Field Notes from Nicaragua

In February 1990, Nicaragua’s Sandinista National Liberation Front lost national elections for the first time. Soon afterward, Anupama Mande, a young doctoral student from India, arrived in Nicaragua expecting to study the revolution through archives and political theory. Instead, she found a country still arguing fiercely about its past. On crowded buses, in cafés, and at public gatherings, former revolutionaries, students, priests, and ordinary citizens offered radically different memories of the Sandinista years. Her journey eventually took her to the Caribbean Coast, where Indigenous Miskitu people challenged official revolutionary narratives with stories of displacement and resistance. As competing truths collided, she realized that the Nicaraguan Revolution was not a fixed system but an ongoing public conversation. Field Notes from Nicaragua is a vivid memoir of fieldwork, political memory, and the messy afterlife of the revolution.