Women Writing Resistance

Table of Contents

Preface by Elizabeth Martinez
Introduction by Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez

Part One: Re-Envisioning History
1 Revision by Aurora Levins Morales
2 We Are Ugly, But We Are Here by Edwidge Danticat
3 The Silent Witness by Raquel Partnoy
4 And What Would It Be Like? by Michelle Cliff
5 Everything I Kept: Reflections of an “Anthropoeta” by Ruth Behar
6 The Dream of Nunca Más: Healing the Wounds by Emma Sepúlveda

Part Two: The Politics of Language and Identity
7 Language as an Instrument of Domination by Rosario Castellaños
8 Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers by Gloria Anzaldúa
9 Las aeious by Ruth Irupé Sanabria
10 Art in América con Acento by Cherríe Moraga
11 The Myth of the Latin Woman by Judith Ortiz Cofer
12 The Quincentenary Conference and the Earth Summit, 1992 by Rigoberta Menchú
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Excerpt

From the Introduction, Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez

Women Writing Resistance: Essays on Latin America and the Caribbean appears in a time of intense awareness of the effects of globalization—the transnational movements of capital and of people—and a heightened awareness of the porousness of borders that used to seem firm, especially national and cultural borders. Old categories such as “First World” and “Third World” are no longer neatly mappable, and the old divides of nationality, language, and race have become much more fluid. The contributors to Women Writing Resistance range across all of these borders, locating themselves in the borderlands between “Latin America,” “the Caribbean,” and “North America,” even as they call into question the validity of such labels as a signpost to identity.

From Latinas of various national origins, many now writing in exile, to writers of anglophone and francophone Caribbean origins, to members of the Hispanic Jewish diaspora, to Chicanas who culturally straddle the US-Mexico border, to Puerto Riqueñas with their special hybrid American political status, and even including one North American of European Jewish ancestry, Margaret Randall, whose lifetime of commitment to social justice movem...

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Praise

“In this volume some of the finest women writers of Latin America and the Caribbean give us history re-told, language and identity refigured, and resistance writ large and loud. Their visionary thinking and beautiful, clear voices tell us what we urgently need to hear and know. The sheer force of word and spirit gathered within these pages helps us vision the world we should work for.”
—Elizabeth Alexander, author of The Venus Hottentot

“While fiercely speaking against acts of state terrorism, neo-colonialism, racism, and patriarchy that pervade Latin America and the Caribbean, the writers in Women Writing Resistance also bring to light other atrocities against humanity, such as the Jewish Holocaust, the Vietnam War, IMF/World Bank policies, and the Iraqi War. It reminds us of how transnationally connected the region is, and how important it is to view local struggles in relationship to broader regional and global developments.”
—Kamala Kempadoo, editor of Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition and Sun, Sex, and Gold

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