Cultural Icons
Nicaragua’s cultural icons include people who greatly shaped the political and artistic landscape as well as influenced thinking that defined major historical twentieth-century events. While there were important female, indigenous, and creole contributors to the revolutionary struggle in this period, they were much less prominently featured in propaganda posters such as these. This highlights the on-going struggle surrounding gender and racial equality in Nicaragua.
This exhibit focuses mainly on three whose thinking influenced the Nicaraguan Revolution: Rubén Darío, Augusto César Sandino and Carlos Fonseca. Darío’s poems and literature about U.S. imperialism and the unjust state of society set the groundwork for Sandino to fight against the American occupation of Nicaragua in the 1930s. Sandino’s struggle was the inspiration needed for Fonseca and the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) to overthrow the dictatorial Somoza regime in the 1979.