Marin Speaking Out

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Speaking out Together: Testimonials of Latin American Women

Lynda Marn

Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 18, No. 3, Voices of the Voiceless in Testimonial Literature,Part I. (Summer, 1991), pp. 51-68.

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Speaking Out Together: Testimonials of Latin Am erican Women by Lynda Marin

Certain words o r phrases seem invariably to provoke us, to challenge usto position ourselves, to define and respond. I am thinking of chargedlangu age like "right to life," or patriotism, or sex , as oppo sed to the neutralityof terms like doorknob, or mashed potatoes, or altitude. In academia, thetestimonial see ms to be one of those charged term s. Its legitimacy as a fieldof study is never directly questioned, but lurking behind much discussionabou t it is just that. (I am reminded of similar conversations about sciencefiction, journal w riting- often depend ing on the gender and social status ofthe journ alist-an d children's literature.) After all, the testimonial is notusually produced by great writers, and often not by writers at all. Besides,the testimonial almost always raises issues about genre which remain irre-solva ble. In an Institute for the Study of Ideologies an d Literature publication(see Jara and Vidal, 198 6) for instance, 1 7 essay s represent the testimon ialas sharin g significant territory w ith autobiography , ethnography, biography,history, fiction, oral literature, documentary, journalism, and even photo-journalism. Yet, putting asid e the fact that all these "genres" stand in prob -lema tic relation to one another, som ething abou t the testimonial s ets it apartas a genre, even as it overlaps with so many others. This tension betweenconsolidation and individuation that so characteristically marks the efforts toassign the testimonial to its ow n genre is nowhere m ore keenly m irrored thanin particular post-1960s testimonials by Latin Ame rican wom en. This articleexplores the mutually constitutive relationship of gender and genre in thetestimonials of four Latin Ame rican wo me n and suggests way s in which theirtestimony might offer, to the Euro-North American First World, alternativetheories, models, and uses of "wom en's writing."

Although the testimon ial has a long and varied history, it has alway s beenseen as a kind of writing from the m argins. Th ose privileged to belong to thedominant class, race, and/or gender write Scripture, literature, autobiogra-phy, or ethnog raph y. From the point of view of privilege, the testimonial hasLynda Marin teaches wom en's studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and is pursuingher doctorate in the literatures of the Americas.LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 70, Vol. IS No.3,Summer 1991,51-680 1991 Latin American Perspectives

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52 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

been seen as the means by which those who are not privileged tell aboutthemselve s and particularly about their struggle against the powers that claimprivilege over them. It would seem, then, that almost all writing of womenunder patriarchy would have something essentially in common with whatconstitutes the genre of testimony , that is, a kind of s pea king from the m arginsto and about the system s which o ppress that sp eaking. Seen in this textual-political light, three of the four testimonials which I will discuss might bethought of as quintessentially women's writing. Of course, nothing is everthat simple. But the ways in which all four of these testimonials struggleinternally with political intention, narrative strategy, and voice contribute agreat deal to the discussion about what wom en's writing might be and mightbecome.What most obviously marks these Latin American women's testimonialsin particular and the genre in general is the self-professed eschewal of thefirst person singular subje ct. On the open ing page of Let Me Speak (1978),the first words of the B olivian Dom itila Ba rrios de Chungara emp hasize hercollective stance, her insistence that hundreds of others might be tellingexactly the sam e story, had they not been denied the opportunity or killed instruggle:

That ' s why I say that I don't just want to tell a personal story. I want to talkabout my people. I want to testify about all the experience we've acquiredduring so ma ny years of st ruggle in Bol ivia (1978: 15).'*In similar fashion, the Mayan Rigoberta Me nchli, in immediate contrad ictionto the Eng lish title of her testimonial, I Rigoberta Menchli (1984), states

I'd like to stress that it 's not only my life, it 's also the testimony of mypeople. . . . Th e important thing is that what has happene d to m e has happenedto many other people too: My story is the story of all poor Guatemalans. Mypersonal experience is the reali ty of a wh ole peop le (1984: I ) . ~In her compo site recounting of the life of Salvadoran C omm ander Eug enia,

Claribel Alegria in They Won't Take Me Alive (1987) qualifies the introduc-tion of her subject like this:

But the story is not just Eugenia's. It is that of her suffering and rebell iousfellow-nationals, st i l l engaged in waging the 'popular war, ' against a systemthat many of them describe here in cruel and personal detail . . . . And it is abook dedicated to Salvadoran wom en engaged in poli t ical s t ruggle, to AnaPatricia (Eugenia's daughter), to the next generation and a new civil isation(1987: 32).3*All quotations from Barrios (1978) are copyright O 1978 b y Monthly Review Press. Reprintedb y permission of Monthly Review Foundation.


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Marin 1TESTIMONIALS OF WOMEN 53

And Elvia Alvarado, a Honduran campesina, suggests the collective n atureof her speaking w hen , in the forward to her Don't Be Afraid, Gringo (1987),she says,I thought about our st ruggle, how we suffer hunger, persecut ion, abuse by thelandowners. How we fight with all the bureaucrats-at the National AgrarianIns t itu t e . How w e f igh t wi th the pol i ce , t he a rmy, the secur i ty forces . . . .But then I dec ided tha t I couldn ' t pass up a chance to t e l l t he wor ld ourstory (1987: xi i i ) . jIn forcgounding this collective stance, each of these speakers seemsconcerned to inform us that hcr life story is interchangeable with any other

story of her people, that her experiences and choices are only (and barely)particular but not unique. It's as if each speaker feels the necessity to warnus to resist the power of our Western obse ssion with individuality, to resistthe danger of -a s Doris Somm er calls it in spea king of the relationshipbetween autobiography and testimonial- conflating hum an culture and his-tory with lives of extraordinary individuals (198 8: 110). Th at Latin Americanwom en's testimony foregrounds the struggle between the first-person, sac-rosanct, individual "I " (usually conceived of as the male hero) and the diffuse,polyphon ic, am orphous "w e7' (traditionally conceived of as the seethingmasses, the other, the force against which the "I7'emerges) suggests the kindof politics these wom en a re engaged in: not necessarily a reversal of power -of wrenching the "I" from the patriarchy, the colonizer, the dominant posi-tion-b ut rather a transvaluing of the "we," so as to rescind its status as thenecessary o ther against which the tyrannical "I" m easures its existence, andto claim instead a space fo r the collective identity to exist in its ow n right.

In stark contrast to this collective voice with which Latin Americanwomen giving testimony authorize themselves to speak stands the testimonyof Omar Cabezas in Fire from the Mountain, the Making of a Sandinista(1985). In his book, C abezas describes the period in his life of com ing intopolitical consciousness and joining the guerrilla forces in the mountains ofNicaragua. Here we encounter the individual man whose develop men t as aSandinista climaxes in a transcendental moment of self-recognition. At thevery end of his story, having left and then returned to "the mountain," hemeets don Leonardo, an old man, w ho sp eaks of fighting 40 years earlier withSandino:

S o w h e n I me t that man , when'he told m e all of that, I felt I real ly was h is son,the son of S andino, the son of history. I understood m y ow n past ; I knew w he reI stood; I had a country, a historical identity, with ever ything that don Leo nard owas tell ing me. . . . I had recovered my ow n history, the tradit ion, the esse nce


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54 L A T IN A M E RICA N PE RSPE CT IV E S

of Nicaragua. I had found my genesis, my antecedents; I felt myself a co ntin-uation, concrete and uninterrupted. I had found the source of my strength, Inow realized. It was Sand ino who had been m y nourishment, but I had neversee n, materially, my umbilical cord -and sudden ly it w as there. Right beforemy eyes (1985: 2 2 1 ) . ~Significantly wha t precedes this finale is the description of a secre t drivepast his mothe r's ho me in Leon to discover that her life and the lives of his

brothers have gone on uninterrupted by his absence; that he is not ofconseque nce; that this family does not ground him in any reality wh atsoever.That he "discovers," for the first time as it were, his umbilicus to be thestruggle of Nicaraguan men in the tradition of resistance and revolution,reveals the extent to which his testimon y turns on the trope of the individua lmale hero wh ose autonom y is inscribed by reeng endering his origins, eras ingwoman altogether and replacing her with a line of self-same male heroes.The book end s with Cabez as holding the old ma n's hands. "Well, we'll beseeing each other soon" he tells him. And don Leo nardo respo nds, "I am oldnow, but rem embe r, here are all my sons" (1985: 22 1).6 In this final pa triar-chal gesture, the father co nfer s unilaterally onto the so n his exclu sive identity,the inheritance of his warring manhood.Th e difference in voice in the four wom en's testimonials and that of Om arCabezas (even as I speak of them, the women group together and Cabeza sstands alone) seems to mirror a distinction which Brodzki and Schenck(198 8) make regarding the male and fema le tradition of autobiograph y. Theycontrast the premise of the (masculine) trad ition- that the autobiographe rfrom Augustine on assume s "his universality, his represen tativeness, his roleas spokesm an for the (male) comm unity" (1988: 1) -w ith the premise of thefemale autobiographer who assumes marginality in a male-dominated cul-ture and, at best, only a mediated se lfho od. And the degree to whichCabe zas's assumed representativeness is predicated on the erasure of womanmight be measured by reading alongside him Claribel Alegria (1987), whodescribes the development of Commander Eugenia (Ana Maria CastilloRivas) in the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front at approximatelythe same time Cabezas describes his own making as a sandinista. Foralthough both figures inhabit different countries and revolutionary move-ments, Commander Eugenia's role in the guerrilla effort in El Salvador issuggestive of necessarily similar positions many Nicaraguan women havetaken up as fighters and partners in a tradition of struggle and revolutionwhich Ca bez as cla ims at the end of his testimony so exclusively for the sonsof Sandino and don Leonardo.' W hat seem s most telling about the differencebetween these male and female authoredlproduced testimonies is not thatthey are clearly gendered (they are), but that for Omar Ca bez as the gendering


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Marin I TESTIMONIALS OF WOMEN 55

authorizes him to speak unproblem atically as the heroic "I," (in the flipsideversion here as the self-consciously but only temporarily anti-heroic "I")whereas for the women, a much greater struggle ensues to find a subjectposition that is appropriately inclusive and yet accurately reflects the veryproblematic status of the collective "we" as viewed through individualexperience.Curiously, it is another man's drawing on the model of these women'stestimonials whic h identifies and explores the alternity of that co llective andtherefo re problem atic "we." In his fictional One Day of Life (1983), ManlioArgueta formally produces with unerring verisimilitude the fragmented,interpenetrating, overweaving voices that struggle just beneath the brokensurfaces of actual Latin American women's testimonials. Arranging thenarrative to ostensibly cover a period between 5:30a.m. and 5:00 p.m., weare treated to the boundless wanderings of the minds, hearts, and me moriesof various (mostly women) characters, all of whom are bound together bytheir relation to G uadalupe Fu entes the dominant narrator. Gu adalupe sp eaksand is spoken of in any number of ways: to Maria Pia she is Mama; toAdolfina she is grandmother Lupe; to Rubenia Fuentes she is child; to theauthorities she's a crazy old whore; and although we never hear from herhusband JosC, w e surm ise from her point of view that to him s he just is- th emother of their children and the partner in their struggle to s u ~ v i v e . ~s eachchapter opens, we are never sure who is speaking. Sometim es it is Guadalupe,sometimes one of the other women. Our desire to identify the speaker ismediated by what we begin to perceive as a commingled subjectivity ofrelatedness among all the speakers, so that the identity of the individualspeaker no longer grounds our reading in the traditional sense. In this wayArgueta achieves a heightened sen se of the collective subject that the actualtestimonials he models his fiction on m ore problematically strive to claim.

I say problematically because it is this tension in Latin Am erican wom en'stestimony between its stated project- to speak in a un ified way 'for a peoplein strug gle-a nd its unstated project-to do so in a way that negotiatestruthfully am ong the various positions of inequality that women occupy intheir cultures-which pervades this writing and most curiously ma rks it. Onthe first page of her testimony, Domitila identifies herself in two ways. S hesays, "I'm proud to have Indian blood in my heart. And I'm also proud ofbeing the wife of a m iner (Barrios, 1978: 19). After identifying her ground,her Indian blood (from her mother?) and her status as a miner's wife, shegoes on to describe the Bolivian mining town, Siglo XX, and the kinds ofhouses the m iners live in. As the wife of a miner sh e includes herself in thatcategory, "the miners." Usually when she refers to the miners, she also meanstheir families, everyone whose lives center around the mine shifts and


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working conditions. But that conflation is never really complete, never canbe, and her use of nouns and pronouns gives us a clue as to the constantrepositioning of her own narrative stance.

Th e miners' h ouses in the camp, which from every point of view are on loan,are theirs after they comp lete som e years of sew ice. The compa ny do esn't lendus housing immediately, becau se there's a shortage. Most miners work as manyas five or ten years without getting a house. S o they have to rent rooms in oneof the non-company villages (1978: 23).9The ho uses are given to the workers, and although D omitila's life is one ofrelentless labor, it is her trabajador (worker) husband to whom she says thehouse is given. In the sentence which describes the delay between the timewhen a worker's family needs a house and the time when the family gets it,she uses the "us" p rono un- the entire family is equally waiting, subject tothe conditions prescribed by the o wn ers of the min es and the towns as well.But when any agency is suggested in the next sentence, when rooms hav e tobe rented while fam ilies wait for a wo rker's house, the pronoun is curiouslythird person again: ". . . hey hav e to rent rooms in one of the non-com panyvillages." Th e "they" wh o has to rent, of course, includes other fam ilies aswell as her own, but the subject of the previous sentence was "miners"wo rking in the mine, the husbands, therefore, the men. S o that wh en s he tellsus "they" rather than "we" have to rent elsewhere, the reader can 't help butobserve the position of powerlessness that her erased otherness in thisrepresentation evok es. Th e content of the next paragraph explains her reasonsfor "disappearing" herself here while also exemplifying her particular placeas wife of a trajabador: "Also they can only use the house during the timethey are with the company. O nce a miner die s or retires beca use of occupa-tional disease or miner's sickn ess, they throw the widow or the miner's wifeout of the house and s he has ninety days to go som ewhere else" (1978: 23).1Once the worker can no long er work , it is expressly the wido w or wife, nowin a completely powerless position, who is thrown out. Here the nouns andpronouns do specify her, though only to suggest her disempow ered status.But in collectivity with other women, the disempowered status is medi-ated, though that collectivity itself bleeds through the narrative only viainnuendo and context. In speaking of her own home, Domitila tells us it is"very small, that is, we have a little room measuring four by five or sixmeters." But then sh e goes on to tell us of others' hom es: "there ar e two littlerooms, and one of them is the kitchen; they also have a little corridor." Atthis point, when she tells us, "this is what the housing that the com pany loansus is like . . ." (197 8: 23),11 w e can read that "us" in any num ber of way s: asreferring to her own family, to all the miners' families, or perhaps, not so


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Marin 1TESTIMONIALS O F WOMEN 57

intentionally but nevertheless, to the women for whom she finds herselfspeaking most particularly. The rest of the paragraph further suggests thethird possibility although nev er conclusively:

And that's how w e have to live, with our children , all crowded together. In mycase, we set up three beds in the room; that's all that will fit. Th at's w here myseven children sleep, that 's where they do their homew ork, that 's w here we eat,that's wher e the kids play. In the little back room I have a table and a bed w hereI sleep with my husband. T he few things we have just have to be piled o ne ontop of the other, or hung from the ceiling , in the corridor. And the babies, well,some of them have to sleep in the beds and some of them under the beds.Wherever (1978: 23-24).12Th e disjunction in the first two sen tence s between "our children" and "in

my case" sugg ests that the binary is between o ther wom en's children and herown. "That's where my seven children sleep" reinforces that suggestion,leavin g the other possibility of "our children" to mean her and her husband'schildren unstated throughout. T he first person app ears again in a telling waywhen she says she has a table and a bed where she sleeps with her husband.Th is is the first time she has m entioned him in relation to the house, and thatmention is restricted to the bed that she has, along with her table. When inthe next sentence sh e speak s of "the few things we have" the context sug geststhat the num ber an d person of that verb form m ight well refer to "we w omen"who all live under similar conditions as wives of miners and who all havebabies who sleep in and under beds.

Later in her accoun t of the proceed ings of the International Wom en's YearTribunal, Domitila foregrounds her resistance to identifying primarily withwom en while at the same time she speaks very com pellingly from the pointof view of the Housewives' Co mm ittee of Siglo XX, a group of women wh ohave organized themselves for political and economic change in Bolivia.Finally, whe n in a postscript added in 1978(and app earing only in translation)Moema Viezzer asks Domitila about the place of women's liberation in thepeople's struggle for socialism, Domitila resolves the tension between thevoice of the people and the voice of women with a sequencing of prioritiesthat appeals as a theoretical stance but leaves practice (a messier and morecomplex ph enom enon) to fend for itself.

W hat I think is that socialism , in Bolivia , like in any country, will be the toolwhich will create the condition s for wom en to reach their level. . . . But I thinkthat at this momen t it's muc h mo re important to fight for the liberation of ourpeople alo ngsid e the men. It's not that I accept "machismo," no. But I thinkthat "machismo" is a weapon of imperialism just like feminism is. Therefore,I think that the basic fight isn't between the sexes; it's a struggle of the couple(1978: 234).


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But no matter how much Domitila resists representing laboring Bolivianwom en in order to avoid in any way exclud ing laboring Bolivian men, herstory is indeed that of a w om an, and m uch of its effectiveness is due to hergender. Just as w e hear from other Latin American w omen 's testimonies thatfollow hers, much of her political activity is inseparably intertwined w ith thebearing and nurturing of children. In fact, it is when her husband is angrywith her and will not return to Siglo XX , the miners cam p, wh ere the childrenwait alone, that she disguises herself to go to them. On her way she isrecognized and arrested. The physical brutality she undergoes w hile she is injail is marked specifically by her gender. The torture culminates with theearly, forced birth of a son whom, upon her own blood-soaked coming-to,she finds dead on the floor and still attached by his umbilicus. Th e violen ceof this story, told in her matter-of-fact way, has an unsurpassable kind ofpower. And her capacity to survive it does too. Without taking gender intoaccount, John Beverley suggests that the Latin American testimonial is forthe proletariat what the novel was for a rising bourgeoisie, that is, a discoursewhich reflects and constructs simultaneously a work ing model of subversion,resistance, and survival (Beverley, 1 987 : 168 ). Bu t reading testimonials likeDom itila's requires us to see that gender, or in the wor ds of feminist historianJoan W allach Scott, "knowledge about sexu al difference,"13 in the testimo-nies of L atin American w omen is a critical instrument in the rewriting of thathistory in which these testimonials are embedded.

An d not just history in the sen se of the past. In her very interesting article,Laura Rice-Sayre (1986) also sidesteps the gender question but positionstestimony as the reality check on a political discourse that has lost allgrounding in recog nizable fact. In the article, Rice-Sayer juxtaposes the LatinAmerican testimonial with texts from former U.N.ambassador, JeanneKirkpatrick who, in speeches and papers, persistently denied the contradic-tion between Jim my Car ter's foreign policy based on the principle of humanrights and the actual practices sanctioned and fund ed by the United S tates inthe name of eradicating the threat of com mu nism an yw here on the Americancontinent. In an essay entitled "Dictators and Double Standards," for in-stance, Kirkpatrick denounces those who criticize U.S. foreign policy forsupporting violent autocracy, imperialism, racism, and so on.

[If ] revolutionary le aders describe the United Sta tes as the scourge of the 20thcentury, the enemy of freedom-loving people, the perpetrator of imperialism,racism, colonialism, genocide, war, then they are not authentic democrats or,to put it mildly, friends. . . .The United States is not in fact a racist, colonial[neoc olonia l?] power, it do es not practice [fund ?] geno cide, it do es not threatenworld pe ace with expan sionist activities (Kirkpatrick in Rice-Sayer, 1986:56 ;brackets Rice-Sayre's).


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From this point of view, Rice-Say re sugg ests that acknow ledging the realityof testimonies like Rigoberta Menchfi's or Dom itila Barrios de Ch ungara's"mud dies the water of binary oppositions in which Kirkpatrick w ishes to sailthe Ship of State" as well as threatens to lift the convenient veil over thecontradiction between human rights and cold war foreign policy (1986: 56).Rice-Sayre goe s on to dem onstrate just ho w that contradiction is lived out inpublic opinion polls in 19 74, four yea rs before Let Me Speak was published:that 8 0 percent of U .S. citizens favored standing strong against commu nismand co ntaining it on their continent, but the same proportion said the UnitedState s should not have intervened in C hile (under Allend e) to destabilize thegovern ment. However, a plurality of respondents also thought the CIAsh ouldbe a ble to work inside other countries to strengthen elemen ts serving U.S.interests and to weaken those opposed to U.S. interests. The extreme sawfighting communism as synonymous with guaranteeing human rights. Thetestimonio, says Rice-Sayre, cra cks open that false equation. It "focuses andgives credence to what might otherwise be seen as the vague altruisticlongings of do-goo der idealists." It bring s us bac k in touch with moral lawand asserts another order to monopoly capitalism. And crucially, it "bringsback the body to the abstract field of huma n rights" (1986: 68). Wh at I wouldadd to Rice-Sayre's conclusion here is that even more crucially, LatinAmerican women's testimonials bring back women's bodies, which havebeen, if it's possible, doubly disappeared, to the field of humanity. In thereading of these testimonials, it is the subjectivity of wo me n, rooted as it isin women's bodies and women 's experience that mediates what we hear, see,feel, know.

Having introduced her childhood family in the first chapter, RigobertaMenchfi, in the second chapter of her testimonial, "Birth Ceremonies,"foregrounds the role of the mothe r in her Maya-QuichC culture: "Later, whenshe's in her seventh month, the mother introduces her baby to the naturalworld, as our customs tell her to do" (1984: 7). In an important sense,Rigoberta's own story begins while still inside her mother's body. Interest-ingly, Elisabeth Burgos-Debray in her introduction to the book tells us thatshe had been told that "placing the chapter dealing with birth ceremonies atthe beginning of the book might bore the reader" (Which reader? A whiteWestern ma le?). After trying to rearrange the material in othe r wa ys, she saysshe went back to following "the order of Rigoberta's spon taneous associa-tions" (Burgos-Debray in Menchfi 1984: xx). Certainly we find that thechildbearing wo rk of her mothe r's body plays an essential role in Rigoberta'schildhood e xpe rienc e, often in unexpected w ays . She describes herself at agefive looking after her baby brother while her mother prepared three daily


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meals for the workers of her group and work ed in between m eal preparationspicking coffee for wages. "Watching her made me feel useless and weakbecause I cou ldn't d o anything to help her except look after my brother. That'swhen my con sciousness w as born. It's true" (1984: 34).14 Th is consciousnesshas to do with working fo r money and becom ing a wage earner in the family.She attributes it to an identification and empathy with her mother, whosechildbearing and childraising responsibilities flow over onto Rigoberta as afem ale child, but also by extension locate her point of entry into the enor mo uswor k of survival which en gage s the entire comm unity.In many places in her testimony, Rigoberta claims an even strongeralliance with her father than with her mother, an expressed favoritism aboutwhich she exhibits som e guilt, or at least tension. Nevertheless, throughouther testimony, we get many more details about her mother and the influencesof other wom en on her than w e do her father. In the scen e in which th e familyhas to watch the brutal torture and death of her already brutally torturedbrother, it is her mo ther's reactions through which w e see the horror but alsothe incredible endura nce that allow s both wom en to go on. It is with the samekind of en durance and spirit that Rigo berta, later, describes the witnessing ofher own moth er's death -wh ich is even , if possible, more horrendo us thanher brother's, and whic h, of course, also includes rape. An d it is Rigoberta'sown inhabiting of her woman's body that allows her to be so moved by theexperiences of other women. S he describes the enormous influence of herfriend M aria who dies young of poisoning in the fields, but who has left herindelibly marked w ith the notion of resisting marriage and thereby resistingthe agony of w atchin g her children die of starvation, or violence, or illness."And when my friend died," she tells us, "I said; 'I'll never get married',because that's w hat she 'd said" (1984: 88 ). Her "first co rpse," sh e tells us, isthat of Petrona Chona, a very young woman who is hacked to death forrejecting the advances of the son of a landowner for whom she and herhusband are working. For almost three days the twenty-five pieces of herbody lie on the floor of her hut while her family and friends wait for therequired visit of the authorities. No longer a ble to bear the disgrace and theodor, it is finally Rigoberta and her father who gather the pieces in basketsand bury her. She does not analyze the impact of this "first" (wom an's) body,yet she tells us enough to understand the enorm ity of it:

Every time I remember it I get the same feeling. The first time I picked up adead body. All in pieces. For about six years afterwards perhaps, I dreamedabou t Dona Petrona. There wasn't a single night I didn't feel I'd dream ed aboutDona Petrona. For a long time I couldn't go to sleep for thinking about her(1984: 152).


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Marin /TESTIMONIALS OF WOMEN 61

At other times, her condition of being wom an is exactly what affords herthe chance and the motivation to make incisive analyses of the social,economic and racial inequities that shape her life and the lives of all herpeople. For instance, her experience of becoming a maid in the city (anopportunity made p ossible only by her gender) leads to a close tracing of justhow it is that poor, uneducated, often Indian wom en wind u p in prostitution(1984: 91-100). And her empathy with other Indian women leads to herobs ervatio ns on the exploitation of their cultural heritages at annual ladino(the Spanish-speaking nonindigenous population) festivals in which nativewomen are forced to participate as "beauty queens," to display their nativecostumes, and to go home afterwards without any compensation whatsoevereven though "everyone has to pay to go in" and the ladinos in charge "get alot of money from the presentation of the queens" (1984: 209).

Like Rigoberta a nd D omitila before her, Elvia Alvarado speak s for bothmen and women but clearly from a woman-centered experience. Her testi-mony, however, occasionally points directly to the gend er tension which theother women's earlier testimonials tend to suppress. In a chapter entitled,"Taming Mac ho W ays,"I5 she tells us,

when I started working with the mothers' c lubs in the Catholic church, it wasthe first time I realized that we women work even harder than the mendo. . . . It's true that there are so me jobs that require a lot of strength and thatwomen can't d o as well as men. . . . I don't know if it's a physical differencefrom birth, but the fact is that here in Honduras women are usually eitherpregnant or nursing, and that takes a lot of energy out of you.Men may be out working during the day, but when they come home theyusually don't do a thing. They want their meal to be ready, and after theyeat they either lie down to rest or go out drinking. But we w omen keep onworking. . . . Even wh en w e go to sleep, we don 't get to rest. If the babieswake up cryin g, we have to go take care of them. . . . And if our husbandswant to make love, if they get the urge, then it's back to work again (1987:51-52).

She moves on to speak of economic inequities that arise from a man'sprivilege to abandon h is family and a woma n's inescapable sense of respon-sibility fo r her children. (In fact, she herself lea ves three of her children withher mother when she decides to live with Alberto; in keeping with her point,however, the children become yet another woman's responsibility.) But inthe same chapter, she discu sses the connection between her own realizationof gender inequality and her capacity to alter what she describes as negativebehavior patterns such as gossiping and criticizing amon g other campesinas.Through this personal change, she recognizes the value of unity amongwom en fighting for social change.


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Although this most recent of the four testimonies discussed here moreopenly recognizes the problems of gender inequality within the communitywhich Elvia speaks for, it never identifies with what she sees as NorthAmerican feminists' separatism. It cannot afford to. As in the other LatinAmerican women's testimonials that precede hers, Elvia Alvarado recog-nizes the necessity that her en tire peo ple achieve the land reforms w hich w illsupply them with the basic resources they need to live and thrive. And so, inher critique of machismo, sh e conc lude s by ostensibly positioning wom en a sthe beneficiaries of her manda te for cultural chan ge.

We all have to make changes. Campesino men have to be more responsiblewith their women. They have to have only one woman . Because they have ahard enough time suppo rting one family, let alone two. C ampesinos wh o drinkhave to stop drinking . And cam pesino s who fight with their wives have to stopfighting. Our struggle has to begin in our own homes (1987: 56).But even as she speaks for and with wo men here, she is, in the first and lastsentence, also speaking to them, exho rting them to dem and these chang es ofmen, their own men with whom they are inextricably bound. The "we all"and "our" of these two sentences literally embrace and contain all those"they's" in the middle.Far from using her gen der critique to split women off from m en, Alvaradouses it ironically, in the end, as a platform for overturning the traditionalpositions of the Third World vis-A-vis the First. Reappropriating the femi-nized space of the Third World as it is constructed by the First, Alvaradospeak s in solidarity with all Hon duran s when s he takes it on herself to turnthe gaze back around on the big gun.

It's hard to think of chan ge taking place in C entral America w ithout there firstbeing changes in the U.S. As we say in Honduras, "Sin el perro, no hayrabia." . . . S o you A mericans who really want to help the poor have to changeyour own government first. . . .You have to begin educating people, tellingthem the truth about what's happ ening in the world . Because if the press in theU.S. is anything like i t is in H onduras, the people aren't w ell informed. . . . A ndonce you've educated people, then get them organized (1987: 144-145).

This is exactly, of course, what Alvarado has herself done in Honduras,beginning as sh e did in the mot he rs'cl ub of the Catholic church. Here, in thesimple language appropriate to U.S. ideas about how Third Worlders speak,Alv arado displaces the signifying power of the "First World" or, as we kno wit, the one and only world that has the market cornered on determ ining whosignifies what. In the chapter titled "Democracy?/Communism?" in whichshe does a comparative critique of the U.S. and Cuban governments, she"innocently" offers these observations:


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Marin / TESTIMONIALS OF WOMEN 63

We hear that the United States is a great democracy. I don't know m uch abou twhat things are like inside the United States. I used to think there were onlyrich peo ple in the United S tates. Bu t now I learned that there are rich and poorthere, just like in H onduras. M aybe the poor aren't as poor as we are, but theUnited S tates is such a rich country there shouldn't be any poor people there.If it were a really democratic country, there wo uld n't be people without homesand jobs (1987: 122-123).She also does an amusing transvaluation of the Reaganesque mentality oncapitalism versus commun ism.

If someone doesn't like what you're doing, they label you a communist. Butwe campesinos aren't afraid of the Soviet Union. I've never seen a Sovietperson in my life. But I've seen lots of gringos, almost all of them soldiers. Sothat's who we'r e afraid of- the United States (1987: 124).Through simple language and "innocent" observation, Alva rado consistentlydisrupts the system to claim her own authority. "Reagan can't tell me whatto do. Ortega can't tell me what to do. My own mother can 't even tell mewhat to do because my thoughts are my own" (1987: 125). (We can't helpnoticing wh o, in the hierarchy of three, she credits with the m ost power.) Andit is exactly in the position of m other that sh e assum es the greatest authorityand strength with which she encourages the frightened, childlike First Worldto educate, organize, and den oun ce U.S. policy in C entral America. "We needyou to join the struggle," she says. She closes her testimony w ith the mostfamiliar of motherly reassurances: "do n't be afraid, gringos. Kee p your spiritshigh. And rememb er, we 're right there with you!" (1987: 1 46). A wholecountry full of mothers to set an example and to comfort us with theirpresence seems to me a quintessential instance of the "discursive displace-ment" that Gayatri Spivak claims as a fundamental strategy for subalterndiscourse (198 8: 197-221).16

The subversion of the "I" by the collective "we," as emblem atic of thevarious kinds of displacements that Latin American women's testimonialsperform, is enacted also by their mode of production. Doris Som mer (1988)points to the collective construction of testimon ials- that their gen eric logicand their material relation to literary and political history require that they becollaboratively produced. Very poor peoples in a day-to-day struggle forsurvival have neither the resources or leisure to produce their own texts.Testimonials of Latin American women have grown out of a close teamworkthat is initiated by peo ple of a different class, often of a different culture, andinevitably motivated by different (though certainly sympathetic) intereststhan those giving their testimony. In her foreword, Elvia Alvarado character-izes Medea Benjamin as an outsider with whom she decides to take a risk.


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64 LATIN AMERICA N PERSPECTIVES

"So here comes this gringa asking me to tell our story." After an initialdistrust, she decides the possible benefits outw eigh the dangers. "Even if youare a gringa, I thought, once you understand why w e're fighting, if you haveany sense of humanity, you'll have to be on our side" (1987: xiii). MoemaViezzer tells us first off that the idea for her book grew out of Domitila'spresence at the International Women's Year Tribunal, and by readingDomitilas's account of her somewhat frustrating experience there we learnmore about why she felt willing to collaborate with M oema on her testimony.In a 1 978 postscript, Domitila em phasize s the use of her testimony a s aninternal document to be "analyzed and criticized" by the Bolivian people.We cannot doubt that Moema shares that purpose, but it is likely she hasother, possibly wider ranging political and literary motives as well. In herintroduction to I . . .Rigoberta Menchd, Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, a Vene-zuelan living in France, tells us how the project began when she metRigoberta in Paris in 19 82 as a representa tive of the 31January Pop ular Front."The idea of turning her life story into a book came from a Canadianw o m a n . . . very sym pathetic to the cause of the Guatemalan Indians" (1984:xiv). At least three women from three distinct cultures are involved in theinception of Rigoberta's testimonial, and four if w e include the British AnnWright who translated it later into English. Claribel Alegria's compositereconstruction of Commander Eugenia of the Salvadoran guerrilla forcesdraws on multiple testimonies of friends, relations, and com rades. Alegria,herself born in Nicaragua but raised in El Salvador, writes this testimonialfrom the vantag e point of North America (the preface alludes to her exile)where she received her college education, married, and had four children.Amanda Hopkinson, the translator is a Londoner. Here, with only a barebones tracing of those involved, we get the multicultural/multiclass sense ofthe project.

What's even more striking, though perhaps not surprising, is that everyoneinvolved in the collecting and writing and editing of these testimonials is awoman. In her essay, Sommer points to the power of the flesh and bloodexchange that happens in the process of producing these testimonies. Thenarrator speaks her story to an actual person, another woman . The audie nceis never an abstraction. There fore, Som mer says , the narrative voice som e-times slips into the second person, and as a result each reader beco mes the"you" that addresses the interviewer. That slippage facilitates the transgres-sion of cultural and political boundaries in much the same way thatRigoberta's heteroglossic mixing of Spanish and Quichk does. By extension,I would add that it also transgresses gender boundaries in equally important,liberating ways, because it is an exchange among women within which allreaders must locate themselves.


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Marin /TESTIMONIALS OF WOMEN 65

Th e collective voice, the wom an-centered view of "the people's" story,and the collaborative, gendered mode of production of Latin Americanwomen's testimonials model a kind of women's writing that has importantliterary and political implications. Sara Ruddick (1989) in attempting totheorize a feminist maternal pe ace politics, attributes to those who birth and/or care for children (mostly but not exclusively women) certain cognitive skillsthat resist and exceed Western rational man's militaristic mode of "survival"(in qu otes because typified by such absurdities as MA D -Mutually AssuredDestruction -etc.). Like the narrators of Latin American wom en's testirno-nials, R uddick in her se arch for an alternative thinking to inform a politicsof peace, wo me n's bodies at the center of what that thinking might be.Sh e quotes the South African novelist, socialist and pacifist O live Schreiner:"No woman who is a woman says of a human body, 'it is nothing.' . . . Onthis one point, and on this point almost alone, the knowledge of woman,simply as wom an, is superior to that of man ; she knows the history of hum anflesh; she know s its cost; he does not" (in Ruddick, 19 89: 186). Certainly thetestimony of Latin American wom en w ho have lost their children, the fleshof their flesh, and their brothers and sisters, and their husbands and com-padres and neighbors and extended family wh om they have cared for as theirown in their concerted struggle for survival is saturated with the know ledgeof that cost. And it is exactly that cost, Ruddick suggests, understood withinthe context of centra l ma ternal concepts - the primacy of bodily life and theconnectedness of self and other -which propels women to bring their bodiesto bear against the institutionalized violence of the state. Ruddick o ffers theexamp le of Las Madres de la Plaza de May o in Argentina wh o, by attachingto themselves photographs of their children and relatives during their publicdemons trations against the government's kidnapping, torture, and m urder ofthese loved ones, translate the symbols of mothering into political speech(1989: 229). The testimonials of Latin American women might be seen asthe counterpart, that is, political sp eech translated into a maternal practice, apractice motivated by what Rud dick calls preservative love. The ir speakingout is a historical intervention whose object extends beyond personalinterest because maternal thinking is a bout collaborative survival, collectivedeliverance. "The testimon ial produces complicity," S om me r says. Let ushope so.

NOTES1. In compliance with ed itorial preference, I am quoting from the translated texts. However,because many of my observations rest on the specific linguistic choices of those giving their


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testimony (and if we can bust that their editors have respected and left intact those originalchoices), in most following notes I include the Spanish text and citation.

"Por eso dig0 que no quiero hacer no mi s una historia personal. Quiero hablar de mi pueblo.Quiero dejar testimonio de toda la e xpenen cia que hemos adquirido a trav6s de tantos afios delucha en Bolivia . . . " (Barrios, 1979: 15). The English title has a much more forceful andindividualistic tone than the more polite insinuation of the original Sp anish title.

2. "Lo importante es, yo creo, que quiero hacer un enfoque que no soy la hnica, pues havivido mucha gente y es la vida de todos. La vida de todos 10s guatemaltecos pobres y tratar6de dar un poco de mi historia. Mi situacibn personal engloba toda la realidad de un pueblo"(Menchh, 1983: 30).

3. This quote, located in Amanda Hopkinson's note in the English translation, is areworking of comments Alegria and Flakoll make in the prologue to the Spanish edition:"Eugenia, modelo ejemplar de abnegacibn, sacrificio y heroism0 revolucionario, es un casotipico y no exceptional de tantas mujeres salvadorefiasque han dedicado sus esfuerzos, e inclusosus vidas, a la lucha por la liberacibn de su pueblo" (A legria and Flakoll, 19 83). Claribel Alegriais a major figure in C entral American letters and is the only career writer among the wom endiscussed here.

4. This testimonial was originally published in English, a fact which might be explainedby the title itself rega rding its intended U.S. audience. Although it has been translated now intoSpanish, it has not yet been published in that langu age.

5. "Entonces, cuando yo encuentro a ese hombre y que me dice todo eso yo me siento hijode 61, me siento hijo del sandinismo, siento que soy hijo de la historia, comprendo mi propiopasado, me ubico, tengo patria, reconozco mi identidad histbrica con aquello que me decia donLeonardo . ..me habia reencontrado con mi propia historia, con la tradicibn, con la esencia deNicaragua, encontr6 mi gtnesis, mis antepasados, me senti continuacibn concreta, ininte-rrumpida, encontr6 mi fuente de alimentacibn, que n o la conocia, yo estaba siendo alimentadopor Sandino, pero no habia logrado ver materialmente mi cordbn umbilical, y eso me nacib, lodescubri en ese momento" (C abezas, 1982: 288).

6. "Ai nos vam os a estar viendo . . . .Si, yo ya estoy viejo, pero acutrdes e que a hi estinmis muchachos" (1982: 289).7. A number of texts detail wom en's roles and experience s in the Revolu tion in Nicaragu a:Helen Collinson (1990), Jane Deighton et al. (1983), Margaret R andall (1983, 1981).

8. Th e representation of Guadalup e through her recountings of her husband is curiouslythe most problematic because it comes closest to merginglerasing her subject position in thecomplex intenveavings of the various characters' perspectives.9. "La vivienda que ocupa el trabajador en el campamento, y que desde todo punto de vistaes prestada, la tiene t l cuando ya ha cumplido a lgunos ~ o se servicio. No es inmediatamenteque la empresa nos presta la vivienda, por la eseasez que hay. Muchos mineros trabajan hastacinco, diez afios sin tener su vivienda. Y entonces se van a alquilar cuartos en una de laspoblaciones civiles" (1979: 21-22).

10. "Adem is, la vivienda es prestada solamente durante el tiempo en que el trabajador estien la empresa. Una vez que se muere o es retirado del trabajo por la enfen nedad profesional,que es el ma1 d e mina, la botan de la vivienda a la viuda o a la esposa del trabajador y ella tienenoventa dias para desocupar la pieza" (1979: 22).

11. "Muy reducida, o sea que es una cuartito de cuatro por c in w o seis metros . . .hay doscuartitos, y entonces uno sirve de cocina; y tienen tambitn un corredo rcito. . . .En esto consistela vivienda que nos presta la empresa" (1979: 22).

12 . "Y asi tenemos que vivir con mis nuestros hijos, en una gran estrechez. En mi casoarmamos tres camas en el cuarto; es todo lo que entra. Aqui duermen mis siete hijos, aqui hacen


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Marin I TESTIMONIALS O F WOM EN 67

nos chicos sus tareas, aqui comemos, aqui juegan 10s chiquitos. En el cuartito de atrhs tengo unamesa y una cama donde du ermo con mi marido. Las cositas que tenemos, bueno, tienen qu e estarataucadas en el techo, ataucadas en el corredorcito, ataucadas unas sobre otras. Y las wawastienen que dormir algunas en las camas y otras debajo d e ellas. Asi" (1979: 23-24).

13. In her introduction, Joan W allach Scott makes the claim for gender as a useful categoryof historical analysis in this way: "that gender offers both a good way of thinking about history,about the ways in which hierarchies of difference-inclusions and exclusions-have beenconstituted, and of theorizing (feminist) politics" (1988: 10).

14 . " . . . pues yo me sentia muy inhtil y cobarde de no poder hacer nada por mi madre,~ ni ca m en te uidar a mi hermanito. Y asi es cuando a mi me naci6 la conciencia, pues" (Menchfi,1983: 79).15 . Especially because this text was published originally in English, I assume the chapterheadings reflect directly Medea Benjamin's sense of the intended aud ience that ElviaA lvarad olstestimony (and Benjamin's questions which elicit it?) so clearly identifies.

16. The context for this phrase is a discussion of how Spivak sees the Subaltern StudiesGroup attempting to represent the means by which the colonial subject emerges into a narrativeof political agency and self-definition. One of these means includes marking the politicalmom ent(s) of change by a functional change in sign systems so as to locate the agency of changein the subaltern. She uses the phrase "discursive displacemen t" as a (slightly) shorter method ofreferring to that functional change in the sign system (Spivak, 1988: 197).

REFERENCES

Alegria, Claribel and D. J . Flakoll1983 No me agarran viva : La m ujer salvadoretia en lucha. Mexico City: Ediciones Era.1987 They Won7 Take me Alive. Translated by Am anda Hop kinson. London: Women's Press.

Alvarado, Elvia1987 Don? Be Afraid Gringo. Translated and edited by Medea Benjamin. S an Francisco:Institute for Food D evelopment Policy.

Argueta, M anlio1983 One Day of Life. Translated by Bill Brow. New York: VintageiRandom House.

Barrios de Chu ngara, Domitila with Moema Viezzer1978 Lef Me S peak! Tesfimony of Domil ifa, a Wo man of the Bolivian Mines. Translated byVictoria Ortiz. New York: Monthly Review.1979 "Simepermiten hablar. . ." Tesfimoniode Domitila una mujer de 1asmina sdeBolivia.Mexico City: Siglo XXI.

Beverley, John1987 Del Lazarillo a1 sandinismo: Esfu dios sobre la funcidn ideoldgica d e la lifer afu raespatiola e hispanoamerica. Minneapolis, MN: Prisma Institute.

Brodzki, Bella and C eleste Schenck (eds.)1988LifeiLines: Theorizing Women's Autobiograph y. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Cabezas, Omar1982 La monfaiia es algo ma's que una inmensa esfep a verde. Mexico City: Siglo XXI.1985 Fire from the Mountain: The Making of a Sandinisfa.Translated by Kathleen Weaver.New York: Crown Books.

Collinson, Helen (ed.)1990 Women and Revolufion in Nicaragua. London: Zed Books.


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Deighton, Jane, Rossana Hosley, Sarah Stewart, and Cathy Cain1983 Sweet Ramparts, Women in Revolutionary Nicaragua. London: Nicaraguan SolidarityCampaign.

Jara, Rent and Hernan Vidal (eds.)1986 Testimonio y literatura. Minneapolis, MN: Institute for the Study of Ideologies andLiterature, M onograp hic Series of the Society for the Study of Contemporary H ispanic andLusophone Revolutionary Literatures (3) .

Menchd, Rigoberta1983 Me llamo Rigoberta Menchli y asi me nacid la conciencia. Havana: Casa de lasAmtricas.1984IRigoberta Menchli. Edited by Elisabeth B urgos-Debray and translated by Ann Wright.London: Verso.

Randall, Margaret1981 Sandino'sDaughters: Testimonies ofNica ragu an Women inst rug gle . Edited by LyndaYanz. Vancouver, BC: New Star Books.1983 . . .y tambikn digo mujer: testimonio de la mujer nicaraguense hoy. Santo Domingo:Ediciones Populares Feminista.

Rice-Sayre, L aura P.1986 "Witnessing history: Diplomacy versus testimony," pp. 48-72 in Rent Jara and Hem anVidal (eds.), Testimonio y literatu ra. Minneapolis, MN: Institute for the Study of Ideologiesand Literature, Monographic Series of the S ociety for the Study of Contemporary Hispanicand Lusophone Revolutionary Literatures ( 3 ) .

Ruddick, Sara1989 Maternal Thinking. Boston: Beacon Press.Scott, Joan Wallach

1988 Gend er and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press.Sommer, Doris

1988 ''Not just a personal story: Women's testimonios and the plural self," pp. 107-130 inBella Brodzki and Celeste Schenk (eds.), LifelLines; Theorizing W omen's Autobiography.Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Spivak, Gayatri1988 "Subaltern studies: Deconstmcting historiography," pp. 197-221 in Gayatri Spivak, InOther Worlds. New York: Routledge, Chapman &Hall.

Documents

Marin Speaking Out