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 sets out to exam- ine 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. 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. The inci- dents related range in time from the start of guerrilla war and coun- terinsurgency in the early 1980s, to more recent battles such as the FMLN final offensive in 1989 and the massacre at Santiago Atitldn in 1990. Most of these children, although their fears have abated, now find themselves in a life and death struggle for economic survival. Twelve-year-old Chico, who lost his grandparents in an army mas- sacre in El Salvador, invokes the mango tree as a witness to his own encounters with sorrow and destruction. But in the end, it is the children themselves, wise beyond their years, who give eloquent tes- timony to the resilience of the human spirit, and the persistence of hope in the face of fear. Salvador's Children: A Song for Survival by Lea Marenn, Ohio State University Press, 1993, 216 pp., $24.95 (cloth). Lea Marenn, a 40-year-old U.S. 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. Sal- vador's Children is the engrossing story of her baptism into mother- hood and into El Salvador's dark history through the eyes of the child. Maria is at first silent and guarded. 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. Embassy, express the child's trauma. In the United States, through Maria's daytime stories of events safely in the past, and her night- time 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. When, near the end of the book, we read the news- paper 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. Central American Children Speak: Our Lives & Our Dreams a video by the Resource Center of the Americas (317 17th Ave. 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). 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 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?" "What sports do they play?" "Do they have big houses and big families?" Ostensibly in answer to these questions, we meet Maria and Karin who live in a Guatemala City barrio threatened with dispos- session; Evelin, a bright, charming Mayan girl who weaves traditional fabrics in the Guatemalan high- lands; Orlando, who sells bread door-to-door with his father in Managua; Jonni, a politically pre- cocious young man growing up on an organic farming cooperative near Estelf; 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. While the dramatic device of questions from the U.S. classroom falls a bit flat, the slices of child- hood life are colorful and effec- tive. The wider social and political context is somewhat understated, but is revealed, rather interesting- ly, in the words of the children themselves. Women in Brazil by the Caipora Women's Group, Latin America Bureau/Monthly Review Press, 1994, 139 pp., $10 (paper). Women in Brazil, originally pub- lished in German in 1991, was put together by the German and Brazil- ian members of the Caipora Wo- men's Group. While the book does not provide any details about the group, it's clear that the authors have a strong women's rights agen- da. The collection's guiding theme is the intersecting oppressions of race, class and gender in women's lives in Brazil. The book interspers- es brief topical essays with occa- sional first-person recorded testimo- ny and short poems. The scattershot organization of the book, while allowing a broad variety of themes to be included, is often jarring. 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 repro- ductive-rights issues such as the high rate of caesarian births and sterilizations in Brazil. E Unless otherwise noted, all reviews are written by NACLA staff
