I write about the civil war in El Salvador, the long years of immigration and my permanent state of exile. The political inhabits my work because I am an immigrant, someone who fled his war-torn country, and an exile, who carries the broken memory of his birthplace and all its dead.
—William Archila
Abstract
US Central Americans are destabilizing, reconceiving, and revitalizing the US Latina/o canon, and in doing so, they are forcing us to reconsider hegemonic ideas about Latinidad. The cultural production of Latinos/as of Central American descent has engaged in a critical denunciation of the violence that characterizes not only the history, but also the current situation, of the Central American isthmus. This essay examines the strategies used by US Central American poet William Archila and visual artist Alma Leiva to (re)construct the past and memorialize the victims of violence across Central America. I argue that Archila’s poetry collection The Art of Exile and Alma Leiva’s installation-photography series Celdas are examples of the “art of witness.” As such, their works play a key role in the reconstruction of Central American collective memory from the diaspora.
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Notes
A shorter version of this essay appeared in the catalogue for the Counter-Archives to the Narco-City exhibit at the Snite Museum (University of Notre Dame) in 2015, under the title “Remembering and the Struggle Against History in Alma Leiva’s Celdas,” pp. 75–83.
I borrow the concept of the transisthmus from critic Ana Patricia Rodríguez, who coined it to refer to the “ever-shifting literary, cultural, and historical configurations of the Central American isthmus as an in-between discursive space linking regions, peoples, cultures, and material goods” (2010, p. 2).
As Lehoucq states, “Civil war engulfed Central America in the 1980s. A peace agreement was not signed in El Salvador until late 1992, although the fighting between the government and the FMLN had dissipated to an inconclusive war by the late 1980s. The civil war in Guatemala did not end until 1996, although its military had defeated the insurgents, at a great loss of life, by the mid-1980s” (2012, p. 66).
“Central America’s victims perished mostly at the hands of their own soldiers or from right-wing death squads, and invariably from weapons made in the U.S.A., since in each country our government provided massive military aid to the side doing most of the killing” (González 2011, p. 131).
The concept of the 1.5 generation was originally developed by Rubén Rumbaut, but began to gain traction after critic and author Gustavo Pérez Firmat applied it to theorize the condition of Cuban-American writers who, like himself, left Cuba at around age twelve, and grew up in the United States. For more information, please see Pérez Firmat’s Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way (1994).
Some of the works by Francisco Goldman, Héctor Tobar, Sylvia Sellers-García, and Marcos Villatoro, among others, address similar concerns pertaining to the civil wars. Similarly, the performance work of Guatemalan artist Regina José Galindo thematically complements that of Alma Leiva.
The connection between Forché’s and Archila’s literary production is evident in Aaron Michael Morales’ review of The Art of Exile, where he begins by stating: “Where Carolyn Forché first gave the literary world a sip of the El Salvadorian civil war in her disturbing poem titled ‘The Colonel,’ Archila has brewed a hefty cask of sorrow, longing, and profound respect for those tumultuous years” (2009, p. 57). Renny Golden makes a similar point when she writes, “Carolyn Forché brought the traumatic to powerful witness. But her voice was not a voice like this [Archila’s]: quiet, tender, the voice of a Salvadoran who escaped but who never escaped” (n.d.).
As the SWJ Editors explain, “It is thus the political/diplomatic context in which the war is fought that determines whether it is a ‘small war’ and not the size and scope of resources expended, or the specific tactics employed” (2008). While the civil war of El Salvador falls under the “small war” category, the poem’s references to a “small war” also point to the irony behind this category.
Statistics about U.S. service members casualties of the Vietnam War can be found in the United States National Archives and Records Administration website of Military Records (n.d.). The statistics for the Vietnamese death toll come from the study published by Obermeyer et al. for the BMJ (2008).
According to Renwick, from the Council on Foreign Relations, “The nature of the violence is distinct in each country, but there are common threads: the proliferation of gangs, the region’s use as a transshipment point for U.S.-bound narcotics, and high rates of impunity are major factors contributing to insecurity in the region. A CFR special report in 2012 said organized crime is a clear legacy of the region’s decades of war” (2016).
“El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras consistently rank among the most violent countries in the world. […] Organized crime in the Northern Triangle includes transnational criminal organizations, many of which are associated with Mexican drug-trafficking organizations (DTOs); domestic organized-crime groups; transnational gangs, or maras, such as Mara salvatrucha (MS-13) and the Eighteenth Street Gang (M-18); and pandillas, or street gangs” (Renwick 2016).
According to a report conducted by the Latin American Working Group Education Fund and the Center for International Policy, “For the fourth year running San Pedro Sula, Honduras’ second-largest city, has earned the title of most dangerous place on Earth outside of a war zone, with a 2014 murder rate of 171 per 100,00 people” (Haugaard and Kinosian 2015, p. 16).
Tatiana Reinoza and Luis Vargas-Santiago “propose the concept of the narco-city as a deterritorialized and global city that connects industrials [sic] centers, and migration points with established illicit narco-economies (such as in Chicago, Ciudad Juárez, Lima, Medellín, Rosario, and San Pedro Sula) whose vast network of supply, demand, and distribution renders us all complicit and connected to this violence” (2015, p. ix).
The use of English phrases on the chalkboard hints at the emergence of a deterritorialized and transnational U.S. Central American identity while possibly denouncing the violence that children of Central American descent often witness or fall victims to in the United States.
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Acknowledgements
My deepest gratefulness to the reviewers for their invaluable suggestions, and to the Latino Studies editorial team, especially Lourdes Torres, for their work. I also want to thank Francisco Aragón from Letras Latinas at the Institute for Latino Studies for facilitating my interview with William Archila when he visited Notre Dame in 2010. I’m also indebted to Dr. Tatiana Reinoza for inviting me to contribute to the Counter-Archives to the Narco-City exhibit catalog, which became the inspiration of this essay. And finally, my sincerest gratitude to William Archila and Alma Leiva for their friendship and generosity. I hope their works continue to inspire us for many decades.
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Moreno, M. The “art of witness” in US Central American cultural production: An analysis of William Archila’s The Art of Exile and Alma Leiva’s Celdas . Lat Stud 15, 287–308 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-017-0069-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-017-0069-8