Organizing a Space of their Own? Global/Local Processes in a Nicaraguan Women’s Organization

Abstract

This article analyzes the internal, organizational processes within a Nicaraguan women worker’s organization, the Working and Unemployed Women’s Movement, “María Elena Cuadra” (MEC) to explore the ways in which place-centered, locally constituted political identities articulate with transnational flows of ideas and discourses to shape actors’ collective practices. MEC’s changing organizational practices reflect the influence of strategies and practices employed in the mass organizations of the FSLN and transnational flows of discourses and ideas about issues such as feminism, personal and political autonomy, and the relationship between individuals and a collective. I explore the impact of members’ experiences within the Sandinista mass organizations on MEC’s organizational practices and analyze MEC’s uneasy relationship with feminist organizations and Northern-based NGOs. While transnational linkages have opened new opportunities for groups like MEC, certain relations of inequality, such as those based on neocolonialism, persist. The case of MEC sheds light on the complex ways in which power operates through and within transnational organizational relations.