Movie Depicts Their New Responsibilities : War Spurs Gains for Nicaragua Women

After the contras overran La Estancia in 1982, the surviving men of the village left their women and children in a squalid refugee shelter and marched off to fight in the Sandinista militia.

When most of the militiamen returned 11 months later, they found a rebuilt cooperative with new tractors in the cornfields and a feminist revolution in the wind.

“Some men didn’t like the idea of women driving tractors or carrying rifles,” Feliciana Rivera, an instigator of the new order, recalled the other day. “But after struggling alone that year, we understood we had the same duties and rights as men, and we were not about to give them up.”

L.A. Showing Planned

This story of how war has altered roles of men and women and their relationships is the subject of Nicaragua’s first feature-length movie, “Women From the Border.” It received its premiere here this week and is expected to be shown in Los Angeles at a Latin American cinema festival.

The narrator and lead character is Feliciana Rivera, one of 23 peasants who portray themselves in the hourlong film. Parts of it were filmed on location in La Estancia and the nearby town of Jalapa, a few miles from Nicaragua’s border with Honduras.

In 1982 and 1983, the Jalapa area came under siege by the the U.S.-backed contras in their campaign to overthrow the Marxist-led Sandinista government.

La Estancia, population 70, is the kind of place most often hit in the five-year-old war, which is intensifying again as thousands of rebels filter through rural Nicaragua from camps in Honduras. The village also appears to exemplify, in a dramatic way, the rapid social changes imposed by the war.

Suddenly in Charge

At age 18, with two children, Rivera suddenly had to take charge of a larger family when her father died in the rebel raid, her husband left with the militia and her mother took to bed after childbirth.

After languishing for three months in a disease-ridden shelter in Jalapa, waiting for the men to come back, she and other women decided to risk a new attack and hike back to their farmland.

They were stopped by Sandinista soldiers who ordered them to return to the shelter until their homes, destroyed by the contras, could be rebuilt by the government. Instead, Rivera led a sit-down protest in the road until the army relented.

After helping finish the new houses themselves, the women sowed corn and began patrolling the village with automatic rifles. Some took a government course to learn to drive three tractors given to the cooperative.

One of the movie’s climactic scenes shows returning militiamen dismayed by the changes.

‘I Wear the Pants’

Pointing to a woman on a tractor, a character named Jose taunts his friend Ricardo, “I don’t see how you can stand to see your wife riding so high.”

Ricardo confronts the woman. Demanding the tractor keys, he says: “I wear the pants in the family! Stop making me look ridiculous!”

A crowd gathers, Ricardo backs off and his wife rides away.

In the sharp exchange that follows, Rivera is adamant: “I have three kids to raise. Who has the right to tell me I cannot drive a tractor? What happens if the contras attack again? All of you will go off to war again, and our suffering will start over.”

The movie was produced by the state-run Nicaraguan Cinema Institute at a cost of $60,000, with technical assistance from Cuba’s film industry.

Burden Brings Status

Far from being a feminist protest against war, it accepts the Sandinista war effort as an inevitable burden that brings new status to the rural women who help shoulder it.

“This is a film about human courage, about women fighting on a par with men in the face of aggression,” said Ivan Arguello, the 33-year-old director.

The Sandinista revolution is run by men who have given wide latitude to women’s groups that support it. A constitution that took effect this year enshrines sexual equality. Women dominate the ruling party’s mass organizations, hold a few high government posts and serve as volunteers in the Sandinista army.

To Rivera, a small, dark-skinned woman with a fourth-grade education and a natural, self-assured screen presence, the revolution “has made women, especially poor women, aware of their rights.”

Under the right-wing dictatorship that was overthrown by the Sandinistas in 1979, she said, “nobody talked to us about those things.”

Won Ownership Rights

Since the events portrayed in the film, women have won a legal petition to become shareholders in the cooperative. For the most part, Rivera said, they perform the same field work and sentry duty that men do and pursue their own activities outside the home.

But the coming of feminism has broken five marriages in La Estancia, she said, including her own.

“We had fight after fight because I got active in the national women’s association and the Sandinista Defense Committee and did volunteer health work,” she said.

“As far as my husband was concerned, I was doing all this to meet other men. When the film was being made, he told me to stop working on it. That’s when I told him we’d better separate.”

She has since married a soldier who had a role in the movie, left the farm to live in town and plans to pursue new acting roles.

Few Trained Actors

Nicaragua has produced a handful of internationally recognized short documentary films since the revolution. But it has so few trained actors that Arguello, one of the leading directors here, experimented with a mix of 15 stage professionals and 23 peasants whose story he wanted to tell.

The actors in “Women From the Border” included Rivera’s three children and her mother.