The main political and social precedent and source of my coming to being as a book is the international media work of  Feminist International Radio Endeavour (FIRE) throughout it's 17 years since 1991. Many of the interviews and testimonies in me come from that source as you will see in the different chapters. Furthermore, many of the trips for FIRE to cover events around the world provided the setting for many others that did not necessarily become FIRE productions. Or as Netherlands feminist Irene Dubel once said of me “This book is an effort to take the stories on FIRE to yet other audiences this time though literature.”

The main personal precedent and source has been Maria’s own lifelong effort to reconstruct her life based on the feminist epistemological stance that sates that “the personal is political” by developing introspective, retrospective and “context-spective” in the deconstruction of internalized patriarchy and her participation in social transformation towards a world where women and their worlds can have a safe and signified place.

For María, it included learning to listen, but also to be heard. Exercising the right to “name” the world. Refusing to name or be “named” by stereotipical definitions. Strengthening herself collectively and individually in group experiences like “Las Humanas” in CODEHUCA in the late 1980s, and “La Nuestra” of Latin American and Caribbean women towards the recognition that women’s rights are human rights in 1993. Also important for María was her participation in the different collectives of FIRE throughout the last 16 years, Women Against the Combo (privatization of telecommunications in Costa Rica) in 2000, Wings of the Butterfly in 2006, Mujeres contra el TLC (Women Against the Free Trade Agreement or CAFTA – Central American Free Trade Agreemen) in 2007, and since 2006, Meso American Women’s Feminist Watch.

Also part of María’s process were a series of individual therapies, a collective psychodrama group experience and friends and partners who have always accompanied her in loving critical term, helping her to grow.

 Academic sources have been the following:

  • A Degree in Journalism from the Universidad Federada San Judas Tadeo in Costa Rica between 2000 and 2003 where Maria learned to find her own writing persona.
  • The courses taught with Margaret Thompson at the University of Denver since 2000 regarding gender, intercultural and international communications where I have learned to develop clarity of exposition beyond language about women’s paradigmatic contributions to social change globally.
  • The Ph.D. in Education at the University of La Salle in Costa Rica between 2003 – 2006 where MarĂ­a joined a group of feminists and gave herself a space of her own in the program to write the kind of book (me) she always wanted to write.
   

I was originally called Women in the Cutting Edge of Paradimatic Shift but was later re-baptized with the name with which you know me: Women, Metamorphosis of the Butterfly Effect. In my original version, there are still at least 12 more chapters that have not been published yet.