Reflections on Solidarity: Greater Boston's Central America Solidarity Movement

Abstract

Over the course of the past year I embarked on a journey of experiential learning by spending over forty hours listening to the experiences and reflections of a group of activists. In particular, I interviewed and collected oral histories on the Central American Solidarity Movement from the perspective of seventeen different people in the Greater Boston Area: key organizers, politicians, and religious leaders that were active in the 1980s and 1990s. According to Sharon Erickson Nepstad, the Central America Solidarity Movement “emerged in the early 1980s when US citizens sought ways to support Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans who were fighting for human rights, economic justice, and democratic freedoms. Solidarity activists also worked to obstruct US political, economic, and military intervention in Central America.” I became interested in this social movement when I began mentoring a student at Somerville High School from Honduras. After hearing intimate details of how he emigrated to the United States as an unaccompanied minor, I began to research the “root causes” of migration. This led me to join an international human rights delegation to Honduras in August 2021. I have since been on delegations with the Witness for Peace Solidarity Collective (WFPSC), the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), and the Needham Guatemala Partnership to Cuba, El Salvador, and Guatemala, respectively. From my involvement with these organizations, I developed a large network of older organizers and activists. As I took on a volunteer leadership role at Massachusetts Peace Action (MAPA), I realized that there is little to no published material on the Central America Solidarity Movement of the 1980s and 1990s in Greater Boston. This project served as an opportunity to research this important yet often overlooked social movement. It also provided me with the time to interview an older generation of activists, whose stories are being lost to aging memories and end-of-life. The following two interviews are only a piece of the larger project. I chose to feature my two interviews with Dr. Jeanne Gallo (1938–2025) and Congressman Jim McGovern (1959–) because they were both early leaders of the Central America Solidarity Movement in the Greater Boston Area. As was characteristic of all of my interviews, I asked Dr. Gallo and Congressman McGovern three sets of questions. First, I asked my interviewees questions about their personal history, such basic facts as where and when they were born, where they grew up, who was in their family, etc. Second, I asked them questions about how they got involved in the movement and to think about the history, politics, and sociology of the movement overall. Finally, I asked my interviewees about what the movement meant to them, including some final reflections on the meaning of solidarity, the achievements and failures of the movement, and its lessons for the younger generations of activists today. One key finding from my project is that the movement in Greater Boston contributed much more to the success of the overall trans-national movement than what has been previously acknowledged (e.g. Temporary Protected Status (TPS) was written by Jim McGovern and passed by Congressman Joe Moakley). In addition, spirituality for these activists, whether they identify as secular or religious, is rooted in a strong sense of social justice and human rights. Dr. Gallo put it best when she said that for her, “to be spiritual is to be a decent human being.” Their solidarity influences their spirituality, just as much as their spirituality informs their solidarity. The following are verbatim transcripts and therefore are not altered to be grammatically correct. They aim to capture the flow and conversation style of the speaker. The audio files corresponding to the transcripts can be made available upon request.