and faith have a central place.

            Christian base communities and the Church of the poor have had to deal with a dilemma in their treatment of popular religion:  to what extent are they authentic expression of traditional culture, and to what extent are they the product of the old, paternalistic Church’s attempt to control the faithful by focusing their attention away from poverty and suffering in this world and toward miracles and salvation in the next world.  The remainder of this paper will focus of the Santo Domingo fiesta, the Church of the poor’s attempt to reinterpret the festival and its myth as “popular religion of liberation,” and two incidents in which the saint was “stolen” in 1961 and 1991 that demonstrate that “truth” and “power” follow a popular logic that resists easy appropriation by religious or political structures.

 The Fiesta of Santo Domingo

            Each year on August 1, tens of thousands of people accompany the diminutive 20 centimeter statue of Santo Domingo on a procession from the Las Sierras church on the outskirts of Managua to the church of Santo Domingo in the capital's center.  A core of several hundred people march and dance along the route to fulfill a promise they made to the brown saint, affectionately called "Mingüito."  They are "paying" the saint for a miraculous cure or protection from illness.  Dozens walk on their knees near the end of the journey into the church and up to the altar where the saint rests. These images of slow-moving masses of the faithful invoke for the poet Pablo Antonio Cuadra the dual, mestizo character of Nicaraguan processions in the pilgrimages of the Spanish to saints' shrines and of Indians to volcano gods, prompting him to declare that "Nicaraguan faith is processional" (Cuadra 1971:72).

            My own participation in the procession in 1989 and 1991 yielded the observation that while faith was processional, it was not necessarily orderly.  Far exceeding these promesantes are tens of thousands of people, a great many drinking clear rum from plastic bags (which they call agua, or water) as they sell goods from pushcarts, dance, sing, play music, and fight.  In a world momentarily turned upside down, the poor own the streets, especially bands of ragged teenagers rebelliously running amok coating everybody in sight with a layer of black grease.  Good Christians dress as devils or pagan Indians (some wearing the long feathered headdresses of North American Indians).  Gay men come out and display open affection and transvestites swagger, to whistles and cheers, whereas on other occasions they perhaps would be met with scorn and derision.  Frail old men and women dressed in elaborate outfits featuring bull horns dance as if possessed and charge the crowd at unexpected intervals.  As Lancaster notes, small signs of reversals and inversions permeate the fiesta:  male and female, conqueror and conquered, good and evil (1988:44).

            The Santo Domingo fiesta, like other carnivals and festivals in Europe and Latin America, is a ritual of inversion and rebellion, at the same time expressing dissent and acknowledging social and cultural conventions within a ritual context.[1]  Bakhtin (1984:10) notes how European carnival "celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order" through such subversive elements as ritual humor. Nicaraguan anthropologist Milagros Palma notes that rural fiestas are like "tranquil revolutions":

Rural life in Nicaragua is organized by means of the everyday relation with the patron saint.  This silent cult is the germ of the large popular demonstrations of the delirious mobs that spring up at all times of the year in paths, villages, barrios, and cities.  The carnivalesque processions with dance troops and street theater constitute a species of sacralization of popular identity.  These demonstrations are true tranquil revolutions where saints, devils, and imps and other imaginary personages drive traditional values, releasing the brakes in an apparent popular anarchy where we live the sensation of true liberation from the social order.  (Palma, 1988, p. 23)

 

Yet, beyond merely functioning as an "escape valve" for dissent against the status quo, this ritual rebellion has exploded into actual rebellion within the fiesta at specific historical moments that have preserved a historically forged culture of rebellion.  More than providing the sensation of liberation, rituals such as the Santo Domingo fiesta provided the framework, if not the material conditions, for the transformation of the social order, as I will show.

            Between this bullanguera (riotous) procession to the Managua church and the return ten days later to the countryside, revelers take advantage of the make-shift cities surrounding the churches to drink, disco dance, gamble, buy and sell sex, watch displays of machismo of the bullfight arena, and partake in all manner of other such dubiously “religious” activities.  The scene is only slightly more solemn within the churches where, amidst the devout approaching the altar on their knees, people push and shove to get to the saint's image or light candles.  At one point in the 1991 celebration, a fight broke out involving the shattering of glass bottles reminiscent of a barroom brawl.  When the saint entered the church, cries of "viva Santo Domingo" were intermingled with the cries of people being trampled and shouts of "stop that man, he stole my purse."

            Santo Domingo is popularly known in Managua as the patron saint of alegría, or joyfulness.  Some believe him to have been a doctor who treated the sick regardless of their social class or ability to pay, a mortal healer of the poor who has been transformed into a saint of the poor (Lancaster op. cit.:44).  More to the point (as a reeling celebrant confided to me), some call him the saint of drunks and sinners.  He is not, however, the official patron saint of Managua, but has usurped this status from the comparatively placid Santo Santiago, whose cult has all but lapsed into obscurity.

            Santo Domingo de Guzmán, an austere 13th century missionary, ironically made his mark combating a heretical sect in Southern France, earning the epithet "hound of God" (Farmer 1978), which contrasts markedly with the saint of joyousness that the Nicaraguans celebrate today.  Either as the miraculous saint who practiced Western medicine or the saint of vice who persecuted heretics, Santo Domingo's life and legend augment the inversions that permeate his celebration.

            The day-long march and fiesta, the saint's return to the city's outskirts on August 10, and a series of traditional events in the interim continued uninterrupted during the popular insurrection in the late 1970's and the 11 years of the Sandinista revolution.  Although some in the socialist Sandinista government regarded the celebration of Santo Domingo as a pagan rite, an ‘opiate of the people,’ the official and widely accepted policy of the Sandinistas was to respect the cultural traditions of the people.[2]

            The Sandinista mayor of Managua, Carlos Carrión, helped each year with the preparations and took his place on the float on which the saint was raised during the last few miles of the procession.  Though Sandinista police patrolled the route in abundance, they rarely intervened except to curtail the frequent drunken fights.  They made no effort to stop the consumption of alcohol, although glass bottles were confiscated for safety reasons.  Some say that vices, such as gambling and prostitution, have been under control, if not curtailed, since the Revolution (Arnaiz Quintana 1990:143).  Not only did the Marxist-inspired Sandinistas tolerate this kind of popular religious practice, they have sought to legitimate their authority among traditional Catholics by participating in some of the ritual acts.  Even though the poet Pablo Antonio Cuadra identifies with the conservative right, the Sandinistas would agree with him that along with faith, "Nicaraguan politics is processional" (op. cit.:75).

 Christian Base Communities and Popular Religion

            Even as the Sandinistas tolerated and even participated in the festivities, their religious allies, the Christian base communities seemed to all but ignore the Santo Domingo celebration.  Hardly a member with whom I spoke admitted to marching in the procession, much less to fulfilling a promise to the saint.  Several stated that the bands of drunks and youths performing pranks made the fiesta too dangerous to attend.  Traditional Catholics echoed this concern that the celebration had devolved into a drunken revel.  At most, members would stand on the sidelines to view the parade as it passed by their barrio.  Doña Adilia, who ran CEB 14 de Junio's "Olla de Soya" at that time, sold soy cakes on the side of the road.  She regarded the fiesta as an opportunity to spread the word about the nutritional value of soy, and how it could be incorporated into the Nicaraguan diet if properly prepared, as well as to raise funds for the CEB project for malnourished children.  The religious aspect of the event was for her a secondary consideration, and she regarded it largely as a cultural expression.

            This image of the CEBs standing on the sidelines in the midst of a wave of popular religious expression presents a problem.  It seems to contradict the stated precepts of their theology of liberation and pastoral action, the accompaniment of the poor, by essentially ignoring the poor's traditional activities. 

            This contradiction mirrors the ambivalence that the CEBs hold towards traditional popular religion.  Although many elements of popular religion possess alienating features, mystifying the actual relations of power in society, other elements are said to contain "seeds of the Word"[3] that express an inherent resistance to domination.  In Marx's terminology, religion is at once "an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering" (Marx in Tucker 1978:54, italics in text).  For CEB members, this protest remains beyond the conscious level of most believers and within the confines of a sacred space and time prescribed by the dominant religious class.  Most of the year, the image of Santo Domingo lies hidden behind the altar of Las Sierritas church on the outskirts of Managua.  For a 10 day period, the saint is taken out of the temple away from the control of institutional Church authority and belongs to the people.  The rest of the year, the pronouncements and ritual acts of the Church hierarchy carry considerable weight among the population.

            The leadership of Managua's Christian base communities slowly began to realize the contradiction between "respect" for cultural tradition and actual participation in these traditions.  During meetings of the CEB coordinating body before the Santo Domingo fiesta in August 1991, participants remembered how, in the early years of the revolution, they wished that some revolutionary edict could get rid of the alienating and mystifying popular religious practices by which, one participant implied, the Church maintains a stranglehold on the poor.  Now they realized that this attitude of revolutionary "political correctness" had in fact served to alienate them from the people, and that they had not done enough to accompany them in their religious practices and their faith.  Indeed, the institutes in Managua associated with the Church of the poor, particularly the Antonio Valdivieso Center, as well as the Sandinista Ministry of Culture, has been a primary force in salvaging, preserving and documenting cultural traditions.  They have attempted to give these traditions a liberationist spin, emphasizing the strength of Nicaraguan culture (as a nationalist construct of local traditions), how it has been able to resist the material and symbolic domination of capitalism, and how it provided the conditions for the Revolution to occur.  But cultural theory had eclipsed cultural practice with regard to popular religion, especially in the context where war and economic crisis had favored a more materialist practice in the form of  local development projects.

 Santo Domingo in Myth and History

            At the August 1991 meeting mentioned above, Sister Margarita of the CEB coordinadora's equipo animador ("animating team") read from a illustrated pamphlet which related, in common language, a version of the origin myth of the Santo Domingo fiesta, as well as the actual life of Santo Domingo de Guzmán.  The “comic book” had been produced several years earlier by the Antonio Valdivieso Ecumenical Center and sold at its bookstore.  Now this material characteristic of revolutionary popular education,[4] combining word and image in a popular medium relevant to people's lives, served as the basis for an educational campaign among CEB members.

            By intertwining myth with history, an oral history of rebellion in the fiesta as well as the documented history of the saint, the CEBs have appropriated the cultural tradition of a myth in order to show the liberating potential of popular religion.  Myths are strongly structured stories that resolve logical contradictions in human social life (Lévi-Strauss 1963:229).  However, I regard these structures as more social and than innate in humans, and the contradictions that myths resolve change with changes in the social formation.  Myths "operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact" (Lévi-Strauss 1969:12), but the material conditions and historical moment in which they live affect how myths operate.  For example, the myth of a healing saint may express the human powerlessness to cure epidemic disease in one period, and a protest against an alienating (or inadequate) medical system in another.  The relation between illness and cure in this myth may point a way toward spiritual as well as physical salvation, or it may indicate a practical alternative to unsuccessful medical procedures.

            The relation between myth and historical conditions is dynamic.  A myth, such as the origin of a saint's fiesta, gathers around it remembered historical events from specific fiesta celebrations that enhance its significance.  In turn, events such as fiestas, and revolutions, are viewed by the participants through the cultural filter of myth, as reenactments of the mythic story (cf. Sahlins 1981).

            The significance of history for the Christian base communities lies in their reading of the sacred history encoded in the Bible and in popular tradition as the unfolding struggle and eventual triumph of the poor against oppression within history.[5]  Christ died on the cross for his commitment to the poor, so that he could serve as an example of sacrifice in the poor's struggle for liberation.  In addition, their analysis of actual social condition shows the continued oppression of the poor as rooted in their ignorance of their own history of struggle as much as economic marginalization.  Thus, the notion promulgated by Somoza that Augusto Sandino (from whom the Sandinistas took their name) was a cutthroat bandit, obscured the fact that in the 1920’s and 1930’s he led an army of poor peasants fighting for land and sovereignty.  Liberation is achieved through a self-conscious awareness of a people's history and culture, as well as owning their means of production and reproduction.

            CEB members view themselves as pastoral agents acting as mediators who, through education and by example, endeavor to accompany and teach the poor majority that they are conscious subjects of their own destiny.[6]  They serve as catalysts, but the poor themselves must, according to theologian Pablo Richard, "break the mechanisms of alienation which have invaded their religious consciousness and bring about the advance from a popular religion of resistance to a popular religion of struggle" (1985:21).  Contrary to members of millenarian movements, they endeavor to teach the poor to actively work for material and spiritual liberation in this world, rather than wait for the shadowy promise of salvation in the next.  In this context, myth is not a timeless story, revealing part of a universal moral code, or a quaint tale displaying the common people's idiosyncratic traditions, views that the Church hierarchy tends to take, depending on the "official" status of the myth in Catholic dogma.  Rather, for the Church of the poor, myths are exemplary tales which occur at determinate points in the historical past yet still have resonance for the present.

            Here I provide a synopsis of the illustrated pamphlet version of the myth.[7]

                        In the mid 17th century there lived a poor charcoal maker named Vincente Aburto.  One day when he was out chopping wood, he spotted a black wood tree which was ideal for making charcoal.  On the first swing of his ax he struck a hard object in the trunk which turned out to be a sculpted image of a tiny brown saint.  He took the saint to the priest of the Vera Cruz church in Managua who identified it as the image of Santo Domingo and placed it on a mantle in the church.

                        A few days later Vincente returned to the forest to collect firewood, and once again he found the saint's image in the same tree trunk.  He then rushed to the priest and inquired, "padrecito, why have you brought me the santito again?"  The shocked priest replied that he had not and then discovered that the saint was missing from the altar of the locked church.

                        This phenomenon was repeated three times.

                        Thus the priest told Vincente that this was a sign from the saint to the people that on August 1, the day he was discovered, they should carry the saint from its home in the outskirts of Managua to the capital in a joyous procession accompanied by popular music.

             This tale, the origin myth of Managua's Santo Domingo fiesta, reflects the ambivalence of the encounter between the European conquerors and the conquered Americans.  The 17th century marked the wide diffusion of saints' cults in Latin America, and their fiestas, through the missionary activity of religious orders, and their attempt to impose strict Christian religious practices on the native populations (Arnaiz Quintana op. cit.:51).  The story follows a literary form, the returning saint, well known in Europe and widespread in Latin America.[8]  In another version of the myth, the saint thwarted the priest's wish to bring the image to the capital by growing heavier at each step of the journey (Palma 1988:92).  Although the priest had authority, the saint, comprising both foreign and indigenous elements, was in control.

            The 17th century colonial encounter also signified an increase in mestizo populations and socio-cultural forms.  The peasant Vincente Aburto also possesses a dual mestizo character, at once the mystified seeker of the guidance of colonial religious authority, and at the same time one of many discoverers of "miracle-yielding saints," an Indian "who is chosen by history to provide the civilized and conquering race with a miraculous icon" (Taussig 1987:189).  Even the chop of his ax further sanctifies the image by releasing its miraculous power:  the statue has a cut in its head that is believed to possess curative powers if touched.  In yet another version of the myth, Vincente encountered the saint while trying to find a bark remedy for his sick daughter, and "a brown image appeared in the groove cut in the trunk of the tree announcing that the little girl had been cured" (Palma op. cit.:91).  Subsequently, the saint supposedly cured numerous people, establishing his ‘medical credentials.’

            After the presentation at the base community coordinator's meeting by Sister Margarita, the participants held a discussion regarding the significance of the Santo Domingo myth in establishing the "people of God's" identity as represented by the poor mestizo peasant.  This discussion evolved in a political context where, after the defeat of the Sandinistas in the 1990 elections, the Church of the poor shared a credibility gap with the revolutionary party.  They now undertook an attempt to better understand the needs, interests, traditions and religiosity of the poor.[9]  The participants at the meeting arrived at three conclusions concerning what the myth reveals about Nicaraguan popular culture.  First, the tiny brown saint, referred to affectionately with a diminutive suffix as "Mingüito," is of the people, and wants to be with the people.  Second, the saint was discovered by a poor, faithful mestizo peasant, not the white urban priest, and in fact most Managuans are mestizos and trace their cultural roots to the countryside.  Third, the people express their devotion to the saint in their own manner with their own cultural traditions.  If this includes drunken revelry, so be it.  But more importantly, "in their own manner" points up the fact that the people are autonomous actors who not only had the potential for defiance and rebellion, as in the 1961 theft of the saint (see below), but who were also capable of a revolution in 1979.

            Still, if identity and rebellion were integral to the myth, the base community members felt that it lacked a sense of what the people stand for.  Their solution was to depict the saint as a human who devoted his life to the poor rather than an otherworldly dispenser of salves and salvation.  Thus, after the myth, the pamphlet goes on to depict the life of Santo Domingo de Guzmán, the 13th century founder of the Dominican order of preachers, who left the comfortable life of the noble Spanish clergy to work among the poor.  That this work involved complicity in the suppression of the Albigensian heretics of Southern France is alluded to but not emphasized.  Neither does it mention the role of Dominicans in the Spanish Inquisition.  Rather, the last section of the pamphlet highlights the Dominican defenders of the Indians, "Sons of Santo Domingo in Latin America":  Fray Bartolome de las Casas and Fray Antonio Valdivieso, third bishop of Nicaragua and the namesake of the religious center that produced the pamphlet.  The saint is associated with some of the most powerful figures in the history of liberation in Nicaragua.

            Nevertheless, the pamphlet ends on a note, not of austerity or joy, tragedy or farce, but of earnest conviction:  Santo Domingo "lived his Christian faith preaching among the poor and incarnating the gospels in the new social order that arose in his era.  He is an example for us" (CAV n.d.:15).  It characterizes this new order, the collapse of the feudal system and the increasing exploitation of the poor underway during the 13th century, as parallel to the conditions of late capitalism that gave rise to the revolution of 1979 in Nicaragua.  Despite the vastly different circumstances of these new orders, the pamphlet depicts a quasi-mythical parallel to the past, as the CEBs have done with the Revolution as parallel to the biblical Exodus.

            However, the Church of the poor did not introduce the idea of presenting both the myth and history of Santo Domingo.  The priest of the Santo Domingo church, Ignacio Pinedo, S.J., wrote a complete account of the Santo Domingo celebrations from 1949 to 1970.[10]  Through oral history, he fixed the date of the saint's discovery to 1885, a two century difference from the CAV pamphlet.

            Pinedo represents the conservative view that fiestas such as Santo Domingo expresses the authentic religiosity of the people, a pristine form characterized by religious observance, folklore, and order (1977:114).  Opposed to this was a "mafia" of thugs and drunks who seek to subvert the fiesta for their own selfish and blasphemous ends, a tendency which the Church and State (the Somoza dictatorship at the time) should control through force if necessary.  By sketching how the fiesta has moved from a romantic "jewel" of the people's religious expression into the "mud" of debauchery,[11] Pinedo has inadvertently laid the foundation of a social history of resistance to Church authority during the Santo Domingo fiesta.  This written social history, reproduced and sold along the fiesta route in a newspaper "Homage to Santo Domingo,”[12] augments an oral history preserved in the collective memory of Managuans that has become integral to the Santo Domingo myth.

            This myth/history pits the forces of hierarchical order and orthodoxy, not against an image of chaos and immorality, but against a popular order operating upon different principles.  During the 1950's, the Santo Domingo fiesta had developed a reputation as a bacchanal, a religious cover for a roving party featuring drinking, prostitution, fights, gambling, etc.  The Nicaraguan Church hierarchy had tried to temper the fiesta, appealing for order through the pulpit and newspaper editorials.  The archbishop of Managua, Mons. González y Robleto, resorted to a ban on the fiesta in 1961 by refusing to let the saint's image out of the Las Sierritas church.  This enraged a group of devotees led by Lisímaco Chávez, planned and executed a legendary "kidnapping" of the saint.  They evaded guards by entering Las Sierritas church through a secret back passage, and stole the saint from his altar while others created a diversion at the front of the church.  They led the saint on a procession to Managua, picking up hundreds of surprised people along the way, and used a tree trunk to force open the doors to the Santo Domingo church.  A mere Church edict could not deter the saint from being with the people.  Many Managuans viewed the edict as another oppressive act by authorities in the context of the times, where elite landholders with the blessing and complicity of the Church, were engaged in massive expropriation of peasant land to make way for agro-export crops.  The theft was seen as a redress, if largely symbolic, against a Church distant from its constituents, and the completion of a ritual order whereby the saint makes his yearly trip to Managua.

            The Church responded to this challenge to its legitimate authority over religious celebrations by recommending the excommunication of the group that stole the saint.  However, the edict banning the procession was rescinded, and the fiesta proceeded the following years, though the image was taken from Managua to the Sierritas, a reversal of the normal path.  This prompted the Chávez group to make another attempt at stealing the image, which resulted in the leader's imprisonment.  Finally, by 1965, the fiesta proceeded according to tradition as the Church decided that it was better to coopt popular tradition than oppose it.  Thus, after the 1972 earthquake that destroyed Managua, including its cathedral, the Nicaraguan Church's curia moved to the Las Sierritas church.  Cardinal Obando y Bravo subsequently used this pulpit at the center of Managua's popular religion, if far from its geographical center, to exhort the people to respect the sanctity of the fiesta (along with warnings about the dangers of communism).

            Most Nicaraguans, including revolutionary Christians, hold the Cardinal in high reverence as their spiritual leader and are proud that a fellow mestizo Nicaraguan has attained such a high position in the Church.  However, although for the most part they follow his lead on such social issues as abortion, there is little evidence to suggest that he has succeeded in directly pacifying the fiesta.  For the celebrants, there is no contradiction between sacred and profane:  the very presence of the saint among the people bestows sanctity upon them, no matter whether their actions accord with the moral prescriptions of the Church.  Yet one element explains the Church's tolerance of the fiesta:  the saint, as a divine intermediary bestowing sanctity, serves as a surrogate for the authority structure of the Church hierarchy.  Although he occupies a position above temporal authority, he validates a hierarchical order more important to the Church than its system of moral codes.

            The Church of the poor calls into question that very authority structure, and their use of the Santo Domingo myth (or myth/history complex) serves this end.  They seek to establish a kind of participatory democracy of the spiritual life, where priests and bishops serve the "people of God" through education and rite, and as exemplary models of good Christians.  In appropriating the myth they seek to transform this image of the saint as divine intermediary.  In their view, the saint's image is merely an emblem of an all too human figure acting as an example of service to the poor in the cause of social change.  The miraculous appearance of the saint's image represents one moment in this historical and teleological process which incorporates the life of the saint and the concrete actions of the poor in history.

            The Nicaraguan Church hierarchy's ties to State-level power had been weakened by their break with the Somoza regime in the 1970's, and further so under the socialist Sandinistas.  The Church hierarchy was in a position where it had to defend against this challenge to its authority from the “popular Church,” and did so with implied charges that revolutionary Christians were Communists and heretics.[13]  Its authority relies upon a hierarchical chain of command based upon patronage and obedience to one's spiritual betters, as much as it relies on faith in the "Kingdom of God."  The appropriation of the saint's "home" in the Las Sierritas church served to legitimate their tie to a saint with a high position on this "chain of being."  In this context, the interface of myth and history become privileged arenas for an ideological conflict between the hierarchical and grassroots sectors of the Catholic Church.

            By issuing pamphlets, meeting in study groups, and using the platform of progressive priests, the Church of the poor has attempted to reconstruct a myth which appropriates both popular story and Church history, in a sense to outflank the Church hierarchy's own attempt at appropriation.  This myth interweaves poor people's self-awareness of their own faith, identity and history with the example of service to one's fellow in the cause of liberation.  It promotes rebellion and the subversion of the Church's hierarchical authority structure by offering an example of a saint who left that hierarchy to work directly with the poor.

            It is difficult to evaluate how this reconstructed myth of liberation has "caught on" among the people.  Its proponents seem to realize the slow pace of cultural change even in a revolution, and the Sandinistas' loss of power has meant the loss of much of the grassroots Church's material and symbolic capital.  To most people, the Church of the poor remains associated with the Sandinistas even though some members of the grassroots Church feel they have been opportunistically used and abandoned as the Sandinistas sought to improve relations with the Church hierarchy.

 The Recurrence of Resistance

            In 1991, amidst deteriorating economic conditions, the bajada (lowering) of Santo Domingo into Managua developed a twist that demonstrates its continued efficacy as a vehicle for popular protest.  In mid-route, a downpour began which lasted for the rest of the day.  Red paint on those masquerading as Indians and black paint on devils began to wash off, and the numerous youths bathing unsuspecting victims with grease did so to little avail.  A dozen men stoically carried the platform with the saint's image that seemed to grow heavier as in the myth.  A hundred or so men and women carried a rope in a concentric circle around the saint to seal off the "sacred space" as part of their promise, but even they began to appear fazed by the heavy downpour.  The usually boisterous brass and marimba bands sounded disheartened, but the air still somehow cracked with the sound and smoke of rockets and firecrackers fired by boys expert in keeping their powder dry.

            Even before the rain, the numerous mobile vendors, many driven to this occupation by the massive lay-offs in the public sector after the 1990 Sandinista electoral defeat, had trouble selling their food, drink, trinkets, and votive offerings.  The economic situation had been steadily worsening, and nobody had money to spend, especially the poor participants in the procession, many of whom lived in shantytowns which the government had promised to eliminate.

            Eleven hours into the procession, the new ultrarightist mayor of Managua, Arnoldo Alemán, took his place as the fiesta's mayordomo on the float where the saint had been lifted.  The crowd responded with vehement disapproval.  It proceeded to pelt him with insults, stones, bottles and watermelon rinds.  Ironically, the anti-Sandinista mayor had to take cover protected by the Sandinista police.  The float took off at full speed the last 20 blocks to the church, where the mayor retreated into a nearby school.  The saint, protected by a double cordon of police, was whisked into a side door of the church.  This caused an uproar:  several hundred people forced their way into the church, fighting their way through the police and the mayor's loyalists.  Despite sustaining many injuries in this bloody struggle, the usurpers managed to carry the saint out of the church, its flower-covered platform in shreds but the image itself intact.  There they and the people waiting outside performed the traditional dance with the saint and afterwards took it back into the church through the main doors.  People soon realized that, for a short period, the saint again had been stolen.

            Mayor Arnoldo Alemán, who had sat out the years of Sandinista rule in Miami and came back to ride the electoral wave that brought the opposition coalition to power, enacted policies which alienated both the poor and traditionalists.[14]  He supported an economic development of Managua which involved removing squatters from their land and taxing the pushcarts of small informal sector vendors. In addition, he did not allow the main group of Santo Domingo "traditionalists" to participate in the preparations since this group was led by Lisímaco Chávez.  Chávez had eventually reconciled with the Church to the point where he had been allowed to oversee the fiesta's preparations.  Though he did not identify himself as a Sandinista, he had cooperated with the Sandinistas in arranging the fiesta, and they appreciated his past as a thorn in the side of the Church hierarchy.  Thus Chávez's removal fit within Alemán's policy of "change," which Sandinistas characterize as a policy of revanchismo (revenge).  Many suspected that people sympathetic to Chávez had initiated this new "theft" of the saint.  The identity of the perpetrators remained the subject of dispute, but Mayor Alemán had become a symbol of arrogant authority which became an object of revolt in this ritual of rebellion.[15]

            Despite the apparent anarchy of the fiesta, both ritual and real rebellions, these behaviors exist within a broader set of "rules of the game."   These rules became dramatized when they were broken:  the mayor rejected the "legitimate" traditionalists and some of their pre-procession customs, and the saint was taken through the wrong door without allowing people the traditional dance with him.  After the incident, a peasant woman proclaimed before the assembled people and the startled media that "Santo Domingo does not belong to the UNO [government] nor to the Sandinistas; he belongs to the people."

            This statement was featured on that evening's television news on both the government and Sandinista stations, and became the subject of discussion during the following days among Managuans and in the press.  According to the political preference of the person or media, the saint did not belong to the neo-liberal government, the Sandinista-controlled mobs and police, or even U.S. imperialism, but always carried an implication that brazen, unsubtle political manipulations of the religious celebration violated the rules of the game.  These rules followed a logic defined by class, even after the Revolution.  On the actual saint's day, August 4, the saint took a boisterous, zigzag journey through the chaos of Managua's popular central market, Mercado Oriental, punctuated with drummers pronouncing couplets satirizing sexual and political relations.  Meanwhile, the elites engaged in brazen political posturing in an expensive, pageantry-filled and orderly horse parade which never crossed the path of the popular procession or the saint.[16]

            CEB members were heartened by what they regarded as a spontaneous revolt against injustice which demonstrated the inherent rebelliousness of the people.  But some noted that this rebellion did not go beyond challenging political authority within the confines of the religious event.  At this juncture, people were not prepared to follow the example of saints or revolutionary martyrs.  Others argued that the participation of these people in the revolutionary transformation of society had already begun to transform their class and religious consciousness, allowing them to act independently of authority structures, whether on the political right or left.

            In 1991, the government of Violeta Chamorro lacked a substantive social base, and caught between reactionaries in the legislature and Sandinistas in the army and police, lacked the ability to function effectively.  The Sandinista Front suffered from a certain ‘routinization of their charisma’ caused by its inability to stem the U.S. sponsored war, an economic crisis, and a tendency toward centralizing (and sometimes abusing) their power.  Nevertheless, the Sandinista Revolution itself left a legacy of a people aware of their identity and defiantly disposed against authority, regardless of its ideological color, whether Sandinista red and black or UNO white and blue.  By succeeding in overthrowing the Somoza dictatorship, the people of Nicaragua have begun to regain their history, validated in myth, and stand poised to challenge new forms of centralized political or religious authority.  As an organized movement producing pamphlets, projects and illustrated pamphlets, the Church of the poor may have run up against objective limits:  its identification with Sandinista authority.  In the pursuit of rapid economic and political changes that favored a centralized, vertical leadership structure, the Sandinistas succeeded in alienating the very poor for whom they had fought.  But one might say that the poor majority, at least in Managua, are but a stone's throw away from the real process of cultural creation and historical re-creation which often lies beyond the appropriation or anticipation of leaders.  Both the popular uprising initiating the 1979 revolution and the spontaneous rebellion during the fiesta demonstrate this.  To paraphrase Marx, the women and men of Nicaragua have made their own history, but not precisely of their own choosing.[17]

 

REFERENCES

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NOTES

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