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Chapter 1: Campesina as Nation: Feminine Resistance and Power in Manlio Argueta’s Un día en la vida and Cuzcatlán: Donde bate la Mar del Sur
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Chapter 1 Campesina as Nation Feminine Resistance and Power in Manlio Argueta’s Un día en la vida and Cuzcatlán: Donde bate la Mar del Sur By the time Manlio Argueta published his seminal novel, Un día en la vida, in 1980, war had become an unavoidable reality in the country. The Farabundo Martí Liberation Front (FMLN), a unified political block consolidated in 1980 and comprising El Salvador’s leading left-wing militant organizations, opted to engage in guerrilla warfare and was preparing to launch its first major offensive against state military forces.1 In keeping with its socialist political ideology, the FMLN sought to eradicate the oppressive class system and inequality instituted and maintained by El Salvador’s oligarchic state. Originally a network of fourteen family groups that came into power at the end of the nineteenth century, by 1974 the Salvadoran oligarchy boasted more than sixty-five family firms that owned the majority of the country’s land and controlled its agro-export industry based primarily on coffee (Dunkerley, The Long War 7). Many of the country’s presidents belonged to one of the “families,” helping to expand the oligarchy’s dominance into the political arena and protect its economic interests. The use of state-sanctioned military violence and repression against the rural labor force on which the Salvadoran agroexport economy depended was a routine practice, most often carried out by the National Guard, a military organization founded under the auspices of the oligarchy in 1912 and charged with the task of policing the coffee fields and maintaining internal order. A key player in the FMLN’s project of national liberation, which it planned to achieve by way of a strategy of popular armed insurrection, 15 16 / Changing Women, Changing Nation was the Salvadoran rural community. Although a major sector of the country’s population and one of its most important economic mainstays, this community had lacked a political voice and presence throughout most of El Salvador’s history. Attempts by rural peasants to change their exploitative labor conditions and political disenfranchisement, such as the ill-fated 1932 uprising that culminated in the massacre of thirty thousand peasants, including famed Communist leader Augustín Farabundo Martí, by government forces, ensured the continued subordination of rural populations.2 The rhetoric of liberation theology, a strong undercurrent of many of the Christian missionary groups that provided aid and services to campesinos during the 1970s and 1980s, fostered a radical change in this situation. As Tommie Sue Montgomery notes, when one speaks of the Salvadoran church that surfaced during this period, one is speaking of the “iglesia popular (popular church)—that is, the tens of thousands of people, most of them poor, who came to believe that ‘liberation’ is not only something one achieves at death but also something that, with God’s blessing, one can struggle for and possibly achieve during one’s lifetime” (84). This new understanding of themselves as an oppressed group with the ability to change their precarious condition, coupled with the FMLN’s strategic organizing efforts in the countryside, was one of the main reasons for the mass mobilization of El Salvador’s rural sector. Another was the incessant persecution of their communities by the state’s military forces, which deemed peasants part of the growing “communist threat” that needed to be eradicated at all costs. Violent affronts on rural livelihoods, including the imprisonment, killing, or disappearance of one or more members of the same family, were commonplace occurrences that forced a restructuring, to a certain extent, of gender roles and hierarchies. Because the majority of the individuals targeted by government forces were men, women had to occupy the leadership positions in community organizations that their husbands had left vacant while also adopting new roles as the sole providers and protectors of their families. Rural women soon found themselves not only fighting for their lives but also in the midst of a significant transformation concerning what had been, up to that time, their limited public agency and their perceived domestic roles.3 Campesinas emerged as historical protagonists whose participation in their community’s battle for survival and social justice altered the contours of the civil conflict as much as it did their individual lives. The ways and extent to which rural women incorporated themselves into the struggle were varied, influenced by generational divides and differing degrees of politicization. Older generations of grandmothers and mothers provided shelter, food, and laundry services to guerrilla [3...