July 19, 2019 marked the 40th anniversary of the FSLN’s ouster of the Somoza dynasty, which had ruled Nicaragua since the 1930s.

To commemorate that historic event, I posted a free preview of my book that analyzes the Sandinista Revolution and its relationship with the Reagan Administration on my Medium page. Below you will find a brief excerpt of Sandinista Nicaragua’s Resistance to U.S. Coercion, published by Cambridge University Press in 2017.

Preface to Sandinista Nicaragua’s Resistance to U.S. Coercion

I began to write this book without realizing it during my first quarter in graduate school. That quarter I took a course on strategic interactions. As I read through the literature, I immediately found “red flags” going up because Latin America — with the exception of the Cuban Missile Crisis — was completely missing, and even in that case the scholars exploring it focused on U.S. and Soviet actions to assess its outcome. Although there were some case studies on conflicts involving African, Asian, and Middle Eastern countries, the majority of the cases covered involved the major powers, such as the United States, USSR, China, Japan, or European powers. Unfortunately, as I’ve subsequently discovered, this focus on the great powers is not limited solely to qualitative case studies but is often the case in the International Relations (IR) field generally.

At the time, I was perplexed by the fact that so little of the scholarship focused on Latin America or U.S.–Latin American relations. I found even less on Latinos’ role in the U.S. foreign policy formation process. Interestingly, no one else seemed to find this problematic or even notice. This really puzzled and troubled me, because I was committed to becoming a serious IR scholar, keeping my regional specialization on Latin America and thematic focus on U.S. policy toward revolutionary guerrilla and social movements, as well as on exploring how Latinos influence U.S. foreign policy. So, over the next few weeks, I searched through the IR literature until I came across a few chapters and articles on Reagan’s failed efforts to oust the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) from power.

At first, I was just happy to read anything involving Latin America, but I soon found that something was missing: in these studies, the Central Americans had no agency. On the contrary, they were passive actors (objects) in the explanations, which instead focused exclusively on the strategies and actions of the Reagan Administration (subjects) to explain the cases’ outcome. And yet, this went against everything I knew to be true. Throughout my life I had personally witnessed tremendous transnational political activism on the part of Central Americans — primarily Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, and Guatemalans — in the United States. I found it hard to believe that their activism played no systematic role in the course of political events that unfolded between Central America and the United States during the 1980s.

Identifying these three voids in the IR literature — (1) the relatively limited work on U.S.-Latin American relations; (2) the lack of Latin American agency in IR accounts of strategic interactions between the United States and Latin America; and (3) the lack of scholarship on Latino/as’ participation in and impact on U.S. foreign policy — led me to reflect on three moments from my childhood, which illustrate why I responded so viscerally to challenge these absences in graduate school.

These three moments correspond to my earliest political memories. The first, from when I was about five years old, is of marching (while holding my mom’s hand as she carried my younger brother on her hip) on 24th and Mission Streets, in the heart of San Francisco’s Latino barrio, to protest Anastacio Somoza’s bombing of Nicaragua’s cities where innocent civilians were victims of the carnage.

The second memory is…

To finish reading my post please visit: https://medium.com/@HectorPerla415

If you are interested in purchasing the book you can do so here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/sandinista-nicaraguas-resistance-to-us-coercion/FEA9A716E750EBEDBF5A5EA38661C9FE