Evelyn Galindo-Doucette

Plotting the Past in the Present: Reflections on the UCA in Post-War El Salvador

University of Wisconsin-Madison, EE.UU.
egalindo@wisc.edu

 

This article analyzes El Salvador’s UCA (Universidad Centroamericana “José Simeón Cañas”), the site of a 1989 massacre of six Jesuit scholars, their housekeeper and her daughter, as a memory space and explores how individual memories intersect with larger political processes in the Salvadoran post war context. The UCA serves as a case study that illustrates how memories of the war of the 1980’s, which had been silenced during the 20-year reign of the right-wing ARENA party, have increasingly become part of a hegemonic framework of memory since the democratic transition of 2009. While recognizing the importance of memory work carried out by the left, this article illustrates that state recognition of the UCA is not a passive opening of the past, but rather suggests a plotting of the past in the present that promotes a specific narrative of national identity in accord with the current politics of the state.

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