Who Do We Remember? A Review of Jenny Murray’s ¡Las Sandinistas! (2018)

Murray, Jenny, dir. ¡Las Sandinistas! 2018: Kino Lorber.

¡Las Sandinistas! (2018), a documentary directed by Jenny Murray, follows women who participated in the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), a leftist paramilitary group that arose in opposition to the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua in the early 1960s. It is a film rich in its diverse yet cohesive storytelling, implementing unique and untold perspectives from one of the most influential popular leftist movements in Latin America. These women, as the film’s thesis posits, have been largely erased from the history, politics, and face of the FSLN, and from Nicaraguan history as a whole. While the film creates an important space to tell their untold stories, it ultimately undermines this goal by neglecting to question the underlying power dynamics and imbalances between different groups of women in the FSLN.

The film interviews several women now older in age, most of whom held leadership positions in the FSLN for many years and engaged in active combat. They fought to overthrow the Somoza military government in the 1970s, and against the US-backed Contras in the 1980s. The interviewees recount their personal paths to joining and participating in the Sandinista Front through their gendered, racialized, and classed perspectives. They take the viewer through a detailed collective historical account, from the formation of the FSLN––driven by extreme poverty, violence, and class divisions under the Somoza government––to the Nicaraguan Revolution that overthrew Somoza, and their ultimate ousting and alienation from the FSLN party. The film presents a unique historical perspective as it reframes this much-told narrative through the voices of actors who have not had the space to speak about their own histories before.

As its protagonist figure, Dora Maria Téllez, puts it, ¡Las Sandinistas! is a discussion of “the experience of memory [t/n: of remembering] and the experience of the erasure of memory.” The women of the FSLN were, as they themselves express in recounting their own stories of the Revolution, active and significant participants during this moment of Nicaraguan history. Many of them were Sandinista leaders––most notably Dora Maria, one of the Front’s most prominent commanders. Had she not been actively excluded from the all-male national Directorate after the Sandinista victory in 1979 (set off by her own initial victory in Leon), she would have been directly involved in Nicaraguan political leadership. Daisy Zamora was the country’s first vice-minister of culture until she was pushed out after rejecting the romantic advances of a member of the Directorate. Lea Guido was Minister of Health and the first female minister in Nicaraguan history. Monica Baltodano personally commanded the decisive FSLN takeover of Managua after Dora Maria’s success in Leon set off a series of sieges across major cities, to name a few.

The absence of these names in Nicaraguan scholarship surrounding the Sandinista movement is itself a key premise that the film seeks to address. Dora Maria’s opening musings consider not only the act of remembering, in which the women engage by telling their stories of the Revolution, but also the acts of erasing memory and of being erased. This is clear when one places ¡Las Sandinistas! in its context among scholarly works on the FSLN, especially in more recent works that take a retrospective approach to the Sandinista Front as a point of origin for current President Daniel Ortega, who was also a prominent Sandinista commander.¹ The Front’s women are largely absent from these and other discussions of the Sandinistas due to the gendered nature of scholarly works on the FSLN. 

In comparison, literature about Sandinista women is scarce and often restricted to analyses of their involvement in women’s rights groups such as the Women’s Autonomous Movement (MAM) and the Luisa Amanda Espinoza Association for Nicaraguan Women (AMNLAE), both of which had roots in the Sandinista Front and have since been actively targeted by the FSLN party under Ortega.² These are, to be clear, valuable contributions to the discussion around the political involvement of women in the Nicaraguan Revolution, but they speak to a paradigm of women’s political involvement that is limited to designated women’s spaces. That is to say, women actors are only visible when we speak of women’s issues. Their crucial historical involvement in broader political moments (such as the FSLN), anti-dictatorship, and anti-colonial leftist movements and thought is largely invisible in wider scholarship. 

In that sense, ¡Las Sandinistas! makes an invaluable contribution to the literature surrounding the FSLN and the Nicaraguan Revolution by giving space to women’s stories, which have been drowned out from Nicaraguan history. It makes an equally important contribution to expanding conversations around women’s political involvement in Nicaragua beyond designated women’s spaces. It also carries incredibly nuanced and personal commentaries on the deeply rooted intersections of gender, race, class, and imperialism in Nicaragua and Latin America as a whole. This is not surprising, seeing as the women the film concerns itself with were not only combatants but leaders and thinkers of one of the most prominent leftist and anti-colonial movements in the region. Their ideological reflections are often undermined, however, by the film’s editing. For example, snippets of Dora Maria’s commentary on military and political guerrilla tactics are pulled far out of context and come off as disjointed much of the time, leaving the viewer confused and unsatisfied. 

This brings me to my primary criticism of the film: because it concerns itself so particularly with the personalities and stories of its protagonists, it loses itself in what could have been more coherent political commentary. This could be explained away as an assumption that viewers will be familiar with Nicaraguan history, which may often be true. Even so, the issue is less a lack of sufficient historical context and more that the film constantly hints at political stances without firmly taking them. Despite following an entire cast of former leftist paramilitary fighters, the film only vaguely references leftist politics. This is perhaps why a young Dora Maria’s interviews on leftist revolutionary theory are so heavily clipped and scattered throughout the film: it dodges any substantial point on radical leftist ideology, even as she describes extensive military training with Cuban groups in the mid-1970s. Similarly, although the women being interviewed range from wealthy, white, and university-educated to extremely poor, indigenous, and with no formal education, the film does not pay particular attention to how these dynamics might have affected experiences of political inequality among these women. In fact, the film spends much more time with more privileged women who held more prominent leadership positions in the FSLN. Their positions of higher influence relative to other women are taken as a justification for their voices, stories, and opinions to take higher precedence than other women who might have been combatants rather than commanders. The power dynamics among FSLN women are, therefore, of minimal concern to the film. I can’t help but question how ¡Las Sandinistas!, in this way, plays into its own criticism of memory and erasure of women in Nicaraguan history by reifying the power structures they worked so hard to take apart.

1. Salvador Martí i Puig, “The Adaptation of the FSLN: Daniel Ortega’s Leadership and Democracy in Nicaragua,” Latin American Politics and Society 52, no. 4 (2010): 79-106. ↩︎
2. Delphine Lacombe, “¿’Luchar contra el peor escenario’? Construcción del Movimiento Autónomo de Mujeres y debates de la militancia feminista en el contexto pre-electoral nicaragüense (2004-2006),” Latin American Studies Association, Toronto, Canada. ↩︎

Editors

Julia White, Managing Editor

Nicole Monette, Copy Editor 

Carolina Xavier

Carolina Xavier (she/her) is a second-year MA candidate and Merey Fellow in NYU’s Program in International Relations, concentrating in International Law. She graduated from the University of Toronto with an Honours Bachelor of Arts degree in International Law & Human Rights. She is currently a Political Affairs Intern at the United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs. Previously, she worked with ECCO Political Consulting in Brazil and at the Brazilian National Congress. Her research centers around Latin American electoral politics and historical regional relations. In her spare time, Carolina enjoys listening to music, reading literary fiction, and exploring niche Brooklyn cafés.