But over the years a good sum of my time remained dedicated to continued research into Nicaraguan social history. I was able to maintain a few long distance research networks. And to cultivate opportunities. For example, as a graduate student researcher, I thought I could capture the popular religious forces at play in the Nicaraguan Revolution. I delved into university, National and Sandinista archives ( later the IHCA), as well as hemerotecas in Nicaragua. I also interviewed local religious folks about religion and revolutionary politics.
Quite incidentally, I started to keep track of empirical materials about North Americans in Nicaragua in the 1890s to 1970s time periods, including many Canadians. That material quickly filled my filing cabinets and hard drives. Back in Canada, in casual discussion with my friend, Jeremy Mouat, a gold mining historian, I mentioned the La Luz y Los Angeles gold mine. Sandino had destroyed the mine in Siuna, Nicaragua in the late 1920s.
A week later Jeremy dropped by my office with a large folder of engineering reports about the mine, correspondence, descriptions about transport challenges to reach the region, labour force issues, local and national politics, observations on ecology, opinions on the scale of the ore body, its worth, and potential to attract London financiers.
A week later Jeremy dropped by my office with a large folder of engineering reports about the mine, correspondence, descriptions about transport challenges to reach the region, labour force issues, local and national politics, observations on ecology, opinions on the scale of the ore body, its worth, and potential to attract London financiers.
Basically, Jeremy introduced me to a whole new world of sources for the study of global financial and industrial imperialism in LA related to mining history, that could be read obliquely to grasp international relations between US, Britain and Nicaragua, attitudes of foreigners towards local political elites, and social and political controversies surrounding foreign ownership of natural resource concessions, especially on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua.
We began to work together. We combined Spanish language materials about foreigners and foreign concessions in Nicaragua that I gathered from my visits to archives in Managua, Granada, Bluefields, and Bilwi, and triangulating that work with Jeremy's work in archival collections in North America and Britain that held mining sources. Together we then worked the US State Department Archives and varios collections in Washington. D.C. as well as the Library of Congress and Presidential papers.
The first paper that we wrote together was Merchants, Mining, and Concessions on Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast: Reassessing the American Presence, 1893–1912, in Journal of Latin American Studies. Here we used a great run of U.S. State Department papers on Nicaragua, materials that we recovered at the old State Department Archives in downtown Washington D.C..
And then a second paper The Emery Claim in Nicaragua and American Foreign Policy, c. 1880-1910 in which we offer a nuanced theoretical and empirically detailed investigation into imperialism and internal Nicaraguan politics.
In both papers we engage the dominant North American and European historiography of Nicaragua and Central America, offering a counter-reading of area studies.
So serendipity can be important, alongside thorough, investigative research work.
We began to work together. We combined Spanish language materials about foreigners and foreign concessions in Nicaragua that I gathered from my visits to archives in Managua, Granada, Bluefields, and Bilwi, and triangulating that work with Jeremy's work in archival collections in North America and Britain that held mining sources. Together we then worked the US State Department Archives and varios collections in Washington. D.C. as well as the Library of Congress and Presidential papers.
The first paper that we wrote together was Merchants, Mining, and Concessions on Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast: Reassessing the American Presence, 1893–1912, in Journal of Latin American Studies. Here we used a great run of U.S. State Department papers on Nicaragua, materials that we recovered at the old State Department Archives in downtown Washington D.C..
And then a second paper The Emery Claim in Nicaragua and American Foreign Policy, c. 1880-1910 in which we offer a nuanced theoretical and empirically detailed investigation into imperialism and internal Nicaraguan politics.
In both papers we engage the dominant North American and European historiography of Nicaragua and Central America, offering a counter-reading of area studies.
So serendipity can be important, alongside thorough, investigative research work.
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