With Buenas al pleito, Alejandro Bendaña fills an important lacuna in the study of Augusto C. Sandino and his 1927–33 rebellion. While it is common to hear about Blanca Aráuz, Sandino's wife, Bendaña uncovers a host of women who supported Sandino's forces in myriad ways. But Bendaña aims to do more than restore these women to history; he argues for shifting focus from the men on the front lines of battle to the people at war. Those in the rear guard were also combatants, Bendaña argues, and, in large part, they were women. They were the base of social legitimation and the key to logistics for the armed struggle.Bendaña is careful, however, not to exaggerate the roles that these women played and Sandino's openness to women in the struggle. This was still a patriarchal world, and Sandino was a product of his times. Women almost never fought alongside Sandino's all-male army, although a few carried weapons and could defend themselves if necessary. In fact, Buenas al pleito takes its name from a comment about two young women, Rosa and María, who fought alongside the Sandinistas: “Aguerridas como las de ahora, buenas al pleito” (p. 80). In using the phrase in the book's title, however, Bendaña stresses that women in the rear guard were equally fierce and that the men could not have functioned without the noncombat support of the women. As he explains his goal, “We want to complete the history of the first Sandinista war by incorporating the network of farmers, providers, sellers, feeders, and informants, within and outside the camps, who risked their necks, usually without arms, without whose support and daily care the struggle would have been unsustainable and inconceivable” (p. 278).As expected, a key role for many of these women was to accompany Sandino's men and take care of basic needs: cooking, washing, sewing, nursing the wounded or ill, and sexual companionship. They joined his forces for a variety of reasons—accompanying family, survival, self-defense, lack of viable alternatives, shared ideals. Others perhaps were escaping abuse at home or seeking control of their own destiny.The women who stayed at home but supported the insurgency played key roles as well. They remained on their milpas, caring for their own families and providing for Sandino's forces. At times Sandino “invited” the women to accompany him as cooks and tortilla makers—it was unthinkable that men would make their own tortillas (p. 103). And although the invitation was not really a choice, Sandino promised that if they helped now he would help them later—a mutual obligation and debt owed, a recognition of the value of women's support.One of Bendaña's most interesting contributions is his discussion of women farmers (finqueras), small and medium producers of corn, wheat, rice, and sugarcane. They were part of a parallel market trafficking in food, cattle, horses, mules, coffee, money, and gold from mining zones, a network stretching across the Honduran border. The finqueras knew the area intimately and were an important source of information and communications. These women, in part due to the war, had been freed from patriarchal control and were well aware of their importance. As Bendaña says, “they demanded respect, and they received it” (p. 119).He also provides a fascinating portrait of Teresa Villatoro, Sandino's compañera in the mountains from 1926 to 1931. In the past, she has been dismissed as solely a sexual partner or was omitted from a sanitized history that preferred to present Sandino as pure and devoted to his wife, Aráuz. Villatoro, who originally helped Sandino organize in the mines, administered his mountain headquarters and organized the women in the scattered camps, sending them and supplies to where they were needed. Organizing the extensive network was a formidable task.The book is based primarily in documents and photographs from both the US government and private sources, scanned and posted to SandinoRebellion.com by historian and Sandino authority Michael J. Schroeder. Bendaña mines those sources, along with the interviews conducted by the Instituto de Estudio del Sandinismo in the 1980s, to provide the most complete study of women in the Sandino struggle.Bendaña endeavors not just to portray the types of women who helped—campesinas and finqueras—but to identify many by name, giving them their historical due. In the process, especially given limited information from source material, the book feels at times like a catalog. The logic of the book's organization is not always clear, especially in the second half of the book, with chapters on particular women seemingly in no particular order. There are potentially wonderful photographs that offer a tantalizing look at women participants. But unfortunately, the photographs are produced in too small a size and without corrections for clarity and lighting that would have given us a better look at the women who played such an important role.
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Jun 25, 2024
Debra Jackson + 1
Open Access
