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Travel Photography > Isthmus > Granada, Nicaragua
Camille, Paloma, and then I come to the last one, who is darker than the rest, and his hair shaggy. He is shorter than the children, but just as curious, so I say, "And you're name is? But I imagine you don't belong to this family?"
The family laughs at this, and so he does too, after looking at them. They ask him his name in Spanish, and he responds with a smile. All 13 of them take turns looking at the upside-down image under the dark cloth. They recount their visit to Disney World, where they dressed up as a frontier family, coon-skin caps, and a Disney employee took a sepia-tone of them from behind a wooden Ansel Adams camera. "Do you like Granada?" they ask. "Why did you choose to come here?" they ask. "Do you think our country is beautiful?"
The way they are dressed, this family on vacation from Managua; their English-speaking, the implied wealth: isn't it possible this family were Sandinistas twenty years ago? Brought into good fortune by the corruption that ensued when the Sandinistas redistributed land ownership? And this little man, more Mayan blood than Spanish, is it not possible he is a displaced campesino, a rural farmhand driven to the big city? His profile is one of a counter-revolutionary. A contra. These rural farmers - it was in many ways for them that the revolution took place for equality after nearly a century of Saddam Hussein Somozas.
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