If the Mango Tree Could Speak a video by Patricia Goudvis (distrib- uted by New Day Films, 22 D Holly- wood Ave., Hohokus, NJ 07423), 1993, 58 mins., $250 (sale), $60 (rental).
Patricia Goudvis sets out to exam-
ine how the conflict between fear
and hope is playing itself out in the
lives of Central American children
who have lived through over a
decade of political violence. In a
series of well-chosen and sharply
etched vignettes, we meet three
children from Guatemala and six
from El Salvador, all of whom
have experienced armed attacks,
the deaths of family members, and
an all-pervasive terror. The inci-
dents related range in time from
the start of guerrilla war and coun-
terinsurgency in the early 1980s, to
more recent battles such as the
FMLN final offensive in 1989 and
the massacre at Santiago Atitldn in
1990.
Most of these children, although
their fears have abated, now find
themselves in a life and death
struggle for economic survival.
Twelve-year-old Chico, who lost
his grandparents in an army mas-
sacre in El Salvador, invokes the
mango tree as a witness to his own
encounters with sorrow and
destruction. But in the end, it is the
children themselves, wise beyond
their years, who give eloquent tes-
timony to the resilience of the
human spirit, and the persistence of
hope in the face of fear.
Salvador’s Children: A Song for
Survival by Lea Marenn, Ohio State University Press, 1993, 216 pp., $24.95 (cloth).
Lea Marenn, a 40-year-old U.S.
academic with a rudimentary
knowledge of the Spanish language
and Central American politics,
went to El Salvador in 1984 to
adopt eight-year-old Marfa. Sal-
vador’s Children is the engrossing
story of her baptism into mother-
hood and into El Salvador’s dark
history through the eyes of the
child. Maria is at first silent and
guarded. In lieu of words, the
beads of sweat that glisten on her
forehead as she sleeps the first
night, and the rash that breaks out
on her body as Lea arranges the
visa at the U.S. Embassy, express
the child’s trauma.
In the United States, through
Maria’s daytime stories of events
safely in the past, and her night-
time stories in which the terrors
and fears of her past live on in the
present, Lea learns about Maria’s
extended family, about the hamlet
of San Antonio near San Vincente
which was the center of Marfa’s
world, and about the way that
death threaded through her life and
finally shattered it. When, near the
end of the book, we read the news-
paper accounts that Lea digs up in
the Library of Congress about the
counterinsurgency war in the San
Vincente area in 1982, Maria’s
story is like a palimpsest, imbuing
the dry words with new meaning.
Central American Children
Speak: Our Lives & Our Dreams a video by the Resource Center of the Americas (317 17th Ave. S.E., Min- neapolis, MN 55414), 1993, 41 mins., grades 4-8, available in Spanish or English, accompanied by 28-page study guide, $75 (institutions), $35 (individuals).
The producers of this film have
succeeded in the difficult task of
presenting politically sensitive
material in an interesting visual
format for American grade-school
and junior high-school kids. The
film’s point of reference is the
somewhat artificial staging of a
series of questions about children
in Central America by some
fourth-graders in Minneapolis,
such as “Do Central American kids
go to school?” “What sports do
they play?” “Do they have big
houses and big families?”
Ostensibly in answer to these
questions, we meet Maria and
Karin who live in a Guatemala
City barrio threatened with dispos-
session; Evelin, a bright, charming
Mayan girl who weaves traditional
fabrics in the Guatemalan high-
lands; Orlando, who sells bread
door-to-door with his father in
Managua; Jonni, a politically pre-
cocious young man growing up on
an organic farming cooperative
near Estelf; and finally, Lisbet and
Rafael, talented young musicians
and children’s rights activists who
co-produce a radio program by and
for children in northern Nicaragua.
While the dramatic device of
questions from the U.S. classroom
falls a bit flat, the slices of child-
hood life are colorful and effec-
tive. The wider social and political
context is somewhat understated,
but is revealed, rather interesting-
ly, in the words of the children
themselves.
Women in Brazil by the Caipora Women’s Group, Latin America Bureau/Monthly Review Press, 1994, 139 pp., $10 (paper).
Women in Brazil, originally pub-
lished in German in 1991, was put
together by the German and Brazil-
ian members of the Caipora Wo-
men’s Group. While the book does
not provide any details about the
group, it’s clear that the authors
have a strong women’s rights agen-
da. The collection’s guiding theme
is the intersecting oppressions of
race, class and gender in women’s
lives in Brazil. The book interspers-
es brief topical essays with occa-
sional first-person recorded testimo-
ny and short poems. The scattershot
organization of the book, while
allowing a broad variety of themes
to be included, is often jarring. The
essays, usually signed by individual
women, cover such subjects as the
1989 strike of women factory
workers at the DeMillus lingerie
factory, the struggle of domestic
servants for civil rights, and repro-
ductive-rights issues such as the
high rate of caesarian births and
sterilizations in Brazil. E
Unless otherwise noted, all reviews are
written by NACLA staff
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