Word: managua
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...MANAGUA, Nicaragua--Managua's ragged army of the poor awakens early to prepare for work. Within the thousands of cardboard and tin shacks that ring the Nicaraguan capital, the breakfasts of beans and rice are headed over wood stoves and eaten quickly, patched clothing is pulled on, and an army of maids, servants, shoe-shines, car-washers, vendors of every conceivable food and item, beggars and hustlers, young boys and old women, all hanging to the economy by the edges of their fingernails, drifts off to work...
...many of the poor, there are no jobs. In a recent sociological study of Managua, fully 40 per cent of the heads of poor families reported they were without any sort of work. These families, mostly headed by women, subsisted on the few pennies brought in daily by the smaller boys (and sometimes girls) who shine shoes, wash cars or sell tiny pastries...
Each Latin-American nation has its own name for the urban poor--Argentina has its villas miserias, Brazil its favelas. Mexico its colonias proletarias. In Managua, the poor are called "parachutists," because so many of them have "landed" on unoccupied land to erect their shacks and begin the continual search for work that Iured them from the countryside. The wave of migration began about 1950 and has continued to the present; the poor, 70 per cent of them outside the capital, now constitute fully one-half of Managua's 400,000 population...
...there is no work in Managua. The tremendous inequality of wealth and income has largely prevented the emergence of a significant internal market that could encourage industrial development. The average Nicaraguan can afford at most two changes of clothes--little incentive for a flourishing textile industry. Even the small middle class--the more successful small shopkeepers, the few white collar employees--wield little spending power by Northamerican standards. As a consequence, the few necessary manufactured goods and all capital goods are imported, also largely from the United States. Luxury goods are concentrated, of course, in the few lavishly wealthy homes...
...family moved to a bigger place. His sister June left home when Nicholson was four to be an Earl Carroll showgirl in Miami. Jack, bright and funny in school, skipped a grade. He made his unofficial show-biz debut at ten on the stage of Roosevelt Grammar School singing Managua Nicaragua...