 in the last panel, but it pertained much more to this conversation, so I held it until now, and I'm hoping that both of you have more to say about it, having just rewatched the conversation. One of our audience members asked Margaret and Diaconda in regards to the Nicaraguan women's movement, what do you hope that historians take away from your story? It's a big question. I think Diaconda should go first since she's a Nicaraguan woman. Well, I think for me, the women's liberation movement since the 60s, 70s is the biggest and most important revolution of the 20th century. And I feel that we take that, we take that we were pioneers, that we opened the doors for many women that were still trying to find their consciousness. And in the case of Nicaragua, I think Nicaragua has the most, the strength of women has made this country what it is. And it keeps the hope and it keeps the spirit going, though we have a very, very difficult situation. I mean, and to be living through another dictatorship, you have no idea what that means after all the sacrifices that this country made to kind of get rid of one tyrant to end up with another, it's really very depressing and terrible. But women, for example, the women who have husbands in prison right now, we have more than a hundred political prisoners who are treated very badly, who are tortured, who are isolated and in human conditions. And women have been talking about them, women have a very important participation in the society. So that's what I take away from what we did. I mean, it's not one thing, so many things, it changed so many things, but still like Margaret was saying, it's not like we have done it all, we still have things to do. For example, we have in Nicaragua, a very big problem with violence against women and in all of Latin America, it's a paradox that Latin America has had the most number, the largest number of women presidents. There was a time when there are seven women presidents and yet we have the highest number in the world of women who are beaten and killed by men. So it's a domestic violence, it's a very huge problem in Latin America. So we still have a lot to do, but I am very, very happy of what we have done so far. You know, when I heard you say in Shakonda that talking about the women's movement in the 70s and 80s, I agree with you. And I also think that the most important revolution in the world today is the revolution that women are making. I mean, look at Spain, look at Chile, look at so many places, each place is different and you have this terrible new dictatorship. We have now a handmaiden on the Supreme Court, you know. We're risking losing women's rights to control our bodies and all kinds of things. So each country is different because we have different cultures, different histories. But I think that women are really at the forefront of addressing these issues and also realizing that there are so many connected issues. I mean, climate change and violence against women, as you say, and immigration and healthcare, it's all connected, dictatorship, the struggle against the rise of neo-fascism. But I see the lessons from Nicaraguan women and other women in the 70s and 80s as being reflected. It's part of our history and we're building on it today. So, you know, I see a question in the chat from Jules LaBelle and Karen Engo saying that both of us have lived through periods of great hopes and dreams. And what hope and dreams do you still see today? And I think what we see, at least from my point of view, is the same issues, you know, we want equality, we want justice, we want real democracy, not the kind that inhibits voting and so forth and so on. So, you know, we still have a lot of work to do, but if the earth exists, if the planet exists, I think we'll do it. Well, I think, you know, we are coming to a moment, well, hello to Jules and Karen. We are coming to the moment where we have to make very important changes because if we don't, like somebody said, it's not the world that is going to disappear, it's the human species. You know, we as humans are going to disappear. And this pandemic, for example, it's very much a sample of what we are going to have to face if we do not do something about taking care of the world. And that's where I think women are going to have a very important role because we have a chip for caring. We, you know, because of our biological instinct and our biological role of bringing up life or taking care of life, I think we are going to have to put that in service of the world so that we can all go back to all the things we have done wrong and not keep doing them wrong. So it's very interesting that during the pandemic, the heads of state that did the best jobs in their countries were women. I mean, you know, I love, I mean, love has in the Ardennes in New Zealand and, you know, Angela Merkel, the president of Finland, Iceland, Norway. I mean, it was very interesting to see how they took care of their own. And I hope, you know, that we were going to be able to take care of the world. And I hope in the United States, just a fight that wins so that, you know, Trump, that is, you know, a menace. We, you know, it's really a menace to the world, that guy. I mean, all the things that he's done to go back on climate change. So I really think we have to worry and we have to worry and we have to work. And like some women said to me a long time ago when the Iraq war was going to begin and we had to do some work together. And they said, you know, if you think you are too small to make a difference, you have never been in bed with a mosquito. And I thought that was such a great thing. Yeah, yeah. I'd like to ask a couple of questions. I know we also have a question from one of our panelists waiting in the wings. But I wonder what you consider to be the changing roles of academic activists in an increasingly shrinking and limited space. And I, it doesn't specify if we're thinking of the US or Nicaragua, but I imagine there's a space for both answers to both. Well, I see the scholars that matter, the academic scholars that matter to me. I remember when Barbara was talking about archives that matter, but the scholars that matter to me are scholars and activists. And I think we're seeing more and more of that. I know we're seeing more of it in the United States. You're a prime example of this Liz. Roberto Tejada is a prime example. I mean, there are so many and so many fields in history and anthropology in letters in the sciences as well. And I'm not really familiar with what's happening in Nicaragua now in the academy, in the academic world, but I imagine it can't be, I know it must be influenced by the dictatorship, by the Ortega Murillo dictatorship, but I imagine that there are also scholars there who are tremendous activists. So I think the future of the academy is absolutely in the hands of scholars who see their role as being a dual role, as being scholars on the one hand, but also activists who are actively involved in trying to look to change. I don't know what's happening. We have the oldest academic activist, Carlos Tunerman. He's 86 years old and he's still in the trenches, so to speak, but Nicaragua has offered a lot in that regard because the university has lost, it's autonomous nature and it's just a place where propaganda is being dispersed and not dispersed. What does it say? It's being given to the students. Disseminated. Disseminated. And so it's very sad, but what I'm hoping for is for young people to become academics. I'm worried about also the influence of the social media in the concentration, in the study, in all the things that demand a much more focused attention. That worries me because I think the tendency is for all this digital world, at least for a while, is going to kind of absorb the energies that otherwise would go to more long-lasting endeavors in terms of study and in terms of sharing experiences in different communities. Yeah, we have that problem here as well. Yeah, I'd like to invite right now Roberto Tejada to turn on his camera and ask a couple of questions and that lets me read through the Q&A in the chat. Thank you, Margaret and Jack Onda. It's been riveting to hear you talk. And I was wondering what I got a sense of the conversation between the two of you was that there was this incredible belief that change was possible. And so I was wondering if the two of you could talk us through a day in the life of your work together in Nicaragua during that time. Because maybe the day-to-day aspect of it could be a model for thinking about change in the present. Lots of coffee. That's what I remember, lots of coffee, like 10 or 12 cups a day. Well, we worked together in media and I think that that was very interesting for me. It gave me so much, it really taught me a lot because Giaconda was my boss, he was my superior and your job, I guess, was to try to change media television, newspapers, radio to reflect the values of the revolution and everything from sitcoms to the news. And I remember you would send me to some of the television stations and I would work in that. But I learned a lot from you. I think that you should talk about what that work was like. Well, I started advertising and journalism in Philadelphia when I was very young and so I applied my knowledge or tried to apply my knowledge to change the perception that the United States had of what was going on in Nicaragua. It was the Reagan years, we were in the Contra war, we were facing this giant machinery that was trying to crush the Nicaraguan revolution and we had to do our best to talk to journalists, to well, to make them realize what we were going through to get our points across, get our story across and I think we did a pretty good job in a way, considering the circumstances because the United States never invaded Nicaragua at the end and also because people in the United States were in solidarity movement in the United States was very strong to support the Nicaraguan revolution that we were going through. And I think that's another thing that is not talked about enough which is how the Nicaraguan revolution, however, whatever else has happened now, changed the lives of so many people who got involved, helping in solidarity. I mean, it was a time of a beautiful kind of generosity in very, a lot of young people got involved, they came to pick coffee. The Nicaraguan revolution had a lot of charm, really. And I think we all contributed a little bit to that charm because we were, it was not inflexible, it was more relaxed, we were very young, it was, we had fun also, we drank coffee but you remember, Margaret, we had that root spinola. She told me to say hello to you. We had this person working in the office who was from the Dominican Republic and she knew opera. She was an opera expert and she taught us how to love opera and she didn't stop talking the whole day. And we also, when I was sick, I remember one night that they came to my house, not you, Margaret, but a root and another friend as I had to finish a report. And so they gave me Calvados, we all got drunk. And we finished, but we finished the report. I mean, we worked in very difficult circumstances also, but we loved what we were doing. And I think that's the most important thing. And I remember Ruth playing opera areas loud. So I just, yeah, I remember those days as being, and they were long days. I mean, they were 18-hour days, 19-hour days. And it never seemed to us that, I mean, we just didn't have these hours of eight to five or nine to five because you don't make a revolution from nine to five, it takes 24 hours, it takes more. But I remember a lot of wonderful moments from those times. And sometimes, even today, I draw on the lessons that I learned back then. And you mentioned how the Nicaraguan Revolution brought people into it with lots of solidarity movements. And so I think the Nicaraguan Revolution was really, but also at least in the United States sparked so much solidarity interest in El Salvador and Guatemala. It started with Nicaragua and the success of the Sandinistas in 79 made people here in the United States believe that perhaps there could be success in Guatemala, in El Salvador, and so forth. So. And there was success in El Salvador, I mean. Yeah, yeah. There was. No, I did such a good job when I was doing my job as trying to change the perception of journalists that I fell in love with one of them. And I ended up living in the United States for almost 20 years. And now I am back in Nicaragua with the same person. And it was, I tell that in my memoir, that was a very paradoxical thing that happened to me. But it was, journalists became also involved in the, I saw some journalists crying when we lost the elections in 1990. It's fascinating. I cried. Because I think if I can follow up, there was also a change of perception in the mass media in America, Latina as well. The last issue of El Corno is fascinating because there's an essay by Edmundo Desnois called The Secret Weapons because there was a great suspicion of the way the mass media were being used to distort the perception of Latin America. But I think by the time of the Nicaragua, the movement, there was probably a movement to change the perception of how mass media could be used even within the United States to change opinion and attitudes. Roberto, do you have a second question, I think? I do, if that's all right. I mean, both of you have been involved with the women's movement and feminism has changed radically in the last decades. I wonder if, I know, Margaret, you've translated a trans author, Celi Lima. If you could talk about transgender activism in both of your contexts. Yeah, I think it's extremely important. I mean, I think one of the big problems that we all had and by we, I mean, those involved in revolutionary movements in the 80s, in the 70s and 80s, I see when I look back, one of our greatest problems has having been sectarianism. You know, it was gonna be everybody, but maybe we wouldn't talk about race or we wouldn't talk about gender yet. Certainly we didn't talk about gay rights and much less transgender. I mean, those words didn't even exist for us then. So I think that the fact that we did not include everybody and by everybody, I mean, not just in saying in the discourse, well, when the revolution is won, we'll deal with women's rights or we'll deal with racism or we'll deal with homophobia, but we didn't really incorporate those voices and those struggles into the struggle itself. And I think that was a big mistake. And I think it was partially responsible for our failures. You know, whatever part of the failure can be ascribed to us. I know a great deal of it was of course the fault of the United States, but not all of it. Today, I would say that transgender transgender, right? The transgender people are sort of at the bottom of the ladder. There's always somebody at the bottom of the ladder. So right now it's Muslims, it's transgender people. It's the people we can as a society push away or push down and we just can't do that. And you mentioned Shelley Lima. I did an anthology of Cuban women's poetry in 1982 called Breaking the Silences. And Shelley Lima was the youngest person in that book. She was a young woman poet and I remembered her work well. And when I got ready to collect the poetry for a much more recent anthology of Cuban poetry that I translated and edited called Only the Road, Eight Generations of Cuban Poetry that Duke University published a few years ago. I looked for Shelley, I couldn't find her. People had told me that she had left Cuba. And I did find him too late. Shelley, too late to be in the book. Shelley had moved to many other countries and then finally Miami and had transitioned to being a man. I finally got in touch with him and asked to see what he was writing at the moment. And it was so profound and inspiring because he had a book that was all about the sort of psychological aspect of his transformation. Not the physical aspect, but the psychological aspect. And it was wonderful poetry. And so I translated it and it was published by the operating system in Brooklyn. So yes, I'm always interested in who is in this category of humans that we push to the very bottom of the heap. You know, Muslims, transgender people, immigrants of all kinds of all countries because I think that's where we're tested to be able to understand the fullness of humanity. Well, in Nicaragua, you know what has made the transgender issue more visible is because some of the girls that were caught during the protests in April of 2018 were transgender, are transgender. And they were in the prison, they were put with the men. They are both women and they were put with the men because, you know, they didn't accept that they weren't, that they were women. And so that kind of put a light on the issue and they got enormous amounts of sympathy from everybody. I mean, of course there is a reactionary conservative. I think it's a hard, like Margaret's saying, it's something that it's going to have to become accepted by more people, the more that they are seen, the more that they are recognized. You know, we are moving in this identity issues. We are not moving as fast maybe as we should, but I think we are moving pretty fast. I think part of the Trump phenomenon has to do with the fear that so many people have of this new identity politics, no? And so, but I think that's what happened in Nicaragua. It doesn't have a lot of attention, but we have an association of L, B, G, T, I don't know how to say it in English, but, you know, and they are active and so we'll see. I think it will go well. Thank you. Thank you so much for those important answers. I have a specific question for Margaret that came through actually in the earlier panel. One of our listeners would like to ask whether you could tell us a bit about your relationship with Diane de Prima, given Diane's recent passing. I would be glad to and honored to. Just before I answer that question though, I see that there's a question from somebody called Lisa Daller. And she asks, she says somewhere I was told that Margaret Randall is supporting intervention by US military against Daniel Ortega's regime. And I just want to make clear that I am absolutely not supporting intervention by the United States against anyone in the world. So, so much for that. In terms of Diane de Prima, she died on the 25th a few days ago after a very long illness. She was an extraordinary poet. I think that her revolutionary letters, many, many, I can't even remember how many, but there were several volumes of revolutionary letters, poems under that title, were so, were prophetic. I mean, they were published in the early days of Diane and I were friends. We were, she was just two years older than me. So we knew each other briefly in New York and then reconnected during the years of my immigration case after 84 when I came back to the country. She read several times for my case in defense of my staying here. I also think that, and so I think that those revolutionary letters of hers were fabulous and they're still very, very relevant today. Another book of hers that I would recommend to people is Loba, incredible book. And another book that I would recommend to people is her autobiography. I can't remember the name of it now, but it should be very easy to find online. She wrote it maybe, I don't know, 15, 20 years ago. It's an extraordinary book about an extraordinary life, but also a book in which the 60s and 70s are particularly reflected from a woman's point of view. Yeah. Recollections of my life as a woman. Saigo tells us that her book is Recollections of My Life as a Woman, which is the title of her autobiography. Yes, everyone should read it. I have a, can I say something? Yes. I am really impressed with the work that our two sign language translators are doing. I think sign language is such a beautiful thing to see. I remember once in Cordo, I was in a poetry reading and there was a person who was doing sign language of the poetry and it was so beautiful. Thank you guys. You are doing an amazing job. Thank you. Thank you so much, Efrain and Claudia. Really wonderful work. Yeah. We do have a few more questions from folks watching. One asks you, the both of you, to compare your memoirs. Both of your autobiographies have similarities of honesty, humility and introspection, but they were written at very different times. What do you two think are the similarities and differences of your memoirs? Well, I think one of the most important, I mean, I talked some about Giaconda's memoir in the conversation that we just had. And I think that the most out, I think it's an extraordinary memoir, but I think that one of the things I admire most about it is when it was written. It was written 20 years ago. And for those of you who weren't able to tune in to our conversation, Giaconda was able to talk about things that were very, very difficult for many people impossible to talk about back then, such as misogyny and the way women were treated in the Sandinista movement and in general. And it's also a beautifully written book. I don't know, what do you think, Giaconda? What do you think the differences are? Well, I think they are similar in many ways. In my memoir, I just chose to do a piece of my life which had to do with my joining and then joining the revolution and then moving to the United States after the electoral defeat. Margaret goes much more into her past, her family. I didn't do that. But in terms of our struggle as women to kind of make ourselves heard to the obstacles we had, what our relationship to our children in the middle of all these topsy-turvy lives that we had, all of that has something in common. And also the thought about the good and bad of revolution. So I think you would do it maybe more than I did, but I did begin to state questions about whether we had really done the revolution justice and everybody who died justice. And we were already seeing, I was already seeing the authoritarian rasgos, you know, authoritarian characteristics that, you know, later came to full bloom with Daniel Ortega because I wrote the memoir in 2000 and 2000. It came out in English in 2001. And I had left the Frente Sandinista in 1993. I resigned because of the way that Daniel Ortega was trying to centralize all the power and marginalize, but those who had really been in the revolution for being part and fought. So I have an opinion that I had since then about what was happening and how it was not going the way we thought a revolution should develop, what had happened with the electoral defeat, with the contra war. I tried to make a critical reading of all those things. Yeah. That's why I think it was so brave because I mean, it's much easier to do that now. In my book, I'm doing it in retrospect. And so much of what we thought back then or began to think has come to fruition and we see it, but it's in retrospect. And you had the courage to do it when it was still developing, when very few people really understood that that was what was happening or made excuses for the fact that it was happening. I mean, I can remember talking to people in the 90s about Daniel Ortega's sexual abuse of his stepdaughter, Soy Lamerica, and saying, a man who does that is not fit to be president of anything or even head of a family or anything. And people saying to me, people in the solidarity movement here are revolutionary people who fought for justice. And so we're saying, but that's his personal life. That doesn't count. We don't need to talk about that. And I always thought that that was just absurd. Yeah. Yes. I wanted to voice a question that came in earlier and this one is for Margaret. And it speaks directly to a section of your memoir where you talk about being raised in the United States in the middle class and not knowing you were of Jewish descent. And this brought to mind Jessica Krug, the professor who was passing as Afro-Caribbean. In the discussion of the Randall archives, the idea of speaking for others was mentioned. And this audience member is wondering how Margaret has managed to avoid speaking for others or speaking as the other and rather has facilitated the ability of women to speak for themselves. Can you address that, Margaret? Well, I'll try to address that. I mean, it's a very tough question. And I think it has to be looked at historically. When I first did oral histories in the 70s, I was trying not to speak for the other. I was trying to let the other speak through me, but I was just learning how to do oral history. And I don't know that I was always successful at that. Gradually, many of these women who spoke through me at that time gained their own extraordinary voices and have spoken for themselves in books and articles and films and in many other ways. So I think it was something that evolved. I mean, I think that the work that I did was important and I'm proud of it at the time that I did it, but I think that at this point, we need to, and we can encourage people with the resources that we have today, we can encourage people, women and everyone to speak for themselves, to speak about their own lives as the protagonists that they are. I remember when I first went to Nicaragua at the end of 1979, just after the Sandinista victory, I was invited by Ernesto Cardinal and one of the things that he wanted me to do and which I did was to give a four-day course in oral history. And I remember Ernesto saying to me, the students in this course are gonna range from people who do not know how to read and write to people who have doctoral degrees. So make it broad. And so I started out with how you use a tape recorder and how you put people at ease and so forth, how you ask open-ended questions. But I ended up trying to explore some of the issues that we were talking about even back then, the ethics of how you present yourself, how you must present yourself when you do that kind of work so that the reader of an oral history will not only hear the voices that you're presenting, but know where you're coming from and what you're filtering those voices through. Yeah. Well, speaking of the voices of others, I was going to see if Fiora of Nicaragua would like to speak to the group. Fiora, are you there? Yes, I'm here. Well, I think I would prefer to speak in Spanish. Is that possible? Oh, great. Well, first, I wanted to say to Margaret that it really is an honor to meet her. At the end of 2018, by chance of life and the repression of Daniel Ortega, I went to live in her house in Osrobles, the house she had Osrobles in Managua. And I was able to see a little bit of her photographs that are still there. So it was interesting to know from another perspective of the revolution and it is now more interesting to know that she is here in Albuquerque. Well, my question was more than everything because it is a discussion that I think is a generational issue in Nicaragua and that I may be able to talk a little more about it. But I think there is a lot of that perception between the young people, that yes, before there was a hope of being able to change things in a way that now no longer seems possible. So it is something that I personally believe a lot that my friends and friends who are now exiled too. I would like to know what would be your answer to how to maintain the hope of all this, for example, between Nicaragua and the United States and in several other places where we now see a lot refugees, immigrants and people trying to make a life in the middle of the chaos. Look, the other day they told me a lot of things, thank you very much for that question. They told me something that I thought was great, that you can't live in utopia, because it is utopia, but you can't live without utopia. I mean, I think that one has to believe that the world is going to be better. What happens is that what we have, let's say, the people that we have already lived through these processes, let's say, is that we know that maybe we are going to see the result of our dreams and we begin to accept that reality. That reality means that what we did is not that we were wrong, but that the processes of history take a lot of time. So I think that you, as young people, have to compromise with your life, with the present, with time and do the best you can to push the car of history. Maybe you won't see everything you want to see, but what is important is to know that one does something, because the most important thing is that one feels that life has a purpose, that one's life is here to do something important and change a little bit of history. So that's what I think the hope is. As long as there is hope, things move, things can be difficult, things can not happen immediately, but I tell you, compared to us, let's say the Andeans, when we started from the 70s, there was nothing, we were also fighting against an army, against a dictatorship. So one has to believe that the worst thing that one can do is lose hope, because as long as there is hope, one moves, but I understand you, I mean, I understand that it's very difficult and I don't, I also get depressed and sometimes it seems to me that this is going to be eternal, but it's not true, it's not true, because the same people are not eternal, that is, Daniel Ortiz is going to die, he killed her too and he's going to die when you don't feel very well. I don't know. And Trump too, hopefully. In the last instance. I think we have to have hope, but we also have urgency, right? I mean, we don't have another, right? We don't have the remedy. We have to keep fighting because not doing it would be dying, right? Exactly. That's what I think, yes. Yeah. Muchísima gracias, Fiore. Now the voice of the youth has spoken and I appreciate those answers from experience. We were all young once, but these days it's hard to remember. We are approaching the end of our time together and I know some people have had to leave, but one of the questions that I thought was worth thinking about well, actually it was a repetition of the hopes and dreams kind of question. So I think what I like to do is thank you, Dioconda, and thank you, Margaret, so much for all the hard work and preparation, as well as the joy and passion that you brought to this project of celebrating the Margaret Randall Archives at UNM. Likewise, I'd like to thank all of the panelists who spoke earlier in the day. I know most of them are are still online and they did a wonderful job and hope that this has given us new opportunities to connect not only through Zoom, but also through our archives, through our work, through our activism. And in a closing moment, I would like to show you who all, oh, darn, sorry, all of the people who have helped make this possible from our technical support, our publicity work, particularly that of Marlene Linares Gonzalez, the interpretation which we've already celebrated and we celebrate again of Efraín and Claudia with the support of Tommy Tejeda. And again, a big thanks to all of our our public, our audience for joining us this afternoon and reminding us once again of the lessons we learned and teach each other from these marvelous women who spent time speaking with each other. Would either of you like to say anything in closing? Well, I just say thank you to everyone. The panels were great. Jakonda, it was just thrilling to be able to talk to you. I hope we can keep in close touch. Liz, your work in getting this together and solving all the problems that came up is more than astounding. And the people behind the scenes, as Jakonda said, the signers have been wonderful. And so I'm just very, very grateful and humbled and moved there were times when I was fighting back the tears. So just thank you for this afternoon. Thank you for accompanying us. Thank you to all. Yeah, and I want to thank Liz very specially because I feel that she worked so hard and she was such a champion for this event. And thank you for everybody that watched. And I was super honoured and happy to be able to be with Margaret, to talk to her at length about all these things, about her memoir. And please, buy your memoir, read it. It's very important. You're going to be very inspired. And thank you so much to New Mexico University and to all the people who worked on this event. It was great. Yes, thank you, everyone. And have a good evening. Please stay safe and well. And I hope we can convene again sometime soon safely. Take good care.