Alicia Quiros, University of Notre Dame
“Nicaragua: Methods of Resistance in a Society Trapped in Violence”
Bio: Alicia Quiros is a junior studying Anthropology and Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She spent a semester in the Spring of 2008 studying in Nicaragua, living with Nicaraguans and learning the history and political, economic and social situation of the country today. While there, she also researched various forms of violence and resistance to them as a path to building a culture of peace and continues this research today. Alicia is focusing her studies on Latin America and the phenomena of immigration from that region to the United States and how it affects South Bend and other communities.
Abstract: The violence in Nicaragua is not only a phenomenon in one place or within one social group. Due to a recent violent history, the people still silently suffer the affects of an unjust, war-torn society. These effects, which are easily and eerily hid, are most present in the cycle of overt violence today. The violence in Nicaragua is present in every aspect and in every group of society. In my investigations, I study three different cases of violence: how violence affects women via the culture of machismo, how violence affects children via sexual exploitation and how violence affects rural farmers and their land. In each case, I investigate the cycles of structural, cultural and direct violence. Following these investigations, I analyze the methods of resistance to each type of violence in a hope to find common threads in each struggle, weaving together a metaphorical cloth of not only a peaceful society, but a just society as well. While many of my conversations and findings simply lead me to believe that there are only isolated pockets of people committed to change in Nicaragua, the cloth that weaves just society is continually stitched with tired, worn hands and broken spirits. Yet somehow amid this, the Nicaraguans are making their way to a society less enshrined in violence.
As I continue in my analysis, I also investigate the role of recognition, acceptance and various methods of healing in the process of creating this society built on justice rather than false peace. In the reconstruction of Nicaragua the struggle indeed continues, for peace, for justice, and for a life without violence as an everyday reality.
