Nicaragua Before Now: Factory Work, Farming, and Fishing in a Low-wage Global Economy

"Nell Farrell's sensitive and haunting images reveal diverse aspects of varied communities from urban to rural. Her text adds profound meaning to the current struggles of Nicaraguan youth to survive and progress, both individually and as a nation ravaged by poverty and war. This book is an excellent fusion of photographs and words."-Miguel Gandert, photographer and professor of Communication and Journalism, University of New Mexico

Farrell Explores the economic and cultural implications of globalization in immediate, up-close-and-personal terms. In a way that no academic discussion could do, her interviews, her intimate photographs, and her own observations show the relationships among Nicaraguan laborers, international politics, and global markets. Farrell traveled to Nicaragua in the fall of 2005 when the newly passed Central American Free trade Agreement (CAFTA) was still being debated by the Nicaraguan Asamblea Nacional. She spent three months photographing and interviewing young people who would be affected by the agreement and whose lives were already shaped by the low-wage global economy. She focused on workers in four regions-young women in the factories of Managua's Free Trade Zone, dairy farmers and cattlemen in the interior state of Matagalpa, laborers in the surgarcane fields of Chinandega, and indigenous lobster divers on the Miskito Coast.

Nell Farrell is a documentary photographer and writer specializing in Latin America and the American Southwest.