In a restaurant in Estelí, Nicaragua, Dianne Walta Hart, a visiting American scholar, and Marta Lopez, member of a Nicaraguan women's organization, began to talk of the Sandinista revolution and of the changes it had brought, especially for women. Their conversation was to continue at intervals over the next four years; it expanded to include Marta's mother, Doña María, her sister, Leticia, and her brother, Omar, a Sandinista soldier. From these conversations has come the powerful and moving oral history of a Nicaraguan family in the twentieth century: a testimonial by ordinary people caught up in civil strife and living in a country devastated by war and inflation.

Laying bare the inner workings of the Lopez family, Dianne Walta Hart evokes a picture of a close-knit and loving family. Tracing their story from the years of repression and guerrilla activity under Somoza through an era of personal and political revolution in the 1970s and 1980s, she shows people persevering against every kind of adversity.