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Maintaining Nicaraguan Caribbean Identity Far from Home

My experience as a student in Leon, Nicaragua

My memories of the community of Nicaraguan Caribbean Coast, Indigenous, and Afro-descendant students at UNAN-Leon.

By Brisa Bucardo (Confidencial)

HAVANA TIMES – A few days ago, I was listening to a song by Sir Wally. The mix of Caribbean rhythms and languages—Miskitu, Creole English, and Spanish—which I would personally describe as Afro-Indigenous, brought back memories of parties during my university years in Leon, Nicaragua (2017 to 2022). Back then, we didn’t fully grasp what those spaces meant culturally.

Like many young people from Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast, I left my region to study at UNAN-Leon, in the western part of the country, and lived in the university dormitory known as La Prepa. For decades, an agreement has allowed students from the Caribbean Coast who meet certain requirements—initially, passing the entrance exam—to receive room and board while pursuing their degrees. That opportunity has meant that different generations of costeños, or people from the Caribbean Coast, have passed through this well-known dormitory.

Different generations of Indigenous and Afro-descendant students had lived at La Prepa, in some cases even members of the same family. So we arrived at a place where others had already lived, confronted racism, created forms of organization, and transformed some of the conditions they encountered.

The area that would become our temporary home had some 17 or 18 rooms that looked more like barracks, some with as many as 15 or 20 bunk beds, bathrooms inside, and virtually no privacy. We also shared the dining hall, wash basins or laundry areas assigned to each room, a basketball court, and other common spaces. Under those conditions, students from different parts of Nicaragua lived together, with a significant presence of young people from the Caribbean Coast.

Before entering La Prepa, it was common to hear stories about costeños who had lived there. Earlier generations told us there had been a time when Indigenous and Afro-descendant students were grouped in rooms separate from mestizo or non-Indigenous students. Miskitu, Mayangna, Creole, Rama, Garifuna, and Ulwa women were placed together in one room, and the same was done with the men. By the time my generation arrived, that segregation no longer existed: rooms were divided between men and women, but we lived alongside students from different backgrounds.

That change did not happen on its own. Before us, there had been generations of students from the Caribbean Coast who confronted those exclusionary conditions, called out the racism, organized, and gradually transformed the space for the generations that followed. We inherited some of those gains without necessarily knowing the full history behind what seemed to welcome us as equals. What might have seemed normal to........

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