October 15, 2007.

Art, voice and resistance, talk at Dartmouth College

When Maria walked into LALACS House to give her talk on Women’s Voices in Paradigm Shifts, she began with a seemingly unrelated subject – flight delays upon returning from the World Conference Against Racism in South Africa when she had been changing flights in New York City. An airport security guard informed passengers that they had to leave the airport.

Maria recalled her indignation; she talked about how she had confronted the security guard for yelling so loud and most of all, for not explaining but simply giving orders.

“Look, lady,� he told her, “a plane just crashed into the World Trade Center, and another one is following it. What else can I tell you?�

Maria agreed to leave without further questions, going downstairs to get her bag. She described people running away from the airport while fearfully glancing back at the site.

The images of people running astray and looking back in fear of the smoke could following them reminded her of her experiences of civil war in Central America in the eighties– resulting in a rare, unpleasant parallel between the Unites States setting she was witnessing now and Latin American settings throughout the decades of war. “Those worlds, for the first time in my life, came together through very difficult circumstances - Maria told the Dartmouth College audience comprised of 40 student, staff and professors – I never expected to see its globalization in so many ways.� She added that breaking the silence for peace is urgent everywhere today.

Continuing with the story, she told us that once in Brooklyn, where she arrived partly by bus, but mostly walking with a friend who had also been at the airport with her, she noticed that the typically unfriendly New York City population had turned into a community: people working together to provide relief for one another; providing water supply lines, crafting a smile in the midst of the fear, setting tables along the way for first aid support, helping people in wheelchairs, etc.

Once at a friend’s house in Brooklyn that same afternoon, Maria made her own, unique contribution - she set up a radio station at the kitchen table. Soon, feminists in New York and all over the world were calling in to talk about how 9/11 had affected their lives.

As a journalist, feminist, and human rights activist, Maria has been bringing different voices and different worlds together for more than a decade. In 1991, she and a colleague set up radio station FIRE (Feminist International Radio Endeavour), which provides an international communications network where women’s concerns could be addressed and their contributions emphasized for a global audience when internet was hardly available.

In an interview after her talk in Dartmouth, Maria told me said that her work in human rights, popular education and literacy lead her towards feminism. While she was living in El Salvador and Guatemala, she realized that the human rights framework neglected women’s rights. She aims to contribute to remedy that.

“Maria's main goal is to ‘give voice to the voiceless through radio shows,� said Dartmouth student Glavy Cruz who heard Maria speak in her LATS 41 class (Representations of/from Latinos in the Media and the Arts).

Maria’s first radio experience was in shortwave radio, a method that many in our generation would consider anachronistic, yet it definitely has its merits. “In many Latin American countries, it’s the only form of electronic media that people have access to,� said Professor Douglas Moody, who is teaching LATS 41 this term. By using short-wave radio, FIRE was able to reach women in some of the poorest countries in the world.

“She realizes that a large portion of her audience may not have access to fast internet connections, or even televisions,� said Jacqueline Theintz ’10.

“Her talk made me consider radio in a whole new light,� Karli Beitel ’10 said. “She really liked ‘the intimacy of the radio,’ and said that on the radio you are heard for what you have to say, but on television looks are involved.�
Maria’s energy showed that radio is still a relevant, dynamic medium. However, rather than restricting her work to the radio, Maria combines both old and new media in order to reach and impact as many women as possible. Since 1998 FIRE became the first internet radio station in the world that is owned, produced and engineered b women. “I think, is a quality which singles her out among other activists,� Jacqueline Theintz said.

FIRE can be found online (http://www.radiofeminista.net), where visitors have access to streamed and downloadable radio episodes. The website also outlines the patriarchal dominance of the media, and how women’s perspectives are often ignored. The media is a new ‘power-space’ which mobilizes the masses and influences many aspects of people’s daily lives, which makes pursuing gender equality within the media doubly important.

According to Maria, both media and society operate under a hegemony which subordinates alternative forms of expression. These alternatives have potential to benefit society, and deserve be brought to light and explored. Such is the rationale behind Maria’s book “Women: Metamorphosis of the Butterfly Effect,� to be published in 2008.

During her talk at LALACS, Maria introduced the musical theater show “Wings of the Butterfly,� which is based on her unpublished book. The show will explore the ‘alternative’ contributions of women throughout history – contributions which have not been recognized, and thus rendered invisible.

Such women include Mileva Maric, the first wife of Einstein, who was a prominent physicist and mathematician in the same university as her husband. She frequently aided Einstein’s work, but hardly appears in any of Einstein’s biographies. When Einstein received the Nobel Prize, he chose to offer Maric part of the prize money rather than give her credit for her work.

Other women featured in the show include singer Guadalupe Urbina, genetic scientist Evelyn Fox Keller, and ‘Lucy,’ one of the oldest mummified skeletal remains ever discovered.

The show is named after ‘the butterfly effect’ from chaos theory, but ‘Wings’ gives the phrase a new meaning.

“It is a small action which triggers a huge reaction,� said Maria. The name honors African-American Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white man during the racial segregation of the 1950s. “She unleashed a movement to do away with segregation, [just] because she didn’t get up from her seat,� said Maria.

‘Wings of the Butterfly’ is another example of Maria’s bridge-building between different disciplines. The show takes academic findings and presents them in an artistic and popular manner. Maria stated that the project did not mark her departure from academia to the arts – rather, it is an attempt to integrate the two.

Maria also said that the show would ‘place her book in the hands of people.’ She plans for the book itself to be highly interactive, and hopes that the readers will be able to relate the women’s stories to their lives. The show’s website invites visitors to submit stories of important women in their own communities.

“Maria Suarez Toro's commitment to providing a voice to women all over the world was inspiring,� Erin Johnson ’08 commented. “She understands the best way to communicate with international audiences and give a global perspective to women far removed from ‘first world’ technologies.�

Hopefully, the book will be able to transcend international boundaries the same way that Maria’s other plentiful contributions have.

Based on the talk, “Women's Voices Inspire New Paradigms: Radio, Resistance and Art in Free Trade Struggles and Beyond� by Dr. María Suárez, award-winning Latin American journalist, feminist, activist and artist, describes the role of women in the recent Costa Rican struggle against the Central American Free Trade Agreement and in other actions that are forging new approaches to knowledge and social change.

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