Wed, 4/2/03, 4-6pm, MCC: "Maria's Story" (film), with Maria Navarrete, on events in El Salvador, 1970s-present
Maria Ofelia Navarrete, the subject of the stunning documentary, "Maria's Story" (1990), is a former guerrilla combatant in El Salvador. The film, co-produced with Channel Four in Great Britain, was shown nationally on public television in the United States, and tells the story of her coming of age in the turbulent 1970s, her decision to join the FMLN guerrillas, and her hopes for a new El Salvador in the midst of the war, which finally ended with a negotiated settlement in 1992.
Now active in Salvadoran politics, she was elected to the National Assembly in 1997, serving till 2000 as a deputy for the left-wing FMLN.
She has published an account of her life, "Maria's Stories," in Feminist Futures: Re-imagining Women, Culture and Development, edited by Kum-Kum Bhavnani and John Foran of UCSB's Department of Sociology, and Priya A. Kurian (London: Zed Press, 2003).