The Exiling of Respectability: The Case of Granada, Nicaragua

I have to live for others and not for myself; that’s middle-class morality.
George Bernard Shaw


The Granada in which I spent my adolescence was a cultured, genteel community. One of Nicaragua’s largest cities—as well of one of the oldest on the American continent, founded in 1524—Granada was a place where courtesy, honor, respectability, and education were held in high esteem. In the mid-1960s, when my family moved there from Los Angeles, California—after I had just turned eleven—I felt as if I had stepped back a couple of centuries to a place and time where civility, good manners, being cultivated, and preserving one’s good name mattered immensely.

Of course, the majority of Nicaraguans lacked access to an education of quality, to the schooling vital for improving one’s condition in life. As a result, moving up the ladder of respectability—and, if a person was fortunate, moving up the economic scales as well—was something only the most diligent, persistent, and resourceful among the poor could achieve. Nevertheless, the majority of Granadinos and Granadinas, regardless of social class, recognized and admired the men and women who lived their lives by strict codes of public conduct while at the same time pursuing lofty educational and personal goals.

Oddly, or at least it seems so in my memory, the folks that inhabited this refined civic echelon came almost exclusively from the middle-class. The wealthy led lives separate from their fellow Granadinos and Granadinas. The elite seldom ventured out of their majestic colonial homes; few outside this closed society knew what the city’s aristocracy did behind locked doors. As a result of this isolation, with the upper-class’s lives being utterly private, it was up to the middle-class to carry the banner of sophistication and good breeding out in public, to be the standard bearers of refinement. Middle-class morality, that life lived for others which George Bernard Shaw refers to—and I interpret his quote at face-value, not as irony—was in fact the glue that held together centuries-worth of traditions regarding an individual’s responsibility to set a good example for others.

I was fortunate enough to grow up in a middle-class Granada home. My mother’s extended family was part of a social class that for generations sought to keep their offspring well-educated and cultured—without the burden of being materialistic, which being middle-class implies today. My family’s emphasis on being respectable made it possible for me to have several role models to choose from within my own family: men and women who devoted themselves to becoming the best persons they could possibly be. And it was to them that, like an impressionable adolescent looking into a crystal ball, I turned to for some insight with regard to who I could become.

I’ll share one example (but only one, for the list is rather long): that of my great-aunt Mercedes Jacinta López, better known within the family as “Chintita.” In an era that predated the feminist movement, she shattered gender barriers, walls that had been keeping women from positions of responsibility for centuries. In the early 1940s, Chintita became the first woman to work for a bank in Granada. Today, throughout the world, a woman bank-teller is a common sight, but her appointment provoked a temporary uproar in patriarchal Granadino society. On her first day on the job, several men withdrew their savings, arguing that a woman wouldn’t know how to handle their money. But within a matter of days, Chintita’s efficiency, honesty, humor, and gift for making people feel at ease soon put an end to their apprehensions.

Years later, urged on by friends, Chintita began to dabble in politics. Eventually, she became the first woman vice-mayor of Granada. Still, in spite of these considerable honors, Chintita, a well-read person who knew and could recite most of Rubén Darío’s poems by heart, wore these distinctions with humility—always ready to smile and be amiable, even to the humblest person in Granada. When Chintita died, four years ago, thousands attended her funeral. By living her life according to the middle-class standards set generations before her, she was able to touch many, many lives.

Last June, during my most recent visit to Granada, my sister and I, in comparing notes, kept repeating that something was missing, that Granada had changed, and substantially, in the years since we grew up there. We both agreed that the city had lost the gentility of old. In the streets, backpacking tourists, aggressive peddlers, and local vagrants have replaced the refined adults of our youth who always seemed to have time for us without expecting anything in return. And during the evenings the doors of middle-class homes, that in our adolescence were always open to welcome every visitor, were now gated and locked; the lives of the inhabitants in the heart of Granada are turned inward, and missing are the social and cultural interactions of old.

I admit that the colonial buildings of the city look better than when my sister and I lived there. The restoration was funded by foreigners who recognized the beauty of Granada and quickly moved in after the fall of the Sandinista government, in the beginning of the 1990s, to capitalize on the site’s potential for tourism. Their efforts and investment has made the Granada beautiful to behold. But these entrepreneurs, although ingenious and more well-intentioned than not, have been unable to replace the centuries-worth of respectability that the former middle-class represented.

What, then, happened to Granada’s middle-class?

A Revolution.

Ironically, as well as tragically, although during the 1970s popular rage in Nicaragua was directed toward the Somoza family and their closest allies, the change in government ended up mostly displacing the middle-class. Disenfranchised from the businesses that made them able to earn a decent, if not modest, living—especially compared to the US middle-class—the heart of Granada’s gentility was forced into exile. Paradoxically, the city’s aristocracy—the wealthy, that is—was better equipped to weather the political storm and hold onto, or successfully reclaim, their properties. And Granada’s elite continues living behind closed doors today, seemingly oblivious to the plight of the less fortunate.

Throughout our recent visit, my sister and I felt displaced, as if we never lived in this majestic city. And now that I look back, I believe it’s because the type of persons we once looked up to as adolescents, the type of persons we could emulate, no longer have a public function. The standards bearers of social respectability—that middle-class from which came the mentors of our youth—have been driven underground, labeled during the Revolution as the petite bourgeoisie, enemies of the common man and woman.