A very normal triumph
n the early morning Francisca laughs because she can not believe
that a fully grown woman anywhere in the world could not know
how to make a tortilla! Her hands look delicate but have the
strength of 33 years of pounding corn. The daily grinding
of the corn, followed by the rhythmic thumping of hands on
tortillas, adds to the harmony in her kitchen, her house that
she and her husband have built together, her family that is
the pride of her life. A very normal sound in country life,
the very normality of it is a mark of her mastery of fate.
Francisca was already an old woman at 25 when she met Vidal
in 1989. She was a single working mother and a child of a
single mother, raised in the desperate poverty and the desperate
succession of stepfathers of a single woman. Vidal himself
was a landless migrant worker who finally won land, a house
and
a woman.
Today, Francisca is a stern mother of school-going children,wife
of a land-owning man and a farmer in her own right, a member
of the farmers’ cooperative. She struggles to find the
love of learning that was denied her as a child. Just last
year she got her sixth grade exam, and the boards of her church
group and of the farmers’ cooperative compete for her
secretarial skills. Every meeting is a trial for her, a conquest
of “the timidity of poverty”, as she says..
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