Introduction to the Site

     This Website is envisioned as a comprehensive digital interpretive archive on the nationalist rebellion against US military intervention in Nicaragua led by Augusto C. Sandino in the 1920s and '30s.   (Right: Statue in Managua commemorating the 1979 Triumph of the Sandinista Revolution, July 19, 2009; photo by the author)

     Right now this Website houses and integrates over 1,000 archival documents on the rebellion, most transcribed and fully searchable.  It also lists & identifies the specific archival locations of over 5,000 individual documents, which together comprise some 15,000 pages of text.  Eventually (by the year 2015, I hope) this Website will house and integrate over 25,000 pages of documents — and thousands more pages of published texts — materials collected over two decades in archives & libraries in the United States and Nicaragua.

     This tsunami of evidence on this oft-mentioned but little understood guerrilla war and nationalist campesino rebellion offers an unprecedented look at events "on the ground" in a major episode of foreign invasion & occupation during the golden age of US imperialism in the circum-Caribbean (c. 1898-1934).  The portrait of Sandino's revolt that emerges from this documentary deluge is vastly more nuanced and complex than any scholar or poet has yet conveyed.

    Yet however nuanced this portrait, however intricate and messy and confusing, it is also true that everything you read about in these pages — all the killing and suffering, all the heroism and sacrifice, all the planning & scheming & marching & spying & fighting & dying — all were rooted in a simple reality:  the government of the United States of America decided to invade and occupy this small Central American country, and a small group of Nicaraguans, led by a charismatic patriot, decided to resist.  (Left: 1984 Bulgarian postage stamp commemorating the 50th anniversary of Sandino's death)  

     The Website's Focus.    As a social & cultural historian, I am mainly interested in the Sandino revolt as a social and cultural process, as a local response to foreign invasion and occupation.  The documents presented here reflect this focus.  They were selected because they speak, in some fashion, to the agency of Nicaraguans and Segovianos in shaping their own history.   

     By Way of Background & Context.    The US Marines first intervened militarily in Nicaragua in the civil war of 1912, and were stationed in the country more or less continuously for the next 20 years.  Nicaragua effectively became a U.S. protectorate, surrendering much of its sovereignty to the United States, as was true of much of the circum-Caribbean during this period.  Read more ...

     Las Segovias.    In the late 1920s this rugged region bordering Honduras was home to about 120,000 people spread over some 6,000 square miles of mountains, valleys, forests, and jungles, in several dozen towns and hundreds of villages, hamlets, and homesteads.  Even before the Marines arrived, extreme inequality, oppression, exploitation, poverty, and violence dominated the social landscape.  After May 1927 Segovianos flocked to Sandino's banner.  The Marine invasion intensified; the US-created National Guard grew in power; and by 1932 the Sandinista rebels, based in Las Segovias and organized into a government of their own, threatened to topple the national government.   Read more ...

     The Imperial Spotlight.   Before mid-1927 there is very little documentation on Las Segovias, a frontier region bordering Honduras mostly ignored by the national state.  Then in June 1927 came the Marine invasion & occupation, and our documentary base explodes.  For 5½ years the US imperial spotlight -- expressed in a dazzling variety & quantity of texts -- illluminated the hidden corners & crevices of a culture & society & history hitherto almost totally obscured.  The interpretive challenge for scholars is to read these texts against the grain, in the words of Ranajit Guha in his classic The Prose of Counter-Insurgency (1988) -- and with a fertile & reasoned historical imagination.  Alongside this explosion of imperial texts was the proliferation of texts & artifacts created by the Sandinista rebels that the Marines & Guardia were trying to eradicate.  In January 1933 the spotlight vanished, and a month later Sandino's armed rebellion effectively ended in a provisional peace treaty with the newly elected Sacasa government.  The Marines went home, carting hundreds of boxes of records with them.  What the US imperial gaze spotlighted for those 5½ years constitutes the bulk of what I wish to share here.  Smaller in scale but often still punchier in impact are the textual fragments & social memories that survived the brutal repression that followed Sandino's assassination in 1934.

     Animating Questions.     Lots of questions inspire & animate this website.  Mainly I'm interested in what the US invasion & occupation, the formation of the Guardia Nacional, and Sandino's revolutionary movement meant for ordinary Segovianos — campesinos, Indians, tenants & sharecroppers, smallholders & squatters, miners & migrant workers, seasonal & day laborers (who together comprised some 85-90% of the region's population), as well as townsfolk, artisans & smugglers, peddlers & traders, boat-drivers & mule-drivers, ranchers & coffee growers, merchants & professionals, politicians & military leaders — individuals, families & communities caught up in a whirlwind of foreign invasion and insurgency as complex and multifaceted as any in history.  I also want to know what these events meant in the broader sweep of history — in Nicaragua, Central America, the Western Hemisphere, and the Atlantic World — and how they intersected with broader changes within these overlapping spheres.  What manner of revolutionary movement was this?  What were its origins, characteristics, and legacies?  All the documents here speak in some fashion to these broader questions & themes.   (Right: street boy, Telpaneca, ca. 1929, Carl P. Eldred Papers, Marine Corps Research Center [MCRC], Quantico VA)

     Why a Documentary History?    Historians come and historians go, but the documents endure.  These documents, if read with enough care and attention (and along with the published literature) will bring us as close as we can get to understanding what this tumultuous period meant for ordinary Segovianos, and to its complexities as a social process locally, nationally, and transnationally.  Documents, of course, do not speak for themselves.  They must be analyzed and interpreted, which is the job of historians and of rational human beings generally.  Publishing these documents online creates not only a valuable tool for students and researchers.  It also means that others might interpret these documents differently than I do.  That is as it should be.  I introduce or conclude many documents with some interpretive comments.  Others might disagree with my interpretations or emphases.  If you do, let me know!  Let a thousand interpretations bloom!  (Left: detail of letter from Sandino to Faustino González, 2 April 1931, one of around 1,000 Sandinista documents to be published here for the first time)

          This way anybody — you, e.g. — can tap into this densely integrated web of information and ask just about any kind of historical question you want to ask.  You can ask about war-making or coffee making.  Vocabularies of political violence or social geographies of production and trade.  Gender, class & race relations.  Popular nationalism.  Poverty, malnutrition & disease.  Military tactics & strategy.  Insurgency & counterinsurgency.  Borderlands & identities.  Local political economies.  Historical geography.  State formation & guerrilla war.  Leadership, weapons & tactics.  Production & settlement patterns.  Social memory & identity formation.  Just about anything.    (Right:  campesino in field, Western Segovias, 1928, George F. Stockes Collection, MCRC, one of 70 photos from the Stockes Collection published here)

          I create this site in the classic tradition of scholarship:  as a substantial and original contribution to existing knowledge on a specific topic.  In part it is envisioned as a documentary annex to my forthcoming book.  In part it is meant to give back to the Nicaraguan people a part of their own history.  In whole it is rooted in the hope that we — humanity, and especially US citizens and policymakers — might learn from our mistakes.  The story told by these documents is not only edifying and important but endlessly interesting, and should become part of humanity's common stock of knowledge.

     What's Here?     Right now only a fraction of the collection is published here (maybe 5%).  All can be found via this UPDATE BOX:

          Around two-thirds of the primary documents come from the Records of the United States Marine Corps & Nicaraguan National Guard, housed mainly in the US National Archives (Record Group 127, or RG127), comprising about 150 linear feet of files.  The rest come from a variety of repositories:  the Marine Corps Research Center, the Library of Congress, the US State Department, the Hemeroteca Nacional Rubén Darío (Managua), the Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamerica (IHNCA-UCA, also in Managua), and others.  Everything filtered out of these collections and presented here speaks in some way to how Central Americans, Nicaraguans, and Segovianos acted to shape their own history. 

      How is the Website Organized?    Densely.  And so it's easy to use.  For a full explanation, please see the user's guide.  Briefly:  At the top of every page are links to ten document collections, ten thematic collections, eight other links, and a Google search engine.  At the heart of the site are 20 homepages serving as portals into 20 collections of documents, sorted by type & theme.  With so many documents & branches & sub-branches, the site is designed so it's simple & easy to navigate, find & cross-reference information, and find your way back to where you started from & ended up.  Again, please see the USER'S GUIDE.

           Suggestions & comments invited.  This website launched March 2007 & revamped in March 2010.

Painting by Thelma Gómez F., Masaya, Nicaragua, 1989

Visitors since March 2010: