College Drinking: Salvadoran Refugee Women in Costa Rica

by Robin Omes Quizar

Overview

Salvadoran refugee women tell their stories of escape from El Salvador during some of the worst years of civil unrest (1979-1981) and their subsequent adaptation to refugee life in Costa Rica. These stories—called testimonios—are interwoven against the backdrop of their children's daycare center. The women's complex relationships with one another and the ambiguous nature of their interactions with the author as ethnographer are examined. The author's voice is used in the text to place the women in their historical and cultural context.

The daily lives and the testimonios of the refugees serve as an eloquent expression of the multidimensional feminism that has developed in Latin America. In contrast to mainstream feminism in the United States that focuses primarily on the power relationships between men and women, the concern of Latin American feminism is with power asymmetries in socioeconomic class, ethnicity, and religion, as well as gender. The women, whose daycare center is supported by international funding, rely on their cultural traditions to survive in the face of tragedy and oppression.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780897895408
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	03/19/1998
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.62(d)

About the Author

ROBIN ORMES QUIZAR is Associate Professor in the English Department at Metro State College of Denver. In Costa Rica she held a Fulbright Senior Lectureship in linguistics at the National University in Heredia, and while there she conducted research among both Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees.

Table of Contents

Introduction
The Women Alone
María: Three Soldiers Raped Me…and I Was Eight Months Pregnant
Rita: They Invaded All the Resettlement Groups
Carmen: It Is My Turban To Weep
Mirabela: We, As Women,…Cannot Remain With Our Arms Crossed
Alicia: My Entire Family Fell Apart
Ligia: Exile Has Been a Kind of School
The Women Together
Carmen: This Is the Way We Can Collaborate For Now
Rita: I Only Wanted To Cry and Cry
Alicia: So We Go On Alone
Mirabela: Robin, When Will You Let Me Talk With You Again?
María: "Lady, I Thought You Were Stupid"
Rina: My Husband Abandoned Me…Just When I Needed Him Most
Carolina: Feeling Much Stronger Because We Were Together…
Ligia: There Are Limits As To What You Can Do
Alicia: For the Sake of Our Cause…
Epilogue: That Is the Way Life Is
Works Cited
Index

Editorial Reviews

The author's reminiscences of working with El Salvadoran refugee women in a cooperative daycare center in Costa Rica are combined with social and historical commentary and the testimonies of eight of the women themselves to shed light on the experiences of El Salvadoran women and their sociopolitical world. While all of the women are members of the refugee community, their backgrounds range from peasant women to a middle class teacher and an upper-class liberal. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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