I detail the impacts of US imperialism on both the structural and interpersonal levels and how these memories live in the bodies of migrants. I discuss Comandante Susana’s unearthed archive, which was found by a campesino farmer in a corn field in 2015. That archive contained the intimate letters of Domitila, the woman whose story opened the book. I show how history can be a tool to connect with movement ancestors, heal historical trauma, and reawaken a radical imagination to organize powerful social movements. I underscore the necessity of revolutionary feminism in our current historical moment. I conclude with a discussion of the larger political lessons of the Salvadoran revolution and its current-day political relevance. In an era of state violence and despair, we have much to learn from Salvadoran women who waged revolution.

This chapter examines efforts by government officials to blunt the impact of social movements on their human rights policymaking. Grassroots solidarity advocates tried to save the victims of the Argentine military regime – including West German citizens ensnared in the Dirty War – broaden the refugee admission program to Argentinean political refugees, and end abuses in the Colonia Dignidad in Chile. Government officials and mid-level Social Democratic politicians did not welcome these demands because they saw activists demands as unwelcome intruders in the making of foreign policy. Yet the Social-Liberal coalition’s attempt to shove aside popular advocacy for human rights in Latin America failed in the face of solidarity advocates’ refusal to give up. State officials and mid-level Social Democrats responded with a technocratic human rights policy that prioritized expert knowledge over the demands of social movements.

This chapter argues that a neoconservative, market-friendly vision of human rights gained hegemony during the first four years of Helmut Kohl’s chancellorship (1982–1986). Christian Democrat Heiner Geißler, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, Nicaraguan anti-Sandinista activists, market-friendly human rights advocates from the IGFM, and neoconservative thinkers worked to vilify Sandinista Nicaragua and the Salvadoran guerrillas as human rights violators. Claims by market-friendly human rights advocates conflicted with reports from NGOs such as Amnesty International or Americas Watch. Their evenhanded assessments served market-critical advocates to rebut conservatives’ exaggerated claims. However, government officials opted to accept the conservative interpretation. Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and State Minister in the Foreign Ministry Jürgen Möllemann presented El Salvador as a successful example of democratization that Nicaragua ought to emulate. By 1986, West German government officials dropped the ”silent diplomacy” and took human rights claims seriously in the making of foreign policy. But they also chose a diluted version that excluded social and economic rights.

In late eighteenth-century Havana, residents frequently referred to the existence of large communities of negros and pardos as “officers in the trade of painter” and the authors of “exquisite works.” But who are these artists, and where can we find their works? What sort of works did they produce? Where were they trained, and how did they master their crafts with such perfection? By centering the artistic production and social worlds of artists of African descent in Cuba since the colonial period, this revisionist history of Cuban art provides compelling answers to these questions. Carefully researched and cogently argued, the book explores the gendered racial biases that have informed the constitution of the Cuban art canon; exposes how the ideologues of the slave-owning planter class institutionalized the association between “fine arts” and key attributes of whiteness; and examines how this association continues to shape art historical narratives in Cuba.

Contrary to Central America, the politics of emergency remained an essential framework for solidarity activists with the Southern Cone. However, these activists mobilized an explicitly market-critical interpretation of the human rights problems in Chile and Argentina. Grassroots human rights advocates criticized the lack of thoroughgoing judicial accountability, and the continuation of the economic policies imposed by the outgoing military regimes. Government officials, conservative politicians, and market-friendly NGOs such as the IGFM rebuffed these demands. They endorsed market-friendly democratization, the cornerstones of which were a negotiated ending to military rule, continuation of the neoliberal reforms initiated by the military regimes, and the non-prosecution of most perpetrators of human rights abuses. Pro-Pinochet activists favored a protracted process of democratization in Chile to ensure the continuation of his economic policies. This clashed with the efforts of Christian Democrats Heiner Geißler and Norbert Blüm, who wished to speed up the end of Pinochet’s rule and endorsed the acceptance of left-wing political asylum seekers to the FRG on humanitarian grounds.

The Association of Women of El Salvador, an organization composed of combatants, peasants, and exile, redefined revolution to mean the overthrow of both capitalism and patriarchy. The sites of feminist praxis included guerrilla territories in El Salvador, refugee camps in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, and solidarity networks in Mexico, Nicaragua, and the United States. Within the guerrilla territories, AMES members actively participated in community councils, an experiment in popular democracy, and generated a feminist praxis that linked the exigencies of wartime survival to the long-term liberation of women. At the international level, Salvadoran women collaborated with other radical women from Latin America and the United States to push their organizations in more feminist directions.