American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Don Paco Mendez owns and operates one of the strings of general stores that line the calk commercial, or commercial street, of Puerto Cabezas, the port capital of Nicaragua’s recently formed North Atlantic Autonomous Region (la Raan as it is known locally). One afternoon I stopped by his store for an informal interview with him. He told me that his family was one of the founders of Puerto Cabezas during “company time.”’ His Costa Rican mother and Nicaraguan father migrated from the Pacific side of Nicaragua to establish a commercial outlet in the burgeoning Caribbean port city that in the 1920s was converted from a small Indian village called Bilwi to the Nicaraguan headquarters of the largest employer in Nicaragua-the Standard Fruit Company. He was quick to remind me that although he had been born and raised en la costa, on the Mosquito Coast, he was, in an existential sense, profoundly del Pacifico, from the Pacific. Although he referred to himself as an indigma and an indio, he explained to me, with more than a trace of prejudice, the fundamental superiority of the Pacific Indian vis-a-vis the Moscos de aqui (Moscos). Don Paco explained that he had spent some time in the campesino (small-scale agricultural) villages of the mountainous Nicaraguan interior, an area that, in the national mental map of Nicaraguans, is part of “the Pacific.” In the Segovian mountains he had witnessed the vigor and skill with which the Indian campesinos rendered harvests from marginal and relatively dry lands. In his opinion the land’s suitability for agriculture and the climate of the Pacific interior were far inferior to that of the Mosquito Coast, Nicaragua’s relatively sparsely populated and heavily forested Caribbean lowlands. Don Paco’s perception of the absence of ideal geographical, climatic, and social conditions for agriculture in the Pacific vis-A-vis the Atlantic stood in sharp contrast to his perception of the disparity in productivity between the inhabitants of each region.