As
she was the presenter of the radio program Foro de la mujer, broadcast by the University radio station, Radio
Universidad. It may have been her work for this program that finally provoked
the action against her; for she had recently recorded an interview, by then
still untransmitted, with Indian women from the Quiché province of Guatemala,
one the most active areas of guerrilla opposition to the country's military
government.
After Alaide Foppa's disappearance, relatives combed Guatemala City's hospitals, but found no trace of her. Appeals were made to the government (two of whose then members were her relatives) though international bodies such the UN Committee on Human Rights, through a long list of internationally known intellectuals and cultural figures. There has so far been no response.
Alaíde Foppa was a poet, translator,
art critic, teacher and feminist activist. She spoke for the women who were silenced
during her country's dictatorship. She denounced the untouchables and injustice
in Guatemala. In 1980, exiled in Mexico, she traveled to Guatemala with the
intention of renewing her passport and visiting her mother. Shutting up her
voice was the reason for her disappearance.
During the first few years after the kidnapping, several friends still expected or demanded that she come back alive. Honduran writer Augusto Monterroso also tried to make room for this duel. In his diary, La Carta, from 1984, he observes her hometown from the plane on the way to Managua, and painfully remembers his friend:
Guatemala
now “passes” below us. You are welcome [...]. Down in the mountains, in the
cities and in the villages, our friends in struggle, our dead; another day in
their lives and in their deaths for a cause that is not that of the North
Americans either, and that says that this is the cause: the popular cause, the
poet Alaíde Foppa, tortured, killed and disappeared; that of her children,
killed in combat.
Elena
Poniatowska, Mexican writer and journalist,
winner of the Cervantes Literature Prize
in 2014, says it is difficult to accept the poet's definitive disappearance and
thinks, “Now she will open the door and
enter. The phone will ring and I will hear her voice.”
Many authors who knew her personally
highlight her sweet character, her charming personality, her culture and also
her work as a feminist and intellectual.
Four decades of political turmoil
The
October 1944 Revolution in
Guatemala neutralized all parliamentary attempts to maintain the traditional
system, opening space for all democratic changes in a country marked by
successive military coups, oligarchic agreements and repression.
The Revolution generated democratic
changes and the Agrarian Reform Law. Juan
José Arévalo, the first democratically elected president, began a process
of modernization of the State, expanding its functions and the population's
access to public services.
His successor, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, had the objective of advancing in the
transformation processes. However, on December 19, 1954, a coup d'état forced
Árbenz's resignation, and installed the bloody dictatorship of Carlos Castillo Armas, commanded by the
United States.
Civil War in Guatemala
Occurred between the years of 1960 and
1996, it was a war between different groups of guerrillas and the government.
Estimates indicate that approximately 40,000 people disappeared and 150,000
lost their lives.
Its origins date back to the 1954 coup
d'état. The CIA of the United States had drawn up this strategy. Dictator Carlos
Castillo had connections with death squads and anti-communist groups. In 1958,
Castillo was assassinated and replaced by General Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes.
In 1960, young soldiers opposed to the
actions of the Guatemalan government organized an uprising, but they were
unsuccessful. After the failure, these soldiers defected and made contact with
the armed forces of the government of Cuba, which had recently consolidated a
socialist regime.
During the 1970s, some of Foppa's sons
became involved with the guerrillas, mainly with the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP). In 1980, his son Juan Pablo died in Nebaj, a Guatemalan
city in the department of El Quiché. Her husband was run over and killed in
1980.
Political involvement
Foppa began to get involved
politically after her son Juan Pablo's death. Her fight for the rights of women
and indigenous people was fundamental to feminism in Mexico, where she
co-founded the magazine Fem in 1976.
Her tragic death is also the central theme of Gilda Salinas' book, Alaíde
Foppa – the echo of her name, which joins testimonies from friends and
family with fictional fragments in which the author tries to imagine what must
have gone through the poet's head in the last moments of her life.
In late 1996, a permanent ceasefire
agreement was signed between the government and the guerrillas. A general
amnesty was instituted both for guerrilla soldiers responsible for misdeeds in
actions. The government has committed itself to reforming the structures with
the aim of achieving peace and development in the country.
Exiles in Mexico
At the time of her first exile in
Mexico, from 1931 to 1944, she was a professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and
Letters at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where she held the
chair of Italian Literature and Sociology. The definitive exile took place from
1954 to 1980. The main reason for the second exile was that her husband,
Alfonso Solórzano, was a communist.
They said that Foppa never felt deeply
exiled because she felt very intellectual with the environment she found in
Mexico. Her house became an intellectual meeting place. For her, life in Mexico
was, without a doubt, an enrichment, a promise, as defined by Amy Kaminsky (Ph.D. Professor of Gender,
Women and Sexuality Studies, University of Minnesota):
The
exile's sense of identity and the sense that exile is a u-topia (a non-place)
with the promise that it will at least survive - transforms into the diaspora
day's sense of suffering in place, if not place. The Diaspora connects exiles
with intellectuals and writers who were already in the country when the coups
took place, who also feel connected.
The importance of translation in her career
Alaíde Foppa is mainly known for her
poetry, but she was a multifaceted woman, activist, art critic, editor of Fem Literature magazine, academic at
UNAM where she taught women and, finally, a translator.
In listing these activities, often her
work like other activities is added at the end, as if it were secondary and
insignificant to her activities. Even some authors do not even mention her work
as a translator. However, the translation should not be interpreted as a
secondary aspect of her work, but as fundamental.
Foppa translated texts of a very
different nature, usually on request. In the early 1940s, when she had just
settled in Guatemala, she worked as a translator at the Italian Embassy and
collaborated as an art critic and poet in the Saker-Ti group. At the same time, she was director of the Italian Institute
of Culture and her work as a translator was committed to the direction of the
Institute.
Also in Mexico, she had to adapt to
translation and interpretation, more and more she works as a simultaneous
translator, from Italian to French and vice versa, from Italian and French to
Spanish or vice versa, in addition to the possibility of translation into
Spanish from Spain, Mexico, Guatemala or Argentina.
Feminist and Literary Activities in Mexico
In 1954, Alaíde went into exile in
Mexico and became a professor at UNAM - Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México, where the first sociology course for women in
Latin America was taught. She was also an art critic and in 1977, she organized
an exhibition of women artists at the Carrillo
Gil Art Museum.
In 1976, she co-founded Fem, the first feminist weekly magazine
in Mexico. She also collaborated on Foro
de las mujeres (Women's Forum), a guaranteed radio program of Rádio UNAM.
She is an active member of the International Group of Women against
Repression. She has produced over 400 radio programs on Foro de las mujeres. She has also
published the poems Las palabras y el
tempo (words and time), La sin
ventura (the luckless), Elogio de mi
cuerpo (Praise of my body), Los dedos
de mi mano (The fingers of my hand), Auque
es de noche (Even though it's night), and Guirnalda de primavera (Spring wreath).
One of the first steps in the
reassessment of her poetic work was, in fact, a publication of the Antologia
Poética, prepared by Luz Méndez, Guatemalan writer, journalist, actress and
poet.
How to define your nationality?
Alaíde was born in Barcelona in 1914,
spent her childhood in Argentina and part of her youth in Italy, where she
studied the history of art and literature. She is the daughter of a Guatemalan
mother and an Argentine father, she was born in Barcelona and later naturalized
Guatemalan. According to Franca Bizzoni,
Foppa was not sure what it was. “She felt
very connected to Italy; I don't know if Italian, Mexican or Guatemalan, she
didn't even know what it was anymore. Or Argentina! She did not have a
nationality, let us say, what she felt was Guatemalan and Italian and she loved
this country very much.”
Tributes
Several tributes were dedicated to her
mainly. The purpose of these texts is to draw attention to the drama and keep
the name of Alaíde Foppa alive.
In 2014, on the centenary of the
poet's birth, the documentary Alaíde
Foppa, la sin ventura (the luckless) was released. On the awarding of
prizes to the best documentary at the Festival
Ícar, her daughter Silvia said
that "unlike the family of the
years, that the family of the years celebrated the anniversary of the death,
probably now that the daughter of the centenary more internationally a
party."
Forty years after the kidnapping and
forced disappearance, Radio UNAM paid tribute to the social and literary work
of Alaíde Foppa, A phoenix of words, and to remember her poetic work, her
legacy and her feminist activism. A miniseries, which was streamed December
7-9, 2020, with rebroadcasts on Saturdays, December 12, 19, and 26, 2020, on
96.1 FM and 860 AM.
The program addressed controversial
and unprecedented topics, such as the decriminalization of abortion,
contraception, motherhood, women's liberation, parental alienation, gender
violence, the rights of sex workers and harassment.
Alaíde Foppa's career crosses
affectionately with the University radio. In the early 1970s, Foppa began
broadcasting the radio program Foro de la
mujer (women's forum), through Radio UNAM frequencies.
Used and suggested links
