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The Central American Question: Nicaraguan Cultural Production And Francisco Goldman's The Ordinary Seaman, Oscar A. Gonzalez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the cultural production and political history of Nicaragua from the 1960s to the early 1990s and interprets Francisco Goldman’s The Ordinary Seaman alongside Central America’s literary boom period, the nation-building project of the revolutionary letrados, and race relations between Nicaragua’s Pacific region and its two autonomous sectors of the Atlantic coast. It is argued that Central American ways of seeing are colored by the interplay between a revolutionary past, the myth of the pure Indio or mestizo, and the erasure of national identity in the US contact zone. Rather than recuperating a Central American identity, it …