From pinta to changed man: performing reinsertion and escaping color at the Nicaraguan margins

Even though the Sandinista nation-building project claims to stand above ethno-racial differences and instead foregrounds class as the major social divider in Nicaragua, the popular experience of class on the mestizo-dominated Pacific coast remains heavily entangled with notions of whiteness/progress and darkness/backwardness. Given that bodies and spaces of social relegation are imbued with expectations of class and color, the social imaginary enveloping the prisoners is colorized in a particular way. However, through the institutional discourse of ‘cambio de actitud’ (change of attitude), Nicaraguan prisoners are pushed to engage in moral performances to lose their delinquent ‘color’ (also a popular metaphor for stigma). In doing so, they both embody and seek to distance themselves from their stereotypical presentation as urban ‘pintas’ (literrally ‘painted ones’, colloquially used to refer to ‘delinquent-looking’ young men). Based on long-term ethnographic research with (formerly) imprisoned young men, I draw out the imaginary surrounding the urban pinta, and then explore the metaphor of ‘color’ widely repeated by my research participants. In doing so, I argue that the ways in which (formerly) imprisoned young men resist and deal with the moral politics of policing and confinement reveals an inherent process of exposure; of coloring and losing color.