This is connected to my previous post on Roberto Lovato's recently published book on El Salvador. It is abundantly true that anti-Salvadoran rhetorical, policy, and political campaigns erase the basic truth of a beautiful people deserving of so much more than what this world has offered.
Thanks to Dr. Gabriella Gutiérrez Muhs for sharing.
-Angela Valenzuela
When reporting on a nation’s civil war erases the truths of a beautiful people
Roberto Lovato October 1, 2020Updated: October 1, 2020, 10:42 am
News reports of unidentified men in camouflage bearing semiautomatic weapons shooting at BLM protesters or shoving them into unmarked government vans elicit a predictable response in me: My eyes, arms and other body parts sometimes shake involuntarily. The triggers and twitches of El Salvador’s terror taking their toll. Still.
Such memories from my experiences in the Salvadoran Civil War of the ’80s and early ’90s are the reason why, nearly three decades after I first read the phrase “terror is the given of the place,” from Joan Didion’s book “Salvador,” I can still relate to her words.
My tremors come from the dubious distinction of having been pursued by semiautomatic-bearing Salvadoran escuadrónes de la muerte in El Salvador during the civil war, and in Los Angeles after the war. These paramilitary death squads hunted down those of us fighting the fascist military dictatorship that slaughtered entire towns of women, children and elderly people. I, a curly-haired Salvadoran kid born in San Francisco, had grown fed up with stories of astonishing terror in my parents’ homeland. So I decided to go there and fight the source of the terror: the escuadrónes who, along with the Salvadoran military, were responsible for 85% of the estimated 75,000 to 80,000 deaths during the war, according to the U.N. Truth Commission. I survived, but the terror quakes in me with unpredictable frequency.
At the time of its publication in 1983, the book by my fellow Cal Bear Didion signaled that we Salvadorans had made it: The private world of my parents’ homeland finally entered the public realm of my classrooms. I spent hours in my Berkeley apartment searching for, but not really finding, the deeper meaning of Didion’s using “Exterminate all the brutes!” and other Joseph Conrad quotes, but they sounded deep. “Tattered” didn’t begin to describe my heavily highlighted copy of a book that the Atlantic magazine credited (in bold caps) with telling the world that “EL SALVADOR HAS TRULY BECOME THE HEART OF DARKNESS.” And even though it felt weird doing so, I tried to fit my own Salvadoran experience to the elegant contours of Didion’s words. My efforts failed.
Today, when I read that “terror” phrase — the most oft-quoted phrase about my parents’ homeland (and about Salvadorans, generally) — the writer in me marvels before the luminescent power of words to carry and generate new meaning from, during and beyond the darkest of times.
Sometimes, however, the electricity of words can have a Frankenstein effect, making monsters of an entire people. Sadly, Didion’s writings about us forgot a foundational fact of Salvadoran life: our humanity.
Should there be an American literary canon?
It took me a few years, but I eventually shook off the hypnotic effect of Didion’s prose. Today, I see her Salvadoran writing as an older, more liberal version of the exoticism informing both news conferences by President Trump and news reports featuring pictures of tattoo-faced Salvadoran mareros, even though these gangs stopped tattooing their faces long ago.
Similarly, the research I did for the Columbia Journalism Review on the reporting of Trump’s child separation policy — one of the biggest news stories of 2018 — found that all of the child separation stories in major media left out Central American experts — lawyers, scholars, nonprofit leaders, journalists — who could have provided a three-dimensional perspective. The only Central Americans in the story were those contained in two-dimensional images of pain and sound bites of suffering and, of course, the Kurtzian terror.
One of my missions as a California writer of Salvadoran descent is to remind English language readers of the tenderness that survives the terror.
I found the title of my book, “Unforgetting,” after reading how Hannah Arendt and other theorists of fascist terror looked to the ancient Greek concept of aletheia (unforgetting) as a way of uncovering important truths lost in dark times. The concept was perfect for the purpose of excavating the Salvadoran heart lost in the darkness of U.S-backed fascist military dictatorships.
Didion concluded that “terror is the given of the place” after spending two weeks in El Salvador. After spending more than 56 years among my Salvadoran friends and family, I concluded that love is also the given of the place — and of the people.
And I didn’t need to travel to El Salvador to understand this. I just had to inhale the ancient spirits of the dominant smell of the many gatherings my parents organized in our crowded San Francisco apartment: the salsa of Mom’s special mix of spices — pepitoria (dried pumpkin seeds), ajonjolí (sesame seeds), chile pasilla, sticks of canela (cinnamon), bay leaves and others — passed down by her ancestors over hundreds of years. Like many Salvadorans who came to San Francisco, the primary hub for Central American migrants to the U.S. in the 1950s, my grandmother, Mama Tey, came aboard a ship. This ship also carried coffee destined for the warehouses and processing plants of Hills Brothers, Folgers and other coffee companies headquartered just a 90-minute drive from where Didion was starting her writing career in her hometown of Sacramento.
Didion’s books about the Golden State make obvious that she inhabited a very different California than the one I was from, a California wholly devoid of Salvadorans and all other Latinos. In my youth, I read Didion looking for Latinos who never materialized. As an adult writer, I read her to remind myself that beautiful style is no excuse for erasing the truths of beautiful peoples.
