Margaret Randall

Margaret Randall
Born December 6, 1936
New York City, New York, USA
Occupation writer and photographer
Years active circa 1959 to present
Website margaretrandall.org

Margaret Randall (born December 6, 1936, New York City, USA) is an American-born writer, photographer, activist and academic. Born in New York City, she lived for many years in Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua, and spent time in North Vietnam during the last months of the U.S. war in that country. She has written extensively on her experiences abroad and back in the United States, and has taught at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and other colleges.

Biography

Randall moved to Mexico in the 1960s, and married a Mexican citizen, giving up her American citizenship.[1] She moved to Cuba in 1969, where she deepened her interest in women's issues and wrote oral histories of mainly women, "want[ing] to understand what a socialist revolution could mean for women, what problems it might solve and which leave unsolved."[1] Her 2009 memoir To Change The World: My Years in Cuba chronicle that period of her life.[2] She lived in Managua, Nicaragua, from 1980 to 1984, writing about Nicaraguan women, and returned to the United States after an absence of 23 years.[1]

Shortly after her return in 1984, she was ordered deported under the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952. The government’s case rested on two arguments. First, while living in Mexico and married to a Mexican citizen, she had taken out Mexican citizenship, thereby presumably losing her U.S. citizenship.[3] This was in 1967. In addition, under McCarran-Walter, the government claimed that the opinions Randall expressed in several of her books were "against the good order and happiness of the United States". The INS district director gave the justification that "her writings go far beyond mere dissent".[4][5][6][7] With the support of many well-known writers and others, Randall won a Board of Immigration Appeals case in 1989 ordering the INS to grant her adjustment of status to permanent residence.[8][9]

She now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with her partner of many years, the painter Barbara Byers. She travels widely to read and lecture. She was a professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and also taught briefly at the University of New Mexico, Macalester College, and the University of Delaware.

Among her best-known books are Cuban Women Now, Sandino’s Daughters, Sandino’s Daughters Revisited, and When I Look into the Mirror and see You: Women, Terror and Resistance (all oral history with essay).

Recent books include Che On My Mind (essay), The Rhizome as a Field of Broken Bones[10] (poetry), and Haydée Santamaría, Cuban Revolutionary: She Led by Transgression (essays), .To Change the World: My Years in Cuba (memoir, with photos), Narrative of Power and First Laugh (essay), and Stones Witness, Their Backs to the Sea, My Town, Something's Wrong with the Cornfields, and Ruins (poems, with photos), and As If the Empty Chair / Como si la silla vacía (poems in tribute to the disappeared of Latin America, in bilingual edition, translations by Leandro Katz and Diego Guerra).

The desert of the U.S. Southwest is her spiritual home, and ancient ruins—here and in other parts of the world—are increasingly her greatest source of inspiration.

Works

Her writings include:

References

  1. 1 2 3 Zuckerman, Marilyn (1987). "Stranger in a Strange Land: Albuquerque: Coming Back to the USA by Margaret Randall". The Women's Review of Books 4 (7): 13–14.
  2. Gwin, Minrose (2009). "The Paella of Revolution: To Change the World: My Years in Cuba by Margaret Randall". The Women's Review of Books 26 (6): 4–6.
  3. "Writer Loses Round in Fight To Stay in U.S.". The Washington Post. 16 May 1987. Retrieved 21 January 2013.
  4. "Margaret Randall". hrcr.org. Retrieved 2013-01-24.
  5. "Deporting Dissent (editorial)". The Nation. 19 April 1986. Retrieved 22 January 2013.
  6. Alison E. Clasby. "Comment: The McCarran-Walter Act and Ideological Exclusion: A Call for Reform", University of Miami Law Review, May 1989. Retrieved 21 January 2013.
  7. "FindLaw's Writ - Cassel: Why Citizens Should Be Concerned When Their Government Mistreats Aliens". findlaw.com. 2003-10-31. Retrieved 2013-01-24.
  8. "Janet Hamill & Margaret Randall". The Poetry Project. 2009-12-29. Retrieved 2013-01-24.
  9. Randall, Margaret (2013). More Than Things. University of Nebraska Press. p. 320.
  10. http://www.wingspress.com/book.cfm?book_ID=157
  11. Randall, Margaret (1978). "Estos Cantos Habitados". Colorado State Review. Colorado State Review Press. LCCN 79118305.
  12. "Estos Cantos Habitados". 1978.
  13. Robinson, Circles (September 13, 2009). "Margaret Randall’s Years in Cuba". Havana Times.

External links

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