In the Land of God and Man: A Latin's Woman's Journey [Paperback]

Silvana Paternostro (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1999

"Paternostro tells the stories our mamis always told us not to tell and in doing so, she brings to light the secret sexual heart of our Latin culture. I loved reading this book."--Julia Alvarez, author of Yo! and How the Garca Girls Lost Their Accents

As the daughter of the privileged Colombian elite, Silvana Paternostro was programmed to go from convent school to cocktail parties, obedient to God and man, never questioning the injustice she saw all around her or demanding a voice in public life. She left Latin America twenty years ago, but recently returned to "look critically at our Church, our Constitution, our daily lives." Told in a lyrical and personal voice, but backed up by solid research, In the Land of God and Man draws a new map of Latin and Latino America--from Quito, Ecuador to Queens, New York--exposing its hidden cultural undercurrents and bringing women out of the factories and favelas, the brothels and the boardrooms, and allowing them to tell their own stories.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Silvana Paternostro, born into a well-to-do Colombian family, was taught to be a traditional, virginal, obedient Latina. Sent to the United States to be educated, Paternostro has since remained, tied to her Colombian family but unwilling to fall in step with her culture's expectations. Now a widely published journalist and fellow at the World Policy Institute, Paternostro has revisited Colombia and several other Latin cultures to boldly uncover the quietly damaging sexual contradictions of the Latin world she left behind.

Here, where well-bred women must be virgins before marriage, monied young men are ritually deflowered by prostitutes at their fathers' expense and often continue to frequent brothels while courting their future wives. While married women are discouraged from educating themselves about sex and birth control, many husbands at every class level secretly pay for sex with women, boys, men, and transvestites. The consequences for traditional Latin American women, Paternostro discovers, are grim: married monogamous women are at far greater risk of being HIV-positive than female prostitutes, who can at least insist on condoms with their clients. Women in Latin America have, on average, more abortions than women in the United States, frequently at risk of their lives. Paternostro condemns not only the deceit fueling these epidemics but the larger culture that keeps many Latin women obedient and powerless. This devastating, important first book concludes with an investigation into the relationships of Latin American men and women who are being raised in the United States, with the author's hope that this "new world" might offer a boost to the condition of fellow Latin women. --Maria Dolan --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

In an elegantly written, sophisticated analysis of Latin American cultureAfrom Bogot to New YorkAPaternostro illuminates intersecting debates over gender, sexuality, Catholicism, Latin tradition, law and AIDS. In her world, law and Church conspire: poor women perform their own "abortions" with Coca-Cola bottles, papaya stalks or wire, while young ladies of the elite have secret surgeries in Europe or the U.S. followed by hymen reconstruction, considered a routine "cosmetic" surgery. Paternostro, a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute who has written for the Washington Post and the Nation, also interviewed transvestite prostitutes (who "service average men" in a culture where bisexuality is common but hidden) to understand Latin male reliance on machismo ("having sex with a man is the uttermost expression of manhood," but only for the "active" partner) and their blindness to the dangers inherent in their behavior. Racism, homophobia and chauvinism intertwine, she finds, to keep women, gay men and darker Latins at bay. Throughout, Paternostro deftly and provocatively draws on her own experience. A daughter of Colombian elites who describes herself as "white" (but later revises this to "cafe con leche") and who takes inspiration from Machiavelli, Paternostro aims to educate women and to inspire their political activism, to transform "empowerment" into more than "words in academic papers." Spanish colloquialisms flow smoothly in and out of the narrative, which is written in English (because, as the U.S.-educated Paternostro explains, it is "easier to talk about sex" in English). In whatever language, hers is a beautifully written and astute analysis of complex matters.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Plume (September 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0452280303
• ISBN-13: 978-0452280304
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #331,669 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Machos and beatas: opposite sides of a single curse, March 30, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: In the Land of God and Man: Confronting Our Sexual Culture (Hardcover)

I fervently hope In the Land of God and Man is a huge success. I heard the author interviewed on Latino USA, immediately ordered the book, and read it in very short order. Having gone to boarding school in Coconut Grove in the fifties, I have long been familiar with the role played by Miami in the consciousness of the Caribbean and Latin America. Reading Paternostro brings back the days when I did class assignments at the Miami Public Library and, looking across Biscayne Boulevard, could see garishly lit billboards promoting "Ciudad Trujillo" as a tourist destination.

In the early Castro years, a wave of indignation swept la gente bien en Miami not because of the paredon, but because Fidel let blacks go to the beach!

This book, written by a Colombian woman still in her thirties, talks at length about the threat of AIDS to Latin American women of all social classes. However, she describes a world that has changed remarkably little during the past half century. It is a world beset by very serious problems indeed but one that can be remarkably appealing to those who come to know it well.

For going on thirty-five years, I have pursued the craft of interpreting, working in courts, maquiladoras and quite a vast assortment of other public and private entities. My wife, who is also my interpreting colleague, is from El Paso-Juarez and was extensively educated on both sides of the border. Both our families and our work experience lead us to to hope that Paternostro continues to pursue the topics raised in her book.

In the Land of God and Man was such a welcome read that I hesitate to mention what appeared to me to be its one major oversight. I call on others to correct me if I'm wrong, but I do not recall seeing the term beateria in this book even once.

I am convinced that the machos Paternostro describes so precisely cannot exist in the absence of beatas. The two come intertwined in a sort of mutual aggravation society and are in effect opposite sides of the same curse. Too many ninas bien win for themselves only a provisional respite from beateria in early adulthood. As the years pass, the lure of beateria, which Paternostro tacitly acknowledges, endures. Highly intelligent women when thus afflicted revert to what another writer, Beverley Onofrio, describes as the status of "born-again virgins."

While their macho husbands pursue their multi-gendered flings, grown-up ninas bien often drift back towards social and religious conservatism and acquiesce to the norms of a society that takes it for granted that alguien tiene que mandar. These women fall back on the idea that their fate in eternity is somehow tied to following rules learned as very young girls about attending Mass and abstaining from sex. Recently, many ageing ninas bien have hastened to embrace Hillary as victim while persisting in admiring Bill because he's powerful and because en fin de cuentas todos los hombres son iguales. Fostered by the current occupant of the Holy See and by the likes of the late Mother Teresa, beateria, like machismo, is alive and well at the dawn of the new millennium. Together they threaten the health and happiness of human beings of all orientations from Alaska, with its surprisingly large Hispanic population, all the way to Tierra del Fuego.

In the Land of God and Man is a fine and important book, but it remains only a beginning. I hope it is far from Paternostro's last word on a subject which is literally a matter of life and death.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Amazing Biography/ Ethnography, May 25, 2000

By 

Luisa Perez - See all my reviews

This review is from: In the Land of God and Man: A Latin's Woman's Journey (Paperback)

As a latina, I am extremely proud of Pasternostro. I've recommended this book to all the women in my life and I cannot wait to share it with my kids when they are older.

Having a Latina write so candidly about what goes on in so many latino marriages is refreshing. I am aware that she probably received much criticism as a latina for exposing so much of her personal and family life. she has broken the silence, lifted the mantilla over the eyes of latina women, every woman, latina or not should read this book. She covers topics such as infedility, aids, women's submisivness, the street kids of Rio and Bogota, gay and lesbians and how they are treated in Latin America. Amazing.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good, June 2, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: In the Land of God and Man: A Latin's Woman's Journey (Paperback)

And eye-opening book in many ways. I had read in passing in a Norman Mailer interview that Latin men do not consider being the active one when having sex with another man homosexual. Only the passive one is considered gay. That seemed so absurd, I found it hard to belive. But this book makes that point and furthers it. In a way it's the foundation of the whole book. An extreme instance related in the book is of a man who had done a lot of penetrating of men, but had never been penetrated. But one night he was so drunk he allowed it to happen. The next day he found the man who had been his partner and shot him in the head.

As one joke that is told to the author goes, "What is the difference between a straight Latin and a gay Latin?" "Two drinks."

The citing of passiveness encouraged in Latin women is interesting, too. The author herself fought that, and is a single professional middle-aged woman living alone in New York City, something that would marginalize her in her hometown in Colombia, but is accepted in New York.

Some of the book is tainted with the author's self-absorption and slight martyr complex. Her relating her losing her virginity is a bit too graphic and dramatic. But over all an interesting book. And if you're a typical American like me, who is rather shamefully less aware of the countries on either side of the States than he should be, you might read this book to find what is going on south of the border.