Double Book Review: What went wrong? The Nicaraguan Revolution: A Marxist Analysis / Dan La Botz / 2018 and The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History / Mateo Jarquin / 2024

What went wrong? The Nicaraguan Revolution: A Marxist Analysis / Dan La Botz / 2018 and The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History / Mateo Jarquin / 2024 

Reading both of these histories side by side was incredibly illuminating. 

La Botz provided a wide-ranging overview, all the way from the independence movement forward. Readers get to read about filibuster William Walker, Sandino’s resistance, the Somoza regime, the original Sandinista regime, the neoliberal period led by Chamorro, then finally the Ortega regime. Although he’s occasionally old-timey in a weird white way, such as referring to indigenous people as “Indians,” he’s otherwise extremely astute on the hard facts and social dynamics. He diagnoses weaknesses and strengths in the organization structure of the top-down Marxist Leninist leadership, which failed to account for democratic processes. He then notes how this weakness led the state to exacerbate the conditions of a civil war, when it disappointed indigenous and peasant communities it claimed to represent, people who literally fought alongside the Sandinistas during the revolution. It had a great breakdown on the successes and failures of the literacy campaign, for example, that both lifted the country out of illiteracy and felt like a colonizing campaign for many indigenous communities. The last two sections of the book, both Chamarro’s victory (partially through US intervention) and Ortega’s rise. Chamarro’s and Ortega’s betrayal of the revolution are staggering to read, especially Ortega’s. This book definitely clarified the terrain for me, especially because there are Ortega apologists and tankies on the left who still celebrate Ortega’s dictatorship, despite its deep compromises with capitalists and its betrayal of basic human rights and progressive values. 

Jarquin’s book, on the other hand, is written with more fire and focus, narrowing its attention to the Sandinista revolution itself, capturing the zeitgeist and delineating the diplomatic efforts that enabled and ended the revolution. Jarquin’s great argument is that reductionist Cold War analyses of the Sandinistas fail to account for the bold statesmanship of several Latin American countries to defy the US’s will to take down Somoza and later end the war without totally annihilating the Sandinistas. In Jarquin’s book, you’ll get the excerpts from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Nobel Laureate speech and other cultural contexts that will make you feel the heat of the situation. 

I give both books 5/5 and consider them some of my most important reads in 2025. My degree in Latin American studies really should’ve made me learn more about the Sandinistas. Up until recently, I didn’t realize how pivotal it was to understand Central America as a region in order to understand the countries individually. You cannot understand the political conditions of the Salvadoran Civil War without understanding the Sandinistas. 

Double Book Review: Civil Resistance and If We Burn

Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know / Erica Chenoweth / 2021 and If We Burn / Vincent Bevins / The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution / 2023 

I read Civil Resistance at the recommendation of a friend. If anyone else gets recommended Civil Resistance, I recommend you read If We Burn, instead, as it tackles the same questions in a much more intelligent and captivating manner. 

Below is a brief list of my qualms with Civil Resistance. 

1. It does not know who its audience is. There’s a portion of the book that lists and discusses different methods of civil resistance. She spends a bit of time delineating when and why tactics like self-immolation, hacktivism, hunger strikes, leaks, property destruction and riots are  "civil resistance" and not. None of this is objectionable necessarily, but there's a tendency for baby organizer books to be advanced and rudimentary at the same time, which I think is just a weakness in writing. Like, hey, reader, I'm gonna explain street art to you since you need that, but also SELF-IMMOLATION even though you clearly still need street art explained to you. 

2. I wastes its time with silly baby organizer questions like “has civil resistance been effective against racism?” “What about against corporations?” It's just silly baby questions anyone with a modicum of historical understanding can connect dots. The author claims civil resistance ended slavery, which is a mic-drop moment of stupidity. Because of course civil resistance was critical to ending slavery, and no, it was not nearly sufficient enough. Like have you heard of the civil war and Sherman's march? The UK didn't end slavery "in response to armed and unarmed revolts" alone necessarily, either. The Black Jacobins explains how the UK was losing the upperhand against other slavers and it economically behooved it to abolish slavery, take the moral upperhand, and use the newfound position as abolitionists to manipulate opponents colonial holdings. Hey Haitian slaves, we'll help you overthrow the French if you let us become your economic overlords and give you your "freedom." etc.

3. There seems to be far too much determinism in how she views the aftermath of violence and nonviolence. For example, she blames Palestinian violent resistance for moving Israelis to the right. While she’s certainly right in part, she doesn’t take into account that 1) there's been global shifts to the right, suggesting other material and economic circumstances, like social media, etc, contribute to the problem 2) the other option for Palestinians and many other groups is a silent genocide. 

The tricky thing about her sort of analysis is we can't compare movements with what would've happened otherwise and for movements with a lot of dynamism and pressure, this book provides maybe just a reminder of the risks and benefits of violence. To be clear, I'm all for civil resistance. It can and has worked to get concessions from states. If that's your only goal, then it's clearly the wiser path. Civil resistance is also a critical step in any revolutionary process. You won't be able to lead a people's army if you can’t lead a well-coordinated boycott or civil disobedience campaign first. Marxist Leninists are sure to bristle at the ways this book is confusing the masses on what is effective protest and how to determine what sort of protest would be most effective. 

If We Burn, on the other hand, is written by a journalist who trailed and interviewed movement leaders in Egypt, Ukraine, Brasil, Turkey, China, and elsewhere for years to understand the shape of their civil resistance movements, and why and how they failed. Rather than encouraging folks to pursue the same tired strategies or pointing out with an almost doomerist tone that most strategies fail to yield substantial and long-lasting concessions, Bevins challenges readers to get more creative, organized, and centralized in the face of defeat. Notably, he pointed out that of the leaders he interviewed globally, when they shifted perspectives, they universally shifted towards wishing they had been more centralized and hierarchical, rather than decentralized, so that when it came time to seize power they would have been ready. They realized, there is no such thing as a political vacuum. Political power will be seized with whoever has the means and will to do it. You can’t just remove a bad actor and expect things to work themselves out. Things can always get worse. 
While Civil Resistance includes decontextualized, shallow descriptions of a range of social movements, If We Burn provides in-depth narration shaped by key movement figures and an invested leftist journalist’s analyses. Civil Resistance deserves a 1 out of 5, especially compared to If We Burn, which I’ll give a 5 out of 5.

The Black Jacobins / C. L. R. James / 1938

The Black Jacobins narrates the story of the Haitian revolution largely through its focus on one of its most critical figures Toussaint L'Ouverture. James narrates the military drama with a novelist’s eye for detail, psychological depth, and tension. His occasional asides to provide his own thoughts and connect the history to his times are revelatory and shrewd. It can be easy to be fatalistic about the rise of technofeudal fascism in our era, but during the Haitian revolution, a largely enslaved population had to shake off the chains of three imperial powers: the French, the Spanish, and the British. James spares no detail on the cruelty of the slaver’s torture tactics, from the burying of Africans to be devoured slowly by ants to the dogs to the branding. In some of its most moving passages, James narrates how in the last battles of the war, the generals told their men they did not need to fight with bravery but with an abandoned rage to survive and win; the formerly enslaved faced their deaths with an unhinged pride and resolution that stunned the colonizers. James astutely points out the catch-22: the enslaved were accused of being less than human for their “willingness” to accept slavery, but when they resisted it with all their might, sometimes petting the dogs sent to devour their limbs, other times placing the noose around their own necks at the gallows, they accused them of being incapable of feeling human pain, of being monstrous in their strength. I could say more, but you ought to just read it. 5 out of 5.

The Management of Savagery / Max Blumenthal / 2019

I picked up this book looking to better understand the history of US intervention in Afghanistan and the Middle East, as well as reactionary and perhaps revolutionary violent resistance against it. In order to contextualize Afghanistan, Blumenthal begins in the Cold War, when the US began arming tribal Islamists, including Al-Qaeda, who were frequently compared to US independence heroes and Star Wars rebels by interventionists. In particular, Blumenthal does a great job disentangling the ways the military industrial complex manipulates the media to sanitize allies, demonize targets, and muddy an admittedly complex terrain to audiences to justify intervention and pull Washington’s purse strings. Inevitably, Blumenthal ends up playing defense for the Assad regime in Syria, pointing out untrue propaganda against his regime, a move his critics see as apologetic but I see as simply nuanced. Blumenthal can be seen as a tankie by some, and that’s probably inevitable for a writer who spends so much time countering hyperbolic US propaganda against its enemy nations, who are of course as flawed and complex as any other nation. I particularly appreciated Blumenthal’s writing on the rise of Alex Jones, who had an early career as a 9/11 truther through documentaries like Loose Change, which I had watched as a middle schooler. I never connected the dots from Loose Change to the Sandy Hook massacre denialism to the rise of Trump. Blumenthal includes a skillful argument about how neocon and neolib US military interventions led to the rise of Trump by destabilizing once functional countries and increasing the amount of terrorism and refugees in Europe. This increase led to a rise in ultranationalism and xenophobia the far right thrives on. As someone who was too young during the 9/11 era and didn’t pay enough attention to the interventionist wars during the Obama era, Blumenthal provided an incisive and clarifying narration of the history I lived.  4/5 

The Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latino/a Social Justice, Theology, and Identity / Robert Chao Romero / 2020

The Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latino/a Social Justice, Theology, and Identity / Robert Chao Romero / 2020

I was recommended this book by one of my besties, and in general, there’s a part of me that does miss the clarity of a holy sense of purpose in the world in the religious sense, so I entered the book an eager participant, but was somewhat quickly and maybe rather unsurprisingly spat out. Romero is attempting to straddle several different audiences: ethnic studies peeps, theology peeps, homies in the pews, and other Christians at large. If you are a white Christian or a person of color assimilated into the white Christian experience looking to understand the Latino Christian experience, this is an excellent book for you. Hopefully, you’ll love it and consider it a 4 to 5/5. If you are on the dangerous path of thinking Ted Cruz makes a lot of sense, hopefully this book can pull you back into a more Christlike path. That’s because what the book does most excellently and the thing that truly makes it worthwhile is the genealogy it carves out for the Latin American/Latinx churchgoer. Romero traces the social justice legacy of the Latinx church going as far back as Bartolomé de las Casas through Sor Juana to Santo Romero and the sanctuary movement. Gathering the stories of these Latin American Christians and articulating their shared legacy and inspiring contributions is necessary work in the canon building of our history. Here, Romero does an excellent job also holding these saints to task for their missteps. He mentions De Las Casas anti-Black mistakes, for example. In a similar move, he doesn’t sugarcoat the tragedy of Sor Juana’s last years and death, where she repudiated her past feminism and died silenced and shamed into submission by the Catholic church, erased by history until her work was rediscovered in the 1950s by feminists. While Romero is invested in weaving a narrative meant to inspire not just cultural interest, but also Christian conversion, you can feel him strain against these messier moments. For me at least, these messier moments reveal so much more about the people and Christianity’s institutions. Is Sor Juana’s story an inspiring story about a woman’s bravery fighting against patriarchy in Christianity? Or is it a crushing tale about the feminist freedom that is yet to be possible and perhaps literally impossible within the Catholic church and similar structures?

If you are like me-- interested but already damaged by and thereby suspicious of religion--you will likely be disappointed. One of the most baffling and egregious missteps where Romero truly lets down all of his audiences comes from his omission of syncretism. Syncretism is “the amalgamation or attempted amalgamation of different religions, cultures, or schools of thought.” Syncretism is a crucial part of the story of Latin American Christianity-- for both Black and Native people-and Romero just doesn’t bother even mentioning it. I’m left to conjecture here, but I believe he does this 1) because he doesn’t want Latin American Christianity to seem “less” Christian than Western Christianity and 2) because he’s a bit anti-indigenous and antiblack. This misstep is gigantic because it’s just common knowledge in ethnic studies and becomes emblematic of his other missteps, such as when he fails to talk about the indigenous history behind Juan Diego and La Virgin de Guadalupe and in effect erases Chichimeca deity Tonantzin. A more honest engagement with non-Christian folk traditions and the cosmovision of Mexico Profundo (again another common knowledge text in ethnic studies) would have been so much more interesting and fruitful for understanding the so-called brown church. Romero buys into the outdated conception of mestizaje, referring to himself as la raza cosmica in the book and literally detailing his DNA results in a move that flattens identity and belonging to mere blood. Although he acknowledges the anti-Black history of the mestizaje elsewhere, Romero fails to rigorously conceptualize race throughout the project. Romero tries (in maybe two pages) to theorize a “brown” identity somehow uniting all Latinos with Natives, Arabs, Asians, presumably some Black folks, and even Eastern Europeans. The sheer arrogance and carelessness of this move is stunning. By the end of the book, the word “brown” is still rather empty of significant meaning and seems mostly there to portray a false unity between disparate people with different relationships to Christianity and their own non-whiteness. My global south peers, especially in South Asia, take issue with being asked to identify themselves against whiteness when their shades of brown aren't conspicuous where they're from. They don't think about themselves against a white backdrop the way Latinos do. Romero proclaims this book to be about “the global Brown Church” then leaves out rich Black, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern, and Asian Christian thought. It is stunningly slipshod for a so called academic text.

While I can appreciate framing Jesus as a brown man from the hood, his constant mapping of Galilee onto LA has strong disconnected youth pastor vibes. He might as well had sat with his baseball cap backwards and talked about how Lin-Manuel Miranda is his favorite rapper. If he could keep this attempt at inclusivity consistent, I might not have faulted him on it, but he calls the Virgin Mary a single mother, something which is both factually incorrect and a slap in the face of Joseph and other adoptive parents. He uses ableist metaphors unbecoming of an ethnic studies scholar. And worst of all, he fails to ever explicitly mention LGBTQ+ communities. This last omission especially practically guarantees the failure of his project because homophobia is a major reason young people abandon religion. For me, this book was a ⅖ at best. I'm still waiting on the day for Christians to forsake the colonizer logic behind their missionary work and be more Christlike.

Poets and Prophets of the Resistance: Intellectuals and the Origins of the Salvadoran Civil War / Joaquín M. Chavez / 2017

Poets and Prophets of the Resistance: Intellectuals and the Origins of the Salvadoran Civil War / Joaquín M. Chavez / 2017

This book is everything I wanted and more. It unbraids the tangle of historical movements fighting for justice in El Salvador during its revolutionary era, providing clarity where led savvy and untrained political thinkers only see chaos. It draws out the history of university militants, liberation theologians and their flocks, campesino organizers, and more in their respective and crossing paths for change, be it through electoral politics, armed resistance, or otherwise. The conversations and tensions between these groups is illuminating, especially since most history paints the Salvadoran conflict as a Cold War battle with US and Israel supporting the dictatorship and Cuba and Russia supporting the FMLN. The recovery of the different ideologies at play in the resistance is key to a deeper understanding of how we got to where we are now and how we can try to do better. It was illuminating for example to learn of Che Guevara's dismissal of revolutionary possibility in El Salvador, in part because the country lacks enough mountains for guerillas to retreat in, and how leftist militias built broader based coalitions to sustain the revolution, adapting Vietnamese and Maoist strategies. It was illuminating to learn of the debates surrounding Roque Dalton's death, where militarized and dogmatic rooted peasant revolutionaries bristled against the influence of cosmopolitan petit bourgeoisie they felt was attempting to hijack the revolution because they did not want a Cuban and Soviet revolution, but a Salvadoran one. This book holds the pain, paranoia, and horrors of people who literally sacrificed everything in an attempt to forge a brighter future for El Salvador. I'm immensely grateful to Chavez for his work. Alongside Unforgetting by Lovato, this book is key to understanding El Salvador and especially illuminated my understanding of the political forces at play. There's plenty of people and areas of research I will continue to research where Chavez has pointed me. 5/5

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner and Before Us Like a Land of Dreams by Karin Anderson

As someone whose ancestors survived the middle passage and the genocides of smallpox and European imperialism, as someone whose living ancestors survived warfare and migration, I sometimes pray to my ancestors for strength and wisdom. This is a common practice for many people of color I know. We pray to those who sacrificed everything so that one day their descendants could know something more than mere survival. If we romanticize our ancestors, it is only to balance the grotesque stereotypes of them popular in American culture. In writing prompts, it is common to ask young writers of color to reflect on their lineages and share their histories of survival.

That same writing prompt lands differently when given to a white person.

When white people romanticize their histories and feel proud about their ancestors, it’s complicated. American bootstraps narratives and manifest destiny abound, frequently blithely turning the eye away from the masses of enslaved Black bodies, massacred Indigenous bodies, and silenced Queer bodies left in their wake.

When people of color turn to their ancestors for strength, there is something holy, even if simplistic. When white people turn to their ancestors, there is sometimes a reckoning, the dance of positionality has more chances for missteps.

As a teacher, I have wrestled with how to best teach my students how to reckon with their heritages. For my students of color, there is often the need to validate, to empower, to bring to light; for students of color farther along their identity development, I challenge them to complicate their histories, to stop performing their histories cleanly for white people. There are plenty of models I can point my students towards to develop their writing in this way. In the past, however, I have been somewhat at a loss for how to best direct my white students when wrestling with their cultural legacies. Books by white people that reckon with the weight of the legacies of racism and imperialism in ethically satisfying ways are harder to come by perhaps or they have somehow escaped my attention. Too often, the conversation ends with How to Kill a Mockingbird.

I was excited to read Before Us Like a Land of Dreams by Karin Anderson, because it seems like one of the few books by white people that strives to find a way to ethically narrate and thereby define a spiritual relationship with white history. By chance, I read Anderson alongside William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Reviewers of Before Us Like a Land of Dreams are fond of comparing Anderson’s novel to As I Lay Dying. The obvious connection is the shifting first-person perspectives in which the novels are narrated, as well as the authors’ shared ambition in encapsulating a region’s history and culture. The obvious connections end there. While Faulkner’s novel is driven by a clear conflict—the Bundren family’s desire to bury their mother in a faraway town—the conflict in Anderson’s novel is less clear. Before Us Like a Land of Dreams covers five different sets of characters from distinct generations, whose conflicts don’t necessarily interact with one another. In this sense, Before Us Like a Land of Dreams more closely approximates The Glory Field by Walter Dean Myers than As I Lay Dying. The impetus for Anderson’s novel seems to be derived from the author’s mid-life crisis after a divorce—from a husband and a religious history. Like Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous, the novel starts with non-fiction and ends in the imagination: Anderson moves from narrating a mid-life crisis to voicing the stories of her ancestors as a way of finding herself anew in the world. While Anderson compassionately retraces the family histories of several branches of her family tree, Faulkner exposes his characters for the amusement and derision of his readers. Reading As I Lay Dying is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. With this in mind, both novels perhaps offer two contrasting ways of engaging the legacy of whiteness: by Anderson’s approach, compassionately humanize the ancestor in all their flaws and shortcomings, tracing the limits of their strength and desire; Or by Faulkner’s approach, expose the callousness and depravity of your kin without erasing the ache that makes them human. I don’t think it’s fair to call Anderson’s approach redemptive. Rather, much like the Matthew Arnold poem from which the novel takes its name, Anderson seems to nod to the fact that much of the love and light in the romanticized narratives of Mormon history are an illusion.

In Faulkner, we find a fiercely poetic prose with descriptions and moments that will steal your breath. The slim narrative hits you like a bunch of knife jabs. Anderson’s novel is much more sprawling and unfocused. Each voice in Faulkner’s novel clearly pushes along the narrative arc. Each voice in Anderson feels like the beginning of a new novel. Both novels beg for rereading in order to fully appreciate the rich switches in voice. Reading these novels side-by-side is miserably dizzying, although rewarding.

I first engaged with Anderson’s novel in a panel at Southern Utah University. What captivated me the most then was the novel’s attempt to compassionately narrate unspoken parts of Mormon history, such as the forced removal of indigenous peoples from Mountain West, queer figures like Julian Eltinge, and so forth. I am deeply grateful this novel exists, because it narrates the stories of a Utah concealed from the public. Before Us Like a Land of Dreams is a solid counterpoint to all the romanticized stories about pioneers young Mormons are fed in church and public school. A large part of our conversation in that panel was a discussion about how to best represent marginalized stories in Mormon history without losing the ears of our devout community members. I have mixed feelings about how successful Anderson was in that count. There are moments where the autobiographical narrator’s callousness towards the religion makes her seem a tad biased and I can imagine that offending the devout. When the same callousness comes in the voices of the ancestors, it feels more acceptable to me. It’s harder to lay blame on the dead.

On a formal level, Anderson’s novel is worth reading for the explosions of brilliance scattered throughout the novel. There is an absolutely fantastic four-or-so page scene where circus elephants leap off a cliff and into a river—and survive! Equally impressive is the story of a drag performance in rural Idaho that wins the hearts of the conservative community. Then, there’s the story of the white boy who helped Natives steal a herd of farm animals. Time and time again, Anderson narrates these unlikely stories in a way that makes them utterly believable.

I recommend Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying to anyone interested in studying perspective in fiction. I recommend Anderson’s Before Us Like a Land of Dreams to anyone interested in Mormon Studies, history of the American West, perspective in fiction.