Women Writing Resistance: Essays on Latin America and the Caribbean

PREFACE TO THE 2003 EDITION

– Elizabeth Martinez –

THIS EXTRAORDINARY COLLECTION. . . I could begin that way, but no. Those words, though true enough, seem all too inadequate. The book is—here comes a risky claim—revolutionary. But why? An encouraging number of anthologies of writings by women of color have appeared in recent years, with This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, leading the way. That development ended decades of invisibility. Now comes Jennifer Browdy’s book, offering new reasons to celebrate.

There is, first, the welcome fact that her book focuses on Latin America and the Caribbean, those huge expanses of our hemisphere too often ignored or minimized in the past. Except for academic specialists, few people, even on the left, paid much attention to Latin America until thousands of indigenous rebels rose up in southern Mexico [in 1994, in response to the North American Free Trade Agreement]. And the Caribbean exists in the minds of many North Americans mostly thanks to a unique, struggling revolution in Cuba that won’t go away. Although we see more attention given to this region today, there is still too little awareness of the many peoples, histories, and cultures that the women writers in this book so eloquently and passionately illuminate.

Their stories of resistance to oppression are also global, for the conditions they present exist worldwide. These writers cry out against the effects of colonization, unfettered imperialism, and corporate globalization on billions of people, as well as on the planet itself. Their rage is haunting. Who can forget the saying of poor Haitian women under slavery and colonial oppression, as recalled here by Edwidge Danticat: We are ugly, but we are here? And here to stay, Danticat adds. Every once in a while, we must scream this as far as the wind can carry our voices, she writes.

The book’s call for such defiance is not new. Since September 11, 2001, the need for it has been greater than ever, as the US response to that dreadful day continues sending its dreadful message: ours is an age of intensified empire-building in which no war is unthinkable.

It is also an age of galloping globalization for the benefit of capitalist growth. In our hemisphere, the suffering caused by NAFTA has not halted the drive toward more of the same alphabet. Today’s Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), and a similar plan for Central America (CAFTA), move forward that caravan of misery.

Around the world we find institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO), whose policies could mean starvation for three billion peasant farmers, according to Samir Amin, director of the Third World Forum in Senegal. Unable to grow foodstuffs that can compete with products imported from advanced countries, how can these people survive? When Kyung Hae Lee, a Korean farmer, committed suicide at this year’s [2003] WTO meeting in Cancún, Mexico, he was protesting a deadly greed that should enrage us all. His suicide was a desperate call for more of the activist commitment that fills the pages of Women Writing Resistance.

The book is a collective Declaration of Resistance to the power and arrogance of ruling-class, racist, patriarchal domination. Its call for resistance also imagines a transformed world. These women offer visions that are profoundly revolutionary, and they do so with great beauty. In offering this wealth of prose and poetry by some of the world’s finest writers and strongest feminists, Jennifer Browdy confirms that politics and art cannot be separated, despite the critics who try to do so.

Finally, Browdy offers us a shining, elegant introduction that makes the totality of her anthology a work of art in itself. Gracias, Jennifer, y venceremos!

INTRODUCTION

WRITING RESISTANCE, ENVISIONING THE BETTER WORLD THAT COULD BE

– Jennifer Browdy –

WOMEN WRITING RESISTANCE: Essays on Latin America and the Caribbean chronicles a time of intense awareness of the effects of globalization—the transnational movements of capital and of people—and of a heightened awareness of the porousness of borders that used to seem firm, especially national and cultural borders. Old categories such as First World and Third World are no longer neatly mappable, and the old divides of nationality, language, and race have become much more fluid. The contributors to Women Writing Resistance range across all these borders, locating themselves in the borderlands between Latin America, the Caribbean, and North America, even as they call into question the validity of such labels as signposts to identity.

From Latinas of various national origins, many now writing in exile, to writers of Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean origins, to members of the Hispanic Jewish diaspora, to Chicanas who culturally straddle the US-Mexico border, to Puertorriqueñas with their special hybrid American political status, and even including one North American of European Jewish ancestry, Margaret Randall, whose lifetime of commitment to social justice movements in Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, and North America make her an inveterate border crosser—the contributors to Women Writing Resistance exemplify the possibility of coalition and alliance among women from widely divergent backgrounds, all working in what Aurora Levins Morales calls the field of cultural activism to envision and manifest a more equitable, peaceful, and sustainable future for the Americas and the world.¹

Beyond their commitment to social justice, the authors included in Women Writing Resistance are outstanding writers, garnering international acclaim for their novels, poetry, and essays, which often make use of formal innovations such as linguistic code switching, oral history, authorial collaboration, and the creative juxtaposition of previously pure genres such as poetry and prose or fiction and nonfiction, all in the service of textualizing previously marginalized, culturally complex voices. All the contributors have enacted in their writing what Mary K. DeShazer has called a poetics of resistance, in which writers participate in resistance by inscribing it in beautiful, powerful poetry and prose.²

To understand these writers’ resistant politics, we must explore the history of Latin America and the Caribbean, which forms the backdrop of their work. Globalization as a socio-historical phenomenon has been going on for a long time: it began to assume its current configuration roughly five hundred years ago, when the age of European imperialist domination of the peoples of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas began. This Euro-American cultural hegemony has always been accompanied by various kinds of resistance movements. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the initial goals of resistance were to throw off the twin yokes of colonization and slavery, goals that were for the most part accomplished by the mid-twentieth century.

But the eradication of slavery and the arrival of nationalist and independence movements did not do much to improve conditions for women and other racial/cultural minorities, or for the poor in general, throughout the region. Social codes that privileged light skin (as evidence of European ancestry) persisted, and women continued to be confined to restricted areas of the patriarchal compound, pinned down by the male supremacist code known as machismo.

Not surprisingly, the glaring inequalities of this social system offered many opportunities for oppositional movements to thrive. Socialism was the most widespread social justice movement of the twentieth century in Latin America and the Caribbean. Marxist and Maoist organizers fanned out across the region, spreading a new gospel of egalitarian human rights that attracted a wide following among the millions of disenfranchised, and also stimulated vicious reprisals from conservative leaders, who were supported by the United States in their efforts to maintain power and privilege, under the guise of fighting the spread of Communism.

During the twenty years between 1965 and 1985, much of Latin America and the Caribbean became an ideological and physical battlefield, with the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union driving local stakes even higher. Hundreds of thousands of lives were lost; thousands of followers of social justice movements were rounded up, tortured, and disappeared; entire families and even villages were dislocated and forced into political exile; and economies were left in ruins, all in the name of ensuring democracy—an increasingly obvious euphemism for securing safe conditions for imperialist capitalism throughout Latin America, the Caribbean, and other developing regions of the world.³

It was in the crucible of this violent, tumultuous period in Latin American and Caribbean history that the women writers included in this collection came of age and developed what Chela Sandoval would call their oppositional consciousness.⁴ Contributors like Marjorie Agosín, Emma Sepúlveda, Julia Alvarez, and Ruth Behar were caught up as children or young adults in the political upheavals of Chile, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba, and were driven into exile in the United States, where they continued from afar their commitment to social justice in their countries of origin. Women Writing Resistance is especially fortunate to include contributions from three generations of women in the Partnoy family: Alicia Partnoy, who was disappeared and tortured in the late 1970s during the Argentinian genocide, an ordeal she chronicled in her book The Little School; her mother, Raquel Partnoy, whose essay describes how she channeled her pain at her family’s persecution into her painting; and Alicia’s daughter Ruth Irupé Sanabria, who was two years old when her mother was disappeared and who fled with her parents to the United States after their release from political imprisonment. The generational movement of the Partnoys is emblematic of the collection as a whole, which spans more than thirty years of women’s active involvement in resistance, through writing, to various forms of oppression.

In addition to the larger ideological battles between socialism and capitalism that have torn through Latin America over the past fifty years, many of the contributors to Women Writing Resistance have also been intimately involved with the feminist struggle to eliminate sexism and with the indigenous and Black struggles to overcome the entrenched racism of Latin America and the Caribbean—struggles that have been waged within both the socialist and the capitalist camps. Margaret Randall has suggested that the socialist movements in Latin America and the Caribbean were impeded by the failure to develop an indigenous feminist discourse and vital feminist agenda.⁵ That said, Latina feminists have been careful, as Aída Hurtado observes, about not ranking oppressions which might exclude causes perceived as not central to women’s rights. Instead, Hurtado continues, Latina feminists struggle to incorporate diverse issues without losing the centrality of gender in all their battles.⁶ Randall puts it categorically: "If a revolution is unable or unwilling to address the needs of all people, it is doomed to failure."⁷

This is a lesson that the writers of this collection have learned through painful experience and immediate observation, in a range of specific geopolitical sites throughout the Americas. As women who understand their writing as a form of resistance to the intertwined and complex oppressions of imperialism, elitism, racism, sexism, and homophobia, they have been practicing transnational, intersectional feminism avant la letter, long before these terms became fashionable in the US academy. All the contributors to this volume have challenged borders—linguistic, geographical, social, cultural, ideological—through their writing and in their own lives, and in so doing they have, as Aurora Levins Morales put it, found a way to affirm our complex realities, which are a mirror of the complex realities of so many women of the Americas. It is this complexity, this many-sided seeing, this daring to name the uses and practices of power wherever they are found, says Morales, that is our greatest gift.⁸

Both Randall and Morales have offered a comparison between the individual discrimination and abuse often experienced by women under patriarchy, and the collective oppression perpetrated by the male-dominated social forces of imperialism, with its accompanying racism and elitism. Individual abuse and collective oppression are not different things, Morales declares. They are different views of the same creature. . . . Personal abuse is the local eruption of systemic oppression, and oppression is the accumulation of millions of small systemic abuses.⁹ In order to heal society at both the local and global level, Morales and Randall agree, personal wholeness and political health . . . must be rewoven into a single fabric. They cannot be separated, writes Randall.¹⁰

This reweaving is a major goal of the writers included in this anthology, whose writings move from the personal to the political and back again with great fluidity, grace, and power. Located as they are, in what Gloria Anzaldúa calls the borderlands between cultures, moving back and forth between their home countries and their various locations in exile, these writers are all profoundly mestizo, to use Anzaldúa’s influential term. As Anzaldúa explains:

The work of mestizo consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her a prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended. The answer to the problem between the white race and the colored, between males and females, lies in healing the split that originates in the very foundations of our lives, our culture, our languages, our thoughts. A massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness is the beginning of a long struggle, but one that could, in our best hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war.¹¹

Undoing the artificial separations between us and them, self and other, has been the project of many postcolonial writers, who have sought to enact a mobile, contingent, strategic deployment of identity in the interests of a politics of solidarity across differences. The writers in Women Writing Resistance have all used their writing in the service of what Chela Sandoval calls global decolonizing alliances, motivated by the goals of egalitarian social relations and economic well-being for all citizenry—and also, I would add, for those whose very claim to citizenship is contested, as in the case of Guatemalan Quiché Indian Rigoberta Menchú.¹²

Menchú, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 for her work as an indigenous human rights leader, chronicled in her best-selling testimonial I, Rigoberta Menchú, emerged as an international leader in global struggles for indigenous rights, work that culminated in the 2007 ratification by the United Nations of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Menchú has been at the forefront of efforts to bring to justice the perpetrators of the 1970s genocide against the Guatemalans, and she twice ran for president of Guatemala, the first indigenous person to do so in Latin America. In all of her work, Menchú has endeavored to build solidarity between the different ethnic groups in Guatemala, stressing the importance of alliance to successful movements for social change.

I believe in community as an alternative way forward, and not simply as a memory of the past, Menchú says. It is something dynamic. Identity is not just nostalgia for eating tamales. It is holistic, and comprises all the integral aspects of a culture.¹³ Menchú envisions a new kind of world community, which would be pluralistic, diverse, multiethnic and multicultural. We must accept that humanity is a beautiful multi-colored garden, she says, using a characteristically organic metaphor.¹⁴

There is undeniably a current of rage that runs through the writings included in this volume—rage at social injustice, at political oppression, at the collusion of the United States and Europe in sustaining the deep inequities that mar living conditions for the majority throughout Latin America and the Caribbean—and there is also a profound current of sorrow. My poems acknowledge those voices muzzled in dark and silent torture chambers, especially the voices of women and of children who were forbidden to sing and denied the opportunity to grow knowing the soothing touch of a parent or to simply gaze, unafraid, at open horizons, says Marjorie Agosín.¹⁵ Through remembrance, Agosín, Edwidge Danticat, and others in this collection seek to bear witness to the repressive political regimes of the Americas and to pay homage to those whose lives have been lost unnecessarily. Most of all, these women writers seek to channel their anger, sorrow, and pain in positive directions, undertaking, according to Aurora Levins Morales, the work of infusing people’s imaginations with possibility, with the belief in a bigger future. This cultural activism, she says, is the essential fuel of revolutionary fire.¹⁶

The social visions of these women writers are nothing short of revolutionary, demanding a rethinking of history as well as a re-envisioning of the present. Running throughout is an insistence on centering the histories, priorities, and self-determination of all women, but especially women who find themselves disenfranchised and marginalized under patriarchal capitalism. Though the women writers in this collection come from a wide range of cultural, educational, and material circumstances—some having enjoyed positions of relative power and comfort by virtue of their European ancestry, others having been discriminated against on the basis of class or race. But all insist on a radical politics of inclusion, based on what Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty describe as the feminist democratic practice, which calls for solidarity among women across the bounds of nationality, sexuality, race, class, language, ethnicity, religion, and other artificial barriers. As Alexander and Mohanty elaborate:

In order for solidarity between Third World women in the geographical Third World and women of color in the first world to take place [and, I would add, between the aforementioned groups and white feminists as well] imperialist domination and capitalist attitudes towards acquisition and advancement must become part of a feminist project of liberation. Feminist democratic practice in this context, then, cannot be about self-advancement, upward mobility or