Women Writing Resistance: Essays on Latin America and the Caribbean (review)

In her introduction to Women Writing Resistance, Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez states that in order for us to have a vision of a just and inclusive world, we need writers and poets to illuminate our way. The contributors to this collection of essays, stories, and poems do just that: Through personal and political accounts of experiences in many Latin American and Caribbean countries spanning several decades, these women writers demonstrate the power of the written word in the face of violence, marginalization, and oppression under patriarchal capitalism.

The writers whose work makes up this volume include Latinas of various national origins, some of them writing in exile in the United States or other countries; anglophone and francophone Caribbean women; members of the Hispanic Jewish diaspora; Chicanas who reside in the cultural borderlands of Mexico and the United States; as well as Puerto Riqueñas who occupy a particularly hybrid status. Indeed, due to their cross-national and cross-cultural positionalities, the contributors to this book extend the possibility of coalition building between women from many different backgrounds—activists who seek a more equitable and sustainable world. They also challenge many types of borders—geographical, social, linguistic, cultural, and political—and this not only affirms their own "complex realities" (5) but also reflects the multi-sided perspectives of numerous women of the Americas.

These women writers were exposed to violent and traumatic times in Latin America and the Caribbean, a period of brutal dictatorships supported by the U.S. government during the Cold War, and countered by leftist social justice movements many of whose participants were arrested, tortured, and "disappeared." For example, Raquel Partnoy, a Jew who lived until recently in Argentina, writes about her experience as the mother of a "disappeared" child. Partnoy poignantly chronicles the devastating effect on her family of her daughter's and son-in-law's arrest and imprisonment, and how she eventually channeled her anger and despair into research on testimonies of survivors of both the Holocaust and the military dictatorship in Argentina. She eventually painted a series of works titled "Surviving Genocide" so that the world's people would "never again" be subjected to such atrocities. Another writer, Emma Sepulveda, became aware of the parallel developments in her country, Chile, under Pinochet and those in Vietnam during the war with the United States. Her deep empathy with the people of Vietnam is captured in her poetry that strives to reflect the "individual, collective and universal memory of which we are all participants and witnesses, guilty and innocent, perpetrators and victims" (64). The transnational connections these and other writers in this collection make highlight the importance of viewing local struggles in relation to developments in other parts of the world.

Most of the contributors to Women Writing Resistance have been involved in the feminist struggle to end sexism and the indigenous and black movements to overcome racism. While they may not have embraced readily the feminist label, nevertheless, they have been committed to ending the multiple oppressions affecting the majority of the population. For most of the writers, women's rights constitute the central component of all struggles for social justice and equality. For example, the Guatemalan Quiche Indian Rigoberta Menchu, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, writes that the "struggle of indigenous people . . . represents all oppressed people of the world" (127), but recognizes also that Mayan women are "fighting for better treatment and better condition. . . . We want equal opportunities, and to have them within the norms of our own culture" (131).

The book is divided into three sections. Part one, "Re-Envisioning History," contains narratives, essays, poetry and art that bear witness to the tumultuous events and their effects on women of Latin America and the Caribbean. Part two, "The Politics of Language and Identity," focuses on language as an instrument of domination and how the writers use language to resist their and others' oppression. As Gloria Anzaldúa aptly...