Rupturing the Silences: Intergenerational Construction of Salvadoran Immigrant War Necronarratives

As the children of wartime immigrants from El Salvador become adults, they must grapple with the role violence played—and continues to play—in Salvadoran society. Second-generation Salvadorans interpret their relatives’ stories of war, death, and violence through a lens that prioritizes lessons gained over traumatization. Thus, immigrant parents’ casual discussions about their experiences during the Salvadoran Civil War (1979–1992) become what this article calls necronarratives: stories pieced together from memories based on foiling death and violence generated through state necropolitics. Youth interpret inherited memories through a lens of survival, resilience, and healing. Necropolitics refers to the ability of the state to legislate and draw policies that determine who lives and who dies. Although scholars have noted that high levels of war-related trauma among Salvadoran immigrants cause them to remain silent about those experiences, my research reveals that children of these immigrants collect and construct narratives using the memory fragments shared during casual conversations with their relatives. Drawing from 20 semi-structured interviews with U.S. Salvadorans, this paper shows that U.S. Salvadorans construct narratives out of their family’s war memories in order to locate affirming qualities of the Salvadoran experience such as surviving a war, achieving migration, and building a life in a new country. Contrary to past indications that Central American migrants live in silence about their national origins in order to avoid discrimination in the U.S. and to avoid traumatizing their children, this study on second-generation Salvadoran adults describes the ethnic roots information families do share through war stories. The Salvadoran case shows youth actively engage with necronarratives as they come of age to adulthood to yield lessons about how their national origins and ethnic heritages shape their senses of belonging and exclusion within U.S. society.

Remembering the Return from Exodus: An Analysis of a Salvadoran Community’s Local History Reenactment

On June 20, 1986, amid the 12-year civil war in El Salvador (1980–1992), a group of displaced Salvadorans from the northern department of Chalatenango declared San José las Flores their home. As the war between the Salvadoran army and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) intensified in rural areas, many people left to find refuge in other parts of the country. Since the FMLN had an active presence in Chalatenango, the Salvadoran military bombed this region frequently, which transformed las Flores into a ghost town by 1984. Those Salvadorans who decided to hide instead of leaving the country or even the region faced treacherous conditions as they trekked through the mountainous terrain of Chalatenango fleeing from military operations. By 1986, many of these Salvadorans emerged from their precarious living to demand their right to live in San José las Flores. More than three decades after the repopulation of the town, and more than two decades since the signing of the peace accords, residents of las Flores continue to celebrate their history, without fail, every year, bearing witness to a reenactment of the events that led to their town’s repopulation. This article examines these anniversaries, especially its 30th anniversary in 2016, to understand how the town remembers, interprets, and transforms their local history. What prompts residents of las Flores to relive these events? How is social memory and trauma transmitted to the diverse audience in attendance? What does reenactment have to do with collective memory? This article argues that the performance of the repopulation of las Flores, enacted by former guerrilla soldiers, survivors of the war, and their children and grandchildren, demonstrates how the history, memories, and values of this town are transmitted from generation to generation. In Diana Taylor’s words, they remember their collective suffering, challenges, and triumphs through both archival and embodied memory.

‘Cadáveres Amados’: Martyrs, Memory, and Cuban National Symbols

On November 27th, 1871, eight young medical students were marched into a public plaza in Havana and shot by Spanish authorities. On the first anniversary of their death, the exiled José Martí used their execution to denounce Spanish rule in Cuba, and to legitimize the violent struggle for Cuban Independence. The executed students became martyrs to Cuban nationalism. Since then, their execution at the hands of tyrants has been repeatedly repurposed in revolutionary periods in Cuban history. This article engages with the work of Maurice Halbwachs, Jan Assmann, and Pierre Nora to reflect on the process of collective and cultural memory formation and reformation. It considers the factors that contributed to the transformation of the execution of these students from a singular tragedy, among a wider field of atrocity, into a defining moment in Cuban identity. Further, drawing on works by Jay Winter, Robin Cohen, and Ron Eyerman, this article interrogates the role of individuals and groups in this process. Over one hundred and fifty years, members of exile communities, moral witnesses, student protesters, and revolutionary leaders used the memory of these martyrs to contest authoritarian rule, hoping to advance their vision of a Cuba that could be. Driven by changing political imperatives, the memory of the students altered to reflect new collective priorities. This case study shows change and continuity in cultural memory. Tracing the evolution of this narrative from the Cuban War of Independence, through the rule of dictators, Castro’s revolutionary war, and the following socialist era, this article concludes by asking how their memory is being—once again—transformed today. With a focus on the construction and use of public monuments and memorials, but incorporating literature, images, annual marches, and films, this article argues that the public memory of their deaths altered in different periods to invoke a revolutionary vision of Cuban national identity battered by a century and a half of instability.

Impressions of National History: Retracing Panama through Memory Lines

Against the background of the 30th anniversary of the invasion of Panama by U.S. troops, this article analyzes cross-generational differences in how Panamanians evoke and signify this event. Panama’s current climate is ideal to explore this topic, because 2019 also marked 500 years since the foundation of Panama City. This article focuses on how different generations revamp collective memory and relate a story that befits the circumstances of their time. Drawing on informal interviews, secondary data, and relevant aspects of family biography, it examines the interplay between generational drifts and subjective knowledge of Panama. This analysis spotlights how local and transnational processes intersect with biography, shaping perceptions of national history. By the end of the 20th century, U.S. militarized presence in the Panama Canal Zone gave way to a less conspicuous—yet no less significant—influence over Panamanian affairs. Thereupon, past generations’ concern with sovereignty has been overshadowed by a growing focus on the country’s integration in the global economy. While Panamanian millennials are not oblivious to recent U.S. armed intervention, their attitude towards this action is impersonal and dispassionate. Their perception of an increasingly faster course to meet the future dovetails with both a subjective distancing from Panama’s neocolonial history and a growing disconnect from the anti-imperialist discourse of past generations.

Postmemories of Migration: Cuban Exile and Poetics of Latinidad in Jennine Capó-Cruet’s Make Your Home Among Strangers

Taking Juan Flores’s premise of historical memory and lived experience to foundational to U.S. latinidad as a starting point, this article asks how twenty-first century second-generation Latina writing intervenes in contemporary understandings of U.S. latinidad as a pan-ethnic cultural field. It analyzes the narrative techniques, structures, and conventions through which contemporary Latinx writing engages ethnic memory and lived experience, considering how, and whether, those narrative conventions coalesce into a “poetics of latinidad.” Specifically, this article analyzes Jennine Capó Crucet’s Make Your Home Among Strangers (2015), a novel comprising two interlaced storylines that animate the categories “lived experience” and “historical memory.” The novel intertwines its protagonist, Lizet’s, lived experience as a second-generation Cuban-American and the fictionalized re-rendering of the Elián Gonzalez case, a historical event that has proved an inflection point for Cuban-American exile identity in the U.S., destabilizing Cubans’ status as an “exceptional” community in the U.S. Latinx migrant imaginary. Thus, this article argues that Capó-Crucet’s novel fashions a poetics of latinidad in key ways. Engaging Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory,” it analyzes how the interwoven stories of Lizet and Ariel Hernández (the fictionalized Elián González) repurpose the role of historical memory toward the narrative intelligibility of the second generation’s lived experience in the U.S. while recuperating and memorializing the first-generation’s experience of exile. It then situates this novel within a burgeoning corpus of twenty-first century Latina college narratives, including Patricia Cardoso’s Real Women Have Curves (2002), Meliza Bañalez’s Life is Wonderful, People are Terrific (2015), and Gabby Rivera’s Juliet Takes a Breath (2016). These texts rely on postmemory to address the experiences of second-generation Latina college students; Capó-Crucet’s novel articulates a poetics of latinidad in this intertextual framework.

“Ni de aquí, ni de allá”: Memory, the Hyphen, and Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

One of the intellectual and emotional labors undertaken by children of immigrants is having to negotiate their place in between two different cultures. Existence in this in-between space is understandably challenging and is explored in Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, as the protagonist Yolanda and her sisters struggle to find themselves in between American and Dominican cultures. This article argues that memory plays a key role in navigating this space, as Alvarez constructs her semi-autobiographical work in reverse chronology, allowing Yolanda to work through the decision of where she believes she fits best using a series of flashbacks and memories from her own eyes and the eyes of other members of her family. While Marianne Hirsch theorizes that postmemory affects generations following those that experienced trauma, what Yolanda experiences differs. The trauma of navigating the “hyphen” of Dominican-American identity is her own, and it is through these memories, in addition to a focus on linguistic differences between English and Spanish that the girls struggle with, we follow Yolanda on her journey of self-discovery. What works such as Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents prove is that individuals have to find peace in an identity that is neither here nor there, ni de aquí ni de allá.

Violence and Hopelessness in the Colombian Novels La Virgen de Los Sicarios and Satanás

Colombia is a South American nation that has captured the imagination of the world. It is a land of beautiful colonial cities and towns, famous for coffee production, rich emerald mines, and the literature of José Asunción Silva and Gabriel García Márquez. Colombia’s beauty and rich literary history, however, are often overshadowed by the memory of Pablo Escobar, a notorious drug lord, and numerous deadly guerilla groups. Their roles in the international drug trade made Colombia the top producer and exporter of cocaine, which resulted in terrorism and violence that left the country one of the world’s most dangerous.1 In this article, I will explore how violence in Colombia has perpetuated the theme of hopelessness in the nation’s literature beginning in the mid-twentieth century. I will show this in three parts. Firstly, I will trace the history of violence in Colombia through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and show that a literary genre of violence was absent in the nation until 1946, when the period known as “la Violencia” commenced. Secondly, I will explore how hopelessness resulted from violence in Colombia beginning in the period of “la Violencia.” Thirdly, I will show how violence is depicted as an evil that traps the protagonists of the contemporary Colombian novels La Virgen de Los Sicarios and Satanás in a state of hopelessness due to their powerlessness to truly change themselves because of the frustrated society in which they live.