Abstract

Studies of peri-urban communities in Nicaragua have been brief, if not nil in anthropological science. This article arises as a derivative of an investigation in the region La Hoyada, of the Sierritas de Santo Domingo that aimed to understand the sociocultural dynamics of a peri-urban. The methodology used is ethnographic, aided by the analysis of the ethnohistorical method and ethno-psychoanalytic didactics. The findings were found to revolve around: a) diffusion of the city-periphery border, b) historical link with the Chorotega culture of the Managua Valley, c) dialectic of development in the community and d) community resistance based on their cultural identity.

1. Introduction

This article is a derivative of anthropological research to qualify for the title of Master in Anthropology and Social Leadership of the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua, UNAN-Managua. It is framed within the current of decolonial thought, by the very fact of reuniting with the origins of communities as part of the process of recognition of social and cultural values that reflect their perspective of development.

It analyzes a community immersed in the city, but not an urban or rural space. In the literature and empirical data, there are subjective and material cultural boundaries that show a line of encounters and disagreements between the subjects who share the living space. In this sense, the case study in the region La Hoyada, of the Sierritas de Managua, reflects a complex diversity, between two parallel worlds, and two different social groups, in terms of cultural features and historical evolution.

The reflection starts from the ethno-cultural origins of the community, to provide the sociocultural findings that demonstrate that this region has a cultural identity below the social fabric structured in modernity. Foundations reflected in their daily lives and have emerged as a mechanism of resistance to the processes of deterritorialized urbanization of space. The cultural diversity in this region is not necessarily studied from an indigenous approach because a community recognized as an original people will not be studied.

Within this study, the concept of ethnic identity and the process of its emergence (identification) as an object of research associated with observable elements such as material vestiges with cultural signifiers and iconographic, symbolic, and linguistic expressions, as such, susceptible to a structuring, therefore it is analyzed if the current identity acquires value, regarding its sense of territorial relevance, cultural symbology, ancestral descent (Oliviera, 2007: 79).

Among the affirmations that the analysis throws is that the culture is intersubjective and associated above all with everyday language, family organization, symbols, and cultural objects that encode their way of seeing and understanding the physical world and their mental resignification (imaginary) of space. In the Pacific of Nicaragua, it is essential to interpret current expressions as unconscious acts of recognition and link to an ancestral legacy. Cultural foundations are an expression of the origins of today’s populations and their configuration over time.

Therefore, the definition of the community universe is proposed starting from the fact that the community has built a (Narváez, 2019)Community-I, which in simple terms would be the sense of belonging that individuals have about their territory and socialization space with their semantic codes built over time. Therefore, when it is indicated that it is urbanized in a deterritorialized way, it is that, when urbanizing, the original inhabitants are displaced with their cultures and particular identities associated with the territory.

The above translates into a recognition of its space, of its internal structures in the community in constant resistance to the global development dictated by the hegemony of capitalist power. The research found an interconnection of subject// subject, and subject// environment in the community, which allowed us to find new points of approach to the cultural identity of the Sierras de Managua, but also to the collaborative ways of the community to resist.

2. Theoretical discussion

2.1. Identity and culture

Current populations maintain within their unconscious practices elements that they have internalized through oral transmission and socialization. Of course, culture covers very diverse elements: it includes objects and material goods that in that sense organized social system, here is called people, and considers its own: territory, and natural resources (Batalla, 1990). Identity is a binding element with historical processes, associated with the origin of populations. The reflections of this identity are processes constructed by different moments of socialization in which individuals and the community have been direct actors. (Pair, 1981)

Identity studies are associated with complex systems linked to the earth and its ecosystem relationship. Therefore, the construction of the individual cannot be separated without a link with his territory, his society, where he has formed a personality, which is the bearer of the local culture. The territory, therefore, has its implication from being: (Mead, 1993)

The place of birth and upbringing, the well-traveled paths, the areas of residence and work, or the place where dead relatives are buried, have an emotional charge derived from the affective bond of human beings with their surrounding environment. It is therefore a polymorphous space, loaded with meanings that are not necessarily shared by all the citizens of a State, but basically by those who reside in a certain area (Bartolomé, 2010: 17).

A community links to its identity and culture: a territory, natural resources, and therefore sociocultural patterns typical of socialized construction. Which is framed in almost indivisible processes. Bonfil Batalla (1990), argues that after the Spanish colony structural mechanisms were created that hid the identity of the original groups, denying it, sending it to their unconscious, and reflecting in their conscious the identity imposed by the dominant power.

The denied culture addressed by the author is just one of the many mechanisms of adaptation of the original people, who, to have a certain social level, denied themselves their identity. (Battle, 1990) Populations keep in their unconscious and from historical transformations a cultural self-awareness.

Identity is a construction that societies carry out both to express their otherness in front of others and order their behaviors. Identity is internalized, subjective and on the other hand externalized and objectified in cultural, social, political, and ecological materials. It is expressed without much effort in every day and “simple” aspects of the life of today’s social groups. (Bartholomew, 2006)

(...) the set of internalized cultural repertoires (representations, values, symbols...) through which social actors (individual or collective) symbolically demarcate their borders and distinguish themselves from other actors in a given situation, all in historically specific and socially structured contexts (Giménez, 2000: 28).

These symbolic representations frame identity in social and cultural structures immersed in the community where the subject is a member. Identity as such is assumed as a product of the collective, reflected in the individual and vice versa. Therefore, identity itself relates to a chain of feelings, and axiological elements that are pragmatically associated with concrete and tangible expressions, in turn, symbolic, beyond the coding that is interpreted in language.

Identity must be reflected critically from reality itself, of course from the currents of thought, there has been an attempt to conceptualize, however, identity and culture are not static and that simple analysis cannot adhere to a philosophical current (Grimson, 2020).

2.2. A theoretical approach to the city and its periphery

The city is considered a determining factor for people’s attitudes and behaviors, the important point individuals is that of the specificity of the city as a physical environment; Totally constructed and, therefore, historical, it imposes and, at the same time, testifies to a relationship of human beings with the processes of commerce, services, and goods. The city is also understood as:

(...) The product of the social relations that are intertwined in it also highlights an important point, although they are different from one city to another, urban relations always have in common a character, which is a necessary and perhaps sufficient requirement for the birth of the city: in the city, the socially necessary division of labor is separated, tendentially, of the bonds of sex and age and tends more to be structured and articulated economically. That is, based on a relationship between means and ends that is consistent with the objectives privileged by the structure of the powers of each city and the social system of which it is part (Signorelli, 1999: 72).

Life in rural communities served to explain life in the city. These two poles - the urban and the rural - are models of forms of social and cultural organization, which correspond to two different lifestyles: the rural dominated by custom, by the slow and uniform rhythm of sensations, and the urban by constant change, by an anomic and pragmatic way of being. The city, from this perspective, allows the formation of a specific personality that breaks with the traditional schemes of community organization (Safa, 1995: 116).

The reflection of recent years has led to a theoretical address to the economic emancipation of the suburbs of the central city. Peter Muller (1981: 6) cited in Nivón (2005: 153) argues the redefinition of the suburb, since the first impression is subordination to the city, however, the new trend of the suburbs in the United States is the reconstruction of the new export sector, with economic independence about the city.

This trend has largely been adopted by many cities in Latin America and especially in Nicaragua. Families with purchasing power seek spaces removed from the city to get away from the hectic dynamics of the city, and generating social transformations, the people from whom they buy seek the neighborhoods of the city or other departments.

This trend leads to the creation of new boundaries by making borders blurred. In this sense, the city no longer ends at the center of power but is expanded by the migration of the wealthy to the peripheries. As diffusion becomes noticeable, and new spaces are conceived, the public ceases to be used in the periphery, and there is a need for new services, and means of individual transport to move from home to work. (Nivón, 2005)

The peri-urban communities’ product of the migration of external agents has manifested processes of varied socialization on the one hand more exclusive aspects of life (purchasing power) and on the other hand labor force and loss of communal territory by the communities(Nivón, 2005).

From a critical perspective with such theoretical positions, and starting from how neoliberalism has differentially shaped cities, this article shows some evidence that there are three of the many urban processes that have been accentuated in neoliberal cities: 1) stigmatization, segregation, and degradation of poor and popular neighborhoods; 2) gentrification of historic centers; and 3) suburbanization of the middle classes in urban centers increasingly closed in on themselves and subject to security and control measures (Monreal, 2016).

This is clear evidence that neoliberalism promotes this exclusion and even spatial restriction. Of course, from this logic, the resistance that communities in the diffuse periphery have is analyzed. An experience like that of Nicaragua from 1990 to 2000 was lived in other countries, for example, Brazil, in some way has experienced that growth from the periphery to the center, however, the space moves, but not the people, that is, if they are people of a low purchasing power, they are not in the new center, but, who are retreated to suburbs always marginalized from the center power(Magnani, 2019).

2.3. Anthropology of Development

Many authors agree in taking as the founding act of the “age of development” the speech on the State of the Union delivered by Harry Truman in 1949. Defining in this way a contemporary concept of development, however, this was triggered by a change in international relations and the imposition of a new world order marked by the decline of colonialism, the beginning of the Cold War, capitalism seeking new markets, an acceleration and confidence in scientific advances even greater than in previous eras, and the configuration of a new institutional framework of a global character called: modernity(Marin, 2005).

The super-modern situation broadens and diversifies the movement of modernity. It is a sign of logic of excess and this would be tempted to measure it from three excesses: the excess of information, the excess of images, and the excess of individualism, moreover, each of these excesses is linked to the other two. This would indicate that(Augé, 1999)this type of development is closely linked to the socializing detachment of the collectivity, so cities become more pragmatic and their communication more complex directly linked to the relationship of power and management of information. (Castells, 2013)

Since the anthropological optics the relationships that exist in this type of visualization are more complex and define a constant dialectic, between those who seek to expand their material domains, in this sense lands, and those who resist in the lands to sell or be displaced. However, there is a reality in peri-urban contexts, a coexistence of identities and personalities, even if they are not related to each other.

To explain these processes or strategies of hybridization, for survival in spaces of power relations, García Canclini uses the term borrowed from the economy, “re-conversion” the types of economic and symbolic reconversion is not used as strategies of the hegemonic sectors or the cultural industry exclusively, but are also updated in the daily practice of the popular sectors, such as peasant migrants who adapt their knowledge to live in the city, as well as their handicrafts and products for urban consumption (Szurmuk and Mckee Irgwin, 2009:134).

What is important to analyze is that the concept of development must be reconsidered, Arturo Escobar (1999) argues that “development has been considered part of an original myth deeply rooted in Western modernity”. Faced with this, to say that the development was an invention is not equivalent to labeling it a lie, myth, or conspiracy but to declare its strictly historical character and, in the traditional anthropological style, diagnose it as a concrete cultural form, framed in a set of practices that can be studied ethnographically. Considering development as an invention also suggests that this invention can be “uninvented” or reinvented in very different ways, particularly according to the context and their own experiences.(Escobar, 1999, p. 53)

International parameters that have a globalizing vision of “development” are not enough, since this vision excludes the cultural realities that exist in the communities, therefore, they classify under a system that hides the perspective of the people in their territories. The application of cultural approaches to explain development and sustainability is fundamental for a closer and related understanding of the diverse realities and needs experienced by peoples, cultures, and territories. (Road, 2022)

Taking into account all these debates, the vision of the people cannot be excluded from the development programs and definitions, and investment policies that are outside this possibly end up violating in some way the truly integral development (Lattuada, Nogueira, Portmann, & Urcola, 2019).

Therefore, that the approach to development must be analyzed critically, even when it is established from the new discourse of sustainability and sustainability. Neglecting the historical, and cultural realities and their asymmetrical ways of imposing development also entails a bias in the theoretical and scientific approaches that are developed.

3. Materials and Methods

3.1. Research approach

The approach used has been qualitative. This research focuses on understanding the phenomenon of urban development starting from the roots of the community, therefore, it responds to what research coincides with as its genesis: ideas. To start this research needed an idea; which methodologically starts from the intention or interest in the problem or phenomenon. Ideas constitute the first approach to objective reality (from the quantitative perspective), subjective reality (from the qualitative perspective) or intersubjective reality (from the mixed perspective) to be investigated (Sampieri, Fernández Collado, and Baptista Lucio, 2010).

3.2. Type of Research

Qualitative research is analytical-descriptive, analyzing the ethno-cultural roots and the development perspectives of the peri-urban community about the city. Descriptive studies seek to specify the properties, characteristics, and profiles of people, groups, communities, processes, objects, or any other phenomenon that is subjected to analysis (Sampieri, Fernández Collado, y Baptista Lucio, 2010:29).

3.3. Research area

The research was carried out in the area of the Sierras de Santo Domingo, La Hoyada region. This community is located south of the Hermitage of Santo Domingo. Limited with the urbanizations of the Altos de Santo Domingo.

3.4. Population and research subjects

The epistemology arising from the known subject (interlocutors) comes to speak where the epistemology of the knowing subject (researcher) is silent, mutilated, and limited and tries not to make the voice of the known subject disappear behind that of the knowing subject. In other words, it is the population that is selected(Gialdino, 2006) that provides the empirical sustenance. The selection criteria of the research subjects focused on having a generational connection with the community’s past.

3.5. Type of sampling

The qualitative research resumed the type of non-probabilistic sampling, for convenience that allowed the selection of those accessible informants who accept to be included in the research (Otzen and Manterola, 2017). The non-probabilistic sample generates flexibility in the research process. Using the snowball technique to reach the subjects that the research needed and from whom the information was obtained for the development of the study and the application of the observation and analysis of the units of analysis of the object of study. The incorporation of the informants is done iteratively, according to the information that emerges in the fieldwork, (Bernal, 2010)moments of meetings are created. As experts in this mode of inquiry emphasize, what is decisive here is not the size of the sample, but the richness of the data provided by the participants, and the observation and analysis skills of the researcher. (Martinez-Salgado, 2012)

3.6. Research methods

Because it is an anthropological study, its main method is ethnography. Rossana Guber (2001), states that the work of ethnography must be reflective. The ethnographic method provides a descriptive and analytical portrait of the context of the study(Narváez, 2019). This research was also framed in the ethnic historical method, which “is a particularly appropriate methodology, it implies the approach of colonial documents (administrative, legal, religious and commercial) to obtain verifiable data”. (Nacuzzi, 1989) For this research that points to decolonization, it is important to read historical documents from the perspective of the anthropologist and his interlocutors. Problematizing the documents or archives with “anthropological question” this interpretation that was made of the data obtained from historical sources and archaeological findings does not show an absolute truth but is approximate to the reality of the current populations of the Sierritas de Managua. (Krotz, 1994)

3.7. Didactics of ethnopsychoanalysis

The research aims to achieve a deep link of analysis between qualitative theory and ethno psychoanalysis approaches. Ethno psychoanalytic didactics implies this process of fieldwork, in which the researcher exposes his subjectivities and contrasts them with the subjectivities of the informants, questioning reality and creating deeper interpretations.

To interpret is to teach the informant the meaning of the hidden social reality, transferred precisely by him (interlocutor). The interpretation contains confrontation with reality, the same that perhaps the informant fails to perceive and is in his unconscious. In ethno-psychoanalytic didactics, interpreting is a constant action in research. It begins with the introduction to fieldwork and continues during the talks with the informants. Interpretation is achieved when the researcher advances from the simple description of the exterior exposed by the informant, that is, the conscious reality, which the informant narrates, and deepens with the reflection generated by the countertransference and relationship with the symbolic material elements created in society, of which the subject may be aware or not. (Albrecht, 2018)

4. Results

4.1. Approach to a reflective ethnography of the La Hoyada community

The streets were adorned with trees, plants, forests, and animals. Today they are adorned with walls that rise by more than three meters to avoid contact with the undeniable reality that exists there many years before the “development” will arrive. In this way is the imagination of the community La Hoyada, located at km 10 road to Masaya, and perhaps 30 minutes into the Sierras by motorcycle taxi.

When you get off the bus that leaves the passengers on the track, you must take one of the motorcycle taxis that are the means of internal transport to the Sierritas de Santo Domingo, what is observed are highly developed roads from the urban model, houses and luxury condominiums, throughout the tour is an almost static panorama. Although on the streets that are circulated by the latest model vehicles, some passers-by walk with a plaid shirt, to protect themselves from the sun, boots, and some hygiene material.

Those who walk on foot are the residential workers, who are precisely among the few who perhaps still live in the same area. The motorcycle taxi will turn and turn through desolate streets and with some gardeners on their sidewalks cleaning the front of the residential ones. However, the street will lead to a certain place where the hydraulic concrete road ends and meets the dirt road.

The whole area of Santo Domingo is one, although internally it is marked by distinctions of social classes. In the same territory, there are people with high economic levels and the original inhabitants of the community, who cohabit in the same space, although without apparent interaction.

Each condominium has its own internal socialization space, parks, or internal squares. The region has its meeting and socialization space: the small school. Meeting points that exist between two social groups are only economic relations. The one who has not ended up buying their land, end up being made by their employees (security guard, domestic, gardener).

Indigenous communities cohabit in a space with external populations, in many cases international. In the 60s Marvin Maltez, one of the informants of the community remembers that these lands were fresh, with many trees, and people were dedicated to the work of the lands. At that time there were about 75 homes of the original people, who according to Marvin, have always lived there. They even remembered their parents telling them the stories of the community when their grandparents were still alive.

I remember there has always been what is San Antonio Sur, La Hoyada that is part of Santo Domingo, San Isidro de la Cruz Verde that was the other, that later these regions have been delimited in others let’s say sub-communities other regions that have been created but that took part of the original communities from here. (Maltese, 2019)

He also recalled that in areas near the community there were lands that had belonged to a former leader of the Somoza dynasty, they called him “THE shark”, those lands that belonged to the landowner, they promoted that others arrived intending to seize and displace the first settlers.

It was after the triumph of the Sandinista revolution, that these lands are expropriated and handed over to the community in the form of a cooperative. According to Marvin, they were cooperatives that served the community and other people who came to live there as a result of the Agrarian Reform. Therefore, by the beginning of the 80s, the community had had considerable growth, as other inhabitants arrived.

The houses were separated from each other, by considerable distances, the informant called it Fincas style, which could be translated as housing and productive spaces of the families. During that time that there were already people in the same conditions as the informant recalls, it is that the community begins to have a perspective of development, from its reality.

Founded in 1982, the first school was called Luis Alfonso Velásquez Flores. For this proposal for community development, the villagers organized and formed entourages, these varied among which they collected funds, labor, and attention to workers. Contextualizing those eras, post-revolution Nicaragua had the experience of communal organization, which could have greatly facilitated proposals for community development projects.

When we did that school we got the materials through the Ministry of Education and the community contributed the labor that we did here of everything, we did raffles, walks of everything, we took advantage of it to build the school we did parties we did kermés we did a lot of things because the thing is that we collected the money to build the school. (Maltese, 2019)

The community experienced the first steps of the desired development, by which the collective will was directed to the organization of the productive and associative forces to achieve concrete products, such as schools. According to the informant, throughout that period of the 80s, community initiatives would remain in perspective, since the counterrevolutionary process was installed, the war in Nicaragua, and the blockade of the United States of America, forces the community to organize now in function of civil defense, and family-community productive systems.

At the beginning of the 90s, some informants recall, the community is as weakened as all of Nicaragua. The government of Violeta Chamorro takes power, and processes of setbacks begin in the communities, says Marvin Maltez, because the cooperative of the community is dismantled, the previous owner is compensated for the lands, but also claims them and takes them from the cooperatives. Other community members affiliated with the cooperatives sell out of fear that they would be dispossessed as rumored during that time.

This process was experienced throughout the neoliberal period using a mechanism of “soft” expropriation, which is known as the decapitalization of peasants, which was nothing more than the weakening of the economic-productive system of peasant societies. From the government of Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, a new form of displacement and underdevelopment of peasants was experienced.

The above denotes a mechanism of adaptation as proposed by Parin (1981), taking into account that the State during the 1990s, created the conditions of domination over wills. To survive, people adapted to the new stage, that is, to stop living on the land and sell it. In that sense, the system of domination created the need to gain apparent freedom through the sale of their lands.

During the years 1990, a good part of the population that had arrived in the community of La Hoyada, but also to different points around Santo Domingo, lived in a precarious situation. Marvin comments that the population, especially those who arrived with the Agrarian Reform, saw the need to sell. The natives, although suffering the same conditions, preferred to stay, for what the informant called: “the love for the terrucha left by their parents”. (Maltese, 2019)

That love is the identity reflected in the external reality, which was built and socialized throughout his childhood. Marvin says that, although many had left, displaced by the purchases very cheap, those who had always lived in the community remained, organized to achieve the development that it wanted. That identification with the land and the community that the informant understands as the group of people who live in space is what allowed, what he understands as the struggle for better conditions.

4.2. Ethno history of the community: link with the Valley of the Chorotegas

It is indisputable to consider that the community presents remnants of native peoples and that its activities connect with a community environment that emerged many years away, within the cultural dynamics cultural materials and the spatial organization of the houses prevail as proof of the original predecessor group.

Their economic-productive practices show a cultural rootedness to the most significant elements of the autochthonous culture, the current populations distribute the space of the territory in housing and productive, distinguishing perfectly the areas that are arable, with the housing. They tend to express an intersubjective self-awareness associated with the original language, symbols, and more concrete practices in everyday life.

My uncle and dad found it [the metate or grinding stone] in the garden while planting a long time ago. We still use it at home to grind rice and prepare atol, we know our ancestors did it. (Molina S., 2018)

Obviously, they have codified their world, their community universe from the spatial distribution, although there is still a denial of their link with some original people, by the number of mixtures there have been in time, it is also strongly influenced by internal colonialism, that is, to deny themselves.

In this sense, decolonizing reflection is thought mainly from the construction of one’s discourse as liberation. It was rethought from the vision of the people of the communities to themselves and others in society. There is certainly a contrast between how the heads of families project themselves in space-time relative to younger members of the community. (Dussel, 1994)

Managua was a colonial citadel with few influences, it had its cultural group, settled on the shore of Lake Managua or Xolotlán. The data investigated so far show that the population settled for the time of the Spanish colony was Chorotega, as quoted by the historian Clemente Guido, with a chronicle by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo:

And from what was said, I went to the population of Managua of the Chorotega language, which in truth was a beautiful and populous square, and as it was lying on the shore of that lagoon, going from León to it, it took a lot of space; but not so much or having the body of a city, but a neighborhood or square in front of another, with a great interval; and when it was more prosperous (before the moth of war entered there), it was an extended and unvaried congregation (...) but there were in prosperity ten thousand Indians of bows and arrows and forty thousand animals, and it was the most beautiful square of all (Martinez, 2017)

This quote shows that Managua, in addition to having Chorotega cultural features, was highly populated in a central area and concentrated at that time on the shore of Lake Xolotlán. The interesting thing is that Oviedo, cited in Clemente Guido (2017) indicates that it was a prosperous place before the war, this suggests that there was a moment of conflict that caused the migration and displacement of the Chorotega population.

Then, the routes that possibly existed were Tipitapa and Masaya, therefore, it is reasonable to think that the original population of the Sierras de Managua is descended from Chorotegas that came from the valley. At another point Clemente Guido quotes Oviedo:

From Managua to Itipitapa there are two leagues of the road in which there are twenty streams of hot water, which enter the lagoon of León, on the coast of which are Managua and Itipitapa of the southern band (...) and all of them come from towards the part and Mount Masaya (2017: 9).

This indicates that, during the war process, which narrates the chronicles of Oviedo (Guido, 2017), it could have originated by not accepting El Requerimiento, these populations of the Managua Valley, had Tipitapa and Masaya closer to settling, in the transit route, there were also the Sierritas, which were the highest parts. a

On the other hand, this process of colonization has been accentuated in the positioning of the Catholic Church, therefore, the Chorotega square, narrated by Oviedo, was intervened by the colony through the church, in a text on the construction of the cathedral of Managua it is indicated that the oldest church was the Parish, that was built exactly where the old Cathedral stands today.

In 1781 the colonial church fell. The priest Chamorro defrayed the expenses with the work of the natives of Tipitapa, who were the first ones who were in the square and had already migrated and made the foundations. The engineer José María Alexander made the plans in 1783 by order of the President of the Audiencia. Including what Father Chamorro spent, the Parish of Managua, a village at the time, cost 10,771.00 silver pesos. (Halftermeyer, 1946)

If the invasion mentioned by Oviedo, provoked the war at the beginning of 1600, that explains why the first parish already existed in the vicinity of the lake. Precisely where the original population lived because of its proximity to the natural wealth of the area. The construction of the church with new architecture made use of people from the area, called “Indians” in the chronicles, but that is a term of reference null today.

Those who remained in that area were enslaved, but also indoctrinated towards the cultural elements of the Catholic Church. Colonization is assisted by indoctrination through the church, and social or cultural dispossession imposed by force by the invaders. Archaeological evidence shows cultural movements southeast of Lake Xolotlán, that is, the areas of the Military Hospital, the UNAN-Managua, Barrios Los Placeres, El Recreo, and the rural communities that connect with the Sierritas de Santo Domingo, such as Las Viudas, Jocote Dulce, among others.

In this journey, coming from north to south, looking for the eastern part of Managua, the archaeological cultural sample is evident, which possibly evidences the migration of these populations to high areas, after living in Lake Xolotlán. Archaeological research shows that there was such a movement (Lange, e t al., 1995), (Vásquez, Lange, and Espinosa, 1996), (Balladares, Lechado, and Delfino, 2001), and that confirms the hypothesis that the context under (Vasquez, 2017)(Hodgson, 2017) study has been a recipient of these waves.

The archaeological findings are typical of populations of around the year 1200 (AD), that is, dated between the Sapoa and Ometepe periods, a stage in which the Chorotega and Nicaros culture was flourishing. These waves of Mesoamerican populations of the Uto-Aztec, Nahuatl, and Otomangue linguistic trunk passed through the Gulf of Chorotega and advanced to the South Pacific (Portilla, 1972) mentioned (Narváez, 2019).

The original populations could extend in time, that is, they found the way of life that the colony resisted and that later would end up consumed by force or mediated by fear. Las Sierritas de Santo Domingo has a church that bears the same name and where it is located, also adjoining the cemetery of Santo Domingo, in the tour that was made buried families of the late 1800s were found.

However, Adán Molina and Marvin Maltez maintain that their ancestors are buried in that cemetery and that by that time there was already a Catholic parish, that is, the pattern of establishment of the church where groups of native populations were located.

During the conversations, it was difficult to make the family tree to Don Adán Molina, since he is quite old, and his hearing a little low, however, during the days of the conversation he managed to manifest that he would have a high parental approach with the first populations, or at least of the first housing waves, which is possibly those that migrated from the Chorotegas Valley on the shore of the lake.

“My parents and grandparents have lived in this region. We are one of the first families. Imagine I’m 92 years old, my mom died 101, and my grandmother walked around(Molina A., 2018) .”

Therefore, the region La Hoyada, and the entire area of the Sierras de Managua, are a true paradise of ancestral information. It is a polymorphous space, loaded with meanings that are not necessarily shared by all citizens because now not all belong to the first populations, but basically by those who reside in a certain area with cultural roots or a sense of belonging (Bartolomé, 2010: 17)

The Chorotega were completely extinct, their linguistic features were mutilated, and even when scientific efforts are made for the reconstruction of this important society, comparative studies would have to be carried out regionally, since it could not be defined from a local trunk such as La Hoyada, or Las Sierras de Santo Domingo, where there is less native population.

The language that is a determining factor can only be analyzed among the everyday phrases that could have an original linguistic trunk. From Chorotega and Subtiava -which belonged to the Oto-Mangue family, the closest relative is Tlapaneco, which is still spoken in Mexico in different dialects by more than 100,000 people (Salamanca, 2011: 20). Although it is notorious that the language has become extinct in today’s societies, on the contrary, only variants of site names, or surnames, remain in some cases. Of course, in the community of La Hoyada, has been complex to find a native name, because a fairly considerable portion, already has the names of the condominiums.

4.3. Thinking about development from the La Hoyada community

The informants recall that in 1991 they “struggle” for the street, the school, and other elements that gave development to the community, that is, in its condition of peripheral space, fighting is an expression of autonomy and freedom (Parin, 1981). And that libertarian expression would lead the community to obtain an income from electric energy, which people understood as an achievement, that is, the realization of the community is understood with achievements, goals, or projects that bring contextualized development.

Development is seen in the language of Marvin Maltez, as the materialization of vital conditions of improvements, public services, and access, rather than being visualized with large-scale accumulation is foreseen as collective well-being. Achieve goals that complement their spiritual culture, but in turn generate pressure on their lifestyle and worldview.

In the development of his discourse, it is perceived that the need to acquire resources (materials or services) fostered the collectivization of community wills. He was still in the conversation expressing his experience when he fought for the municipality to build a road that would give better access to the community. According to the list of facts, the motivation of a road was the product of the lack of an exit with optimal conditions.

He recalls that he and other community members were leading the construction of the road that would make the community accessible. However, he maintains that the Mayor’s Office during Arnoldo’s government refused to do so, and suggested that the construction should be by another way, which the community did not accept. The informant when commenting on that experience can see in his look and expression the satisfaction of the struggle he led at that time. He mentions that as a result of the protests he and his companions were imprisoned to build the road. Says:

3 days after being released from prison, no! like a week because I went out on Holy Monday, look, and [when he arrived at the community] it was full of people at the entrance, like there was a party, throwing rockets. The thing is, well, that stimulated me a lot to keep fighting along the way (Maltese, 2019).

He laughingly says he was proud that when he was released, people in the community were waiting for him with joy, launching rockets. This development brought with it other interests alien to the population of the community. Since the road meant access to optimal and warm areas, this is how the process of housing invasion of other external people begins. Those who still kept their lands as a result of the Reformation, and other natives were selling little by little.

The informant says that for the love of the dollar people sold their land. Perhaps we should also ask whether these sales were produced by institutional mechanisms in the related infrastructure and superstructure based on the analysis of historical materialism. That is, the changes in the infrastructure of the community, produced the interests of the dominant classes and created mechanisms in the superstructure – institutional apparatuses and public discourses – that is, the ideal of life, and utopian imaginaries, presided over by an institutional construction in which the free market was promoted (neoliberal period), selling lifestyles that fed people’s desire for the urbanized city, and denying in some the desire to continue in rurality. (Harnecker, 1984)

4.4. Dialectics of development: the reconfiguration of community identity and universe

The economic relations that emerged in the neoliberal period (1990-2006) determined the condition of belonging and displacement of the inhabitants of the community. After the construction of the highway (infrastructure), the informants remember that construction companies came to settle in the places of the people they had sold, recalls an urbanized called Sovipe, which began to establish itself in Nicaragua and Honduras in 1995, where they would have been accused of environmental damage according to a note by La Prensa de Honduras. The Nicaraguan partners settled in this country and were building the homes of the entrepreneurs and elite that were made of the lands of cooperatives of the 80s, creating clearing and reconfiguring their original lifestyle.

At the end of five years, the gap between the social relationship, spatial distribution, and productive economic system of the community had changed considerably. People were already coexisting with families living in separate systems of walls, the original region was being reduced and economic-productive activities were changing, as the new inhabitants were hiring some members of the community as employees, servitude, who would no longer be dedicated to the production of the patio plots.

This process of development of urbanization of the community has been imminent and above all enhanced by the interests of social groups with greater economic and privileged possibilities. The community is in a dilemma, whether to safeguard its heritage, that is, to continue living in the same place, the land, the customs, the culture, and its traditions, or to leave and sell as the other regions and neighbors have done.

The informants mentioned nostalgia in the public discourse. It is handled that the community of Santo Domingo has developed; but that in this development the existence of the original population is denied. Therefore, the contradiction of society is rooted in development that is subject to a displacement of indigenous peoples from local spaces.

We are not leaving, I say no because the urbanization would come to a finish with the few trees that remain because we are the ones who maintain the trees, we comply with the law, and we ask for permission, but those developers have completely discouraged us. (Molina N., 2019)

The community was in urgent need of development, the same needs led it to the struggle for the income of services and materials. However, development is consuming them, in the words of the informant, it is extinguishing them. Since the surplus value generated by the residences raises the living costs of the people of La Hoyada that means that because they are in the same spatial zone as I had indicated above, the costs of basic services are equal.

Development is not sustainable for the original communities or regions that are sharing space with other groups with greater purchasing privileges. The panorama of the region is of a peasant landscape, immersed in capitalist development. It seems that, in the unconscious of people, there is a resistance that is mediated by the sense of belonging to the earth. But it is being lost in time, that is, in generations.

The capitalized and valued urban development would cause the periphery to fade, because the city as a center extends, and the periphery ceases to be, the periphery and is configured in a node of power relations. Today the road area to Masaya, and the Sierritas de Santo Domingo, would no longer be a periphery, but a peri-urban community with liminal borders concerning the city as a center.

This, therefore, reconfigures social and economic relations in the territory of the Community. Within the community, there is a constant struggle of silent resistance, which is sustained to date by social programs of the current government. The possibilities of resistance and continuity in the community would depend on the type of government that this and its policies.

In the neoliberal years, conditions were unprotective for populations in peripheral areas, vulnerable to the point of selling their land. The wealthy class of Managua, aimed at the warm and fresh environment of the Sierritas of Managua, therefore, having interests in the community and establishing different mechanisms to appropriate the land. Doña Vilma Arce, maintains as a fundamental element, the fact of thinking that the Sierritas have developed, but that it is a development that has caused the departure of the original people. In addition, he adds, that the urbanizations have maintained and will maintain an interest in these lands because it breaks the residential landscape that is trying to be built.

To my nephews, I gave some land, and they told me we want to sell. I told you that’s your decision, if you want to sell, sell. Of course, I grabbed the papers because the land was still mine, they came out in my name, so when buyers arrived I told them very expensive prices, so they wouldn’t want to. A buyer appears with my nephews, look we come to buy him in fourteen thousand, and I told them, then he tells me, look we bring you civilization, that’s perdition! for me, that’s not civilization, it’s doing shit everything. (Maple, 2019)

The above affirms that the notion of the descendants of the original populations is not wanting to sell, or reject globalization and the expression of civilization. It is not that they do not want to live in it, but because it disrupts their world, their ecosystem, and the social and cultural environment in which they have always lived. However, it is a feeling of adults, Doña Vilma is 79 years old and feels a closer attachment to the earth and what is in it. Young people, on the other hand, some of them, do not feel that way, influenced mostly by the most urbanized socialization spaces, technology, and the global system, have acquired according to Doña Vilma another way of thinking.

The influence of globalization disrupts the sense of belonging, so some young people want to leave the community. For its part, the other social group subjectively denies the existence of the peri-urban community that already inhabited that space. Therefore, it is important to reflect on Sustainable Development Goal 11, aimed at sustainable cities and communities (United Nations, 2015), and rethink the idea of understanding the development of communities. It does not lie in the idea of buying their land and moving it to neighborhoods or urbanizations. Rather, it is to create social conditions to raise the conditions of their housing without altering the community system.

That said, it is clear that these communities come from generations-long struggles to protect their lands. If you take into account the archaeological and historical data, the Chorotega groups had been displaced by the colony, and then by the Creoles from the shores of the lake to the mountains. And in this new stage of recent history, community members have fought to conserve their lands.

Within this logic, the struggle is an expression of resistance through identity. There is a revitalization of identity in communities, this is conceived as the I-community because they maintain the value of sustainability within internal practices.

In this context, there is a dialectical struggle between the idea of Western development based on concrete forests, and sustainable and community development, based on the vision of community. Returning to identity and culture as a resource of resistance and resilience to the new struggle for the defense of the territory or the community universe.

The reality in the community is irreversible. There is no denying any of the faces, none of the worlds. Therefore, creates a complex situation. Proposing in this sense, a dialectical configuration of clashes of identities. Identity is negotiated with external reality, that is, the mechanisms of resistance that people express in their reality, they are detached from their internal struggle between their unconsciousness and consciousness, proposing what they want, which is to stay in the community, with what is achieved which is to survive, before selling their land.

5. Final Thoughts

The cultural roots of a community emerge as responses to external influence, which in some cases are global-like technologies but which members of a community resist in the community environment. The peri-urban community of La Hoyada coexists with two culturally and socially distinct groups. Both are in the same territorial space, but cultural clashes and influence resistance are increasingly complex. Capitalist development is denying in the discourse the subjects of the original populations.

This community universe builds identity through the I-community people socialize and internalize the social, cultural, and semantic values of space, territory, and intersubjective relationships. Of course, peri-urbanization has caused a high cost of public services, causing a complex experience for the community, therefore, the special programs of the government of the day can slow down urbanization and the disappearance of the population.

Cultural negotiation between original members with internal structures, that is, their families, allows them to interconnect among members belonging to the community, and resist. Negotiations influenced by exogenous structures, such as political processes outside the community, end up creating mechanisms of resistance or adaptation.

The urbanizations are causing a diffusion of the periphery, and therefore creating new spaces of peri urbanization because the original inhabitants persist in the community. The groups that already inhabit these spaces have a cultural particularity, in the case of the Sierritas de Managua, the La Hoyada community has ancestral vestiges which cause other dialectical relationships and cultural resistance.

Like other realities in Managua and Latin America, there may come a point where that community – referring to the original populations – disappears. There is evidence of clear peri urbanization of some points of the capital by private urbanizations, of course in the medium or long term can cause the wealthy class to live in the best conditions, in spaces with greater ecological potential, microclimates, and native populations are crowded in spaces already conglomerated.

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