Reviews

iAdelante Mujeres! Mexican-
American/Chicana Women
National Women’s History Project,
7738 Bell Road, Windsor, CA 95492,
1992, 30 mins., $10 (preview);
$49.95 (sale).
“iAdelante Mujeres!” is an ambi-
tious and upbeat historical survey
of Mexican-American women.
Using archival photographs (which
vary considerably in their quality
and resolution), the video attempts
to document how Mexican and
Mexican-American women’s lives
have been affected by the conquest, colonization, Catholicism, the an-
nexation of northern Mexico to the
United States, the Depression, war,
McCarthyism, discrimination, and
U.S. immigration policy. Although
sketchy in its treatment of these
forces and other obstacles that
Mexican-American women have
confronted, the video does an ad-
mirable job of representing their
struggle to support their families
and maintain their culture, values,
and personal dignity.
The video highlights the ways in
which Chicanas have resisted op-
pression, both as political ac-
tivists-in labor unions, in defend-
ing their language, and in the cre-
ation of cultural associations and
publications-and in their everyday
lives as mothers and wives, re-
claiming their cultural heritage in
the preparation of foods and in the
celebration of religious and cultural
events. The video (available in both
English and Spanish) is accompa-
nied by a well-written guide for
classroom use.
-Erica Polakoff
Between the Lines: Letters Between Undocumented
Mexican and Central American
Immigrants and Their Families and Friends Translated, edited, and with an intro- duction by Larry Siems, University of Arizona Press, 1995, 311 pp., $19.95 (paper).
From an early age, one is taught
that it is wrong to read other peo-
ple’s private correspondence.
Reading published collections of
letters thus evokes the guilty sensa-
tion of eavesdropping. In this case, the reader finds herself privy to the
most intimate fears, discoveries,
musings, and traumas of Mexican
and Central American undocument-
ed immigrants and their families
and friends back home.
The correspondence is organized
in categories-letters on arrival, the
situation at home, and love letters,
to name a few. Some letter writers
appear only once; others are repre-
sented throughout the volume or
dominate a particular section.
Certain themes and concerns arise
time and again: the economic straits
in the country of origin, the remit-
tances sent or promised, the loneli-
ness and isolation of many in their
new environs, and the difficulty of
finding steady employment in the
United States.
The letters in the original Spanish
appear on the left-hand page with
the English translations on the right.
The book is a joy to read in the
Spanish, with an occasional glance
to the English version for clarifica-
tion of meaning. Unfortunately, the
translation is a disappointment.
Siems does a word-for-word trans-
lation which comes off sounding
unnatural and stilted.
Between the Lines is a much-
needed antidote to anti-immigrant
rhetoric which reduces undocu-
mented immigrants to a faceless
horde. The book endows this most
vulnerable sector of the U.S. popu-
lation with voice, personality, and
humanity.
Life on the Hyphen:
The Cuban-American Way by Gustavo Perez Firmat, University of Texas Press, 1994, 216 pp., $30 (cloth), $12.95 (paper).
In this book about Cuban-American
contributions to U.S. popular cul-
ture and the arts, we are treated to
an intelligent, lively discussion of
such figures as Desi Arnaz, Gloria
Estefan, PNrez Prado and Oscar
Hijuelos. In Prrez Firmat’s reading,
they all exemplify the Cuban-
American condition of hybridism
and biculturation. This characteris-
tic, he argues, is especially true of
the so-called “1.5 generation”–
those Cuban Americans, now in
their mid-30s to early 50s, who
were born in Cuba but who came of
age in the United States. “One-and-
a-halfers are translation artists,”
P6rez Firmat writes in a typical dis-
play of his lambent, playful prose.
“Tradition bound but translation
bent, they are sufficiently immersed
in each culture to give both ends of
the hyphen their due.”
P6rez Firmat calls his genealogy
of Cuban-American culture the
“Desi Chain” in a nod to Desi
Arnaz’s foundational role. Ricky
Ricardo-the character played by
Arnaz in the I Love Lucy show of
the 1950s-is usually dismissed as
a minor “ethnic” character made
palatable for middle-American TV
viewers. PNrez Firmat, however,
sees Ricky as the “tutelary spirit or
orisha” of Cuban-American cul-
ture. In the most engaging part of
the book, he recounts hilarious ca-
pers from old I Love Lucy episodes
that reveal how Ricky gingerly ne-
gotiates the terrain of American
culture.
P6rez Firmat never once uses the
word “postmodern” in his book,
but the imprint of that school of
thought is everywhere. It may ac-
count for what is not discussed.
Cuban-American culture, he writes,
is “shamelessly materialistic and
resolutely middle brow.” He doesn’t, however, ponder the connection
between that orientation and the
fact that Cuban Americans are ex-
iles of a socialist revolution.
Moreover, these 6migrds have par-
ticular class and racial affinities
which affect how Cuban-American
culture has evolved. The author
makes only glancing reference to
the fact that Cuban culture has had
its blackness expunged in its
American translation.
Continued on page 48
Vo XXIX, No 3 Nov/DEc 1995 47 VOL XXIX, NO 3 Nov/DEC 1995 47REVIEWS
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 47
Chile’s Free-Market Miracle:
A Second Look
by Joseph Collins and John Lear,
Institute for Food and Development
Policy, 1995, 311 pp., $15.95 (paper).
Starting in the 1950s, Chile’s
“Chicago boys” developed a cri-
tique of statist and protectionist
economic models that is now hege-
monic throughout Latin America.
Under the rule of Augusto Pinochet
(1973-90), they put their neoliberal
ideas into practice, imposing the
“freedom to choose” on a nation si-
lenced by soldiers and tanks. By the
late 1980s, the reformers claimed
success: Chile had a high-growth,
low-inflation, export-oriented econ-
omy. The reforms were praised by
the high priests of economic cor-
rectness in the U.S. government,
the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) and World Bank as proof of
the magic of the marketplace, and
were held up as a model for the rest
of Latin America to emulate. But
what were the costs of the Chicago
boys’ reforms?
According to this important and
lucid book, Chile’s free-market
“miracle” led to two disastrous re-
cessions, widening inequalities of
wealth and income, the growth of
underemployment and insecure
employment, greater poverty, the
plundering of natural resources,
massive borrowing, a bloated mili-
tary, and the neutering of the state’s
power to regulate and guide the
economy. If this sounds familiar, it
should: while implemented sooner
and with more ruthlessness and
thoroughness in Chile, these re-
forms bear a broad resemblance to
the Reagan/Thatcher “revolution”
in the United States and the United
Kingdom.
Collins and Lear are especially at-
tentive to the fate of workers during
the so-called miracle. Trade-union
leaders were heavily targeted in the
killings, firings and arrests that fol-
lowed the 1973 coup that brought
Pinochet to power. The 1979 Labor
Code created a highly fragmented
system of collective bargaining that
effectively prevented workers from
organizing beyond the individual
firm. Labor was therefore kept di-
vided and weak. Employers’ rights
to hire and fire were almost unre-
stricted, and seasonal and tempo-
rary workers were denied basic
rights to organize. Between 1973
and 1993, the percentage of workers
in unions declined from 35% to
13% while the real value of the min-
imum wage plummeted.
An epilogue by Stephanie
Rosenfeld that covers changes
under the civilian Aylwin (1990-
94) and Frei (1994-) governments,
provides some grounds for opti-
mism. Since the end of military
rule, labor has regained some of its
lost rights, and the new govern-
ments have succeeded in reducing
poverty by raising the minimum
wage and introducing social pro-
grams long prohibited by free-mar-
ket dogmatists. But the transition
to a civilian regime took place
without a fundamental revision of
the economic model set in place by
the Chicago boys, so social im-
provements are likely to be mar-
ginal in the next several years.
Lear and Collins’ carefully-re-
searched and persuasively-argued
book provides an immense service
by showing that the social costs
of “actually existing neoliberal-
ism” are unacceptably high, and
that the time has come to explore
alternatives.
-Anthony Pereira
Shantytown Protest in
Pinochet’s Chile
By Cathy Lisa Schneider, Temple
University Press, 1995, 269 pp.,
$49.95 (cloth), $18.95 (paper).
The storm of protests that swept
Chile between 1983 and 1986 in
the aftermath of a harsh economic
downturn is an overlooked chapter
in the much-celebrated Chilean
“economic success story.” Cathy
Schneider’s recent book reminds
us of those turbulent times, when
ordinary Chileans took to the
streets to struggle against tyranny
and injustice.
Schneider skillfully teases out the
dynamic interaction between politi-
cal action and situational factors.
The rebellions of the early 1980s
were not the spontaneous uprisings
of the dissatisfied masses, spurred
to action by the economic downturn
in 1983, as conventional wisdom
has it. Through careful comparison
of several shantytowns in the out-
skirts of Santiago, Schneider ob-
served that protest activity in some
shantytowns was more intense and
prolonged than in others. What em-
boldened some communities to
protest and others to remain quies-
cent, Schneider argues, was the na-
ture of community networks within
the shantytowns. In some communi-
ties, the social and political net-
works built up by left-wing ac-
tivism, and particularly by the
Chilean Communist Party, survived
the dictatorship’s repression. In the
wake of the economic crisis, party
activists were able to reactivate
these networks-Schneider calls
them the “roots of resistance”–and
mobilize widespread and sustained
protests against the government in
shantytowns like La Victoria and
Pablo Neruda.
Schneider also maps out the im-
pact on the grassroots protest
movement of the reemergence of
Chilean political parties from 1986
through the democratic transition in
1990. Ironically, the links between
social movements and political par-
ties that had facilitated protest in
the early 1980s became a demobi-
lizing factor by 1990. In particular,
the decision of the Communist
Party to engage in armed struggle
against the dictatorship devastated
grassroots networks. More moder-
ate parties, pursuing negotiations
with the Pinochet regime to relin-
quish power, actively discouraged
grassroots protest.
All reviews, unless otherwise noted,
are written by NACLA staff.