Reviews
The Murals of Revolutionary Nicaragua, 1979-1992 by David Kunzle with an introduction by Miguel D'Escoto, University of California Press, 1995, 203 pp., $65 (cloth), $29.95 (paper). From the...
...While recession, natural disaster, and demographic pressures provided the catalysts, the interactions among the region's central political actors-the military, popular organizations, the church, revolutionary movements, and the U.S...
...The University of Missouri offers a 1991 paperback edition of Massacre in Mexico, Elena Poniatowska's harrowing account of the 1968 killing of hundreds of student demonstrators at Tlatelolco by government troops...
...But, as Vilas argues, it would be a mistake to overlook the dramatic changes in Central American societies-such as the opening up of the region's political institutions and greater popular participation-forged in the crucible of revolution...
...We are not incompetent...
...In his opening discussion of the theoretical and historical background to revolution, Carlos Vilas provides an incisive and elegant analysis of the relationship between economics, consciousness, politics, and the revolutionary process...
...Vilas contrasts the rise of revolution with the trajectory of reformism, more successful in Costa Rica than in Honduras...
...Most of the heroic rescues were made by concerned young people who burrowed into the rubble with shovels, picks, and their bare hands...
...What is the positive outcome of all this...
...The book is comprised of a patchwork of testimonies of earthquake victims buried alive in the rubble, of others who frantically searched for the bodies of loved ones in makeshift morgues, and of the volunteer rescuers who worked around the clock digging out victims...
...The photographs are accompanied by an extended introduction in which Kunzle describes the significance of the mural movement-and popular art and culture in generalin building a new Nicaragua...
...Now Temple University Press has put out a translation of her 1988 account of the Mexico City earthquake of September 18, 1975...
...The earthquake pulled back a curtain on Mexican social relations...
...These spontaneous acts of human compassion and solidarity planted the seeds for the flowering of grassroots organizing in the tragedy's aftermath...
...The dismal working conditions of clandestine sweatshops were revealed after hundreds of seamstresses died when the poorly constructed factories crumbled in the quake...
...A multiplicity of social themes are also addressed in the murals...
...Between Earthquakes and Volcanoes: Market, State, and the Revolutions in Central America by Carlos M. Vilas, translated by Ted Kuster, Monthly Review Press, 1995, 224 pp., $36.00 (cloth), $18.00 (paper...
...The soldiers who arrived on the scene in the first crucial hours were more concerned with cordoning off the area and preventing looting than with rescuing lives...
...The establishment of a neoliberal regime in Nicaragua on the heels of the Sandinistas' electoral defeat, the Salvadoran peace agreement followed by a difficult transition for the left, and the onagain, off-again peace process in Guatemala seem the hallmarks of regression rather than triumph...
...Kunzle annotates each image with information about the location of the mural, its contents, and when and by whom it was executed...
...intervention, with the United States often symbolized as the grim reaper...
...Between Earthquakes and Volcanoes is a thoroughly documented, datapacked, and systematic retrospective of the 30-year revolutionary cycle in Central America...
...During the 1980s, 28 Centers for Popular Culture were built throughout Nicaragua to fulfill the revolution's mandate that "culture should be made by and not for the masses...
...As each account concludes, the narrative folds back in on itself to the early morning hour when the ground rocked for two and a half terrifying minutes...
...Vilas' most significant contribution lies in the final third of the book, which assesses the revolutionary experience and its ambiguous results...
...The insurrection itself is celebrated in a number of the murals which depict street barricades, peasants bearing small arms against the heavy artillery of the National Guard, and the role of Christian guerrillas in the struggle...
...Although what motivates people to rebel, he argues, is a sudden and dramatic change in living conditions, "the symbolic dimension of this process is as important as material life conditions...
...they are the blackboards of the people...
...What is incompetent is the system that we live in...
...It's a pleasure to see the works of prominent Latin American essayists finally finding their way into English translation...
...The absence of a single narrative thread enhances the potency of the book...
...Kunzle's defense of the mural movement and autochtonous cultural expression in general is unwavering...
...Today, few of those murals remain intact...
...The murals celebrate the insurrection and revolutionary construction," writes Kunzle...
...Nothing, Nobody: The Voices of the Mexico City Earthquake by Elena Poniatowska, translated by Aurora Camacho de Schmidt and Arthur Schmidt, Temple University Press, 1995, 327 pp., $49.95 (cloth), $18.95 (paper...
...David Kunzle has done a splendid job documenting the mural movement that flourished in Sandinista Nicaragua...
...In the trunk of a car buried by the wreckage of the collapsed Attorney General's Office, the decomposed cadaver of a human rights lawyer was discovered bound and gagged, a victim not of the earthquake but of government repression days before...
...strategy of "low-intensity warfare" against the burgeoning revolutionary forces next door...
...Capitalist development in Central America in the 1950s and 1960s, Vilas argues, gave rise to the protagonists of the region's revolutions: the new middle classes and a mass of rootless semiproletarianized labor...
...While he sometimes goes overboard with his rhetoric, Kunzle has nonetheless done a thorough and praiseworthy job of collecting photographs of now-destroyed murals, thereby helping preserve the cultural heritage of Sandinista Nicaragua that others are so bent on obliterating...
...The Centers promoted mural painting, poetry and pottery workshops, and dance and theater festivals...
...I think that the old inferiority complex that Mexicans have should be questioned...
...From the Sandinista victory in 1979 to its defeat at the polls in 1990, over 300 murals were painted in different corners of revolutionary Nicaragua...
...Many emphasize the promise of a better life embodied by the revolution: free and universal health care, literacy campaigns, well-nourished children at play...
...The Murals of Revolutionary Nicaragua offers vibrant, high-quality color photographs of 64 murals, as well as black-andwhite images of over 200 others...
...They are extensions of the great literacy campaign, which turned 'all Nicaragua into a school,' as the phrase went...
...Political factors are also crucial since people "must be convinced that collective action can set things right...
...The earthquake proved to us that when we work together, we do a good job...
...The majority, however, were deliberately painted over under the orders of Managua's conservative mayor, Amoldo Aleminwho is today favored to win Nicaragua's October, 1996 presidential elections...
...But in both countries, he writes, reforms were attenuated by the U.S...
...reflects one survivor...
...The high number of casualties was in part due to the historical willingness of government officials to turn a blind eye on buildingcode violations in exchange for a bribe...
...government-generated the chemical reaction...
...Vilas offers a credible framework for understanding events in the various countries of the isthmus as part of a single, broad-based revolutionary experience...
...The challenge that lies ahead is how to convert this historic opportunity into genuine democracy and lasting peace...
...The murals strikingly portray the struggle against U.S...
...But the brightest light was shone on the authorities, whose response to the disaster ranged from incompetent to obstructive to outright criminal...
...Some were destroyed by the elements, others by indifference...
...They are selfimage and self-education, popular autobiography...
Vol. 29 • May 1996 • No. 6
