Subversive Expressions of Migrant Counter-Narratives of Nicaraguan Exile in Costa Rica
-----
Rivera’s research explores how Nicaraguan exiles in Costa Rica make sense of their lived experiences of forced migration through art and community gatherings. Drawing on poetry and oral history narratives, combined with fieldwork and content analysis, Rivera finds that Nicaraguan exiles construct subversive counter-narratives that counter the Daniel Ortega-Rosario Murillo (ORMU) regime’s attempts to rewrite the sociopolitical uprising of April 18. These narratives play a critical role in exposing the political violence that has forced Nicaraguan migrants into exile. To examine how they use memory and lived experience to develop subversive counter migrant narratives, Rivera analyzes the poetry and oral history narratives of eight exiled Nicaraguan mestiza and multi-racial LGBTQ individuals living in San Jose, Costa Rica. Analyzing these narratives provide insight into how Nicaraguan exiles articulate the impact of authoritarian violence and displacement amid the struggle for survival. Together, these narratives focus on making visible the continued feminist/subversive-oriented persistence and presence of exiled Nicaraguans in Costa Rica. Ultimately, this research is based on an analysis of how expressive forms of writing produce a subversive record or counter-archive in relation to authoritarianism, forced migration, and exile.
-----