ABSTRACT
THE WISCONSIN COORDINATING COUNCIL ON NICARAGUA (WCCN) WAS PART OF an historic social movement in the United States that aimed to end U.S. military intervention in Central America and, in particular, Nicaragua. In the 1990s, the organization shifted its transnational activist strategies to challenge the gendered and racialized effects of global economic restructuring in Nicaragua. To this end, the WCCN worked with the Nicaraguan March 8 Women’s Inter-collective on projects to end violence against women and with the Coalition of Protestant Churches for Aid and Development (CEPAD) to establish a loan fund. Viewing this reconfiguration from a multicultural, multiracial feminist standpoint, I explore how the WCCN developed a series of projects with Nicaraguan nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that aimed to address the social and economic injustices of global economic restructuring in Nicaragua. The study demonstrates that, even as the WCCN worked to reverse the North-to-South flow of ideas and development strategies, the organization and its Nicaraguan counterparts were circumscribed in locally specific ways by the very power imbalances they were attempting to undo.
