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‘Dreaming the dream of a dead man’ memory, media, and youth in postwar El Salvador

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Abstract

Using postwar El Salvador as a case study, I argue against the dominant paradigm that situates the repressive role of the state as both the central object of memorialization and the main subject of history. Instead, I focus on the ways in which the memory of insurgent collective action is constructed among young members of the popular classes in postwar El Salvador. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research in the communities of northern Morazán, I understand memory as the suspended time of praxis. Media—such as Internet, Facebook, and TV play a key role in this process, impinging on the ways youth relate with the revolutionary past of their relatives making sense of their present living conditions. I argue that memory must be understood as a particular form of praxis, one that is embedded in historic concrete forms of class constitution in which the role of media has become a constitutive element in the labors of memory, particularly among young people.

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Notes

  1. People’s Revolutionary Army.

  2. Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front.

  3. In 2001 Salvadorian economy was completely dollarized, in a process some authors have called Turbo-dollarization for the speed in which this happened (see Ibisate 2001).

  4. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CGYPCvn1Zg.

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Acknowledgments

I want to thank Professors Ellen Moodie (PI) and Leigh Binford (Co-PI) for inviting me to participate in their NSF funded project ‘From Wartime to Peacetime: Postinsurgent Individuality in northern Morazán, El Salvador’. I acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation BCS 0962643 channeled through that project, which allowed me to travel to El Salvador, as well as the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología of México for its financial support (Grant #33743). I also want to express my gratitude to Nick Dyer-Witheford for his comments and support while I was drafting the manuscript. Special thanks to Ever Martínez and Gerson Claros in Segundo Montes, for their help and friendship during my fieldwork in Morazán.

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  1. Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil

    Rafael Alarcón Medina

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Correspondence to Rafael Alarcón Medina.

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Alarcón Medina, R. ‘Dreaming the dream of a dead man’ memory, media, and youth in postwar El Salvador. Dialect Anthropol 38, 481–497 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-014-9350-5

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