The following study reveals how the mobilization of the urban working classes in Nicaragua’s national insurrection of 1978 and 1979 grew out of decades of unequal urbanization, social exclusion, and political radicalization in Managua. It balances analyses of the ways in which socio-economic and discursive structures of power shaped political transformations in Nicaragua during the Cold War with the everyday experiences of Managua’s residents (Managüenses) as they navigated and negotiated development, disaster, and war in the capital city Scholars of Nicaragua’s popular insurrection of the late 1970s have characterized the overthrow of the Somoza regime as a cross-class, broad-based mobilization against a violent and corrupt dictatorship. However, even as Nicaraguan political discourse and ideological platforms opposing the dictatorship emphasized inclusionary, cross-class alliances, Nicaraguan political parties and social movements remained divisive and atomized in practice until the eve of the revolutionary victory. I locate the points of commonality and conflict between actors from across Nicaragua’s political spectrum in the politics of development, where institutional logics and autocratic power met individual and community strategies for economic survival, social stability, and personal liberation. I show how the failure of the Somocista-led development regime to produce meaningful and lasting social and economic progress during the height of the Cold War simultaneously affirmed power dynamics in Nicaraguan society and exposed the limits of the Somoza dictatorship’s authoritarian control over the country. My research illustrates that Managua’s working classes and poor stood at the center of these social transformations as both discursive symbols and political activists.
