Reviews
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...
...Salvador's Children is the engrossing story of her baptism into motherhood and into El Salvador's dark history through the eyes of the child...
...Central American Children Speak: Our Lives & Our Dreams a video by the Resource Center of the Americas (317 17th Ave...
...While the book does not provide any details about the group, it's clear that the authors have a strong women's rights agenda...
...The incidents related range in time from the start of guerrilla war and counterinsurgency in the early 1980s, to more recent battles such as the FMLN final offensive in 1989 and the massacre at Santiago Atitldn in 1990...
...Lea Marenn, a 40-year-old U.S...
...Salvador's Children: A Song for Survival by Lea Marenn, Ohio State University Press, 1993, 216 pp., $24.95 (cloth...
...classroom falls a bit flat, the slices of childhood life are colorful and effective...
...The collection's guiding theme is the intersecting oppressions of race, class and gender in women's lives in Brazil...
...Patricia Goudvis sets out to examine 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...
...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...
...In the United States, through Maria's daytime stories of events safely in the past, and her nighttime 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...
...Ostensibly in answer to these questions, we meet Maria and Karin who live in a Guatemala City barrio threatened with dispossession...
...Twelve-year-old Chico, who lost his grandparents in an army massacre in El Salvador, invokes the mango tree as a witness to his own encounters with sorrow and destruction...
...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...
...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...
...Evelin, a bright, charming Mayan girl who weaves traditional fabrics in the Guatemalan highlands...
...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 wider social and political context is somewhat understated, but is revealed, rather interestingly, in the words of the children themselves...
...The book intersperses brief topical essays with occasional first-person recorded testimony and short poems...
...The scattershot organization of the book, while allowing a broad variety of themes to be included, is often jarring...
...E Unless otherwise noted, all reviews are written by NACLA staff...
...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...
...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...
...Most of these children, although their fears have abated, now find themselves in a life and death struggle for economic survival...
...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...
...Women in Brazil by the Caipora Women's Group, Latin America Bureau/Monthly Review Press, 1994, 139 pp., $10 (paper...
...Embassy, express the child's trauma...
...When, near the end of the book, we read the newspaper 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...
...Jonni, a politically precocious young man growing up on an organic farming cooperative near Estelf...
...Women in Brazil, originally published in German in 1991, was put together by the German and Brazilian members of the Caipora Women's Group...
...What sports do they play...
...Do they have big houses and big families...
...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 reproductive-rights issues such as the high rate of caesarian births and sterilizations in Brazil...
...Orlando, who sells bread door-to-door with his father in Managua...
...While the dramatic device of questions from the U.S...
...But in the end, it is the children themselves, wise beyond their years, who give eloquent testimony to the resilience of the human spirit, and the persistence of hope in the face of fear...
...Maria is at first silent and guarded...
Vol. 27 • May 1994 • No. 6
