War Echoes: Gender and Militarization in U.S. Latina/o Cultural Production

2. “I Have Something to Tell You”: Polyvocality, Theater, and the Performance of Solidarity in U.S. Latina Narratives of the Guatemalan Civil War

introduction / 25 and formerly colonized peoples in this empire’s workings. The historic actions of U.S. veterans at the NATO summit in May 2012, when over fifty veterans discarded their medals of honor, broke the silence on condemnation of the U.S. military from within and reenergized and inspired critics outside the armed forces. The veterans who spoke out at the summit confronted both the racism of U.S. policies in the Middle East and the sexism within the military. In doing so they exposed the patriarchal violence that operates within the military while forging connections with the citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan, to whom many of the veterans apologized. But even as those who care about war and militarism witnessed these important events and the ensuing police crackdown, military recruiters continue to target disenfranchised communities while the D.R.E.A.M. Act and the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell are touted as progressive developments. If there is anything these actions, events, and legislative developments can teach us, it is that military policies and responses to them interact with communities, identities, and movements in complex and often contradictory ways. Recognizing that one overarching narrative of these interactions is neither possible nor necessary, this book nevertheless explores how U.S. Latina/o cultural production has represented, synthesized, and theorized the interplay between gender, identity, sexuality, and ethnicity in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first. In doing so I hope to offer a way of understanding and viewing how current military projects are refracted in various arenas (social, political, and artistic) and to ensure that issues of social and political identity, activism, and art remain an integral part of such discussions. 1 / Gender, Difference, and the FSLN Insurrection Two things decided my life: my country and my sex. —Gioconda Belli, The Country under My Skin In a conversation at her home in Oakland, California, in 2007, Nina Serrano described how she became involved in both Nicaraguan solidarity work and filmmaking. Her story emphasized the significant role of her gender and ethnic identity and the impact these had on her political and artistic orientation. After telling me about her Colombian-Anglo heritage, Serrano described her Central American solidarity work and her meeting with the Salvadoran poet and member of the Salvadoran Communist Party Roque Dalton in Cuba in 1969. Dalton noticed the Spanish headline of a local San Francisco community paper Serrano had and questioned her about Los 7 de la Raza, a group of Salvadorans who were accused of murdering a policeman.1 Serrano told Dalton that “the defense of those [men was] being used as an organizing tool in the barrio , in the Latino barrio in San Francisco.” Dalton told her, “When you go back I want you to help them,” and Serrano “vow[ed]” she would. Serrano ’s initial entrance into Central American politics within the United States derived not from a U.S. Latina/o internationalist consciousness but rather from a Latin American internationalism (provoked by Dalton) that she literally brought back to the United States. Dalton’s role in Serrano ’s development as a political activist evidences how she incorporated Latin American revolutionary ideals into her U.S. Latina/o activism.2 Serrano’s connection to Latina/o and Latin American politics through the poet-revolutionary Dalton emphasizes the place of the artistic imagination in her political formation as well as in her enactment of her political ideas. She explained how her identity as a poet as well as her age and 28 / gender, difference, and the fsln insurrection her gender determined her participation in Latina/o politics in San Francisco . She contacted the organizing committee for Los 7 de la Raza, but they “were . . . not at all interested in [her]”: “I was a poet and I was older than them. . . . They were . . . young students and youth and . . . they said, ‘Oh a poet, well, go contact this other crazy poet, Roberto Vargas , he’s putting together a fundraiser for us’—and you could see they thought little of that—‘ . . . Get a hold of him,’ and so I did. And thus began my entrance into using poetry as a political tool. . . . I did my first poetry reading . . . through [a] fundraiser that Roberto was doing called Los 7 de la Raza.”3 Serrano’s story illustrates and expands on the concept of concientización. For Paulo Freire (1993, 17), concientización...