Today’s post is about Prudencia Ayala, and her first book: Escible (something that is worth knowing/saying). It is a chronicle of her trip to Guatemala and subsequent imprisonment imbued with her ideas of Central American unionism. She’s an incredibly interesting historical figure and early feminist that I think deserves more attention. Before I get there, here’s a short review of a Kurt Vonnegut novel and some articles I recommend reading.

Mini Review - God Bless You Mr. Rosewater

Originally published in 1965, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater is as funny, biting, and relevant today as when it was written. Somehow, Vonnegut was able to pack a broad range of social satire in a relatively short novel without it feeling preachy or stilted. My quick synopsis of the book is that it follows the (mis)adventures of a young man (Eliot Rosewater) from a wealthy family who receives millions each year from a trust fund. Growing up he was the golden child, but after a traumatic experience while deployed in the military, he was never quite the same. He opens a nonprofit where he basically acts like Jesus (except drunk and confused all the time), and does everything he can to help anyone who calls. His father, a devout Christian senator who goes on diatribes about Christian values, absolutely detests his son’s behavior and his love for the poor and unfortunate people he helps. Wikipedia has a great synopsis here.

There are many layers to the book, including scathing critiques of the class system in the U.S. and the awful things that money leads people to do. While Eliot’s father feels like he should be a caricature, his opinions are sadly all too common still today. While Eliot really is an alcoholic and likely needs help, Vonnegut eviscerates the Freudian psychoanalysis of the time. Eliot and his wife both develop empathy to a damaging extent, and the role therapy plays in the book is an attempt to uphold the status quo and allow them to return to their high-society lives, stop embarrassing their families, and continue ignoring the poor. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon writes similarly of a police torturer who came to his mental hospital because torturing so many people was leading him to become abusive to his wife and children. The torturer wanted Fanon to help him overcome those very human emotions so that he could continue his atrocities without affecting his family life. Similarly, through Eliot Rosewater Vonnegut highlights that while feeling empathy for the plight of others can cause harmful coping mechanisms like alcoholism, the true disorder is that of the wealthy who insulate their lives and their psyches completely from their less-fortunate neighbors.

Reading Recommendations

1. Continuing the theme of prison abolition, Knock LA reported a series on sheriff department gangs and the violence they inflict on people:

“Crawford’s case never made it to trial. Lynn says that’s common with deputy gang cases: “The County does not want these cases going to trial because then you get deputies and victims under oath, and they avoid that at all costs. The County just keeps throwing money at the defendants and the lawyers. It’s a business.” Crawford settled for $60,000 and signed an affidavit that he wouldn’t pursue any action on residual injuries. Crawford says he chose to settle because his father was ill with colon cancer, and with no insurance, he was set to lose the family home. He never considered that over 30 years later he’d still suffer from splitting headaches and consistent aching in his leg.”

2. As I will repeat a million more times, everything is interconnected. Here’s a great piece from Bolts which highlights how immigration and mass incarceration are intertwined and how rising immigrant detention can offset declining prison populations to keep prisons in business and stymie reform. The ease of ICE access to local detention centers also contributes to the rising incarceration of immigrants in a vicious cycle. Plus, since most immigration violations are considered civil violations, immigrants do not have the same rights to due process as criminal defendants in the U.S.

   “Do detained immigrants have access to the same rights in the justice system as legal residents who are arrested? — Bolts Lover, from Virginia

   They do not. In the 1883 case of Fong Yue Ting v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that deportation, and by extension, detention, was not a punishment for a crime. This created one of the fundamental paradoxes of immigration detention—that it’s a civil or administrative form of imprisonment, rather than criminal punishment, even when it’s taking place in the exact same jail! In practice, this means that migrants in deportation proceedings have few due process protections: They are not entitled to legal representation, to a trial by jury, to a speedy trial.”

3. This essay from Inquest highlights the pathway from culture war to criminalization. It gives a good description of the playbook to wield government power against your enemies. The first step is always demonizing and othering people.

"Before they were wars of criminalization, all of these began as culture wars that demonized groups that needed to be subdued and brought under control. Culture wars unfold against backdrops of political, social, economic, and ecological tensions and uncertainties. As precarity, already widespread, intensifies, so does the elastic appeal and power of scapegoating and criminalization."

4. Finally, here’s a great article from ProPublica from 2022 which details the many ways the wealthy pay less in taxes than the rest of us. Of note is that “But the real standouts were the billionaires who reported such low incomes that they qualified for government assistance. At least 18 billionaires received stimulus checks in 2020, because their tax returns placed them below the income cutoff ($150,000 for a married couple).” Additionally, it’s worth digging into Warren Buffet’s statement that “he followed the law and preferred that his wealth go to charity.” There are two major issues with this. The first is that only the wealthy are afforded the privilege of deciding to not fund public goods and instead direct their money where they personally want it to go, regardless of the impact on their neighbors. This is an anti-democratic way of doing things. Secondly, because of all the tax breaks they receive, the private donations of the wealthy are actually subsidized by the rest of us. They donate to whatever charity they choose, and the rest of us have to cover the costs of the infrastructure that allowed them to accumulate such massive wealth. One final anti-democratic instance noted in the article was this:

7. Think Your Taxes are Too High? Change the Tax Laws

Sometimes, it pays to fight for a new tax break. For the billionaires who contributed millions to Republican politicians, the payoff came in the form of Trump’s “big, beautiful tax cut” for passthrough businesses. We found the change sent $1 billion in tax savings in a single year to just 82 ultrawealthy households. Some business owners also boosted their savings with a trick: They slashed their own salaries and categorized the money instead as passthrough income.

Prudencia Ayala: Badass Salvadoran Feminist

I recently read Escible, a book by Prudencia Ayala, which was edited and republished a few years ago by the Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen in El Salvador. Though the efforts of the museum and historians have made her more visible, I think she still deserves much broader recognition both in El Salvador and worldwide. Her English Wikipedia page is short and only cites seven sources. The Spanish one is a little more complete with 18 sources, but neither do justice to her incredible story.

Escible, which in English means “something that is worth knowing; or something that is worth saying,” is a chronicle of Prudencia’s journey in 1919 to Guatemala with her friend Rosa Amelia Guzmán. Here is my translation of the back cover, which gives a good summary of the plot:

Under the stormy skies of October 1919, two women travel alone on horseback from the city of Santa Ana [El Salvador] to the capital of Guatemala. They cross the frightful river which demarcates the border and ride through Guatemalan territory. Their purpose is to explore the living conditions of women on the isthmus and the strength of commitment to Central American union. Upon arriving in Guatemala City, they are arrested by the regime of dictator Estrada Cabrera. This is a chronicle and testimony, which Prudencia Ayala offers in her first book published more than a century ago. An early advocate in the fight for citizenship rights for women, in 1930 Ayala would scandalize patriarchal society by running as a candidate for the presidency of the republic.

Prudencia’s chronicle begins with a threatening premonition which she shares with her friend Rosa. In spite of her worries, the two pack their things and set off for Guatemala on horseback. Throughout their journey Prudencia makes note of the many people they encounter, such as the group of boys coming to the small inn where she and Rosa are staying to sing love songs to the daughters of the owner.

After a few days, they cross the dangerous river that marks the border with Guatemala and shortly thereafter encounter a group of men who had clearly been working in the fields all day. It is here that Prudencia first makes her unionist sympathies known to the reader, first yelling to the men, then explaining to Rosa her belief that unification of the Central American governments into one nation is the only path toward prosperity. Finally, she yells to the men “¡Viva la Unión!” [Long live the Union!].

Later, at a small boarding house she and Rosa engage in a political discussion over lunch with a man they met there. Prudencia talks about the poor condition of the roads and the fact that the candidate in El Salvador that she supported and who was the workers’ candidate lost. The man asks her if she is from El Salvador and she replies “From there because I was born there, but my country is all of Central America.”

Closer to the capital, she sees a group of drunken and dirty soldiers and comments to Rosa how terrible the state of the dictator must be to allow soldiers to act like that. Once they arrive in the capital, they are immediately brought in for questioning by the police. They were imprisoned for more than 30 days for no other reason than being “political.” This is a claim Prudencia denies, though as we’ll see later, she was highly politically active both before and after this experience. After several petitions to the dictator, they are finally released and allowed to make their way home.

So that’s the chronicle, but in this recent edition, it’s followed by a series of essays which give a broad background on the incredible life and work of Prudencia Ayala. The first essay by Elena Salamanca focuses on Central American feminism and absolutely demolishes the myth of historical figures like Prudencia being “exceptional individuals.” Until the 90s and early 2000s, much historical research in this area focused on men and many historians implicitly assumed that figures like Prudencia were exceptions to the rule. The assumption being that most progress was achieved by men, and only a few outstanding women did much of anything. What Salamanca shows is the broad network of connections that Prudencia cultivated across Central America, working with both men and women to advance her main causes: feminism, unionism, and workers’ rights.

As Salamanca points out, in 1919 when Prudencia and Rosa set out on their journey, women were not even considered citizens in their country. The only rights they had were as property of the men in their lives. It was an incredible feat even to start on this journey. What makes it even more incredible, as a later essay points out, is that Prudencia had been imprisoned earlier that same year in El Salvador for criticizing a local mayor. In spite of her protestations that she was “not political”, she was a journalist whose work was first published in 1913, and her family had a history of involvement in movements including the claim (not fully proven) that Prudencia’s mother was promoted to colonel for her participation in the 1894 rebellion against Carlos Ezeta in El Salvador. Many other women participated valiantly in what was known as The Revolution of the 44, including Lola Soliz who was shot in the leg and achieved the rank of general.

In closing Salamanca states:

The hypothesis that obscures the suffragist movement in El Salvador is the same that created the solitude and exceptionality of Prudencia Ayala and turned her into a mythical figure surrounded by mystery and prophecy.

As made clear by Prudencia’s mother (Aurelia), Rosa, Lola, and the many other women who fought with them to overthrow despots, organize seamstresses, and push for the union of Central American countries, while amazing in her own right, Prudencia was not a fluke or solitary heroine, but part of a wide-ranging feminist movement that existed in spite of the many barriers to education and political participation women in Central America faced at the time.

To finish this blog post, I’d like to mention what Prudencia is most famous for: being the first woman to run for president in El Salvador and Latin America in 1930. This was the first democratic election in El Salvador, and unfortunately the last for many decades as the president was shortly overthrown by his vice president, ushering in years of various military dictatorships. In the years between the events chronicled in Escible and her candidacy for president, Prudencia continued to fight for the rights of women and workers across Central America. She even saw her dream of union realized (for a brief time), when in 1921 the Central American presidents came together to create the short-lived Federal Republic of Central America. She continued her work as a journalist and published her own periodical called “Redención Femenina” [Feminine Redemption], though very few editions remain, you can see a scan of one in the pdf at the bottom of this page.

Prudencia’s story gives me hope because it helps put world progress in perspective and shows what you can do when you work together to build movements with others, even when you lack political rights. Her work was cross-coalitional, advocating for women’s rights, better working conditions for all, and an overarching goal of unification of Central American nations in service of these goals. All of this organizing and collective action was done when most people traveled on horseback, and information would take days or weeks to arrive.

Purchase the Book

If you’d like, you can purchase some of the books mentioned in this post from bookshop.org. This is a way to support local bookstores (or me if you use the link below), and avoid the Amazon monopoly.

Here is the link to my store page, with all of my recommendations.

You can also use the store locator and select a local book shop for the profit of your purchase to go to. According to the website:

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