History lies buried just beneath the surface in San Juan del Sur. While new houses and condos for wealthy expatriates spring up on its borders, the town itself bears the scars of Nicaragua's troubled history.
The nearly two decades of fighting – first to overthrow the Somoza dictatorship in the 1970s and then between Daniel Ortega's Sandinista government and the Contra rebels in the 1980s affected lives throughout the country.
We didn't meet anyone who fought in the 1979 revolution, in which the FSLN -- Frente Sandinista de Liberation Nacional -- succeeded in the brutal Somoza family dictatorship that had controlled the country for 40 years. (On Victoria’s flight home, she sat next to a Managuan man who told her that all of those people were dead or living in the mountains up North.) By most accounts, the revolution in 1979 brought about numerous reforms in Nicaraguan society, including democratic elections and a national constitution. Other reforms included literacy initiatives, education reform, rights for women, and improved conditions for the poor.
Many argue that in the years following the revolution, the Sandinista government under Daniel Ortega stagnated and lost touch with its initial socialist ideals. One gentleman that we met in San Juan who worked for the library told us that the FSLN doesn't care at all about the poor now. “Everything they do is bajo de la mesa” (under the table),” he told us. Despite having lost elections in the past, Daniel Ortega is considered a frontrunner in this November's presidential elections. A cash infusion from the Venezualan government of Hugo Chavez has allowed the Sandinistas to blanket the country with massive billboards promoting Ortega’s candidacy.
We did meet several people who vividly recalled the counterrevolution in the 1980's, in which the US-backed “Contra” rebels fought to overthrow the Sandinista government.
I talked to Juanita, a petite woman who now performs kitchen and housekeeping chores in Jane's hotel. Juan, who works the hotel desk at night also joined the conversation. They told of patrolling in the mountains with shovels and pistols during the 1980s to prevent soldiers from Ortega's Sandinista governement from marching into town and conscripting teenagers to fight in the war. When soldiers were spotted, the town's boys and young men would be sent into hiding in holes and cellars until the danger of conscription had passed.
Lest you think the Sandinistas were the only ones conscripting youngsters, we also talked to John, a native of Nicaragua's east coast, who recounted in his lilting Carribean-accented English how he had initially been drafted into the Sandinista army, had deserted, and then had been conscripted by the Contras and forced into basic training. In both cases, he said, it was unclear to him what he was being forced to fight for. He eventually escaped to Costa Rica until the war ended.
Returning from an afternoon out with the bookmobile one day, Alvaro, one of the drivers, explained that the dirt road we were traveling had originally been the railroad route connecting San Juan del Sur with Managua. It lasted until the rails were torn up, perhaps in the 1950s. Eager to feed our interest in local history, he took us to the river and showed us the few pilings that remained of the railroad bridge where it crossed into town, bringing cargo and visitors from Nicaragua's larger, more prosperous communities. “Where did it go?” we asked. He motioned with his arm and pointed to the sea. "Like what happened in Indonesia?" we asked him. Yes he said, a tidal wave 15 or 20 years ago had washed the bridge away, along with homes near the river.
“Are there any photos?” we wanted to know. With a gleam in his eye, Alvaro veered off the route and pulled up to a small home on a street corner. He yelled inside to one of the residents. "Do you have that old picture of San Juan?" The man nodded yes, but said that his mother was home and was expecting guests. Undaunted, Alvaro zipped down the street to an Internet café (perhaps "Cyber Leo's") and told us to go inside. On the wall above the desk, he pointed to a faded photo of San Juan del Sur as it looked in roughly 1990 – a sleepy fishing village with none of the pricey new condos in the hills. Alvaro left us with a promise to locate other old photos of town--maybe one that the barbershop has -- and mail us photocopies. I don't use email, he told us.
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Knowing of our interest in local history, Jane Mirandette mentiond that we should talk to Rudolfo, a local history expert. One day, we ran into him by chance in the library, where he was poring over a book on fish. We introduced ourselves and in short order we had plans to meet in his home the following afternoon.
Rudolfo's small apartment sits atop a pizza parlor near San Juan del Sur's beachfront strip. He has been a fisherman and a teacher at a technical school for decades, and many days he can be seen hunched over a book on his open balcony. At night he frequents a pool hall a block away, and can occasionally be found sipping a drink on the patio opposite the Casa Blanca hotel. During the day, he fishes in the surf using the traditional tackle – a cord wrapped around a weathered board with two tiny bits of lead wieghting down the lure.
When we arrived at Rudolfo's apartment on Tuesday afternoon, he led us up the crooked spiral staircase into his sunny living room. Arrayed in front of him on a piece of corrugated cardboard were items that gave tantalizing hints of San Juan del Sur's past. There was a large rock filled with marine fossils, primitive tools and weapons made of stone, and heads from pottery figures: a bird, a devil-like creature, and several other pieces. Rudolfo said the ceramic items date back hundreds of years to the time before the Spanish conquest of the region. He believes that the stone tools and fossils are thousands of years old.
More recent – but still ancient history for a town on the move – was a medallion used during Cornelius Vanderbilt's short-lived coast-to-coast multimodal transit system during the California gold rush in the mid-1800s. He also had photocopies of a tiny engraving of the town as it looked in 1850, and a newspaper article published decades ago in Managua celebrating the 100th anniversary of the first telegraph line between Corinto and San Juan.
Rudolfo found many of the items in the ground near San Juan, others were gifts from academics and archaeologists he has known. "Why do you have them?" we wanted to know. He told us there was no where nearby to house them. With each successive municipal government, everything in the city hall had been gotten rid of. It seemed not to make sense to him to try and put them in anyone else's hands.
After we picked his brain (and made him repeat things a number of times – talking about pre-Columbian archaeological finds stretched our utilitarian Spanish vocabularies to the limit), Rudolfo turned the tables and asked us for help. He has been teaching himself English, and was interested in checking his pronunciation. He had grouped his lesson book into categories, with indexes written in pen on the cover of a spiral bound notebook. He turned first to animal words, and we went through a book he had with photographs. It is perhaps questionable whether starting out with animals like "Ocelot" is the most effective way to learn English, but if Rudolfo ever ends up visiting an American zoo he’ll be all set.
While we had found tantalizing hints of the city's hidden past, I still hoped to find something that would tie it all together. The day before we left town, I followed up on a tip I'd gotten from someone about a "House of Culture" located somewhere near the working port. I walked down toward the waterfront and passed the "Palacio de Communicacion," an elegant blue building constructed in the early 1940s. It now contains a tiny post office and the offices of Enitel, Nicaragua's national phone network. After walking back and forth, I finally found the "house of culture", a thatch-roofed building with several businesses inside. I walked in and spoke with two people who worked at a language school being operated out of the building. When I said I was interested in local history, they said they didn't know much, but if I came back in the afternoon someone might be there who could help.
Unfortunately, I ran out of time and was unable to follow up on this latest lead. But this encounter seems to follow the pattern of so much other local history: it is located in the heads and closets of the townspeople, not in any sort of formal museum or archive. Now that San Juan del Sur is changing so rapidly, it's worrisome that there appears to be so little documentary evidence of local history. Will the children of today only know the town that is now growing up around them – the one with the massive homes on the hillsides and tourist-oriented businesses near the waterfront? Or will they understand the deeper (and sometimes more troublesome) aspects of their local history?
On our last day in San Juan, we met a Canadian midwife, Cynthia, who had returned to Nicaragua for the third time to document midwifery practices in Nicaragua. She spent hour after hour in her room, transcribing and translating the oral histories that she was slowly gathering on her trips into the countryside. Her work was a bright spot, and points to the need for the myriad groups working in Nicaragua to document the work that they do. With that in mind, our little blog goes out into the world. Look for us on Google...
