Family Affairs: Class, Lineage and Politics in Contemporary Nicaragua

As I get older I give more importance to continuities, and try to discover them under the appearances of change and mutation. And I have reached the conclusion that there is only one great continuity: that of blood. Class structure never entirely displaces other criteria and forms of differentiation and hierarchy (e.g. ethnicity, gender, lineage) in the constitution of social identities and in prompting collective action. Class as a concept and as a point of reference is linked to these other criteria; often it is subsumed in them, thus contributing to the definition of the different groups' forms of expression and of their insertion into the social totality. But class does not eliminate these other criteria nor the identities deriving from them, nor can it preclude the relative autonomy derived from their specificity, as they define loyalties and oppositions which frequently cross over class boundaries. The relevance of these criteria in Latin America is even greater since the society's class profile is less sharply defined because of the lower level of development of market relations and urban industrial capitalism. Several studies have pointed to the importance of ruling families in shaping the socio-economic structure of Latin American countries, their political institutions and their cultural life. Prominent families have been considered the axis of Latin America's history from the last part of the colonial period until the beginnings of the present century – and until even more recently in some countries. Interestingly enough, these historical studies have contributed to a better understanding of one of the features most frequently discussed in today's sociological studies of Latin America: the weak or inchoate differentiation between public and private life and between collective and individual action.