Nearly thirty years after the end of the civil war, campesina women continue to remember their revolutionary past. The Survivors’ Historical Memory Committee of Arcatao, Chalatenango, has worked on four major projects: the exhumation of victims killed in military-led massacres, the construction of a sanctuary to house the remains of loved ones, commemorative events, and a community museum led by survivors themselves. These popular historians facilitate intergenerational continuity across decades of struggle. The committee’s work to mourn, exhume, bury, and remember the dead charts a path toward healing, a tenuous process given the ongoing violence in postwar El Salvador. Additionally, I draw insights from two workshops I facilitated in 2015 to trace how committee women understand their revolutionary past. They have a specifically feminist understanding of their insurgent past and highlight the central role of civilian organizing within the guerrilla territories. Campesina women insisted on remembering how their revolutionary organizing created more equitable gender relations and resisted state violence against women, and they critiqued male leftists who ignored their contributions.

This chapter focuses on the role of women teachers and campesinas in the class struggle. Two mass organizations played a critical role in building a combative labor movement: the National Association of Salvadoran Educators and Union of Rural Workers. Women comprised 80 percent of members in the teachers’ association, while significant numbers of campesinas participated in the rural union. By 1975, teachers and peasants joined forces in a revolutionary coalition to overthrow the political and economic system that exploited the entire working class. Many teachers and rural workers joined guerrilla organizations, such as the Popular Liberation Forces, whose cadre helped build mass organizations. Participation in the class struggle led to changes on two fronts. First, it deepened women’s class consciousness and revealed the state’s brutality in crushing the most minimal reforms. Second, the struggle transformed how women saw themselves and their role in changing society. Women confronted sexist expectations that shamed them for working alongside men and prioritizing political participation over domestic work. Fifteen years prior to the outbreak of the revolutionary war in 1980, a multigenerational movement of women had broken with patriarchal tradition. That rupture was fundamental. It facilitated women’s political participation and their increasing militant action that elevated class struggle to unprecedented levels. This gendered history allows us to appreciate what it took to build and sustain the revolutionary mass struggles of the 1960s and 1970s.

The epilogue explains West German engagement with Latin American politics from 1988 to 1992, restates the historiographical contributions of the book, and briefly examines the trajectory of market-friendly and market-critical human rights from the 1990s into the 2000s. Christian Democratic officials encouraged market-friendly democratization in Latin America by supporting the electoral ouster of the Sandinistas in 1990, and providing development aid packages to El Salvador despite continued abuses and rampant corruption. Alongside the collapse of state socialism in East Central Europe, democratization in Latin America helped enthrone market-friendly human rights into German reason of state. But the market-friendly conditionality principle instituted in 1991 has selectively targeted some states, such as Cuba, while ignoring abuses in countries important to German economic development. Market-critical human rights activism endured by establishing links with left-wing parties in Germany and with the transnational anti-globalization movement. But the propensity of some of its adherents to support authoritarian states makes it an easy target for market-friendly advocates. However, market-critical human rights can be a helpful corrective to an international human rights system that has largely eschewed criticism of inequality since the 1990s.

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.

This chapter examines West German efforts to admit refugees from Chile. It argues that the rhetoric of antifascism mobilized by the Chile solidarity movement was influential during the government of Willy Brandt (1973–1974), because the key pillars of the Social Democratic Party (youth organizations, trade unions, and regional party structures) endorsed the admittance of refugees as antifascist fighters, and members of the Free Democratic Party also sanctioned the admittance of refugees from Chile. However, following Helmut Schmidt’ accession to the chancellorship in 1974, securing political asylum for refugees from Chile became far more challenging and nearly impossible for political refugees from Argentina. This is because Schmidt and fellow government officials opposed left-wing solidarity during a time in which the focus shifted towards stabilizing the economy and combating left-wing terrorism. The government’s stance forced the solidarity movement to emphasize their humanitarian motivations. As the case of Helmut Frenz’s engagement demonstrates, the politics of emergency coexisted with a market-critical understanding of the violence perpetrated by the Chilean military regime.

The introduction explains the book’s innovative contribution to the historiographies of human rights and German history. Whereas human rights scholarship largely sees post-1970s rights advocacy as a form of conservative humanitarianism, the book demonstrates that the triumph of market-friendly human rights in Cold War Germany was the product of contingency. Bitter political fights within the left, conservative left baiting, and the decline of revolutionary projects in the Global South enabled the market-friendly vision promoted by Christian Democrats to sideline the market-critical human rights vision of the left. The introduction also demonstrates that any account seeking to understand the development of the German left after 1968 must pay close attention to its internationalism.

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.