aerial view of the Amazon river

El Salvador

Spring 2016 | Volume XV, Number 3

Table of Contents

Editor’s Letter →

by June Carolyn Erlick

First Take

First Take: Twenty-Four Years Later

First Take: Twenty-Four Years Later

English + Español
It was midnight in Mexico, New Year’s Eve, 1991. Friends gathered in our home together with my family, marking the beginning of another year of exile from El Salvador. Shortly after midnight, the…

Public Policy, Public Politics

Beyond Polarization in 21st-century El Salvador

Beyond Polarization in 21st-century El Salvador

My father was a civil engineer who worked for the government during the civil war years. He specialized in roads and had to spend several days a month traveling to remote places in El Salvador. I was 10 in 1986, and I remember my mom asking my dad…

El Salvador’s Future

El Salvador’s Future

In 2005, I met María Chicas. The gaze of this young woman reflected the harshness of her life in Torola, one of the poorest municipalities of Morazán. For…

Perspectives

Indigenous Rights in El Salvador

Indigenous Rights in El Salvador

English + Español
The story I will tell you here is of a remarkable woman, the last in a centuries-long line of Maya-Lenca matriarchs and a living conduit of ancient traditions brought into the modern world. It is…

Postwar Kids

Postwar Kids

It’s not a good time to have great hopes for Salvadoran politics, especially if you are a young Salvadoran. As I write this, in mid-February, the country is still debating the legacy of former…

Art and Action

Roque Dalton

Roque Dalton

James Iffland is a professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Boston University. He is currently at work on a book on Roque Dalton. He was the 2005-2006 Central American Visiting Scholar at DRCLAS…

Reimagining the Future

Reimagining the Future

My parents tell me how lucky I was to be born in a hospital. It was late November of 1989 amidst the “final offensive”—one of the last but more gruesome clashes…

The Past in the Present

A Nation at War with Itself

A Nation at War with Itself

In January 1981 the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador headed by Robert White sent an urgent cable to the Department of State in Washington. The memo, labeled SECRET, alleged that the death…

Remembering Romero

The Boy in the Photo

The Boy in the Photo

The mangy dogs strolled everywhere along the railroad track. I remembered dogs just like them from the long-ago day in La Chacra in 1979 with Archbishop Óscar Romero, just months before he was killed…

Remembering Romero

Remembering Romero

English + Español
As the meeting was ending, Romero—who hadn’t yet been installed — was asked if he’d like to say a few words. For all Schindler knew, they…

San Romero de América

San Romero de América

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador—María Isabel Delario is crying. Her body is bent, her face buried in her arms, her hands rest on the metal cast depicting the face of a murdered archbishop, a man…

The Diaspora

The Legacy of War

The Legacy of War

Miguel was six years old when he was forced to witness the execution of his first-grade teacher for participating in a teachers’ strike. “What I remember is that the…

Book Talk

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