Editorial Reviews
Book Description
"It is a great beauty of a book, and I am so proud of you for standing with and for the disappeared. A sister, a lover, a witness."
--Alice Walker
Mary is nineteen and living alone in Albuquerque. Adrift in the wake of her mother's death, she longs for something meaningful to take her over. Then José Luis enters her life. A refugee from El Salvador and its bloody civil war, José has been smuggled to the United States as part of the sanctuary movement.
Mary cannot help but fall in love with the movement and the man. And little by little, she begins to reveal to José Luis the part of herself she has never known. . . .
"A book that becomes more timely every day, in our present political climate, and deserves the widest possible audience for its beautiful prose and humanitarian heart."
--Barbara Kingsolver
"Demetria Martínez has pulled out all the stops: here is truth to arouse any hardened heart; here is the 'insanity' of a woman in love calling forth a revolutionary lucidity. Read it. Get angry. And act."
--Luis J. Rodríguez, Author of Always Running
From the Publisher
That it is possible to learn as much from fiction as from nonfiction is made abundantly clear from a reading of MOTHER TONGUE. Martinez focuses her story on a young woman who becomes involved with a refugee from El Salvador who is smuggled into the U.S. by members of the Sanctuary movement, advocates for the tens of thousands of Salvadorans who have been harassed, tortured, and "disappeared" by a U.S.-supported military government.
There is the truth of experience behind Martinez' fiction. In 1987, she was charged with conspiring against the U.S. government and aiding the entry of Salvadorans into the country. At the end of her 1988 trial, she was acquitted of the charges on First Amendment grounds -- the jury determined that she had a right, as a reporter for the National Catholic Reporter, to witness efforts to aid refugees as part of the Sanctuary movement. Martinez knows whereof she speaks, and writes of it with the voice of the poet that she is.
--Margaret Sanborn/Publicity
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Mother Tongue
Mother Tongue,Demetria Martinez,One World/Ballantine,0345416562,Fiction,Fiction - General,General,Literary,Fiction / Literary
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