RETHINKING THE “AGE OF REAGAN”: INTERNATIONAL FEMINISM IN THE 1980s

Until recently, the historiography of the 1980s has paid scant attention to liberal and left-wing politics during the decade. For example, many accounts focus on the period through the biographical lens of Ronald Reagan, whose name has become a synecdoche not only for his presidential term (1981–89), but also for the decade as a whole, with historians referring to the “Reagan era” or the “age of Reagan.”Footnote ³ In these narratives, Reagan's electoral victories against Jimmy Carter in 1980 and Walter Mondale in 1984 represent the high tide of a brand of political conservatism that had its roots in the disintegration of the New Deal electoral coalition, negative responses to the social movements of the 1960s, and the rise of Sun Belt politics during the 1970s.Footnote ⁴ The dominant narrative of the 1980s consequently characterizes it as a period of decline for American liberalism: a decade of conservative political ascendancy, low taxes, deregulatory economic restructuring, and the dramatic decline in the power of organized labour, not only in the US, but across the industrialized world.Footnote ⁵

In most of these accounts, the left is virtually nowhere to be seen. To an extent, this is understandable. Compared to the 1930s and the 1960s, to give two obvious examples, progressive political activism was relatively marginalized during the 1980s. But this fact did not prevent a number of vibrant social movements from emerging during the decade, centring on issues as diverse as nuclear disarmament, the HIV–AIDS epidemic, anti-apartheid activism, and opposition to US intervention in Central America. Several recently published histories of post-1960s American politics and society, as well as a number of more specific studies of political activism in the period, have begun the process of tracing the development and impact of these oppositional movements: notable examples include Robert Subrug's Beyond Vietnam (2009), Simon Hall's American Patriotism, American Protest (2010) and Bradford Martin's The Other Eighties (2011).Footnote ⁶ This important research is part of what Julian E. Zelizer has described as a “new wave” of historical scholarship on the history of American conservatism that is developing “a historical narrative about the divisions, oppositions, struggles and compromises” that conservatives battled with during the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote ⁷ As Kim Phillips Fein has recently argued in the Journal of American History, this type of scholarship should help us to think of the “Reagan era” as “a moment of sustained conflict” between liberal and conservative interests, during which the left “helped to determine the course of events” even though the period “often seemed dominated by the right.”Footnote ⁸

This interpretive scheme is as relevant to Central America activism as it is to any of the decade's social movements. As Roger Peace has shown in an important study of Nicaragua-centred activism, solidarity networks and anti-interventionist groups countered the Reagan administration's attempts to acquire support for its policies by launching a “tenacious, grassroots-based campaign” to end funding to the Contras and prevent a direct US invasion of Nicaragua. Whilst not universally successful in these goals, Peace has shown that the movement “raised the political cost of a potential invasion.” This meant that dealing with domestic opposition became a primary concern of policymakers such as national security adviser Lt. Col. Oliver North, who identified anti-interventionism as a key obstacle to US policy in Central America.Footnote ⁹ To highlight the political agency of the movement in this way is not to argue that the 1980s was, in fact, an inherently liberal period in American history. However, it is to make the subtler point that the left was by no means invisible during this period, even if, on balance, it ended the decade in defeat.

It is the contention of this paper that an examination of the growth of internationalism amongst US feminists adds a new strand to this emerging historiographical synthesis. However, it is first necessary to recognize that the 1980s was by no means the first period in which American feminism developed an international consciousness. For example, Bonnie S. Anderson has shown that significant contact took place between feminists in the US, Great Britain and Germany between 1830 and 1860 as they sought to intersect their activism with that of abolitionists and early socialists.Footnote ¹⁰ Furthermore, Lucy Delap's analysis of early twentieth-century avant-garde feminism demonstrates that a rich transatlantic tradition was revived as the politics of women's issues fused with modernist aesthetics.Footnote ¹¹ Expanding beyond a purely transatlantic frame of reference, and towards a global one, scholars of twentieth-century African American women's history have also identified the existence of a core group of “transnational radical black females” who embraced pan-African politics and moved “outside of circumscribing national spaces” in a bid to link their opposition to US racism, patriarchy and class exploitation to international struggles for decolonization.Footnote ¹² In a similar fashion, the late twentieth-century international feminists under examination here looked to Central America in order to take account of emerging political movements outside the US.

In making this international “turn,” American women's activists were, at least in part, responding to the prominence of anti-feminist campaigns of various stripes during the 1970s. Part of the broader “backlash” against the political agendas of the civil rights movement and the New Left, this opposition to gender equality took a variety of forms. In response to the Supreme Court's 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade that a woman's right to privacy as upheld by the Fourteenth Amendment extended to her decision to have an abortion, for example, activists opposed to the expansion of women's reproductive rights mounted a nationwide campaign to overturn the decision, and, in some instances, attacked abortion clinics. The “Stop ERA” movement that coalesced around Phyllis Schlafly was another example of this antifeminist tendency, as were intense debates in the American public sphere about affirmative action and a woman's right to pursue a career.Footnote ¹³ However, this conservative backlash did not cause the retreat of feminist politics; rather, activists developed new strategies and found new problems with which to engage. These included initiatives as diverse as the formation of political action committee EMILY's List, and the promotion of women's studies as an academic discipline in order to harness the intellectual power of feminist critique.Footnote ¹⁴ Whilst these essentially domestic dimensions of post-1960s US feminism have garnered some scholarly attention, it is also important to understand the developing focus amongst women's activists on international politics during the 1980s. This process involved the internationalization of feminist discourse in order to contextualize the domestic experience of antifeminist backlash, and to argue that American women's issues were, in a variety of ways, linked to those in the Third World. This article consequently focusses on the importance of Central America as an issue in the radicalization of women's activists in the US in order to add an important dimension to the study of feminism in the “age of Reagan.”

During the period from 1975 to 1985, for example, the establishment by the United Nations of an International Decade for Women tapped into a mind-set amongst feminist activists that emphasized, in the words of historian Christine Stansell, “the idea of a cosmopolitan body of women whose loyalties to the sex transcended their national identities.”Footnote ¹⁵ As a part of the Decade for Women, a series of international conferences took place, allowing representatives of nation-states and nongovernmental organizations to meet and discuss the issues that faced women throughout the world. In 1975, the first International Women's Conference took place in Mexico City, setting out a “World Plan of Action” that aimed towards “full gender equality and the elimination of gender discrimination; the integration and full participation of women in development; and an increased contribution by women towards strengthening world peace.”Footnote ¹⁶ Another meeting was held in Copenhagen in 1980, but perhaps the most significant event was the Third International Women's Conference held in Nairobi, Kenya to mark the culmination of the Decade for Women in 1985. According to a report on the event that appeared in US journal Feminist Studies, activists came away from Nairobi having discussed the practical and theoretical issues underpinning international feminism, concluding that “rethinking feminism beyond sexual egalitarianism … has become a central task for many within the North American feminist movement.”Footnote ¹⁷

This urge to take feminism “beyond sexual egalitarianism” was represented in prominent works by women of colour such as Angela Davis and Gloria Anzaldúa that were published during International Women's Decade, which emphasized the global dimensions of feminist struggle, as well as the important intersections between gendered, racial, ethnic and class oppressions.Footnote ¹⁸ A particularly notable example of this tendency was feminist theorist bell hooks's book Ain't I a Woman (1981), which argued that African American women had been sidelined by both the patriarchy of the black freedom struggle and the racism of the liberal feminist movement, before suggesting that “our struggle for liberation has significance only if it takes place within a feminist movement that has as its fundamental goal the liberation of all people.”Footnote ¹⁹ In making this argument, hooks was building on a history of internationalism amongst women of colour that was a persistent feature of their political activism, especially since the black and Chicano nationalist movements of the 1960s and 1970s developed strong connections to women and men struggling against colonialism in Africa, Latin America and Asia.Footnote ²⁰ In this sense, women of colour developed an internationalist consciousness much earlier than their counterparts in the white, middle-class women's movement, and therefore acted as a kind of vanguard, leading the mainstream US feminist movement towards an engagement with the Third World in the 1980s.

Women's activists consequently reoriented themselves towards universalist women's issues in the Third World, such as reproductive rights and genital mutilation.Footnote ²¹ However, they also looked towards specific national liberation struggles for inspiration, especially those taking place in the United States' “back door”: Central America. The rest of this article examines the manner in which the Nicaraguan, Salvadorean and Guatemalan revolutions influenced the thinking of US women's activists about both feminism and anti-interventionism. It therefore focusses explicitly on the attitudes and activism of North American feminists, rather than on their Central American counterparts. In doing so, it fleshes out the importance of intervention in Central America in the radicalization of US feminists during the 1980s, as well as highlighting the contributions made by intellectuals and filmmakers to the culture of activism that emerged out of the anti-interventionist movement.

INTELLECTUAL ACTIVISM: MARGARET RANDALL AND CYNTHIA ENLOE

In the aftermath of the 1979 Nicaraguan revolution, in which female guerrillas had participated on an equal footing with men, the Sandinista government enacted a number of measures improving the status of women in the country, including the formation of an Office of Women to provide advocacy on a variety of issues.Footnote ²² As queer historian Emily Hobson has shown, these developments meant that the revolution appeared to activists in the US as “the most explicitly pro-feminist national liberation movement of the post-war era, one that offered reconciliation between the goals of anti-imperialist struggle and women's liberation.”Footnote ²³ A relationship of mutual intellectual and political sustenance therefore developed between the two movements: as feminist thinking bred new ways of approaching US involvement in Central America, so anti-interventionist struggles occurring outside the US bred new ways of thinking about women's activism.

These advances can be illustrated in more detail through examination of the 1980s output of poet and oral historian Margaret Randall, and scholar of international relations Cynthia Enloe. Born in 1936, Randall spent the late 1950s and early 1960s working in avant-garde literary and artistic circles in New York before experiencing the turbulence of 1968 in Mexico City. As a consequence, her political development was intimately linked to the second wave of US feminism that developed during the late 1960s.Footnote ²⁴ She moved to Cuba in 1969, before relocating to Nicaragua in 1980, where she stayed until 1984. At the start of her career, Randall developed a reputation both as a poet and as an editor of the transnational New Left literary journal El Corno Emplumado.Footnote ²⁵ However, by the 1980s she had shifted orientation: starting in Cuba in the late 1970s and continuing throughout her time in Nicaragua, Randall conducted workshops that aimed to teach ordinary people, especially women, to record oral testimony in order to develop popular, self-authored historical narratives.Footnote ²⁶ The workshops resulted in a number of edited collections seeking to give Cubans and Nicaraguans ignored by “official histories” the space to document their everyday experience. For example, Sandino's Daughters (1981), which contained the testimony of women who had taken up arms with the FSLN during the Nicaraguan revolution, was intended to document “a different kind of history: women speaking for themselves about their experiences as women, and at the same time analysing the process of political development in their own country.”Footnote ²⁷

Sandino's Daughters, along with several comparable collections Randall edited during the 1980s,Footnote ²⁸ acted on the proposition that “feminism is about memory, about re-inserting memory into history.”Footnote ²⁹ At the centre of Randall's mission was an attempt to develop a form of historical documentation that would represent the subjective experiences of women's everyday lives and their own individual struggles against imperialism. In this way, Randall sought to build on second-wave feminism's strategy of “consciousness raising,” which formed the backbone of women's organizing during the 1960s and 1970s by emphasizing the political dimensions of “personal experience” and “self-scrutiny.” The formation of consciousness-raising groups and the organization of “speak-outs” provided women with situations in which they could recount individual experiences of rape, violence and abuse, thus “placing accounts of women's lived experiences at the core of the feminist project.”Footnote ³⁰ Randall's approach to oral history can consequently be viewed as part of a broader development within the North American leftist imagination, in which Central American solidarity became a discourse that, at the same time as it protested US intervention on behalf of the region's counterrevolutionary forces, also meshed with the conception that “the personal is political” to promote a feminist politics of memory.

This politicized conception of history was also important because of the relatively traditional and gendered analysis of Central American politics produced by much of the US left during the 1980s. For example, prominent revisionist historians such as Gabriel Kolko and Walter LaFeber paid close attention to the region during the decade, arguing that the American public was poorly informed about the revolutions that were taking place there, and consequently suffering from a “crisis in historical perspective.”Footnote ³¹ Furthermore, noted linguist and public intellectual Noam Chomsky authored a critical examination of US policy in the region and embraced a radical anti-interventionist stance.Footnote ³² However, these prominent and widely discussed analyses did not engage the issue of gender, either in relation to the Nicaraguan, Salvadorean and Guatemalan revolutions themselves, or as it pertained to US intervention and its impact on Central American society. Randall's attempt to forge a feminist politics of memory can therefore be viewed not only as an effort to give Central American women the space they were not afforded in their own “official” national histories, but also as an attempt to counteract the lack of attention paid to women's lives in the historiography produced by the US left itself.

Two years younger than Randall, Cynthia Enloe was born in 1938. She took a bachelor's degree at Connecticut College in 1960, and a PhD in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, which she completed in 1967. Whilst Enloe was involved in Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, she was only on the fringes of the developing women's movement, and has acknowledged that she did not even use the word “woman” in her doctoral dissertation, which focussed on multiethnic politics in Malaysia.Footnote ³³ However, as her career progressed Enloe became one of the leading practitioners and theorists of feminist international-relations scholarship. The shift towards feminism in Enloe's research occurred during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and resulted in the publication of her first explicitly feminist work, Does Khaki Become You?, in 1983, the Preface to which claimed,

The book included discussion of the militarization of prostitution, military wives and the role of nurses in modern militaries. However, its most significant contribution in the context of this paper was Enloe's examination of the role of women in national liberation armies, in particular that of Nicaragua. She began by posing a question: “To what extent does participation in insurgent anti-state military forces emancipate women?”Footnote ³⁵ The answer, in the case of Nicaragua at least, was by no means simple. Whilst Enloe found evidence to suggest that women saw their active involvement in the Sandinistas' guerrilla campaigns as a means by which they could “change relations between women and men in Nicaragua,” she also worried that the postrevolutionary Nicaraguan army was maintaining the traditional sexual division of labour by reverting to a “masculine state-authorized institution.”Footnote ³⁶ In making this point, she emphasized that although the feminist agenda was advanced in certain important ways, many Nicaraguan women were concerned with the ongoing patriarchy of the Sandinistas as the revolutionaries pursued their primary goals of land redistribution and the defeat of the Contras.

In 1985, Enloe published an article in Radical America entitled “Bananas, Bases, and Patriarchy: Some Feminist Questions about the Militarization of Central America.” It argued that the relationships of dependency that characterized the international political economy were more gendered than previous scholarship had acknowledged. Enloe suggested that this conclusion had a direct relevance to the Central America solidarity movement: “when we root our political organising in analyses which disregard gender, feminism can quickly get shrunk to a shadow of its formerly vibrant self.”Footnote ³⁷ These arguments culminated in Bananas, Beaches, and Bases (1989), which stood as Enloe's first systematic attempt to formulate a feminist theory of international relations, and was published just as gendered analyses of world politics by scholars such as Carol Cohn, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Judith Hicks Stiehm and J. Ann Tickner, along with those of Enloe herself, entered the mainstream of the discipline.Footnote ³⁸ In the book's introduction, Enloe used the recently exposed Iran–Contra affair as a touchstone, considering what role women played in the scandal, as well as how it affected their everyday lives, not only in the US, but throughout the Third World.Footnote ³⁹ Again, then, analysis of a particular facet of US intervention in Central America was used to demonstrate the ways in which the politics of anti-interventionism and feminism were mutually reinforcing. In spite of the obvious differences between Randall and Enloe – the first an activist and cultural worker favouring the political rhetoric of poetry and oral history, the second a professional scholar working within the disciplinary boundaries of the US academy – their examples highlight the intersections between feminist intellectual culture and anti-interventionist activism during the 1980s, and demonstrate how the urge to internationalize women's political thinking created new and fruitful ways of conceptualizing US intervention in Central America.

DOCUMENTARY POLITICS AND THE TESTIMONIO NARRATIVE

This type of political convergence also took place in several politicized documentary films produced during the 1980s. Writing in 1994, film scholar Paula Rabinowitz described what she saw as a “puzzling contradiction” that emerged during the period: in spite of intense “political repression” by the New Right, during which public funding of the arts was markedly reduced, documentary filmmaking had exhibited an unexpected “renaissance.”Footnote ⁴⁰ In making this point, Rabinowitz highlighted the fact that during the 1970s and 1980s, increasingly large numbers of activists made use of improved access to documentary filmmaking's means of production and distribution – as constituted through the development of affordable, lightweight equipment and video technology – to make films that engaged with a variety of political issues. During the same period, widely distributed, prizewinning films such as Harlan County, U.S.A. (Barbara Kopple, 1976) and The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988) demonstrated the potential impact and critical acclaim that could be acquired by politically minded documentary filmmakers.

Documentary film also played a significant role in the cultural life of the feminist and Central America solidarity movements. Two films that typify the relationship that developed between feminist filmmakers and anti-interventionist activists are When the Mountains Tremble (1983) and Maria's Story (1990). When the Mountains Tremble uses the narration of Rigoberta Menchú, an indigenous Guatemalan peasant-turned-guerrilla and a subsequent winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, to narrate the struggle of her people against the US-backed Guatemalan armed forces. The film was the brainchild of a trio of American freelance filmmakers – Pamela Yates, Tom Sigel and Peter Kinroy – who came together in 1980 to form the independent production company Skylight Pictures. It originated in a project undertaken by the group to make a set of documentaries for commercial network CBS. In 1982, two hour-long films entitled “Central America in Revolt” and “Guatemala” appeared as a part of the CBS Reports series. During the production of these programs, however, the crew collected a large amount of unused material, which they decided to draw on to make their own feature-length film that would eschew the format imposed by network television and consciously adopt a “partisan approach” to the history of US involvement in Guatemala.Footnote ⁴¹

Maria's Story chronicles the daily life of Maria Serrano, a mid-level guerrilla leader in the Salvadorean Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). The initial monies for the production came from the British television company Channel 4, which allowed the crew to travel to El Salvador and shoot sixty-eight hours of footage.Footnote ⁴² However, on their return to the US in June 1989, directors Pamela Cohen and Monona Wali still required $107,000 to complete the film. The project was initially rejected for screening on PBS, and for over twelve months looked as though it might never be realized.Footnote ⁴³ However, further funding was eventually acquired from the New York State Council on the Arts, a body similar in makeup to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that operated at the state rather than federal level, as well as the Women's Project and the Paul Robeson Fund.

When the Mountains Tremble and Maria's Story were therefore intended for screening on public television networks, which would offer access to a mass audience. However, both sets of filmmakers also recognized the importance of alternative distribution networks, and sought to collaborate with the Central America solidarity movement in order to establish viewers amongst this specific activist community. In a 1985 interview, for example, Pamela Yates suggested that she wanted When the Mountains Tremble to “help organize Americans to stop US intervention in Central America.”Footnote ⁴⁴ With this strategic goal in mind, the film was distributed alongside another Skylight Pictures production, Nicaragua: Report from the Front (Deborah Shaffer, 1983). The two films were screened together in order to highlight the interconnections between revolutionary situations throughout Central America, because, as Yates pointed out, “Although a lot of people know that the United States is involved with Nicaragua, they don't know there is a war going on in Guatemala.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The film's credits thanked the Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala and the Committee to Aid Guatemalan Refugees, and it was advertised in the programme for the 1985 convention of the largest US-based solidarity organization, Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), indications of their makers' connections with the Central America solidarity movement.Footnote ⁴⁶

Maria's Story was also linked to the solidarity movement, via Camino Film Projects, an organization established by Pamela Cohen and other activist filmmakers in 1985. The company was designed as “an independent entity aimed at producing documentaries about social change,”Footnote ⁴⁷ and was “committed to providing educational and organizing tools for solidarity and anti-intervention organizations.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Maria's Story was consequently made with the cooperation of CISPES, representatives of which helped its crew gain access to the FMLN.Footnote ⁴⁹ CISPES networks throughout US also screened the film, often with introductory speeches by representatives of the Salvadorean guerrillas, and Camino shared a percentage of the proceeds from each premiere with solidarity organizations that helped to sponsor the events.Footnote ⁵⁰ Both films were therefore used as “organizing tools” within the solidarity movement, and helped to open up discursive spaces in which anti-interventionist and feminist political agendas could be brought into fruitful conversation.

The films did not have a significant impact within policymaking circles in the same way as bigger-budget dramatic pictures Under Fire (Roger Spotiswoode, 1983) and Salvador (Oliver Stone, 1986), both of which were given high-profile screenings on Capitol Hill in an effort to boost support for anti-interventionism during the 1980s. However, the 1986 broadcasting of When the Mountains Tremble on public television caused a stir in the mainstream media when New York Times reviewer John Corry argued that

Corry's criticisms demonstrate that the impact of the film was felt beyond the important, yet relatively narrow, confines of the Central America solidarity movement. Indeed, despite being released seven years apart, When the Mountains Tremble and Maria's Story entered a media landscape defined by contestation over the legitimacy of politicized art forms. Was the representation by US filmmakers of the lives of individual Central American women and the manner in which they were affected by US intervention an inappropriate cause for filmmakers to take up and for federal or state bodies to fund? Or were such perspectives on Third World revolutionary struggle an essential corrective to those provided by mainstream television reporting? These questions shaped the reception of the two films, just as their distribution blurred the line between documentary filmmakers' appeals to the divergent audiences provided, on the one hand, by the solidarity movement and, on the other, by public television networks.

To appeal to these audiences by fusing the politics of anti-interventionism and international feminism into a potent mixture of propaganda and political filmmaking, When the Mountains Tremble and Maria's Story replicated the rhetorical strategies of the “testimonio narrative,” a genre that rapidly rose to prominence in Latin American literary culture during the late Cold War. Literary critic John Beverley has defined the testimonio as:

Further to these claims, Beverley notes that the author–narrators of testimonios tend to have political, rather than purely literary, ambitions for their texts, and that the development of the form was closely linked to the rise of anti-imperialist national liberation struggles in Latin America after the Cuban Revolution of 1959.Footnote ⁵³

One of the genre's most notable early proponents was Rigoberta Menchú, who first published Ma Llamo Rigoberta Menchú Y Asi Me Nació La Concienca in 1983. The text was quickly translated into English and published as I, Rigoberta Menchú by London-based Verso Books, and has since risen to prominence in the US based primarily on Menchú's receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992, but also due to the significant controversy in literary and academic circles caused when the truth of its author's autobiographical claims was questioned by anthropologist David Stoll in 1999.Footnote ⁵⁴ However, in order to understand the context in which the text emerged, as well as its subsequent importance for When the Mountains Tremble, it is important to remember that upon its release, Menchú's book stood as “a call to conscience, a piece of wartime propaganda,” designed to draw the attention of the world to atrocities being committed by the Guatemalan military, and reinforced by Ronald Reagan's policies towards Central America.Footnote ⁵⁵ Indeed, as Ana Patricia Rodriguez has noted, the text emerged as the most notable example of a much broader culture of “testimonial narrative textuality” that served as “a historiographic record of neo-colonialism” for communities throughout the isthmus, similar in technique and political intention to the work of Margaret Randall.Footnote ⁵⁶ When these factors are borne in mind, the contrapuntal structure of When the Mountains Tremble – in which shots of Menchú delivering her testimony in subtitled Spanish are interspersed with original documentary footage highlighting the history of late Cold War Guatemala – may be read as explicit markers of the film's links to the testimonio narrative. The interweaving of Menchú's personal story with a wider examination of Guatemalan politics also highlights her testimony's status as the story of an entire community, another consistent feature of the genre. Indeed, Menchú herself makes this point when she categorically states, “I'm going to tell you my story, which is the story of all the Guatemalan people.”

A similar rhetorical style is evident in Maria's Story. Along with interviews and conversations with her husband, the testimony provided by Maria serves to establish the details of her biography, and provides the film's voice-over narration. As its title suggests, Maria's Story intends to tell Maria's personal story, in which she bears witness to the realities of everyday life as an FMLN combatant. However, her account also stands for something larger, as she makes clear in her final dialogue with the camera:

In tying their narratives to the formal conventions of the testimonio in such a way, When the Mountains Tremble and Maria's Story each focus on using the story of an individual woman to paint a broader political portrait of revolutionary struggle. What were the political implications of these narrative strategies? First, the foregrounding of female revolutionary subjectivity enacted by the films highlighted the manner in which they were consciously taking sides in a debate over US counterrevolutionary intervention in Central America. Second, in adopting the rhetorical style of the testimonio genre, both films succeeded in opening up a discursive space in which the potential links between anti-interventionist and feminist political agendas could be articulated.Footnote ⁵⁷ This meant that Menchú and Serrano, as the primary subjects of When the Mountains Tremble and Maria's Story, were represented by their positions within the narratives of the two films as articulate subaltern subjects.

The pitfalls of drawing such a conclusion have been adequately highlighted by, amongst others, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, whose 1988 essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” provides a negative assessment of the ability of subaltern subjects (i.e. Menchú and Serrano) to provide authentic representations of themselves within the parameters provided by Western political discourse.Footnote ⁵⁸ In When the Mountains Tremble and Maria's Story, it is clear that Menchú and Serrano do not speak for themselves. Rather, they are represented on screen by US filmmakers, who, no matter how sympathetically, sought to use their narratives to serve a political cause. Indeed, as Greg Grandin has suggested, Menchú had been unable to escape a similarly discrepant power relationship during the initial publication of her testimonio narrative: based on interviews conducted by Elizabeth Burgos-Debray and translated by Ann Wright, I, Rigoberta Menchú was, at best, “a composite of many people's work abridging, resequencing, and editing the raw material of Menchú's story.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Furthermore, the focus of the two films on strong, articulate protagonists was by no means unique within contemporaneous US political filmmaking. For example, Roger Spotiswoode and Oliver Stone, the directors of the mainstream yet decidedly anti-interventionist Under Fire and Salvador, both chose to centre their stories around the experiences of male heroes in order to romanticize their positions within the drama of the revolutions taking place in Nicaragua and El Salvador.

The use of Menchú and Serrano also highlights the manner in which indigenous political “martyrs” are regularly used by solidarity organizations to draw activists into sympathy with their causes. As Larry Reid has argued, this form of “solidarity martyrdom” helps to explain why individuals devote time and effort to “the cause of people with whom they have nothing obvious in common.”Footnote ⁶⁰ At the same time, though, the strategy also risks stereotyping indigenous politics and distorting northern activists' understandings of southern societies: “unless people are taken beyond the initial exposure to a martyr … the martyr figure becomes counter-productive.”Footnote ⁶¹ It is therefore necessary to recognize that, at least in part, the testimonio style used by the filmmakers emphasized the martyrdom of Menchú and Serrano, and was adopted in order to avoid challenging US audiences in the habit of viewing this type of narrative, rather than out of fidelity to a distinctly Central American form of storytelling.

Nonetheless, it was in their representation of the lives of individual Central American women that the directors of When the Mountains Tremble and Maria's Story believed the power of political persuasion resided: as Pamela Cohen has argued, the “personal portrait” provided by Maria's Story was praised by solidarity activists because of the way it “helped them reach a broader circle of folks in their education, outreach and advocacy work.”Footnote ⁶² Whilst their consciously politicized narrative styles did not escape mainstream convention, and they were not able to overcome the contradictions inherent in providing representations of subaltern subjects, When the Mountains Tremble and Maria's Story were nonetheless able to successfully adapt the form of documentary filmmaking to bring the observations of feminism and anti-interventionism together to form a powerful ideological combination. Rather than being perfectly accurate representations of the lives of Central American female revolutionaries, then, the films are important because of what they reveal about the North American feminist imaginary as it adapted to the international political situation in the “age of Reagan.”

THE FEMALE REVOLUTIONARY EXPERIENCE

Discussing the manner in which her film deals with feminist issues, Pamela Cohen has noted that

Cohen's point highlights a common trait linking When the Mountains Tremble and Maria's Story: whilst neither of the films' protagonists self-identifies at any point as a feminist, their stories were filmed by documentary filmmakers with political intentions informed by the political culture of international feminism. As such, it is important to examine how the two films were able to capitalize on the formal and rhetorical strategies outlined in the previous section to articulate a distinct brand of feminist anti-interventionism.

When the Mountains Tremble dramatizes the difficulties faced by women under a military regime through the representation of a “Miss Guatemala Pageant,” at which a group of women clad in either Wrangler denim or revealing swimsuits are paraded in front of a crowd of smartly dressed men. As the contestants come onto the stage, a male compère tells the audience: “The Guatemalan woman greets you with love and devotion,” before asking several of the women questions as a part of the competition. After this, two participants arrive onstage in the traditional clothes of Guatemalan indigenous groups and read out patronizing details about the groups they represent. The women are very clearly sexualized, and, in the case of those in native dress, take part in the eroticization of indigenous culture. To provide a contrast to the beauty pageant, the film immediately cuts to an interview with an indigenous woman, who, as if in direct response to the spectacle, indignantly states, “The government uses us when it is in their interest. They exhibit us in our native dress as though we were in a zoo … the army and the rich consider us unskilled brutes who don't know anything.” In dramatizing the contrast between the high-spirited scenes of the beauty pageant and the woman's raw anger, the film therefore combines a critique of the manner in which Guatemalan culture has become sexualized by American business presence: in having integrated the most superficial of northern rituals (the beauty pageant) to give pleasure to their US patrons, the country's elite have subordinated women and indigenous communities to the status of spectacle, trapped in this position by a repressive political system.

This point is reinforced later in the film when a group of indigenous women are shown talking to a guerrilla leader. He asks those who have been raped by members of the armed forces to raise their hands, and the majority do so, highlighting the vicious basis of military rule. Maria's Story also dramatizes a similar ideological critique of the Salvadorean army. Early in the film, for example, Maria discusses the death of her eldest daughter Ceci, and confides to the camera that at the moment she realized Ceci was dead “I've never felt so much rage. Not so much because they killed her, because we are making a war, them against us, us against them. But because after killing her, they stripped and mutilated her.” In these representations of the armed forces, both films portray the ruling order as viciously sexist, and inherently tied to a system of patriarchy that views rape and gruesome violence as a legitimate means of waging war.

When the Mountains Tremble and Maria's Story also demonstrate the impact of women's domestic labour in bringing them to political consciousness. Reflecting on her life before becoming politically active, Maria states,

After experiencing this form of work, and forging a sense of solidarity with other poor women, Maria describes how she decided to join a peasants' union in order to bring about political and economic change. In detailing the life of her mother in When the Mountains Tremble, Rigoberta Menchú tells a similar story: “My mother had to go to work as a servant in the capital to support our family. In the city she experienced even worse discrimination than in the country. But there she also met poor non-Indians whose living conditions were terrible, just like ours.” This process of coming to consciousness led Menchú's mother to join with her fellow servants in an attempt to organize their opposition to the ruling order: again, then, direct experience of the traditional life of peasant women was a necessary step in the journey towards the realization that society could be changed for the better through resistance to the status quo. Whilst neither of these stories was told in the explicit language of feminism, feminist ideological observations were essential in order for the filmmakers to frame them in such a way as to emphasize the important gender dimensions of the transformations that took place in the lives of their subjects.

In a similar vein to the work of Cynthia Enloe, both films also explore the impact of guerrilla warfare on the lives of female combatants. The final third of When the Mountains Treble, for example, is filmed almost entirely in a Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) camp, and it soon becomes clear that women are an important sector of its community. At one point, a female guerrilla speaks to a large group of women and argues that their participation in the revolution is just as important as that of their husbands, sons and brothers:

These arguments for gender equality are backed up by the comments of two young URNG recruits, who affirm that their male counterparts treat them as equals and that they consequently feel a sense of sexual liberation through their participation in the revolution. One even goes so far as to suggest that this could be a permanent feature of life in the new Guatemala: “up here, we've learned better ways to live, and when we win, and go back to our villages, we'll live even better, since it will be easier there.” In presenting this point of the view, directors Yates and Sigel engage the question, posed by Enloe in Does Khaki Become You?, whether or not gender equality amongst revolutionaries can be sustained in the aftermath of a successful guerrilla war, and, by offering a tentatively positive answer, posit the Guatemalan struggle as one not only against social inequality and US interventionism, but also against patriarchal social forms.

In her role as a mid-level FMLN combatant, Maria Serrano also exemplifies the liberated female guerrilla. Her marriage to husband José breaks with conventional gender stereotypes, in that she is a fighter whilst he works behind the lines in the FMLN supply chain. Speaking about their marriage, José makes the point that “in a relationship, anything can happen. If it's not the husband who leaves and joins up first, it's the wife. In our case Maria broke away first!” In this account, José does not try and excuse the fact that he is not a combatant, but instead embraces the route Maria has taken into the guerrilla army. Maria also reflects philosophically on her status: “If someone had told me ten years ago that I would be sitting planning military strategy, or even carrying a gun, I would never have believed it. But just to survive, I've learned to do so many things I never imagined I could do.” She thinks of her role in the FMLN as a fact of life, a necessity brought about by the great inequality and repression she experienced whilst performing domestic labour. She is therefore liberated from the drudgery of her former life, but has by no means lost her feminine identity: her thirteen year-old daughter Minita talks of feeling her mother's “support” every day, and Maria herself admits that when the war is over, “I'm going to change these old boots for the shoes of a lady.”

In these various ways, When the Mountains Tremble and Maria's Story argue that participation in guerrilla struggle positively transformed the lives of many Central American women, in spite of the difficulties involved. The films highlight the dialectic that existed in the relationship between women's treatment under the Guatemalan and Salvadorean military regimes – where they were sexualized objects, and the subjects of gruesome sexual violence as a form of political repression – and their comparative liberation after joining the revolution. Whilst life with the guerrillas is not overtly romanticized, these documentaries undoubtedly make the point that a change in gender relations can only come as a part of an upheaval of broader social relations relating to economic equality and democratic freedom. In doing so, they functioned as propaganda for the Guatemalan and Salvadorean revolutions, but they also represented a marked tendency in the solidarity movement to find new and productive relationships between the politics of feminism and anti-interventionism.