ABSTRACT
Marcela Zamora Chamorro, documentary filmmaker and former director of El Faro’s documentary film department, has made a series of films on human rights, gender, and historical memory in Central America. María en tierra de nadie (María in Nobody’s Land) (2011) follows a group of Salvadoran women searching for family members who have disappeared while attempting to migrate to the U.S. The documentary film travels with them as they follow in the footsteps of their missing children. Zamora is part of a young generation of Salvadoran journalists, centered around the online newspaper El Faro, who have documented the contemporary Central American crises of violence, poverty, and migration. Claribel Alegría, poet, novelist, and chronicler, tells the story of Ana María Castillo Rivas in No me agarran viva (They Won’t Take Me Alive) (1983), a documentary narrative often read as part of the testimonio genre. Better known as Commandante Eugenia, Castillo Rivas served in the revolutionary forces of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), gave birth to a daughter while in hiding, and was killed in action by a government death squad in 1981. Through Castillo Rivas’s story, Alegría describes the causes of the civil war in El Salvador and the role that U.S. foreign policy played in stoking it. This chapter will analyze these feminist representations of mothers caught up in tumultuous histories of instability, violence, trauma, and displacement. It will link Zamora’s documentary film with Alegría’s history of female revolutionaries, with reference to trauma studies, regional political history, and studies of the Latin American documentary narrative form testimonio.
