Blood, sweat and cheers

Mike Phipps reviews Crossing Borders by Rigoberta Menchu, published by Verso, £17.00; Women and Social Movements in Latin America by Lynn Stephen, published by Latin American Books, £12.99 and Red Hot by Hall Greenland, published by Wellington Lane Press, £10.00.

The first volume of Rigoberta Menchu's autobiography has for many years been Verso's best-selling title. Crossing Borders resumes the story following the burning alive of her father and the rape, torture and murder of her mother at the hands of the Guatemalan military. The title summarises the next twelve years of exile, when she was never in one country for more than one month at a time. But it also refers to her political and personal journey to a life of activism on behalf of the Mayan people which won her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992.

Crossing Borders describes the difficulties of lobbying the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the United Nations and the contrast between affluent, indifferent Switzerland and her rare returns to Guatemala. Rigoberta pays tribute to the native peoples of North America and identifies with the discrimination they suffer. No wonder she is seen as the most important living figure to have publicised the plight of indigenous peoples worldwide.

In Central America alone there are tens of thousands of similar life stories of immense suffering and courage. Lynn Stephen's book contains a powerful interview with Morena Herrera, a founding member of Dignas (Women for Dignity and Life), an autonomous women's organisation in El Salvador. Morena, a leading commander in the FMLN's "final offensive" against the Salvadorean dictatorship in 1989, recounts her early years in the armed struggle.

Between 1979 and 1989 she gave birth to three children in clandestine conditions, each of whose fathers were killed in battles with the military. When her long-standing partner was killed in 1989, she had no chance to mourn, but was told: "Companera, you can't cry now. The fucking army is getting really close and you have to take over." Morena's experiences led her to create a new non-party organisation championing the particular struggles of women. Stephen's book contains interviews with other women activists in Mexico, Brazil and Chile.

Also in the field of political biography is Hall Greenland's Red Hot, about the life of Australian union activist Nick Origlass. Offensive, quarrelsome, bad-tempered, intolerant, authoritarian and unbearable are just some of the author's descriptions of Origlass - and he was one of his closest friends. Origlass was one of the most expelled men in Australian politics - from the Communists in 1931, the State Council of the Unemployed (1939), his union (1946 and 1955) the Labor Party (1955 and 1968), the Fourth International (1965) and his local council (1969). But he was also a tenacious fighter, leading a successful six-week strike of 3,000 metalworkers in Sydney's shipyards in 1945 and in the 1960s reinventing himself as a community and environmental campaigner.

Red Hot is a fine social history, especially on the 1932 "dole riots" and the physical confrontations between the Stalinists and their opponents, but with perhaps a bit too much on the arcane internal politics of the Australian Trotskyist movement.

Red Hot is available from 11 Temple Fortune Lane, London NW11 7UB, price £10. Make cheques out to W. Greenland.

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