MEDIATING the INTERSECTIONS: FEMINISMS, QUEER THEORIES and TESTIMONIAL LITERARY PRODUCTION ABOUT WOMEN in CENTRAL AMERICA, 1977-1987 by ALLISON L

MEDIATING THE INTERSECTIONS: FEMINISMS, QUEER THEORIES AND TESTIMONIAL LITERARY PRODUCTION ABOUT WOMEN IN CENTRAL AMERICA, 1977-1987 by ALLISON L. GLOVER B.A., Allegheny College, l992 M.A., Middlebury College, 2003

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Colorado in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Spanish and Portuguese 2018

This thesis entitled: Mediating the Intersections: Feminisms, Queer Theories, and Testimonial Literary Production About Women in Central America, 1977-1987 written by Allison L. Glover has been approved for the Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Leila Gómez, Ph.D.

Tania Martuscelli, Ph.D.

Andrés Prieto, Ph.D.

Celeste Montoya, Ph.D.

Robert Buffington, Ph.D.

Date

The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline.

Glover, Allison Lee (Ph.D., Latin American Literature Department of Spanish and Portuguese)

Mediating the Intersections: Feminisms, Queer Theories and Testimonial Literary Production

About Women in Central America, 1977-1987.

Thesis directed by Associate Professor Leila Gómez

This dissertation explores the different ways testimonial narratives about Central American women represent and resist repressive governments, patriarchal culture and North American imperialism during the Cold War. The texts I study are: (1) Margaret Randall’s “Somos millones…”: la vida de Doris María, combatiente nicaragüense (1977), (2) Elizabeth Burgos’

Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (1983), and (3) Medea Benjamin’s

Don’t be Afraid, Gringo. A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart: The Story of Elvia

Alvarado (1987). I use feminist and queer analytics to explore the narrators’ diverse positionalities and reveal the conditions from which their unique brands of de-colonial feminism emerged. This dissertation also analyzes the forms of gendered oppression that the speakers describe in their testimonies, including but not limited to: a lack of decent paid employment opportunities for women (Doris Tijerino), rape as a tactic of war (Rigoberta Menchú), and domestic violence (Elvia Alvarado).

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This dissertation is dedicated to the courageous women who fought and continue to fight for more just and democratic societies in Central America.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you Dr. Leila Gómez for directing this project. Thank you Dr. Tania Martuscelli, Dr.

Andrés Prieto, Dr. Celeste Montoya and Dr. Robert Buffington for serving on my committee.

Thank you Doreen Williams for your assistance over the years and Dr. Esther Brown for your help during the rough patches. Thank you Anne Becher for putting me in touch with Margaret

Randall, and Dr. Nancy Uvalle-Ordónez for introducing me to Dr. Ileana Rodríguez and helping me conduct research in the archives at el Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica

(IHNCA). Thank you Margaret Randall and Medea Benjamin for granting me interviews in your homes, and Dr. Ileana Rodríguez and Dr. Margarita Vanini for deepening my understanding of feminist movement in Nicaragua. Thank you Andrés, Brooke, Courtney, Dulce, Fernanda,

Gillian, Jennifer, Kelly, Meghan, Molly, Nancy, Richardo and Rómer for keeping my head above water. Thank you Dr. Rutledge Currie and Arleta Currie (1942–2016) for your generosity, and Andrew, Deborah, Effie, Elizabeth, Izabel, Katherine, Malcolm, Mia, little Rutledge and

Sarah for understanding why I’ve missed so many family gatherings. Thank you John T. Glover

(1943–1991), my father, for insisting I mind my manners and Melanie M. MacKenzie (1946–

2016), my mother, for instilling in me a work ethic that would serve me throughout my life.

Thank you J.T. Glover, my older brother, for reminding me to be happy and grateful, Christian

Glover, my younger brother, for encouraging me to draw a line in the sand, and Arya Aziz

Glover-Torab, my niece, for motivating me to be the best Auntie I can be. Thank you Daniel

R.W. Currie, my husband and PB, for your optimism, sense of humor and unconditional love.

Your creative brilliance, adventurous spirit and playful attitude make our life together exciting and fun. You are the world’s greatest teammate.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I. INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Historical and Politcal Context ...... 1

National Libertation Movements and Testimonial Narratives………………...8

Theoretical Framework……………………………………………………….14

Positionalities and Testimony Psychotherapy ...... 27

Women, Speech and Gendered Violence ...... 35

CHAPTER

II. MEDIATED TESTIMONIAL LITERATURE, DECOLONIAL FEMINISM

AND CONTEMPORARY DEBATES ABOUT GENDER AND GLOBAL

JUSTICE………………………………………………………………………….41

Introduction ...... 41

Intertextuality ...... 43

The Speaker ...... 44

Women and Weapons ...... 48

The Mediator ...... 50

Historical and Political Context ...... 52

Women, Gender and Global Justice ...... 57

A Precursor to De-colonial Feminist Thought: "There are millions of us…" The Life

of Doris María, a Nicaraguan Combatant ...... 62

A Female Revolutionary Geneology in Literature and Life ...... 71

The Voices of the Subaltern…………………………………………………………..81

Doris Tijerino: Girlhood ...... 83

Doris Tijerino: Adolscence ...... 85

Doris Tijerino: Motherhood and Militancy ...... 87

Prison, Interrogation and Torture……………………………………………………..90

CHAPTER

III. TRACES OF QUEERNESS IN ME LLAMO RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ Y

ASÍ ME NACIÓ LA CONCIENCIA [I, RIGOBERTA MENCHU, AN INDIAN

WOMAN FROM GUATEMALA] ...... 95

Introduction ...... 95

Guatemala: A Stomping Ground for Spaniards and Gringos ...... 101

The Logics of Heteropatriarchy ...... 108

Birth Ceremonies ...... 109

Marriage Ceremonies ...... 112

Queer Ecologies ...... 115

Queer Failure ...... 118

Knowledge Production in the Street and Field ...... 125

Queer Futurity ...... 127

Conclusion ...... 129

CHAPTER

IV. CONSCIOUSNESS RAISING, AFFECTIVE SOLIDARITY AND

FEMINIST STANDPOINT EPISTEMOLOGY ...... 130

Introduction ...... 130

Letting Go of 'We' and Embracing 'Me' ...... 137

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“I'd call him a drunk and he'd call me a communist." ...... 141

"I was a rebel from the time I was born." ...... 144

Honduras: Christopher Colombus, Capitalism, and the C.I.A...... 146

Consciousness Raising, Affective Solidarity and Feminist Stanpoint Epistemology 151

"We have to fight with more courage, more conviction, more strength." ...... 162

“We'd surely do a better job of running our country than these rich guys can." ...... 166

"Ever since the Sandinistas came to power, the United States as been building bases

all over our country." ...... 168

Conclusion ...... 171

CONCLUSION ...... 173

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 175

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

The goal of this dissertation is to determine how Central American testimonies written by and about women in the 1970s and 1980s exemplify feminine and feminist writing. I will explore the ways in which they represent and resist patriarchy and hegemony in public and private spheres. In order to do that, I will analyze three texts that document the experiences of female revolutionaries and activists during repressive regimes in Central America. They are: (1) Doris

Tijerino and Margaret Randall’s “Somos millones…”: la vida de Doris María, combatiente nicaragüense (1977), (2) Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (1983) authored by Elizabeth Burgos, and (3) Don’t be Afraid, Gringo. A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart: The Story of Elvia Alvarado by Medea Benjamin (1987). I am interested in examining the intersection between public and private spaces and the repressive politics practiced by right-wing governments in Nicaragua, Guatemala and Honduras. I intend to highlight the thematic similarities that unite the texts by exploring how the narrators represent not just authoritative power structures but also the tactics they used to destabilize these structures. In this light I aim to demonstrate that testimonies written about women in Central

America during the Cold War can be viewed as literary artifacts that challenge repressive regimes, patriarchal culture, and North American imperialism.

Historical and Political Context

In an interview with Heinz Dieterich in the early 1990s, world-renowned scholar, historian, philosopher and political activist, Noam Chomsky, described the events that transpired in Latin

America in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as “an invasion by a very alien culture” (10). The

material riches that the aliens – the Spanish explorers, conquerors and colonizers – extracted from the Americas catapulted Spain into the position of the world’s largest and most powerful empire. After winning independence from Spain in the 1800s, their descendants – the wealthy creoles – laid down the roots of what would become a feudalist economy by appropriating land that belonged to the native populations. These powerful creole families were largely responsible for the prolongation of the colonial system in the region.

Acquiring heavy debt and simultaneously fighting multiple wars in both Europe and the

Americas led to Spain’s gradual economic and political decline. As the centers of world power began to shift in the nineteenth century, the increasing economic and military mite of the United

States fueled the beginning of its’ ascent toward the top of the international power structure. In his book The Penguin History of Latin America, Edwin Williamson makes clear that the United

States applied the tenets of the Monroe Doctrine, issued in 1823, not only to conquer “the West” but also to “meddle in the internal affairs of other, weaker countries in order to advance its own interests” (323). In his book The Twentieth Century, Howard Zinn, internationally acclaimed historian, political activist and playwright, states that the US carried out “103 interventions in the affairs of other countries between 1798 and 1895” (2). US intervention in the Cuban War for

Independence, a conflict commonly referred to in the United States as the Spanish-American

War, marked the end of the Spanish Empire and the beginning of a permanent and formidable

North American military presence in Latin America.

There were two main factors that drove the US to shape the political landscape throughout Latin America in the latter half of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century. They were: 1). defense of its expanding commercial interests in the region, and 2). fear of a socialist or communist takeover of the region (Williamson 322-7).

Consequently, the US government used the tenets of the Monroe Doctrine to claim its right to act as what Theodore Roosevelt described as an “international police power” by delivering – both directly and indirectly and overtly and covertly – money, arms and training personnel to military regimes who were quelling popular resistance and armed revolutionary struggle by killing their own people (Williamson 324).

Zinn explains that both liberal and conservative administrations in the White House championed the commitment to train foreign military officers at the School of Americas (339).

Originally located in the Canal Zone, the SOA was founded on the heels of World War II by the

United States Department of Defense in 1946. At the time of its inception, the facility’s official mission was to provide “military training and education to military personnel of Central and

South American countries and Caribbean countries” (U.S. Code: Title 10, Section 2166). This background information is important because all of the Central American countries that are represented in my corpus bore the brunt of the effects of the SOA.

Javier Agüero García does a fine job explaining how, when, and where the US government in general and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in particular waged its war against the spread of communism in Latin America. Having risen from the ashes of World War

II as one of the potential leaders of the new global order, the North Americans were keen to cordon off the influence of the Soviet Union, and vice-versa (Agüero García 2). As the battle between capitalism and communism intensified over time, it divided the world into two opposing camps. Each side aimed to defeat the other by expanding its sphere of influence to diverse regions of the world, including but not limited to Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Agüero García analyzes how the US government waged its war against communism in countries such as Guatemala and Cuba. He states:

El orden bipolar se extendió a regiones como América Latina, que aunque no tuvo un papel

predominante al inicio de la Guerra Fría, la región empezó a convertirse en un escenario muy

particular durante los años cincuenta, con la caída del gobierno guatemalteco en 1954 y con el

triunfo de la revolución Cubana en las postrimerías de esa misma década. (3-4)

[The bipolar order extended to regions like Latin America. Even though it did not play a

major role in the beginning of the Cold War, the region began to change in the 1950s with the

fall of the Guatemalan government 1954 and the triumph of the Cuban revolution at the ended

of the decade.] (3-4 my translation)

He also contends that the eye of the storm hovered for decades over Central America in particular because both Washington and Moscow acted to advantage their allies and execute their political, ideological and economic plans for the region. García explains:

Por un lado la URSS proponía un modelo de economía centralizada en que las decisiones

acerca de la producción y de la distribución, recaían en el Estado. En tanto que el estilo

estadounidense propugnaba al mercado como motor del crecimiento económico. (7)

[On the one hand, the USSR proposed a centralized economic model in which the decisions

about production and distribution fell back on the State; on the other hand, the North

American style advocated for the market as the motor of economic growth.] (7, my

translation)

García’s work is useful to my project because it provides the testimonies in my corpus historical background regarding US activity in three Central American countries: Nicaragua, Guatemala and Honduras. I chose these countries for several reasons. First, the North American government deployed marines to Nicaragua for the first time in the early 1900s. It supported the Somoza family dynasty (1937-1979), harassed the fledgling socialist government of the Sandinistas

(1979-1990), and celebrated the victory of Victoria Chamorro – the conservative presidential candidate and a close US ally – in 1990. Second, the CIA orchestrated a military coup that ousted Guatemala’s first democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, in 1954. This event marked the arrival of the eye of the Cold War storm to Central America, where it remained until the US invaded Panama and overthrew General Manuel Noriega in 1989. Finally, US military forces and funds poured into Honduras, which enabled the North Americans to transform the nation into its hub of counter insurgency training, communication and collaboration. Paid for and built by the US, Palmerola opened in 1981 and remains a US military base today. Currently, there is talk in Honduras about plans to covert Palmerola into an international airport. However the deal goes down – if it does – the US will likely own and run it.

Elisa Servín’s work overlaps with García’s, and provides context for my framing of the mediator’s role in testimonial literary production about women in Central America during the

Cold War. I view Randall, Burgos and Benjamin as intermediaries in the sense that Selvín uses this word in her article “Frank Tannenbaum entre América Latina y los Estados Unidos en la

Guerra Fría [In between Latin America and the United States in the Cold War: Frank

Tannenbaum] (my translation). She contends that the US academy’s most recognized scholar of

Latin America and one of the most respected intellectuals – both in the United States and in

Latin America – of his time, Tannenbaum, was a conduit through which North, Central and

South Americans could communicate, improve regional understanding, and engage in collaboration. I argue that the mediators in my project are also conduits, and that they too transmit knowledge and facilitate dialogue between Latin America and the United States. Their research methods and interpretations, however, are very different from those of Tannenbaum. I suggest that the texts in my corpus represent a more informed and critical approach to

collaboration between American nations because both the mediators and the speakers call for accountability from the US for working with repressive military regimes in Central America. The information they transmit stands in stark contrast to the stories and histories that move through

Tannenbaum. There are striking differences between not just Tannenbaum and Randall, Burgos, and Benjamin but also between the roles they play as intermediaries, for whom, and why.

The common denominator between the four interlocutors is that their concrete life experiences radicalize them. Tannenbaum, who was eleven years old when his family emigrated from Austria to New York City in 1904, was working as a waiter when he met members of the

Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and became friends with a young North American anarchist named Emma Goldman. In 1914, he and many other activists were thrown in jail for a year after they seized control of several churches in Manhattan and demanded food and clothing for the city’s street population. In contrast to the experiences that Doris Tijerino, Elvia Alvarado, and Rigoberta Menchú’s parents had in prison, which I explore in the chapters that follow this introduction, Tannenbaum caught a break while serving his sentence. After visiting him in his jail cell, a wealthy, private citizen offered to pay for his education at Columbia University, where he eventually earned tenure and taught seminars until his death in 1969 (Servín 50-52). Unlike the mediators I study, Tannenbaum had easy access to powerful people such as Nelson

Rockefeller, Lázaro Cárdenas and presidents Roosevelt, Nixon and Eisenhower. He also had access to elite spaces, such as the classrooms at Columbia. Servín explains that the graduate seminar about Latin America that he taught there became a space of “interlocución privilegiado entre latinoamericanos, y entre ellos y estadounidenses interesados en la región” (57) [privileged dialogue between Latin Americans, and between them and North Americans who were interested in the region] (my translation). Eventually, myriad heavy hitters from Latin America, including

but not limited to Carlos Fuentes, Mario Benedetti, Alejo Carpentier and Elena Poniatowska, criticized Tannenbaum for defending the tactics the US government used to wage its war against the spread of communism in Latin America. For example, he defended US motives for orchestrating the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, and also criticized the

Cuban revolution for its communist leanings. At the Image of Latin America seminar, which was held at la Universidad de Concepción in Chile in 1962, several of the aforementioned Latin

American intellectuals publically raked Tannenbaum over the coals because during the seminar he argued that imperialism did not impact inter-American relations. Fuentes hit hard when he published a letter to Tannenbaum in a local newspaper the next day:

Es la infinita ceguera norteamericana al considerar que toda idea disidente, toda filosofía

revolucionaria, toda reivindicación nacional latinoamericana es parte de una siniestra

conspiración contra la libertad encarnada y las instrucciones del “mundo libre.” En esta

actitud ciega e intolerante, que Tannenbaum ofreció a ojos vistos en Concepción, radica el

fracaso incansable de la política exterior de los EEUU en Latinoamérica. (qtd. in Servín 73)

[It is the infinite blindness of North America that considers every dissident idea, every

revolutionary philosophy, and every national Latin American vindication, is part of a sinister

conspiracy against liberty and the “free world’s” teachings. It is in this attitude of blind

intolerance, which Tannenbaum displayed before all open eyes in Concepción, that the

untiring failure of US foreign policy in Latin America]. (qtd. in Servín 73, my translation)

Tannenbaum had fallen out of favor with the new intellectual left in Latin America. When he died in New York City in 1969, Margaret Randall was already living and working in Mexico.

Elizabeth Burgos was completing military training in Cuba. Medea Benjamin was about to begin working as a nutritionist and economist for the World Health Organization in Africa and Central

America. They were the new intermediaries in Latin America. They didn’t just take the places of the elite intellectuals that men like Tannenbaum represented. They also deepened the inter-

American dialogue by including in it the voices of women in general and of underserved women in particular.

National Liberation Movements and Testimonial Narratives

My corpus consists of three mediated testimonies. The challenge of working with this corpus lies in the fact that numerous scholars and critics have pointed out the difficulty in concretely defining the testimonial project. John Beverly and Elzbieta Sklowdowska have underscored the hybrid nature of testimony and the form’s resistance to strict categorization by critics in the literary field. In his book chapter “Testimonio, Subalternity, and Narrative Authority” (2008),

Beverly articulates the essential components of the testimonial form:

A testimonio is a novel or novella-length narrative, produced in the form of a printed text, told

in the first-person by a narrator who is also the actual protagonist or witness of the events she

or he recounts. Its unit of narration is usually a “life” or a significant life episode. Because in

many cases the direct narrator is someone who is either functionally illiterate, or, if literate,

not a professional writer, the production of a testimonio generally involves the tape-recording

and then the transcription and editing of an oral account by an interlocutor who is a journalist,

ethnographer writer, or literary author. (571)

The voice of the narrator is paramount in the testimonio because it becomes the mechanism by which the speaker’s situation reaches a larger audience. It is crucial to note that although the narrator often speaks in the first person, the circumstances that she or he relates are emblematic of a popular struggle. In this sense, explains Beverly, the nature of the testimonial voice transforms the singular storyteller into a spokesperson for others who are faced with the poverty,

subjugation and exploitation that are recounted in the text (172). All of the books in my corpus recreate the circumstances that led to popular revolts in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, as well the tactics employed by State apparatuses to wipe out resistance movement.

Moreover, in her book Testimonio hispanoamericano: historia, teoría y política, Elzbieta

Sklodowska thoroughly examines two different kinds of testimonio. They are: “el testimonio mediatizado” y “el testimonio noticiero” (4). While a scholar, journalist or anthropologist transcribes the mediated testimony, the latter is representative of the trend of “New Journalism” in the United States and is exemplified in Latin America by Rodolfo Walsh’s Operación massacre (1956) and Elena Poniatowska’s La noche de Tlatelolco (1971) (4). In addition to the two kinds of testimony examined by Sklowdowska, in her article “Women as Witness: Essays on

Testimonial Literature by Latin American Women,” Linda S. Maier discusses the “direct / pure testimony,” which underscores the narrator’s role as eyewitness and/or participant in the events that she recounts in her text, as well as her role as the writer of the text (6). Sklowdowska underscores the political and interventionist quality of testimonial discourses by drawing attention to “el empleo de la Voz de la Persona (sinécdoque de un grupo marginado) para contrastar o desmentir la Voz del Sistema, o sea la versión oficial de los hechos” (28) [the use of the Voice of the Person (synecdoche of a marginalized group) to contrast or deny the Voice of the System, that is to say the official version of the facts] (my translation). She proceeds to explain that testimonial texts make action manifest, and that the form can be linked to other types of resistance (51). The intersection between history, feminist and resistance movement, and the collective voice of female activists in Central America are essential to my research project.

The mission of all of the texts in my corpus is rooted in the authorial desire to intervene in reality by using literature as a form of action and activism. The narrators and writers adopt

ethical and textual positions by debunking the official version of history – la Voz del Sistema described by Sklowdowska – and, to borrow Maier’s words, by “introducing previously subaltern voices into the mainstream” (Women 5). The fact that testimony inserts itself into the historical record will be essential to my analysis of this literary form as instrument of agency and an ideological form of weaponry that is used by women in Central America in the 20th century

(Zimmerman Literatura).

George Yúdice explains that in Si me permiten hablar…una mujer de la minas de Bolivia

[Let Me Speak! A Woman from the Mines in Bolivia] (1977), Domitila Chungara, the speaker, uses “nosotros” [we] and the phrase “me dijo que” [he/she told me that] (“Testimonio” 212).

These narrative strategies enable her to create a collective voice that documents a people’s history of Bolivia’s rural populations and the mining communities in which they lived and worked. For Yúdice, the term testimony refers to many kinds of discourse, including popular oral histories such as Chungara’s that aim to “give voice to the voiceless,” testimonial novels like

Miguel Barnet’s Biografía de un cimarrón [Autobiography of A Runaway Slave], and complex documentary/ficcional works, such as Yo el supremo [I the Supreme] by Augusto Roa Bastos

(214). He contends that Barnet’s mission was to recover the stories that dominant versions of history repressed, discounted, or erased from the official record, and that he also aimed to help articulate a collective memory and foster solidarity across class lines (225). A couple of years later, Barnet himself succinctly described the purpose of writers of testimony: “El gestor de la novela testimonio tiene una sagrada misión y es la de revelar la otra cara de la medalla” (“La novela” 120) [The person in charge of the testimonial novel has a sacred mission and that is to reveal the other side of the coin] (my translation).

Beverly contends that testimonio emerged as a genre from the national liberation movements and the “generalized political and cultural radicalism” of the 1960s (Against 71). He explains that there were two main developments during that decade that fomented testimonial production in Latin America. First, social scientists in the academy composed anthropological or sociological life histories from tape-recorded narratives, which were well received and widely read. The popularity of “direct participant accounts of political and guerrilla activism” also influenced and contributed to the production of testimonies (72). Specifically, the narrative texts by or about Cuban revolutionaries ignited testimonial production in other countries such as

Colombia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru and Venezuela (72). Beverly states: “Testimonio embraces many things besides the first-person guerrilla narrative, but its emergence and prestige was clearly closely tied to armed struggles for national liberation in Latin America, and the Third

World generally” (72-73). The event that endorsed testimonio as a genre or mode in Latin

America was the decision of Cuba’s Casa de las Américas to start presenting a prize in this category in its annual literary contest. Girón en la memoria [ Girón in My Memory] by Victor

Casaus won first prize in the inaugural competition in Cuba in 1970. His text was a collection of

“eyewitness observations of events that occurred almost 15 years earlier during the victory against imperial aggression” (Rivero 70). Many others quickly followed suit. Written by

Comandante Omar Cabezas Lacayo and published in Nicaragua in 1982, La montaña es algo más que una inmensa etapa verde [The Mountain is More than a Vast Green Path] was a big hit.

Un día de la vida [One Day in Life] was published by Manlio Argueta in 1983. Claribel

Alegría’s No me agarrán viva [They Won’t Take Me Alive] hit the bookstores in 1987 (71-75).

The testimonies I explore in this project were published between 1977 and 1987. Their narrators recount the violence and repression that ran rampant in their countries during the Cold War. The

battle between communism and capitalism enveloped Nicaragua, ravaged Guatemala, and converted Honduras into the CIA’s headquarters in Central America. In exchange for millions of dollars in economic aid, the Honduran government gave away land. The US military built and operated counter-insurgency training camps, as well as constructed and controlled military bases.

The CIA facilitated from Honduras communication and collaboration between powerful anti- communist military men, politicians, and presidents both in North America and in Nicaragua and

Guatemala.

Beverly also explains that the consciousness-raising (CR) groups that were integral to the women’s liberation movement, which encouraged females to orally recount their personal histories and struggles, also popularized the genre. His contention that testimonio is “an instance of the feminist slogan the personal is political” is crucial to my argument that the texts in my corpus may be viewed as feminist collaborations (Against 73). The authorial relationship between the mediators, the female subjects who speak, and the published texts is fundamental to understanding the complex dynamics that operate in testimonial literature. The women I study in this project aim to express not just themselves but also other women. They also aim to reach a specific audience, as well as to achieve concrete political, social and economic objectives. In other words, all of the women who create and produce the Central American testimonies in my corpus do so with a specific agenda in mind. What they desire to communicate, to whom, and why will inform my analysis of how they describe oppression and their resistance to it, and also how they depict feminist movement.

Barbara Harlow was one of the foremost scholars and critics in the 1980s and 1990s that examined prison literature written by women in developing countries. In her article “From the

Women’s Prison: Third World Narratives of Prison” (1986), Harlow suggests that women began

writing narratives about their experiences in jail in order to publicly contest the unrestrained power of the hegemonic political/military structures that were in place at the time. Much like

Beverly, Zimmerman and Sklodowska, Harlow underscores that the authors of these narratives aim to transmit a collective and historical message to a public audience. In her book Resistance

Literature (1989) she posits that a resistance narrative “calls attention to itself, and to literature in general, as a political and politicized activity” (28). She goes on to explain that resistance literature directly contributes to the fight for liberation from “dominant forms of ideological and cultural production” by examining and critiquing the systems that perpetuate this production

(85). Finally, Harlow posits that “the resistance narrative is not only a document, it is also an indictment” (98). The power to openly condemn patriarchy and hegemony will be essential to my analysis of the testimonies that make up my corpus.

It is imperative to understand that while testimony undeniably shares some common ground with autobiography, the overall aim of the two forms is dissimilar. While Beverly notes the authority of personal encounters in both autobiography and testimony, he highlights a rather striking difference between how each form represents authorial identity. He states: “in contrast to the attention that an autobiography showers on the main character and writer, the narrative voice in a testimonio does not lay claim to an individual identity” (“Testimonio” 573). In “Literature,

Ideology and Hegemony” Beverly and Zimmerman succinctly posit this contrast by asserting that testimony “involves an erasure of attenuation of the role and thus also of the textual presence of author” (7). The voice of the narrator is paramount in a testimony because it becomes the mechanism by which the speaker’s situation reaches a larger audience. Testimonial scholars generally agree that although the narrator often speaks in the first person, she relates circumstances that are emblematic of the collective suffering of a subjugated population. It must

also be noted that the complex relationship between the mediator, the subject who speaks, and the published text reveals the presence in testimonial literature of a powerful convergence of the acts of speaking and writing. Finally, a testimony’s success hinges on how readers receive the story it tells. A text reaches its zenith when it inspires readers to take action on behalf of the social struggle that the text represents. Production, reception, and activism are therefore inextricably linked in the testimonial project.

In Testimonio y literatura [Testimony and Literature] Rene Jara and Hernán Vidal contend that “la presencia del yo” [“the presence of the I”] is the mechanism through which victims of institutionalized violence, terror, and injustice “se unen en el testimonio” [“come together in testimony”] (1-2, my translation). Beverly asserts that the “I” summons “an implicit polyphony of other possible voices, lives and experiences” (Testimonio 11). In “Voices for the

Voiceless: Testimonial Literature in Latin America,” George Gugelberger and Michael Kearney state that “the desire motivating these accounts is not to leave a personal record, but instead to document the reality of a whole people” (8-9). To use the words of Beverly and Zimmerman, neither Tijerino nor Menchú strive to “achieve the magisterial or omniscient point of view of an author” (“Literature” 176). They do not aspire to bask in the spotlight, but rather to elucidate a popular struggle against repression and violence. As I demonstrate in Chapter 4, the same cannot be said for Alvarado.

Theoretical Framework

The general theoretical platform of my dissertation will be twofold. First, I will analyze how the testimonies in my corpus recreate local, national and international power structures, as well the ways in which they represent popular resistance to the repressive tactics employed by these structures. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (1970) by Louis Althusser and

Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception (2005) are useful analytical tools for considering the conditions in Central America that give rise to mass mobilization against violence and tyranny, as well as for analyzing how the speakers and mediators use testimony to deconstruct authority.

Second, I will argue that the testimonial projects in my corpus exemplify both feminine and feminist writing. Helene Cixous’ well-known essay “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1976) and bell hooks’ Feminist Theory from Margin to Center (1984) are highly productive analytical tools for considering the kinds of female voices that emerge in testimony, and that also become part of the historical record through testimony.

Althusser’s observations will provide me a theoretical framework with which I will examine both the relations of capitalist production and the violence that right-wing governments employ against citizens in order to reproduce these relations, as they are portrayed in testimonies.

All of the speakers describe the capitalist economies that take root in their respective countries, as well as underscore the negative impact of capitalism and US imperialism on the working poor.

Also, Althusser’s analysis of the repressive State apparatus is crucial to my study of how the speakers and mediators represent the violent tactics that members of the military systematically employ to quell resistance movement in Nicaragua and Guatemala and to push back against leftist activism in Honduras.

The State, for Althusser, is a “repressive regime machine.” He states:

This term covers not only the specialized apparatus whose existence and necessity follow

from the requirements of legal practice – that is, the police, the courts and prisons – but also

the army, which apart from its national defense role, intervenes directly as the auxiliary

repressive force of last resort when the police (and its specialized corps: the riot police, and

others) are overwhelmed by events. (Ideology 70)

It is useful to keep Althusser’s words in mind while reading the texts in my corpus because all of the women recount police, military or paramilitary brutality by underscoring their institutionalized practices of detaining, interrogating, torturing, raping and/or killing civilians suspected of insurgent activity. The narrators also denounce the US government for providing training, money, and military men to conservative leaders in Central America. In this sense, the testimonies in my corpus can be viewed as literary spaces that give voice to historically marginalized and silenced women who, in turn, utilize speech to document state violence and indict dictatorial regimes (Tijerino and Menchú) and lambaste U.S. intervention in Central

America (Alvarado).

In addition to recreating state sponsored repression that functions publicly, the testimonies in my corps also recreate what Althusser calls the organizations that correspond to the ideological state apparatuses, such as schools, the Church, the family and modes of communication (70-6). They depict the propaganda that religious and conservative political and military leaders used to reaffirm the traditional role of women in family and society.

Furthermore, the speakers describe not just the patriarchal logics that impacted them and their life experiences but also the unconventional choices that enabled them to subvert these logics.

In his book State of Exception, Giorgio Agamben repeatedly underscores the fact that the subject of his book is difficult to define because it is located at “the limit between politics and law” (1). At the outset of his text, Agamben explains that the roots of the state of exception take hold in a fertile gray zone that exists on the edge of politics and law, and which can be viewed as a potentially explosive intersection between governance, revolution and violence. Agamben points out that the state of exception is “state power’s immediate response to the most extreme

internal conflicts,” and that it is tightly linked to “civil war, insurrection, and resistance” (2). He also links his notion of the state of exception to repressive regimes. He states:

Modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of

exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political

adversaries, but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into

the political system. (2)

Agamben’s study of the state of exception is useful to my analysis of how women use speech and writing to document lawlessness, popular resistance and violence in their testimonies. All of the speaking subjects in my corpus delineate the ways in which repressive regimes attempt to rid them and/or their families and comrades from the social system, which mirrors Agamben’s claim that during a time of crisis a state will do whatever it deems necessary to ensure its salvation

(41). I will argue that the testimony is a powerful mechanism by which women act via spoken and written words in order to disorient right-wing governments and threaten its efficacy.

Agamben makes clear that the conditions created by a state of exception are calculated responses to the perceived threat posed by a state of emergency (2). Popular resistance movements, such as those that spread throughout Central America in the twentieth century, pushed back against the repressive mechanisms of control employed by authoritative regimes.

The objective in Nicaragua and Guatemala was to topple dictatorships through mass organization and armed resistance. Violence, therefore, became an integral part of revolutionary strategy. In their oral histories, Tijerino and Menchú detail the origins of revolutionary movement and the emergence of repressive states in their countries. I will argue that the their accounts both legitimize revolutionary movement in Nicaragua and Guatemala and denounce what Agamben calls the “lawlessness” practiced by the right-wing regimes in these countries. In contrast,

Alvarado portrays the dispossessed and their efforts to reclaim their right to land by demanding that the Honduran government force wealthy landowners to obey the Agrarian Reform Law.

When it fails – or refuses – to do so, scores of peasants carry out land recoveries, which are, technically speaking, illegal. Alvarado describes multiple land recoveries and the violent tactics that armed landowners and members of the Honduran military used to suppress them.

Agamben reiterates that the term state of exception is difficult to define because it is

“neither external or internal to the judicial order” (23). He makes clear that it “concerns precisely a threshold […] where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other” (23). Agamben’s notion of the state of exception as “an ambiguous and uncertain zone”

(29) is particularly useful to my analyses of the testimonies in my corpus as literary spaces in which the personal, the political and the historical converge. Just as the state of exception claims a space that is not wholly outside of the law or entirely within it, mediated testimonies blur the lines between literature and history by enabling female subalterns to use their voices to simultaneously portray and deconstruct the repressive regimes of their time and place in history.

Although the mediated testimonies in my dissertation are diametrically opposed to dictatorships and governments that facilitate an unequal distribution of liberties and land, they too depart from a norm and take root in a threshold. These oral histories and the published texts that preserve them diverge from traditional and official versions of past events because women create and control them. In this sense, they may be viewed as points of convergence in their own right because they stake their claim in a shapeless frontier on the edge of history, literature, politics, and, as I argue in my dissertation, feminist movement. I posit that the Central American testimonies in my corpus, as well as the female characters that are constructed in them, lay claim to a threshold that provides the voices of subaltern women a liminal place of belonging that is at

once included in and excluded from official registers of literature. It is precisely from within their threshold location that mediated testimonies about women in Central America threaten the stability of repression and injustice in that region of the world.

The goal of my research is to examine how the narrators depict the resistance strategies they used to survive repressive politics and patriarchal logics in jail, in their communities, and in the home. I aim to demonstrate that the books in my corpus may be viewed as textual representations of both the destabilization of multiple and diverse hierarchies and the construction of spaces of feminine resistance. I hope to prove that a new kind of female political subject is conceived in these repressive spaces. Furthermore, my dissertation examines the international horizontal communication that exists between the texts and the women who collaborated to produce them.

Discipline and Punish is divided into four sections: Torture, Punishment, Discipline, and

Prison. The author begins his investigation with a description of the torture methods the state would publicly inflict on the masculine body in the Paris of 1757. Foucault contrasts these methods with the techniques and regulations that León Facuher also implemented in Paris eighty years later in “House of Young Prisoners” (3-6). Foucault emphasizes that the act of removing the gallows and executions from the public eye was not the work of men with a high moral code, but rather the calculated political answer of the intellectual elite to the changes in society as well as in the nature of the crimes of the period. The goal of the reforms was to make punishment more ubiquitous by means of “inserting the power to punish more deeply into the social body”

(82). For the elite, the incarceration of the criminals, whom they classified as socially inadaptable, was necessary to protect society to its fullest measure. Therefore, the act of private punishment became synonymous with protecting the public.

Foucault proceeds to highlight the infrastructure of four principal prisons that were founded over the span of two hundred years, and that served as models for the establishment of modern day penitentiaries. They are: The Rasphius of Amsterdam (1596), Ghent (1749),

Gloucester (1779), and Walnut Street (1790). Some of the fundamental characteristics of these initial prisons were the strict schedule, obligatory labor, strict surveillance, and the reforming of the criminals’ moral compass. The most striking component of Walnut Street was the secrecy related to punishment. Foucault explains that it is the criminals and the authority that guard them who are up to date with what occurs in the prison. He also stresses brainwashing as one of the tactics utilized by the personnel to reform criminals. It is only in secrecy, continues Foucault, that “the prison, though an administrative apparatus, will at the same time be a machine for altering minds” (125). The procedure of brainwashing, and the methods by which political prisoners resist it, are fundamental for the analysis I expect to make concerning the resistance strategies that the authors recreate in their texts.

Foucault also emphasizes that when criminals entered into Walnut Street, a dossier containing information about the crime and the individual that committed it, was already in the hands of the authorities. The criminal’s personal and familial histories were central in the creation of a strategy that would lead the individual into recovery. The authorities observed the criminals and noted their conduct and state of mind in the dossier. In this way, the criminal became the object of study and the prison became what Foucault calls “a knowledge apparatus”

(126). The authorities’ objective was to eradicate all presence of pernicious desires from the criminal’s soul and normalize them. Foucault’s observations pertaining to the dossier and observation are fundamental for my project because, although I focus my research in Central

America (and Foucault in the first European prisons) it is possible to argue for a co-relation

between the authoritarian mode and “knowledge apparatus” also in the Central American context.

Foucault’s analysis concerning the examination as a measure in the accumulation of knowledge is crucial in my analysis about the political prisoner’s capacity to momentarily defy the prison’s established power dynamics. I use Foucault’s comments to explore the torture and interrogation sessions that Tijerino recounts in her testimony. For example, she recreates the questions and conditions under which she was interrogated, as well as reconstructs the mechanisms of intimidation and violence the authorities used to demoralize her and extract incriminating information from her. I analyze how she describes interrogation and confession in the torture chamber, as well as how she represents solidarity among female prisoners and the tactics they employ to destabilize the prison’s repressive system. In this light, I go beyond

Foucault’s analysis of the first European prisons by using it to examine the clandestine detention centers in Nicaragua during the Somoza family regime.

Finally, for the early prisons that Foucault examines in Discipline and Punish, the objective of restoring the individual was of crucial importance. In spite of the violence that is enacted either on them, their loved ones or their comrades when they are in prison, the women whose testimonies I study refuse to be restored. Instead, they double down as an armed combatant (Tijerino), as a committed activist (Menchú) and as a spitfire community organizer

(Alvarado). I suggest that they create their own images of what responsible and productive female citizens are and do by refusing to be molded into what Foucault refers to as “obedient subjects” (128). I contend that they are simultaneously subjects and agents, and that their resistance strategies create what Foucault calls “temporary inversion of power relations” (27). I

expect to reveal that it is during these moments of inversion that the Central American females I study bring into being a new feminine political subject.

Written by Pilar Calveiro and published in Buenos Aires en 1995, Poder y desaparición: los campos de concentración en Argentina [Power and Disappearance: the Concentration

Camps in Argentina] compliments my use of Foucault’s work. The author, who was detained in three different secret prisons in Argentina during the 1970s, elaborates how totalitarian regimes employ “las lógicas binarias” [binary logics] to divide society into two opposing camps: “el propio y el ajeno” [us and them] (my translation) (88). While the former uses violence to eliminate dissidence and difference, the latter destabilizes the conservative social-political order by subverting it (88-90). For Calveiro, the detention center is the main institution that a state uses to normalize those who threaten its efficacy or, when they refuse normalization, to eradicate them and, in some cases, their friends and family members (95-100).

Published for the first time in English in Signs: Journal of Women and Culture and

Society in 1976, Helene Cixous’s essay “The Laugh of the Medusa” is a highly useful theoretical tool by which to consider the testimonies in my corpus as examples of feminine writing. The testimonial project is a literary space in which a constellation of individuals participates in and contributes to the telling of a story. The texts I chose for my research project are both written by women and mediated by women. All of them are stories about women who narrate a history, which is at once about themselves and mass resistance movement.

I argue that the texts in my project can be viewed as examples of feminine writing precisely because women conceive of them, nurture them through a complex process of interviewing, organizing, editing, and, in some case, translating, and, ultimately give them life through publication. Consequently, the Central American testimonial projects in my corpus

simultaneously bring women to writing and insert them into the text, world and history.

Therefore, it is by their own movement that women secure a place for all women in literature and history (875).

Cixous also makes the point that culture in general and writing in particular have been tightly controlled by men, may they be fathers, husbands, writers, publishers and/or editors.

These “big bosses” (877) have perpetuated the repression of women through what Cixous refers to as a “parental-conjugal phallocentrism” (876), the “imbecilic capitalist machinery” (877) and the “biblico-capitalist society” (886). She underscores that both fictional and non-fictional writing have been dominated by men, which has relegated and continues to relegate women to an inferior position in society, one which is violently marked by silence. It is only by infiltrating the space of writing, continues Cixous, that women will simultaneously “seize the occasion to speak” (880). Consequently, transgression becomes the only viable mechanism by which woman may emancipate herself from patriarchal repression.

Cixous’s contention that writing is a space in which the seeds of change may be sown is particularly useful to my analysis of the testimonies in my corpus. First of all, it must be noted that the mediated testimonial project serves as a place of intersection between the act of speaking and the act of writing. It is a collective process that involves a speaker, a compiler, a translator and/or writer, as well as a team of professionals such as editors and publishers. Female journalists, activists or sociologists who welcomed the opportunity to meet and interview women who were fighting for emancipation from tyrannical and patriarchal oppression, initiated the projects in my corpus. Each speaker simultaneously tells her personal history, as well as her nation’s history, to the compiler, who later organizes the narrative into a cohesive text. In this light, mediated testimonies can be viewed as the literary space in which the repressed people of a

culture are able to symbolically mobilize and conceive of a different social, economic and political order (878).

Finally, Cixous states in unequivocal terms that a woman who writes “her self” or writes another woman, brings into being “a new insurgent writing, which, when the moment of her liberation has come, will allow her to carry out the indispensable ruptures and transformations in her history” (880). I contend that the female writers of direct testimonies and female narrators of mediated testimonies take hold of the opportunity to speak and/or write in order to advance an agenda of affecting radical social, economic and political change in their respective countries. In this sense, testimony presents itself as a unique literary space in which “personal history blends together with the history of all women, as well as national and world history” (882). Doris

Tijerino, Rigoberta Menchú and Elvia Alvarado, as well as their corresponding mediators,

Margaret Randall, Elizabeth Burgos, and Medea Benjamin, can be viewed as combatants in emancipation struggles who aim to influence what Cixous calls “a mutation in human relations, in thought, in all praxis” (882).

Written by bell hooks and originally published in 1984, Feminist Theory from Margin to

Center exposes the contradictions inherent in early feminist movement in the United States, as well as provides a framework for constructing a more inclusive, mass-based movement.

Published in 1963, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique set second-wave feminism on fire by initiating dialogue among formally educated, married, white women about the unfulfilling nature of domesticity, as they experienced it in their roles as housewife and homemaker. These females wanted access to careers and money for the purpose of gaining financial independence and equalizing gender roles in society. hooks begins her book by taking The Feminine Mystique to task because it excludes the voices of marginalized females, such as women of color and low-

income and impoverished women, from the conversation. The silencing of their daily experiences facing racial and economic-discrimination in addition to facing sexism is, for hooks, a huge red flag.

hooks goes on to explain that during its initial phase, the women’s liberation movement in the United States encouraged female scholars to delve into the past in order to recover silenced and/or forgotten histories about women who participated in and advanced feminist struggle in patriarchal society. At that time, feminist theory, the initial phase of which sought to examine and question established “sexist gender roles” in society in order to reframe them and dismantle

“patriarchal culture” (xii-xiii), was making its way onto college and university campuses.

Moreover, she notes that the original theoretical framework for feminist struggle, which emphasized the existence of a collective female suffering, was transformed in the late 1970s, when “radical women of color and white women allies began to rigorously challenge the notion that gender was the primary factor determining a woman’s fate” (xiii). It is precisely at the site of the intersection between race, gender, and class that the testimonies in my corpus converge with what hooks calls “revisionist feminist theory” (xiii). I compare the alliances that develop in the

United States between radical feminists of color and their white counterparts with the collaborations between the speakers and mediators whose books I study. Like hooks, in addition to underscoring gender, the narrators of the testimonies in my corpus also call attention to race and class. They describe these key differences between women and the dissimilar impact they have on them, according to their location in the patriarchal social structure, which they also delineate. While Tijerino’s light skin color evidences her European bloodline, Menchú’s and

Alvarado’s brown skin marks them as natives. Irrespective of racial difference, I suggest that all three of them may be viewed as de-colonial feminists. The mediators, in contrast, are white

women who were raised in the middle class in the United States (Randall and Benjamin) or among Venezuela’s elite (Burgos). In my dissertation, I elaborate the reasons they could be viewed as the white female allies that hooks describes in her work.

The author of Feminist Theory from Margin to Center also contends that examining how race, gender, and class inform women’s life experiences enabled revisionist feminist theory in the late 1970s in the United States to “change the direction of feminist thought” (xiii). She puts forth an agenda that calls for participation from women and men of all races and social classes for the purpose of pushing feminist movement beyond the platform created and dominated by college educated white women. Moreover, hooks’ text champions the voices of the

“radical/revolutionary feminist thinkers” (xiv) who stressed the importance of including race, sex, and class in any serious discussion about gendered social roles that females and males play in society. Its goal is to construct a theoretical platform for a “mass-based feminist movement” that will challenge the “political system of imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy” in the United States (xv). I aim to demonstrate that hooks’ analysis and agenda, which are contemporary to the historical period that the narrators in my corpus delineate, are common threads that run through and unite their testimonial narratives.

The theoretical framework that hooks advances in her text is useful to my analysis of testimony as a literary space that gives voice to marginalized women of color, who, with the help of allies, break into the conversation about race, gender and class, as well as become part of the historical record. Thus, the testimonial projects in Central America allow the debate about race, gender and class to extend far beyond what hooks refers to as the “corridors of the educated elite,” (xvi). Said in a different way, it can be argued that the mediated testimony attempts to

bring the experiences and knowledge of marginalized women of color, as well as the resistance struggles of their people, to the center of feminist movement.

hooks underscores that “sisterhood” is a fundamental pillar of “political solidarity” among women (44). She states:

Solidarity strengthens resistance struggle. There can be no mass-based feminist movement to

end sexist oppression without a united front – women must take the initiative and demonstrate

the power of solidarity. Unless we show that the barriers between women can be eliminated,

that solidarity can exist, we cannot hope to change and transform society. (44)

The role that the speakers, mediators and authors play in the testimonial project is crucial to understanding that the notion of sisterhood is a common thread that runs through all of the texts in my corpus.

Positionalities and Testimony Psychotherapy

All of the women involved in these projects go to great lengths to demonstrate solidarity.

In their introduction, each mediator emphasizes that solidarity among women cuts through the racial, economic and cultural divisions that separate them from the women whose stories they publish. They strive to create political unity among women by mediating histories that expose institutionalized sexism, as well as accuse the political structures in Central America of oppressing and victimizing native and poor populations. The narrators demonstrate a keen understanding of the relationship between economic, racial and sexist oppression. They also describe the ways in which the political and cultural institutions in their respective countries attempt to shut down resistance movement through the use of violence. Finally, solidarity is the thematic weapon of choice of both the storytellers and the women who see to it that the testimonies reach larger audiences, both in Central America and the United States.

This is not to suggest, however, that the relationships between the women whose books and stories I explore in this project are uncomplicated. I analyze how the power differentials between mediators and speakers may impact their personal relationships and textual partnerships.

Each major female figure in my project occupies a unique location in her local social order and in the developing global order. I pay attention to what Beverly describes as

[t]he contradictions of gender, class, race, and age that frame the narrative production can

reproduce themselves in the relation of the narrator to the direct interlocutor, especially when

it is the case [that] the narrator is someone who requires an interlocutor with a different ethnic

and/or class background in order first to elicit the oral account, then to give it textual form as

a testimonio, and then to see to its publication and distribution. (Against 77)

The narrators and mediators are diverse in terms of their level of formal education. Benjamin and

Tijerino went to college but Alvarado, Randall, and Menchú did not. Alvarado stayed in school through the fourth grade. Menchú too was a child when she stopped going to school. Randall graduated from high school and took a few community college courses before leaving New York

City for Mexico. In terms of language acquisition, Benjamin, Randall and Menchú learned

Spanish as a second language while Alvarado and Tijerino are native Spanish-speakers. Menchú is the only native speaker of Mayan in my corpus. If, on the one hand, Randall and Tijerino maintained a mutually respectful relationship, the friendships between not just Alvarado and

Benjamin but also between Menchú and Burgos, became strained over time for a variety of reasons. Race also varies. Menchú is the only woman in my project who self-identifies as native.

Alvarado refers to herself and her female counterparts as campesinas, whereas Tijerino, of

European bloodline, self-identifies as Nicaraguan. As I mentioned previously, all of the

mediators are white women. Randall and Benjamin hail from middle-class North American families. Burgos, however, was born into Venezuela’s landowning upper class.1

I would like to note that there are two intertwined levels of mediation in these texts. On the one hand, the mediators mediate on behalf of the women whose stories they produce; on the other hand, the narrators also function as mediators because they speak for equally or more marginalized women. I use feminist theory and feminist methodology to analyze this level of mediation in order to examine the different kinds of things that can happen when we add a feminist voice to revolutionary discourse. When I view these texts through a feminist lens different versions of de-colonial feminism come into focus, each one originating in and coming out of a different place.

Tijerino was a child of certain privilege. Her brand of de-colonial feminism is a Marxist one because although she addresses gender, she does so within her framing of class as the key intersection. She mediates for her comrades in the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) and for the marginalized females – sex workers and thieves – she meets in prison. While Menchú too creates the articulation of a specific class, race and ethnicity are the primary intersection for her. Her brand of de-colonial feminism is rooted in a religious and cultural dimension that she frames within her portrayal of Mayan spiritual beliefs and cultural logics. She mediates for the indigenous peoples who died from hunger or disease as a consequence of the “devastation wrought on the wretched colonial economies by European capitalist competition” (Antonio

1 Although they play opposite roles in the collaborations that lead to testimonial production, Burgos and Tijerino have much in common. Class privilege, European heritage and ancestry, and a college education are three similarities that are worth noting. A commitment to advancing leftist movement in Latin America and motherhood are two more. My point is that Tijerino shares more common ground with Burgos, who is a mediator, than she shares with the speakers or with her mediator. Had Tijerino wanted to tell her story or write a memoir, I suspect she could have done so without Randall. The same can’t be said for either Menchú or Alvarado.

Gramsci qtd. in Forgacs 112). Finally, Alvarado views the social system around her through the lens of a peasant. Her brand of de-colonial feminism comes out of the tenets of liberation theology in general and out of her local Mothers’ Club in particular. She mediates for what

Gramsci calls the “peasant masses” (106). As one can see, diverse articulations of feminism originate in diverse positionalities.

While I characterize both Alvarado and Menchú as Gramscian organic intellectuals – activists whose critique of socioeconomic and political inequality comes out of their location in an oppressed group and the knowledge they acquire there – I distinguish between them.

Menchú’s mother and father were community leaders who schooled their daughter in survival and resistance strategies in addition to Mayan cultural traditions and spiritual beliefs. Menchú learned to help and organize others by following their lead. Alvarado’s parents, on the other hand, did not stand out from the other parents in their community. Her awareness of gendered oppression comes out of the female-centered spaces that the Mothers’ Clubs provide her. Thus, while Menchú certainly fits into the category of Gramsci’s organic intellectual because she develops political consciousness as part of her lived experience; Alvarado is the quintessential organic intellectual in the Gramscian sense of the term.

Gendered violence is a theme that is discussed across these testimonies despite the diverse positionalities of the women who narrate them. Doris Tijerino underscores structural forms of gendered violence such as a lack of decent paid employment opportunities for women, the gender pay gap, and the feminization of the informal economy. She also describes women’s lack of control over their reproductive capabilities and human trafficking. Menchú engages political violence against women when she elaborates rape as a tactic of war. Alvarado portrays the unequal distribution of domestic tasks, as well as gives voice to domestic abuse.

Movement is the common denominator between all of the women I study in this project.

Going beyond their local settings and social orders transforms all of them. The impact that travelling had on them and their direction in life is woven into the fabric of their accounts. For example, Randall left the US for México, and eventually lived in Cuba and Nicaragua, among other places. Tijerino left Nicaragua to study at a university in the Soviet Union, as well as traversed geographical borders to work covertly for the FSLN. After Burgos finished college, she travelled as an activist in Venezuela and throughout South America, including a stint in Cuba, where she trained for combat with the Cuban revolutionaries. As a child, Menchú repeatedly travelled with her father to Guatemala City. Later, she moved around her country organizing

Mayans, was forced into exile in Mexico and, eventually, flew to Europe to give talks on the international human rights circuit. Benjamin lived and worked in various countries in Central

America. Alvarado’s work as a community organizer required her to travel extensively to rural communities throughout Honduras. She also made several trips to the United States to go on tour with her mediator.

In this sense, none of the women that I engage in this project is to be viewed as typical because circumstances – albeit drastically different ones – enable all of them to leave home.

Acquiring knowledge through travel changes them and their desires, as well as motivates them to continue moving around in order to advance justice. Their choices require them not just to transcend conservative configurations of femininity but also to cross regional, state, national, global, and – in the cases of Randall, Benjamin and Menchú – linguistic boundaries.

Furthermore, their lived experiences bring them into contact with diverse forms of violence and enable them to transcend trauma. On the one hand, I acknowledge that it would be entirely appropriate to view the speakers in my corpus as victims because either they or their

dearest loved ones suffer physical abuse, torture, or rape and death by male soldiers and security guards. For example, Tijerino endured interrogations and torture while in the Somoza prisons in

Nicaragua. She also details the impoverished origins of the female sex workers she meets there, as well as recounts the sexual violence they tell her they suffered working in brothels and on the street. Menchú contends that the arrival of the Spaniards to her ancestors’ land – today what we call Guatemala – marked them for death (Morgansen). When she tells her story more than 400 years later, however, Menchú does not just recall the bloody consequences of colonialism and, later, of imperialism and capitalism. She also recounts the terror, torture and death that the

Guatemalan armed forces soldiers inflicted on her people – descendants of the Mayan civilization – including several members of her biological family. Finally, Alvarado is jailed and tortured for her activism in Honduras. She also recounts her skillful and fearless leadership in the face of state violence during land recoveries. The term land recovery refers to an attempt by the rural poor to regain control of lands that they argue generations of landowners stole from them.

Alvarado was organizing her community and advocating for its rights decades before Barack

Obama strode onto his nation’s stage in 2008, talking about his experiences as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, and making them – and him – sound rugged and sexy.

Farver et al. contend that during armed conflict women’s bodies can become

“battlegrounds where sexual violence becomes a weapon of war used to express power and to humiliate, dominate, or disrupt social ties among them” (793). In their discussion of the impact that state-sanctioned sexual violence has on victims and communities, these authors explore various coping mechanisms that women may use to face and overcome trauma. Their notion of

“testimony psychotherapy,” is particularly useful to my project. Testimony psychotherapy is a collaborative and communicative approach that underscores interviewing and story telling as key

components of emotional and psychological healing. They state:

In these settings, participants were invited to tell the story of their trauma and then, with the

help of the interviewer, were able to construct a coherent narrative of the event that gave a

meaning to the experience and helped the survivor to function. (794-795)

Testimony psychotherapy aims to provide violence survivors a strategy for mitigating the emotional and psychological consequences of the assault, such as posttraumatic stress disorders, depression and anxiety. Instead of repressing the event in order to forget about it, victims of rape may engage in testimony therapy in order to process it and thus improve their psychological functioning.

In her article Gender, Death and Resistance: Facing the Ethical Vacuum (1987), Jean

Franco examines “behaviorist ideology” and the influence it had on both right-wing regimes in

Latin America and the methods they employed to control leftist movement (105). She contends that when they first began to testify in court, survivors of violence tended not to describe the details of what they endured because they felt guilty and ashamed (110). Mary Jane Treacy engages Franco’s scholarship in her study of female members of el Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional [The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front] in El Salvador and the memoirs they wrote about their experiences in prison. In “Woman, Guerrillera and Political

Prisoner” (1995), she claims that in their texts the authors gloss over their “deep memories” and emphasize their “common” ones (351). She goes further a year later in “Double Binds: Latin

American Women’s Prison Memories” (1996), when she calls attention to the absence of deep memories in these texts and suggests that they have been “removed from site” because they are too painful to remember and represent (132). Although her analysis is logical, I prefer to analyze what the women I study say when they recount their experiences to their mediators, rather than

speculate about what they do not. I contend that the testimonies in my corpus give voice to the type of memories that Treacy argues are missing from the female-centered prison memoirs she studies. In this light, I argue that they evidence what Franco calls the “feminization of the whole notion of resistance” (116).

The settings of the collaborations that led to the production of the mediated testimonies I analyze in this project are similar to those of testimony psychotherapy in several ways. First, the mediators interview the speakers, record their responses, and enable the production of coherent narratives. I view Randall’s work as what Martin Bell, a former war correspondent for the BBC, describes as the journalism of attachment:

A journalism that cares as well as knows; that is aware of its responsibilities; that will not

stand neutrally between good and evil, right and wrong, the victim and the oppressor. (qtd. in

Hoijer 516).

Randall shunned the Westerners who wanted their Latin American counterparts to view them as

“knighted saviors” (Belloni 454). She did not set out to “uncover the dramatic story of human despair,” but rather to illuminate and critique the “unequal power relationships between the West and the less developed world” by paying specific attention to the asymmetries between the

United States and Nicaragua (455). A formally trained anthropologist, Burgos was the conduit for Menchú’s oral history, which enabled the speaker to document the “unequal relationships of domination and subordination,” that took root in Latin America at the end of the fifteenth century, lasted throughout the Cold War, and continue to persist today (Belloni 454). Benjamin records, translates, and publishes Alvarado’s life story in English in order to reach a broader audience and to convince the North American government to begin acting responsibly and justly in Honduras.

Women, Speech and Gendered Violence

Tijerino, Menchú and Alvarado recount not just their run-ins with male members of the armed forces or paramilitary squads but also those of their comrades, friends and family members. They also represent “structural violence, such as abject poverty and hunger caused by political oppression” (Hoijer 513), and explain how it fuels inequality and dilutes the potential for social, economic and political change. Alvarado tells her mediator about the prevalence in her community of violence against women, and thus disrupts the “traditional belief that domestic violence is a family problem that should not go beyond the household walls” (Farver et al. 802).

In closing, I would like to point out that although I ground my study of testimonial production in Nicaragua, Guatemala and Honduras, the literary genre and the social, political and economic conditions that brought the genre into being extended far beyond the Central American region. Repressive regimes in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Bolivia, for example, also used violent methods to vanquish popular struggles for justice and suppress leftist movements that aimed to advance a more equitable distribution of rights, resources, and wealth. In her book

Displaced Memories: The Poetics of Trauma in Argentine Women’s Writing (2009), for example,

M. Edurne Portela explains that the volatility of the political landscape in Argentina throughout the first 75 years of the twentieth century eventually led to the military coup that seized power in

1976 (11). She describes the tactics by which General Jorge Rafael Videla, Admiral Emilio

Massera, and General Orlando R. Agosti swiftly took control of the country:

Through violence, they attempted to restructure the economy, labor relations, education, and

international relations; they forbade all political parties, shut down the parliament,

restructured the judiciary, forbade freedom of speech and censored all media; finally, they

eliminated all political, economic and religious dissidents from positions of power and

replaced them with their supporters. (12-13)

The author also underscores the fact that the rampant repression and state-sponsored violence that characterized Argentina’s Dirty War (1976 – 1983) culminated with the death or disappearance of roughly 30,000 Argentine citizens (11).

Similarly, in her book The Post-Dictatorship Generation in Argentina, Chile, and

Uruguay: Collective Memory and Cultural Production (2012), Ana Ros explains that when the conservative government came to power in Uruguay in 1971, it took control of public radio stations and universities, announced its declaration of war against the left, and underscored the mechanisms of control and repression that it would use to wage this war. The Armed Forces stated unequivocally that they would rid their society of “corrupting foreign Marxist-Leninist doctrines” in order to defend “Republican ideals and Uruguayan values” (159). In order to do so, the junta relied heavily on Death Squads, the “military-civilian” Consejo de Seguridad Nacional

(CONSENA), concentration camps, and torture chambers (161).

The author also demonstrates that suspected Uruguayan subversives were imprisoned at a higher rate and served longer sentences than their counterparts in other countries (157).

Moreover, she maintains that for several years in the mid-1970s Uruguay had “the highest percentage of political detainees per capita in the world” (161), and that vast and coordinated repression prevented a democratically elected leftist government from taking office until 2005

(166). It is also worth noting that Uruguay, along with Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, and

Paraguay, was part of Operation Condor, a far-reaching and top secret intelligence and surveillance system that took root in the Sothern Cone in the 1970s. In her book Predatory

States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America (2008), J. Patrice Sherry explains

that Operation Condor was a clandestine component of a “larger U.S.-led counter insurgency strategy to preempt or reverse social movements demanding political or social change” (1).

Bolivia experienced its own share of chaos and repression in the latter half of the twentieth century. El Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario [The Revolutionary Nationalist

Party] led an uprising and successfully took control of the government in 1952; however, Paz

Estenssoro, one of the major players in the MNR, was overthrown by the Bolivian military in

1964. This event brought General René Barrientos to power and inaugurated two decades of authoritarian governance and state-sponsored violence in Bolivia. Labor movements and unions, strikes spearheaded by factory workers and miners, and dissenting voices in the universities were violently silenced by the military. McSherry contends that Condor operatives were active in

Bolivia throughout the 1970s, and also that military coups and counter coups were commonplace throughout the 1980s. As one can see, the culture of violence that prevailed in Latin America during the Cold War has shut down the voices of many citizens who were fighting for freedom. I propose to analyze three female voices from Central America as representatives of those who were silenced by fear, death or disappearance.

In Chapter 1, I examine “Somos millones…”: la vida de Doris María, combatiente nicaragüense [There Are Millions of Us…” the Life of Doris Maria, a Nicaraguan Combatant].

The text is structured chronologically and is divided into three parts: I. 1943-1955, II. 1955-

1965, and III. 1965-1975. Each part is comprised of a series of smaller sections, which are also organized chronologically. The mediator introduces each of these narrative segments by underscoring one of the most poignant comments that the speaker makes in them. These key words stand apart from the sections they introduce because they appear in bold print and are set off by quotation marks. Although none of the three main parts into which the text is divided has

the same number of smaller narrative sections or the same number of pages, all of them cover between ten and twelve years of Tijerino’s life. I will explore several sections from each main part of the testimony. My purpose in doing so is to examine the speaker’s portrayal of key events from each period in her life and the impact they had on her and the trajectory of her life.

My aim in the initial chapter of my dissertation is to build a bridge between this mediated testimony and de-colonial feminism. I will underscore how the speaker and the mediator employ three de-colonial feminist practices when they delineate the social, economic and political landscape in Nicaragua in the 1970s. These practices include interrogating patterns of global gender disparities, analyzing their root causes, and calling for accountability from responsible agents. Specifically, I put Tijerino and Randall in dialogue with de-colonial feminist scholars –

Alison M. Jaggar, Uma Narayan, Abigail Gosselin and Hey-Ryoung Kang – for the purpose of calling attention to the former’s portrayal of both the gendered disparities that existed in

Nicaragua and the structural injustices that caused them. I hope to reveal the overlapping between the speaker’s description of the feminization of the informal economy in Nicaragua in the 1970s and the content of current debates about capitalist imperialism and gender and global justice.

Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia [I, Rigoberta Menchú, An

Indian Woman in Guatemala] the text I analyze in Chapter 2, is the most well-known testimony in my corpus and arguably the most famous and widely read mediated testimony of all time. The book is comprised of thirty-three chapters. Although it begins with Menchú’s portrayal of Mayan beliefs regarding origins, births, and beginnings, and ends with her description of her experiences in exile in Mexico, the overall narration in each chapter is loosely linear. Throughout her oral history the speaker weaves her life experiences into the fabric of Guatemala’s history and Mayan

history, which enables her give voice to the violence she suffered as well as to the persecution her Mayan community suffered. Her testimony also serves to document Mayan history, cultural practices, social structures, and familial relations.

I use contemporary queer theories in my analysis of Menchú’s description of and resistance to the cultural laws that govern relationships in her community. I view several of the stories she tells through a queer lens in order to demonstrate how the choices she makes unsettle the dominant cultural codes of her time and place in history. I will do this by engaging the queer critiques of heteronormativity that Michael Cobb (2007), Lisa Duggan (2002), and Judith

Halberstam (2011) advance in their scholarship. I use Tina Takemoto’s (2016) and Christina A.

Leon’s (2017) notions of queer failure and stuck subjects for the purpose of demonstrating that

Menchú may be viewed as both. Finally, I examine the possibilities for considering Menchú’s testimony as an example of what José Esteban Muñoz describes as a “backward glance that enacts a future vision” (Cruising 4). I will argue that the violence and persecution she depicts throughout her oral history could be viewed as backdrop to the better and more just world she creates for her people through speech.

In Chapter 3, I examine Don’t be Afraid, Gringo. A Honduran Woman Speaks from the

Heart. The Story of Elvia Alvarado. Alvarado’s is the only testimony in my corpus that was originally published in English. In each of the fourteen chapters that comprise the book, the speaker describes a particular phase of her life by detailing their key events and explaining the impact they had on her. Similarly to the other oral histories I examine in my dissertation, in the first chapter of Don’t be Afraid, Gringo the narrator depicts her childhood. She does not, however, describe her family of origin or her early years in detail, as both Tijerino and Menchú do. Although neither the chapters nor the stories that Alvarado tells in them follow a

chronological order, the reader is able to trace the evolution of her awareness of gender inequality. The main themes she elaborates in her oral history include marriage, motherhood, machismo, land reform, land recoveries, and community organizing.

I use three feminist theories to analyze Alvarado’s portrayal of her process of becoming aware of the patriarchal logics that govern of gender relations in her home and in her community.

They are consciousness raising, affective solidarity and standpoint epistemology. I use these analytics to examine the Mothers’ Clubs that the speaker details throughout her testimony. I view these clubs through a feminist lens in order to demonstrate that they raise women’s awareness of gender oppression, foster emotional bonds between women, and produce knowledge about women’s lives that is rooted in their concrete experiences. Moreover, I underscore the strategies

Alvarado employs to destabilize patriarchal logics in her marriage and in her home. I also highlight the tactics she uses to challenge the hegemony of the military forces that are sent in to halt the land recoveries that Alvarado claims she leads.

CHAPTER 2

INTERLOCKING FORMS OF FEMALE-CENTERED EXPRESSION: MEDIATED

TESTIMONIAL LITERATURE, DECOLONIAL FEMINISM, AND CONTEMPORARY

DEBATES ABOUT GENDER AND GLOBAL JUSTICE

“Si hablamos algo sobre las mujeres que estuvieron en la cárcel conmigo – las presas comunes – se tendrá una idea de la verdadera condición de la mujer nicaragüense proletaria y campesina, de la mujer explotada por la clase dominante en el país y por el imperialismo. A decir verdad: de la mujer de todos los países explotados y oprimidos” (Doris Tijerino Somos millones 49-50).

[If we talk about the women that were in jail with me – the common prisoners – you will have an idea about the true condition of proletariat and rural women, the women that are exploited by the dominant class in this country and also by imperialism. Truthfully, these are the women of all exploited and oppressed countries] (my translation).

Introduction

In this chapter I build a bridge between the mediated testimony Somos millones…la vida de Doris María, combatiente nicaragüense (1977) [There Are Millions of Us: the Life of Doris

María, a Nicaraguan Combatant] (my translation) and de-colonial feminism. I argue that Doris

Tijerino – the speaker – and Margaret Randall – the mediator – use three de-colonial feminist practices when they represent the social, economic and political landscape in Nicaragua in the

1970s. These practices are interrogating patterns of global gender disparities, analyzing their root causes, and calling for accountability from responsible agents. Afterwards, I highlight intertextuality and the tension between fact and fiction that may operate in this mediated testimony by exploring the significance of the speaker’s claim that Maxim Gorki’s novel Mother

(1906) heavily influenced her. I consider the ramifications that Gorki’s representation of

Pelagueya Nilvona – the novel’s female protagonist – may have had on Tijerino’s account of her own story, including how she represents her mother in There Are Millions of Us. Finally, I argue that Randall and Tijerino may be viewed as agents of resistance and promoters of social justice, and also that their attention to interlocking forms of oppression such as race, gender and class are antecedents to Kimberle Crenshaw’s notion of intersectionality.2

I frame the examples of gendered violence that Tijerino underscores in her narrative within Alison M. Jaggar’s (2002; 2005; 2014) and Uma Narayan’s (2005) discussions about the link between colonialism, globalization, international development policies, and the feminization of poverty in underdeveloped nations. Then, I highlight several moments in Tijerino’s narrative in which she engages a contemporary framing of issues of gender and global justice, particularly as these issues pertain to Nicaraguan women who work in the informal economy, or informal sector (IS). Moreover, I legitimize the role that mediated testimonial literature by and about women plays in global movements to advance gender justice claims. In so doing, I conceptualize this mediated testimonial project as a mechanism that gives marginalized females their due voice by providing a safe zone that enables dialogue among them.

I provide a de-colonial feminist analysis of the speaker’s representation of both the gendered disparities that existed in Nicaragua in the 1970s and the structural injustices that

2 In her article “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics” (1989) Crenshaw makes two interrelated points. First, she argues that the “single- axis framework” of dominant feminist theory does a disservice to women of color because it ignores their experiences and needs by excluding them from theoretical analysis (140). Then, she demonstrates that dominant antiracism policies privilege males of color over females of color. In light of the fact that Black women’s lives are “multidimensional,” Crenshaw proposes a hybrid analytic– intersectionality – that conceptualizes gender discrimination and race discrimination as interlocking forms of oppression (145).

caused them. I put Doris Tijerino in dialogue with contemporary de-colonial feminists by revealing the overlapping between her representation of the feminization of the informal economy in Nicaragua and current debates about capitalist imperialism and gender and global justice. Historically rooted in the systematic exploitation of labor, capitalist imperialism aims to maximize the investor nations’ capital gains and geopolitical power by transforming underdeveloped economies to their liking and by absorbing them into their sphere of influence.

Like many other countries in Central America, Nicaragua produced cash crops for Western markets and consumed products that were manufactured in the US. In addition to shaping

Nicaragua’s economic and political structures to its liking, the US government engaged in educational and family planning campaigns for the purpose of influencing social relations, protecting its financial investments, and securing its position of dominance in the region. The speaker’s representation of the feminization of the informal sector (IS) in Nicaragua in the 1970s is a case in point.

Intertextuality

Written by Maxim Gorki and published in 1906, Mother is a work of historical fiction that tells the story of a group of factory workers who commit to advancing resistance movement in the fictionalized city of Nizhni-Novgorod, the author’s birthplace, and a site known for its revolutionary fervor in Russia in the early 1900s. I trace the protagonist’s evolution in the novel from a battered and barely literate woman to a committed revolutionary and skillful orator. I also trace the evolution of Pelagueya’s political consciousness, highlight her engagement with feminist principles, and draw comparisons between her representation in Mother and that of

Doris Tijerino’s mother in There Are Millions of Us. I aim to evince the significance of books – and the smuggling or handing down of them – in both the novel and the mediated testimony.

Furthermore, I argue that Nilvona and Tijerino may be viewed as founding mothers of revolutionary movement in literature and history. I argue that Doris Tijerino’s representation of her mother in her testimony, combined with her claim that Gorki’s novel impacted her profoundly, may be viewed as an attempt to legitimize and preserve a revolutionary genealogy in which mothers – not fathers – are the heroes.

The Speaker

Doris Tijerino was born in Matagalpa, Nicaragua in 1943. Her father was raised in a bourgeois family in León and her mother hailed from a conservative coffee growing family of

English ancestry. The latter instilled in her daughter a passion for reading and an incipient understanding of the relationship between U.S. imperialism and the Somoza dictatorship.

Tijerino attended the Ramirez Goyena Institute in Managua and, at the age of seventeen, joined both the Patriotic Youth of Nicaragua (JPN) and the Nicaraguan Socialist Youth of Nicaragua

(JSN)3. In 1963, she completed her BA and travelled to the Soviet Union to study at the Patricio

Lumumba University. She married Humberto Vinuesa, a student from Ecuador and an aspiring poet, and gave birth to a baby boy. Profoundly impacted by Marxism and her friendships with young revolutionaries from throughout Central and South America, Tijerino left her husband, abandoned her studies, and returned to Nicaragua in 1965 with her son in order to join the

Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). She was arrested twice in 1967 and later incarcerated for two years, 1969-71. At Nicaragua’s National University (UNAM), Tijerino served as President of the Student Association for the Faculty of Science and Letters (1971) and

3 Established in early1960, the Juventud Patriótica Nicaragüense (JPN) and the Juventud Socialista Nicaragüense (JSN) consisted of young activists who were committed to advancing democracy and social justice in Nicaragua. The members of the JPN and the JSN carried out protests and other direct actions against the Somoza dictatorship. Most of the youth that joined these organizations drew their inspiration from the successful revolution in Cuba in 1959 (Staten History 67-8).

General Secretary of the University Center (1972). Then, she worked for the FSLN covertly in other countries, 1975-1979. A full commander in the FSLN, Tijerino was imprisoned and tortured two more times during the period leading up to 1978 (Byron “Doris Tijerino” 181).

When the Sandinistas came to power on July 17, 1979, they named Tijerino Secretary of

International Relations. She also assumed multiple responsibilities in the Ministry of the Interior.

Two years later, she commanded the General Omar Torrijos Brigade, which wiped out 22 contra- revolutionaries, all of whom were former members of Somoza’s National Guard (Barricada 27

Nov. 1981). In 1982, the Democratic Republic of Germany awarded her their highest distinction, the Curie Medal.4 This gesture of solidarity underscores the close relationship between Germany and Nicaragua and situates their alliance within the bipolar world order of the Cold War period.

In January of 1985, her adolescent daughter María Doris Morales Tijerino5 died in a plane crash.6 Several months later, Tomás Borge, Commander of the Revolution and Minister of the Interior, who had met Tijerino when they were both teenagers in the JS, appointed her Chief

4 Georg Boehn, the president of the Democratic Republic of Germany’s Council for Peace, presented the medal to Tijerino. He stated: “The days of our shared enemy’s dominance in Latin America are over. There is now a revolutionary effervescence in almost all Latin American countries that imperialism can’t hold back.” Jaliot Curie founded the Movement for World Peace. (Barricada 4 Dec. 1982)

5 Doris Tijerino and Ricardo Morales Avilés, one of the FSLN’s most revered intellectuals, combatants and poets, fell in love in the early 1970s. Morales fathered Tijerino’s second – and last – child. He was subsequently captured, tortured and murdered by Somoza’s National Guard in 1973.

6 On January 19, 1985, Cuba Aviation’s Ilyushin-18, which flew routinely to Nicaragua, exploded after taking off from the José Martí airport in Havana. Forty people died. In addition to Tijerino’s daughter, the wife and one-year old daughter of Noel González, Nicaragua’s ambassador to Cuba, Francisco González, the secretary of International Relations for the Central Sandinista Workers (CST), and the vice-president of the Central Bank of Nicaragua, also perished. Fidel Castro had been on the same plane 10 days prior, when he flew to Managua to attend the Daniel Ortega’s inauguration ceremony. (La Prensa 20 Jan. 1985)

of the Sandinista National Police Force. According to an article that Barricada7 published the day after the news of her appointment became public, Tijerino’s promotion made her “la primera jefa de policía del mundo” [the world’s first female chief of police] (my translation). In addition to applauding her participation in Nicaragua’s struggle for emancipation and highlighting her fame, the article draws attention to her commitment to advancing the fight for gender equality. It states:

[D]oris, who moved national and international public opinion with her heroic actions against

the Somoza dictatorship during the national liberation struggle, became – both before and

after the triumph – a symbol for the Nicaraguan women’s movement.

(my translation)

A few months into her new job as Chief of Police, Tijerino was invited to Cuba to participate in

“El encuentro sobre la situación de la mujer en América Latina y el Caribe de hoy” [The Meeting on the Situation of Women in Latin America and the Caribbean Today”8] (my translation). As reported in Ko’eyú latinoamericano,9 she opened the assembly with her keynote address, “An

Alternative Model of Development,” which she gave in Havana’s prestigious Palace of

Conventions (PALCO).10 About a month later, she was chosen to lead the official Sandinista

7 Created in 1979 and directed by Tomás Borge, Barricada was the official newspaper of the FSLN. The newspaper closed in 1998. 8 Held in Havana, Cuba in June 1985, “El encuentro sobre la situación de la mujer en América Latina y el Caribe de hoy” addressed the specific negative impact that capitalist imperialism was having on the lives of poor women and children in Latin American and the Caribbean. 9 Fleeing persecution by Alfred Stroessner, who ruled Uruguay as a dictator from 1954-1989, Joel Atilio Cazal relocated to Venezuela and founded Ko’eyú latinoamericano in Caracas in 1978. Ko’eyú latinoamericano is a magazine that analyzes politics and culture in Latin America in general and in Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Bolivia in particular. Cazal served as the magazine’s editor for more than 30 years. He died in Caracas in 2010. 10 Tijerino begins her speech by evincing the unjust burden that the global capitalist financial system is placing on nations in Central America and the Caribbean. First, she reviews almost four decades of transnational financial history by underscoring Bretton Woods and the austerity

delegation to the United Nations World Conference on Women in Nairobi, Kenya.11 Currently,

Tijerino resides in Managua, Nicaragua. She has removed herself from the political scene entirely and refuses invitations to participate in activities that are organized and sponsored by contemporary Nicaraguan scholars, historians and activists.12

programs and lending practices of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). She also speaks to the crippling debts that poorer nations owe to wealthier ones in the North, and the specific vulnerabilities to which primarily export-based economies are exposed on the global market. Then, she berates imperialism’s “insatiable thirst for capital” and excoriates the negative impact that the Reagan administration’s “imperial aggressions” have on the poor in general and poor women and children in particular (8-9). These consequences include a lack of decent paid employment opportunities for women in the formal economy, lower wages for women across the board, the high demand for women and girls who will work in the informal sector as maids or prostitutes, and the double exploitation of women who are expected to generate income outside of the home while also cooking, cleaning and caring for the people in it (9-10). Finally, she highlights female participation in the social and emancipatory movements not just in Cuba and Nicaragua but also in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Bolivia and Peru (10). Finally, she calls for a new international economic order. She states: “There can’t be liberation for women while unequal and unjust relations between countries persist, nor while the economic and political structures of dependence, exploitation and misery persist. A structural transformation that allows for more egalitarian relations between northern and southern nations is necessary for advancing the situation of women (11, my translation).

11 In this sense, Tijerino follows in the footsteps of Domitila Chungara, who attended the first World Conference on Women, which was held in Mexico City in 1975. Chungara is the speaker in Si me permiten hablar…” testimonio de Domitila, una mujer de las minas de Bolivia. Moema Viezzer, who first met Chungara at the World Conference on Women, mediated this testimony and published it in 1977. The United Nations organized three more World Conferences on Women. These include Copenhagen (1980), Nairobi (1985) and Beijing (1995). The UN General Assembly has held four follow up sessions – 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015 – in order to review and assess the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action and to “consider future actions and initiatives” (unwomen.org. Title of webpage: World Conference on Women. July 28, 2017).

12 When I was conducting research in Managua in July 2017, I met people who knew Tijerino well. Several days later, one of them privately slipped me Tijerino’s address. Hoping I could ask her a few questions, or at least meet her, I took a cab to her home. The man who met me at the gate nodded his head slowly as I explained to him who I was and why I was there. When he asked me how I knew where “la Comandante” lived, I stared at him blankly, and said nothing. He sent me away. I returned the next day. Tijerino’s employees did not invite me in, but they wrote down my name and cell phone number. Unsurprisingly, Tijerino never called.

Women and Weapons

Tijerino was not, however, the only female Sandinista that excelled in armed combat, occupied positions of military leadership within the FSLN, and, later, made it almost to the top of the new government. In 1967, Gladys Báez was the first female to join the FSLN as a full- time armed combatant (Luciak 17). Mónica Baltodano, Leticia Herrera, Dora María Téllez and

Dorotea Wilson – to name a few of the most well known and revered female revolutionaries in

Nicaragua – followed in Baez’s footsteps. Téllez led the general command of the FSLN’s western front, which liberated the city of León and handed the Sandinistas their “first major military victory” (21). Herrero and Telléz moved up through the ranks of the FSLN to become guerilla commanders on the battlefield, positions that placed them – as they did Tijerino – just below the all-male “nine-member FSLN National Directorate” (18). Dorotea Wilson, who became politicized through religion and was a former missionary,13 joined the Sandinistas about a decade after Baéz did, eventually served for four years (1994-1998) on the FSLN National

Directorate. At the time, she was one of only three females to do so (Kampwirth 31-32). On the one hand, these women’s achievements and leadership destabilized traditional configurations of femininity, and also enabled other women to reconfigure the role they would play in their nation and in their home. On the other hand, the “new” Nicaraguan woman that Báez, Herrero, Téllez,

Tijerino and Wilson represented was in no way viewed as the male Sandinista’s equal. The common thread that runs through their comments about their experiences as female

13 Liberation theology, which originated in Europe and South America, had a major impact in Nicaragua beginning in the 1960s. Initially located in marginal urban neighborhoods and remote rural areas, Basic Christian Communities (CEBs) were study groups that met to discuss the Bible “and its relevance to ordinary people’s daily lives, particularly their social problems” (Collinson 84). These comunidades eclesiales de base (Christian base communities) pushed the poor in Nicaragua toward “prayer, analysis, and often radical action.” (Kampwirth 31-32)

revolutionaries is the fact that gender inequality existed and persisted within the FSLN (Bayard de Volo 16-20).

It also important to keep in mind that female participation in the Sandinista guerrilla movement was massive. It steadily increased between 1961, the year the FSLN was formed, and

1979, when Anastasio Somoza Debayle fled to Miami, FL (21). Chuchryk (1991) contends that the rate of female participation in armed combat during the insurgency was “the highest of any

Latin American revolutionary movement” (qtd. in Luciak 16). Scholars generally agree that when the Sandinistas triumphed in 1979, an estimated 25 to 30 percent of the armed insurrectionary forces were women (Bayard de Volo 5; Lucíak 16; Kampwirth 2). The new government, however, put very few females in positions of political powerful, effectively sidelining for at least a decade feminist interests and objectives (Bayard de Volo 5-6). Issued in

1987, the FSLN’s “Proclamation on Women” spoke to gender inequality:

[T]o move forward we need some mechanism that will enable us to identify the obstacles to

emancipation, to identify women’s most pressing problems, and to propose practical

solutions. (“Proclamation” qtd. in Bayard de Volo 87)

The Sandinista’s manifesto, however, did not end there. Instead, it went on to declare the organization’s rejection of any faction or association that:

proposes the emancipation of women through a struggle against men, as an activity exclusive

to women. This position divides and distracts people from the task at hand. (87)

Consequently, the Association of Nicaraguan Women, Luisa Amanda Espinosa (AMNLAE)14 was not granted autonomy from the FSLN. The organization’s control over AMNLAE created

14 Formerly known as the Association of Nicaraguan Women Confronting the Nation’s Problems (AMPRONAC), AMNLAE was the principal mechanism for organizing women in Nicaragua. It

conflict not just among some of the women who belonged to the association but also among female members of the FSLN. On the one hand, AMNLAE advocated for consciousness-raising among women to fight sexism. Some high-ranking Sandinista women openly referred to themselves as feminists. On the other hand, both AMNLAE and the FSLN recoiled from the word feminism. For them, it “generally functioned as an epithet for elitist and out of touch with local reality” (88-89). These contradictions illuminate the tensions that operated not just between the FSLN and AMNLAE but also between the women who belonged to these organizations.

Tijerino was a member of both; however, she never self identified as a feminist. The same cannot be said for the North American woman to whom she told her life story.

The Mediator

Margaret Randall, “one of the foremost oral historians of recent revolutionary history and, more specifically of the history of women in revolutions,” was born in New York City in

1936 (Ellinger and Sokolower). Before she became one of the founding mothers of mediated testimonial literature by and about women in Latin America, Randall created El corno plumado, a bilingual literary magazine in México. In 1969, she published – also in Mexico – a landmark compilation of articles about the multiple brands of feminism that were developing in the 1960s in Europe and the United States. Las mujeres15 [Women] (my translation) provided Latin

Americans a panorama of ideas that were developing in the burgeoning second-wave of the

was named in honor of Luisa Amanda Espinosa, the first Sandinista woman to die in armed combat. 15 Arnaldo Orfila, the founder and head of Siglo Veinte and also Randall’s editor, suggested she not use words like feminism or feminist in the title because the book would not get past the censors that existed in many countries in Latin America at that time. Randall obliged, chose the title, and wrote the book’s introduction. Las mujeres [Women] went into more than thirty editions.

women’s movement. It was also the text that first introduced US feminism to a Latin American readership.

Randall participated in the student movement in México in 1968, moved to Cuba in 1969, and lived in Nicaragua from 1980 to 1984. When she returned to the United States in 1985, the

North American government revoked her citizenship and deported her. Citing the McCarran-

Walter Immigration and Nationality Act (1952), the US government claimed that Randall was

“ill disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States." Supported by the Center for

Constitutional Rights, she won her citizenship back in 1989 and continued her careers in journalism and in literature (McLaren).

During the 1990s, Randall openly criticized the Western monolingual – and primarily male – journalists who were reporting on events in Central America for being both bias toward non-Western cultures and inadequately informed. They conducted their research, she quipped, at the “Americanized bar” in their hotel (“Reclaiming Voices” 104). Randall and her counterparts, in contrast, produced reliable reporting (104). Describing her vocation as a “new female practice of journalism” (103), she underscores bilingual and bicultural women as powerful protagonists in the stories they tell. She states:

If you didn’t understand the language, if you didn’t speak Spanish, how could you really

communicate? How could you listen? To report accurately on a given part of the world, we

decided, you must live and work in that place. (105)

Randall contends that the exploring women’s understanding of language and culture and investigating women’s lived experiences were new ways to produce valuable knowledge and reliable news. Second wave feminism heavily influenced her and her female colleagues, as well as their professional projects. She states:

As writers, as journalists, we gradually came to feel it was no longer satisfying to try to write

like men. We were no longer sure we accepted male criteria for what good writing, or accurate

journalism, was. We began to listen to our own voices and play by our own rules. (105)

Finally, Randall continues to be forthright about the nature and objectives of her work as a writer in general and as a mediator in particular. She states:

I approach memory and remembrance as I do in all my work, as the thread that holds history

together. Our patriarchal society, with its glorification of violence and war, tends to disparage

memory. We are urged to distrust our individual memories, and our collective memories are

rarely taught or honored. (2015)

One of her aims as a mediator is to help women in Central America reclaim their memories and use their voices to tell their personal stories. Another objective is to share their narratives with readerships not only in Central America and the Caribbean but also in the United States.

Historical and Political Context

In his book Nicaragua: Living in the Shadow of the Eagle (2003), Thomas Walker contends that Nicaragua’s history is as tempestuous as it is fascinating. He states:

If, on the one hand, it features incredible elite exploitation, mass suffering, and foreign

interference, it also includes a significant element of popular resistance, national pride, and

human nobility. (9)

He explains that since the time of the Conquest in the sixteenth century, land has been concentrated in the hands of a wealthy few whom exploited the native population not just in gold mines and on coffee, cotton and sugar plantations but also on the slave market. Walker makes clear that the indigenous population was decimated within a few decades of the beginning of the colonial period mainly due to disease and the exportation of native slave labor to other colonies

in the region (7-11). Furthermore, he contends that the phenomenon of dependency is responsible for the unjust economic conditions that have afflicted and continue to afflict the poor in

Nicaragua. He goes on to explain that fighting for independence from Spain did not quell the tensions that existed between the main cities of Granada – aristocratic and conservative – and

León – working class and liberal – because each group aimed to rule the country. Both Great

Britain and the United States began to assert its authority in Nicaragua in the 1800s mainly because politicians and wealthy businessmen on both sides of the Atlantic fancied the country as the ideal spot for a canal that would facilitate trade between them and the developing export economies in Latin America (11-13).

The situation in Nicaragua was further complicated in 1855 when a charismatic adventurer and former soldier from Nashville, Tennessee, William Walker, banded with the most powerful liberals in León, took control of Granada, and declared himself president of Nicaragua.

He immediately “legalized slavery, and declared English to be the official language” of his new nation (13-15). In Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua Under U.S. Imperial Rule

(2005), Michel Gobat explains that the future generations of Nicaraguans viewed Walker and his avaricious North American followers as “nothing but brutal invaders who tried to enslave their ancestors and invade their country” (21). Walker’s hubris signaled that the Monroe Doctrine was still in full swing.

Arturo Cruz (2002 explicates that concern among the Nicaraguan elite that they would lose their country to the United States diminished considerably when an alliance of Central

American countries defeated Walker and expelled him from Nicaragua in 185716 (Nicaragua’s).

The Conservatives emerged more powerful from the Walker fiasco and attempted to create a

16 Following another foray into Latin America in 1860, Walker was executed by firing squad in Honduras.

semblance of unity with the Liberals. Cruz contends that the 1858 Constitution was the foundation for thirty years of “constitutional order in Nicaragua” (12). The death of Evarista

Carazo in 1889 and the subsequent appointment of Roberto Sacasa to the presidency, however, marked the beginning of the end of the Republic. Sacasa’s disastrous tenure as president “ended in three civil wars between 1893 and 1896, a war with Honduras, and the revolution of José

Santos Zelaya” (19). Zelaya, a liberal reformer, made great strides toward resolving the conflict between León and Granada by transforming Managua into an economic and cultural hot spot and

“the seat of government” (19). He also involved Nicaragua in many wars in the region and created fiscal chaos throughout the country.

In 1909, the US government intervened to overthrow Zelaya and install a conservative government. A few years later, North American marines were sent in to crush a liberal rebellion

(Babb). In U.S. Intervention and Regime Change in Nicaragua (2005) Mauricio Solaún underscores the relationship between revolts in Nicaragua and the arrival of trained members of the U.S. Marine Corps to suppress them (24). It is widely known that the U.S. marines created the Nicaraguan National Guard, which welcomed assistance from the U.S. Air Force to defeat the nationalist rebellion led by Augusto César Sandino. During the U.S. occupation of Nicaragua

(1912-1933), conflict between liberals and conservatives heated up and culminated in another civil war. In 1927, all but one of the political and military leaders from both parties agreed to an armistice. General Sandino, however, vowed to continue fighting until the US extracted all of its marines from Nicaragua (Babb). Solaún explains that shortly after the marines departed in 1933, and despite having already signed a peace agreement, Anastasio Somoza García, the first U.S. appointed Nicaraguan leader of the National Guard, ordered Sandino’s execution and proceeded to spearhead a military coup and take over the government in 1936 (30). The Somoza family

dictatorship enjoyed its amicable relationship with the United States, made a lot of money, and ruled Nicaragua for more than forty years.17 Moreover, in the 1940s the Somoza family permitted the United States to construct military bases and training camps in Nicaragua. It is no secret that the CIA used these strategic posts to covertly support the military coup that overthrew

Jacobo Arbenz, the first democratically elected president of Guatemala, in 1954 (Walker 25-30).

Sandino was murdered by the Somoza regime; however, his heroic legacy became a permanent part of Nicaragua’s national history. The leaders of several organizations that were rebelling against the dictatorship eventually joined forces and, in 1961, named their party after him. Despite massive funding for the Somoza regime from the United States, the FSLN unconditionally liberated its people from the dictatorship on July 17, 1979. The Sandinista incumbency was immediately faced with the difficult task of resolving the social, economic, political and gender divisions that existed within the party while simultaneously fending off external aggressions and interventions (Babb, Después). Both the Ronald Reagan (1980-1988) and George H.W. Bush (1988-1992) administrations implemented “massive surrogate invasion, direct CIA sabotage, and economic strangulation” in order to annihilate the Sandinista

Revolution (Walker Nicaragua 45). The Contra War (1981-1990) achieved its goal when the

Nicaraguan people voted democratically to put and end to the bloodshed, death and dire economic straits that plagued their country by electing to the presidency Violeta Barrios de

Chamorro.18 She was the candidate whom the George H.W. Bush administration supported (56-

58).

17 Anastasio Somoza García ruled Nicaragua for two separate periods. These include 1937-1947 and 1950 -1956. Luis Somoza Debayle governed from 1956-1963. Anastasio Somoza Debayle was also in power for two different periods. These include 1967-1972 and 1974-1979. 18 Violeta Barrios de Chamorro (b.1929) was the candidate of the National Opposition Union, a coalition of fourteen parties. She served as president for one term.

Puig (2010) explains that after its defeat in the 1990 elections, the FSLN divided into two main factions. These included the “renovating” faction that championed open dialogue with other political forces, and the “principle-oriented” faction, commanded by Daniel Ortega, that called for aggressive opposition to the new government (88). Unable – or unwilling – to resolve the conflicts between them, the two factions split completely in 1995. As the undisputed and unrestricted leader of the new FSLN, Ortega lobbied to keep the revolution’s social programs in tact, which gave him popular credibility, and also capitalized on the disputes between presidents

Arnoldo Alemán (1997-2001) and Enrique Bolaños (2002-2006). By the end of the latter’s term, the FSLN had reclaimed its role as “the key player in Nicaraguan politics” (91). Ortega won the

2006 presidential elections with a minority vote of 38%, mainly because the “anti-sandinista block” split into two factions, the Nicaraguan Liberal Alliance and the Constitutional Liberal

Party (Jarquín “Construcción” 24, my translation). Amid accusations of widespread fraud and voting irregularities, he triumphed in the general elections in 2011, supposedly winning 62% of the vote (Peraza 130-34). In early 2014, Ortega’s administration passed a bill that abolished article 147 of the Constitution, which limited the number of terms for which a president could serve. This reform essentially opened the door to the possibility that Ortega would rule his country indefinitely (Gallard 102). Furthermore, five months prior to the national elections in

2016, Ortega announced in a speech that he would not allow any independent, national or international organizations to observe Nicaragua’s electoral process (Peraza139). He also chose his wife as his running partner. Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo currently serve as president and vice-president of Nicaragua.

Politically and ideologically speaking, however, the FSLN that currently rules Nicaragua bears little – if any – resemblance to the revolutionary vanguard that ousted the Somoza regime

in 1979 (Baltodano; Pérez; Jarquín El régimen). Baltodano unequivocally states that el danielismo, the political phenomenon that adulates the party’s strongman and works tirelessly to expand his power and wealth, embodies a “rupture and distortion of the heroic history” of el sandinismo (44, my translation). She goes on to explain that rather than implement social, educational and economic programs that could alleviate widespread suffering among

Nicaragua’s poor and generate better paid employment opportunities for the middle class, Ortega has enabled himself, his loved ones, and his most loyal political accomplices to become part of

Nicaragua’s modern oligarchy (45, my translation). Pérez provides an exhaustive list of the lucrative businesses that the Ortega-Murillo family now controls. These include but are not limited to energy and construction companies, television networks and radio stations, the pharmaceutical industry, public transportation, food distribution services, safety and security services, and the Seminole Plaza Hotel, located in the nation’s capital (Pérez 49-52 my translation). The author then poses a poignant hypothetical question that drives home

Baltodano’s point. He asks: “If Sandino were alive, what would he say?” (53 my translation).

Jarquín takes Baltodano’s and Pérez’s claims a step further when he calls Daniel Ortega a

“sultan” and suggests that Nicaragua’s leader has consolidated personal, familiar, political and financial power like “no one before in Nicaragua’s modern history, including the Somozas” (El régimen 55 my translation).

Women, Gender and Global Justice

In this section I put Doris Tijerino’s narrative in dialogue with the works of four de- colonial feminists. I reveal the common ground between her representation of factors that exacerbate gender inequality and the theorists’ analysis of the causes of global gender disparities.

The de-colonial feminists – Abigail Gosselin, Alison M. Jaggar, Hey-Ryoung Kang, and Uma

Narayan – analyze the causal relationship between colonialism, globalization, and international development policies and the feminization of poverty in the Global South.19 Their discussions provide productive tools for analyzing not just Tijerino’s framing of the causes of gender disparities in Nicaragua, but also her call for accountability from the United States.

I suggest that in her representation of Nicaragua’s political, economic and social reality in the 1970s, the narrator of There are Millions of Us lays bare the unjust burden that capitalist imperialism is having on her nation’s most marginalized citizens. She repeatedly calls attention to the damage that the emerging single market is causing to Nicaragua’s formal economy. She also elucidates the negative impact it is having on workers in the informal sector, particularly women. In short, opportunities for finding a decent job, “the single factor most likely to transform the situation of the poor” are abysmal (Brock “Global” 125-6). I argue that Tijerino’s analysis of the causes of her country’s economic plight, combined with her claim that marginalized women bear the brunt of the burden of economic hardship, may be viewed as an antecedent to de-colonial feminism’s critique of contemporary gender injustice.

First, Gosselin summarizes the ways in which socio-economic structural injustices facilitate the inequitable distribution of the benefits and burdens of a single transnational economic system (“Global”). She explicates the ways in which the current global economic and political order privileges wealthy nations over poorer ones, and also conceptualizes within a global framework the inequitable distribution of mental health disorders worldwide. Gosselin

19 There were two main events that signaled the end of the Cold War: the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. My dissertation examines literary narratives that were produced prior to these events, when the global order was still divided between East and West. In spite of the time and space that separate Tijerino’s analysis from those of Gosselin, Jaggar, Kang, and Narayan, they have things in common. In order to evince these similarities I expand the temporal arc of de-colonial feminism’s critique of the socio- economic and political divide between the Global North and the Global South to include the Cold War years.

provides an epidemiological analysis of both a nation’s location within the global order and individuals’ location within their nation, and argues that social inequality is strongly correlated to ill health. Lastly, she calls for global structural reforms that will eradicate the relations of oppression and domination that more than 40 years of globalization have cemented worldwide

(100-103).

Gosselin bolsters her argument by engaging Marion Young’s (2006) contention that capitalist imperialist global policies enable the capacity of some groups of women to flourish while simultaneously inhibiting the ability of most groups of women to flourish. Young claims that socioeconomic injustice is rooted in transnational economic, political and social systems that constrain underserved females’ capacity to arrange their lives according to two key values: self- development and self-determination. She also posits that hermeneutical injustice occurs when social structures systematically hinder marginalized female populations’ ability to “participate in processes of knowledge production and meaning-making” (qtd. in Gosselin 101). I use Young’s theory to analyze Tijerino’s representation of the systemic injustices that harm poor Nicaraguan women, who – to use Gosselin’s words – “have little choice in the circumstances of their paid work” (107).

In “Transnational Cycles of Gendered Vulnerability: A Prologue to a Theory of Global

Gender Justice” (2014), Jaggar contends that women’s subordination is created by observable

“transnational patterns of gendered disparities” (18). She begins her discussion by citing Saskia

Sassen’s (2002) notion of the “feminization of the global proletariat,” which underscores the idea that a woman’s unpaid and low-paid labor benefit local, national and transnational market sectors. She demonstrates that women have been and continue to be expected to make up for cuts in funding for social welfare programs by carrying out household duties and caring for young

and ill family members for free. Jaggar also points out that in addition to comprising a majority of the global workers, women are underrepresented in politics and suffer higher rates of illiteracy, sexual harassment and violence (20). Furthermore, she frames sex work in a transnational context by exposing how “developments in the global economy” and “policies imposed by transnational actors” entrench some groups of women in cycles of gendered vulnerability (34). She contends that a lack of decent paid employment opportunities in the formal economy is what drives so many poor women into the unregulated informal economy, where “sex work or one of its variants may be the best option” (32).

In “Transnational Women’s Collectivities and Global Justice” (2014), Kang critiques nationalist and cosmopolitan theoretical models of global justice because neither model tackles the “ontological conditions and circumstances of justice which have been engendered by current processes of globalization” (40). She claims they do not sufficiently represent the justice claims of females, primarily poor females in poor countries, whom carry a disproportionate burden of the effects of the current neoliberal economic world order. Kang privileges a transnational feminist model in which “transnationalized socio-economic units […] serve as ontological conditions of justice” (40). In her model, Kang centers transnational women’s collectivities as agents of global justice (41). Kang and Jaggar overlap in their analysis of the root causes of women’s subordination to men at local, national and transnational levels. There are also similarities between their critiques of both the unequal distribution of the benefits and burdens of globalization and the role that the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO play in maintaining it.

Kang champions transnational women’s collectivities because they aim to give women their due voice. For her, the fact that underserved females in developing countries do not have the chance to weigh in on “decisions taken at the global level,” reveals what she calls the

“procedural unfairness of current dominant global institutions” (43-44). She claims that the act of testifying, of telling others one’s stories, is crucial to sustaining a distributive justice model in which the global poor have opportunities to make their voices heard. Formed across borders, transnational women’s collectivities provide formal and informal spaces in which “similarly situated, vulnerable individuals can participate in free dialogical discourse about their justice claims” (52). Such dialogic safe zones provide women the chance to locate their personal experiences in the transnational economic order. As agents of change, transnational women’s collectivities enable females to make informed and empowered calls for global justice precisely because they are, as Kang states, “situated in their class, race, nationality, or sexuality on the basis of which global injustice has been committed” (59).

In her article “Saving Amina: Global Justice for Women and Intercultural Dialogue”

(2005), Jaggar argues that the only way to fully understand the poverty and abuse that underserved women suffer is by locating their oppression within a “broader geopolitical and geo- economic context” (62). She provides several examples of the negative impact that Western processes of economic globalization and “Western-inspired and Western-imposed principles and policies of neoliberalism,” have had and continue to have on poor women in poor countries (62).

Jaggar contends that the “expansion of export agriculture, typically mandated by programs of structural adjustment,” combined with the “heavily subsidized foods” that wealthier nations

“dump” on poorer nations, have led to the deterioration of small-scale and subsistence agriculture (63). Unable to produce vast cash crops that are in high demand in the global market or pushed off of their land entirely, many poor women relocate to the “shantytowns that encircle most major cities in developing countries” in order to work in the informal economy, which is

“characterized by low wages or incomes, uncertain employment and poor working conditions”

(63).

Finally Uma Narayan argues that the “unequal forms of economic development engendered by colonialism” are the real reasons why the informal sector (IS) continues to both expand in Third World economies and absorb into it a disproportionate number of Third World women (352). She emphasizes the fact that approximately 80% of women in almost all poor countries work in the IS, where they lack basic “economic rights” such as a minimum wage, health and safety regulations, paid holidays, and labor unions (358-9). Underscoring colonialism’s four key strategies – expropriating fertile lands from the native population, introducing capitalist market forces and the notion of private property, taxing the colonized, and transforming them into consumers of purchased commodities – Narayan offers a causal analysis of current global and gender injustices. She exposes both the “underlying structures of unequal dependence between developed and developing economies” and the “structural disparities that cause disproportionate poverty in the developing world” (361).

A Precursor to De-colonial Feminist Thought: “There are millions of us…” The Life of

Doris María, a Nicaraguan Combatant

Tijerino and Randall foreground the unjust distribution of the benefits and burdens of a global capitalist economic system, lay bare the negative impact that capitalist imperialism has on vulnerable nations and the poor populations who live in them, and harangue the US for the role it plays in shaping and ruling an unjust global economic and political order. The mediator packs a punch by exposing the political and military tactics that “la mafia norteamericana” (8) [the North

American mafia] employs in order to secure its hegemony in Nicaragua (my translation). The speaker refers throughout her narration to the injustices that the US committed on Nicaraguan

soil, as well as to the negative effects that US imperial practices are having on Nicaragua’s most vulnerable citizens. Revealing the similarities in both women’s critique of a capitalist system that privileges the business interests of wealthier and more powerful nations over the rights and needs of poorer and weaker nations allows me to ground my analysis of their shared discourse in contemporary issues of gender and global justice.

In the introduction to the testimony, Randall throws shade at the United States in multiple and intersecting ways. Foregrounding the cozy relationship that the US government has had for more than three decades with the Somoza family, she holds North American elites accountable for financially and militarily supporting a family-led military regime that exploits not only its masses but its nation’s natural resources as well. Ruling Nicaragua with a strong arm from 1936-

1979, the Somoza family welcomed doing business with the North Americans, and privately profited from what Randall calls “el sistema de saqueo capitalista-imperialista” (8) [the capitalist-imperialist pillage] of Nicaragua (my translation). She also points out that multiple military interventions by the “Yankees” enabled the US to absorb Nicaragua into the emerging single-market economy that it controlled. The production of cash crops such as coffee and sugar may have brought in US dollars but it also led to what the mediator calls the “super-exploitation” of rural farmers and urban factory workers alike (8). Furthermore, she calls out the U.S.

Department of Defense for financing and training the Central American Defense Forces

(CONDECA), and also critiques the role that both the U.S. Agency for International

Development (USAID) and the US Alliance for Progress played in quelling leftist movement in

Nicaragua.

Similarly, the speaker lambastes North American politicians, businessmen and marines for their coordinated efforts to force Nicaragua into a subordinated political, economic and

military position within the emerging global order. In the second section of her testimony, she recalls that by the time she joined the Nicaraguan Socialist Youth (JS) party in 1960, she was already convinced that systematic reforms were the only viable way to begin solving her nation’s economic stagnation. She states:

[T]enía completa seguridad de que la solución estaba en el cambio de sistema y tenía plena

conciencia de que solo una organización verdaderamente de izquierda, solo una vanguardia

revolucionaria, en otras palabras, que solo el partido de los obreros podía darse a la tarea de

transformar la sociedad. También creía, y creo ahora, que gran parte de la solución del

problema nicaragüense estaba en poder solucionar el problema del campesino, el problema de

la tierra. (30)

[I was certain that the solution was to change the system and I was aware that only a leftist

organization, only a revolutionary vanguard, in other words, that only a workers’ party was up

to the task of transforming society. I also believed, and still believe, that a big part of the

solution of the Nicaraguan problem was being able to solve the peasants’ problem, which was

rooted in the problem of the land.] (my translation)

Invoking one of the core principles of José Carlos Mariátegui’s famous text Seven Interpretive

Essays on Peruvian Reality (1928), Tijerino reveals her knowledge of and agreement with

Mariátegui’s causal analysis of the land tenure system in Perú, and also uses his framework to analyze the inequities in Nicaragua’s economy. Surely she knew that Mariátegui was an avowed, self-taught Marxist, and also that he insisted a socialist revolution should evolve organically in

Latin America on the basis of local conditions and practices. Exposing the historical roots of the

West’s notion of private property, Mariátegui grounds his critique of the inequitable distribution of land in Peru in “the colonial economic infrastructure” (29). For him, the systematic

exploitation of native populations was paramount to the success of colonization, slavery, feudalism, mercantilism, and the latifundio. At the outset of his essay entitled “The Problem of the Land,” the author states:

Those of us who approach and define the Indian problem from a socialist point of view […]

are not satisfied to assert the Indian’s right to education, culture, progress, love and heavan.

We begin by categorically assuming the right to land. (31)

Foregrounding a lack of access to cultivable lands as the origin of other social and economic injustices, including gender inequality, Tijerino follows in Mariátegui’s footsteps by exposing in her testimony the absuses that Europeans and North Americans committed against the indigenous population in Latin America in general and in Nicaragua in particular. Furthermore, she offers several concrete examples of the gendered consequences of these abuses. Most importantly, Tijerino acknoweldges thrughout her testimony that a lack of fertile land is the main reason why underserved rural females migrate – or are coheresed into migrating – to the city in search of work. In the pages that follow, I highlight several segments from Tijerino’s narrative in which she represents the reality of their lives in urban centers.

Weaving into 26 paragraphs of her testimony several stories that her fellow, female prisoners tell her, Tijerino elaborates diverse forms of violence against women. Often leading with phrases such as, “they told me” and “she said to me,” the speaker recounts the gendered experiences of common prisoners, laborers, prostitutes, and thieves. First, Tijerino describes what happened to her and to other women in the jails that Nicaragua’s National Guard controlled. Emphasizing gendered torture tactics and female solidarity, she recreates the vertical power dynamics between female prisoners and male guards and the horizontal relations of solidarity and support that develop between women. She also retells the stories that several

female inmates told her about how they ended up in prison. In this way, the speaker provides her mediator with a female-centered perspective on the socio-economic structures that allow for the systematic exploitation of the poor in general and of poor women in particular. It must also be noted that in this section of her testimony, Tijerino engages several issues that contemporary feminst policy-makers, theorists, economists, activists and philosophers grapple with in the field of gender and global justice. They are: prostitution, human trafficking, and women’s lack of control over their reproductive capacities.

Reconstructing other women’s personal narratives enables Tijerino to center a collective female perspective and allows her voice to become the mechanism by which marginalized, excluded and/or silenced female voices are heard and preserved. She goes to great lengths to give voice to Nicaragua’s most vulnerable group of people – poor girls from the countryside – who are trafficked and/or forced into prostitution or thievery in order to feed their families.

Furthermore, her transnational framing of gendered issues of oppression and exploitation are relevant to contemporary debates about gender and justice.

According to Tijerino’s testimony, she meets several types of prostitutes while she is in prison. Professional prostitutes are located at the top of the sex industry’s hierarchy. Young girls who are trafficked and sold into brothels are at the bottom of the hierarchy. Poor females who work two jobs in order to make ends meet – one in the manufacturing industry and another in the sex industry – are located somewhere in the middle. She states:

En el país, además, se da otro tipo de prostituta, que son obreras que por lo bajo del salario de

ven obligadas, para sostener a sus familias, a salir a las calles los fines de semana en busca de

un cliente, como ellas dicen. Estas mujeres se ven sometidas a los mayores ultrajes porque al

no ser ellas prostitutas de oficio, como se les llama a las otras, no tienen carnet de sanidad que

necesitan en la cantina. Entonces estas mujeres tienen que salir a la calle y ubicarse más o

menos en los lugares donde trafican de noche los hombres, turistas y ese tipo de gente. Estas

mujeres son reprimidas por unas patrullas especiales que trabajan principalmente los fines de

semana, que es cuando trabajan estas obreras. (50)

[In this country, there is another kind of prostitute. They are workers who are so underpaid

that in order to care for their families they feel they must walk the streets on weekends in

search of clients, as they say. These women are subjected to the worst affronts because they

are not professional prostitutes and they don’t have a health identity card, which they need to

work in the bars. So these women have to work in the street, in places where men and tourists

and those kinds of people do illegal things. These women are detained by special police

forces that work primarily on the weekend, which is when these women also work.] (my

translation)

Reflecting on what a young female inmate and former prostitute told her, Tijerino locates the roots of human trafficking and prostitution in Mariátegui’s framing of the problem of the land:

Allá se acostumbra que los tratantes de blancas, gente que se encargaban de abastecer los

prostíbulos los prostíbulos de mujeres, se meten al campo, a la zona montañosa en donde la

población padece de mucha hambre, con el fin de reclutar mujeres supuestamente para el

trabajo doméstico en la ciudad. Se traen campesinas, entre doce y trece años, a trabajar como

‘hijas de casa.’ Entonces esa gente que se dedica a la trata de blancas usa este manto para

reclutar a las campesinas jóvenes, hijas de campesinos arruinados o del proletariado agrícola,

que son traídas a la ciudad y llevadas directamente a prostíbulos. (50)

[It’s customary that human traffickers, people that are in charge of stocking the brothels with

prostitutes, go out to rural areas – to the mountainous zones where the population suffers from

hunger – in order to supposedly recruit women for domestic work in the city. They offer

young campesinas, girls who are thirteen or fourteen years old, jobs as nannies. The

traffickers use this trick to recruit these girls, daughters of impoverished campesinos or

migrant farm workers, transport them to the city, and take them directly to brothels.] (my

translation)

Tijerino is quick to point out, however, that men are not the only culprits in maintaining what she calls a “ciclo vicioso” (51) [vicious cycle] (my translation) of exploitation and abuse. Several madams of local bordellos make private deals with the military men who command the prisons.

Giving the guards cash to cooperate and keep quiet, these women use their money to solidify their position of power and privilege by exploiting younger, poorer and more vulnerable women.

According to what Tijerino tells Randall, these madams “escogen a las muchachas más jóvenes y más bonitas y les pagan la multa con el compromiso de que tienen que irse a trabajar a las cantinas de ellas” (52) [choose the youngest and prettiest girls and pay their fines, under the condition that the girls will work as prostitutes in their bars] my translation).

In addition to frequenting state prisons in order to illegally buy girls and women, madams use these jails as dumping grounds for females who resist the terms and conditions of sexual enslavement. Tijerino states:

Había dos mujeres dueñas de prostíbulos que visitaban con frecuencia la cárcel. Estas mujeres

llegaban y continuamente estaban sacando y metiendo mujeres a la cárcel. Sacaban a las que

les convenían y cuando ya no le reportaban ningún beneficio las volvían a meter preses,

acusadas de cualquier cosa o cuando las mujeres se les rebelaban. (52)

[There were two female owners of brothels that frequently visited the jail. These women came

and continually took women out of or put women in jail. They took out the ones that most

interested them and when they were no longer of use to them, or when they rebelled, these

madams threw them back in jail by accusing them of just about anything.] (my translation)

Moreover, in the stories that Tijerino recounts, it is noteworthy that both males and females oppress female prisoners. That is to say, she narrates the ways in which women with power oppress weaker women by buying them out of prison or selling them into it, and also by restricting their reproductive freedom.

Me contaban también que en estos prostíbulos les administraban a ellas medicinas,

medicamentos para impedirles su menstruación de manera que no dejen de ganar dinero ni in

solo día. Les obligan a practicarse abortos cuando quedan en estado y las envician a tal grado

que a ellas les es prácticamente imposible encontrar, al momento de alejarse de la cantina, la

manera de permanecer en otro medio. (50)

[They also told me that in these brothels the owners forced them to take pills in order to

impede their menstruation so that they would not stop earning money, not even for one day.

They made them get abortions when they got pregnant and abused them so badly that it was

practically impossible for them to survive if they left the bars.] (my translation)

In addition to describing the ways in which local structures oppress female sex workers,

Tijerino also explicates the burdens that transnational structures place on female farm and domestic care workers, thereby further exposing the unjust capitalist structures that Gosselin,

Jaggar, Kang and Narayan take to task in their work. First, the narrator frames her critique of capitalism by foregrounding four concrete ways that capitalist forces oppress poor women who work outside of the home. These include a lack of paid employment opportunities, precarious employment, a dismal minimum wage, and violence that they suffer in the workplace (50-53).

Furthermore, she describes the gender pay gap: “Un obrero que recoge café, por una lata de café

llega a ganar hasta cuatro, cinco o seis córdobas. Y en ese mismo lugar una mujer gana dos córdobas. O sea, una cantidad totalmente inferior a la que gana un hombre” (53) [A male laborer earns four, five or six córdobas for collecting a can of coffee. And in that same place, a woman earns two córdobas, a totally inferior amount compared to what a man earns.] (my translation)

Tijerino’s most biting critique of capitalism, however, occurs when she retells the story of a young woman who attempted to abandon theft in search of honest work. Tijerino states:

Otra mujer me dijo que en una oportunidad salió del tipo de trabajo que llevaba y se puso a

trabajar como doméstica, porque no sabía hacer otra cosa, ¿no? Y entonces ella me decía que

en un mes se ganaba como domestica fácilmente podía conseguirlo en un solo día robando.

Eso sin contar con el trato que recibía de los patrones. Las domesticas trabajan cerca de doce

y catorces horas. (51)

[Another woman told me that she once had the opportunity to get out of her old line of work.

She took a job as a maid because she didn’t know how to do anything else. She told me that

she earned in one month as a maid what she could easily get in a single day of robbing. And

that says nothing about the abuse she suffered at the hands of her bosses. Maids work about

twelve to fourteen hours a day, and some even more.] (my translation).

The common theme that runs through all of the personal stories that Tijerino recounts in this section of her testimony is the fact that Nicaragua’s economy places the heaviest burden on underserved women who seek employment in the informal economy as day laborers on farms, nannies and maids in private homes, and sex workers in brothels or on the streets.

I suggest that both Tijerino’s and Randall’s representation of the gendered hardships that underserved women experience in the informal sector may be viewed as antecedents to de- colonial feminist thought, which arose in the 1990s, more than a decade after the publication of

There Are Millions of Us: The Life of Doris María, a Nicaraguan Combatant. The speaker and the mediator evince the unjust economic structures that place a disproportionate burden on marginalized females in Nicaragua, and also call for accountability from responsible agents, mainly Spain and the United States. For Tijerino and Randall, colonialism and capitalist imperialism are the root causes of the patterns of gendered vulnerabilities that they highlight in their text. Finally, I suggest that this mediated testimony could also be viewed as a literary form of the dialogical safe-zones that Kang highlights in her discussion about transnational women’s collectivities. The mediator and speaker collaborate in There Are Millions of Us: The Life of

Doris María, a Nicaraguan Combatant to document both one woman’s history and the collective history of an oppressed population. Women’s collectivities, explains Kang, are mechanisms that give oppressed groups of females their due voice and enable them to locate their personal and collective experiences in the transnational economic order by dialoguing and forming bonds of solidarity with other similarly situated women.

A Female Revolutionary Genealogy in Literature and Life

According to what she recalls in both her testimony and the interviews she gives over a period of three decades, if there is one person who served as a role model and guide to Doris

Tijerino, it was her mother. In her book Memorias de la lucha Sandinista: de la forja de la vanguardia a la montaña, Mónica Baltodano confirms this by quoting Tijerino directly:

‘Tuve la gran fortuna de tener de madre a Doris Haslam Macy. Ella me enseñó que había que

organizarse para la lucha, y siempre anduvo metida en intentos de crear organizaciones de

base, obviamente de mujeres, de cosas que tenían que ver siempre con la política, por

ejemplo, en la defensa de los presos.’ (qtd. in Baltodano 240).

[‘I had the great fortune of having Doris Haslam Macy as a mother. She taught me that we

had to organize ourselves for the fight, and she always got involved in attempts to create

female grassroots organizations.] (my translation)

The youngest of fourteen children, Haslam Macy was born into a family of English coffee plantation owners who lost most of their money during the years of the revolution led by

Augusto César Sandino (1927-1933). Tijerino recalls that her mother did not hand down her family’s conservative and patriarchal values:

Le gustaba leer y entendía la lucha de Sandino. En varias oportunidades yo recuerdo que me

explicó que había que entender las razones que pudo haber tenido el general Sandino para ser

inflexible con los extranjeros. (12)

[She liked to read and she understood Sandino’s struggle. I remember that on several

occasions, she explained to me that I must understand the reasons that General Sandino may

have had for being inflexible with foreigners.] (my translation)

Reconstructing her mother’s informal history lessons, Tijerino summarizes their key points.

They are: 1. a conflict erupted between the Sandinistas and the Nicaraguan government; 2.

Sandino was an honorable man; 3. the U.S. intervened on behalf of the state; and 4. competing versions of past events exist. Weaving her family’s past into the fabric of her nation’s history,

Tijerino’s mother frequently highlights themes such as truth, social justice and the systemic abuse of the indigenous population by the wealthy, European families, such as her own.

In addition to history, Haslam Macy also schools her daughter in religion and literature.

First, explaining that she does not attend mass because she is not a practicing Catholic, she indirectly gives her daughter permission to reject the tenets of her family’s religion, which,

several years later and to her husband’s dismay, will get their daughter thrown out of catholic school. Secondly, she gives her daughter some books. Tijerino recalls:

Fue entonces cuando me entregó una serie de libros, entre ellos ese libro de Gorki que había

guardado de su propia juventud. De cuando había conocido a los sudamericanos que

mencioné. Era La madre, de Gorki. Ella lo tenía guardado para que yo lo leyera cuando

tuviera quince años. Pero me permitió leerlo antes. Ese libro influyó grandemente en mí. (14)

[That was when she gave me a series of books. Among them was Gorki’s book, which she

had saved since her youth, from when she had known the South Americans that I already

mentioned. It was Gorki’s Mother. She had saved it for me so that I would read it when I

turned fifteen. But she let me read it earlier. That book profoundly influenced me.]20 (my

translation)

The South Americans to whom Doris refers are young Chilean activists. Her mother met them when they were travelling in Nicaragua. It is significant that both the main character in Gorki’s novel and Tijerino’s mother literally put important, provocative and – in some cases – illegal books in the hands of people who might not have had access to them otherwise. As I demonstrate in the paragraphs that follow, the covert handing down of books is a recurring theme in both

Tijerino’s life and Gorki’s novel.

Three crucial aspects of the liberal home school education that Tijerino describes must be noted. First, it is her mother – and not her father – who both acquires knowledge through reading and transmits it orally to her young daughter. Also, Haslam Macy opens her daughter’s eyes to the role that the U.S. government played in their country’s struggle for liberation. She states: “Mi

20 Haslam Macy gave Gorki’s novel to her daughter on her thirteenth birthday because, as Tijerino herself explains, “she detected in me a certain attitude, a lot of political passion and a visceral anti-somocismo.” (Baltodano 238)

madre siempre, constantemente, me hacía ver la relación que existía entre el imperialismo norteamericano y la dictadura de los Somoza, y la situación del pueblo nicaragüense” (14) [My mother constantly made me see the relationship that existed between North American imperialism, the Somoza dictatorship and the situation of the Nicaraguan people] (my translation). Finally, Haslam Macy challenges her husband’s authority over her, thereby setting the example in the private sphere of the home of an independent woman who thinks and acts of her own volition. Tijerino narrates: “Sé que mi mamá tuvo alguna participación política aun en contra de la voluntad de mi papá. Allá por el año 1947, en unas protestas masivas que hubo en el país, por un fraude electoral…ella me contaba” (14) [I know that my mother participated in politics, even against my father’s wishes. One time was in 1947, when there were massive protests due to electoral fraud. That’s what she told me] (my translation). As we shall see, Doris

Tijerino questions her father’s authority and follows her mother’s lead by engaging in revolutionary movement. She also pursues the chance to study in the Soviet Union, the homeland of both Maxim Gorky and the fictionalized rebels he immortalizes in his novel. In the paragraphs that follow, I analyze several key themes in Gorki’s book in order to reveal the similarities between the mother in the novel and Haslam Macy.

At the outset of Mother, the narrator reveals that domestic abuse runs rampant in the city where most of the events in the novel take place. When they returned from the factory or the bars to their homes, the men “quarreled with their wives, and often beat them, unsparingly with their fists” (4). The character in the novel that embodies male violence is Michael Vlasov, the town drunkard and illiterate bully. Pelagueya, his wife, bears the brunt of his blows. Toward the end of the novel’s first chapter, Vlasov, the “beast and savage power” (6), suddenly falls ill and dies, which has a liberating effect on both Pelagueya and Pavel, their son and only child. First, I

demonstrate that the Pavel’s transformation into the leader of the local movement is the catalyst for his mother’s engagement of both the revolutionary ideals of the time and place that Gorki represents in his novel and contemporary feminist principles. Then, I shed light on the possible ways in which Gorki’s characterization of Pelagueya may have influenced Tijerino’s representation of her own mother.

After his father dies, Pavel begins acquiring and reading books, stops getting drunk and into barroom brawls, and embarks on a quest for knowledge. When his mother comments on his odd behavior, he explains what he is doing and why:

I am reading forbidden books. They are forbidden to be read because they tell the truth about

our – about the workingmen’s life. They are printed in secret, and if I am found with them I

will be put in prison – I will be put in prison because I want to know the truth. (15, my italics)

If, on one hand, Pavel articulates his purpose in reading, on the other, he plainly acknowledges to his mother that the books do not provide insight into understanding women’s lives. From the outset of the novel, the driving force behind the movement is the workingman’s desire for a more dignified way of life. Women – if not for their contributions to the men’s movement – are delegated to places of secondary importance. Pelagueya, however, quickly becomes the exception to this rule. Although she is not the only female character in the novel that plays a role in the labor movement that Gorki represents in his novel, she is the only one that destabilizes the movement’s patriarchal logics.

Holding clandestine meetings in his mother’s house, Pavel puts her in direct contact with young revolutionaries who gather to read and talk about illegal books, discuss the tenets of their movement, and prepare to distribute leaflets to the factory workers. The mother’s consciousness is born out of a conversation she has with a young man. The narrator tells us:

It awakened in her misty, dim thoughts, long dormant; gently roused an almost extinct feeling

of rebellion, perplexed dissatisfaction – thoughts and feelings of a remote youth. (16)

On the one hand, the young revolutionary connects the mother to her feelings and raises her awareness; on the other, he schools her in the men’s linguistic appropriation of the movement.

Moreover, Pavel’s best friend reinforces patriarchal logics when he tells Pelagueya that the unbreakable bond among men is in fact the real mother of their movement. He states:

The world is ours! The world is for the workers! For us, there is no nation, no race. For us

there are only comrades and foes. All the workingmen are our comrades; all the rich, all the

authorities are our foes. When you see how numerous we workingmen are, how tremendous

the power of the spirit in us, then your heart is seized with such joy, such happiness, such a

great holiday sings in your bosom! We are all children of one mother – the great, invincible

brotherhood of the workers of all the countries all over earth. This idea grows, it warms us

like the sun; it is a second sun in the heaven of justice, and this heaven resides in the

workingmen’s heart. Whoever he be, whatever his name, a socialist is our brother in spirit

now. (38, my italics)

As his words demonstrate, when he excitedly proclaims that the world is for everybody, what he really means is that the world is for men only. His appropriation of motherhood as a worldwide brotherhood of socialists conveniently excludes the women who brought these men into the world, as well as ignores the specific needs of women and their right to freedom and justice.

Pelagueya proves to be the only character that refutes patriarchy by incorporating inclusive vocabulary into her conversations and speeches.

The mother takes to activism like a duck to water. Immediately accepting the first job the young rebels offer to her, she experiences happiness for the first time in her life. She states:

Pressing her hands to her bosom, she gave hurried reassurance that she would carry out her

mission well and escape detection. Finally, she exclaimed in triumph: “They’ll find out –

Pavel Vlasov is away, but his arm reaches out even from jail. They’ll find out!” […] The

mother smiled. It was evident to her that if the leaflets should continue to appear in the

factory, the authorities would be forced to recognize that it was not her son who distributed

them. And feeling assured of success, she began to quiver all over with joy (79, my italics).

The italicized words in this narrative passage point to her expanding awareness of the unique ways she can be of service to the movement. Furthermore, Pelagueya is excited about her plan and confident in her ability to reach her objective of creating a smoke screen for Pavel. She does not, however, think to herself that the authorities will find out her son is innocent but rather that

Pavel Vlasov – the young revolutionary who carries her married name – is innocent. Her thoughts imply her awareness that Pavel – her only biological offspring – is an extension of her just as her actions enable his arm to reach out from his jail cell. I contend that the symbiotic relationship between mother and son, combined with Pelagueya’s engagement in clandestine activity and her awareness of her utility to the cause, indicate a subtle shift in their relationship.

The narrator’s representation of the mutual need that develops between the two revolutionaries could be viewed as a step – albeit a small one – toward equality between women and men.

In order to execute her plan, Pelagueya reaches out to a fellow female for help and thus brings to light the affective solidarity that exists among some females in the village. Marya,

Pelagueya’s unwitting accomplice, states: “It’s hard to be a woman! It’s a wretched business! To live alone is hard, to live with anyone, still harder” (81). Explaining to her friend why she is so quick to honor her request for work, Marya reveals the shared experiences and the emotional bonds that have united these women for many years. She states: “You remember how you used

to hide me from my husband? Well, now I am going to hide you from want” (81). Unaware of her friend’s intention to secretly distribute forbidden literature, Marya hires Pelagueya to help her prepare and sell soup to the workers in the factory plaza. Despite the danger she knows she is in, the mother skillfully executes her plan by slipping books into the hands of the men who huddle around her to buy what she is selling. Emboldened by her courage and the imminent success of her mission, Pelagueya imagines a showdown between her and the male police commissioner, who watches her disapprovingly from a distance. The narrator states:

[A]nd she said to him in her mind, with a feeling of vindictive pleasure:

“Take this, sir!” And when she handed over the last package, she added with an air of

satisfaction: “And here is some more, take it!” (91)

Pelagueya mentally provokes the commissioner by challenging him to take what she is dishing out. Despite the fact that she knows she could be jailed, interrogated and beaten for her actions, she relishes the moment of vindication that her actions and thoughts provide her. Perhaps even more useful to my feminist reading of these events is the feeling of “delightful awareness” (95) that envelops Pelagueya when she is finished delivering illegal books to the factory workers.

When Nikolay Ivanovich, the young man Pavel put in charge of taking care of his mother while he is in prison, asks Pelagueya to transport reading materials to peasants who are organizing in the countryside, she handles the job impressively. Her young comrades call on her services regularly and she becomes the woman for every job involving the smuggling of books.

The narrator states:

The distribution of literature, in fact, became the mother’s occupation. Several times a month,

dressed as a nun or as a peddler of laces of small linen articles, as a rich merchant’s wife or a

religious pilgrim, she rode or walked about with a sack on her back, or a valise in her hand.

Everywhere, in the train, in the steamers, in hotels and inns, she behaved simply and

unobtrusively. She was the first to enter into conversations with strangers, fearlessly drawing

attention to herself by her kind, sociable talk and the confident manner of an experienced

person who has seen and heard much. (245)

She has evolved into a clandestine activist. She has freedom of movement, access to wardrobe changes, and money for travel and lodging expenses. She secretly teaches herself to read, gives speeches in public, and travels alone to deliver the truth to the people by bringing them books.

I conclude my feminist analysis of the main character in Gorky’s text by foregrounding that she is the only female character in the novel that linguistically appropriates the workingmen’s revolution as a movement that will liberate all people. As a final point to

Pelagueya’s evolving consciousness and role as a revered revolutionary, I emphasize that she is the only activist in the novel that frames the movement in terms of gender equality. Throughout the final section of the book, the mother freely and confidently converses with the people she meets when she travels to carry out her missions. She deconstructs the masculine framing of the movement by emphasizing that its leaders – herself included – will not cease until “the people are welded into one soul, until the people will say in one voice: I am the ruler, and I myself will make the laws equal for all” (308, my italics). Expressing the idea that the right to self- determination, equality and justice are human rights, she claims her agency and encourages her comrades to follow in her footsteps. In contrast, even toward the end of the story that Gorky tells in his novel, Pavel continues to frame the movement in patriarchal language. He states:

We will conquer – we workingmen! The consciousness of the great role unites all the

workingmen into one soul. Our energy is a living power, founded on the ever-growing

consciousness of the solidarity of all workingmen” (365-366, my italics).

Pavel may be the undisputed leader of the revolution, but Gorky gives his mother the last word.

Delivering a fiery speech in public is in fact her final act. Explaining the ways in which the inequitable distribution of wealth and resources places a disproportionate burden on the poor, she cries out to the crowd: “Arise you working people! You are the masters of your life!” (401) After a policeman strikes her in the face and knocks her down, several others drag her away. Under the threat of prison, torture, exile or death, it is noteworthy that the Pelagueya uses her final words not to invoke the brotherhood of the workingmen but rather to unite men and women under one title: we, the working people. Surely this did not slip by either Haslam Macy or her daughter.

Research has shown that Tijerino consistently portrays her mother not only as a courageous and committed activist but also as the force that propelled her choose to engage in resistance movement. Haslam Macy seemed to understand that her financial and educational privileges, combined with her freedom of movement, could be useful to the revolution, and also that her daughter had what it took to follow in her footsteps. Is it possible that Gorki’s representation of Pelagueya Nilvona influenced not only Haslam Macy’s mothering but also

Tijerino’s portrayal of her mother in There are Millions of Us? I believe so. In spite of the obvious differences between them – Haslam Macy was an educated member of the middle class and Nilvona was not – both females are represented as women who demonstrate a natural inclination for activism. While Nilvona influences the unfolding of events in Gorki’s novel,

Haslam Macy shapes the course of her daughter’s life. Said in a different way, without

Pelagueya Nilvona, there is no Mother. And, without Doris Haslam Macy, there may never have been a Comandante Tijerino.

Furthermore, while Gorki’s book and Tijerino’s testimony illuminate maternal leadership, they simultaneously underscore paternal absence. In Mother and There Are Millions

of Us, women – and not men – are the protagonists. I suggest that Tijerino’s choice to underscore

Gorki’s novel and the indelible impression it made on her mother and on her may be viewed as attempt to preserve a revolutionary genealogy in which mothers – and not fathers – are the heroes. In this regard, intertextuality is the mechanism by which the mediated testimony legitimizes Nilvona and Haslam Macy as founding mothers of revolutionary movement in literature and history.

The Voices of the Subaltern

In the introduction to There are Millions of Us, the mediator centers the economic situation of poor rural and urban women in Nicaragua in the 1970s. In the initial paragraph of the introduction, she locates the oppression of underserved women in a transnational context by foregrounding the relationship between the Somoza regime and the US government. The mediator exposes unjust global structures and institutions, as well as lays bare the negative impact that US intervention and economic aid packages have had and continue to have on destitute populations in Nicaragua. She states:

La mujer nicaragüense como la mujer de nuestra América – y la mujer do todos los países

dependientes – doblemente explotada por el sistema de saqueo capitalistas-imperialista y por

la opresión específica a la que es sometida como mujer, no se queda ya con las opciones que

el tío Sam y el dictador Somoza les ofrecen. (7)

[Nicaraguan women, like the women of our America – and the women in all dependent

countries – doubly exploited by capitalist-imperialism and by the specific oppression to which

she is subject, is no longer willing to accept the options that Uncle Sam and Somoza offer

them.] (my translation)

From the outset of the book, it is clear that Randall views the struggle of Nicaraguan females as an integral part of the struggle that is taking place throughout Central America, and also that she sees herself as belonging to this region of the world. I suggest that she invokes the words of José

Martí’s famous essay “Nuestra América” [“Our America”] (my translation) for the purpose of aligning herself with the people of Latin American countries whose governments depend economically, politically and/or militarily on the United States. She also repeatedly call out the gringos for the role they have played and continue to play in enforcing economic policies that disadvantage Central America and the underserved populations who live there.

Randall goes on to expose the injustices of U.S. economic interests and strategies in

Nicaragua, and also links them to the exploitation of laborers and women. She states:

“Todo este aparato de dominación está montado sobre las espaldas de los trabajadores exhaustivamente explotados de la ciudad y del campo, y se revierte con particular intensidad en las mujeres trabajadoras, doblemente explotadas” (8) [The exploited workers in the city and the countryside carry the weight of domination, which has a particularly intense impact on female laborers, who are doubly exploited] (my translation). Highlighting the negative impact that capitalist imperialism has on the lives of Nicaraguans in general and of Nicaraguan women in particular, Randall points her finger at the United States. She does not, however, speak in the first person. Just as she uses the plural, possessive pronoun “nuestra América” at the outset of her introduction, she later employs the first person plural form of a series of verbs and indirect object pronouns. For example: “Conocimos a Doris Tijerino y hablamos con ella…nos contó su historia…hemos querido mostrar…nuestro propósito ha sido…” (8) [We met Doris Tijerino and we talked with her…she told us her story…we have wanted to demonstrate…our objective has been…] (my translation). The mediator never tells the reader exactly who “we” are. She does not

talk about or mention herself. Consequently, readers who are unfamiliar with Randall’s earlier works do not get a sense of who she is, or how she came to know and work with Doris Tijerino.

Presenting There are Millions of Us as a book that is at once about a woman from

Nicaragua and all women from Central America, the mediator reveals the tensions that operate in the text. As mentioned previously, Tijerino hails from a privileged socio-economic background.

She has access to money and a formal education, and also travels. She is not an underserved female who struggles to feed her children and herself. And, yet, her narrative voice becomes the mechanism by which the voices of poorer and more oppressed women are heard and recorded.

This tension is further complicated by Randall’s choice not to share more details about her relationship with Tijerino, and also by the fact that Tijerino does not contribute to the introduction to the testimony.

Doris Tijerino: Girlhood

In the initial section of the testimony, 1943-1955, Tijerino speaks at length about her mother, as well as paints a fairly clear picture of her father. Providing details about her family’s economic position in Matagalpa, the speaker acknowledges the financial and social advantages that come with belonging to a family of landowners. Tijerino recalls not only the racism and paternalism that operated on her family’s plantation, but also her abhorrence of it, thereby signaling the birth of her awareness of the inequalities that govern relationships in her family’s business. She recalls her incipient understanding of “la relación amo-esclavo” (11) [the master/slave relationship] (my translation) by pointing out the differences between herself and her brothers and sisters and the indigenous children with whom they played. Furthermore,

Tijerino elaborates her critique of the discrimination that Nicaraguans face in their country of origin by describing the high society social clubs to which the wealthy, mostly European

landowners belonged, and the two cemeteries that were constructed in Matagalpa, one for foreigners and the other for Nicaraguan citizens. This moment in her narrative deserves to be underscored because she clearly points out how marriage can be the terms by which the city decides whom is buried where. She states:

Tienen un cementerio para extranjeras, que está colocado al frente del cementerio para

nacionales. Las mujeres de estas familias, al casarse con nacionales pierden el derecho a ser

enterradas en ‘su’ cementerio; esto es casi una deshonra. Sin embargo, la mujer nicaragüense

que se casa con uno de estos ‘extranjeros’ adquiere el derecho a ser enterrada allí. (11)

[They have a cemetery for foreigners, which is located at the front of the cemetery for

nationals. When they marry nationals, the women from foreign families lose the right to be

buried in their own cemetery. This is dishonorable. However, Nicaraguan women who marry

a foreigner acquire the right to be buried there.] (my translation)

In this first section of the testimony, the reader discovers the precarious position that women occupy in family and society. The institution of marriage in general and the nationality of the men in particular serve to demote or promote a woman from one cemetery to another.

Tijerino’s mother, a voracious reader and clandestine supporter of the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua, encouraged her daughter to contemplate the reality of the workers and slaves on her family’s farm, as well as to critique Nicaragua’s emerging capitalist economy.

Tijerino’s father, on the other hand, wanted his daughters to either get married or join the convent. He also asserted his right to control their bodies by forbidding them to have boyfriends, as well as discouraged them from developing their ideas and independence. The speaker states:

“Para la mentalidad de él, la mujer es algo que se puede dominar, algo de lo que él podía hacer lo que quisiera” (19) [For him, a woman is something that a man can dominate and do whatever he

wants with] (my translation). Throughout her testimony, Tijerino compares and contrasts her parents, their religious beliefs and their political ideologies, and it is clear to the reader that she views herself as her mother’s daughter. The apple, as we shall see, will not fall from the tree.

Doris Tijerino: Adolescence

The closeness and mutual respect that develops between Tijerino and her mother is especially apparent in the second part of the testimony, 1956-1965, when the speaker recalls her initiation into subversive movement. When the speaker was 10 years old, her mother, already in contact with guerilla fighters in the area, asked her to illegally transport a box that contained combat boots, food and weapons. The speaker states:

“Mi mama me llamó y me explicó que allí había un rifle, ¿no?, que era necesario llevarlo para otra parte, que si ella lo llevaba era muy probable que se o encontraran. Entonces me dijo que me atrevía a llevarlo…le dije que sí” (24) [My mother called for me and told me that she had a rifle and that it was necessary to transport it somewhere. She told me that if she took it, the authorities would probably find it. Then she asked me if I was willing to transport it. I said yes] (my translation). In Tijerino’s retelling of this event, her mother is the main character. She initiates the interaction with her daughter, explains to her why it would be dangerous for an adult to transport the aid package, and asks Tijerino to help her carry out the mission. In a later passage, the speaker reveals that her mother also facilitated her entry into the Patriotic Youth of

Nicaragua (JPN), where Tijerino claims she took her first steps as an activist. The speaker foregrounds both the solidarity that develops between mother and daughter and their imminent role reversal. She states:

Cuando empiezo a militar en JPN mi participación tiene otro sentido. Hasta antes de 1960 era

una colaboradora de mi mama, pero después los papeles cambian. Para que yo pudiera asistir

a las reuniones ella inventaba visitas que tenía que hacer, y así podíamos salir de noche: yo

me iba a la reunión y ella me esperaba en una esquina o en cualquier lugar. (26)

[My participation in the movement took on a new meaning when I joined the JPN. Up until

1960, I was my mother’s accomplice, but afterwards our roles changed. She fabricated

errands that she needed me to help her run in the evenings. This way, she could wait for me

on a street corner while I attended JPN meetings.] (my translation)

Furthermore, Tijerino’s recalls to her mediator the myriad ways in which her mother transcended the gender norms of the time. These include divorcing her first husband, reading revolutionary texts at a young age and secretly handing them down to her daughter, encouraging all of her children to consider the negative implications of a capitalist, export economy, confessing to her daughter that she did not identify as a Catholic, carrying out subversive activities, and demanding that her daughter pursue an education.

Finally, when Tijerino discusses her desire to study in the Soviet Union, she recalls not just the solidarity between her and her mother, but also the discord between her and her father.

She states:

No tenía más que dieciocho años y no podía salir del país sin autorización de mis padres. Mi

mama me dio la autorización, pero en las oficinas de migración no aceptan el documento y

me exigen que tengo que llevar un documento firmado por mi papa. Por supuesto que él se

negó y empezó la batalla. Se me ocurrió amenazar a mi papa con integrarme a un grupo

guerrillero si no me daba el permiso. (30-31)

[I was barely 18 years old and I could not leave the country without my father’s authorization

to do so. My mother gave me permission, but the migration offices would not accept her

signature and demanded that I return with a paper signed by my father. When I asked my

father to sign the document, the battle began. In the end, I told him that if he did not give me

permission to go to the Soviet Union, I would join the guerrillas.] (my translation)

Tijerino challenges her father’s authority in the home by standing up to him and getting what she wants: an education at the Universidad Patricio Lumumba in Moscow. At the age of 18, she makes a choice that changes her and the trajectory of her life. Tijerino’s friendships with young revolutionaries from other countries in Latin America, combined with studies of Marxist theory, solidify her understanding that only armed resistance will liberate her country.

Doris Tijerino: Motherhood and Militancy

In 1965, while living and studying in Moscow, Tijerino marries a young poet from

Ecuador, and gives birth to a baby boy. It is curious that the speaker does not elaborate her husband or the impact that motherhood had on her, but rather casually states that she returned to her country soon after her son was born, and that she separated from her husband two years later.

She explains that she did not return to Nicaragua to be closer to her family, or to immerse herself in motherhood, but rather to join the ranks of the Sandinistas (31).

Tijerino delineates both her experiences in the Soviet Union and the impact they had one her:

Creo que esta etapa es muy valiosa, porque empecé a tener una militancia, una participación

organizada y directa, y porque tuve la oportunidad de vincularme orgánicamente a la clase

proletaria del país. Por haber podido conocer a revolucionarios de otros pueblos que

influyeron en mi decisión posterior. Por tener, entonces, un mayor acercamiento con la

literatura marxista, que me hizo comprender el verdadero papel del partido de la clase obrera

y que me hizo ver bien claro en cuanto a mi participación en la lucha. (31)

[I believe that this was an invaluable phase in my life because I had the opportunity to refine

myself and better understand my membership in the Party, as well connect organically with

the working class in the Soviet Union. I met revolutionaries from other countries who later

influenced my decision to return to Nicaragua. I studied Marxist literature, which made me

understand the true role of the workers’ party, as well as clarified for me what my

participation in the fight would be.] (my translation)

We can deduct from her words the fact that new knowledge and friendships, rather than love, marriage or motherhood, both left an indelible impression on her and confirmed her call to arms.

In the ten paragraphs of this section of her testimony, Tijerino repeats the words revolucionarios and marxista three times each, as well as uses the words militancia, militar, and militante one time each. In two paragraphs that consist of a total of 19 lines, she reconstructs the memory of

Nora Paíz, a female combatant from Guatemala, who was killed in Nicaragua in 1967, and after whom she names her first weapon. She states: “En homenaje a ella, ‘bauticé’ a un revolver 38 que la Organización me entregó en 1969 con el nombre de ‘Norita.’ Era pequeño y efectivo como ella” (31) [In homage to her, I baptized the 38 revolver that the organization had given to me in 1969 with the name ‘Norita.’ The weapon was small and effective, like her] (my translation). Naming her first weapon after a female fighter, describing Paíz’s personal attributes and enviable abilities as an armed activist, and offering sparse comments about her husband,

Tijerino represents her admiration for women who engage in combat, as well as and the camaraderie between them. Her nameless husband’s attributes seem to pale in comparison to those of women like Paíz:

En la Unión Soviética me casé en 1964. Me case con un compañero ecuatoriano, que

estudiaba agronomía, pero que se dedicaba más a las letras, es poeta. En el año 1965 nace mi

primer hijo, y de inmediato regreso a mi país. Posteriormente, en 1967, me separo de este

compañero. (31)

[I got married in the Soviet Union in 1964. I married an Ecuadorian classmate, who studied

agronomy but devoted himself to literature and poetry. In 1965, my first child was born, and I

immediately returned to my country. Later, in 1967, I separated from this classmate.] (my

translation)

On the one hand, Tijerino discloses her love for Paíz; on the other, she vaguely refers to the man she married as a compañero and a man of the letters, whose penchant for poetry did not seem to make much of an impression on her.

Faithful to her narrative strategies of legitimizing female fighters, preserving their memory, and constructing a revolutionary female lineage, at the outset of the third section of her testimony, 1965-1975, Tijerino tells her mediator about Conchita Alday:

Ese es el nombre que en el año 1966 la dirección nacional del Frente Sandinista decide que

debo llevar, y en esa reunión es que se me da este nombre. Se me hizo ver que el nombre de

Conhita Alday debía ser llevado con dignidad, que tenía que hacerle honor, tenía que

merecerme el honor de llevar el nombre de esta compañera. (31)

[During a meeting with the Sandinista leaders in December of 1966, I was given Conchita

Alday’s name. The made me understand that I should carry her name with dignity, that I

should honor her and prove that I deserved the honor of carrying this comrade’s name.] (my

translation)

The speaker pays tribute to Alday’s unwavering commitment to both the Sandinista movement and her partner, General Francisco Sequeira, who was killed in a raid in 1927 minutes before

Alday, who was with him at the time, was brutally murdered. Tijerino states: “Conchita es esa

época estaba en un avanzado estado de embarazo, y los soldados gringos con sus bayonetas le abrieron el vientre para sacarle el feto, estando ella viva, y posteriormente la descuartizaron totalmente” (34) [Conchita was in the advanced stages of pregnancy when the gringo soldiers used their bayonets to cut open her womb, rip out the fetus and completely disembody her] (my translation). Thus, in addition to recounting both the pride with which she humbly accepted the name of a revered, fallen, female fighter and her determination to live up to Alday’s memory,

Tijerino uses this moment of her narration to take a jab at the North American marines, whom she characterizes as ruthless thugs. Finally, it is worth noting that after she recounts her experience receiving her war name, an event that occurred almost ten years before Randall records her testimony, Tijerino discloses that “the oldest members of the Organization still call mel Conchita” (34). I contend that by linking the past to the present, and also by well underscoring that the memory of Alday lives on through her, Tijerino constructs a female lineage and secures her place in it.

Prison, Interrogation and Torture

What – if anything – can be said of Tijerino’s omission of her feelings regarding motherhood? Exploring four prison narratives – Las cárceles clandestinas de El Salvador [El

Salvador’s Clandestine Prisons] by Ana Guadalupe Martínez; Nunca estuve sola [I Was Never

Alone] by Nidia Díaz; La Escuelita [The Little School] by Alicia Partnoy and Mi habitación, mi celda [My Room, My Cell] by Liliana Celiberti – Mary Jane Treacy contends that the authors follow a “standardized prison narrative that each writer adjusts to suit her own purposes” (133).

Comprised of four main stages – arrest, abduction, interrogation and torture, – and emphasizing solidarity as a means of survival in jail, these prison accounts lack an outpouring of emotion, which, for Treacy, renders them problematic. If I were to use her scholarship to examine

Tijerino’s testimony, I could argue that Tijerino underplays motherhood because it is too painful for her to recall the tension between becoming both a mother and a fully-fledged armed combatant. However, I disagree with Treacy’s claim for several reasons. First, it assumes that repression of pain is the primary motor that informs what female fighters and prisoners who are also mothers say and don’t say in their narratives. Second, it essentializes the experience of motherhood among revolutionary women who are incarcerated as emotionally traumatic. Finally, it oversimplifies the objectives of the female testimonial project.

In the third section of her testimony, Tijerino represents in detail her experiences as a political prisoner. Detained for the first time on January 23, 1967, she spends 13 days in jail.

Captured for a second time almost 10 months later, Tijerino is held in prison for 6 months. She is detained again in 1969 and released two years later, in early May of 1971. Verbal threats and intimidation, physical abuse, and sexual assault are key themes in this section of her testimony, which bring to light what Treacy calls the “double bind” into which patriarchal logics force female political activists and prisoners (“Double” 130). Citing the work of Chilean sociologist

Ximena Bunster-Burotto (1985) and therapist Inger Agger (1994), both of whom have published extensively on the psychological toll that prison abuse has on female political prisoners, Treacy explains that the Latin American ideological framework “divides all women in to either madonna or whore” (135). For both Bunster-Burotto and Agger, she continues, political women are transgressive because they are public women. Abandoning the private sphere of the home to fight for social justice in the jungle and in urban centers, female activists “oppose the regime as well as defy tolerable female behavior” (136).

Amanda L. Matousek (2008) explores how dictatorial regimes in Spain and Argentina shaped both a desirable female identity – woman as dutiful wife, devoted mother, and loyal

servant of the State – and its problematic opposite – woman as promiscuous other, disobedient citizen, and dangerous subversive. Referring to the work of Sandra Nash (1999), Matousek points out that in the posters, magazines, and newspapers that the Spanish fascists used to spread their propaganda, they portrayed the “otra mujer” [the other woman] as a masculine and aggressive (67). Analyzing Tijerino’s account of the ways in which male prison guards both spoke and acted toward her and her mother while they were incarcerated, it is possible to identify traditional, patriarchal discourse and how this discourse was employed to persecute women who went against the grain in Nicaragua in the 1970s.

Tijerino depicts how the male guards contrasted female prisoners by recalling the words they used to torment her mother: “Miren la diferencia: esta señora cristiana, que ha educado bien a sus hijos y le traen comida, se preocupan por ella. Esta otra vieja se ve que lo que parió fue un montón de víboras. Ella es madre de comunistas” 37) [Look at the difference: this Christian woman taught her children well, which is why they bring her food and worry about her. This old lady looks like she gave birth to a bunch of snakes. She is the mother of communists] (my translation). Telling her mediator the details that her mother shared with her about her incarceration, Tijerino inserts into her narration a clear example of how the authorities use a conservative patriarchal discourse into order to juxtapose the two female prisoners. On one hand, the guards praise the devout Catholic who has reared her children well; on the other, they disparage Tijerino’s mother and call her out for bearing enemies of the state. Using motherhood as a weapon against her, the guards suggest that the fruits of her labor are rotten because they are communists. They threaten her, intimidate her, and accuse her of being in involved in the movement against the State because they know Doris Tijerino is her daughter.

Threatening to force into her vagina and rectum an empty tear gas capsule that resembles a

male penis, hitting and interrogating her, depriving her of food and sleep, fondling her breasts, and masturbating in front of her, the male guards turn the torture room into a private setting, where they take turns employing sadistic punishments in order to get Tijerino to talk. They also accuse her of being a man. A real woman, they seem to claim, would not be able to remain silent while being interrogated and tortured:

“Yo le voy a hacer un examen porque tal vez es hombre y ustedes no se han dado cuenta. Le voy a buscar los huevos, los tiene que tener escondidos” (46) [I am going to exam her, because maybe you haven’t realized she is a man. I’m going to look for her balls. She must be hiding them] (my translation). Perhaps puzzled by Tijerino’s composure under pressure, and emasculated by her resistance to their physical and psychological blows, the authorities resort to joking that she could also be a he, and that finding his balls would assist them in breaking them, and her, once and for all. One of the guards sexually assaults her by shoving two fingers into her vagina, which, Tijerino will later discover, produces a hemorrhage. She does not give them any information.

In this chapter I built a bridge between the mediated testimony There Are Millions of Us:

The Life of Doris María, a Nicaraguan Fighter and de-colonial feminism. I underscored how the speaker and the mediator employ three de-colonial feminist practices when they represent the social, economic and political landscape in Nicaragua in the 1970s. These practices include interrogating patterns of global gender disparities, analyzing their root causes, and calling for accountability from responsible agents. There were two main reasons why I put Doris Tijerino in dialogue with several de-colonial feminist scholars. First, I wanted to shed light on Tijerino’s description of both the gendered disparities that existed in Nicaragua and the structural injustices that caused them. Second, I wanted to draw comparisons between her analysis of the

feminization of the informal economy in Nicaragua in the 1970s and Jaggar’s, Narayan’s,

Gosselin’s, and Kang’s contributions to contemporary conversations about capitalist imperialism and gender and global justice.

CHAPTER 3

THE TRACES OF QUEERNESS IN

ME LLAMO RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ Y ASÍ ME NACIÓ LA CONCIENCIA [I,

RIGOBERTA MENCHU, AN INDIAN WOMAN FROM GUATEMALA]21

Introduction

In this chapter, I view Rigobertá Menchú’s description of both the cultural laws that govern Mayan relationships and her resistance to these laws through a queer lens. I contend that she queers her role as speaker by calling attention to how she portrays what Michael Warner calls a “thorough resistance to regimes of the normal” (Fear xxvi). Four main points bolster my argument. First, I build on queer critiques of neoliberal heteronormativity (Cobb 2007; Duggan

2002; Halberstam 2011) to reveal how Menchú reiterates neoliberal heteronormative logics in her oral history. Second, I engage José Esteban Muñoz’s (1999) notion of dis-identification in order to show that Menchú unsettles dominant cultural codes by depicting herself as a non- normative and undomesticated subject. Third, I demonstrate that Menchú may be viewed as a queer failure and a stuck subject, in the sense that Takemoto (2016) and León (2017) use these terms. I also argue that Menchú’s oral history may be viewed as what Muñoz (2009) refers to as

“a backward glance that enacts a future vision” (Cruising 4). I contend that she describes her people’s present suffering and the historical events that led to it, as well as represents a better future for them. I demonstrate that in her testimony, Menchú – to use Muñoz’s words – enacts a future vision – by using speech to bring into being a kinder and more just reality for her people.

21 Six key words from the original Spanish title – y así me nació la conciencia [and that’s when my consciousness was born] – disappear from the English translation entirely, and five different words – An Indian Woman in Guatemala – take their place. It is perplexing that the translator silences the words Menchú used when she described the time and place of the genesis of her awareness to her mediator. That her gender, race, and country of origin are interpolated in the English title is equally curious.

Rigoberta Menchú was born in Chimel, a rural village in the northwest province of El

Quiché, Guatemala, in 1954. She was the sixth of twelve children born to dispossessed indigenous parents. She followed in the footsteps of her mother and father, who, prior to their murders by the Armed Forces, were leaders in their Quiché community, and active members in the Comité de Unidad Campesina [Peasant Unitary Committee]. When Menchú was twenty years old, she joined the CUC, helped organize a massive strike for peasant laborers on coffee and sugar plantations, supported popular resistance movements in Guatemala City, and joined the radical 31st of January Popular Front. Forced into hiding and later into exile in México,

Menchú narrated her people’s story to Venezuelan author and anthropologist Elizabeth Burgos-

Debray. Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia was first published in Spanish in 1982. It brought Menchú international acclaim as a human rights activist, which I will explore in more detail. It made her mediator famous too.22

Elizabeth Burgos was born into an upper class family in Venezuela in 1941. She came of age under the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship, participated in public protests against the regime, and joined the Community Party after Jiménez was overthrown in 1958. As a young woman, Burgos made a name for herself as a committed activist and valuable ally to the guerrillas in her native country. Soon after she met Regis Debray in Caracas 1963, authorities accused them of being involved with the guerrillas. The young lovers fled from Venezuela. After they were arrested in

Peru and expelled to Chile, they found their way to Bolivia, and, eventually, to Havana, where in

1966 they completed military training with the Cubans. Then, they relocated to Bolivia for the purpose of helping Che Guevara advance the popular revolution that he hoped would spread throughout Latin America. With the help of the North American CIA, Bolivian military forces

22 Cuba’s Casa de las Américas celebrated Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia by awarding Burgos their most prestigious literary prize in 1983.

trapped the guerrillas and killed Guevara, and also threw Debray into prison, which is where he and Burgos married. Burgos then moved on to Chile to help Salvador Allende’s fledgling socialist democracy gain its footing; however, leftist movement perished there in 1973, when

Augusto Pinochet led a military coup that ousted Allende. Three years later, Burgos gave birth to a baby girl. She returned to France to raise her daughter and pursue a doctoral degree in anthropology (Stoll Rigoberta 184-186).

David Stoll, author of the bombshell Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor

Guatemalans (1999), had to have known his book would bring him trouble. He knew whom he was going up against: Rigoberta Menchú, the famous female Mayan activist who had grown larger than life on the international human rights circuit in Europe and North America. Menchú, a survivor of extreme poverty, state violence and political persecution in her native Guatemala, was forced into exile in 1981. In January 1982, while in Paris to begin her first human rights tour, Menchú told Burgos her story. Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia was published in English and French in 1984, and eventually in eight other languages as well.

When Menchú won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992, Stoll was finishing his Ph.D. in the

Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. He must have known her voice and story would be forces to reckon with. So why did he do it? His reasons, as it turns out, were undramatic.

In 1987-1991 I did my dissertation research in Nebaj, a Mayan town that, not long before, had

given considerable support to the guerrilla movement fighting Guatemala’s military

dictatorship. Following the worst of the counterinsurgency, I was able to interview hundreds

of survivors. Based on what they told me, I decided to challenge the guerrillaphile

interpretation of the war adopted by the human rights movement. (Middlebury College

Website)

His research also posed a challenge to Menchú’s version of events, which rendered him vulnerable to attacks from liberal activists, intellectuals, and scholars both in the West and in

Latin America. Angered that a white, male anthropologist from the United States had called into question the accuracy of an indigenous woman’s account of her life, many of Stoll’s counterparts in the academy criticized him for carrying out what he describes as “Western epistemological colonialism” (“Moral” 10). Stoll contends that the results of his research inconveniently challenged their widely held belief that Menchú was truthful in her testimony. The basic premise of his book is that bent the truth “to meet the needs of a guerrilla organization she had joined,” and also that liberal activists and academics accepted her story at face value because the Central

American revolutionary movements had failed, and they needed a “new liberation bandwagon” to jump on (11). Thus, neither Menchú nor her testimony was the real problem for Stoll. Rather, he took aim at the people who took her took her oral history at face value and used it to rally support for the guerrillas, whom they claimed were close to ending thirty years of dictatorship in

Guatemala. His problem with liberals wasn’t just that the truth did not matter to them but that they did not want it to matter to anyone else either (14).

On the one hand, Stoll’s work enabled multiple intellectuals in North America (D’Souza

1998; Rohter 1998; Horowitz 1999) and in Latin America (Palmieri 1998; Martí 1999) to attack not just Menchú and her story but also the scholars and human rights activists who believed her; on the other hand, it inspired many to either defend Menchú (Montero 1998; Rodríguez 1998;

Vásquez Montalbán 1999) or take direct aim at Stoll (Carrera 1999; Liano 1999; Skinner-Kleé

1999). A few of the most vicious attacks came from Eduardo Galeano, who compared Stoll’s

book to a new kind of “chemical warfare” (“Let’s Shoot” 99). Menchú accused Stoll of engineering “a racist political agenda [to] discredit and revise history” (qtd. in Butterbaugh 8), and Mary Louise Pratt called his book an “act of hubris” (“I, Rigoberta Menchú” 45). Other scholars set up camp in a middle ground, offering insightful analysis of Stoll’s contribution to the conversation about subalterns and how – and for whom – they speak. Mario Roberto Morales, for example, claimed that Stoll’s findings humanized Menchú. Instead of elevating indigenous peoples to the “illusory stature of myth,” Morales calls on academics to embrace them as “human beings with all the contradictions that the rest of us face” (“Menchú” 364). I draw from Morales when I analyze the contradictions and tensions that operate in Menchú’s narrative.

When Stoll met with Burgos in Paris in 1995, she told him that it was Marie Tremblay, a physician from Canada, who asked her to write an article about Menchú. At that time, Menchú was an unknown figure and about to begin her first tour of Europe as a representative for the

January 1st movement. Neither Burgos nor Menchú thought they were working on a book together (Stoll Rigoberta 184-185). Stoll states that it was only after Menchú left Paris that

Burgos realized Menchú’s story extended far beyond the scope of the magazine article she originally planned to write, and makes it clear that Menchú began her tour of Europe unaware that “the story she was telling would acquire the weighty permanence of a book” (185).

By February 1993, disagreements over contracts and royalties, combined with accusations that the women levied against each other, had soured the relationship between

Menchú and her mediator. The initial relationship that Burgos described in 1983 in her prologue of her book is short lived.23 When Menchú is awarded the Nobel Piece Prize less than ten years

23 According to what Burgos tells us in her prologue, her relationship with Menchú blossomed when the women sat down to eat the tortillas and black beans that she had watched Menchú prepare. The mediator states: “‘Nosotros no confiamos más que en los que comen lo mismo que

later, her mediator is absent from the ceremonies. By the time David Stoll’s book comes out in

1999, Burgos and Menchú have fallen out with one another completely (187-188).

In 1990, The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

(UNESCO), a specialized agency of the United Nations UNESCO awarded Menchú their Prize for Education for Peace. In 1992, when she was 33 years old, she won the Nobel Peace Prize, making her the youngest recipient of the award. The United Nations declared 1993 the

International Year for Indigenous People. That same year, Menchú was named Goodwill

Ambassador to UNESCO. She would go on to win other awards, which include but are not limited to the Prince of Asturias Award for International Cooperation in 1998 and the Freedom

Award from the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis in Tennessee in 2002.

In 2006, Menchú helped create the Nobel Women’s Initiative and, in 2007, she ran for president of Guatemala. She was the first indigenous person to make a bid for her nation’s highest post, and lost terribly, receiving 3% of the vote and finishing 6th out of 14 candidates.

Some speculate that the vice presidential pick for her ticket, Luis Fernando Montenegro, hurt

Menchú’s campaign. Montenegro had two strikes against him: first, he was not indigenous; and, second, he was a successful businessman and former president of Guatemala’s Asociación

Nacional del Café [National Coffee Alliance] (ANACAFE). Despite her loss at the polls,

Menchú was adamant about her contribution to politics. “I’ve opened a door to Mayans and to women,” she stated shortly after her defeat (qtd. in Bevan Word Press). In 2011, Menchú formed

nosotros,’ me dijo un día en que trataba de explicarme las relaciones de las comunidades indias con los miembros de las guerrilla. Entonces comprendí que me había ganado su confianza. Esta relación establecida oralmente demuestra que existen espacios de entendimiento y de correspondencia entre los indios blancos o mestizos” (Me llamo 13-14) [‘We only trust people who eat what we eat,’ she told me one day as she tried to explain the relationship between the guerillas and the Indian communities. I suddenly realized that she had begun to trust me. A relationship based on food proves there are areas where Indians and non-Indians can meet and share things] (I, Rigoberta Menchú xvii).

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WINAQ, the first indigenous-led political party in Guatemala’s history, fused it with el Frente

Amplio de la Izquierda [The Broad Leftist Front] and ran for president for a second time, winning just 3.27% of the votes.

The Rigoberta Menchú Foundation, which she created with the $1.5 million dollars that accompanied her Nobel, advocates for justice for the indigenous people of Guatemala. In 2000, it accused officials in Guatemala’s former military regime of genocide, and filed formal charges against them in a Spanish court. In 2013, it was involved in the trial against former dictator

Efraín Ríos Montt24, whom was convicted of genocide. Two years later, the Rigoberta Menchú

Foundation filed charges against the government officials who ordered the massacre at the

Spanish Embassy in 1981. In 2016, it charged Lieutenant Colonel Esteelmer Reyes Girón, the former commander of the Sepur Zarco military base, and Heriberto Valdez, a former military commissioner, with sexually assaulting 14 young women and holding them as sexual and domestic slaves. The court convicted both men and sent them to prison (Estrada). Clearly,

Menchú was not messing around.

Guatemala: A Stomping Grounds for Spaniards and Gringos

Guatemala, like other countries in what today is called Central and South America, suffered “an invasion by a very alien culture” in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Chomsky

10). Spanish explorers, conquerors and colonizers either killed or enslaved the natives and appropriated their lands, which transformed Spain into the world’s largest empire. The colonial mentality of the time, represented in Guatemala by the ruthless figure of Captain Pedro de

Alvarado from Badajoz, Spain, branded the indigenous population as indolent, barbaric creatures

24 Efraín Ríos Montt came to power after a military coup. He ruled Guatemala as a dictator from 1982-1983. His military regime was infamous for its use of violent counter-insurgency tactics against Guatemala’s rural Mayan population, which included but were not limited to rape, massacre and torture.

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that could be civilized only through conversion and hard labor. The expansion of export agriculture in the region in the 1800s led to the creation of large-scale coffee plantations that depended almost exclusively on Maya labor. The wealthy creoles – descendants of the Spanish elite – claimed their independence from Spain in 1821 and reshaped colonialism into feudalism.

Natives provided them services and labor.

As the centers of world power began to shift in the nineteenth century, the increasing economic and military muscle of the United States fueled the beginning of its’ ascent toward the top of the international power structure. Williamson makes clear that the United States applied the tenets of the Monroe Doctrine, issued in 1823, not only to conquer “the West” but also to

“meddle in the internal affairs of other, weaker countries in order to advance its own interests”

(51). US intervention in the Cuban War for Independence marked the end of the Spanish Empire and the beginning of a permanent and formidable North American military presence in Latin

America.

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a string of heavy-handed rulers – Rufino Barrios, Manuel Estrada Cabrera and Jorge Ubico – courted US. business interests in the country. In For Every Indio Who Falls: A History of Maya Activism in

Guatemala, 1060-1990 (2010), Betsy Konefal points out that imperialists and capitalists championed the notion that the indigenous population needed to submit to the state and its’ most influential citizens: wealthy ladino landowners. She also underscores that the presence of indigenous peoples on the plantations was secured through “various mechanisms of force: debt, servitude, labor drafts, and, later, vagrancy laws” (17). In Guatemala, as in other countries in the region, capitalism and racism worked in tandem to increase the wealth and power of the ladino aristocracy by subjugating the peasant population.

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Ushered in via a popular military coup that was spearheaded by progressives, democratic elections in Guatemala in 1944 put an end to General Ubico’s reign as dictator. Known as the

October Revolution, the successive reformist governments of Juan José Arévalo (1944-1951) and

Jacobo Arbenz (1951-1954) championed public health and education, and also large-scale land reform that would benefit the nation’s poor. Officially passed in 1952, the Agrarian Reform Law sought to reclaim fallow lands that belonged primarily to United Fruit Company for the purpose of redistributing them to the peasant population. The objectives of the new law upset landowners and businessmen in Guatemala and the United States. In order to both protect North American, long-term business interests, and prevent a communist takeover of the region, the CIA helped to both orchestrate a coup d’état that forced Arbenz, who was elected democratically, into exile, and to install a repressive military regime. Death Squads, organized in Guatemala after the coup, became a principal mechanism for eradicating popular resistance movement. Institutionalized terrorism, carried out by slaughtering, maiming, torturing and disappearing civilians, reached its zenith during regimes headed by General Rome Lucas García and General Efraín Ríos Montt. In her book Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala Under General Efraín Ríos Montt,

1982-1983, Virginia Garrard-Burnett explains that by the early 1980s, scorched earth campaigns had become a vital component of state-sponsored violence against rural, indigenous communities

(15-25). This background information is important because Rigoberta Menchú describes almost all of it in her oral history.

Of particular importance is the fact that in her testimony, Menchú gives voice to the girls and women whom the soldiers systematically raped as part of the state’s strategy to wipe out leftist movement in rural areas. She relates that when she learns of the rapes she decides to leave her village to help the victims.

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Yo no soportaba, muchas mujeres, cientos de mujeres, señoritas, viudas, estaban embarazadas

porque los soldados las obligaron a utilizarlas sexualmente. A mí me daba vergüenza de

quedarme en mi lugar tan solo porque yo estaba tranquila y no pensar en los otros. Entonces

decidí irme. (Me llamo Rigoberta 167)

[I couldn’t bear so many women – hundreds of women, young girls, widows – being pregnant

because the soldiers had used them sexually. I was ashamed to stay safely in my village and

not think about the others. So I decided to leave]. (I, Rigoberta Menchú 141)

Menchú travels to a community she once lived in with her family, where they picked cotton to earn a few pennies, and learns of the atrocities committed against her childhood playmates. She states:

Me contaban todas sus desesperaciones de haber sido violadas. Eran cuatro amigas. Dos de

ellas se quedaron embarazadas del ejército y las otras dos no. Pero estaban enfermas porque

las habían violado cinco soldados cuando llegaron a su casa. Una de las dos embarazadas me

decía, cuando estuve viviendo en su casa: ‘Odio a ese niño que tengo y no sé que hacer con él.

Este no es mi hijo,’ y se afligía y lloraba y todo. (169)

[They told me of their despair at having been raped. There were four of them. Two of them

were pregnant by soldiers and the other two not. But they were ill too because they’d been

raped by five soldiers who’d come to their house. While I was living in the house of one of

my friends who was pregnant, she told me: ‘I hate this child inside me. I don’t know what to

do with it. This child is not my child.’ She was very distressed and cried all the time.] (I,

Rigoberta Menchú 142-143)

Reconstructing other women’s personal narratives enables Menchú to center a collective female experience. Her choice to recount her friends’ stories both allows her narrative voice to become

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the mechanism that documents gendered violence against indigenous females and enables her testimony to become an unofficial indictment of the state and the soldiers who carried out its dirty work.

Female testimonies of rape are not, however, the only remarkable components of this segment of Menchú’s oral history. She also portrays her failed attempt to console her pregnant friends, and even seems to hint at the biases she holds about the cultural practices of other ethnic groups. She states:

Pero yo le decía: ‘Tú tienes que amar a tu hijo: no tuviste la culpa.’ Y ella decía: ‘Porque yo

odio al soldado. Como es posible que tenga que alimentar al hijo de un soldado,’ decía la

compañera. Abortó al niño. Pero con la ayuda de la misma comunidad; ella era de otra etnia.

(169)

[But I told her: ‘you must love the child. It was not your fault.’ She said: ‘I hate that soldier.

How can I feed the child of a soldier?’ She aborted the child. She was from a different ethnic

group than ours. Her community helped her]. (I, Rigoberta Menchú 143)

She was from a different ethnic group than ours. I suggest that with these words Menchú conveys to her mediator and to her readers that fact that if she – a young Maya Quiché woman – had been raped by a solider, she would have carried her baby to full term. The laws that govern her people’s culture – she seems to claim – would require her to do so. To be fair, she could also be attempting to distance herself and all Mayans from abortion because at that time it was illegal in Latin America.

Menchú engages in self-reflection as she continues recounting her friends’ predicaments, and seemingly acknowledges that she lacks the life experience that is required to understand the depth of their agony. Thus, in the context of this passage, her representation of her virginity

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marks her as a non-victim of rape. When she compares herself to her traumatized girlfriends, it also renders her naïve and seemingly childish:

[L]as dos embarazadas que fueron violadas tendrían sus catorce años. Estaban muy malas y yo

no sabía qué era lo que tenían, pues. Una no podía caminar bien y a la otra le dolía mucho,

mucho el estómago. Ella decía que le dolía el estómago, y yo, sinceramente, ante eso, no tenía

conocimiento. Y las dos embarazadas rechazaban a sus niños y no querían ser madres de los

hijos de los soldados. Yo me sentía cobarde ante eso. No sabía qué hacer. Sentía grandes

lástimas de verlas. Era muy confusa la situación de ellas. (Me llamo Rigoberto169)

[Both of the pregnant girls were about 14 years old. They were in really bad shape and I didn’t

know what was wrong with them. One couldn’t walk well and the other one’s stomach hurt a

lot. She said her stomach hurt, and I, sincerely, did not understand what was happening to her.

Both of the girls rejected their babies because they didn’t want to be mothers of the soldiers’

children. I felt really cowardly. I didn’t know what to do. I felt a lot of shame seeing them.

Their situation was very confusing]. (I, Rigoberta Menchú 143)

On the one hand, the speaker evidences the girls’ trauma by calling attention to their physical afflictions and emotional wounds; on the other, she recounts her inability to understand them.

Lacking a personal experience with rape, the speaker represents other women and their stories in order to document the reality of sexual violence against women.

Personal accounts of rape abound in Guatemala Nunca Más [Guatemala Never Again]

(1998), the official report on the violence and human rights violations that characterized the country’s thirty-six years of civil war. Based on the oral testimonies given by victims and witnesses of state-sponsored terrorism in Guatemala, the report aims to document the truth by

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preserving the historical memory of political violence and recording the devastating impact it had on individuals, communities, and the nation as a whole. It states:

Las violaciones sexuales, tanto individuales como colectivas, aparecen en el relato de los

testigos como una forma específica de violencia contra las mujeres, ejercida en muy distintas

situaciones: en casos de secuestros y capturas, en masacres, y en operativos militares. (114)

[Rape, both individual and collective, appear in the witnesses’ stories as a specific form of

violence against women, carried out in very different situations: in cases of kidnappings and

captures, in massacres, and in military operations]. (my translation)

Mirroring Menchú’s testimony, the report also evidences that rape led to physical and emotional traumas, including unwanted pregnancies.

Otras consecuencias frecuentes de la violación son el temor al embarazo y los dilemas éticos

que siguen a un embarazo no deseado producido por la violación. Muchas mujeres pueden

vivir posteriormente cambios en la relación con su cuerpo, o tener sensación su suciedad o

disgusto. (120)

[Other frequent consequences of rape are the fear of pregnancy and the ethical dilemmas that

come with an unwanted pregnancy that is produced by rape. Many women experience changes

in the relationship with their body, or have a feeling of filthiness or disgust]. (my translation)

The overlapping between the accounts of rape that Menchú weaves into the fabric of her oral history and the testimonies from victims and witnesses that are compiled in Guatemala Never

Again legitimizes the former’s representation of sexual violence against women and girls in rural communities.

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The Logics of Heteropatriarchy

Heteropatriarchy normalizes child-producing sexual relations and imbalances of power in relationships between men and women who are – ideally –married. Homophobia and sexism inform heteropatriarchal discourse, as well as enable its’ dominance, often through violence. In her article “Ruminations on Lo Sucio as a Latino Queer Analytic” (2014), Deborah R. Vargas

Vargas claims that contemporary heteronormative projects romanticize the experiences of love, marriage, monogamy, and child bearing, and also that they privilege these experiences as proper pathways to productive and obedient citizenship. In “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual

Politics of Neoliberalism” (2002), Lisa Duggan also notes that the most worthy and deserving subjects are the married, monogamous, and heterosexual couples that bring home regular paychecks and produce biological offspring. Puar and Amit (2010) riff off of their work to illuminate how neoliberal heteronormative culture creates what they call homonationalism. They contend that neoliberal heteronormativity aims to domesticate queers by folding them into its project of creating docile and obedient subjects. Finally, they point to how the discursive civilizing of queers reiterates the logics of patriarchy.

I argue that Menchú both reiterates and rebels against the logics of heteropatriarchal culture in several ways. First, she reveals the differences in her community’s reaction to the birth of a girl, as contrasted with that of boys. She also underscores her culture’s normalization of heterosexual relations, including but not limited to parents of children, community leaders, and spiritual advisors. Third, Menchú makes clear the feminized role that women play in her community. Finally, I point to several moments in her testimony that destabilize heteronormativity. She reveals to her mediator why she did not answer her community’s call to marriage and motherhood, as well as speaks to her community’s acceptance of homosexuality.

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Birth Ceremonies

Michael Cobb’s notion of coupledom – the pairing off of heterosexual people for the purpose of producing biological offspring – enables me to view Menchú’s representation of heterosexual relations in her culture through a queer lens. In his analysis, Cobb underscores the couple as both the bedrock of heteronormative projects and the mechanism through which the logics of heteronormativity are constantly reiterated (446). His notion of coupledom facilitates a queer reading of Menchú’s representation of social expectations because it sheds light on heterosexuality as the dominant form of social relations in her culture. This is particularly so when she describes certain cultural norms, such as marriage and parenthood, and also when she represents the circles of support – and who is included or excluded from them – that form around spouses who are expecting a child.

If there is one couple in her testimony that stands out among all others, it is Vicente

Menchú and Juana Tum Kótoja, the speaker’s parents and the leaders of her community.

“Ceremonias de nacimiento” [Birth Ceremonies],” the second chapter of the text, begins with a description of the important role they played in Mayan society. The speaker states:

En la comunidad de nosotros hay un elegido, un señor que goza de muchos prestigios. Es el

representante. Tampoco es rey pero es el representante que toda la comunidad lo considera

como padre. Ese es el caso de mi papa y de mi mamá, que son los señores elegidos de mi

comunidad. Entonces, esa señora elegida, es igual como si toda la comunidad fueran sus hijos.

(Me llamo Rigoberta 27)

[In our community, there is an elected representative, someone who is highly respected. He’s

no a king but someone whom the community looks up to like a father. In our village, my

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father and mother were the representatives. Well, then, the whole community becomes the

children of the woman who’s elected]. (I, Rigoberta Menchú 7)

Vicente Menchú may not be the king, but his role as surrogate father to all evidences a patriarchal framing of social relations in the community. From what Menchú tells her mediator, it seems that Juan Tum Kótoja was elected as a leader because she was Vicente’s wife, which suggests that she married her way into a highly respected position in her community’s social structure. Moreover, the role that Menchú’s father plays in their community could be viewed as a local manifestation of patriarchy, one that is rooted in the Mayan culture that the speaker represents. It could also be viewed as a local manifestation of the undisputed masculine leadership embodied by Guatemala’s string of heavy-handed rulers, particularly Ríos Montt.

The privileged place that the pair of elected officials occupies in their social system calls on them to cultivate and nurture filial bonds of solidarity between – and a sense of belonging among – all members of the community. Their shared experiences, both as a married couple and as the biological parents of many children of their own, enable them to serve as trusted and competent role models, particularly for the newly-wed and newly-pregnant pairs who seek them out for guidance. Menchú states:

La madre, desde el primer día de embarazo, busca apoyo en la señora elegida o el señor

elegido […] el señor ofrecerá todo el apoyo necesario. Les dice: “les ayudamos, nosotros

seremos los segundos padres” […] los señores elegidos nosotros los llamamos abuelitos.

Entonces empiezan a buscar junto con los papás, quiénes serían los compadres, quiénes

serían padrinos del niño. (Me llamo Rigoberta 27-28)

[A mother, on her first day of pregnancy, goes with her husband to tell these elected

leaders that she’s going to have a child […] the leaders then pledge the support of the

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community and say: “We will help you, we will be the child’s second parents” […] They

are known as ‘grandparents’ or ‘forefathers.’ The parents then ask the ‘grandparents’ to

help them find the child some godparents. So the ‘grandparents’ and the parents choose the

godparents together.] (I, Rigoberta Menchú 7-8)

In the social system that Menchú represents in her oral history, biological reproduction is clearly a majority desire and act (Cobb 445). Furthermore, several heterosexual couples are called on to support fledgling conjugal unions and guide young spouses through pregnancy. I suggest that when viewed through a queer analytic, the speaker’s emphasis on coupledom becomes a mechanism for reiterating the logics of heteronormativity. To use Cobb’s words, the social norms that Menchú represents in her testimony demand that men and women be “oriented toward sustained, intimate relationships” (446) that produce biological offspring.

Menchú further reiterates the importance that pairs play in her culture when she describes the social norms that inform who is and who is not called to be present during the birth of a child. She states:

Tienen que estar los papás, los señores elegidos de la comunidad y el esposo. Tres parejas. Si

hay posibilidad, pues muchas veces andan los padres en otros lugares. Pero si hay posibilidad,

que esté el papá del muchacho y la mamá de la muchacha, serían una pareja […] significa

mucho para nuestra comunidad recibir un niño […] tiene que nacer forzosamente entre tres

parejas pero no cualquier gente se llama […] nuestra costumbre no permite a una mujer

soltera que vea un parto. (Me llamo Rigoberta 28-29)

[The people present should be the husband, the village leaders, and the couple’s parents. Three

couples. The parents are often away in other places, so if they can’t be there, the husband’s

father and the wife’s mother can perhaps make up one pair. If one of the village leaders can’t

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come, one of them should be there to make up a couple with one of the parents [...] the birth of

a new member is very significant for the community […] that’s why three couples (but not

just anybody) must be there to receive it […] our customs don’t allow single women to see a

birth.] (I, Rigoberta Menchú 9)

To borrow Cobb’s words, in Menchú’s village, the public is “full of couple’s everywhere” (454). Unmarried females are excluded from the birth ceremonies, except for the rare moment “cuando no hay nadie en casa” (Me llamo Rigoberta 29) [when there is nobody else at home] (I, Rigoberta, 8) to help deliver the baby. This is the first – but certainly not the only or the last – example that the speaker gives to describe the precarious position that women who do not marry occupy in the social order Menchú represents in her oral history.

Marriage Ceremonies

In “Ceremonias de casamiento” [Marriage Ceremonies], Menchú evinces that all children are conditioned to believe that marriage and biological reproduction are their cultural duties. She states:

Me recuerdo que, cuando nosotros crecimos, nuestros papas nos hablaron de cuando se tenía

un niño. En mi caso que soy mujercita, mis papas me decían que yo era mujer y que una mujer

tenía que ser madre y que […] era muy pronto para que yo fuera casada […] es rara la vez que

las parejas no tienen hijos y […] hay veces que hay mujeres que no les gusta ver a otra mujer

que no tiene hijos y hay hombres que no les gusta ver un hombre que no tiene hijos. (Me

llamo Rigoberta 84-87)

[I remember that, when we grew up our parents talked to us about having children. In my

case, because I was a girl, my parents told me that [a] woman has to be a mother […] and that

I shouldn’t wait too long before getting married […] it’s very rare for a couple not to have

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children. There are women who just don’t like to see a woman without children and some men

who just don’t like to see men who’ve no children.] (I, Rigoberta Menchú 60)

In this passage, the speaker represents gender roles, interpersonal relationships and social pressures by framing them within the logics of heteropatriarchy. Parents school their children in the importance of marriage and motherhood or fatherhood, and both men and women in the community reinforce this teaching by scrutinizing couples that do not have children.

Notably, after Menchú discloses her community’s repudiation of childless, heterosexual couples, she calls attention to its acceptance of homosexuals. She states:

No es como el rechazo que se le hace en general a los huecos, que nosotros llamamos a los

homosexuales. Entre nosotros indígenas, no hacemos distinción entre el homosexual o el que

no es homosexual, porque eso ya surge cuando uno baja a otros lugares. No hay tanto rechazo

por un homosexual como hay entre los ladinos que es algo que no pueden mirar. Lo bueno

entre nosotros es que todo lo consideramos parte de la naturaleza. (Me llamo Rigoberta 85-

86)

[This is not the same as rejecting the huecos, as we call homosexuals. Our people don’t

differentiate between people who are homosexuals and people who aren’t. That only happens

when we go out of our community. We don’t have the rejection of homosexuality that the

Ladinos25 do; they really cannot stand it. What’s good about our way of life is that everything

is considered part of nature.] (I, Rigoberta Menchú 60)

25 In his article “Constructing Ethnic Bodies and Identities in Miguel Angel Asturias and Rigoberta Menchú” (2006), Arturo Arias states: “ladino is a word originating in colonial times, designating someone who speaks Latin, and, thus, someone who works at the service of the local priest, an interstitial space and positioning between the West and its Other. Mayans were forbidden from learning Spanish during colonial times for fear they could acquire useful knowledge along with their linguistic still. During the nineteenth century there were sizeable Belgian and German migrations to Guatemala, and most Belgians and Germans mixed with the

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The narrator’s comment about same sex relations exposes a striking difference between her people’s framing of sexuality and that of the European Christians who conquered them. Research seems to support Menchú’s claim. The work of many scholars in the fields of anthropology and sociology (Torquemada 1977; Ross 1996; Joyce 2001; Houston and Taube 2010; Lopez-Austin

2010; Oliver 2010; Montejo-Díaz 2012) documents the presence of diverse genders and sexualities in Mesoamerican societies prior to the arrival of the Spanish. They claim that images on ceramic figurines, sculptures, paintings and carved stones monuments, for example, could indicate that same-sex relations were not necessarily condemned and that adultery and polygamy may have been tolerated in some pre-Hispanic societies. Montejo-Díaz posits that for the

Mayans, same-sex relations between men were “una práctica sexual común, permisible e incluso venerada (111) [common sexual practice, permissible and even venerated] (my translation).

Joyce and Houston and Taube point to an image on a wall in the Naj Tunich cave in Guatemala of what looks like two males having sex. They also note the existence of “common houses,” where elite young Mayan men resided and may have engaged in sex with their male elders

(Joyce 26-27; Houston and Taube 39-41). Houston and Taube also note the Tzotzile Mayan word for hermaphrodites, ‘antzil xinch’ok’ (41). Lopez-Austin illuminates the duality that marked

Mesoamerican conceptualizations of the cosmos. He demonstrates how the belief in “opuestos complementarios” (28) [complementary opposites] informed their understanding of everything in the cosmos, not least of which were the necessarily asymmetrical relationships between men and women and the distribution of rights and responsibilities among them (28). Oliver highlights the

Mayans, adding a new variant to the country’s miscegenation process. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century significant numbers of Italian migrants also mixed with Mayans. Ladinos, however, regardless of their ancestry, generally consider themselves “white,” are proud of their European origins, frequently deny that they have any indigenous blood in their ancestry, and invariably consider themselves Western in outlook.”

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presence of “templos-escuelas” (60) [educational temples] in pre-Hispanic societies, which may have been sites for sexual encounters between native males. He points out the presence of “los berdaches” – a term that loosely translates as male transvestites – in native communities in

Central America, and also notes that they were accepted – and maybe even revered – by their people (61-62).

All of these scholars acknowledge that it is difficult to confirm the role that non- normative sexualities played in Mesoamerica because most indigenous accounts of them and artifacts whose images may have attested to them were destroyed by the Spanish invaders. A common thread that runs through the scholarship I summarize above is the fact that Spanish conquistadors, colonizers and chroniclers interpreted Native configurations of sexuality according to their Christian belief system. Prominent Spanish figures in the Americas in the sixteenth century, including but not limited to Hernán Cortés, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas,

Bernal Díaz del Castillo and Fray Bernardino Sahagún, saw to it that Native people who engaged in same-sex relations went down in history as sodomites.

Queer Ecologies

I now return to Menchú’s claim that her people do not ostracize homosexuals. I use recent scholarship in the field of queer ecologies to queer her representation of her culture’s acceptance of non-normative sexualities.26 I build a bridge between her representation of human sexuality as a reflection on nature and the work of Alaimo (2010) and Chen and Luciano (2015), which centers the notion that there is something inherently natural about queerness. These

26 It is not my intention to impose Western logics onto Mayan culture. Viewing native people and practices through a Western lens could lead one to conclude that Mayans are closer to nature than Westerners are, which would be a troubling oversimplification. It is important to note that when Menchú says that for her culture homosexuals are a part of nature, she too is providing a cultural interpretation of her people’s attitudes and practices.

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scholars interrogate the socially constructed notion that homosexuality is a crime against nature by citing scientific field research that documents the presence of same-sex sexual encounters among animals.

In “Eluding Capture: The Science, Culture, and Pleasure of ‘Queer’ Animals” (2010),

Stacey Alaimo evinces sexual and gender diversity among animals both to dismantle the notion of heterosexuality as normal and to realign human queerness with that which is natural. She weaves into the fabric of her argument myriad scientific accounts of homosexual and bisexual species and exposes the limits that heteronormative biases have placed on knowledge production in various academic disciplines, including but not limited to anthropology, biology, ecology and cultural studies. Drawing from the work of Bruce Bagemihl (1999), Joan Roughgarden (2004), and Myra J. Hird (2004), among others, Alaimo invites her reader to consider how scientific evidence of lesbian and gay sex acts in the natural world might serve to destabilize heteronormative paradigms of sexuality in general and of human sexuality in particular. She contends that the multifarious forms of sexual pleasure that abound in the animal kingdom are vital components of biodiversity, and also that they serve to debunk “biological reductionism”

(55). Furthermore, Alaimo offers a capacious framing of both human and non-human sexual desire by evincing the fact that both have sex for the fun of it. She refutes Jonathan Marks’

(2002) claim that primates engage in sex mainly to produce offspring by citing the bonobos, whom make gestures to initiate sex and negotiate sexual positions, and the female bonnet macaques, whom manufacture self–stimulating sex toys out of leaves and twigs. Alaimo further debunks the notion that animals do not have sex for pleasure by citing the “macho” bighorn sheep that have “full-fledged anal sex” with other males (65-6).

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Instead of cordoning off animals and their diverse sexual preferences and practices, and rather than measuring the human against their animal counterparts, Alaimo calls on her readers to consider how “queer animals dramatize emergent worlds of desire, action, agency and interactivity” (67). She skillfully encourages us to “make nonsense of biological reductionism,” for the purposes of expanding and transforming our framing of sexuality in general and of sexual diversity in particular (52). When viewed through the lens of queer ecologies, Menchú’s words affirm homosexuality as part of the natural order and evidence the European settlers’ failure to eradicate it from society and the historical record. I contend that Menchú’s choice to pay tribute to homosexuals in her oral history enables her to push back against their disappearance by settler logics.

In “Has the Queer Ever Been Human?” Mel Y. Chen and Dana Luciano explore how in her photography Laura Aguilar sheds light on the material union between nature and humans by blending certain human bodies with the natural landscapes that surround them. Aguilar, a

Chicana lesbian artist from San Gabriel, CA, whose work became known in the mid 1990s, centers queer females of color to bring attention to “nonnormative bodies” and “members of marginalized groups” (183). In Grounded #414, for example, the artist’s nude body rests in child’s pose directly in front of a large rock. Notably, both her back and her butt face the camera. The image suggests a union between Aguilar’s body and the landscape that surrounds it.

According to Chen and Luciano, Aguilar employs her big, brown and lesbian body not just to refuse the demands of dominant culture but to also provide a natural altar upon which both recognition and full humanity are to be bestowed (184). The body and the boulder reunite in familiarity and oneness. Chen and Luciano underscore the absence of boundaries between nature and the woman in the photograph. They also contend that the fusion of nature with the human

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body – and of the human body with nature – has the potential to create a new, shared space, one that they can only make manifest by coming together. They state:

[T]o say there is no clear division between the natural world and the human body, is also to

say that there is no natural law to oppose to human deviance, since nature cannot be posited as

other than and prior to humans. And lifting that prohibition, in turn, multiplies the possibilities

for intra-human connection. (185)

The authors claim that, in terms of materiality, the human body and the natural world are united in their sameness. They dismantle the natural law/human deviance binary by underscoring the lack of difference between them. Moreover, they expose natural law as a human construction, one that heteronormative projects have used and continue to use to pathologize, criminalize and marginalize queer genders and sexualities. Chen and Luciano’s work enables me to view

Menchú’s critique of the Ladinos through a queer lens. First, she calls out the white, European

Christians – the Ladinos – for constructing a false law about nature, and also for using it to vilify the multiple and diverse ways of being that she suggests her community embraces. As the speaker makes clear, her people understand that homosexuality both originates in and is a product of nature, just like heterosexuality is. The Ladinos, however, are to be held accountable for, as Chen and Luciano suggest, unjustly dehumanizing homosexuals (188).

Queer Failure

The notion of queer failure engages the idea that people who embody nonnormative gender and sexual identities may derive power from their marginalization. It harnesses the loss that queers experience when they fail to meet cultural expectations, and transforms it into a mechanism for resisting normalization. I use the concept of queer failure to analyze the second half of Menchú’s comment about homosexuality. She states: “So, an animal which didn’t turn

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out right is part of nature, so is a harvest that didn’t give a good yield (I, Rigoberta Menchú 60 my italics). In a move that seems to contradict her culture’s acceptance of homosexuality as natural, she compares homosexuals to both animals that don’t turn out right and harvests that fail to produce a good yield. On the one hand, Menchú indicates that, unlike the Ladinos for whom homosexuality is a sin and a formidable threat to their moral order, her Maya community welcomes queers into its fold; on the other, she seems to equate queerness with falling short of the mark. Moreover, the Spanish word hueco has many meanings, including but not limited to: hole, space, gap, opening, empty, hallow, and superficial. The term invokes openness, but also emptiness, or lack.

Tina Takemoto’s discussion of failure as a salient motif in contemporary queer art and theory is useful to my analysis of Menchú’s representation of her community’s disapproval of not only heterosexual couples that do not have children but also queer people. It also serves to frame the speaker’s choice not to marry or have children in queer terms. For Takemoto, queer failure calls attention to “the emotional dimensions of loss, failure, disappointment and shame” that shadow the LGBTQI lived experience 86). Like the mainstream homosexuals that repudiate certain members of their community by way of projecting what Juana María Rodriguez calls an image of “hypernormative domesticity” (qtd. in Takemoto 86), Menchú indicates that her community disavows childless couples and non-normative sexualities because they do not yield offspring. At the same time, however, the fact that these groups of people do exist marks the

“utopian potentialities of failure as a mode of resistance, intervention, speculation, and queer world making” (86). For Takemoto, queer failure serves as a mechanism for pushing back against the “dual forces of homophobia and homonormativity” (88) because it enables queer

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populations to lay claim to their inadequacies and losses while simultaneously engaging them as acts of defiance and resistance to normalization.

Lastly, Takemoto calls on queers to disrupt “dominant social scripts” by failing to comply with them (87). With her analysis in mind, I argue that Menchú may be viewed as a queer failure not because she is queer, but because she makes a queer choice. I suggest that her

“failure” to do what is expected of her, however, may also be viewed as a mechanism for challenging cultural norms, which she interrogates profoundly. She states:

Saber que uno tiene que multiplicar la semilla de nuestros antepasados, y al mismo tiempo yo

rechazaba el matrimonio, ésa era mi locura. Yo pensaba que era sólo mía, pero cuando

platicaba con otras mujeres, ellas también veían igual la situación de casarse. (Me llamo

Rigoberta 248)

Knowing that I had to multiply the seed of our ancestors and, at the same time, rejecting

marriage, that was a crazy idea. I thought I was alone in feeling like this, but when I discussed

it with other women, they saw the whole thing of getting married in the same way I did. (I,

Rigoberta Menchú 224)

In this passage, Menchú represents the hold that cultural expectations have on her, as well as her inner struggle to come to terms with her desire to refuse the social role assigned to female

Mayans. She continues:

Todo eso me daba horror y me daba mucho que pensar. Estaba muy confundida. La sociedad

y un montón de cosas que no me dejaban libre. Siempre tenía el corazón preocupado. (Me

llamo Rigoberta 249)

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[All of this horrified me and gave me a lot to think about. I was very confused. Society and

so many other things wouldn’t leave my alone. I always had a heavy heart]. (I, Rigoberta

Menchú 224)

By acknowledging her doubts and the torment they caused her, Menchú represents the emotional impact of her choice to refuse normalization, including the heaviness of shame. In Takemoto’s terms, however, Menchú’s feelings of inadequacy are sites for resisting dominant culture.

Thus, when Menchú explains that after heterosexual men and women marry, they immediately begin thinking of the many children they will have, and when she asserts that people [“can’t think any other way in Guatemala”] (I, Rigoberta Menchú 124), what she really means is that while most people can’t imagine a different future, she and some of her compañeras can. Her refusal of domesticity may be viewed as an anti-normative act that draws attention to something else, a new or different way of being in her world. Her non-normative desire to pursue a particular form of liberation by estranging herself from marriage and biological reproduction enable her to construct a new form of womanhood that has the potential to denaturalize domesticity as the main road to respectability and belonging. Abjection, then, is not just loss and shame, but also a site of resistance and a way for her to claim power. Instead of following her society’s scripts, she writes her own.

We can compare Menchú’s process of breaking her people’s sociocultural contract with

Christina A. León’s attention to the process of bringing non-normative identities into being. It is within an impasse, explains León, where both death and rebirth just about happen, that a person may get stuck “between the desire to be outside of racist and sexist frames and the desire to contest them from within” (373). Rather than dwell on the negative meanings that are typically associated with a perceived lack of movement, however, León moves to underscore the potential

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that being stuck has to reverse, reorient and redefine these darker meanings. She contends that the “arrest of slow transformation” could be viewed both as an “occasion to pause within a social tapestry” and a chance to displace the “burden of the future” that is put on populations of people who are “denied a present” (382-383). León overlaps here with José Esteban Muñóz’s argument that fashioning a queer futurity in the here and now is a laborious task, which hinges in part on the “world making potentialities contained in the performances of minoritarian citizen-subjects who contest the majoritarian public sphere” (Cruising 56). With Muñoz’s words in mind, I suggest that Menchú challenges her people’s unbearable present from within her performances as a minoritarian activist and narrator – roles that require her to learn Spanish. She uses the language of the Europeans that conquered and colonized her ancestors to call them out for exploiting the Mayan population, as well as to document Mayan history and culture through speech. Menchú may not be able to escape the racist frames that mark her past and present, but she certainly has the linguistic power to destabilize them in her testimony.

I also use León’s and Munóz’s ideas to bolster my contention that Menchú represents her choice to forego marriage and motherhood in a way that could be described as queer failure. I suggest that her quotidian experiences during childhood, girlhood and adolescence slowly turned her away from having a husband and children because they helped her realize that being a wife and mother would be a burdensome experience in which the likelihood of pain far outweighed the possibility of pleasure and security. Menchú knew by watching her mother and other women in her community that domesticity would be an ongoing struggle that would prevent her from becoming an activist and community organizer.

Moreover, I suggest that her representation of her decision not to marry could be viewed as a refusal to be called into being or hailed, a process which Louis Althusser calls interpolation

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(qtd. in Muñoz “Performing” 11). On the one hand, she repeatedly discloses that females and males in her community are pushed toward normative culture; on the other, she underscores her choice not to pursue marriage or motherhood. She is, to borrow León’s term, stuck. She lays bare the tensions that exist between social expectations for females and what she really wants out of life. Although she was raised to be what in her book The Queer Art of Failure (2011) Judith

Halberstam calls a “future mother,” I suggest that the Menchú “revolts” against dominant culture by choosing to embody a queer way of being in the world (27). I also claim that in her representation of her process of reflection and her choice, Menchú illuminates what Halberstam describes as the “counterintuitive link between queerness and socialist struggle” (29). Her desire to fight for her people compels her to do something different, to choose something else.

To use Michel Pecheux’s words, Menchú is not a “Good Subject” because she does not submit to dominant cultural practices. She is not a “Bad Subject” because she does not strive to dismantle the majoritarian norms in her community (qtd. in Muñoz Cruising 11). Thus, rather than assimilate into or fervently oppose normative cultural expectations, she dis-identifies with them. For Muñoz, Pecheux’s notion of dis-identification is best understood as a strategy that attempts to “transform a cultural logic from within” (11). It requires both a constant effort to

“enact permanent cultural change” and an ongoing commitment to acknowledging the value of quotidian “struggles of resistance” (12). I argue that Menchú may be viewed as a queer minority subject because she negotiates her community’s “majoritarian public sphere,” as well as fails to

“turn around to its interpellating call” for hypernormative domesticity (13-15).

Halberstam’s contention that queerness is a way of “refusing to acquiesce to dominant logics of power and discipline” is also useful to my claim that Menchú may be considered a queer minority subject (88). Menchú states:

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Yo tuve muchos enamorados [pero] no lance al matrimonio […] tenía novio y llegó un

momento en que ese novio ambicionaba muchas cosas en la vida: quería tener una casa buena

para sus hijos y vivir tranquilo […] se hizo obrero y trabajó y ya era un compañero que tenía

una capacidad de trabajo […] entonces llegó el momento en que yo estaba entre dos cosas, o

él o optar por la lucha de mi pueblo. Y llegué a eso y tuve que dejar al novio con dolor […] así

es cuando yo seguí la lucha y estoy sola. (Me llamo Rigoberta 248-251)

[I’ve been in love many times [but] I didn’t jump into marriage […] I was engaged once. At

one time, he wanted a lot of things in life: a nice house for his children and a peaceful life […]

he became a factory worker, and then really turned into a compañero with good work

prospects […] well, there I was between two things – choosing him or my people’s struggle

[…] I left my compañero with much sadness and a heavy heart […] I went on with our

struggle and now I’m on my own]. (I, Rigoberta Menchú 224-226)

Menchú is queer in the sense that Halberstam gives to the term because she fails to achieve

“success in a heteronormative, capitalist society” (2). She turns away from “specific forms of reproductive maturity and wealth accumulation” (2) in order to pursue an alternative way of being in her world. Furthermore, I suggest that traces of Cobb’s interrogation of the logics of love can be detected in Menchú´s account of the role that relationships with men have played in her life. After weighing her options, she decides to avoid the trappings of domesticity in order to devote herself to advancing her community’s struggle for justice. To borrow Cobb’s words,

Menchú’s primary obsession is not love, but rather “life itself – life in which important feelings and work are permitted to be accomplished” (451). At the same time, she is aware that choosing singlehood over love marks her as different, and also as potentially dangerous. She claims that

“una mujer de veintitrés años, como yo, es una mujer muy sospechada por la comunidad, porque

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no sabe dónde ha estado, donde ha vivido” (Me llamo Rigoberta 61) [The community is very suspicious of a woman like me who is twenty-three but they don’t know where I’ve been or where I’ve lived] (I, Rigoberta Menchú 61). In order to protect her dignity and maintain the community’s confidence in her, Menchú defends her purity by telling her mediator and her readers that she is a virgin. By doing so, she claims for herself the undisputed and most revered mark of Mayan womanhood prior to motherhood.

Knowledge Production in the Street and Field

In this section, I argue that in the chapter “Primer viaje a la capital” [First Visit to

Guatemala City], Menchú queers her family’s lineage. She disrupts the logics of patriarchy by underscoring that she – and not one of her brothers – was the apple of her father’s eye. She explains: “Mi padre me quería mucho a mi y tenía mucho cariño a mi padre entonces me tocaba viajar con él y me tocaba sufrir lo que a mi padre le tocaba sufrir” (Me llamo Rigoberta 51) [My father loved me very much and I was very found of him and it always fell to me to travel with him and share his suffering with him] (I, Rigoberta Menchú 30). Menchú represents the affect between father and daughter, as well as sheds light on the knowledge he imparted to her on the streets of Guatemala City. First, she points out she felt angry because she could not understand the conversations in Spanish that her father had with the men he hoped would buy the mimbre27 they had carried from their village to the city. She also discloses the humiliation her father felt at the end of the day because he was forced to “dejar el mimbre con el señor que le pagó la mitad”

(Me llamo Rigoberta 51) [“leave the mimbre with the first man who only paid him half of what he asked]” (I, Rigoberta Menchú 30). Her understanding of the absence of fairness and her father’s shame raises her awareness of the discrimination her people face due to their socio-

27 Mimbre is a form of wicker that artisans use to make baskets and furniture.

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economic location. Her father street-schools her in class relations, the power that armed guards have over citizens, the corruption inherent in the Guatemalan National Institute for Agrarian

Transformation (INTA), and the role that prisons play in disciplining poor people. Menchú ends her portrayal of the education her father provided her by reiterating that he taught her these lessons because he expected her to follow in his footsteps. She states: “Mi padre me decía,

‘cuando seas grande, tienes que viajar, tienes que caminar. Ya sabes que tienes que hacer lo que yo hago,’ decía mi papá” (Me llamo Rigoberta 52) [My father told me: ‘When you’re old enough, you must travel. You must go around the country. You know you must do what I do] (I,

Rigoberta Menchú 31).

In “A los ocho años comienzo a trabajar en la finca como asalariada” [An Eight-Year-Old

Agricultural Worker], Menchú represents the knowledge that she acquired from watching her mother work in the fields that Guatemala’s upper class owned and operated. Furthermore, she becomes aware of the struggles that mothering offers to the females in their social location. They are treated unjustly not only because they are Natives and females but also because their economic location constrains their agency and makes mothering an impossible task. Menchú narrates how hard it was for her to watch her mother work in the coffee fields and breastfeed one of her babies at the same time. She also discloses her own lack of agency, as well as reveals that the birth of her awareness was rooted in her helplessness: “Yo me sentía muy inútil y cobarde de no poder hacer nada por mi madre, únicamente cuidar a mi hermanito. Y así es cuando me nació la conciencia, pues” (Me llamo Rigoberta 55) [Watching her made me feel useless and weak because I couldn’t do anything to help her except look after my brother. That’s when my consciousness was born (I, Rigoberta Menchú 34). I suggest that Menchú’s representation of the knowledge she acquires in the field may view viewed through the lens of Gloria Anzaldúa’s

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(1991) notion of the street reader because she learns about reality not only by participating in it but also by observing it. I expand on Anzaldúa’s notion of the street reader to include Menchú’s learning process when she shadows her mother. I posit that the coffee field may be viewed as alternative epistemic community that produces practical knowledge and understanding.

Menchú is forthright about how her experiences observing her parents shaped her identity and enabled her understanding of difference. She relates how time spent on the street and in the field impacted her understanding not only of her people’s location in Guatemala’s social and economic order but also of her individual location within this order. To use Anzaldúa’s words, she is an “individual reader [who] is in possession of a mode of reading that can read the subtext, and can introject her experiences into the gaps” (“To(o)” 258). Moreover, she reads from “the place one’s feet are planted, the ground one stands on, one particular position, point of view”

(258).

Queer Futurity

José Esteban Muñóz (2009) describes the “here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality” as a “prison house” (Cruising 1). This prison house has many rooms, which include but are not limited to heterosexual normativity, majoritarian belonging, racism, and normative heterosexual reproduction. He theoretically dismantles the temporal walls that dominant culture erects between the past, the present and the future, as well as proposes the potentiality of educated hope as both a mechanism and a critical methodology for enacting a queer utopian futurity in which

“multiple forms of belonging in difference adhere to a belonging in collectivity” (20). Desire is integral to the project that Muñóz conceptualizes in his book. The act of longing for more than what the present provides enables us to imagine a self and a world that have not yet become, but that are in the process of becoming in futurity, a temporal space that bends linear straight time.

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For Muñóz, drawing from the past – what Ernst Bloch calls the no-longer conscious –, combined with interrogating the present and configuring a queer utopian futurity, will enable us to move beyond the “stranglehold” of a present that is as noxious as it is unstable (30-32).

With Muñóz’s words in mind, I suggest that Menchú’s oral history is a performance that serves as a rallying point for and a lingering trace of minoritarian belonging in the here and now and in the horizon. She represents the poverty, malnutrition, exploitation and discrimination that define her people’s present, as well as calls attention to the present’s “wretchedness and bitterness” (I, Rigoberta Menchú 225). She unequivocally claims that the world she lives in is

“tan criminal, tan sanguinario” (Me llamo Rigoberta 270) [so evil, so bloodthirsty]” (I, Rigoberta

Menchú 246), and calls on her people to condemn and denounce the injustices committed against them. It is precisely her anger at and frustration with the present that enables Menchú to champion what Muñoz calls the “work of not settling for the present, of asking and looking beyond the here and now” (Cruising 28). She states:

[L]legará un momento en que las condiciones sean diferentes. Cuando todos seamos, quizás

no felices estando en una buena casa pero por lo menos no veamos más a nuestras tierras

llenas con sangre y el sudor. (Me llamo Rigoberta 251)

[There’ll be a time when things will be different, when we’ll all be happy, perhaps not with

nice houses, but at least we won’t see our lands running with blood and sweat.] (I, Rigoberta

Menchú 226)

Toward the end of her oral history, she adds the following: “Estamos pensando que después del triunfo nos tocarán grandes tareas en el cambio […] yo sé y tengo confianza que el pueblo es el

único capaz, las masas son las únicas capaces de transformar la sociedad. (Me llamo Rigoberta

270) [We have to think about the important work we have to do, after our victory, in the new

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society […] I am convinced that the people, the masses, are the only ones capable of transforming society] (I, Rigoberta Menchú 246).

Because Menchú imagines a better future for her people, one that is as just as it is pleasing, I suggest that the textual product of her remembrances spawns a “certain transformative possibility” that has “world making potentialities” (Muñoz Cruising 56). Her oral history may also be viewed as an imagining of “not some fantasy of an elsewhere, but existing alternatives to hegemonic systems” (Halberstam 89). In this sense, Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia may be analyzed as a literary artifact that represents what Muñoz calls an “outpost of an actually existing queer future existing in the present” (56).

Conclusion

In this chapter, I used a variety of queer analytics to examine key passages from

Menchú’s testimony. My objective was to shed light on the potential overlapping between her portrayal of her actions and choices and the conditions that led to them, and queer strategies for resisting normalization. I used queer critiques of heteronormativity to analyze her decision not to marry or have children, and argued that these choices may be viewed as acts of resistance to dominant culture. I also argued that Menchú could be viewed as a queer failure and a stuck subject because although she recognizes the loss that she experiences when she “fails” to meet cultural expectations, she transforms it into a mechanism for rebelling against normalization for the purpose of advancing resistance movement. Analyzed from a queer perspective, Menchú’s process of breaking her community’s sociocultural contract could be viewed as an attempt to destabilize the hegemony of heteropatriarchal logics.

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CHAPTER 4

CONCSIOUSNESS RAISING, AFFECTIVE SOLIDARITY AND FEMINIST

STANDPOINT EPISTEMOLOGY

Introduction

The production of Don’t be Afraid, Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart.

The Story of Elvia Alvarado sheds light on the complex nature of the mediated testimonial project. The book tells the story of Elvia Alvarado, a human rights and social activist, who fought for land reform in Honduras in the 1980s. The author of the book, Medea Benjamin, who at the time was working for the United Nations as an economist for the Food and Agriculture

Organization in Central America, met Alvarado when she was conducting research in Honduras.

Alvarado told Benjamin about her experiences as a woman and an activist in her local community. Benjamin tape-recorded her conversations with Alvarado, translated her words from

Spanish to English, edited the transcript, and published the text in the United States in 1987. In this chapter, I aim to bridge the gap between this obscure mediated testimony and contemporary discussions about gender equality. I view the text through a feminist lens by engaging notions like consciousness raising (hooks; 1984; 2000), affective solidarity (Hemmings 2012), and standpoint epistemology (Intemann 2015; Brooks 2006). I argue that Don’t be Afraid Gringo is a radical feminist collaboration that provides an alternative model of knowledge construction about underserved women in Honduras during the Cold War.

In “Stories from the South: The Voices of Latin American Women,” June O’Connor maintains that “unwilling to be singled out as an unusual, atypical, or exceptional individual, each woman identifies her own story as the story of a people” (284). Moreover, in “Speaking Out

Together: Testimonials of Latin American Women,” Lynda Marín contends that “the self-

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professed eschewal of the first person singular subject” is the most obvious marker of “Latin

American women’s testimonials in particular and the genre in general” (52). My analysis of

Elvia Alvarado’s narrative voice, however, problematizes these scholars’ universal conceptions of the speaking style of testimonial narrators in general and of female testimonial narrators in particular.

Revealing several moments in her testimony when she represents herself as – to borrow

Marín’s words – unusual, atypical and exceptional not only among the women but also among the men in her community, I argue that Alvarado speaks as what in her analysis of Omar

Cabeza’s testimony, Fire from the Mountain, The Making of a Sandinista, Marín refers to as “the heroic I” (55). Alvarado’s narrative tendency to underscore her uniqueness among her people diverges from a more conventional female speaker’s knack for downplaying her individuality.

Rather than shunning the first-person singular subject, I contend that in her capacity as narrator

Alvarado embraces it and uses it to cast herself the fiery and fearless heroin both in her story and in the story of her people, as she depicts them in her oral history. I also suggest that Alvarado employs a hybrid narrative voice because she simultaneously relates a collective struggle and emphasizes her role as the undisputed leader of it.

Don’t be Afraid Gringo is Alvarado’s and Benjamin’s attempt to publically transmit a message. The objectives they aspire to achieve inform the production of the text. Alvarado’s foreword and Benjamin’s introduction underscore their shared mission of collaborating to produce a text that will generate awareness among North Americans of the reality in rural

Honduras in the 1980s. Seemingly united in their critique of US intervention in Honduran affairs and of capitalism, Alvarado and Benjamin work together to construct a form of knowledge that is rooted in Alvarado’s portrayal of her lived experiences. Born out of the particulars of her

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location in Honduran society, Alvarado’s narrative voice calls attention to the interlocking forms of oppression –class and gender – that shape her identity and impact the life experiences that she recounts in her testimony.

In addition to producing alternative knowledge by centering a female perspective on the systems of oppression that operate in rural Honduras in the 1980s, Alvarado and Benjamin also aim to inspire their readers to join them in embracing activism as a mechanism for creating social change. Their text lays bare the undeniable relationship between knowledge, engagement, action, and social justice, and also exposes and denounces repressive political, economic and social structures. Put simply, Alvarado and Benjamin collaborate to intervene in reality in order to transform it. As their text makes plain, this can only be done by taking the Honduran and North

American governments and militaries to task for what they directly and indirectly do to reinforce structural inequalities that privilege the interests of the elite over the basic rights of underserved populations. Advocating for solidarity between women, Alvarado calls on females in the U.S. to transcend the economic, racial and national boundaries that separate them from their Honduran counterparts. In the no-nonsense, tell-it-like-it-is style that marks her entire narrative, she simultaneously engages and provokes her reader in the foreword to her testimony. Drawing a line in the sand, she states: “Even if you are a gringa […] once you understand why we are fighting, if you have any sense of humanity, you’ll have to be on our side” (Don’t xiii).

It is worth noting that during the 1970s and 1980s Benjamin was not the only North

American female collaborating with women activists from Honduras and making their voices heard in the United States. In her article “Honduras: Did the Church Start Something it Can’t

Stop?” Maricela Peraza underscores the experiences of Concepción Umanazor in the Clubes de

Amas de Casa (CAC) [Housewives Clubs] that encouraged Honduran women to “think critically

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about their position in society,” as well as offered them “their first inkling of sisterhood; their first sense of being occupants in society” (13-15). In “Honduras: Organizing Rural Women,” Lee

Saxell recounts the experiences of Sandra Binolla, a widowed, single mother and one of the founding members of the National Congress of Rural Workers (CNTC) in Honduras. Binolla states that members of the CNTC have been “killed by goons hired by the landowners” and that imprisonment, torture and rape are institutionalized methods of repression (9). She also explains that women play an important role in the CNTC, often occupying positions “on the forefront of land invasions” (11). In “Reyna de Miralda: Organizing Peasant Women in Honduras,” Marion

Fennelly Levy sheds light on Reyna de Miralda, who was one of the founders of the Honduran

Federation of Peasant Women (FEHMUC), and elaborates her goal to facilitate “the direct improvement of the lives of peasant women” (116).

This ongoing dialogue between some North American and Honduran females not only gave voice to the latter’s struggles but also created a network of communication between

American women from different races, economic classes, and cultures. Engaging what Beverly calls “consciousness raising, resistance, and empowerment in civil society” (Testimonio xviii), the testimonial articles and texts I mentioned previously provided a space for collaboration between women from different backgrounds who were committed to denouncing repression and violence and creating social and political change. Rooted in the alliance between Alvarado and

Benjamin and grounded in their shared political views and objectives, Don’t be Afraid Gringo contributes to the conversation between North American and Central American females that began in the late 1970s.

While I argue that the relationship between Benjamin and Alvarado is a fundamental component of their collaboration, I underscore the complexities that operate within their

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partnership and their text. Explaining to her readers that Alvarado insisted she accompany her on her daily and weekly rounds in order to see for herself that she is telling the truth, Benjamin not only creates an image of solidarity between mediator and speaker but also represents her self as a field researcher who employs participant observation techniques. In their article “Participant

Observation and the Political Scientist: Possibilities, Priorities, and Practicalities,” Andrea

Gillespie and Melissa Michelson define participant observation as ethnographic research that is usually linked to qualitative sociology or anthropology. Choosing to either “detach from her research subjects in order to maintain objectivity,” or to position herself “at the center of the action,” a participant observer collects a “treasure trove of stories” that enable her to trace systemic social patterns that operate in the culture she studies (261).

Calling the term participant observation an oxymoron, Barbara Tedlock critiques this approach to fieldwork because it presupposes a scholar’s ability to be simultaneously sympathetic and distant toward the people she studies. She wittily questions how it was that professionally trained ethnographers came to believe that this methodology could effectively produce reliable data “that somehow reflect the natives’ own point of view” (Participant 69).

Positing that not only involvement and detachment but also sympathy and scientific objectivity are irreconcilable in the field, Tedlock underscores oral communication as the only viable mechanism by which a scholar or researcher can “enter into another person’s world” (70).

Ethnographic dialogue, she insists, is the best way to fashion “a world of shared inter- subjectivity and to reach an understanding of the differences between the two worlds” (70).

Beginning in the 1960s, she continues, intimate, subjective, first person accounts of fieldwork began hitting the market both within the academy and beyond it, and some ethnographers began publishing both standard ethnographic monographs about and first-person fieldwork accounts of

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the same field experience. Tedlock lays bare the tensions that arise in the latter by calling attention to how an author represents herself in the account she narrates She states:

The world, in a narrative ethnography, is re-presented as perceived by a situated narrator, who

is also present as a character in the story that reveals his own personality. This enables the

reader to identify the consciousness that has selected and shaped the experiences within the

text. (78)

Recasting herself as an active participant and her subject’s ally and also underscoring the unlimited access to both Alvarado and Alvarado’s community that her approach to fieldwork affords her, I contend that Benjamin legitimizes a hybrid methodology.

In “Privileging Fieldwork Over Interviews: Consequences for Identity and Practice,”

Kleinman et al., support Tedlock’s contention that communicative interaction is the most effective and reliable methodological approach for learning about a culture. Exploring the two standard approaches to qualitative research in sociology – fieldwork and in-depth interviewing – they argue that instead of privileging the former over the latter, scholars ought to acknowledge the unique benefits and potential burdens of both. On the one hand, participant observers legitimize their research by underscoring that they immerse themselves for months or years “in a group, organization or community” (38); on the other, qualitative interviewers ask questions and listen to respondents as they orally “portray their worlds, experiences and observations” (38).

Putting aside the obvious differences in these research methodologies, the authors center the

“field setting” as a site of overlapping between them. Fieldworkers and in-depth interviewers choose “a piece of social organization” to study, and produce findings that shed light on the social dynamics that exist within that organization (45). Interview-based studies, however, privilege as a “unit of analysis” an individual’s “social placement” in a setting, as opposed to the

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setting itself (43). Said in a different way, a qualitative interviewer engages the interviewees’ self-reflexivity in order to learn how people use “particular experiences, relationships, and identities to construct the self as an integrated unit” (43).

I suggest that in her capacity as researcher Benjamin employs a combination of sociological and anthropological methodologies, including but not limited to observation, participant observation, and in-depth interviewing. Thus the testimony she mediates blurs the lines not only between history and oral history and fact and fiction but also between observation and participation. Enabling Alvarado to provide a personal account of events that she says she not only observed but also participated in gives voice to a historically marginalized and silenced female perspective. The fact that the mediator, in her capacity as researcher, also observes and participates in the events that she retells in the book further eviscerates the boundaries that have traditionally existed between scholarly disciplines.

Underscoring both her participation in the research that she carries out and her agency,

Benjamin states:

We hiked into the mountains to visit far-flung rural communities. We slept out in cornfields

and on the floors of campesino shacks. We jumped government barricades to join a striking

union. We marched in the capital with the campesinos in a massive demonstration against the

Contra presence. (Don’t xxiii)

I suggest that in this passage Benjamin recasts herself not only as an observer and an active participant but also as one of her subject’s allies. Underscoring the unlimited access to both

Alvarado and Alvarado’s community that her approach to fieldwork affords her, Benjamin legitimizes her methodology. She portrays herself as a mediator who – if not a detached observer

– is at once a participant, a qualitative interviewer, a listener, a compiler, a translator, and –

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certainly not least of all – an emotionally engaged female ally. For these reasons, I posit that

Benjamin and Alvarado actively participate in the construction of a text that could in general terms be viewed as a feminist narrative ethnography.

Describing the reality in Honduras during the 1980s, at the outset of her acknowledgements Medea Benjamin thanks Elvia Alvarado’s family and the National Congress of Rural Workers (CNTC), for whom at the time Alvarado was working as a community organizer, for “taking the risk this book implies” (Don’t xi). She represents the danger she knows the Alvarado family and certain members of the CNTC are in, as well as expresses her anxieties about the text that she was instrumental in producing. Admitting her self-consciousness, her fears, and her ambitions for the book, the mediator states: “I only hope that the book helps to further their vital quest for justice in Honduras” (xi). Furthermore, perhaps revealing that she felt guilty because she had been away from her family for long periods of time in order to conduct the research that is the basis of the book, Benjamin thanks her husband and her daughter, Arlen

Siu, whom she named after the first female Sandinista fighter to die fighting for the revolution in

Nicaragua, for making “home such a wonderful place to come back to” (xi). Benjamin concludes her acknowledgements by expressing her gratitude to Alvarado for allowing her, her staff at the

Institute for Food and Development Policy, members of the Central American Resource Center in the United States, photographer Susan Meiselas, and employees of the Honduran

Documentation Center (CEDOH) “to pry into the nooks and crannies of her life, so that we may share her pain, her suffering, her hopes, her dreams” (xii).

Letting Go of ‘We’ and Embracing ‘Me’

Exposing the complexities that operate in the production of Don’t be Afraid Gringo, the mediator underscores the danger, courage and sacrifice that the publication of the book implies,

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and also the bonds of affective solidarity that impact the project. As I demonstrate in this chapter, in addition to passion and joy, sorrow and rage also shape the personal relationship between

Benjamin and Alvarado and the text that they create. Clearly favoring action over observation,

Benjamin follows Alvarado’s lead, cultivates a connection with her subject, acquires concrete knowledge about how underserved populations work and live, and constructs in her introduction the image of two women united in adventure, risk-taking and – certainly not least of all – activism.

Benjamin might have pulled this off if it wasn’t for one key sentence that follows her description of the marches and protests in which she and Alvarado participated: “Once her initial mistrust of gringos faded […] I had no trouble getting her to talk” (xxiii). I suggest that

Benjamin does several things simultaneously here. First, she evinces her trustworthiness and competence by invoking the faith that Alvarado came to have in her. Then, she champions herself as a reliable channel of communication not just between Alvarado and the people who read her testimony but also between the Americas. Portraying herself as one who can facilitate dialogue between regions in addition to improving understanding between people allows

Benjamin to position herself as a conduit for transmitting knowledge that will bring Central

America and North America closer together. Finally, Benjamin reiterates the power asymmetry that operates in the text by dividing we into I and her, and also by pointing out that she has the capacity to make her research subject speak.

All of this could point to Benjamin’s lack of reflexivity, which some contemporary feminist scholars might deem the fundamental problem of her work as both researcher and mediator. She does not demonstrate any awareness of the ethical dilemmas that arise in feminist research (Kirsch 2005; Halse and Honey 2005; Nagar 2010; Preissle and Han 2015). These

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feminist scholars might claim that Benjamin, seemingly unaware of the implications of her attempt to represent her relationship with Alvarado as an equal one, ignores one of the most fundamental tenets of responsible and ethical feminist research: the importance of practicing reflexivity. She features her agency and good intentions, but does not make evident her understanding of the politics and power dynamics that operate in her relationship with her research participant.

Feminist scholars would be correct to point out that Benjamin offers no information in her introduction about herself or her background and makes no mention of her social location or the ways in which it might inform her project with Alvarado. She does not acknowledge the myriad ways in which she is privileged, including but not limited to her race, socio-economic status, and formal education, nor does she offer any insight into the process by which she translated, edited, and organized Alvarado’s words before she published the text in English in the

United States. Furthermore, the testimony is dedicated to Benjamin Linder, a white, male, North

American engineer who was working in Nicaragua when the Contras shot and killed him in

1987, the same year Benjamin published Don’t be Afraid Gringo. Research has not shown that

Alvarado ever knew, or worked with Linder, and feminist scholars might suspect that Benjamin chose to whom the testimony would be dedicated, and that her choice unveils her unconscious desire to highlight herself and other North Americans who “[extend] a hand of friendship to the poor of Central America” (Don’t xiv). They might even argue that Benjamin is problematically unaware of the ways in which she “writes [herself] into the text” (Cooke and Fonow 2219).

Although I acknowledge the potential validity of these claims, I contend that Benjamin may most accurately be viewed as what in her book Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate

Politics bell hooks calls a “white female ally” (40). Linking white women’s ownership of second

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wave feminism in the US to their loyalty “to Western imperialism and transnational capitalism”

(45), and arguing that the North American women who became the face of second wave feminism adopted a paternalistic attitude toward women in developing nations, hooks posits that white women with class privilege believed it was their right to advance feminist movement and

“set feminist agenda for all the other women in the world, particularly women in third world countries” (45, my italics). Consequently, the author explains, radical women of color and their enlightened “white sisters” began working together in the 1970s and 1980s to dismantle the national and global paternalism that at the time marked mainstream feminist movement (46).

Moreover, in Feminist Theory from Margin to Center hooks insists that simultaneously analyzing sexist oppression from the lenses of gender, race, and class is the only viable way to create a global feminist movement that acknowledges the needs of all women everywhere (50-

52).

I argue that Elvia Alvarado may be viewed as a radical woman of color and that Medea

Benjamin may be seen as white female ally, as hooks describes these terms. Alvarado’s life experiences as a female activist shape her awareness of the gender inequalities that she faces on a daily basis. She evinces the gender-based particularities of her time and place in history throughout her oral account to her mediator. Benjamin is the mechanism through which

Alvarado’s voice is recorded, translated, and published in the form of a mediated testimony. hooks’ analysis of feminist movement in the US and the alliances that developed between some women of color and some white women is a useful tool for exploring Benjamin’s motivations for writing the text. It also facilitates my feminist reading of Alvarado’s analysis of a social, economic, and political system that is patriarchal, imperialist and capitalist.

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Let us recall, however, that although Alvarado speaks for the rural downtrodden, she also seizes the opportunity to speak for herself. Her exceptional story captured Benjamin’s attention because “it stood out from the rest” (Don’t xxii), prompting her to describe Alvarado as

“an eloquent spokeswoman on the plight of the poor and [their] efforts to overcome their poverty” (xxii). At the same time, however, the mediator acknowledges that Alvarado’s life is unusual. She states:

Elvia’s story is by no means that of a typical campesina. Through her organizing work, she

has had the opportunity to travel around her country, talking not only to campesinos but also

to lawyers, professors and politicians. She has gained insights into the internal workings of

her society that far surpass those of a campesino who has never ventured from his or her

village. (xxii)

Alvarado’s unique blend of experiences, combined with her knack for telling both her people’s story and her own, inform both her relationship with her mediator and her testimony.

“I’d call him a drunk and he’d call me a communist.”

Born in 1938 to landless and illiterate parents, Alvarado grew up poor. Taking her seven children with her, Alvarado’s mother left her husband because he was an abusive drunk who could not hold down a steady job. Alvarado was the only child in her family allowed to go to school. She repeated the fourth grade several times because it was the highest level of formal education available to her. She lived in her older brother’s home until, at age fifteen, she became pregnant for the first time. When he calls her a slut and threatens to kill her for embarrassing him by getting pregnant, she flees to the city barefoot and penniless, with two dresses “wrapped in a piece of cloth” (Don’t 4). She eventually returns to her community with her first child in tow and has two more babies with two different men. None of the fathers of her first three children

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provides her economic assistance or support of any kind. One of them abandons her and she leaves the other two. Alvarado is on her own until she meets and moves in with Alberto, who fathers her next three children.

Alvarado identifies the Mothers’ Clubs, which were organized by the Catholic Church, as the place where her formation as an activist began. Participating in these groups allows her access to knowledge that changes her, her relationships, and the direction of her life. Alvarado’s new female friends elect her president of the club, and the leaders of the local church choose her as one of five women who will be paid to organize Mothers’ Clubs in other communities. Her responsibilities as a community organizer inform her analysis of the inequalities that oppress the poor in general and poor women in particular.

Ironically, when the women prove themselves to be skillful and efficient organizers and begin to question the economic and social systems that subjugate them, the church cuts their funding and labels them “communists and Marxists” (17). Alvarado participates in the movement to keep the program in tact. In 1977, the 36 leaders of all the women’s groups rename the Mothers’ Clubs, The Honduran Federation of Campesina Women. That same year, Alvarado joins the National Campesino Union (UNC). In 1985, she helped found the National Congress of

Rural Workers (CNTC). Her commitment to her people’s struggle to reclaim their right to land forces her to flee to the mountains to avoid being arrested by the military, as well as lands her in jail more than five times. In the chapter “Repression and Prison,” she recounts to the reader the violence she suffered in prison. She states: “They tied my hands and feet together and hung me from the ceiling. They kept me hanging there for hours. When they untied me, they threw me on the ground and stomped on me. Then they interrogated me again” (131). Alvarado remains

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steadfast in her commitment to fighting injustice through activism, despite the risks and punishments.

Admitting in the foreword to her testimony that she feared Medea Benjamin when she met her for the first time, the narrator represents the relations of radical inequality that existed between the U.S. and Honduras, and also underscores the negative impact that regional geopolitical tensions during the Cold War had on the peasant population in her country.

Addressing Benjamin directly, Alvarado states:

When you first came to my house, I was afraid to talk to you. ‘What is this gringa doing here

in my house, the house of a poor campesina?’ I wondered. Because you said you were from

the United States, I thought you were here from the U.S. military base, from Palmerola. And

since I thought all gringos were the same, I thought you had come here to do me harm. (xiii)

It was the summer of 1986, she recalls, and Honduran security forces had just released her from prison, where she says they tortured her because she “works for justice and speaks the truth”

(xiii). Skeptical of the benefits and alert to the potential burdens of telling her story, Alvarado admits to Benjamin that she considered throwing her out of her house and her country: “Better to keep quiet and send this gringa back where she came from,” she recalls thinking (xiii).

Alvarado does not divulge any further details about her initial interaction with or her first impression of the woman who would become her mediator. Demonstrating her commitment to advancing her people’s struggle against hunger, persecution, and abuse and her savvy, Alvarado makes her big move: “But then I decided that I couldn’t pass up a chance to tell the world our story. Because our struggle is not a secret one, it’s an open one. The more people who know our story the better (xiii). An astute woman and community organizer, Alvarado determines that the path to communicating her people’s plight to potential allies in other nations runs through

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Benjamin. To borrow from Hélène Cixous’ essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Alvarado seizes the opportunity to speak in order to secure a place for herself and her people in literature and history (870-75). Unlike her mediator’s acknowledgements, Alvarado does not emphasize in her foreword her personal relationship with Benjamin or the myriad affects that shape it.

“I was a rebel from the time I was born.”

Born in 1952 in the state of New York, Susan Benjamin was raised on Long Island in a traditional Jewish family. Describing her parents in an interview in 2014, Benjamin said the following: “What they wanted from me was that I marry a Jewish doctor” (qtd. in Jay). Benjamin witnessed racial violence in high school, which prompted her to ally herself with “the new black girls” in her classes. Also in high school, she created an anti-war student group and organized walkouts as a way of protesting US involvement in the Vietnam War. She renamed herself

Medea, after the Greek mythological character, completed an undergraduate degree at Columbia

University, and began an MA in Public Health at Tufts University, where she joined Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Her condemnation of the Vietnam War, combined with her mounting criticism of capitalism and US imperialism, prompted her to abandon her studies because she “felt like Tufts was part of the problem” (qtd. in Jay). She spent the next four years travelling extensively in Latin America, Europe and Africa.

Benjamin returned to Tufts to finish her MA in Public Health and went on to complete an

MA in Economics at the New School in New York City. Proficient in several languages and two graduate degrees in hand, she began working as a nutritionist and economist for the World

Health Organization in Africa and Central America, where she carried out projects in places such as Mozambique and Guatemala in the mid 1970s. Benjamin protested the presence of both

Nestle, a milk-formula company doing big business in Mozambique, and United Fruit, the

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colossal banana company that controlled vast amounts of fertile land throughout Central

America. Working in Guatemala with “poor women in poor villages” (qtd. in Jay), she witnessed the detrimental effects that North American business practices were having on the country in general and on underserved rural populations in particular. Recounting her experiences to her interviewer, she states:

These women who I was supposed to help teach how to feed their children better were people

who had their own lands that had been taken away from them by U.S. companies. And here

again I'm faced with multinationals [that] had stole the land of indigenous people, that had

made them into poor people, and it seemed very odd that I would be teaching them how to

feed themselves when the issue is how do they get back the land that had been stolen from

them. (qtd.in Jay)

It is imperative to note that while Benjamin was trying to help mothers feed their children in

Guatemala, Alvarado was working for her local Mothers’ Club in Honduras, also educating poor mothers about nutrition. Their paths would soon converge.

United in their pursuit of social justice for the rural poor, Benjamin and Alvarado collaborate for the purpose of representing the disenfranchised in Honduras and transmitting their struggle for justice to readers in the United States. Exposing the local effects of imperialist economic policies, as well as denouncing the use of institutionalized violence to quell opposition to them, the female collaborators use speech and writing as what in her book Resistance

Literature Barbara Harlow calls “ideological expressions of resistance” (14). Representing what

Harlow refers to as “a collective and concerted struggle against hegemonic domination and oppression” (29), Alvarado underscores the subjugation of her people by the elite classes, the

Honduran government, which fails to uphold the Agrarian Reform Law, the military, which often

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intervenes in land disputes on behalf of the wealthy, and by US efforts to convert Honduras into the hub of its anti-communist military operations in Central America. As the mediator and the author of the text, Benjamin enables “the entry into literature of a person who would normally be excluded from direct literary expression” (Beverly Testimonio 35). Alvarado’s testimony may therefore be viewed as what Harlow describes as an “immediate intervention into the historical record” because it exposes injustice, gives voice to an oppressed population, and champions allegiance to their fight for justice (“From” 16).

Honduras: Christopher Columbus, Capitalism and the C.I.A.

In his book The History of Honduras, Thomas M. Leonard explains that it wasn’t until

Columbus’ fourth and final voyage in 1502 that Honduras was discovered and taken over by the

Spanish. Mining for silver and gold eventually gave way to raising cattle on large haciendas, all of which were controlled by wealthy Spaniards and their criollo descendants. The mestizo population was overwhelmingly excluded from the political realm, and the indigenous population, despite mass resistance and revolt, was decimated “through disease, mistreatment, and their exportation in large numbers to the Caribbean islands’ sugar plantations” (19-20).

During the nineteenth century, contends Leonard, “elite families” tightly controlled the political arena “at the expense of the masses” (42). The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ushered in the era of the colossal banana industry in Honduras. Consequently, United

Fruit, Standard, and Cuyamel companies soon became powerful players in Honduran affairs, consolidating most of the country’s fertile land through bribes and backroom politics. Significant labor strikes that took place in 1917 and 1920 were crushed by the Honduran Armed Forces (88), which revealed the powerful ties that were developing between US businessmen and Honduran legislators and lawmakers. Leonard states: “The fruit companies gave financial support to

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politicians who supported their cause; an informal relationship existed between them. Each had the same self-interest in maintaining the socioeconomic order, their own security, and their wellbeing (104). The Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA) addresses the most obvious effect of these corrupt relationships. In “Human Rights Violations in Honduras: Land Seizures,

Peasants’ Repression, and the Struggle for Democracy on the Ground,” the council documents the fact that “by 1933, 44 percent of the rural population was either landless or owned less than a hectare of land.” Resistance movement, state sponsored violence, and U.S. involvement in

Honduran affairs would intensify in the coming decades.

In his book La gran huelga bananera: los 69 días que conmovieron a Honduras [The

Great Banana Strike: the 69 Days that Moved Honduras] Mario Argueta explains that General

Tiburcio Carías ruled Honduras as a dictator for sixteen years, from 1933-1948, and also that he used the threat of Communism to justify “un clima de represión, exilio, delación y muerte implantado” (17) [“a climate of repression, exile, denunciations and death”] (my translation).

Leonard offers the following anecdote: “It became a common sight to see a Carías political opponent walking the streets of Tegucigalpa in a striped prison suit with a heavy weighted ball attached to his ankle (113). Throughout the Carías dictatorship, inflation, poverty, agitation among workers, resentment among university students, public demonstrations and institutionalized violence increased in Honduras. Argueta states:

[L]a Guerra Fría irrumpió abiertamente en las relaciones internacionales. El mundo quedó

dividido en dos campos antagónicos: “ellos o nosotros,” cada uno intentando expandir sus

áreas de influencia, forjando lealtades y estableciendo alianzas de tipo militar y económico.

(18)

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[The Cold War stormed into international relations. The world was divided into two

antagonistic sides: “them or us,” each one trying to expand their areas of influence, to forge

loyalties and to establish military and economic alliances]. (my translation)

Juan Manuel Gálvez, who had served Carías’ War Minister, became president in 1949, which ushered in “a period of relative peace and order” (Leonard 132). For example, the Gálvez administration passed laws “providing for a minimum wage, eight-hour work days, workers’ paid holidays, and work regulations for women and children” (132). Freedom of the press and political parties may have flourished, and political tensions may have continued to diminish if, in

1950, the North American National Security Council (NSC) had not concluded that the Soviet

Union was determined to spread communism throughout the world by indoctrinating the poor in underdeveloped countries (136). The NSC underscored that in Central America, “local communist organizations had become a legitimate spokesman for the needs of the disenfranchised masses” (137). For analysts in the NSC, the definition of a communist was simple and straightforward: “anyone challenging the established order” (137).

Galvez governed Honduras until 1954, when his vice president, Julio Lozano Díaz, formerly an accountant for Rosario Mining Company, deposed him. That same year, Jacobo

Arbenz, the first democratically elected president of Guatemala, was ousted by a military coup that was orchestrated by the CIA and supported by Anastasio Somoza García, dictator of

Nicaragua. Tensions in the region, as well as throughout the world, were escalating.

In Honduras in 1954, a massive and successful strike against Standard Fruit, United Fruit,

Tela Railroad, and the Rosario Mining Company evidenced a work force that was well organized and widely supported by teachers and university students. Elected to the presidency in 1957,

Ramón Villeda Morales “gave significant attention to the unequal pattern of land ownership and

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initiated a program to achieve democratic agrarian reform,” (“Human Rights Violations”). His administration founded the National Agrarian Institute (INA) in 1961. A year later, it passed the

Agrarian Reform Law, which gave the government the right to expropriate uncultivated land for the purposing of redistributing to the poor. Unsurprisingly, the Agrarian Reform Law incited the nation’s conservative upper class. The wealthiest landowners, who belonged to the National

Federation of Agriculturalists and Stock Raisers of Honduras, and the professionals who represented their interests, were particularly incensed. The mutual animosity between the rich and the rural poor was exacerbated, which prompted violent clashes throughout the country.

Oswaldo López Arrellano, who led the armed rebellion that overthrew Villeda Morales in

1963, ended his predecessor’s progressive agenda when he annulled the Agrarian Reform Law.

As Tim Merrill points out in Honduras: A Country Study, the new leader began “persecuting and intimidating peasant unions and any leftist group that represented opposition to his rule” (125).

Not long after Lyndon B. Johnson was elected president of the United States in 1964, he officially recognized the López Arrellano regime, and also publically commended his efforts to

“promote the military suppression of Communism,” (150). Power changed hands several times in the next decade, via both elections and armed takeovers. In 1978, for example, General Policarpo

Paz García orchestrated a successful military coup and proceeded to rule Honduras through violent and repressive measures. In his article “The Tragic Course and Consequences of U.S.

Policy in Honduras,” Philip L. Shepard states: “the mismanagement, incompetence and corruption of the Paz García military regime was unprecedented, even in Honduras tragic history” (111). Despite elections in 1981, the military became an institutionalized machine charged with eliminating dissidence. Honduras soon became a “launch pad for U.S. military intervention in Central America,” particularly in El Salvador and Nicaragua (113).

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The US government pursued its objective of suppressing communism in the region through a “wide range of economic, political, social, psychological, and military activities utilizing several U.S. government agencies” (Leonard 150). Wealthy Honduran government officials, powerful North American businessmen, and the U.S. government, all of whom were committed to cementing a capitalist economy in Honduras, teamed up to prevent socialism and communism from taking root there. Resistance movement was beaten back by force. The historical context that Benjamin elaborates in her introduction to Don’t Be Afraid Gringo is very similar to the context that Leonard, Merrill, and Shepard document in their scholarship. She also addresses the strategic value of Honduras during the Cold War. She points out that the U.S. government constructed military bases there, which it used to carry out the multiple and simultaneous proxy wars it was waging against the spread of communism in the region:

In exchange for vast increases in US military and economic aid, Honduras joined hands with

the United States in its effort to topple the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Honduras became a base

for the Nicaraguan rebel forces, the “contras,” and its army provided logistical and

intelligence support to the Salvadoran military in its war against the FMLN guerrillas. (Don’t

xviii)

She also notes that assassinations, disappearances, secret prisons, and clandestine cemeteries debilitated opposition to the North American presence in Honduras, and also enabled the US to further its “militarization” of Honduras (xx). Moreover, like Leonard, Shepard, and Merrill,

Benjamin also calls out the Regan/Bush administration for training paramilitary death squads in

Honduras and using them to beat back popular resistance movement in other Central American countries. As I demonstrate later, however, the jabs that Benjamin takes at Ronald Reagan in her introduction pale in comparison to what Alvarado hits him with throughout her testimony.

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CONSCIOUSNESS RAISING, AFFECTIVE SOLIDARITY AND FEMINIST

STANDPOINT EPISTEMOLOGY

In this section, I focus my textual analysis of Don’t Be Afraid Gringo on how the speaker depicts the Mothers’ Clubs, the structure of their meetings, and the content of the conversations between women during these meetings. I aim to facilitate a feminist reading of the narrator’s description of the clubs by underscoring the radical transformation that she underwent in them. I conceptualize them not only as sites that promote feminist consciousness-raising and bonds of affective solidarity between women but also as alternative epistemic communities.

hooks explains that consciousness raising (CR) settings were places in the US where women could informally discuss “the importance of learning about patriarchy as a system of domination” (Feminism 7). The structure of the sessions that she describes enabled women to speak and be heard. They also provided women tools for considering the impact that male domination had on them in the home or the workplace. The (CR) groups that she delineates were originally comprised of women who occupied dissimilar locations in the social order that comprised them. She quickly points out, however, that racial and economic diversity dropped significantly when the (CR) sessions were essentially relocated to academic classrooms, where the majority of professors and students were white. As knowledge about second wave feminism was becoming institutionalized in colleges and universities in the US, the Catholic Church in

Honduras – unbeknownst to the male figures who controlled them – were harnessing what hooks calls the “massed based potential” (10) of feminist movement by calling on underserved females in rural communities to join the Mothers’ Clubs.

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In the chapter “The Church Opened Our Eyes,” Alvarado delineates her experiences in the Mothers’ Clubs and how they changed her thinking, inspired her to become an activist, and facilitated her friendships with other women. She states:

I loved going to the meetings. It became the highpoint of my week, because it was a chance to

get together with other women and talk about the problems we had in common – like how to

keep our children fed and our husbands sober. We learned that we had rights just like men did.

We learned that we had to stop being so passive and stick up for our rights. (Don’t 11)

At least two comparisons can de drawn between the all-female spaces that Alvarado and hooks describe. The most obvious similarities are the equally vital roles that the acts of speaking and listening play in both of them. Some of the words that Alvarado’s uses to describe how she and her friends felt during meetings overlap with those that hooks uses to depict the emotions that women tended to experience in the (CR) sessions. While “love,” “highpoint,” “together,” “talk,” and “we” could be viewed as reiterations of hooks’ notion of female solidarity, “we learned” and

“rights” evidence consciousness-raising. For these reasons, the Mothers’ Clubs, like the (CR) sessions, may be viewed as alternative epistemic communities that enable a female-centered form of knowledge production, raise women’s awareness of patriarchy, and call on them to embrace their agency.

One year after her peers elect her to serve as president of their local club, Alvarado is chosen, along with fifteen other women from her community, to attend a one-week course, which is sponsored, like the clubs themselves, by the Church. She illustrates how the course changed her and, consequently, her relationship with her husband. She states:

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I wasn’t the same. Now when he came home drunk, I’d put up a stink. I was more

independent, too, since I had my own group of friends. And my work in the club made me feel

important; it made me feel like I had something to contribute to the community. (12)

The female solidarity that Alvarado portrays influences her decision to attend the course, even if it means disobeying her husband, who forbids her from participating. Viewed through a feminist lens, her refusal to acquiesce both challenges his authority over her and destabilizes the patriarchal logics that govern their partnership and their home. She also reiterates the relationship between dialogue among women and female empowerment:

We worked hard all week, talking about our experiences as women and mothers. We talked

about the most serious problems in our communities […] and about how we could solve some

of these problems […] it was something completely new for us. We never really discussed all

these community problems, and we surely never felt that we could do anything about them.

But just talking about it together made us feel like yes, maybe we could do something to

make our lives a little easier. (13, my emphasis)

Then, when the local religious authorities offer her a job organizing Mothers’ Clubs in other communities, I suggest that the speaker articulates “choice and action,” which hooks claims are equally necessary if one is to “become a believer in feminist politics” (Feminism 7). Alvarado states:

I saw that it was my chance to do something different with my life, to do something good for

myself and other women. The Mothers’ Clubs had opened my eyes to another world, a world

where people got together and tried to change things. (13, my emphasis)

She goes on to convey both her husband’s disapproval of her paid employment opportunity and the tactics he uses to coerce her into declining it, such as getting drunk and hitting her in front of

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their children. When she does finally leave him, her female friends offer to take her children in so that she can travel and do her job.

The projects that women like Alvarado carry out in nearby communities have four main objectives: 1.organize women into Mothers’ Clubs; 2. keep track of pregnant women and mothers who are breast-feeding; 3. record the number of infants; and 4. distribute food to malnourished children. Posing questions to the women in the communities they serve and listening to their responses is the only way for the female organizers to establish the trust that is required for them to do their jobs. I posit that the methodology Alvarado delineates could be viewed as a practical blend of the standard approaches to qualitative research that Kleinman,

Stenross, McMahon and Tedlock elaborate in their scholarship. The community organizers that

Alvarado portrays in her oral history travel to their field settings to conduct qualitative interviews with women for the purpose of producing reliable data about their experiences. Moreover, they pool their findings and use them to theorize gendered oppression. She states:

We came to the conclusion that there were three classes in Honduras: the upper, the middle,

and the lower class. The upper class is the rich people – the landowners, the factory owners,

the politicians. They’re the ones that have power. The middle class is the worker in the city.

They don’t have as much money or power, but they’re better off than we are. We’re at the

bottom of the ladder, especially the campesina women, because not only are we exploited by

other classes, but by men as well. (17, my emphasis)

Her description of what Kimberly Crenshaw calls interlocking forms of oppression mirrors what in her article “Campesina Fights Hunger and Its Causes,” Mary C. Turck depicts as the “triple burden of poverty, racial prejudice and machismo” (14).

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In “Taming Macho Ways,” Alvarado sheds light on the ways in which men exploit women in the home by highlighting the unequal distribution of labor, a man’s right to control his household’s meager finances, and rampant domestic violence. At the outset of the chapter,

Alvarado recalls the birth of her awareness of gender inequality: “when I started working with the Mothers’ Clubs in the Catholic Church, it was the first time I realized that we women work even harder than the men do” (Don’t 51). She illustrates the unequal distribution of labor between males and females by pointing out that in addition to earning money outside of the home just like men do, women are also expected to cook, clean, manage the home, and bear the brunt of all child-rearing responsibilities. She states: “Men may be out working during the day, but when they come home they usually don’t do a thing. They want their meal to be ready, and after they eat they either lie down to rest or go out drinking. But we women keep on working”

(51). I suggest that Alvarado’s use of both the subject pronouns they and we and the gendered nouns men and women marks the genesis of her awareness of a collective identity that is unique to females. Moreover, the narrator’s claim that men make all decisions about how money will be distributed in the home evinces the economic subjugation of women in the private sphere. She asks: “What can a woman say? If she still complains, she is asking for a fight […] that’s why so many campesina women have to work. They will do anything to make a few pennies to feed their children” (51). These words speak to the fact that gendered exploitation constrains women’s agency and restricts the choices and options that are available to them, should they desire to set out on their own.

In her article “Women and the Agrarian Reform in Honduras” Constantina Safilios-

Rothschild explains that the value of the efforts of women to help their families survive by earning “small sums of money at irregular times from a variety of sources” are largely

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discounted and/or ignored by men and policy makers (16-19). Similarly, the absence of a way for women to achieve what hooks calls “economic self-sufficiency” (Feminism 49) is directly linked to their lack of options for escaping domestic violence. Alvarado explains:

Another problem women have is that their husbands often beat them […] sometimes he leaves

her all black and blue or with a bloody nose, a black eye or a busted lip. The neighbors can

hear everything. But since it’s a fight between the two of them, no one interferes […] the

woman never says what really happened. She’s too embarrassed. So she says she fell down or

had an accident. She doesn’t even tell her friends or her own mother what happened. (Don’t

53-4)

I situate the speaker’s description of domestic violence within hooks’ framing of feminist movement as a “force that dramatically uncovers and exposes the ongoing reality” of physical and psychological abuse in the home (61). Alvarado delineates what hooks calls patriarchal violence by exposing her community’s tacit acceptance of a man’s right to beat a woman, even if it is against the law. She makes it clear that domestic violence is a cultural norm that not even the local police will disrupt.

In spite of the odds that are stacked against women in the community that Alvarado describes in her testimony, she insists that improvements can be made if both men and women allow for a shift in their awareness and behavior. On the one hand, she states unequivocally that it is unjust for the demands of the household to fall on women only, as well as underscores the importance of equality in marriage and in the home: “If two people get together to form a home, it should be because they love and respect each other. And that means they should share everything” (Don’t 52). On the other hand, she concedes that creating equality among men and

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women will not happen overnight. Finally, she demonstrates her awareness of the household as a site for change.

I know that changing the way men and women treat each other is a long process. But if we

really want to build a new society, we have to change the bad habits of the past […] we all

have to make changes […] our struggle has to begin in our own homes. (56)

It is significant that the speaker contends that men and women are equally responsible for overcoming “an ethics of domination which says the powerful have the right to rule over the powerless and can use any means to subordinate them” (hooks Feminism 74). As I demonstrate later, Alvarado’s fight against exploitation and oppression will extend far beyond the privacy of the home.

The speaker makes clear that the marital conflicts she depicts in her testimony took place after she and Alberto had been living together for about 15 years, a period during which she gave birth to three more children, all of them his. I put her description of the anger, sadness, and desperation she felt as a consequence of the asymmetries of power that marked her marriage in dialogue with Clare Hemmings’ claim that women may engage in feminist politics by channeling myriad affects, such as frustration, misery, rage, and a yearning to connect with others (148).

Acknowledging the presence of these emotions in their daily life, argues Hemmings, may propel women into a process of transformation by which they come to engage in feminism. Awareness of the origin of such affects, she continues, will necessarily lead women to a state she calls affective dissonance, a sort of destabilization of the marginalized identity that social structures impose on women. This disharmony is, for Hemmings, both the place where “feminist politics necessarily begins from,” and the motor that may inspire and create “affective solidarity” between oppressed groups of women (148).

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If, as Hemmings posits, affective dissonance yields feminist activity, then Alvarado’s description of emotions may be viewed as the origin of her engagement in feminist activity. In the first chapter of her testimony, “Childhood to Motherhood,” Alvarado informs the reader of her male partner’s resistance to allowing her three children to live in his home. The children, who were currently living with their maternal grandmother, had expressed to their mother their desire to live with her again. She recalls:

I was delighted. But a few days after they arrived, Alberto started fighting with them. He

wouldn’t give them food. ‘Let them go back to your mother’s house,’ he told me, ‘because

I’m not about to feed another man’s children.’ What could I do? I had to send them back.

(Don’t 7)

Explaining why her children would visit her only when Alberto was not there, Alvarado remembers a difficult moment:

I remember one day, the oldest boy was sitting at the table eating a tortilla when he heard

Alberto come in. He grabbed the tortilla, stuffed it in his shirt and ran out of the house. I felt

awful. (8)

The narrator recounts the fleeing joy she felt when her children moved back in with her. Her partner’s resentment of their presence, combined with the patriarchal control he has over their home and the fear he inspires in her kids, forces her to tell them they must leave. She highlights her distress and sorrow and underscores the constraints on her agency by calling attention to the patriarchal logics that govern her home and her marriage.

In addition to sharing her anguish, Alvarado makes explicit her rage, which, for

Hemmings, is one of the main affects that may disorient an oppressed woman, and,

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consequently, “create the conditions for transformation” (151). After her son flees with the tortilla, she engages her anger and confronts her husband directly.

‘Look at what you’ve done,’ I yelled at Alberto. ‘I can’t even give my own children a scrap of

food. They’re terrified of you. I work my ass off trying to make a few pennies to support my

children, and you have no right to stop me from feeding them.’ That was when I started

having doubts about living with Alberto. But I was pregnant again, and had nowhere to go.

(Don’t 8)

Alvarado’s outburst centers several key components of her situation. First, she expresses her rage by screaming, calling her partner out, and attempting to hold him accountable for his actions. She describes the wretchedness she feels as a mother because Alberto forbids her children to visit her, and calls him out for using his authority to instill fear in them. Finally, she reminds him that she earns her own money and that he is mistaken if he thinks he has the right to prevent her from spending it as she deems fit.

It is tempting to view the verbal altercation between Alvarado and Alberto, a female and a male who are entrenched in patriarchal culture, as a victory for her, which, to a certain extent, it is. She employs her voice as a mechanism for standing up to Alberto and denouncing the control that he exercises over her and her children. At the same time, she emphasizes her understanding of the limits that her position as a pregnant woman impose on her. She fully acknowledges that her only real option is to remain in his home as his subordinate.

Viewed through the lens of feminist standpoint epistemology, Don’t be Afraid Gringo may be considered a locus of feminist collaboration. In this section, I analyze the text as what in

“A Re-Invitation to Feminist Research” Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber describes as an “alternative model of knowledge building” (6). I contend that Alvarado’s depiction of her “oppressed

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location within society provides fuller insights into society as a whole” and that by recognizing

“women’s life stories as valuable forms of knowledge” (6). Alvarado and Benjamin transmit to their readers the impact that patriarchy, imperialism, and capitalism have on underserved women in rural communities in Honduras. In order to do this, I engage the attention that Hesse-Biber calls to women’s quotidian experiences. She claims that “the concrete lived experience is a key place from which to build knowledge and foment social change” (“Feminist Research” 2). She explains that throughout the 1970s and 1980s, feminist empiricists working in myriad disciplines in the US championed departing from androcentric investigative norms by including gender as a category of analysis. She argues that feminist research disrupts traditionally male-biased modes of inquiry by “paying close attention to the specificity of women’s individual lived experiences,” and viewing women as agents of change (“Re-Invitation” 5). Hesse-Biber also contends that feminist scholarship enriched “knowledge building,” in diverse disciplines in the 1980s and

1990s because it contested traditional “ways of knowing” in the academy (9). Feminist standpoint scholars, she explains, posit that each woman’s lived experiences are unique because of the categories of difference that shape her identity. They also frame each woman’s understanding and assessment of her positionality as a legitimate form of knowledge building

(11-13).

Cook and Fonow (2005) underscore the objective of producing knowledge that liberates women by “challenging the very epistemological foundations of what constitutes knowledge”

(2211). Much like Hesse-Biber, the authors stress the importance of reflexivity throughout the research process, and insist on consciousness-raising as a way to uncover subjugated knowledge.

Feminist research, they explain, is the bedrock of “action and social change” (2223), a force that propels women toward empowerment and emancipation by contesting patriarchy. Similarly,

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Hawkesworth (2012) asserts that feminist scholarship challenges dominate forms of knowledge production across academic disciplines (92). Political convictions, she explains, naturally inform the diverse methodologies that feminist scholars use to contest androcentric research norms

(106). Feminist scholars, she continues, champion objectivity as a means of promoting sensible intellectual deliberation among scholars and urging them to include marginalized populations in their research. Rejecting outright the foundational idea that there is “an absolute ground for truth claims,” feminist scholarship, for Hawkesworth, insists that dominant social and cultural norms influence how (if?) one acquires and processes knowledge (109).

In “Feminist Standpoint” (2012) Kristen Intemann reveals that feminist standpoint empiricism “is committed to producing empirically adequate knowledge that challenges, rather than reinforces, systems of oppression” (1). She underscores “epistemic communities [as] the locus of knowledge and objectivity” (12). Insisting that a communal feminist standpoint does not imply the homogeneity of the subjugated experience, Intemann contends that a standpoint is

“group consciousness that occurs through a process of transformative criticism” (4). Similarly, in

“Feminist Standpoint Epistemology: Building Knowledge and Empowerment Through Women’s

Lived Experience” (2011) Abigail Brooks clarifies and defends feminist standpoint epistemology. She urges us to “see and understand the world through the eyes and experiences of oppressed women,” as well as utilize “the vision and knowledge of oppressed women” to bring about social change (55). Much like Hemmings and Intemann, Brooks contends that centering women’s concrete experiences will yield knowledge about society’s systems of oppression and inspire movement toward more egalitarian structures. She states:

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Much of contemporary feminist scholarship and research strive to give voice to women’s

lives that have been silenced or ignored, uncover hidden knowledge contained within

women’s experiences, and bring about women-centered solidarity and social change. (54-5)

The work of all of these scholars is useful to my analysis of the Mothers’ Clubs as a space where marginalized women talk about their experiences, recover and share their memories, and articulate their rage, pain and frustration. Sharing among women in these clubs foregrounds their collective struggle, creates female alliances, raises their consciousness, and motivates them to try to advance change. Finally, the Mothers’ Clubs may be viewed alternative epistemic communities in which women’s voices produce new knowledge and understanding, as well as inspire some participants to resist oppression by taking action that may lead to social change.

“We have to fight with more courage, more convictions, more strength.”

The chapter “Our Struggle to Recover Land,” depicts the peasants’ fight to reclaim small portions of unused farmland that belong to members of the elite, land owning class. Passed in

Honduras in 1962 and overhauled in 1975, the Agrarian Reform Law sought to redistribute unused land to the rural poor. Alvarado states:

The law is very clear. It says that land has to be fully used, that it has to fulfill a social

function. Whether the land is private or state owned, if its not being cultivated or it only has a

few head of cattle on its supposed to be turned over to the campesinos. (Don’t 68)

Frustrated with bureaucracy and delays and without food to feed their families, the campesinos in Alvarado’s community take matters into their own hands by planting basic crops on plots of land that are not being used, and refusing to abandon their crops when confronted by the landowners.

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Alvarado tells us that the first recovery she participates in was on a piece of the vast lands that a wealthy latifundista had inherited from her father. First, Alvarado highlights that she is the only woman present. She states: “When we entered the field there were about 80 of us, all men except for me” (70). The campesinos plant their crops, and the police arrive to chase them away.

They return the next day and the Honduran Armed Forces scare them off. The campesinos come back, and cattle are sent in to trample what they have planted. On the fifth day, a respected leader in the campesino community is shot in the head while watering the crops. Alvarado describes her reaction:

“I was furious. ‘Let’s go after those murderers,’ I yelled. ‘We can’t let them get away with this!’

When I get mad, there’s no stopping me. I grabbed my machete and went to hunt them down. All of the campesinos followed me” (72). Arming themselves with “machetes, sticks and stones and some old hunting rifles,” the peasants honor their fallen comrade by breaking into the landowner’s house, throwing out the servants and managers, and declaring themselves the rightful owners of the property (73). Alvarado tells us that the police eventually leave in order to avoid being linked to a landowner who murdered an unarmed campesino, and that the landowner retreats to her home in the city.

The second land recovery that Alvarado describes in this chapter takes place “on a piece of land belonging to the sister-in-law of ex-president Suazo Córdova” (73). The tension in

Alvarado’s narration is palpable: “the landowner’s three sons appeared, armed to the teeth. They had rifles and machine guns, weapons they must have gotten from their friends in the military”

(73). Gunfire forces the campesinos to abandon their crops and scramble for cover in the woods.

Alvarado describes her plan for retaliation:

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We returned after they left, but we knew the sons would be back to shoot at us again. “Do you

have the balls to really win this fight, or don’t you?” I asked the campesinos. They said yes,

that they had no intention of turning back […] the bravest man would stay up front with me,

and the rest would be hiding behind us. (73-4)

Alvarado’s plan is successful. One of the brothers drops his gun and runs away. The campesinos capture the other two, strip them of their rifles, and tie them up. Alvarado approaches the prisoners and looks them over carefully. She shares her observations with the reader:

Something bothered me. There was something about one of them that just wasn’t right.

He had a bulge between his legs that was too big to be real. So I looked and looked, and

finally I went up to him and stuck my hand down his pants. “Let’s see what you’ve got here!”

I shouted. And you know what I pulled out? A big plastic bag full of marijuana! (74-75)

According to Alvarado’s recollection of events, the military arrives and the coronel addresses only her, telling her that he knows she is the leader. She reproaches him and his armed soldiers for defending the landowners and for not upholding the Agrarian Reform Law. She also seizes the opportunity to tear into the elite by making a fool of one of their male offspring:

“And you know what else?” I told the colonel. “Not only do the rich violate the Agrarian

Reform Law, but they’re also drug addicts.” I pulled out the bag of marijuana. “You know

where he was hiding this, colonel? Want to take a guess? He had it right here,” I pointed to the

young man’s penis. “Right here between his testicles.” (76)

Alvarado represents this moment as a big victory for her and for her people. Her audacious humor strips the prisoner of his masculinity and provokes the bystanders to laugh at him. She concludes her telling of this series of events by noting that a few months later the National

Agrarian Institute gave the campesinos legal title to 50 acres of that land (76).

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My reading of these events revolves around Alvarado’s depiction of herself as the undisputed leader of land recoveries. I posit that her narrative voice is the mechanism through which she underscores both her actions and her gender. Her choice to extract her individual voice from the collective one that marks most testimonial literature, particularly those texts by and about women, suggests that these events, as Alvarado narrates them to her mediator, are mostly about her. During the first land recovery, the campesinos follow her. She is the only woman. She leads the charges and the showdowns from which the peasants emerge victorious. Alvarado provokes her male comrades into action by calling into question their masculinity. I, woman, have the balls to fight and win, she seems to suggest. Show me just how big your balls are; she seems to say to the men. Alvarado solidifies her position as matriarch by telling the reader that

“only the bravest man” shall stand by her side on the front line of this battle to recover land.

Rather than appropriating male genitalia in order to inspire her men to prove their masculinity by fighting, during the second land recovery, she employs humor to emasculate one of the young, male heirs by symbolically taking possession of his penis. First, Alvarado confidently demonstrates to the reader her knowledge of the appropriate size of a male penis by stating that she knew the bulge between the young man’s legs was too big to be real. After directing her female gaze at his crotch, scrutinizing what she sees and concluding that something isn’t right, she reaches her hand down his pants, extracts the bag of drugs, and triumphantly displays it for all to see. Alvarado’s portrayal of her words and actions in this moment of her narrative demonstrates her power over the landowner’s son – let us remember he is unarmed and tied up – as well as calls into question the existence, size and function of his penis. She mocks his masculinity and virility. Keeping in mind the larger social, historical, economic and political context of Alvarado’s time and place in history, I contend that she takes a stab at the patriarchal,

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landowning class by verbally castrating one of its male offspring. Furthermore, my reading calls attention to the fact that the site of Alvarado’s audacious actions and biting verbal intervention is located less than 100 miles from the largest US military base in Honduras. Knowing that North

American soldiers could be called in at any moment to support the Honduran Armed Forces and the landowners does not deter her. Could it not therefore be argued that Alvarado both mocks a male heir’s manhood and taunts the US military?

“We’d surely do a better job of running our country than these rich guys can.”

In “We Don’t Want to Beg,” Alvarado scrutinizes the U.S.-Honduran relationship. She questions the utility of the money, food and assistance that U.S. organizations – the Agency for

International Development, the Food and Agriculture Organization and the Peace Corps – send to Honduras. Alvarado insists that paternalistic aid packages, combined with the banana companies’ command over the most fertile land and the mining companies’ control of the country’s natural resources, exacerbates Honduras’s dependence on the US. She states:

Honduras isn’t poor, but our riches leave the country. Most of it goes to the United States.

And then we have to go back to the gringos and beg to get some of it back. What a racket!

They get rich off our wealth, and then we get down on our hands and knees begging for help.

(Don’t 102)

Emphasizing the link between the lack of productive parcels of land and rampant poverty in rural communities, Alvarado accuses the Honduran government of selling out its people, land and resources to North American businessmen. In addition to the organizations listed above, the narrator takes aim at Honduran president José Azcona Hoyo, Rosario Mining Company,

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Standard Fruit Company, and the other “big pricks that come here bossing us around” (105).

Surely, her choice of words would have made Helen Cixous very proud.28

Alvarado also underscores the utility of the situated and practical knowledge that campesina women have about economics, as well as hints at what the political, economic and social landscape of Honduras might look like if women were in power. First, she points out their knack for managing the “measly dollar a day that the men give” them to provide for their children and maintain the home (105). She highlights the female practices of “being thrifty,”

“making do” and “sharing” as proven skills that would serve women well in administrative positions at the local and national levels (105). Alvarado describes the ways in which women’s understanding of money and what it is like to survive without it would bring greater freedom to

Honduras in general and to the downtrodden in particular. She states:

We’ll spread the wealth. We’ll distribute the land, we’ll get the banana companies in line, and

we’ll take good care of our minerals and forests. And we won’t depend on the United States

or anyone else. We women like our independence. (106)

Alvarado’s words bring to light her view that her country’s economic and political self- sufficiency is directly tied to women’s liberation from the home and entrance into positions of power. At the end of this chapter, she reaches out to her readers by making a poignant plea for a specific kind of assistance.

I’d say the best way to show solidarity with us is not by sending food or clothing or dollars.

No. Show your solidarity by telling your government that Honduras belongs to the

Hondurans. Tell your government to get out of our country and leave us alone. (106)

28 As I mentioned in my introduction, in her essay“The Laugh of the Medusa,” Helen Cixous posits that men have tightly controlled culture in general and writing in particular. One of the tools she claims these “big bosses” use to perpetuate the repression of women is their “imbecilic capitalist machinery” (887).

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Alvarado makes it clear to her North American readers that the only way they can stand with her is by standing up to their government’s self-seeking economic, political and military policies in

Honduras. Calling on her readers to join forces with her, Alvarado engages their moral compass and fundamental right to freedom of speech as vehicles for holding the US government accountable for perpetuating Honduras’s economic dependency and furthering her goal of achieving social justice and equality for everyone.

“Ever since the Sandinistas came to power, the United States has been building bases all over our country.”

In “Gringos and Contras on Our Land,” Alvarado rebukes the presence of the US military and

Nicaraguan counterrevolutionaries in Honduras. She criticizes Ronald Reagan for meddling in

Central American affairs, and also lambastes the Honduran government for making it easy for

C.I.A. operatives to train Contras on US military bases in Honduras. Her summary of this situation closely mirrors what Bradford Martin states in his book The Other Eighties: A Secret

History of America in the Age of Reagan (2011):

The contras set up bases in Honduras to launch cross-border offenses to destabilize the leftist

Sandinista government and reverse the 1979 revolution that ousted Anastasio Somoza

Debayle, ending a repressive U.S. backed family dynasty that dated back to the 1930s. (25)

Alvarado quickly calls into question both the motives and objectives of U.S. intervention in

Nicaragua: “I don’t understand what the United States plans to do. I don’t think they’d send in

U.S. troops, because the Sandinistas are well prepared and too many gringos would die” (Don’t

114). Her words accurately describe the U.S. military’s penchant at the time for “low-intensity warfare,” which, according to Martin, “sidestepped the politically and emotionally unpalatable

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possibility of American casualties” (30). Instead of sending North American soldiers into

Nicaragua to overthrow Daniel Ortega, the country’s first democratically elected president, the

U.S. government deemed it more strategic to finance and equip the Contras, and to employ the

C.I.A. to train them in Honduras. It is worth noting, as Martin does, that Reagan’s pet nickname for the Contras was “freedom fighters,” and that he portrayed them as “heroic combatants in a vital Cold War struggle” to extirpate the Soviet Union’s influence in the region (25). Thus, as

Shepard states in “The Tragic Course and Consequences of U.S. Policy in Honduras” (1984), by abetting the U.S. military, the Honduran government was essentially “doing Reagan’s dirty work in Central America” (109). Alvarado shares Shepherd’s view.

Invoking the discourse of the Cold War, Alvarado continues her analysis and criticism of

U.S. intervention in Nicaraguan affairs:

I don’t think they’d bomb Nicaragua, either. Because if they bombed Nicaragua, that other

nation – the Soviet Union – would get involved and the United States is afraid of a war with

the Soviet Union. It doesn’t mind a war with little countries like Nicaragua, but it doesn’t

want a war with the Soviet Union. (Don’t 114)

Alvarado’s nascent understanding of the face off between the two world powers is the major theme toward the end of her testimony. She goes straight to the top of the international power structure and lays blame on Ronald Regan. She does little to mask her disdain for him and his policies, placing particular emphasis on his imperialistic and paternalistic attitude toward the region and his political agenda. She states:

It seems to me that if Ronald Reagan loses in Nicaragua, he’ll lose in all of Central America.

But if he defeats Nicaragua, then he’s got it made. He’s already got Honduras, so that’s two

countries. And with Nicaragua and Honduras he can go on to take El Salvador. That’s three

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Central American republics under U.S. control. Then Guatemala will follow. That’s what

Ronald Reagan wants. And he knows that if he loses in Nicaragua, he loses all his interests in

Central America. (114)

Alvarado bluntly calls Reagan out on his intention to wage its war on communism by forcing its hand and shaping events in several vulnerable Central American countries.

Leonard contends that the Reagan administration sought three objectives in this region of the world. They were: 1.sabotage the Sandinistas in Nicaragua; 2.help the military regime in El

Salvador eradicate the FMLN; and 3.ignore the human rights violations carried out by the

Guatemalan military to “suppress alleged communism in that country” (History 156). In her testimony, Alvarado exposes these goals and underscores who bears the brunt of the conflict. She states: “The people who live near the border are scared to death, because they get caught in the battles. Lots of campesinos have moved” (Don’t 112). Alvarado links US proxy wars in Central

America and the Cold War to the central issue in her testimony: the need of a movement to uphold the laws of the Agrarian Reform Law in Honduras. She makes it known that the rural poor are pushed off of their land to make room for the banana and mining industries and for US military bases and training camps for the Contras. They also leave their land and their lives behind in order to escape the violence of the conflict that is financed and orchestrated by the US military.

Alvarado takes her last swipe at Reagan at the end of “Gringos and Contras on Our

Land.” She cleverly breaks her testimony wide open by telling the reader what she would say to

Reagan, if she had the chance to speak to him directly. She states: “I’d tell him he’s on the wrong track. I’d tell him to stop being so unjust with Central America” (114). After denouncing his wrongful approach and policies, Alvarado turns back to her readers. She continues: “I think

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that Ronald’s government is the stupidest government I’ve seen in my life” (114). As noted previously, Alvarado’s condemnation of Reagan’s modus operandi in Central America in the

1980s is rooted in her practical understanding of the impact that his administration’s policies have on the rural poor. For Alvarado, there is a way to begin making things right. She states:

“Someone needs to have a heart-to-heart talk with Ronald and tell him that things in Central

America have to change, whether he likes it or not” (115).

In what I argue is the most wildly impressive narrative moment in her testimony,

Alvarado employs the indefinite pronoun someone, a word that refers to an unknown or unnamed person or a person of importance. I contend that Alvarado is actually referring to herself when she says someone. She implies that she could effectively challenge Reagan’s Cold War discourse and bring him to his senses regarding his unfair treatment of Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador.

It is noteworthy that Alvarado suggests a heart-to-heart as the appropriate vehicle by for communicating with Reagan. Her desire to create an emotional bond between the president of the United States and a campesina from Honduras underscores the importance in her testimony of engaging affects as a mechanism for creating change. In this light, I contend that the Gringo in the title of text is Ronald Reagan and that her message to him goes something like this: I acknowledge your fear, I will tell you the truth about Honduras, and I hope you will listen and begin doing the right thing in Central America.

Conclusion

In this chapter I demonstrated several reasons why Don’t Be Afraid Gringo A Honduran

Woman Speaks from the Heart the Story of Elvia Alvarado can be viewed as the textual product of a radical feminist collaboration. First, I analyzed the partnership between Alvarado and her

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mediator within bell hooks’ framing of the relationships that developed between radical feminists of color and their white female allies during second wave feminism in the United States. Then, I used theories such as consciousness raising, affective solidarity, and standpoint epistemology to carry out a feminist analysis of the speaker’s description of gender inequality in Honduras during the Cold War. I highlighted her resistance to patriarchy in the private sphere by examining her choices to disobey and leave her husband. Finally, I argued that her description of both land recoveries and the important role she played can be viewed as examples of her resistance to hegemony in the public sphere.

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CONCLUSION

This dissertation is my attempt to contribute something new to the longstanding and ongoing conversation about testimonial literary production in Latin America in the twentieth century and the national liberation movements that inspired this production. I do this in several ways. First, I ground my research in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Honduras because, compared to the attention that scholars have called and continue to call to right-wing regimes in, for example, the Southern Cone, the Central American region remains understudied in the academy in the

United States. Second, I privilege mediated testimonies over the more celebrated form of testimonial production, the latter being texts that are authored and narrated by the same person.

Third, all of the texts in my corpus are female-centered. Finally, I weave multiple feminist analytics and diverse queer theories into the fabric of my theoretical framework for the purpose of crossing the borders that that have traditionally separated academic disciplines. The newness of what my dissertation brings to the table stems, in part, from this mixing of fields of study. It also comes from my attempt to combine theories and forms of knowledge in distinctive ways

(Anzaldúa Borderlands).

This hybrid approach to my study of female testimonial narratives enabled me to explore the common ground and the differences between the oral histories in my corpus and the women who collaborated to produce them. It also facilitated my feminist and queer readings of the speakers’ descriptions of their life experiences. I hope that by exploring the texts through a multidimensional lens I have avoided both universalizing female testimonial literature and essentializing the experiences that women narrators depict in them.

In Chapter 1, I viewed the structural injustices that Doris Tijerino describes through a de- colonial feminist lens in order to build a bridge between her critique of US imperialism and

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contemporary de-colonial feminists’ critique of capitalism. In Chapter 2, I engaged queer critiques of heteronormativity and the notions of queer failure and queer futurity to explore how

Rigoberta Menchú depicts not just the cultural logics that operate in her Mayan community but also her resistance to them. In Chapter 3, theories such as consciousness-raising, affective solidarity, and standpoint epistemology enabled my feminist reading of Elvia Alvarado’s portrayal of her life experiences.

I demonstrated how the testimonies in my corpus exemplify feminine writing by pointing to the symbiotic relationship between speaking and writing that is at the heart of the mediated testimonial project. I defended my claim that the narrators portray their resistance to patriarchy and in private spheres by highlighting Tijerino’s description of her ability to endure torture and interrogation in prison, Menchú’s representation of her choice to forgo marriage and motherhood, and Alvarado’s depiction of the Mothers’ Clubs and the influence they had on her.

Finally, I showed how all three speakers challenge hegemony in public spaces by delineating

Tijerino’s military service, Menchú’s pursuit of justice for her people, and Alvarado’s fight for land reform.

174

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