Love is Boss: Fundraising and Lucila Gamero de Medina

Every now and then I share a post here from the GoFundMe I manage.
That’s what this is with a one paragraph addition about Minnesota that exceeded the character limit on the GoFundMe page.

It’s March!

March means we have more kids in Honduras who need school supplies, and we also have credit to pay back in the shops that have been supplying them. We have ongoing medical care to cover for Irene and others. We have daily food needs for several families. We have March birthdays to celebrate, too!

Many of us here have been in this together for a long time now.
I’m so glad we are. And I’m so glad we keep going. Long-haul.
Whatever you can share will, as always, be so appreciated.
Every dollar helps.

I’ve been thinking a lot about long-hauls. I’ve been thinking a lot about the long-haul of just doing what needs to be done every day. That’s what we are in now in Minnesota, too. The long-haul. We have so many refugee families who waited for years - decades for some - for their visas, who had their legal status removed in the past few months, who are still refugees - there is still war and genocide in Myanmar for example - and who are now “undocumented”, who could work legally before their status was removed, and who now can’t work but still need to eat and pay rent and care for their kids. Liddy and I started mentoring a Karen refugee family back in 2016. The process to receive their green cards took years, they only got them recently. Many more of these families haven’t been in the US long enough to have made it through that process and now are blocked from it and we don’t know what their path forward is now.

Last night my students and their families and others in our online Jewish community from across the United States, Mexico, Iceland, Australia, and Germany got together for a Shushan Purim Megillat Esther Reader’s Theater that I wrote especially for us. Kids as young as 9 and adults who could be their grandparents chanted in the original Hebrew and read in English - some parts right from the text and some parts adapted - and we learned from and enjoyed our time in Esther’s story. It’s one of my favorites in all of Jewish literature.

Being so deeply in her story and now turning my thoughts to the stories of Yocheved and Miriam and Batya as I’m now making my way toward Passover, I’m also thinking especially about the women of Honduras. I did a little digging, and I came across a fascinating person I’d never heard of. I wanted to learn more about her, and now I’m sharing some of what I’ve learned with you!

Lucila Gamero de Medina: Doctor, Novelist, and Pioneer

If we’ve never heard of Lucila Gamero de Medina, that's exactly why we need to give her some attention. Born on June 12, 1873, in Danlí, Honduras, and dying on January 23, 1964, she packed nearly a century's worth of extraordinary accomplishments into her life. She was a physician, a novelist, a feminist activist, and a towering figure in Central American literary history — all at a time when women were actively discouraged from being any of those things.

Growing Up in 19th-Century Honduras

Lucila Gamero Moncada grew up in a Honduras where opportunities for women were extremely limited. She completed her secondary education at the Colegio La Educación, and from early on, it was clear she had two deep passions: medicine and writing. She began publishing in the magazine La Juventud Hondureña (Honduran Youth) as early as 1891, when she was still a teenager. That early ambition would define the rest of her life.

Medical Career 

Lucila Gamero de Medina wanted to study medicine formally, but as a woman in late 19th-century Honduras, she was barred from attending university. Rather than give up, she learned medicine directly from her father, himself a doctor, eventually taking over his clinic and running the family pharmacy. Her skills were so undeniable that she was later awarded a diploma of Medicine and Surgery by the dean of the Faculty of Medicine.

In 1924, she was appointed to head the Hospital de Sangre in Danlí, and from 1930 on, she served as the health inspector of the El Paraíso Department. She didn't just practice medicine quietly on the sidelines, she led institutions and shaped public health in her region at a time when that kind of authority was rarely given to women.

Literary Career 

Alongside her medical work, Lucila Gamero de Medina was writing novels that would change Honduran literature forever. In 1892, she published Amalia Montiel -  the first novel ever published by a Honduran woman - as serialized chapters in the weekly newspaper El Pensamiento. Now I want to read it! Have any of you? I’m going to look for a translation.

Her most celebrated work, Blanca Olmedo (1908), is, apparently, the novel that generations of readers remember most - so maybe this is the one I should find in English. It's a love story and also a direct critique of the Honduran Catholic Church and the country's social establishment. The novel proved so enduring that it went through multiple editions: 1933, 1954, and 1972, and reportedly circulated in unofficial editions as well. Nicaraguan writer Antonio Medrano described it as a book whose pages are not merely read, but lived and felt. Today, Lucila Gamero de Medina's novels are a staple of literature curricula in Honduran high schools and universities, and she is widely considered one of the most important literary figures in Central American history. Critic Luis Marín Otero perhaps put it best when he called her "the grand dame of Honduran letters."

Her writing sits stylistically in the late Romantic period of Latin American literature, with love and family as central themes. However, she frames everything with a sharp social consciousness.

She also wrote her autobiography in 1949, making sure that her own voice would be part of the historical record about her. So far I haven’t been able to find a version in English. If you do, I’d love to know about it. 

Women's Rights

Lucila Gamero de Medina was an active suffragette who participated in conferences and helped found organizations dedicated to securing political rights for women. In 1924, she served as Honduras' delegate to the Second Pan-American Women's Conference. In 1946, she was among the intellectuals who helped organize the Sociedad Femenina Panamericana, and in 1947 she participated in the founding of the Comité Femenino Hondureño, affiliated with the Inter-American Commission of Women. In 1957 Honduran women finally won the right to vote.

Her outspoken criticism of the Church's treatment of women did cost her socially and she was shunned by parts of Honduran society for her views. Still, she never backed down.

Legacy

Okay, so I know I’ve been deep in Esther’s story now for about a month - and am every year - so that my mind is drawing parallels between Esther and Lucile isn’t really a surprise. I am very aware, of course, that Esther isn’t history, she wasn’t a real person. The megillah is a novella, and it’s probably a combination of two stories, one Harem Intrigue (Esther) and one Court Intrigue (Mordechai) that became the story we have today. The king in the story is probably modeled after Xerxes and the palace is probably a fusion of the royal winter home at Susa and the main palace at Persepolis. 

And yet, this story has resonated with us for so long we are still telling it. We reimagine it every year. When we take it seriously we dig into the historical context and the rather radical moments when Esther reads the messages sent to her by Mordechai and then writes messages to send back to him. Every year I am struck by her literacy - as well as her skills as a strategist and her commitment as a realist. She cannot win everything, so she wins what she can. I’ve even written versions of the text in the first person, from Esther’s point of view.

Lucila Gamero de Medina, a woman from a small city in Honduras in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was a healer, a published storyteller, and a changemaker. She also insisted that her story was her own so she wrote it in her own words from her own point of view. 

Let’s remember her name: Lucila Gamero de Medina. 

If you want to help in Honduras, you can do that right here.
If you want to help me get food to about 30 refugee families in Minnesota, please reach out to me directly.

Much love, Everyone.