Guardianas

A collection of testimonies from midwives in El Salvador who delivered babies during the twelve-year-long civil war and today fight to protect their ancestral role in the midst of immense government repression.

This bilingual edition includes thirty color photographs and five black-and-white illustrations.

Out of necessity, women in El Salvador began attending births during the twelve-year-long civil war, when pregnant people in rural areas and guerrilla camps could not access medical care. From their mothers and older midwives, these women learned partería—traditional midwifery that was once the norm in El Salvador and has since been prohibited. After the official end to the war, the parteras became central fixtures in the “repopulation” of their country, building new communities, often without electricity or running water or hospitals. In 1994, out of this organizing, the Association of Parteras Rosa Andrade (APRA) was born. Today, the founding members of APRA, along with a younger generation training with them, continue to fight for the reproductive rights of thousands of people living in the municipalities of Suchitoto, Cuscatlán. Three decades since the war, APRA’s work is increasingly criminalized by a government that has made homebirth illegal, synonymized miscarriage and homicide, and banned midwives from assisting in hospitals. 

Collected in 2019 by Salvadoran American birth worker Noemí Delgado, Guardianas weaves together testimonies from twenty members of APRA to tell a collective story of:

• the experiences of midwives, mothers, guerrilla fighters and “gente de masa” during the armed conflict that took approximately 75,000 lives; 
• the role of the midwife during the period of repopulation after the signing of the Chapultepec Peace Accords, when thousands of displaced Salvadorans were finally allowed back into their homeland;
• the brutal obstetric violence that people giving birth in hospitals routinely face, and how this mistreatment compares to care provided by a midwife; 
• the extreme repression Salvadoran midwives have faced since 2011, when the health ministry prohibited home births;
• the ancestral nature of partería, an earth-based art practice that is passed down between generations, and derives from an extensive body of knowledge about safe and empowering births.

This anthology is both a safeguarding of the caretaking traditions of partería as well as a broader invitation to consider the role of birth work in organizing against war, imperialism, and corporate power. Here, the beauty of the testimonies—and the care with which they were compiled—ultimately come together to upend our ideas of what a medical ethnography can be and what an oral history can do.

Founded in 1994, the ASOCIACIÓN DE PARTERAS ROSA ANDRADE (APRA) is a group of thirty midwives fighting for the reproductive rights of thousands of people living in thirty-five rural communities in the municipality of Suchitoto, Cuscatlán, El Salvador. Most of the members of APRA either began or continued the work of attending births during the twelve-year-long civil war from 1979 to 1992, when pregnant people in rural areas and guerrilla and refugee camps could not seek medical attention due to the extreme terror inflicted by the US-backed military dictatorship. Rooted in solidarity and a commitment to their communities, the members of APRA continue to care for pregnant, birthing, and postpartum families today. The current members of APRA include: María Melia Martínez Flamenco, Bonifica Ascencio García, María Amalia Molina Menjivar, Fredelinda Antonia Recinos de Cerón, Vicenta Martínez, Ángela Luz Barahona de Avalos, Cecilia de María Rivera de López, Francisca Catalina Blanco de Ortiz, Ana Teresa Avalos, Patricia Hernández, Tomasa Jovita Torres, Natividad Escobar de Henriquez, Lucía Rutilla González, María Martina Lucero, María Dolores Hernández de Rivera, Vilma Coreas Guzmán, Reina Marlenis Escobar Figueroa, María de los Ángeles Acosta Ardón, Sandra Marciela Flores, María Magdalena Rodas Arias, Dolores Margarita Marroquín de Hernández, Estela Villacorta de Rivas, Angélica de la Paz Martínez León, Morena Elí Orellana Menjivar, Sonia Alicia Cruz Montoya, Yessenia de Jesús Canjura Trejo.
Residence: Suchitoto, El Salvador.

NOEMÍ DELGADO is a doula, body worker, and childbirth educator. Born in San Diego, she began her birthwork journey while living and working with midwives in her family’s homeland of El Salvador, where she received training in traditional birth and postpartum care from members of the Asociación de Parteras Rosa Andrade. In 2019, she was awarded a Public Health Fullbright Fellowship to continue this work. She is cofounder of Cuidando A Las Que Nos Cuidan, a collective generating ongoing support for APRA, and is director of Matronas: The Struggle to Protect Birth in El Salvador (2021), which was an Official Selection at the San Diego Latino Film Festival and the Oakland Short Film Festival and won Best Cinematography at Documentary Short Film Festival. Delgado is dedicated to uplifting ancestral wisdom and challenging the systems that attempt to erase it; Guardianas and Matronas are a part of that effort.
Residence: San Francisco, CA.

EMMA LLOYD is a translator and writer working across genres—from poetry to narrative to film subtitles. Her ongoing translation of Pedro Lemebel’s De perlas y cicatrices (Of Pearls and Scars) won a 2019 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. She is the translator of Julieta Vittore Dutto’s debut poetry collection, Un lugar interminable (An Endless Place) (2022), as well as subtitles for Tatiana Huezo’s Prayers for the Stolen (2021) and Mattis Appelqvist Dalton and Matteo Robert Morales’s The Time of the Fireflies (2022). She has a master’s from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York and is currently pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Alongside her translation work, Emma works at Safe Passage Project, an immigration justice organization.
Residence: Berkeley, CA.

LUZ DEL CARMEN SALAMA-TOBAR is a Salvadoran artist, photographer, and organizer. Born in Sonsonate, El Salvador, home of the Nahuat-Pipil Indigenous people, and raised in Falls Church, Virginia, after immigrating to the US, her work centers around her community. She received her BFA in Photography at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2018 and was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in 2019, during which time she taught as a visiting scholar at the University Don Bosco in San Salvador and began work with Kuna Nawat, an early immersion language program taught by the last native speakers of the Nahuat-Pipil language. She is cofounder of the Virginia-based abolitionist organization La ColectiVA and, with Noemí Delgado, cofounder of Cuidando A Las Que Nos Cuidan, a collective generating ongoing support for the last native speakers of El Salvador and the midwives of Suchitoto, Cuscatlán.
Residence: Washington, D.C.