Bitter Grounds

Bitter Grounds (1997) by Sandra Benitez follows the trajectory of multiple generations of Salvadoran women, whose lives unfurl against the backdrop of the far-reaching coffee industry (alluded to in the book's title) that drove so much of El Salvador's history in the 19th and 20th centuries. The novel makes that national history personal in the form of two pairs of women who sit at the story’s center. Benitez spent ten years in El Salvador as a child while her father, a diplomat, was stationed there for work. Bitter Grounds, which won an American Book Award, is Benitez's second novel, following her highly acclaimed debut, A Place Where the Sea Remembers (1993). Benitez was awarded the Hispanic Heritage Award for Literature in 2004, and in 2006, she was named a United States Artist Gund Fellow.

Bitter Grounds begins with the atrocity of the 1932 Salvadoran mass murder of Indian peasants. The peasants had been officially accused of communist sympathies, but El Salvador's oligarchs had other reasons for wanting them gone. After the massacre, their land was subsequently confiscated, much of it repurposed for coffee cultivation. Pipil Indian Mercedes Prieto and her thirteen-year-old daughter, Jacinta are the only two from their village to escape the rural mass murder—a tragedy that deprives their family of Mercedes's husband, Ignacio, and son, Tino. Mother and daughter are barely able to make ends meet in the aftermath of the killings, and their survival seems unlikely until Mercedes gets a job working for a wealthy local plantation family. Ernesto and Elena Contreras own a prosperous coffee plantation, La Abundancia, and take Mercedes on as a worker, a bean picker. Elena, in particular, is more sensitive to the conditions of the lower classes than most of her class, and she wants to help Mercedes.

Elena, however, has troubles of her own, very different in nature from the struggle to survive that characterizes Mercedes and Jacinta's storyline (although both storylines are reflected in the telenovela Las Dos, which all of the characters watch and constantly refer to, apparently unaware of how it parallels their own lives). Elena's daughter, Magda, is engaged, and on the eve of Magda's wedding, Elena makes a shocking discovery: Ernesto in bed with her best friend, Cecilia. Elena, shocked and humiliated, cuts Cecelia out of her life, with long-lasting, unexpected consequences.



Meanwhile, El Salvador's economic state increasingly shapes the narrative: Political unrest and falling coffee prices begin to make life more difficult for everyone. At the intersection of economics and politics are the unions. Jacinta's first love, a union supporter, is killed for his allegiance. She has already had a child, Alma, by a married man, who grows up to be a political radical and dissident. Alma dies in an elaborate kidnapping that, in going wrong, also kills the husband and son-in-law of Jacinta's employer, Magda. Jacinta and Magda survive and are exiled finally in the 1970s, to Miami, where life proceeds more calmly. There is also an unexpected reunion with someone from Jacinta's past that she had long considered dead—her brother, Tino, whom it turns out was not killed in the initial massacre that opens the novel.

At one point in Bitter Grounds, a revolutionary utters the words, "When all is said and done, there are the few who have and the most who don't. Between the two, there's a chasm with no bridges to link them." And in some ways that is the true subject of Benitez's novel, which explores with little partiality how El Salvador's infamously volatile history plays out across the generations of a single plantation's owners and workers. The novel ends with an epilogue that drives home the significance of the country's history: “The story continues, as all stories do until life itself is done. In a country named The Savior, 1980 brought full-scale civil war. By 1992, when peace was signed, 75,000 had died; 300,000 had fled, and 5 million remained, these filled with hope on bitter grounds.”

Bitter Grounds has been described as a classic upstairs-downstairs novel because of its focus on the upper- and lower-class milieu of a single plantation and how their lives mirror and intertwine with one another. But Benitez's commitment to fully fleshing out all of her characters keeps this unoriginal premise from seeming like a gimmick.