After Stories: Transnational Intimacies of Postwar El Salvador

By Irina Carlota Silber

This book builds upon Irina Carlota [Lotti] Silber's nearly 25 years of ethnographic research centered in Chalatenango, El Salvador, to follow the trajectories—geographic, temporal, storied—of several extended Salvadoran families. Traveling back and forth in time and across borders, Silber narrates the everyday unfolding of diasporic lives rich with acts of labor, love, and renewed calls for memory, truth, and accountability in El Salvador's long postwar. Through a retrospective and intimate ethnographic method that examines archives of memories and troubles the categories that have come to stand for "El Salvador" such as alarming violent numbers, Silber considers the lives of young Salvadorans who were brought up in an everyday radical politics and then migrated to the United States after more than a decade of peace and democracy. She reflects on this generation of migrants—the 1.5 insurgent generation born to forgotten former rank-and-file militants—as well as their intergenerational, transnational families to unpack the assumptions and typical ways of knowing in postwar ethnography. As the 1.5 generation sustains their radical political project across borders, circulates the products of their migrant labor through remittances, and engages in collective social care for the debilitated bodies of their loved ones, they transform and depart from expectations of the wounded postwar that offer us hope for the making of more just global futures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Aug 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9781503632189

Book preview

AFTER STORIES

Transnational Intimacies of Postwar El Salvador

Irina Carlota Silber

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

© 2022 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

ISBN 9781503609099 (cloth)

ISBN 9781503632172 (paper)

ISBN 9781503632189 (electronic)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021052422

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.

Cover photo: Reclaiming the fields, Chalatenango. Early 1990s. Ralph Sprenkels Cover design: Rob Ehle

Typeset by Motto Publishing Services in 10.5/15 Adobe Garamond Pro

For Antonio, Cenzo, and Inés

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Preface

1. Before

2. Numbers

3. Bodies

4. Objects

5. After

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

FIGURES

Figure 1: Family, Chalatenango. Early 1990s.

Figure 2: Author in El Rancho, Chalatenango, 1997.

Figure 3: Repopulation, Chalatenango. Early 1990s.

Figure 4: Reclaiming the fields, Chalatenango. Early 1990s.

Figure 5: Children in the afternoon, El Rancho, Chalatenango, 1997.

Figure 6: Children waiting in the Grupo Escolar, El Rancho, Chalatenango, 1997.

Figure 7: Infants of postwar, Chalatenango. Early 1990s.

Figure 8: Travel in Chalatenango, 1997.

Figure 9: Tweeting official numbers.

Figure 10: Community festival and postwar play, Chalatenango. Early 1990s.

Figure 11: Commemoration of child martyrs, Chalatenango. Early 1990s.

PREFACE

Breathe in and imagine the soft sway to the left and to the right. Breathe out. We are packed in tightly, backpacks on our laps and two gallons of potable water between our feet. Our thighs, probably sticking to the vinyl upholstery, are pressed up against a neighbor—perhaps it is a young mother, like really young, fifteen years old, holding her infant daughter as she creates a little breeze by waving an embroidered handkerchief that she keeps ready on her left shoulder. She has a few colones in her brassiere.¹ We learn this because that is where we now keep our forty colones for the week’s visit. Or perhaps we are seated next to an elderly man wearing a worn straw hat. The machete for the milpa tied to his hip, he moves out of our way. We say con permiso (with permission, or excuse me) as we scooch in. He is accompanied by his teen grandson, who is sporting jeans and a striped polo shirt. They are coming from doing a mandado (an errand) in the capital of Chalatenango. It is hot and the air sweet-sweat smelling. It is such a good smell. We’ll come to miss it. Crave it. It is a bit fetid, for sure, but we will conjure it to remind us of Chalatenango’s earth, the land erupting with corn, fresh beans, and flowers—deep red, fuchsia, violet, orange—all blooming. Such a beauty and bounty of commingled smells: homes with their wood-burning comal (griddle) and tortillas toasting, the hand-washed laundry drying on a line and wafting its perfume left by the big blocks of soap that we learned to handle. And that whiff of bus diesel. We are in what is called a microbus, a small passenger van that has been ingeniously refurbished on the inside to seat at least twice its original capacity. There are no seatbelts, and we are happy to have a spot and make the 10:00 a.m. ride. Otherwise, we would have to wait for the 1:00 p.m. pickup truck, where we would have to hold onto the side, hoping not to fall off on that bumpy curve where we know a curlytopped, adored toddler tragically flew from his mother’s grip. Some of the windows open, some do not. We start off on a cracked, sand-colored cement road, up an incline, through communities that line the way. There are new development-funded cinder-block homes—not yet painted, just the original standard gray—interspersed with others made of bahareque (often bamboo and adobe).² It is not yet the turn of the twenty-first century, which will be marked by massive emigration to the United States and the resulting majestic homes in Chalatenango, with enormous wrought-iron gates and four-wheel-drive vehicles parked out front. We are young back then. My hair is plaited. We try not to romanticize and fall in love with a country and its people.

This book is about El Salvador, about the aftermaths of war, and about how generations of Salvadorans create meaningful lives. It is also, as a result, an indictment of US foreign and domestic policy, past and present. This is important to me, as an Argentine-born and US-raised anthropologist. I’ve been steeped in this work for a long time, and so this book also tracks relationships and intimacies in the field over time. The terrain of everyday life has shifted locally, globally, professionally, and personally for me and for many of the people we’ll meet in this book. In part, I offer my thoughts in an effort to engage with these shifts—small and large—speak truth to power, and step up and step aside with solidarity and a politics of recognition.³ Anthropology as a discipline continues to wrestle with white supremacy, its colonial history, and its relationship to public scholarship—how anthropologists develop, pursue, and present their research, with whom, to whom, and for what purpose. You’ll see, Reader, that I’ll be presenting an always partial, positioned, and reflective account with the aim to contribute in some way to the arc of justice. I write to you all directly, inviting you to join me as readers, thinkers, listeners, critics, and coconspirators, as world-makers in the beauty of our diversity. I do so in the same way that was modeled for me during my first trips to El Salvador in the early and mid-1990s.⁴ Back then, women and men in the Salvadoran countryside—in the Department of Chalatenango, the former war zone where I spent most of my time conducting doctoral research (in the summers of 1993 and 1994, and in 1996–1997) in a repopulated community comprised of recently transitioning insurgents and their community supporters—would instruct their listeners, including me, to really imagine it. Imagínese, people would often say to initiate their storytelling, asking me to imagine being a laborer like them on a cotton or coffee plantation in the 1970s, escaping in the 1980s through the mountains, in the dark, with just the stars for light, body walking behind body during a military bombardment or to imagine being a guerrillera in the FPL (Popular Liberation Forces), one of the five branches of the insurgent Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN).⁵ Chalatecas and Chalatecos, which is what residents of Chalatenango call themselves, pushed me to understand, to feel, in the richness of their narratives’ sensorium, their lived experience and their theories of knowledge about macro- and microlevel social, political, and economic forces that contextualized the stories they shared.⁶ These are stories that they continue to share, decades later. When I write to you, Reader, it is to honor this invocation of imagining it and to extend a politics of recognition that goes both ways.⁷

This book fits into an ever-expanding body of work, most recently by a new generation of interdisciplinary Salvadoran scholars.⁸ To date, there are books and studies about El Salvador’s literary culture and political history, about the armed conflict (1980–1992) and insurgent politics, and about the postwar period and people’s wartime memories. Scholars, activists, and policy makers have written on the impact of transitional justice, on the power of electoral politics and gendered social movements, and of course, on the Salvadoran diaspora, couriers, coyotes, gangs, and unaccompanied minors from the Northern Triangle—just to mention a few topics.⁹ This book moves us across geographic locations, from the rural countryside of Chalatenango to the United States, to places like northern Virginia, New Jersey, and Los Angeles. It also moves us across time as I weave together stories from my early anthropological fieldwork that started in 1993 in El Salvador and that continues, with a different pacing, ebbing, and flowing even as I edit these words in 2022.

I hadn’t intended on writing this book, but I’ve been pulled to imagine it for more than twenty-five years because of the relationships born from fieldwork. As anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod reminds us, it is important not to underestimate the devotion to others that fieldwork entails.¹⁰ Reflecting on her own experiences in the foundational text Veiled Sentiments, she emphasizes the give and take required and the ways that fieldwork is a (rare) form of respect and care for other people.¹¹ Abu-Lughod’s insights help me to share and to frame what I have come to think about as the intersection of insurgency and displacement and about my own anthropological responsibility with stories that started out as ethnographic and can now illuminate contemporary historical processes. Because this book moves back and forth in time and across locations, I offer some thoughts on intergenerational, diasporic Salvadoran lives in the making perhaps of a particular US-Salvadoran story.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the lives of young Salvadorans I first met in the early 1990s who were raised through a Chalateco everyday-radical politics and who many years later migrated to the United States after more than a decade of peace and democracy. They span age groups, from infants born in the early 1980s through those first years of postpeace in the early 1990s. Some children were born amid battle and flight in areas that would later become repatriated communities. Others were born in the Mesa Grande refugee camp in Honduras and recalled their early years of repopulation marked by the death of their kin. And still others were born in those very early days of peace. They constitute what I term the 1.5 insurgent generation—the now young adult children of the forgotten former rank-and-file Salvadoran revolutionaries—who are remaking transnational families in expected and unexpected ways. While I’m intentionally borrowing or playing with the sociological literature on the 1.5 immigrant generation—understood as youth who migrate from their land of origin to a new country at a young age, are raised in this new context, and straddle a series of cultural, linguistic, legal, political, and economic fields between their often first-generation parents and their second-generation siblings born in a new land—my project is not a conventional case study or sociological examination of generation.¹² Reader, this is a book about the Salvadoran diaspora and about what Ralph Sprenkels theorizes as postinsurgent lives¹³ in the longue durée of a postwar full of struggle, possibility, and a living through it all in the everyday as generations redefine the very meanings of posts.¹⁴

Specifically, this is a book that tries to help us think through key themes that I argue are hegemonically leveraged in the knowing about El Salvador. I’ve organized the book, chapter by chapter, around three key tropes. We’ll explore assumptions around the following: (1) the alarming numbers of all things violent, (2) the traumatized, injured, débil (debilitated) and subversive criminal-migrant bodies, and (3) the things or objects, and their lack, of war and postwar. I’ll be suggesting that numbers, bodies, and things have come to define and flatten much academic and popular imagining around war, displacement, the migrant, and the refugee for El Salvador and beyond. But I’ll also be thinking about how these same three categories can illuminate other kinds of knowing and connections around El Salvador’s postwar. And so, while these three themes form the central chapters in this book, they are threaded through my focus on stories that circulate across and between communities through diverse audiences and that also form part of my own ethnographic archive. In offering them, often including the original Spanish to theorize along with my interlocutors’ words, I seek to underscore the long struggle of Chalatecas and Chalatecos for truth, justice, and accountability and expose the alternate narratives of postwar truth-telling that emerge in daily life and the kind of world-making these alternate narratives can inspire.¹⁵

In part, I’ve noticed how these stories create a before and an after, or rather, many befores and many unanticipated afters: before the war, before the influx of AK-47s when insurgents just had homemade bombs, before refugee camps, before the cease-fire, after the peace accords, after the 1994 elections of the century, after the historic FMLN presidential victory of 2009, after the surge of migration, and after the birth of a first grandchild in a distant, unknown land. These befores and afters call for the recognition of an everyday wartime heroism and for rescuing histories of violence, memories of trauma, and an abundance of loss. These befores and afters negotiate the ups and downs and persistence of transmigrant life. These befores and afters, replete with bodies, numbers, and things, entangle with my own anthropologist and personal paths of inquiry, curiosity, solidarity, acompañamiento, hope, outrage, and love. As a result, they bookend our narrative path.

The five chapters build on each other—peopled, storied, and generational. In some we’ll explore the ethnographic archive that we can now read as history, and in others we’ll think about how migrants curate their own archives. We’ll be attentive to the underbelly of things often exposed in the juxtaposition of the spectacular stories and the quieter ones, some told in a whisper and that reveal an affective radicality of making a life amid insurgency and the longue durée of dispossession.¹⁶ Throughout, we’ll see examples of what I’m calling an ethics of collective care, which responds to processes of debility that in the war and its after are key elements in the making of a Chalateca life. I’m careful of seeming too romantic, of eliding what we now know about the embodied experiences of intergenerational trauma, and of placing the burdens of utopic hope on youth amid the now established arc of disenchantment.¹⁷ Yet I do hope there is a truth in underscoring quotidian moments of dignity, of beauty, and of the intimate practices of reckoning and even forgiveness that erupt despite or alongside the lack of reintegration, reconciliation, and justice in El Salvador’s diasporic postwar. I’ll argue that this is a paradox lived across generations, embodied anew by the 1.5 insurgent generation.

Reader, I’m not alone in asking questions about generation.¹⁸ This has been a recent theme in the literature on Central America in particular, and I’m excited by what this focus can open up for us, what tensions and possibilities emerge across contexts and generations.¹⁹ Some, for example, have explored the supposed apolitical stance of youth that is matched interestingly by their increased tolerance for gender and ethnic justice and belief in democracy.²⁰ Others are illuminating how new generations are questioning party politics’ sacred dogma and historical hierarchies and the binaries of Left versus Right that these reproduce.²¹ Work on migration, including Leisy Abrego’s Sacrificing Families, has explored the pain and longing across families and generations in the diaspora.²² Research has also highlighted the shifting subjectivities of returned youth and their existential anguish.²³ This scholarship informs my own.

What I’ll be arguing about generation is quite ordinary: it matters. On the one hand, I contend that the 1.5 insurgent generation’s moral frameworks are born from their kin’s revolutionary participation, the radical political project they were reared in, and that this socialization paradoxically produces entrepreneurial, law-abiding—although mostly unauthorized—migrants.²⁴ And on the other hand, the arguable moral clarity of those who remain in Chalatenango sustains a hegemonically leveraged politicized identity in the region that continues to fight against impunity. As we travel across temporalities and geographies, we’ll think about how these trajectories are entwined, about those who are absent, and about those who remain. We’ll also think about how labor and ideology are tethered through remittances and in the persistent invocations for memory, truth, justice, and repair. As such, my interest in generation offers a study at the intersection of insurgency and migration, attentive to numbers and bodies and to injury and agency, a study on all that was lost (and sometimes gained) as we explore histories that negotiate a continuum of violence with narratives of survival, strength, and persistence.²⁵

There are many ways we could step into this book. There are, as I have indicated, so many befores to honor. Chapter 1 will bring us through a few as we chart out a positioned and partial course. The first chapter also sets the tone for the book by asking us to break apart assumptions that we may have about El Salvador. That’s why we’ll start by meeting a revered elder from the community that I call El Rancho in the municipality of Las Vueltas in Chalatenango, El Salvador. She shared a few folktales with me in 1996, and I have carried them with me ever since. Chapter 1 will also explain my research method and provide a brief review of Salvadoran history, postwar ethnographic context, and the impact of migration. Subsequent chapters will focus specifically on the book’s themes.

Chapter 2 offers my interpretation around the frenetic sense of numbers and analyzes, for example, the statistics of epidemic violence and waves of migration. Here we’ll explore my theorizing on violencia encifrada—codified, encrypted violence made possible by numbers that are entangled with storytelling and memory.²⁶ Chapter 3 explores stories about the bodies of war and postwar to bring into the conversation theories of disability and what Julie Livingston and Jasbir Puar, among others, discuss as debility. Theorizing in Spanish, through the concept of debilidad, I’ll forward what I’m terming an ethics of collective care as central to El Salvador’s longue durée. Chapter 4 highlights both the act of carrying and the materiality of postwar. In part, it offers a reading of the things that Salvadoran retornados, those human beings who have been deported back to El Salvador, carry back with them. I term this an archive of the returned and ask us to hold in tension memories and futures.

Chapter 5 serves as the concluding chapter and plays with what I’m calling Salvadoran after-stories, about how El Salvador continues to be framed in that longue durée of postwar but how it shifts and shapes paths across generations. This too is the afterlife of revolution. I borrow from historian Saidiya Hartman’s theorizing on the afterlife of slavery in which she shows us that slavery still persists as an issue in the political life of black America . . . , because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago.²⁷ And so, in this last chapter, I attempt to theorize what comes after, so to speak, these after-stories and the afterlives of revolution by bringing it all together—the everyday unfolding of diasporic lives rich with acts of labor, love, and renewed calls for memory, truth, and accountability.

Reader, we’ll be traveling back and forth in time and across borders, from that microbus ride in the mid-1990s to virtually accompanying the fortieth anniversary commemoration of the 1980 Río Sumpul Massacre in Chalatenango, during which approximately six hundred Salvadoran men, women, and children were killed. We’ll be thinking through anthropological responsibilities and transnational intimacies, and we’ll learn from generations of Chalatecas and Chalatecos who represent the raison d’être of the revolution and who were to be the fruits of struggle. We’ll be exploring the many alternate ways of knowing and what they can conjure for us all.

For now, let’s begin in November 1996, in Chalatenango, El Salvador, with an admired elder that I will call Nanita and her love of storytelling. Imagínese. Imagine it.

CHAPTER ONE

BEFORE

IT WAS MY THIRD EXTENDED VISIT to a former war zone in El Salvador, to the municipality of Las Vueltas in the Department of Chalatenango. I was just starting fourteen months of doctoral research, which would culminate in my first book, Everyday Revolutionaries: Gender, Violence, and Disillusionment in Postwar El Salvador.¹ In that book, I explored what I call the entangled aftermaths of war and displacement in the lives of former rank-and-file revolutionaries. I unmasked a central paradox of El Salvador’s neoliberal, deterritorialized democratization: the postwar inability to survive under a democracy that produced insecure, clandestine, precarious, obligated, violent, and yet at times productive possibilities in migration. Ultimately, I argued that gendered postwar disillusionment was a key characteristic of El Salvador’s transition to peace and neoliberal democracy. I wanted to highlight the positioned and powerful critique of past insurgent sacrifices—the broken promises and bankrupt dreams of struggle—articulated by what I term the too often elided everyday revolutionaries.

But back then, in November 1996, my research was still coming together. Change was in the air, and hope was in the air. Youth was in the air. Even the experienced were so young. The protagonists of war and their children were just that, children born in war, in refugee camps, or in repopulated communities in that moment of transition to peace—infants of postwar. In retrospect, this focus on the agents of insurgency and peace building eclipsed other research paths, including the experiences of Chalateco and Chalateca elders. Recently though, I came across one of my earliest field recordings with Nanita, a respected and much-loved community elder.² Nanita wasn’t my grandmother, though she had told me to call her so as she welcomed me into her home. Young and enacting solidarity through ritual kinship, I did.³ On most evenings Nanita would unwind her long silver hair and let it drape across her back while she smoked a cigarette. She would sit in the hammock, typically reserved for her husband upon his return from the fields, and swing gently with thin puffs of smoke around her. She was beautiful. The Chalateco nights were beautiful, expansive, and starry or, during the rainy season, heavy with powerful storms.

I picture Nanita in all her glow. Already, back then, much had changed since the earliest days of postwar—things that spoke of the importance of infrastructure.⁴ Nanita’s home had a tile roof over the corredor that had replaced the original lámina. We were talking by the light of a single hanging lightbulb and not a kerosene-lit candle. A cement-block sink, or pila, was erected in the passageway that held the community’s recent potable water streaming from a new faucet. Nanita’s daughter who I will call Elsy was putting the youngest of her children to bed, and I’m not quite sure why, but Nanita asked if I wanted to hear a story, from before. Having read a significant amount of testimonial literature from survivors of war in El Salvador about their militant or insurgent pasts, I was expecting to collect her lived experiences that included her gendered and generational wartime labor; she had prepared thousands of tortillas for the guerrilla insurgency—at the beginning of it all, when participants were called milicias—before heading for the Mesa Grande refugee camp in 1983. Instead, Nanita softly, her voice was always just above a whisper, offered a few cuentos (stories) that her father had told her when she was young. One was about a wandering king and a humble, poor yet generous woman who had given the king a drink of water from her broken pitcher and, as a result, months later received goblets of gold. The longest story was about a man and his wife, a pig, a pair of shoes, and a gender-bending thief.

BEFORE WAR STORIES: NANITA’S FOLKTALES

Nanita started her story this way: Había una vez un anciano que le decían, el Abuelo. Entonces, llegó un joven y le dijo, ‘Abuelo, enséñeme a trabajar como usted trabaja.’ (There once was an old man that they called the Grandfather. One day a youth arrived, and he said, Grandfather, teach me how to work like you do.)⁵ I have to admit that the story was quite difficult to follow. Somewhere along the way, the joven became a thief (un mañoso), a trickster character who fooled the old man and his wife in various ways. Reader, please bear with me; this may not be the opening story you were expecting.

The mañoso first stole the old man’s coveted pig, only to then return it to be butchered. Did he not want to do the work? Was this a skill already being lost? With the old man’s guard down, the thief traveled to the couple’s home and befriended the Abuelo’s wife. Indeed, he breached private gendered spaces by asking to borrow the old man’s razor and mirror in order to shave. He did so to suss out where the elderly couple stored their meat. I wonder about all the intrigue, the intimacy of asking to borrow another man’s razor, the bodily vulnerability, the act of grooming, a young man in front of an old woman. In chapter 4, we’ll come back to wartime razors and bits of mirror, so hold on to this image. In any event, the old man learned about the young man’s visit and subsequently moved the meat to a locked cofre, a chest.

But once again, the thief outmaneuvered the elderly couple by stealing the cofre keys and the old woman’s justán—back in the day, women and girls wore slips as undergarments beneath their dresses or skirts.⁶ The thief, dressed in the slip, haciéndose que era la mujer and posed (or performed) as the Grandfather’s wife. Through various queer acts of gender-bending deception, the thief took off with all the meat, leaving the elderly couple outwitted. Taking on the voice of the old man, Nanita explained, A pues, hoy sí nos dejaron sin la carne y sin tu justán (Well now, today we are left without the meat and without your slip). The last soft words on the tape are Nanita’s in her playful voice: Hasta aquí llega (That’s it), indicating that the story was over.⁷

When I first collected this story, I didn’t know what to make of it. I was supposed to be researching narratives about the armed conflict and people’s gendered sacrifices. Soon I would learn, though, that the testimonial genre, so powerful in the war, was temporally (and temporarily, I would now add) exhausted, as I documented in Everyday Revolutionaries.⁸ What I mean is that most of the people I spoke with in the 1990s in Chalatenango had stopped giving their testimony about the war. The testimonio serves as an act of witnessing, a personal yet collective and public call for human rights and social justice, co-constructed and aimed at a particular international audience. Indeed, in the past I have written about how one family used a book of testimonies as toilet paper when they ran out.⁹ So, following the advice of one of my mentors, linguistic anthropologist Bambi Schieffelin, I focused on the talk of everyday life that was full of people’s cogent theories on their sources of pain and hope. Many residents in the repopulated communities of Chalatenango, where I conducted my research and where Nanita lived, reflected on their mediated agency amid the arc of brutal wartime repression and postwar deception. Nanita’s story didn’t seem to fit, and in retrospect, I have a hunch that I set it aside out of anxiety, and in an attempt to heed the call by Black feminist scholars to decolonize anthropology.¹⁰ I was supposed to be doing important anthropology of human rights and what would become a critical perspective in the field—public, engaged, or activist anthropology. I wasn’t supposed to be collecting a reductionist or essentializing folklore. At the time, very little had been written about El Salvador in the discipline of anthropology in the United States, and I was concerned about falling into a salvage anthropology.¹¹ And so, like generations of anthropologists before me, I set the audio recording and its transcription aside, securely locked in my personal and professional archive. This archive is also part of the story.

Recently, in an effort to restore decomposing tapes, I began digitizing them. Some tapes consist of interviews with community leaders, popular education teachers, women and men on community councils, and leaders of various nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), but so many are of events, an attempt to capture the naturally occurring speech, those everyday conversations that happened at large gatherings, at workshops, at meetings, and in households. I digitized the tapes in real time, listening to the recordings as they transferred into sound files. That was when I heard Nanita’s soft whisper, her storytelling performance that I missed back in 1996 and that I synopsized earlier. Am I wrong to imagine her coy smile? The original transcript is full of ellipses, words that I could never make out. Words that I desperately want us to understand. What key do they hold for us about Chalatenango and the arc of one woman’s life?

And so, Reader, all these years later I asked Nanita’s daughter Elsy to help me understand the story for this book, and she reconstructed it for me. As readers of Everyday Revolutionaries may recall, it is thanks to Elsy that I gained entrance to so many spheres across Chalatenango and the United States. Nanita’s earlier story appears whole, neat, and tidy, but it came together in spurts—filed away over decades and then restored and reanimated across locations over a few days. I shared with Elsy the audio file that carried Nanita’s voice, apologized for the poor-quality sound, and asked if she had understood the stories. Did she remember them? Could she explain them and help me fill in the blanks? Had her mother told her these stories as well? Were they folktales or parables? What was their cultural meaning? I had missed so much of the stories. I was hoping that Elsy’s explanation would make it clearer as to why her mother had shared them with me. I created a barrage of questions. Too many questions.

Meanwhile, I was worried about my request. What emotions could get stirred up in hearing a mother’s cadence twenty years after her death? The last time I had shared photos I’d taken in the 1990s,