A civil war in El Salvador tore them apart. Their high school reunion brought them back together
USULUTAN, El Salvador - They spun around the dance floor, as lighthearted and energetic as teenagers. Classmates sipped mojitos in the sticky heat. Former flames traded private smiles under trees strung with lights. The brains were there, and the athletes, the troublemakers and the do-gooders.
"How young we all look," Mauro Adan Arce boomed into the microphone, prompting applause and laughter from the lined faces smiling back at him. In a corner, white letters backlit with red were a testament to their age: Promo 1978. Class of 1978.
It was a high school reunion, but the school they all remember is long gone. The revelers were home, but it wasn't really home anymore.
They were 20 years old when a civil war ripped through El Salvador like an earthquake and tore their lives apart.
They watched death squads riddle bodies with bullets, faced down the National Guard in hope of escape, abandoned dreams to start over in Los Angeles, left behind mothers who would lose multiple sons to immigration. More than 75,000 Salvadorans died; millions more fled.
A little more than half of the National Institute of Usulutan's graduating class remained, building lives on the ruins of their country. Twenty-five years after, they returned to Usulutan to reunite for the first time. In November, a second reunion brought about 40 of them together again.
