Last week Paul and I took our two daughters aged 4 and 6 to the Plaza in Managua for the 19th of July celebrations. Here in Nicaragua the 19th of July is Revolution Day –commemorating the day that the Sandinista soldiers marched into the capital and gathered to celebrate the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship. It’s a day where people crowd into and on top of buses from all over Nicaragua and make their way to the Plaza in Managua. While it’s true that in recent years the event has become dominated by FSLN party politics, it’s still the largest single public event of the Nicaraguan year, a good place to take the pulse of at least one faction of Nicaragua, and a great place for people watching. 
Evident at the 19th celebrations is the juxtaposition of traditional and contemporary Nicaraguan culture: marimba music and reggaeton, chicha and Coca-Cola, embroidered aprons worn with sparkly jeans. Throughout the celebrations we continued to see traditional Gigantonas – a 10 ft tall puppet representing a Spanish aristocratic lady – dancing to drums next to the Cabezón, a short puppet with a huge head representing an indigenous Nicaraguan man. And representing modern culture, now each group of Gigantonas is also accompanied by a drag queen wearing a miniskirt with fringe and shaking her hips at the gathered crowd.
With hundreds of thousands of hungry, thirsty, hot people packed into one place, it’s also the best place to make money for thousands of Nicaragua’s street vendors. From the moment we began to get even close to the plaza, we were being offered services: a spot on the grassy verge to park our car, a shoe shine, photos taken on larger-than-life plastic horses. No Port-A-Potties for 600,000 people? No problem: a number of enterprising folks had dug holes in an empty lot, strung up black plastic and for $0.20 would offer a few squares of toilet paper and a chance to use their hole in the ground.
Then came the goods: water, juice, donuts, mangoes with salt & vinegar, ice cream, sno-cones, beer (new this year cans of Toña tallboys), rum sold in baggies (called “leche” or milk), squeaky toys, roasted corn, quesillo, fried chicken, pork rinds and cassava, pirated movies, pirated music, Roy Ban sunglasses. Then there was all manner of things Red and Black: t-shirts, bracelets, hats, umbrellas, bouncy balls, you could even get a red and black Che Guevara spray painted on your face. Any parent can imagine what it’s like walking that gauntlet with your kids – “Mama, buy me, Mama buy me, Mama buy me!” – and every vendor knows how to capitalize on that – holding out t-shirts in the right size, pressing bracelets up to little wrists.
The entire pecking order of street vendors were out in force at the Plaza on the 19th – from those who brought their goods in their vehicles, those who brought them in hand carts, those who carried them in sacks on their backs, right down to those who just carried in a sack and spent the afternoon filling it with discarded beer cans and plastic water bottles to sell for recycling. Many vendors had spent weeks preparing – taking out loans to buy goods, screen printing t-shirts, stitching together red and black bandanas, whole families working through the night to weave hundreds of red and black bracelets. And they weren’t disappointed at the Plaza – as every year, they sold and sold and kept on selling long after the speeches and fireworks were over, while the sun set and the crowd began moving out of the Plaza looking for buses to go home. And after even the vendors have gone, the glue sniffing boys came out to dig through the piles of trash left behind for something to eat or sell so they could buy a little more glue. – Becca
