Nicaragua is a small Central American country of about five million people that has struggled for decades against oppression and poverty, but from the 1960s onward Nicaraguans began to fight against those injustices. And one central way in which this struggle became manifest was through socially conscious, or protest, music. The voice of protest has historically adopted many different forms throughout Latin America, but in order to comprehend the particular way in which such music gained acceptance and momentum in Nicaragua, it is first important to understand the country’s history within political, economic, and social realms. As a result of Nicaragua’s history of oppression, socially conscious music became a revolutionary vehicle for the country’s expression of identity and desire for artistic exploration.

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Zimmerman describes the political life in Nicaragua from independence (from Spain) in the 1820s until 1979 as including the violent resolution of conflict between groups of the dominant class, the “exclusion of workers and peasants from political power,” and U.S. intervention.[2] Even the final Somoza was called “the last Marine,” and the entire Somoza era, from 1934-1979, is sometimes considered a “cultural occupation.”[3] The first direct U.S. intervention came with William Walker in the 1850s, an American who used the war between the Liberals and Conservatives[4] to “make himself president of Nicaragua, legalize slavery, and declare English the official language, before being defeated by popular resistance and a joint Central American army.”[5] Early in the 20th century the U.S. intervened to overthew the Liberal president José Santos Zelaya, replacing him with the Conservative Adolfo Díaz; the U.S. military occupation begun during this time persisted until their ousting by Sandino’s Liberal guerrilas in 1933. From 1927 to 1933 Augusto César Sandino led a six-year peasant (or guerilla[6]) war against U.S. Marines, who were forced to withdraw in the final year. Although assasinated by the Somozas in 1934, the memory of Sandino lives on even today in Nicaragua and was one of the strongest ideological forces underlying the entirety of the Nicaraguan Revolution.[7] Sandino took up arms for “the love of [his] country because all [their] leaders h[ad] betrayed it and have sold themselves out to the foreigner or have bent the neck in cowardice. We, in our own house, are fighting for our inalienable rights.”[8]

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