Mozote Homeland: Diasporic Memories of the
Salvadoran Civil War
in Testimonial and Filmic Narratives
University of Maryland, College Park
The Massacre at El Mozote and its surrounding communities in Morazán, El Salvador, and Rufina Amaya’s testimonial account of that fateful December in 1981 have not been forgotten.1 Rather, numerous print, multimedia, and electronic sources on El Mozote attest to how the remembrance of that massacre has been recorded, adapted, and transformed through narrative practices and forms. Amaya’s testimonio, for example, has been reproduced across various testimonial, literary, and journalistic genres,2 as well as multimedia texts such as performance pieces, musical compositions, dance, and film. In digital media, the Massacre of El Mozote has been represented at Internet sites and even as an electronic game called “Tropical America,” developed in 2002 by OnRamp Arts and Belmont High School students in Los Angeles, California, in an effort to explore “the causes and effects of the erasure of culture” and to activate diasporic memory.3 Among the most powerful audio and visual representations of the Massacre of El Mozote are an “electroacoustic” ambient musical composition titled “La Masacre del Mozote” created by JC Mendizabal (1999)4 and the independent short film Homeland (1999), directed by Doug Scott and produced by Daniel Flores y Ascencio and Lisette Marie Flanary. Both Mendizabal’s and Scott’s narrative texts recall, reactivate, and represent through alternative audio and visual media the memory of the Salvadoran civil war (1980-1992), which cost the lives of over 80,000 people, and set off the great Salvadoran migrations of the 1980s through the present. For the Salvadoran diaspora, particularly new generations of Salvadorans born and/or raised outside of the country, El Mozote represents a lost fragment of Salvadoran history, the same history that produced their diasporic condition today. Recovering the story of the massacre at El Mozote and the Salvadoran civil war through any media possible allows for an imaginary recuperation of the Central American homelands, especially for those people who have little or no memory of the Salvadoran civil war. Through a reading of the short film Homeland and other texts grounded in Rufina Amaya’s testimonial account of the massacre of El Mozote, I explore in this essay the transmission of “memory” of war to diasporic communities of Salvadorans through audio and visual-scapes.
Reiterations of Testimony: Rufina Amaya and El Mozote
On 11 December 1981, the U.S.-trained anti-insurgency Atlacatl Battalion of the Salvadoran Armed Forces carried out “Operation Rescue,” killing more than eight hundred people in the village of El Mozote and its surrounding areas in northern El Salvador. Only one person—Rufina Amaya—survived to tell the story of the massacre to those who would listen in and outside of El Salvador. Amaya’s account of the violent destruction of El Mozote circulated in the Washington Post and the New York Times as early as January of 1982, although the U.S. government vehemently discredited these early news leakages of the event.5 Despite the immediate cover-up of the massacre,6 the story of El Mozote slipped through the channels of misinformation, prompting the international community to take action. In her newspaper article of 14 January 2002, Alma Guillermoprieto, correspondent for the Washington Post and one of the first international journalists to reach El Mozote, described the macabre scene of El Mozote. Guillermoprieto explains walking into a village “looted of all contents” and reeking “of the sweet smell of decomposing bodies. This was El Mozote” (Danner, 1994: 185).7 All that was left of the people were “countless bits of bones—skulls, rib cages, femurs, a spinal column—[that] poked out of the rubble” (Danner 1994: 185). In an article published around the same time in the New York Times, Raymond Bonner reported, “it is clear that a massacre of mayor proportions occurred here last month” (Danner, 1994: 188).8 Both reporters, however, would be forced by U.S. government officials to retract their news stories, and in the United States a silent uneasiness would permeate news reporting on human rights violations in El Salvador up through the end of the civil war in 1992.
From the start, Guillermoprieto’s and Bonner’s articles drew from Rufina Amaya’s testimonio, as did Mark Danner’s feature article published in The New Yorker on 6 December 1993 and his spectacular book-length exposé titled, The Massacre of El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War (1994). Amaya’s testimonial narrative served as primary evidence pointing to the Salvadoran government’s human rights violations and war crimes, which were compiled in the UN Truth Commission’s publication, De la Locura a la Esperanza: La guerra de 12 años en El Salvador (1993). Various other print documents and visual documentaries such as Bill Moyer’s “Portraits of a Revolution” (PBS, 1992) and “Denial” (Dir. Daniele LaCourse and Yvan Patry, 1993) also called on the eyewitness Amaya to (re)tell her story. In the United States, a traveling musical theatre piece written by Chilean writer, scholar, and professor Marjorie Agosín titled “Tres Vidas” (Three Lives) interpolated Rufina Amaya’s story into the larger narrative of Latin American women’s resistance, setting it parallel to the stories of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) and Argentine poet Alfonsina Storni (1892-1938).9
At the heart of all these texts (and others to follow) lies Amaya’s chilling hour-by-hour account of how government soldiers killed men, women, and children, as she hid near-by in the bushes for eight nights.10 Amaya alone was left to answer the question: “¿Cómo fue, Rufina?” (What happened, Rufina?). She remembers how:
A las doce del mediodía, terminaron de matar a todos los hombres y fueron a sacar a las muchachas para llevárselas a los cerros. Las madres lloraban y gritaban que no les quitaran a sus hijas, pero las botaban a culatazos. A los niños que lloraban más duro y que hacían más bulla eran los que primero sacaban y ya no regresaban. [At noon, they (the soldiers) finished killing all the men and then they took the girls to the hills. The mothers cried and screamed not to take their daughters, but they knocked them down with the butts of their guns. The children who cried the loudest and made the most noise were the first taken, and they did not return.]11 (Amaya, 2000: n.p.)
Amaya describes waiting in the bushes, escaping on hands and knees through pasturing cattle, and hearing the children’s cries and recognizing her own children’s voices among them: “Mamá, they are killing us; Mamá, they are choking us, Mamá, they are stabbing us!” (Amaya, 2000: n.p.). She recalls telling herself, “If I die, there will be no one to tell this story. There is no one but me” (Amaya, 2000: n.p.). She would begin telling her story to the passersby who gave her shelter and the “international people” who interviewed her fifteen days after the massacre. In an attempt to escape the war, Amaya fled to and lived for seven years in the refugee camp of Colomoncagua in Honduras, which housed up to eight thousand Salvadorans during the war. Through it all, Amaya reminded herself that “What they did was a reality and we must be strong to tell it” (2000: n.p.).
Recalled, remembered, and reiterated in other texts, Amaya’s story of what happened to her family, friends, and community at El Mozote recovers the primary memories of war for Salvadoran nationals, exiles, immigrants, and diasporic communities as well as international spectators. The story of El Mozote and by extension the story of the countless and nameless disappeared in El Salvador form the referential corpus (the missing but not forgotten bodies) in many texts. Together, these texts function as symbolic memorial sites and discursive acts of memory that recover, recall, and represent unresolved social trauma such as that experienced by Salvadorans as a consequence of the civil war, dictatorship, and multiple forms of institutional violence. Examining the recuperation of traumatized memory in Chile after the Augusto Pinochet regime, Alexander Wilde identifies various memorializing public acts, symbols, and performances such “official ceremonies, national holidays, book publications, discovery of the remains of disappeared persons, [and] the trial of an official of the dictatorship—which remind the political class and citizens alike of the unforgotten past” (Wilde, 2002: 4). In the context of post-dictatorship Chile, Wilde cites “a series of expressive ceremonies” sponsored by Chilean authorities, public institutions, and grassroots organizations and made public by the media to denounce Pinochet’s reign of terror and to commemorate the lives of those who were killed or disappeared during his dictatorship. In contradiction to the case of Chile, in El Salvador there have been few state-sponsored memorializing public texts, acts, and events, forcing Salvadorans to deal with post-war social and personal trauma on their own, on superficial levels, or not at all.
Public and Popular Acts of Memory in El Salvador
Since the signing of the Salvadoran Peace Accords on 16 January 1992, state-sponsored public acts recognizing and memorializing the civil war have been few and far in El Salvador. Immediately after the war ended, the official post-war agenda of the Salvadoran state was to move the nation toward “reconciliation” and “reconstruction” and to produce a “culture of peace” through disarmament and the formation of a new National Civilian Police force (the PNC) consisting of former military personnel and leftist guerrilla combatants. From the start, few provisions were made and carried out for the institutionalization of public acts memorializing the dead, disappeared, and victimized during the war and other periods of repression such as La Matanza of 1932, in which over 30,000 peasants and indigenous people were massacred by the military dictatorship of General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez. The massacre of 1932 set in motion a cycle of repression that only intensified with the civil war of the 1980s. As part of the post-war national reconstruction plan, in 1991 the post-war National Republican Alliance (ARENA) Ministry of Education founded a cultural entity named Concultura, whose primary directive was to design cultural politics and projects that would promote the image of a reunified Salvadoran national identity. At its inception, the main objectives of Concultura included “investigar, fomentar, promover y difundir la cultura y valorar las artes” [to research, foment, promote, and disseminate culture, and valorize the arts] according to the post-war agenda (1991).12 Material cultural projects involved preserving folk-culture, restoring the arts and traditional cultural expressions, and building innocuous monuments. Further, Concultura’s mandate was to assist in the reconstruction of “national patrimony,” the promotion of cultural heritage, and the recuperation of Salvadoran folk traditions (Allwood de Mata, 1993: n.p.).
While the Salvadoran government through Concultura sought to preserve Salvadoran folklore, costumes, customs, traditions, in essence, the “local color” of El Salvador, it did not in any significant way, in my opinion, recognize, memorialize, and represent the greater losses of the war, that is, the lives and ways of life of all those who had been killed, massacred, and disappeared. Executing post-war state-mandated cultural policies, Concultura thus aided in the construction of a post-war cultural industry and imaginary that capitalized on diffused memories of the war and nostalgic images of the country. Rather than produce cultural spaces for cultural mourning, recovery, and recuperation, cultural programs sought speedy cultural recovery by sponsoring Casa de Cultura events, publishing the works of the Salvadoran literary canon, and producing modern icons such as that of “El hermano lejano.” Under the auspices of Concultura, the monument dedicated to El hermano lejano, or the Salvadoran emigrant, materialized as a public works project aligned with the imperative of economic recovery: the monument to El hermano lejano was a tribute to the emigrants who routinely send generous remittances to their families and communities in El Salvador valued in 2006 to be over $3 billion. Following a material rather than moral imperative, the government, to date, has not appropriately memorialized the victims and survivors of the civil war, a task that has been taken up by religious, grass-roots, and non-governmental organizations, and the Salvadoran people themselves.
Thanks to the tireless efforts of relatives of victims, survivors, and various non-governmental organizations under the umbrella group, Comité Pro Monumento de las Víctimas Civiles de violaciones de Derechos Humanos,13 a public monument dedicated to the victims of the Salvadoran civil war was finally erected in San Salvador on 6 December 2003, more than a decade after the end of the civil war. The Salvadoran government did not support or contribute funds for the building of the only mass-scale public monument dedicated to the memory of victims of war in El Salvador, although the Truth Commission investigating war crimes and human rights violations committed during the civil war had directed the government to recognize the dead and disappeared through public memorial acts, monument, and symbols. Located in Parque Cuscatlán in San Salvador, the “Monumento a la Memoria y la Verdad” is an 85 meter black granite wall inscribed with the names of over twenty-five thousand identified civilians killed and/or disappeared. The text on the national monument reads: “Un espacio para la esperanza, para seguir soñando y construir una sociedad más justa, humana y equitativa.” [A space of hope, to keep on dreaming and constructing a more just, human, and equitable society].14 A memorial in the village of El Mozote, consisting of back metal silhouette figures of a family standing before wooden plaques engraved with the names of over eight hundred people, pays homage to those massacred in 1981. An article titled “Salvadoreños conmemoran 15 años de la masacre de 1.000 campesinos” [Salvadorans commemorate 15 years of the massacre of 1,000 campesinos], which was published on 9 December 1996 in La Prensa of San Pedro Sula, Honduras, reported on the popular commemoration ceremony that took place in El Mozote fifteen years after the massacre. The writer described how, “Cientos de salvadoreños observaron ayer con actos culturales y religiosos el décimo-quinto aniversario de la masacre de 1.000 campesinos, llevada a cabo por un batallón del ejército entre el 11 y 13 diciembre de 1981” [Yesterday, hundreds of Salvadorans commemorated with cultural and religious acts the fifteenth anniversary of the massacre of 1,000 campesinos carried out by a government battalion between 11 and 13 December 1982].15
Seeking to bury the past, to gain amnesty for offending government officials, and to rebuild the economy of country, Salvadoran authorities have left the remembrance of the war to civil sectors such as non-governmental organizations like the Museo de la Palabra y La Imagen [the Museum of the Word and Image] (MUPI). Since its founding, the MUPI has dedicated itself to preserving the cultural memory and material texts of the war and to fighting “contra el caos de la desmemoria” (against the chaos of memory loss).16 The museum has amassed a collection of photographs, testimonios, posters, recordings, video, print texts, testimonies, literature, and other objects of material culture that document the popular historical memory of El Salvador. The museum has digitized much of its collections while its virtual galleries are open for viewing at the museum’s web site. Beginning with the publication of its inaugural book, Luciérnagas en El Mozote (Amaya, Danner, and Consalvi, 1996), the museum has produced texts on themes of vital importance to the history and memory of the civil war, organized traveling installations throughout El Salvador, and opened a permanent exhibition site with library and archival space in San Salvador, where visitors and researchers are welcome. According to the museum’s founder and director, Carlos Henríquez Consalvi:
Hemos lanzado nuestra primera publicación: Luciérnagas en El Mozote (Testimonio), que integra testimonio e investigación periodística sobre la mencionada masacre ejecutada en 1981, y que fuerzas poderosas trataron de borrar de la memoria latinoamericana, primero negando su existencia, luego obstaculizando su investigación. Nuestra intención era dejar memoria escrita sobre hechos que no deben olvidarse, precisamente para que jamás se repitan. [We have launched our first publication, Luciérnagas en El Mozote (Testimonio), which includes testimonials and journalistic research about the massacre executed in 1981, and that powerful forces tried to erase from Latin American memory, first by denying its existence, then by preventing research on it. Our intention is to leave written memory over deeds that should not be forgotten, precisely so that they are never repeated.] (2002: n.p.)17
For Argentine scholars of memory construction, Elizabeth Jelin and Susana G. Kaufman, the Museum of the Word and Image might represent a “public memory site” or location of “memory struggle,” where negotiations occur in the construction of collective memory (Jelin and Kaufman, 2002: 41). In “Layers of Memories: Twenty Years After in Argentina,” Jelin and Kaufman suggest that spaces consecrated to memory such as museums are also “attempts to make statements and affirmations; they are facts and gestures, a materiality with a political, collective, public meaning” (2002: 41). In El Salvador extra-official cultural and political memorial spaces challenging state-sanctioned programs of forgetting include not only the MUPI, but also the Archbishop Romero Center and the memorial to the massacred Jesuit priests and their housekeeper and her daughter on the grounds of the University of Central America José Simeón Cañas (UCA) in San Salvador, the Museum of the Salvadoran War in Perquín, Morazán, founded and run by former guerrilla combatants, as well as the monuments and walls of names dedicated to the victims and survivors of war in the Parque Cuscatlán and El Mozote. These memorial sites challenge the ongoing context of impunity in El Salvador through the recollection of unresolved human rights violations and post-war crises. Connecting past and present, Rufina Amaya’s first-person collective narrative appropriately serves as the core of MUPI’s inaugural publication titled Luciérnagas en El Mozote (1996). Amaya’s testimonial account of the massacre at El Mozote lies at the heart of the reconstruction of post-war memory and history in El Salvador.
Broken Memories: Of War and Immigration
In “Irruptions of Memory: Expressive Politics in Chile’s Transition to Democracy,” Alexander Wilde recognizes the need of Chilean society to deal with the “unresolved issues of historical memory” (2002: 19). He identifies the victims of human rights violations in Chile as all those who suffered immeasurable human loss and duress during the Pinochet dictatorship, including “the survivors of the dictatorship’s worst infamies and the families of the disappeared” (2002: 19). In regards to countries such as Argentina, Paraguay, Colombia, South Africa, Cambodia, Vietnam, Guatemala, Panama, El Salvador, and so forth, local victims must be identified. Wilde makes an important observation that might be applicable to the case of Salvadoran immigrants, when he states that:
It is they [the disappeared] who bear the deepest wounds, but the victims of that harsh time are far more numerous than this tragic group. They include the tens of thousands unjustly detained and tortured or relegated to internal exile or terrorised in the sweeps of the slums that continued through the dictatorship’s final decade, the more than one hundred thousand exiles, the uncounted citizens that waited for the knock on the door in the night or that still cannot find the means to discuss these years with their children. (Wilde, 2002: 18)
I would like to draw parallels here between the Chilean experience of terror and exile and the Salvadoran experience of terror, displacement, and migration. As Wilde explains for Chilean victims of state terror, Salvadorans also feared the suspicious knock at the door that often was followed by forceful removal or expulsion. Many Salvadoran refugees were forced to flee to camps in Honduras (as did Rufina Amaya after the massacre at El Mozote), to other regions of El Salvador, to neighboring countries of the isthmus, or to countries farther away such as the United States, Canada, Mexico, Australia, and Europe. The victims of the war were also those who had to emigrate, never to return and never to pass on their war memories to their children. The victims, hence, include the children of the war and migration, who, born or adopted in other places, are disconnected from the history that set off their diasporic condition. For diasporic Salvadoran communities, the recovery of historical memories might further serve as a means to collective healing and an active recuperation of the Salvadoran imaginary homeland for those generations whose parents “still cannot find the means to discuss these years with their children” (Wilde, 2002: 18). Indeed, in their Introduction to Genocide, Collective Violence, and Popular Memory: The Politics of Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (2002), David E. Lorey and William H. Beelzey suggest the following:
While again there is no consensus, all seem to indicate that when memory is passed from one generation to the next, from the generation intimately involved with violence to one that has not experienced the same degree of violence, an important peace with the past can be achieved. Complete and lasting reconciliation may not be possible in the generation originally affected. But a younger generation perhaps can help the older generation come to terms with the past. (2002: xxviii)
Director Doug Scott’s short film titled Homeland (1999) represents an imaginary recuperation of war memories and the possibility of generational, national, and transnational memory transmission between those Salvadorans who stayed in El Salvador and those who immigrated to other lands. For the Salvadoran diaspora, El Salvador often figures as an imaginary homeland produced through various texts such as oral history, print materials, films, and other media.
Produced at the intersection of Salvadoran transnational cultures and across the disparate locations that Salvadorans inhabit in their migrations, Homeland (1999) is a post-war, diasporic narrative that challenges set notions of home, nation, and belonging. As the war increasingly expelled many people from El Salvador—their first homeland—, Salvadorans ventured toward ambiguous homelands in translocal cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Washington, D.C., and San Salvador.18 The protagonist of Homeland, Adrian Santos, has lived in New York City ever since arriving there with his mother at the age of four; he has never returned to El Salvador, and his legal status remains undocumented although he has grown up in the United States. By the time the film starts, Santos has become involved in street gangs, and on one fateful day he is caught in the line of fire in which a youth is killed. Accused and found guilty at a “removal hearing” of the “aggravated crime” of being an accessory to murder with no possibility of retrial or readmission into the United States, Santos is quickly dispatched to his “homeland”—El Salvador, which he left as a young child and with which he has near to none material and affective ties. As repeated by various U.S. and Salvadoran authorities in the film, he returns to El Salvador as a “convicted felon,” “inmate number 874361,” and “illegal alien.” The Salvadoran customs officer greets him with his new label: “Ese es el deportado” [He is the deportee]. At first, El Salvador is an inhospitable place for the deportee, the failed immigrant that Santos has become. While his immediate family remains in New York, Santos only has his Tía Leticia in El Salvador, who hesitantly takes him into her home and family, perhaps signifying the reunification of Salvadoran nationals and the diaspora. During his first few weeks in El Salvador, Santos confronts his unfamiliar reality and comes into contact with Salvadoran authorities, relatives, neighbors, and local gang members, all of whom produce at the beginning a sense of defamiliarization and heightened awareness of his environment, condition, and changing identity. Who is Santos, now that he has been removed from the life that he had known in the United States? What is El Salvador to him, since he was removed from it long ago? Will he be able to connect with his new “homeland”? The film suggests that, far from being natural and given, ties to family, community, and nation are constructed and naturalized. Santos cannot be expected to be and feel Salvadoran until he can identify and reconstruct himself as a Salvadoran with multiple experiences, identities, histories, and memories incorporating his multiple homeland conditions. Relocated to another context, Santos’s sense of self is quickly defamiliarized: he must literally regroup his multiple and compounded identities in order “to find himself” in El Salvador. Santos’s lifelong diasporic conditions as immigrant, deportee, and misfit across homelands enable him to survive, adapt, and learn that he cannot escape his destiny or elude his history, which pulls him back to the violence, trauma, and conflict of El Salvador. Scott’s film reminds viewers that, although diasporic subjects may build homes and identities in different locations, they also remain tied to the places, peoples, and histories that they left behind. The trope of reunification and repatriation in the film played out in the reintegration narrative of Santos, thus, suggests that to heal psychic wounding, separation, and the forgetting associated with post-trauma, Salvadorans in the diaspora must somehow return to, or reconstruct, in some fashion, an imaginary, if not “real” homeland.
In a reverse migration, Santos like other Salvadoran deportees, returns to El Salvador, and not by choice. In recent years, deportees have found themselves forcefully returning “home” in a reverse diasporic route that few critics have charted up to now. Deportees from the United States are undocumented immigrants / border crossers who, once apprehended by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arm of the Department of Homeland Security, are “removed” from the United States and returned to their countries of origin. As of 2001, the Department of Homeland Security has made the immigration and deportation of so-called “fugitive aliens” and “absconders” a matter of “national and border security” and terrorism control.19 The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRAIRA 1996, also known as the 96 Act) and the USA Patriot Act of 2001 have since broadened the definition of national security, “deportable crimes,” and removable or “excludable aliens.” Since 2001, a great number of documented and undocumented immigrants have been removed from the United States on charges of “deportable crimes,” as defined by the Department of Homeland Security and preceding immigration laws.20 Under Section 350 of IIRAIRA 1996, criminal aliens in the U.S. were to be deported for “aggravated felony” charges, including murder, rape, domestic abuse, child abuse, neglect, and abandonment, sexual abuse of a minor, drug and weapon trafficking, money laundering, as well as burglary, theft, and fraud or tax evasion.21 The law states, moreover, that an “alien [who] is a danger to the security of the United States,” or an “alien who has been convicted of an aggravated felony (or felonies)” will be deported. Stricter law enforcement measures in states such as California support the deportation crisis afflicting not only Central American immigrants, but Latinos/as in general. As suggested here, immigration and deportation have become the processes by which new transnational identities and cultures are produced in El Salvador.
Repatriating (to) the “Homeland”
A child of immigration and reverse migration (deportation), Santos, of the film Homeland (1999), embodies the displacement, dispersal, and resettlement of over one million Salvadorans across the world. Criminalized, penalized, and removed from the United States for “deportable crimes” (vis-à-vis IIRAIRA 1996 and the USA Patriot Act of 2001), deportees upon their reentry into El Salvador are changing the face of Salvadoran national culture and identities in the expanded context of transnationalism, globalization, and diasporization of Salvadorans across the world. As they return and re-patriate to El Salvador, deportees contribute to the re-construction or remaking of Salvadoran national culture and traditional notions of what it is to be Salvadoran and (Central) American in El Salvador within the global order and movement of human and material capital. In a sense, deportees are subjects of an initial diaspora that begins with the wars of the 1980s as well as a boomerang diaspora that returns to El Salvador with their expulsion from the U.S. They are forced returnees to a country with which they may have varying degrees of familiarity and affinity. As José William Huezo Soriano—former Director of Homies Unidos (an NGO working in gang prevention and intervention in El Salvador) and twice a deportee himself—explains, deportees are “permanent visitors” in El Salvador.22 Indeed, deportees are the cast of new transnational identities and cultures reshaping Central American / Salvadoran identities and cultures across multiple homelands.23
A failed immigrant by the monumental standards attributed to the economic and material contributions of hermanos lejanos,24 Santos becomes the protagonist of a narrative that is only becoming too familiar to many immigrants in the United States—the narrative of forceful deportation, removal, or reverse migration. Upon arriving in El Salvador, he finds a people still at war among themselves over limited economic resources, political factionalism, and unresolved issues leftover from the civil war. Symbolically, Santos spends his first days in El Salvador in a jail cell, where he meets a drunken inmate and survivor of the civil war, who warns Santos that, for him, “the war is just beginning, little brother.” The initial prison scenes of the film serve as a metaphor for the “tiny country [of] El Salvador [that] is like a huge prison,” to which Santos has returned. How to escape the Salvadoran image and mindset of confinement, containment, and disempowerment will be Santos’s task and challenge, for he finds that in El Salvador he has the possibility to unmake or remake himself, that is, he can continue to be a gang member, or become someone else in El Salvador. Indeed, Santos discovers that in that small country imprisoned by larger forces he can find the same extended network of gangs he knew so well in the United States—the MS-13 and the 18, now armed with AK-47s, M-16s, and grenades.
In El Salvador, he encounters rejection, discrimination, alienation, violence, hunger, poverty, and homelessness. But in that small country, he also finds his history, family, and himself, which are suggested by scenes in the film where Santos’s life opens to new opportunities. The scene where he is shown riding a bus to his aunt Leticia’s house in Metapán, for example, is full of light, movement, objects, people, voices, noises, all suggesting a sense of newness and life for Santos. After an uneasy first meeting with his Tía Leticia, Santos begins a difficult process of adaptation and reintegration into Salvadoran society, in which his mentors will be his aunt and a neighborhood girl who befriends him. In successive scenes, Santos literally wanders through the streets of his neighborhood and countryside, figuratively seeking his place in Salvadoran society. Along the way, he encounters authorities, family, neighbors, local gang members, and others who offer options on “how to be Salvadoran.” Early in the film, he meets gang members, who, after interrogating Santos about his tattoos, gang affiliations, and deportation status, invite Santos to join them on their side of the street, a metaphor for how gangs also are reinventing and reconstructing El Salvador. Tellingly, the rap song, which the gang members spontaneously perform for Santos, articulates their vision of El Salvador. Parodying the Salvadoran national anthem, they rap: “Saludando a mi patria y a mi gente nativa. Me dejo caer con una historia de guerra que arruinó a mi país doce años” [Greetings to my homeland and my people. I was brought down with the history of war that ruined my country for twelve years].25 Upon joining the gang members in a violent drunken initiation night scene, wherein Santos almost rapes a Salvadoran young woman, Santos must face the consequences of his actions the next morning, when the woman’s male relatives avenge the act. Santos, thus, learns valuable lessons—the hard way. It is the drunken man of the opening prison scene, however, who teaches Santos his greatest lesson, which is that it is possible to change his destiny in El Salvador. In a climatic scene in the film, Santos runs into the fallen drunken man. The man has died in the street, and Santos picks up his body, carrying it uphill against a background of unresponsive local neighbors and gang-tagged walls. The scene, invoking Christian imagery of carrying one’s cross in life, suggests that Santos has perhaps, at last, reconciled himself with his life in El Salvador and is ready to bear its history, legacy, and memories of war.
By the end of the 30-minute film, Santos, who is always “a fish out of the water,” as his Aunt Leticia calls him, seems to have found some sense of buoyancy in his life. As he cannot leave El Salvador after being deported, he must tread unfamiliar waters, learning to navigate through conflict and trauma and to anchor himself to people who come to his assistance, namely his aunt Leticia. Through a chain of flashbacks of a village massacre, it becomes clear that Leticia’s character is based on the unforgettable figure of Rufina Amaya. Dedicated to Rufina Amaya in the final credits, the film suggests that Leticia’s memories are Amaya’s memories, which are now passed on to Santos as he hears his aunt tell the story of her massacred family, his people. It is through the retelling of Leticia’s / Rufina’s story, then, that Santos acquires a social memory that is now his, although he did not grow up in El Salvador, experience first-hand the massacres, or learn from his parents about the war in El Salvador that sent them looking for sanctuary in the United States. In the film, there are no indications of his prior knowledge of the war or El Salvador. For the first time at Leticia’s side, he seems to hear her story and to witness her memories of the massacre that killed her husband, children, and other Salvadorans. In a key scene, Santos joins Leticia in the cemetery as she visits the graves of her family, and hears for the first time her testimony of the day that everyone was massacred by Salvadoran soldiers while she waited in the bushes for the violence to subside. By listening, witnessing, and incorporating his aunt’s memories into his own, Santos not only mourns with her for her lost family, but also he is transfused with and transformed by the collective trauma of the Salvadoran nation. By the end of the scene, transference of memory has taken place for Santos and the viewers, who are also privy to Leticia’s flashbacks and re-collections of the past.
Like many Salvadoran diasporic subjects, Santos may be said to carry embedded within him the trauma of displacement, which Scott’s film seems to suggest can only be ameliorated by reconciling with the past and present condition of El Salvador. Santos’s recollection of his primary trauma of having been removed from his original “homeland” by war is fittingly triggered by his second removal from his U.S. “homeland.” His encounter with Leticia’s past in the cemetery floods his memory with traumatic material to which he has had little psychic access until that moment. Doug’s film seems to suggest that Santos’s recovery, reconciliation, and repatriation in El Salvador depends on his remembering, reconnecting, and identifying with the pain and trauma shared by many Salvadorans. The physical embrace that joins Leticia and Santos in the cemetery scene more than representing the reconciliation of Salvadorans who remained in the country and those who left it, suggests the possibility of bridging psychic separations produced by the war.
Revisiting her war dead and her memories in the cemetery, Leticia tells Santos, “I was hoping that you would find me.” At the gravesite, Leticia tells Santos about the massacre (of El Mozote) and how she “wanted to forget everything … [but] God kept me alive so I wouldn’t forget.” Leticia’s memories reappear as flashbacks that Santos and the viewer now witness: people being rounded up, screaming children being pushed into a house, women being shot at, and, finally, one woman hiding in the bushes and witnessing everything. This is the memory of Rufina Amaya as recovered by Leticia, Adrian Santos, and the Salvadoran diaspora. After transmitting her memories to Santos and embracing him, Leticia warns her surrogate son, “If you forget the past, you can never change your future.” She reminds Santos that Salvadorans living in and outside of the country must not allow the massacre of El Mozote and the Salvadoran civil war to be forgotten, because history has a way of returning in (post)traumatic ways. The film, thus, ends with Santos and Leticia fishing in a lake in El Salvador. Santos’s “reality” and history are now “Salvadoran.” Upon his arrival, he had been a fish out of water, but by the end of the film he has learned to swim in and not against the turbulent waters of Salvadoran society. The water metaphors abound at the end of the film, as Leticia forecasts, “a big storm is coming, I can feel it.” Although the civil war in El Salvador may have ended, Salvadorans will continue to face storms and extreme conditions, as the film so aptly suggests.
Conclusions
“Layers of Memories: Twenty Years After in Argentina,” Elizabeth Jelin and Susana Kaufman’s analysis of how Argentines dealt with their “conflicted and painful past” and “period of extreme political violence and of state terrorism” during the Dirty War may speak to the Salvadoran legacy of war, violence, and trauma (Jelin and Kaufman, 2002: 31). In their work, Jelin and Kaufman are concerned with the construction of post-dictatorship memory, especially its omissions, silences, conflicts, layering or condensations, and inscriptions in the collective consciousness of a people (2002: 32). In the film Homeland (1999), Leticia (vis-à-vis Rufina Amaya) echoes the phrase, “Remember! So as to not repeat!” With those words, she turns memory into an act of volition, reclamation, and recovery from the trauma left by the civil war in El Salvador. In the case of Argentina after 1983, Jelin and Kaufman assert that there was reclamation of public space. Las Madres and Las Abuelas, for example, took back and transformed La Plaza de Mayo for the purpose of protest, resistance, and remembrance, and a number of first-hand personal narratives (testimonios, theatre, fiction, paintings, etc.) were published in the country (2002: 33). As victim and survivor narratives were recovered and made public, many people were forced to confront their own repressed memories, although: “[I]t was hard for the general population to realize and believe that these unbelievable stories were part of a very recent and, for most people, silenced past” (2002: 35). In Argentina, memorialization of the past came in the form of publicly expressed outrage, demands for the prosecution of military leaders for human rights violations, dissemination of victim and survivor narratives, and the honoring of victims through various events, forums, films, performances, and other commemorative public displays in and outside of Argentina (2002: 36-37).
In their exploration of the reconstruction of post-traumatic social memory in Argentina, Jelin and Kaufman recognize that temporal and physical distance to a collective past shapes the memory of it. This consideration proves useful in thinking about how Salvadoran diasporic communities transmit memories across space, time, and generations. Most generations after the immigrant generation (the one that traveled and experienced the violence first-hand in the country) might not “remember” the past, in this case the war in El Salvador, because for them there was no “previous process of engraving, of fixing something in memory” (2002: 48), as Jelin and Kaufman explain. Instead, successive generations with no direct experience of fear, violation, and repression carry, as Jelin and Kaufman claim, “a presence of the absence”: Adrian Santos has a lapse in memory where the memory of war and migration should be. In the film, Santos virtually has no memories of El Salvador. All his flashbacks are to his personal and social history in the streets of New York—partying with his crew in the park, being ambushed by rival gang members at a store, and being deported to El Salvador. Santos cannot recall his life in El Salvador, for he was barely four years old when he immigrated with his parents to the United States. Thus, he must rely on his intersubjective relationship with Leticia to fill the gaps in his memory and to recover, as Jelin and Kaufman suggest, “the representation of what was once there and no longer is, the representation of something that has been erased, silenced or denied” (2002: 48). To gain access to erased or repressed experiences, knowledge, and memories of war, diasporic generations may turn to what I call the primary carriers of memory—parents, older siblings, extended family, and people who remained in El Salvador, as well as classes, books, photographs, films, music, testimonios, and alternative instances of material culture and information sources on El Salvador.
For Jelin and Kaufman, the transmission of memories is always “an intersubjective relationship” that would fill (in) the gap in memory, which has been induced by separation and distance. They explain that
Social forgetting is also a collective intersubjective affair. It implies a social cleft, a rupture between individual memory and public and/or collective practices (that may become ritualized and repetitious), or a faulty line in the intergenerational process of transmission… Interpretations and explanations of the past cannot be automatically conveyed from one generation to the next, from one period to another, from those who experienced the events to others who did not. As Yerushalmi notes, the past has to be actively transmitted to the next generation, and that generation has to accept that past as meaningful. (2002: 48-49)
Jelin and Kaufman, thus, recognize that no memory can be implanted or interpellated in another subject without that subject claiming that memory as hers or his, or moreover, without that subject becoming an “open receptor” (2002: 49), willing to identify with what is relevant to her or him and to build new meaning out of that memorial material.
In the film, Homeland (1999), Adrian Santos returns by force to El Salvador. As a deportee barred from reentering the United States, Santos suffers secondary trauma after being separated from the U.S. “homeland” he had known all this life. The trauma of deportation is metonymically linked to the first trauma of migration and regressively to the trauma of displacement and war, which, I believe, make him receptive to Leticia’s memories. In the end, Leticia’s memories are incorporated into his mental schemata. As suggested by Jelin and Kaufman’s work, between Leticia and Santos there is an intersubjective, intergenerational, and, I would add, transnational transmission of memory. By the end of the film, Adrian Santos seems to be recovering from the trauma of separation, migration, deportation, and the double loss of the homelands forced upon him by geopolitical forces. Finally, El Salvador becomes “meaningful” to him, and he begins his process of repatriation.
Allwood de Mata, Claudia, 1993: “Mensaje de la presidenta de CONCULTURA,” in: La prensa gráfica (3 November), n.p.
Amaya, Rufina, 2002: “Solo me embrocaba a llorar,” <http://www.serve.com/Mario_Villalta/Embrocaba/htm> (29 July 2000).
Amaya, Rufina, Mark Danner, and Carlos Henríquez Consalvi, 1996: Luciérnagas en El Mozote. San Salvador: Ediciones Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen.
Amnesty Internacional, 2003: “El Salvador: Monumento a la Memoria y la Verdad-hacia la dignificación de las víctimas del conflicto armado,” <http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ESLAMR290112003?open&of=ESL-SLV> (31 July 2006).
Bonner, Raymond, 1984: “Massacre of Hundreds Reported in Salvador Village,” in: The New York Times. Reproduced in Danner, 1994: The Massacre at El Mozote, 188-192.
Booth, John A., and Thomas W. Walker, 1989: Understanding Central America. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
CEJIL (Centro por la Justicia y el Derecho Internacional), 2003: “Monumento a la memoria y la verdad en El Salvador: un gran paso en la dignificación de las víctimas y en la construcción de una sociedad en reconciliación y paz,” <http://www.cejil.org/comunicados.cfm?id=492> (31 July 2006).
Cadaval, Olivia, 1998: Creating a Latino Identity in the Nation’s Capital: The Latino Festival. New York and London: Garland Publishing.
Córdova, Carlos B., 1987: “Undocumented El Salvadoreans in the San Francisco Bay Area: Migration and Adaptation Dynamics,” in: Journal of La Raza Studies 1.1: 9-37.
Comisión de la Verdad, 1993: De la locura a la esperanza: La guerra de 12 años en El Salvador. San José, CR: Editorial Departamento Ecuménico de Investigación.
Consalvi, Carlos Henríquez, n.d.: “Las palabras,” <http://www.museo.com.sv/opinion.html> (15 March 2002).
Coutin, Susan Bibler, 2000: Legalizing Moves: Salvadoran Immigrants’ Struggle for U.S. Residency. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Cruz, José Miguel, and Nelson Portillo Peña, 1998: Solidaridad y violencia en las pandillas del gran San Salvador: Más allá de la vida loca. San Salvador: UCA Editores.
Decree, 1991: No. 55, Diario Oficial, 313.206, San Salvador (4 November).
Danner, Mark, 1993: “The Truth of El Mozote,” in: The New Yorker (December 6), 50-133.
Danner, Mark, 1994: The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War. New York: Vintage Books.
Dunkerley, James, 1994: The Pacification of Central America: Political Change in the Isthmus, 1987-1993. London: Verso.
Guillermoprieto, Alma, 1994: “Salvadoran Peasants Describe Mass Killing; Woman Tells of Children’s Death,” in: The Washington Post (14 January 1982). Reproduced in Danner, 1994: The Massacre at El Mozote, 182-188.
Hamilton, Nora and Norma Stoltz Chinchilla, 2001: Seeking Community in a Global City: Guatemalans and Salvadorans in Los Angeles. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Homeland, 1999: Dir. Doug Scott, Prod. Daniel Flores y Ascencio and Lisette Marie Flanary. Huevos Indios Productions.
Hoyt, Mike: 1993: “The Mozote Massacre: It was the reporters’ word against the government’s,” in: Columbia Journalism Review (January/February) <http://archives.cjr.org/year/93/1/mozote.asp> (31 July 2006).
Huezo Soriano, José William, 1999: “Deported: Weasel’s Diary,” <http://www.radiodiaries.org/transcripts/OtherDocs/weasel.html> (1 August 2006).
Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (the 96 Act) at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services of the Department of Justice website, <http://www.uscis.gov/graphics/publicaffairs/factsheets/948.htm> (1 August 2006).
Jelin, Elizabeth, and Susan G. Kaufman, 2002: “Layers of Memories: Twenty Years After in Argentina,” in: Lorey, David E. and Beezley, William H. (eds.), 2002: Genocide, Collective Violence, and Popular Memory: The Politics of Remembrance in the Twentieth Century. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 31-52.
Lorey, David E., and William H. Beezley (eds.), 2002: Genocide, Collective Violence, and Popular Memory: The Politics of Remembrance in the Twentieth Century. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources.
Mahler, Sarah J., 1995a: American Dreaming: Immigrant Life on the Margins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Mahler, Sarah J., 1995b: Salvadorans in Suburbia: Symbiosis and Conflict. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Mendizabal, JC and Trip Tech, 1999: La Masacre del Mozote. BlackNote Music compact disc.
Menjívar, Cecilia. 2000: Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen, 2006: <http://www.museo.com.sv/> (31 July 2006).
Noticoncultura, 1992: 1.2, n.p.
OnRamp Arts, “Tropical America,” 2002: <http://www.rhizome.org/artbase/27732/tropicalamerica/about.html> (1 August 2006).
Pinderhughes, Raquel, Carlos Córdova, and Jorge del Pinal, n.d.: “Central and South Americans,” Our Multicultural Heritage: A Guide to America’s Principal Ethnic Groups, <http://www.sfsu.edu/~urbstu/rp/arti/art3.htm> (16 March 2002).
Redacción, 1996: “Salvadoreños conmemoran 15 años de la masacre de 1.000 campesinos,” in: La Prensa, San Pedro Sula, Honduras (9 December).
Repak, Terry A., 1995: Waiting on Washington: Central American Workers in the Nation’s Capital. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the Department of Homeland Security website <http://www.ice.gov/about/index.htm> (1 August 2006).
Wilde, Alexander, 2002: “Irruptions of Memory: Expressive Politics in Chile’s Transition to Democracy,” in: Lorey, David E. and Beezley, William H. (eds.), 2002: Genocide, Collective Violence, and Popular Memory: The Politics of Remembrance in the Twentieth Century. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 3-29.
Winschun, Thomas, 1999: ¿Por qué se van? La emigración de salvadoreños a los Estados Unidos. San Salvador: Fundación Heinrich Böll.vuelve 1. An early version of this essay was published by the Smithsonian Institution at the website <http://latino.si.edu/researchandmuseums/presentations/rodriguez_paper.html> (1 August 2006). The essay has been rethought, revised, and updated for this publication.
vuelve 2. See reprint of Rufina Amaya’s testimonio in Danner (1994) and Amaya, Danner, and Consalvi (1996).
vuelve 3. According to a press release, the game “Tropical America” was developed by the non-profit arts organization OnRamp Arts in Los Angeles, California, through an NEA grant in 2002. The game weaved together 13 episodes of Latin American history, beginning with the Massacre of El Mozote. Following the massacre’s sole survivor Rufina Amaya, players gathered evidence, traveled the landscape, and reported on what happened at El Mozote. Game instructions indicted that as the only survivor of a terrible massacre, the player had to find four pieces of evidence in order to bring justice to the memory of her/his people [“Usted es el único sobreviviente de una terrible masacre y debe encontrar cuatro pruebas que hagan justicia a la memoria de su pueblo”; see http://www.elpais.es/especiales/2003/netart/2002_4.html]. According to the press release, the objective for producing the game with high school students was not only to “explore the causes and effects of the erasure of history” in a cross-cultural learning context, but also to expose students to “media literacy.” The game has been removed from the Internet. In 2002, I had the opportunity to access and view the “the game,” which, I believe, met its objectives of teaching the importance of learning history, recovering historical memory, and promoting non-violence in the context of Latin America. See what remains of “Tropical America” at the website <http://www.rhizome.org/artbase/27732/tropicalamerica/about.html> (1 August 2006).
vuelve 4. I examine La Masacre del Mozote (JC Mendizabal, 1999) elsewhere.
vuelve 5. See Danner (1994) for a book-length account of the findings of the massacre. A number of original documents, newspaper articles, and communiqués are compiled as appendices to the book.
vuelve 6. For a retrospective look at how journalists Alma Guillermoprieto and Raymond Bonner were censored for writing about the massacre, see Hoyt (1993).
vuelve 7. Alma Guillermoprieto, “Salvadoran Peasants Describe Mass Killing; Woman Tells of Children’s Death,” 14 January 1982, reproduced in Danner (1994: 185).
vuelve 8. Raymond Bonner, “Massacre of Hundreds Reported in Salvador Village,” reproduced in Danner (1994: 188).
vuelve 9. “Tres Vidas” has been performed at many university venues, such as MIT, Suffolk University Law School, Wellesley University, Jacksonsville University, Sonoma State University, and the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. The three women in the performance are played by Georgina Corbo, who is accompanied by the Core Ensemble, a chamber music ensemble comprised of cello, piano, and percussion. A press release is available at the Web site <http://www.uop.edu/conservatory/calvidas.html> (15 March 2002).
vuelve 10. See Rufina Amaya’s testimonio, “Sólo me embrocaba a llorar,” <http://www.mariovillalta.com/Embrocaba.htm> (29 July 2000).
vuelve 11. This quote and the direct quotes that follow as well as my translations into English are from Amaya, “Sólo me embrocaba a llorar.”
vuelve 12. See Decree No. 55, Diario Oficial, Vol. 313, No. 206, San Salvador, 4 November 1991 and Noticoncultura 1.2 (1992).
vuelve 13. Supporting organizations include the Asociación de Mujeres por la Dignidad y la Vida, Asociación Probúsqueda, Asociación Yek Ineme, Centro para la Paz, Centro para la promoción y defensa de los Derechos Humanos “Madeleine Lagadec,” Comisión no gubernamental de Derechos Humanos, Comité de Familiares de Víctimas de violaciones a los Derechos Humanos, Comité de Madres de Desaparecidos y Asesinados Políticos “Monseñor Oscar Arnulfo Romero,” Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen, and the Oficina de Tutela Legal del Arzobispado de San Salvador. See “CEJIL (Centro por la Justicia y el Derecho Internacional), “Monumento a la memoria y la verdad en El Salvador: un gran paso en la dignificación de las víctimas y en la construcción de una sociedad en reconciliación y paz,” <http://www.cejil.org/comunicados.cfm?id=492> (31 July 2006).
vuelve 14. See Amnesty International’s website <http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ESLAMR290112003?open&of=ESL-SLV> (31 July 2006).
vuelve 15. See “Salvadoreños conmemoran 15 años de la masacre de 1.000 campesinos” in La Prensa, San Pedro Sula, Honduras (9 December 1996), n.p. <http://www.laprensahn.com/caarc/9612/c09001.htm> (15 March 2002).
vuelve 16. Visit the website of the Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen <http://www.museo.com.sv/> (31 July 2006).
vuelve 17. See Carlos Henríquez Consalvi, “Las palabras,” <http://www.museo.com.sv/opinion.html> (15 March 2002). Translation into English is mine.
vuelve 18. During the last decades of the 20th century, Salvadorans were displaced in and from their homelands due to local political, military, and socioeconomic crises. By 1989, over one fifth of the total Salvadoran population had been displaced, and as many as one million Salvadorans had been forced to immigrate across the isthmus and over wide expanses to the United States, Mexico, Canada, Australia, and Europe (Dunkerley, 1994: 46). The U.S. Census calculated that, by 1990, 1,323,830 Central Americans resided in the United States, of these well over 565,081 persons came from El Salvador (Pinderhughes, Córdova, and del Pinal ). In an often-cited study, Hamilton and Stoltz Chinchilla (2001) claimed that Salvadorans account for almost seventy-five percent of the Central American population in the United States.
vuelve 19. See the website for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the Department of Homeland Security website <http://www.ice.gov/about/index.htm> (1 August 2006).
vuelve 20. During the 1990s, many Central Americans sought refuge and asylum under various immigration laws such as the 1980 Refugee Act, which made provisions for the official classification of refugees and political asylum seekers, and the 1986 Immigration and Control Reform Act (IRCA), which granted legal resident status to Salvadoran immigrants showing evidence of having lived in the U.S. prior to 1 January 1982. Subsequently with the arrival of a large number of undocumented immigrants in the 1980s, new legislation such as Temporary Protected Status (TPS), Deferred Enforced Departure (DED), and the American Baptist Churches (ABC) ruling sought to gain permission for temporary and extended stays for immigrants. It is estimated that half of the Central American population currently living in the United States arrived as of the 1980s. On the topic of undocumented immigration and legalization, see especially Coutin (2000) and Hamilton and Stoltz Chinchilla (2001). For studies on Salvadoran immigration to specific sites, see Mahler (1995a, 1995b), Repak (1995), Cadaval (1998), Winschun, (1999), and Menjívar (2000).
vuelve 21. See Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (the 96 Act) <http://www.uscis.gov/graphics/publicaffairs/factsheets/948.htm> (1 August 2006).
vuelve 22. A transcript of an NPR interview with Mr. William Huezo Soriano can be accessed at “Deported: Weasel’s Diary,” <http://www.radiodiaries.org/transcripts/OtherDocs/weasel.html> (1 August 2006).
vuelve 23. For a full length autoethnography on gang members in El Salvador, see Solidaridad y violencia en las pandillas del gran San Salvador: Más allá de la vida loca (1998), which is based on collaborative research and interviews conducted by mara (gang) members, Homies Unidos, and Save the Children. At one time, Homies Unidos, a gang prevention and intervention organization in San Salvador, offered services for deportees from Los Angeles and other U.S. cities.
vuelve 24. The labor of the Salvadoran diaspora is mythologized in the figure of the hermano lejano, whose tall tale overshadows the story of the deportee.
vuelve 25. The National Anthem of El Salvador begins with a similar salutation, “Saludemos la patria orgullosos …” [Let us proudly greet the homeland …]. Translations into English of the anthem and rap lyrics are mine.
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