Mountains of Memories: “Visibilizing” Solidarity and Multivocality in Central American Women’sEncuentros

Abstract

Postwar encuentros from women in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala reveal important tactics for building and maintaining solidarity across national, economic, and sexual borders. Encuentros are a genre of conferences and their proceedings where the values and methods of organizations are discussed, debated, and developed. Specifically, I argue that postwar encuentros from the Central American women’s group Las Dignas successfully document women’s critical commitment to achieving revolutionary goals without vertical leadership styles or androcentrism, and they model multivocal horizontal feminist practices in the early stages of organizing a women’s movement. At the same time, encuentros craft innovative, heterogeneous testimonials that have yet to be assessed for their literary significance. Their egalitarian textual practices permit sustained and fruitful dissent, which has helped them overcome regional, ideological, and classist barriers between members, and, through a rhetoric of visibilizar (to visibilize or make visible), they challenge the literal disappearances and gendered erasure of the revolutions. Even though they lack the international readership of the testimonio, with which they can be contrasted in terms of authorial mediation, circulation, popularity, narrative structure, and critical reception, late twentieth-century feminist encuentros are critical for understanding the importance of women’s organizing in Central America. Additionally, although research about “Central American feminist solidarity” typically focuses on Western solidarity with this region, not on these women’s own strategies of engaging each other across national boundaries, encuentros model critical and instructive innovations in feminist testimony and the praxis of solidarity.