Subjects of Aspirations

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Gracias a Dios, an urban informal settlement in the Pacific region of Nicaragua, this article examines the mechanisms by which investments in Sandinista partisan politics are reproduced even as promises of redistribution made by the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front are chronically deferred. Populist governance emerges as the administration of aspirations in the gap between the populist promise and its failure. The residents of Gracias a Dios, who are presumed to be invested in Sandinista politics either by ideological interpellation or pragmatic self-interest, are revealed to be neither deceived nor blindly hopeful. This article argues that the populist promise opens an ambivalent space that animates aspirations and preserves possibility even when experience suggests otherwise. The regime's capacity to foster possibility in lieu of probability is dependent on punctuating everyday life with irregularly timed interventions and on transforming partisan belonging into a stopgap between promise and outcome.