Content area
Full Text
DOCUMENTARY FILMS Testimony: The Maria Guardado Story. Directed by Randy Vasquez. West Hollywood, CA: High Valley Productions, 2001. 64 min. VHS. $100.
The first time I heard Maria Guardado tell her life story I was a young graduate student at Stanford University. I had heard many stories like hers growing up Central American in San Francisco. My family, like many others, provided safe houses for refugees fleeing the repression of state-sponsored violence in El Salvador and Guatemala during the 1980s. I heard even more similar stories in the early 1990s as a translator for lawyers working on Central American asylum cases. But Maria Guardado's story is one of the most unique, not because of the brutality that she has endured, but rather because of what she has done and who she has become since she arrived in...