We have not had to look far to read stories of the lives of people in Central and South America. You Can't Drown the Fire: Latin American Women Writing in Exile was edited by Alicia Portnoy and published by Cleis Press in 1988. In 1989 Brenda Carter, Kevan Insko, David Loeb, and Marlene Tobias edited A Dream Compels Us: Voices of Salvadoran Women (South End Press). The following year Scott Wright, Minor Sinclair, Margaret Lyle, and David Scott edited El Salvador: A Spring Whose Waters Never Run Dry (EPICA). It is within this setting that Renny Golden has authored The Hour of the Poor, The Hour of Women: Salvadoran Women Tell Their Stories, wherein the words of Salvadoran women powerfully confront us. Golden captures these women's hopes, pain, anguish, suffering, dreams, and commitment unto death.
This work focuses on those organizations that include only women members. Many of the women began their organizing in the campo (countryside) among the workers on the coffee plantations. One woman involved in such work, Hortensia, remembers:
After a long time of working like this (hard work, minimum wage, leaving children alone during the day),...we discovered it was necessary to struggle. We realized the poor worked very hard while the few became rich. We saw a need to protest....We workers organized to say the salaries weren't just.
The richness of women's involvement is also shown by their work in the labor unions. Febe Velasquez, who initially worked for a U.S. corporation in El Salvador and as a result became involved in the labor unions, was killed in October 1989 when her office--the National Federation of Salvadoran Workers--was bombed by the Salvadoran military.
Shouldn't reading about the organizations of women in El Salvador--their commitment to the poor and their struggle against the injustices of the economic system--cause us to reflect on the actions of our women's organizations? For instance, how much discussion has the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement generated among women's groups here?
READERS WILL ECHO the questions that give structure to the book, asking: What does reading the stories of the base Christian communities call us to do? Do we read these women's stories without making connections to our reality?
For that reason it is always difficult for me to return to my home community after traveling to Central America. Having joined women in a base Christian community as they discussed the need to organize to keep their water supply from being polluted by a new factory, I despair in listening to a women's church group planning a Valentine Tea.
So what are we to make of the stories of the martyrs? For what goal, what commitment are we willing to die? This should not be a rhetorical question.
To demonstrate this, Golden recounts the life of Maria Cristina Gomez. I knew Cristi. I know her family. (I was disappointed to find the date of her death incorrectly noted in the book: Her death occurred within two weeks of the attorney general's murder and seven months before the November 1989 offensive.) When I look at my photographs taken over the past seven years, at least four more of those I have captured on film have died violently in El Salvador.
It is undoubtedly a great relief that I have not personally known one person in the United States who has been killed because of a commitment to a cause. However, I fear we are willing to read the stories of martyrs, but lack the commitment to confront the powers that cause their death. Marches and demonstrations leading to arrest were tried, but the funding of wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador continued. Will our commitment push us to find new strategies?
I am haunted by the words Golden brings us from Sister Emma as she is quoted referring to one of the young (28-year-old) martyrs: "They couldn't kill her. She'll only die if we let her, if we fail to continue her work."
Do they continue to die because we let them be killed? Are they at risk because we don't do the work required here to stop the funding of low-intensity conflict; to stop the manufacture of weapons that are used against civilians in poor countries; to read our scriptures and act with the same concern for the poor and a system of justice for all? Do we read their stories and then feel powerless to stop the tragedies that are being re-enacted daily?
Four books in four years. Authors bringing us the words of suffering women. How many books do they need to publish before their words bring us out of ourselves and we hear their call to a commitment to authentic justice and peace?
Judy Isaacson had made several trips to El Salvador and lived in Minneapolis when this review appeared.
The Hour of the Poor, The Hour of Women: Salvadoran Women Tell Their Stories. By Renny Golden. Crossroad Publishing.
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