Mothers in Arms:

Conversations with Women Ex-Combatants from the Late War in El Salvador
A Book Project by Betsy Morgan, Caroline Cargo, Katy Friggle-Norton, Kathy Stayton, Gwenyth Lewis, Marcia Bailey and Linda Panetta

This project began with a photograph of four women: Marina Pena, Salvadoran Director of the Share Foundation; her daughter Shatnam; Tania Gochez, professional translator and communication consultant; and her daughter Delfi. Both Tania and Marina had been FMLN combatants in the civil conflict ending in 1992. Seeing them with their arms around their daughters, the same age now as many women were when they “went to the mountains” to join the guerilla forces, made these authors wonder what kind of world these mothers feel they are bequeathing to their daughters and whether they believe that their sacrifices during the war have made the world a better place for the next generation of women.

The authors knew they had to find our more about women like this. They decided to travel to El Salvador to encounter women ex-combatants from the 1980s war, person to person, woman to woman. They were not interested in a strictly academic product; they were not reaching for statistically verifiable outcomes. They wanted to meet these women, to engage with them in their homes and/or their places of work. They wanted to meet their children, to hear their stories, to listen to their hopes, to capture their moods and reactions in visual images. Furthermore, they wanted to work collaboratively to edit and contextualize these women's stories in a dual language/photography book that women in El Salvador and in the US could read and ponder. The authors hoped that the partnerships they would forge might be an inspiration to others to accompany their sisters across borders and to be accompanied by them.

As luck, or design, would have it, both Tania Gochez and Marina Pena became partners in the project. The Share Foundation agreed to work with these authors on finding and securing good interviewees, ones that represented a balance of urban and rural, mestiza and indigenous, high ranking and foot soldier, religious and secular ex-combatants. Marina’s staff provided that help as well as transportation and translation in country. Tania became the official transcriber and translated many of the finished interviews. The authors were also able to meet both daughters and complete the portrait!

Many women began telling their stories: Nidia Diaz, presently a member of the Central American Parliament; Julia Garcia, active participant in a women’s cattle cooperative in the Baja Lempa region; Morena Herrera, founding director of Las Dignas, an organization for women; Marisol Galindo, an entrepreneur and environmentalist in Morazon; and Claudia Perez, a maker of traditional hammocks, also living in Morazon.

The authors' deepest desire is for these stories, these encounters between Salvadoran ex-combatants and their North American sisters, to approximate a generative space where, in giving their experience to us, we might give it back to them, as well as to others, as a healing witness with open promise for the future.