Book Review
Alegria, Isabel
In this short 176 page book, author Margaret Randall presents a detailed account of the life of Doris Tijerino, a seasoned guerrilla of the Sandinist National Liberation Front (FSLN)...
...With tenderness, she tells of her many co-workers who died in battles with the National Guard or at the hands of military torturers...
...At age 15, Doris made her own entry into the guerrilla support efforts when, at her mother's request, she transported a package of guns past the National Guard...
...Doris writes, "I was made to see that the name of Conchita Alday must be borne with dignity, that I had to respect her, had to deserve the honor of bearing the name of this comrade...
...The sequel to Doris' and her peoples' long struggle can be found in the news headlines of today...
...The assassination of Anastasio Somoza Garcia (the current dictator's father) by Rigoberto Lopez Perez in 1956 also made a lasting impression on her, "I can recall that in my house there was a photo of Rigoberto that they used to show us so we'd recognize him...
...One of her longer imprisonments was after her arrest in July 1968...
...writer living in Cuba, sensitively and skillfully uses a first person autobiographical narrative to relate Doris' story...
...At the bottom of the photo was a stanza of one of Rigoberto's poems that read: The flowers of my days will be withered/ while the tyrant has blood in his veins...
...Doris tells of the deep personal transformation she experienced in her life...
...From then on, Doris Tijerino describes a life of constant struggle and dedication to the work of the FSLN...
...Doris' mother, a leftist daughter of English immigrant parents, had a deep influence on her, putting into perspective the oppressive conditions that Doris saw in Nicaraguan society...
...She moves from being a critical and sensitive but passive witness to her people's oppression to being a committed and highly politicized guerrilla fighter...
...Especially touching are her remembrances of such leaders as Ricardo Morales, Oscar Turcios and Julio Buitrago...
...soldiers for her political connections...
...Even in this elite circle, Doris was not immune from discrimination, "I felt really different...
...I wasn't tall or blond nor did I have blue eyes...
...She was taken to a prison located inside the Somoza residence...
...A large part of her work at this time came in response to the devastating 1972 earthquake...
...She describes, for example, the life of prostitution forced on many peasant women through the collaboration of pimps, National Guardsmen and those in charge of the jails and prisons...
...In 1963, she attended the Patrice Lumumba University in the Soviet Union...
...She remained in prison for two years and describes many of her experiences there, "All the prisoners joined in the hunger strikes we carried out in prison so we would be set free...
...An informative introduction and chronology of Nicaraguan history from 1926 to the present help put her story in perspective...
...Throughout the book, Tijerino takes special care to describe the contributions made by women fighters such as Gladys Baez, Yolanda Nuriez and Elba Campos...
...During her school years, Doris questioned her religious beliefs, took an active part in anti-government demonstrations, witnessed the developing guerrilla movement in the countryside and began her own formal political involvement...
...Doris Tijerino was arrested several times...
...Born in Matagalpa in 1943 into an upper-middle class environment, Doris was the daughter of a conservative Nicaraguan landowner...
...In 1966, after the birth of her first child 54 she returned to Nicaragua and decided to join the FSLN...
...In this short 176 page book, author Margaret Randall presents a detailed account of the life of Doris Tijerino, a seasoned guerrilla of the Sandinist National Liberation Front (FSLN) of Nicaragua and one of the 59 prisoners released recently after the takeover of the National Palace by FSLN commandos last August...
...Here, her life began to take the turn that eventually led to her close association with Nicaraguan revolutionaries...
...I was Nicaraguan...
...She tells of the many workers' strikes supported by the FSLN, including the gasoline, milk and hospital strikes of the mid-seventies...
...In the late fifties Doris entered a public institute to study -her first break from the private schools customarily attended by people of her class...
...Doris tells of growing up in the late forties and early fifties in Nicaragua: the brutal poverty of the peasantry, the role of the National Guard in the long history of repression against the people's movements and her growing understanding of the class differences in Nicaraguan society...
...My mother always, constantly, made me see the relationship between North American imperialism and the dictatorship of the Somozas and the situation of the Nicaraguan people...
...She also explains the unique oppression suffered by women in Nicaragua...
...The FSLN gave her the name of Conchita Alday, a Nicaraguan revolutionary woman who in 1926 was brutally murdered by U.S...
...This book offers a rare glimpse behind the personal anonimities necessary in guerrilla movements, and provides an understanding of the FSLN through the personal story of one of its own fighters...
...Here she developed her political theory and met a number of Latin American revolutionary fighters, including Nora Paiz, a Guatemalan, who was later killed in her homeland along with guerrilla poet Otto Rene Castillo...
...Here she was tortured with beatings, electric shocks and repeated sexual assaults...
...The mothers too: our mothers, the mothers of condemned comrades, mothers of dead comrades, sisters the struggle for the freeing of the prisoners and the solidarity and support for the prisoners was a struggle headed by women Eventually acquitted and freed, Doris resumed her work with the FSLN and was arrested again in April 1978...
...The author, a U.S...
Vol. 12 • November 1978 • No. 6
