Margaret Randall

In To Change the World, the legendary writer and poet Margaret Randall chronicles her decade in Cuba from 1969 to 1980. Both a highly personal memoir and an examination of the revolution's great achievements and painful mistakes, the book paints a portrait of the island during a difficult, dramatic, and exciting time.Randall gives readers an inside look at her children's education, the process through which new law was enacted, the ins and outs of healthcare, employment, internationalism, culture, and ordinary people's lives. She explores issues of censorship and repression, describing how Cuban writers and artists faced them. She recounts one of the country's last beauty pageants, shows us a night of People's Court, and takes us with her when she shops for her family's food rations. Key figures of the revolution appear throughout, and Randall reveals aspects of their lives never before seen.More than fifty black and white photographs, most by the author, add depth and richness to this astute and illuminating memoir. Written with a poet's ear, depicted with a photographer's eye, and filled with a feminist vision, To Change the Worldùneither an apology nor gratuitous attackùadds immensely to the existing literature on revolutionary Cuba.

Nine miles down a primitive trail, over hills of sand and rock, across ankle-deep streams, and around mires of quickmud lies Kiet Seel, a thirteenth-century ancestral Puebloan ruin. This is the place, ancient and enduring, from which Margaret Randall begins her meditations in Stones Witness. Randall explores her connections to land and landscape, history and culture, language and memory, drawing from the events of her own rich history to create a universal link between place, time, and identity. A fluid and provocative collection of poetry, prose, and photographs, Stones Witness is in part an account of an extraordinary woman's radically committed and inventive life. Widely known as an author, activist, oral historian, photographer, translator, and teacher, Randall has dedicated her efforts globally to achieving social and environmental change. Yet with a life so varied and so prolific, Randall maintains permanence through her relationship to the earth and its sacred places. And as she situates her own political involvement within a larger cultural context, again and again she returns her focus to the land, the spaces in which people have birthed and buried ...made art? for centuries. Randall's tone is lyrical and elegiac, urgent yet gentle, a collage of words and images that is at once gratifying and morally intense. With an artist's sensibility, Randall explores landscapes of the soul and of the past, histories of conquest and assimilation, nuances of gender and womanhood, love and difference, power and its abuses. While Randall's words probe timeless and intimate questions on the nature of being, she grounds these reflections in place. Her words and photographs take us from the paintings surviving on the walls of Kiet Seel to the paintings preserved on the walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. With her we visit red rock canyons, touch ancient stones, and feel the ebb and flow of the natural world. In a text, testimony that is always in motion, Margaret Randall transcends the boundaries between politics and ethics, culture and environment. Stones Witness sutures the edges of time, the gaps of language, the connections between person and place that are essential for the earth's survival, nd for ours.

Lavinia is accomplished, independent, and fiercely modern. She is also sheltered and self-involved, until the spirit of an Indian woman warrior enters her being. Then she dares to join a revolutionary movement against a violent dictator and finds the courage to act.

Margaret Randall describes her long love affair with the Grand Canyon as dating to the summer of 1947 when, lying about her age, her father took her down its trails by mule. Since then, she has returned more than a hundred times to explore its rims, hiking trails, river and side canyons. The poems that make up 'Into Another Time' draw on these experiences as well as on additional research and countless conversations with other canyon lovers. The book's main section emerged from a river trip in 1997. The cover painting and interior line drawings, by Albuquerque painter and public school teacher Barbara Byers, were made on site on the same trip. Margaret and Barbara have been partners for seventeen years.

In the early 1980s, in the midst of Central America’s decades of dirty wars, Nora Miselem of Honduras and Maria Suárez Toro of Costa Rica were kidnapped and subjected to rape and other tortures. Of the nearly two hundred disappeared persons in Honduras in those years, they are, remarkably, two of only five survivors. Fourteen years after their ordeal, Suárez and Miselem’s chance meeting at a conference on human rights was witnessed by and is now retold in Margaret Randall’s When I Look into the Mirror andSee You.Through direct testimony, vivid prose, and evocative photographs, Randall recounts the terror, resistance, and survival of Suárez and Miselem. The book details the abuses suffered by them, the ruses they used to foil their captors, the support that they gave each other while imprisoned, the means they used to escape, and their attempts to reconstruct their lives. For the first time, Suárez and Miselem explore the pain and trauma of their past and Randall has done the service of adding these remarkable voices to the global campaign to bring the world’s attention to women’s human rights.

Combining anecdotes with analysis, Margaret Randall describes how, in 20th century revolutionary societies, women's issues were gradually pushed aside. Randall shows how distorted visions of liberation and shortcomings in practice left a legacy that not only shortchanged women but undermined the revolutionary project itself. Finally, she grapples with the ways in which women themselves often retreated into more traditional roles and the rage that this engenders.

In The Price We Pay, Margaret Randall interviews women from a wide range of economic, racial, and cultural backgrounds to reveal the role money plays in their lives. These women speak of their changing expectations and attitudes regarding money. Daughters of immigrants remember what money meant in the transition between worlds. They disclose the feelings that they have of stigma or shame at not having enough, guilt at having too much, and the lies, secrets and silences caused by these feelings. These personal stories are woven into a history of women's economics and chapters on family, work, the media, power and control, and lesbian economics.

"A collection of varied and amazing lives, all bent on shaping history. Together, these experienced, undeterred Nicaraguan women offer powerful clues about a truly revolutionary and democratizing feminism."––Adrienne Rich"If it were not for writers like Margaret, how would women around the world find each other when there is such an institutional effort to keep us apart and silent? Here Margaret brings us the voice of Sandino's daughters, honoring his hat and wearing their own, wiser now, having been part of political and personal revolution."––Holly Near"Powerful, moving, and challenging. Everyone interested in decency and justice will want to read Sandino's Daughters Revisited."––Blanche Wiesen CookSandino's Daughters, Margaret Randall's conversations with Nicaraguan women in their struggle against the dictator Somoza in 1979, brought the lives of a group of extraordinary female revolutionaries to the American and world public. The book remains a landmark. Now, a decade later, Randall returns to interview many of the same women and others. In Sandino's Daughters Revisited, they speak of their lives during and since the Sandinista administration, the ways in which the revolution made them strong––and also held them back. Ironically, the 1990 defeat of the Sandinistas at the ballot box has given Sandinista women greater freedom to express their feelings and ideas. Randall interviewed these outspoken women from all walks of life: working-class Diana Espinoza, head bookkeeper of a employee-owned factory; Daisy Zamora, a vice minister of culture under the Sandinistas; and Vidaluz Meneses, daughter of a Somozan official, who ties her revolutionary ideals to her Catholicism. The voices of these women, along with nine others, lead us to recognize both the failed promises and continuing attraction of the Sandinista movement for women. This is a moving account of the relationship between feminism and revolution as it is expressed in the daily lives of Nicaraguan women.

"A completely new and different book from her earlier Sandino's Daughters. The core is a dozen lengthy interviews with feminist women (all but one), hence not randomly drawn from Nicaraguan society. Randall opens the volume with a useful, wide-ranging interpretative survey of history, politics, and the social situation of women. One observation that sticks: women who most resembled men in their conduct rose highest under Sandinista rule"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57.http://www.loc.gov/hlas/