Out of necessity, women in El Salvador began attending births during the twelve-year-long civil war, when pregnant people in rural areas and guerrilla camps could not access medical care. From their mothers and older midwives, these women learned parteria - traditional midwifery that was once the norm in El Salvador and has since been prohibited. After the official end to the war, the parteras became central fixtures in the 'repopulation' of their country, building new communities, often without electricity or running water or hospitals. In 1994, out of this organizing, the Association of Parteras Rosa Andrade (APRA) was born. Today, the founding members of APRA, along with a younger generation training with them, continue to fight for the reproductive rights of thousands of people living in the municipalities of Suchitoto, Cuscatlan. Three decades since the war, APRA's work is increasingly criminalized by a government that has made homebirth illegal, synonymized miscarriage and homicide, and banned midwives from assisting in hospitals. Collected in 2019 by Salvadoran American birth worker Noemi Delgado, Guardianas weaves together testimonies from twenty members of APRA to tell a collective story of: the experiences of midwives, mothers, guerrilla fighters and 'gente de masa' during the armed conflict that took approximately 75,000 lives; the role of the midwife during the period of repopulation after the signing of the Chapultepec Peace Accords, when thousands of displaced Salvadorans were finally allowed back into their homeland; the brutal obstetric violence that people giving birth in hospitals routinely face, and how this mistreatment compares to care provided by a midwife; the extreme repression Salvadoran midwives have faced since 2011, when the health ministry prohibited home births; the ancestral nature of parteria, an earth-based art practice that is passed down between generations, and derives from an extensive body of knowledge about safe and empowering births. This anthology is both a safeguarding of the caretaking traditions of parterèa as well as a broader invitation to consider the role of birth work in organizing against war, imperialism, and corporate power. Here, the beauty of the testimonies - and the care with which they were compiled - ultimately come together to upend our ideas of what a medical ethnography can be and what an oral history can do.
Founded in 1994, the
ASSOCIATION OF MIDWIVES ROSA ANDRADE (APRA) is a group of thirty midwives caring for the reproductive health of thousands of people living in thirty-five rural communities in the municipality of Suchitoto, Cuscatlán, El Salvador. Most of the members of APRA either began or continued the work of attending births during the twelve-year-long civil war from 1979 to 1992, when pregnant people in rural areas and guerrilla and refugee camps could not seek medical attention due to the extreme terror inflicted by the US-backed military dictatorship. Rooted in solidarity and a commitment to their communities, the members of APRA continue to care for pregnant, birthing, and postpartum families today. The current members of APRA include: María Melia Martínez Flamenco, Bonifica Ascencio García, María Amalia Molina Menjivar, Fredelinda Antonia Recinos de Cerón, Vicenta Martínez, Ángela Luz Barahona de Ávalos, Cecilia de María Rivera de López, Francisca Catalina Blanco Hernández, Ana Teresa Ávalos, María Higinia "Patricia" Hernández, Tomasa Jovita Torres, Natividad Escobar de Henriquez, Lucía Rutilia González, María Martina Lucero, María Dolores Hernández de Rivera, Vilma Coreas Guzmán, Reina Marlenis Escobar Figueroa, María de los Ángeles Acosta Ardón, Sandra Maricela Flores, María Magdalena Rodas Arias, Dolores Margarita Marroquín de Hernández, Estela Villacorta Rivas, Angélica de la Paz Martínez León, Morena Elí Orellana Menjivar, Sonia Alicia Cruz Montoya, Yessenia de Jesús Canjura Trejo, Pedrina Ángela Calderón, María Antonia Landaverde, Emilia Marinet Sánchez, and Marina Martínez.
Residence: Suchitoto, El Salvador.
NOEMÍ DELGADO is a birth worker, body worker, and childbirth educator. Born in California, she began her birthwork journey while living and working with midwives in her family's homeland of El Salvador. She accompanied the Association of Midwives Rosa Andrade during a Public Health Fulbright Fellowship in 2019. She is codirector of
Matronas: The Struggle to Protect Birth in El Salvador (2021), which was an Official Selection at the San Diego Latino Film Festival and the Oakland Short Film Festival and was nominated for Best Short Documentary at the fifteenth Annual BronzeLens Film Festival. Delgado is dedicated to uplifting ancestral wisdom and challenging the systems that attempt to erase it;
Guardianas and
Matronas are a part of that effort.
Residence: San Francisco, CA.
EMMA LLOYD is a translator and writer working across genres--from poetry to narrative to film subtitles. Her ongoing translation of Pedro Lemebel's
De perlas y cicatrices (
Of Pearls and Scars) won a 2019 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. She is the translator of Julieta Vittore Dutto's debut poetry collection,
Un lugar interminable (
An Endless Place) (2022), as well as subtitles for Tatiana Huezo's
Prayers for the Stolen (2021) and Mattis Appelqvist Dalton and Matteo Robert Morales's
The Time of the Fireflies (2022). She has a master's from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York and is currently pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Alongside her translation work, Emma works at Safe Passage Project, an immigration justice organization.
Residence: Berkeley, CA.
LUZ DEL CARMEN SALAMA-TOBAR is a Salvadoran artist, photographer, and organizer. Born in Sonsonate, El Salvador, land of the Náhuat-Pipil people, and raised in Falls Church, Virginia, after immigrating to the US, her work centers around her community. She received her BFA in Photography at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2018 and was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in 2019, during which time she taught as a visiting scholar at the University Don Bosco in San Salvador and began work with Kuna Nawat, an early immersion language program taught by the last native speakers of the Náhuat language. She is cofounder of the Virginia-based abolitionist organization La ColectiVA and is currently pursuing her masters in photography at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts.
Residence: Washington, D.C.
