She Taught Me Trova, I Learned About the Revolution and Education

By Rafael Santiago Meza Duriez

The Nicaraguan troubadour Carlos Mejía Godoy composed a song called “The Little Old Lady from Mozambique.” I remember my mother crying every time this song played and telling me she wanted it to be played at her funeral. It tells the story of Victoriano, a Basque globetrotter who finds an elderly woman from Spain in Mozambique who had been exiled there during the Spanish Civil War. Eventually, the old woman asks Victoriano that, if he ever returns along those roads, he would please bring her a handful of Spanish soil to kiss before she dies. Years later, Victoriano keeps his promise to the old woman. Already very ill and close to death, she takes the soil and kisses it, whispering thanks to Victoriano. Her last words were: “Gracias joven vasco. Que Dios te bendiga. Ahora me muero dichosa y en paz, porque he comulgado con la tierra mía, pensando en mi pueblo y en su libertad.” (“Thank you, young Basque. May God bless you. Now I die happy and at peace, because I have communed with my land, thinking of my people and their freedom.”)  The song obviously touches on themes of nostalgia and exile, but indirectly, it also speaks to the legacy of social struggles, collective memory, and its impact on the lives of those who experienced armed conflict, as well as the generations that followed. Victoriano was touched by the past, and that touch created an ethical connection with the old woman and her struggle.

Only recently did I understand why, despite never experiencing exile, that song touches my mother’s consciousness, and consequently mine. I have many mothers, or, to put it better, my mother has been many people in her life. Her CNA brigade self is perhaps the most complex aspect of her personality, and the one from which I have learned the most.

Last year, I decided to undertake an oral history project on the CNA. Organized a few months after the fall of the Somoza dictatorship, the CNA was the first and perhaps the greatest achievement of the Sandinista Revolution during the 1980s. For six months, from March to August, thousands of young people mobilized into the countryside to teach adult peasants to read and write. The CNA managed to reduce the rate of illiteracy from 51% to 13% (Hanemann 2005; MINED, n.d.). Carnoy and Torres aptly described the magnitude of the challenge facing Nicaraguan youth. They stated that:

Education in Nicaragua has been built out of the ashes of a civil war and the burning smell of gunsmoke. The Sandinistas took power in July 1979, after a bloody civil war in which, during the conflict’s final month, 40,000 people were killed, 100,000 wounded, and over 150,000 forced to abandon their homes. Destruction of material assets, buildings and inventories in the last two years of the revolution amounted to US $500 million by the time [former dictator] Anastasio Somoza fled the country (Carnoy and Torres 1990, 318-319)..

Imagine. Being 14, 15, 16 years old and finding yourself faced with the prospect of rebuilding your country for the better. Turning it into a utopia in the name of los muchachos, “the boys,” those who gave their lives to liberate the homeland. Paradise in no man’s land, a “banana republic” that stood up to the Yankee invaders. Add to that the propaganda machine, full of messages urging you to fulfill your duty, to honor your legacy as the son/daughter of Sandino, the guerrilla who kicked the gringo marines to the curb. Just listen to the literacy anthem to understand the power of these messages. “Avancemos brigadistas, guerrilleros de la alfabetización … levantemos barricadas … puño en alto, libro abierto … ganaremos el destino de ser hijos de Sandino convirtiendo la oscurana en claridad.” (“Let us advance, brigadiers, literacy guerrillas … let us raise barricades … fist raised, book open … we will win the destiny of being children of Sandino, turning darkness into light…”.)

Thus, the purpose of the research project was to rescue the voices of those who lived and shaped the crusade, but I also did it because I wanted to better understand my family’s history and its connection to the Sandinista Revolution; a failed project that degenerated into a dictatorship as cruel as the one it overthrew (Lacombe, 2020). So I interviewed my mother, among others. There were three interviews of about an hour that allowed me to better understand her struggles, successes, and, it must be said, the actions she regrets.

My mother, at 14 years old, didn’t hesitate to enlist in the CNA and go to the most remote place they could assign her. As the daughter of her father, a “declared communist” who despite not finishing primary school taught himself to read and write, the CNA was a calling to contribute to the revolution.

Fui una de las primeras que levantó la mano ya que no pude anteriormente participar en la lucha para el derrocamiento de la dictadura. Entonces yo dije aquí voy y este va a ser mi aporte para participar en la alfabetización y obviamente pues contaba con el apoyo de mis padres y sobre todo de mi papi (así le llamamos en mi familia a su papá, mi abuelo).

I was one of the first to raise my hand, as I had previously been unable to participate in the struggle to overthrow the dictatorship. So I said, here I go and this is going to be my contribution to participate in literacy and obviously I had the support of my parents and especially my papi  (That’s what we call her father in my family, my grandfather.).

And so she set off for Jinotega, the mountainous and cold city in north-central Nicaragua. There she learned that this popular education thing is not chicha, something simple or trivial, as we would say in good Nicaraguan. As soon as she arrived, she found herself facing the hostile side of the countryside. Rebuilding a country required, as she told me many times, to be fully committed to the cause, to ponerse la camiseta (put on the jersey) — either you tough it out or you leave. The nighttime scares from villagers who didn’t want to learn to read and write, the incompetence of the squad leaders (all men, of course), and the restrictive rules of conduct that mimicked a military structure. In the first month alone, she and her group of ten female brigade members had to endure men who came knocking on their doors to scare them. “Recuerdo que tuvimos una histeria colectiva todas. Comenzó a llorar una y comenzamos a llorar todas. Y lloramos una noche, pero dijimos nos vamos a quedar y vamos a seguir.” (“I remember we all had a mass hysteria. One of us started crying, and we all started crying. And we cried for a whole night, but we said we were going to stay and we were going to continue.”) Then, a few weeks later, she had to confront her immediate superior, who wanted to expel her because, desperate because of the lice she had caught, she ignored orders and went down to the city to shave her hair without asking permission.

But to refer only to the difficulties is to diminish the beauty of her struggle. Amidst adversity and new challenges, Joan of Arc learned the value of community and sisterhood, whether sharing food with other brigade members and peasants, or going together to the river to bathe and care for one another. While she taught 14 people — nine adolescent women and five adolescent men — to read and write, she also learned to read the “literacy” of the countryside. She would get up at 5 am to help the families she lived with and spent her mornings helping out around the house before going to teach literacy. “Hay veces que [había] que ir a desgranar maíz, a traer leña para el fuego, para el fogón. O hay que limpiar los frijoles para ponerlos a cocer. O si no llevar agua en baldes de un lugar a otro donde habían pozos para llevarlos a la casa.” (“There were times when we had to go shell corn, fetch firewood for the fire, or clean beans to cook them. Or carry water in buckets from one place to another where there were wells to bring it home.”) It was among the peasants that my mother learned the true meaning of solidarity and sisterhood. She remembers how the peasants knew how to truly love, from humility and care. She mentioned that “[los y las campesinas] siempre estaban preocupados porque nosotras no fuéramos [solas], nos acompañaban. O sea, esa solidaridad de acompañarte, de regresarte o de irte a traer donde estabas durmiendo para que no viajaras sola.” (“[The peasants] were always worried that we wouldn’t go [alone], they accompanied us. That is, that solidarity of accompanying you, bringing you back, or bringing you back to where you were sleeping so you wouldn’t travel alone.”)

Teaching reading and writing was the experience that revolutionized her life. The words she uses to recall that time were perhaps the most vivid and candid throughout the entire interview. It was in one specific excerpt that I understood that, despite the adversities, the disappointments that would come later, the betrayals and distorted discourse, there wasn’t a hint of regret in her voice. She told me, on the verge of tears, the satisfaction she felt when her students learned to read their first words.

Entonces ellos [los estudiantes] me decían, especialmente los más jóvenes: “Mire, mire, maestra, ya puedo [leer], venga, siéntese y escúcheme”. (Se lleva sus dos manos a la boca, mientras el rostro se enrojecía.) Ay, cuando lo recuerdo, me dan ganas de llorar. Recuerdo que empezaban a leer las oraciones que habían escrito. Entonces, eso fue una de las cosas más fuertes… Me hizo… feliz.

Then they [the students] would say to me, especially the younger ones: “Look, look, teacher, I can now [read], come, sit down and listen to me.” (She puts both hands to her mouth, while her face turns red.) Oh, when I think about it, I want to cry. I remember them starting to read the prayers they’d written. So, that was one of the most powerful things… It made me… happy.

It’s that part of her that stays with her after so many years, and the part of her story that, among other things, I carry in my blood.

I share her story for two reasons. First, because I believe that narratives about women’s experiences during the revolutionary processes in Latin America and the Caribbean, in general, and in Nicaragua in particular, have been rendered invisible. The Sandinista Revolution wasn’t just war and pain. It was care, solidarity, and empathy. But the perspective of the white-bearded man, the nostalgic guerrilla, the intellectual Marxist, conceives it as a purely rational event. The voice of women during the war is what sustains the hope that all was not in vain. While I recognize how it is problematic that I, a middle-class urban man, am telling this story, I want to emphasize that it is that voice, personified not only in my mother, but in all the women educators and caregivers who raised and took care of me, that has shaped my vision of the past and the future. Second, if you’re from Central America, whether you were born in the region or not, whether you’re a first-, second-, or third-generation migrant in the United States or anywhere else in the world, it’s your historical duty to understand the ties that bind you to it. As a “child of the postwar period,” I’ve come to understand how the “version” of the revolution my father and mother experienced has shaped my life. My sleepless nights thinking about the suffering of others, my passion for education, and my need to reach out to those in need are legacies of those narratives. But so are my fears, the feeling that I’m never doing enough, that I can always give more, and my desire to please those I love even at the cost of my own happiness.

It’s interesting to see how my sense of ethics and work as a researcher have been shaped by those episodes that she experienced. At the time of writing, seven days have passed since I passed my oral exam, an important milestone for the doctoral program at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education. In the introduction to the exam, I was asked to explain how my life story influences my work as a researcher. And there I am, on May 7, 2025, talking about popular education, collective memory, and revolutions. But there’s a scene that, although I never mentioned it during those three hours, I couldn’t get out of my head while I was presenting.

I’ve been transported back in time. The year is 1999, or 2002. Maybe it was ’97. I’m sitting in the back of a Mitsubishi pickup truck on the way to Matagalpa, a city in central Nicaragua. My dad is driving, his dark Ray-Bans covering half his face. His left hand is placed on the window, gripping the steering wheel, while with his right he nibbles at the snack he bought from the umpteenth vendor who stopped next to him at one of the traffic lights in the towns along the highway. My mom is in the passenger seat, with her thick black hair and bottle-bottom glasses, reading the month’s book. During her breaks from reading, she looks disapprovingly at my dad for his lack of care and for not taking his diabetes seriously. In the background, I heard “Playa Girón” and then “Debo Partirme en Dos” by Silvio Rodríguez, whose lyrical stories framed the events of the Latin American revolutions, transforming into lullabies for my younger self, sources of existential doubts in my adolescence, cruel memories during my early adulthood, and, now, sweet nostalgia. For some reason, during my exam, all I could think about was that scene inside the Mitsubishi, my mother watching me in the rearview mirror and smiling as I was singing one of Silvio’s songs in a low voice, while looking out the window at the deserted landscape. And then I understood that my oral exam was a space to express in academic terms what my mother taught me with her story and with trova. That what I was explaining to my committee had already been sung by Mercedes Soza, Violeta Parra, Silvio, and Carlos Mejía. I was simply repeating the songs I heard as a child on a stereo, and recounting in a depersonalized way what my mother learned during the crusade.

That’s my mother. Joan of Arc, the brigadista. The one who postponed her university studies in favor of the revolution, and when she was finally able to study, had to choose between making photocopies of her sociology textbooks or paying for her own passage back home. The one who taught me to love folk music and, probably unwittingly, placed on my shoulders the task of “bringing her a piece of land” for communion. Like Victoriano, I was touched by a war I didn’t live through, but which I feel in the unconditional love for life, liberty, and justice that my mother professes. Her struggle has me where I am today, and because of that, there is no “piece of soil” that can honor her as she deserves. I only hope that it’s enough for her to know that her struggle is now mine and that I will live until my last breath trying to complete it. And that she can forgive me because, in all likelihood, I too will leave it unfinished.

Happy Mother’s Day, Ma. I love you. (May 14, 2025)

1. Although trova originally refers to a genre of guitar-driven Cuban music, the term was colloquially used as a reference to Latin American protest songs.

References

Carnoy, Martin, and Carlos Alberto Torres. 1990. “Education and Social Transformation in Nicaragua 1979-1989.” In Education and Social Transition in the Third World, 315–58. Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400860692.315.

Hanemann, Ulrike. 2006. “Nicaragua’s Literacy Campaign.” Paper  commissioned  for  the  EFA  Global  Monitoring  Report  2006,  Literacy  for  Life. UNESCO.

Lacombe, Delphine. 2020. “Nicaragua under the terror of the Ortega-Murillo couple: background and the progressive construction of a dictatorship.” Trace (México, DF), no. 77, 146–63. http://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_abstract&pid=S0185-62862020000100007&lng=es&nrm=iso&tlng=es.Ministry of Education (MINED). n.d. “National Literacy Crusade.” https://www.mined.gob.ni/cruzada-nacional-de-alfabetizacion/.

Rafa Meza Duriez is a Ph.D. Student in UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education and a CLACS Graduate Affiliate. A Nicaraguan educator and writer and former Fulbright Scholar. Rafa’s exploration of literacy and language practices from rural zones in Central America allows him to analyze the pedagogical value that service offers to teachers’ reflective work, as understood by the epistemologies and ontologies by which communities live every day. More broadly, Rafa’s research focuses on systematizing success stories from the Global South that propose educational alternatives to our current civilization crisis.