Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

I expected this book to be more auto-biographical. But, in fact, only the first chapter is primarily about Paternostro's own transformation from an aristocratic young woman in Colombia to a liberal American feminist. Instead the other chapters are based on her interviews with various people - an impoverished teen mother in Brazil, a wealthy Guatemalan man who transmitted AIDS to his wife and daughter, transvestites in Colombia, etc. But Paternostro's theme remains loud and clear - that Latin American culture is dominated by machismo and a sexual hypocrisy that harms all its people, but especially women.

I read this book because my wife is originally from Ecuador and I am always interested in learning more about the culture she grew up. My wife moved to the United States at age 31 and we didn't get married until she was 38 and I was 36. She is moderate to liberal in her political beliefs and agrees with Paternostro that traditional Latin society is machista (sexist) and difficult for women. She also agrees that they should offer better sex education there, especially as it relates to birth control. But my wife is still intensely proud of her Ecuadorian heritage and would probably feel that Paternostro is too harsh in her attacks while ignoring the many positives aspects of traditional Latin society.

However, I do understand the strident tone of Paternostro's arguments. This is because the negative effects of Latin machismo and sexual hypocrisy are so damaging that a strong, clear voice does need to be raised against them. It was especially interesting for me to read this book when I did because we were visiting my wife's brother and sister in law in California. The brother moved to the United States when he was only age 10 and the sister in law was born here. But they still seemed intensely focused on "training" their daughters in the domestic arts of cooking and cleaning. Meanwhile the son was pretty much allowed to run free as "prince of the castle." Her brother also openly admitted he would be much stricter with the daughters than the son. To him this was just "common sense." But to me it was very troubling.

So, as Paternostro discusses in her final chapter on "Northern Ladies," many Latin immigrants are choosing to continue their traditional "machistic" practices in the United States. But my hope is still that a majority of people, throughout the world, will give up the sexist, hypocritical beliefs of the past and build a new way of life based on gender equality and sexual freedom.

If you've never lived in Latin America, then this book is likely to revolutionize your perception of how things work. Even if you have lived in Latin America, this book reveals things that are infrequently discussed, secretly pondered, and yet critically important. Also includes a fascinating look into the AIDS epidemic as it has affected Latin America. All in all, a fascinating book.

Silvana Paternostro does an amazing job at explaining the sexual culture in Latin America. The data she gathered shows how the lack of sexual education has become an issue of public health, especially endangering women.
I think this book is a brave account that gives voice to what so many women in Latin America live through and that exposes the double standards of the machista culture that unfortunately prevails.
As a Latin American woman, I felt she describes the social norms that I grew up seeing around me but that are seldom ackowledged or thought about in our societies.
The book reads as a novel would, full of personal anecdotes and fragments of interviews. One of the best books on Latin American culture that has been published lately.

Silvana Paternostro's determination to expose the troubling ways in which the culture of machismo threatens the health and well-being of Latin American women and families is admirable, though at times a little repetitive. An upper-class Colombian who has migrated to New York, Paternostro might well be viewed as more of an outsider than an insider by Latin Americans, a "Western feminist" determined to attack the culture in which she was raised. But although her critiques are strong, they are also largely justified. In the Land of God and Man includes both interviews with health professionals and men and women from all classes of Latin American society. She reveals the troubling phenomenon of men having sex with men to prove how macho they are, and then spreading HIV to their wives--a problem widespread enough that a housewife in Latin America is more likely to get AIDs than a female prostitute. This concern needed to be documented and publicized even more than Paternostro can do.

However, the book is not perfect; given that Paternostro is a journalist by profession, I would have expected her to have collected more interviews from a wider range of countries-there are surprisingly few with women of the lower classes, and none with female prostitutes. Additionally, the book has no references, even when she cites health statistics or quotes Latin American politicians. I can understand protecting the anonymity of the subjects interviewed on sensitive topics, but when writing a non-fiction expose, you should cite whenever possible.

This book is well-worth reading for a better understanding of the effects of machismo on individuals and society, but it is not quite deep enough an analysis to be a classic. Paternostro is not the Friedan or Beauvoir of Latin America.

I have just begun reading In the Land of God and Man: A Latin Woman's Journey by Silvana Paternostro, which one reviewer calls "a cross between a daring anthropological study and a vivid manifesto of the inequalities and abuses women still suffer in most Latin American countries." Paternostro is a Colombian woman born into the elite ranks of Bogota's aristocracy who emigrated to New York in the 70s. The book is a personal and political memoir that touches upon the sexual double standard of Latin American culture and its larger implications (the AIDS epidemic, economic inequality, domestic abuse, etc). Paternostro is talented in interweaving lyrical personal narrative with research and political history, but she is haunted by a compulsion to rid herself of the obvious guilt that plagues her from having been born into the elite upper-class. If she could stop defending her right to speak about the plight of women in Latin America and just speak, the work would benefit. Even so, it is definitely worth reading and difficult to put down.

Many books have been written extensively by research scholars, all introducing Colombia through the front entrance. This book, for the first time, will take the reader inside this country and all its adjacent land, from Patagonia to the Rio Grand border, through the back entrance, paths and roads that even those of us who were born and raised there, never new or walked about.

But most importantly, that these depicted facts, form another crucial (never talked about) influence over the politics that keep our land from progressing in spite of the vast resources it possesses, including dormant brains.

Totally awesome! Silvana writes her thoughts in a honest manner about the whole male machisimo upbringing. I was shocked but but surprised of her findings and would recommend this book to everyone who is dealing with a macho man.