Women of El Salvador
‘Your struggle is
mine’
The
following is excerpted from a talk by Magda Miller at a Workers World Party
International Women's Day meeting in Los Angeles on March 10.
You
may be surprised that as a Mexican I am speaking about women from El Salvador,
but their struggle is my struggle,
too.
I
have my personal experience. I was the child of a mother who illegally
transported hundreds of people into the U.S. from Mexico and El Salvador in the
late 1970s during the peak of the Salvadoran
immigration.
After
[a Salvadoran woman] crossed the border in San Isidro, she thought she was home
free. Not yet, because she was still a woman. She still had to face prejudice,
language barriers, sexism, scrutiny for leaving her children behind, and the
tremendous challenge of starting over with nothing. Many times, she had not even
a single blood
relative.
What
would drive hundreds of thousands of women to make the
journey?
El
Salvador has the second-largest population of the six Central American
countries. A civil war broke out between the government and its people in the
1970s. The U.S. government armed and trained the army and paramilitary death
squads, leading to a massacre of thousands of civilians in 1979.
The
streets of San Salvador had to be washed with fire hoses to remove the blood
from the streets. Soldiers kidnapped young boys from farmlands and armed
them.
After
the civil war in El Salvador, hundreds of thousands of women were alone. In all
cases, women were left to fend for themselves and pull through. Refugee camps
were built to house women and children left homeless by the destruction. Those
camps still exist
today.
As
a result thousands of women immigrated to the U.S. in search of a better life
for their
children.
I
had put this out of my mind for 20 years, until January when I traveled to Iraq
with the Sanctions Challenge to deliver medicines. In the Jordan airport, there
were 12 young women from Sri Lanka. I was told they were coming to Jordan to
work as maids.
And
then it all came back to me and I started thinking about all the Salvadoran
women I met as they came to this country.
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