Guardianas - Noemi Delgado

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 parteria - 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, Cuscatlan. 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 Noemi 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 displa
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