SOURCE: "Quasi-Testimonial Voices in Claribel Alegría's Luisa in Realityland: A Feminist Reading Lesson," in Claribel Alegría and Central American Literature: Critical Essays, edited by Sandra M. Boschetto-Sandoval and Marcia Phillips McGowan, Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1994, pp. 97-110.

In the following essay, Boschetto-Sandoval relates Luisa in Realityland to women 's testimonials and contends that Alegría constructs literary relationships with her readers in order to foster cultural and political change.

In a recent analysis of women's testimonials, Lilian Man-zor-Coats (1990) writes that the place of testimonio in relation to literature is very similar to the place the "disappeared" have within their repressive societies: "at the crossroads between history and fiction, or, better yet, at that limbo site of encounter between untold history and fiction." This site of encounter becomes in women's testimonials a site of resistance, offering the narrator/reader not only an alternative vision to...