The exodus memory community: Leveraging oral history records to understand collected memories of violence

Abstract

Memories about historical episodes of violence are a window not only into experiences of people’s past struggles but also about their aspirations for the future. In this article, I focus on memories about the armed conflict in El Salvador (1980–1992) to better understand how sets of individual recollections reveal collected patterns in the narrative arcs of those who personally lived through the conflict. In so doing, I aim to expand prior works that have explored communities of memory in El Salvador. To accomplish this goal, I rely on an oral history archive. Using a grounded theory approach, I investigate how people in a rural community in northern El Salvador remember the armed conflict, how their collected memories compare with prior research about life stories of former members of the guerrilla movement and the armed forces, and finally, how oral histories contribute to a scholarly understanding of social memories of violence. I find that, within this archive, people’s recollections of the armed conflict can be organized around four themes: (1) community organizing, (2) repression, (3) exile, and (4) reconstruction. I suggest that the metaphor of the exodus serves to understand how individuals from this region remember the armed conflict. I argue that the exodus memory community reveals the importance of acts of everyday resistance to state repression, sheds light on how noncombatants remember the conflict, and suggests a larger and ongoing trajectory to community organizing in which the war is an important chapter, but not the only one.

Keywords

armed conflict collected memory community of memory insurgency oral history

Introduction

Oral histories are a space of inter-subjective encounters where new renditions of the past can be not only recalled but also engendered (Hughes, 2013). In this sense, oral histories are important sources to explore what Olick (2007) refers to as collected memory, that is, patterns across the narrative arcs from sets of individual recollections. Thinking about the collected memories of historical episodes of violence, I employ Iwona Irwin’s concept of communities of memory to focus on the shared bonds that link together such stories, drawing from the case study of the Salvadoran armed conflict (1980–1992).

The armed conflict of El Salvador was a military confrontation between the governmental armed forces of El Salvador and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). It is estimated that approximately 75,000 people were killed and another 8000 had disappeared during this period. The conflict ended with the signing of a peace accord in 1992. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of El Salvador established that 85% of documented human rights violations during the conflict were perpetrated by State security forces, 5% by the FMLN, and 10% by unidentified perpetrators (United Nations Security Council, 1993).

Emerging work in the field of memory studies has suggested that Salvadorans remember the war through a binary lens. Focusing on the political parties that formerly represented the two warring factions, this line of work suggests that such binary discourses constitute a project of memory, a public rendition of the past that politicians and their pundits repeatedly circulate to galvanize their supporters and demonize their political opponents (López Bernal, 2007; Sprenkels, 2011, 2012).

Other scholars have focused on the memories about the armed conflict at the community level, from the perspective of those who personally experienced the conflict (Binford, 2016; Ching, 2016, 2018; Juaniz Maya, 2020; Lara Martínez, 2018) and those born after the peace accord (Chacón-Serrano, 2020; Martell, 2020; Voigtlander, 2016). Among the former, a study by historian Erik Ching (2016), titled Stories of Civil War in El Salvador: A Battle Over Memory looks at published life stories from former guerrilla commanders, commissioned officers of the armed forces, as well as former combatants and ex-soldiers. Ching’s study provides an important window into the collected memories of these different actors, or, as he refers to them following Irwin’s work, “memory communities.” Because Ching’s study is based on published sources, he focuses on the experiences of individuals whose literacy skills and social capital had enabled them to bring their stories to the press. Furthermore, Ching’s meta-analysis is predicated on life stories from people who hailed from different parts of El Salvador, thus accounting for a wide cross-section of personal experiences. However, because of the wide heterogeneity of such sources, this meta-analytical approach may gloss over nuances of memory processes at the micro-level; in other words, of experiences of individuals who have a shared cultural context, such as inhabiting the same geographical space and sharing a similar regional history.

In this article, I aim to address this gap by exploring a collection of oral histories from former combatants, supporters, and nonaffiliated civilians from a rural community in northern El Salvador. I argue that the collected memories from this oral history archive can be grouped into a new memory community and that the metaphor of exodus can encapsulate the shared experiences therein. The exodus memory community is an important contribution to research about memories of the Salvadoran armed conflict because it brings attention to experiences that are not available in print, and thus highlights the value of oral histories in unearthing other communities of memory. In closing, I call for collaborative research partnerships between scholars and community members to produce and analyze oral histories among other actors involved in the conflict including former insurgents whose operations revolved around major city centers, inhabitants of other rural territories that were controlled by the guerrilla movement, and people who inhabited territories in dispute. Likewise, I suggest several avenues for future work: (1) drawing from oral histories, exploring the possible presence of memory communities in other regions, such as northern Morazan, and among other stakeholders of the conflict such as former members of the armed forces, government sympathizers, city-dwellers, and inhabitants of territories that remained in dispute; (2) probing further on the interplay between the cultural value of sacrifice and expressions of everyday resistance to state repression; (3) investigating how the survivors’ generation and the post-conflict generation interact, and whether they belong to the same or different memory communities; and (4) articulating the conceptual link between oral history and social memories of violence.

Conceptual framework

The field of memory studies is concerned with discerning the ways that societies remember the past and understanding the present-oriented goals of memory practices for groups, communities, and nations (Robbins and Olick, 1998). Sociologist Jeffrey Olick suggests the term “collected memory” to refer to the narrative patterns across collections of individual memories (Olick, 2007). Olick argues that attending to individual memories is important because, while memory is socially shaped, individuals are the ones who remember. By attending to individual memories, researchers can understand the nuances, similarities, and differences across collections of mnemonic agents, thus adding depth to scholarly renditions of social memory. However, while the notion of collected memory may indicate the existence of a link between individual and social memories, it does not explain it (Tumblety, 2013).

When collected memories remain stable in time, they gradually permeate into public expressions of remembrance such as annual commemorations (Hirst and Echterhoff, 2008). In the case of incidents of widespread violence, where broad swaths of people experienced trauma, the social dimension of such memories starts with, but is not limited to, the collective patterns of psychological disruption. Instead, the social dimension in memories about historical episodes of violence becomes evident in the disruption and transformation of the social order (Neal, 1998). Furthermore, when individual memories of violence are aggregated, the patterns in their narrative arcs can be collected into groups. Focusing on the memories of the Holocaust in postwar Poland, communications scholar Iwona Irwin (Irwin-Zarecka, 1994) refers to these narrative groups as communities of memory.

Taking inspiration from Irwin’s framework, historian Erik Ching (2016) explores memory communities coalescing around the history of the armed conflict in El Salvador (1980–1992). Ching draws from hundreds of published life stories and found four memory communities: (1) civilian elites, (2) military officers, (3) guerrilla commanders, and (4) rank-and-file actors or “testimonialists.” The latter category is comprised of “former guerrilla combatants and sympathetic civilians” (Ching, 2016: 247).

Ching bases his study on autobiographical materials. The first three memory communities he identifies offer an insight into the experiences of “literate, relatively affluent urbanities, who possibly have access to a computer” (Ching, 2016: 7). By contrast, the third community, the rank-and-file or testimonialists, represent a segment of the population whose stories reached the printing press partly thanks to the support of other stakeholders such as international cooperation agencies, local nonprofits, and grassroots associations. In Ching’s book, the testimonialists cover a wide cross-section of geographical regions, for his sources include individuals who were in the outskirts of the capital, the west, and the east. In this regard, the wide heterogeneity of Ching’s sources may leave out specific patterns at the micro-level. For example, the very name rank-and-file alludes to a shared experience of fighting on, or at least collaborating with, the insurgency movement.¹ This emphasis leaves open the question of how noncombatants articulate their life stories during the conflict, and how such stories contrast with those who fought for either side.

In addition to Ching, a documentary titled La Palabra en el Bosque (The Gospel in the Woods) (Gould and Henriquez-Consalvi, 2011) explores the history of the conflict from the perspective of community members from northern Morazan, in eastern El Salvador. Relying on 26 interviews with former catechists and community organizers the film tells the story of the political evolution of the peasantry in northern Morazan; from gaining awareness of injustice, to organizing in cooperatives and worker’s unions, and to finally taking-up arms in an attempt to not just to bring about change, but to survive escalating military repression. The film offers a historiographical account of the methods and forms of mobilization during the 1970s and 1980s, rather than a study of memory communities. Nevertheless, the parallels in the film’s narrative with Ching’s testimonialists memory community are worth noting.

I aim to expand on Ching’s work by drawing form a collection of oral histories of people hailing from the same geographical region. Like published life stories, oral histories are concerned with the experience of individuals as they remember at the time of their interview (Thompson, 2000). However, unlike a published autobiography, an oral history does not require the interviewee to be literate or have the social and financial capital necessary to bring their written account to the press. Instead, oral histories are in-depth interviews where an oral historian collaborates with a storyteller to piece together the latter’s life experiences (Bornat, 2013). This collaborative process means that oral histories are products of inter-subjective encounters that not only reconstruct, but actively contribute to the production of the past being remembered (Hughes, 2013). Thus, oral histories can be used not only as sources for historiography, but also for research into social memory. Furthermore, given that these oral histories belong to the same region, their analysis may reveal patterns about how memory is remembered among people whose life experiences have been marked by a shared context.

During World War II, the term oral history was coined to refer to the process of recording by handwritten notes the life stories of interviewees (Thomson, 2007). In the 1960s, with the widespread availability of the tape recorder and the advent of the people’s history movement, oral history became a widespread practice among scholars (Thompson, 2000). In the 1970s, some researchers downplayed the value of oral history as a research practice because it was allegedly subjective, unreliable, and depended on the biased nature of human memory in contrast to documentary evidence which was deemed as objective (O’Farrel, 1982). However, it is now accepted that documentary sources are also social constructions and contingent on the circumstances of their creation (Trace, 2002). By the same token, human memory has been proven to be dependent on the context of its elicitation, socially constructed, resilient, and comprehensive (Thomson, 2011).

Importantly, while historians often treat oral histories as sources for historiography, I am concerned with understanding social memories of violence through oral history records. In this regard, I follow Palmberger’s (2016) articulation of memory and history as narratives, not juxtaposed but in dialogue and mutually shaping one another. Focusing on the case study of the armed conflict of El Salvador (1980–1992), I analyze a collection of oral history records to answer the following questions: (1) how the individuals whose oral histories are included in this archive remember the armed conflict? (2) how these collected memories compare with what Ching would refer to as “the-rank-and-file” memory community? (3) how can oral histories support inquiries into social memories of violence, such as those pertaining to the Salvadoran armed conflict?

Methodology

To perform this inquiry, I analyzed a set of 25 oral history records from the Unfinished Sentences Archive. These oral histories resulted from interviews with residents from Arcatao, a rural community in the northern department of Chalatenango, El Salvador. Arcatao is situated in a valley and faces, toward the north and east, the mountain chain that marks the northern border between El Salvador and Honduras. By the year 2009, 2946 people lived within the 22.81 square miles of the Arcatao territory. This town is located 83.9 miles north from San Salvador, and 19.9 miles east from the capital of the Chalatenango department (Pleitez et al., 2011). Chalatenango was a major battleground throughout the civil war. Many of its inhabitants joined the guerrilla movement, and those who did not fled to the Honduras. These refugees gradually returned to El Salvador between 1988 and 1992 (Wood, 2003).

Unfinished Sentences is an initiative of the Center for Human Rights at the University of Washington. This project aims to document human rights violations perpetrated during the Salvadoran civil war. Its oral history archive is a collaboration with two more organizations:

The Pro-Historical Memory Committee (PHMC). A grassroots organization devoted to preserve the collective memory of Arcatao (Map 1).

The Institute of Human Rights (IDHUCA). An office of the Central American University in San Salvador.

Map 1.

Arcatao’s location.

The stories of the Unfinished Sentences archive were recorded during the summer of 2014. The interviews were recorded 22 years after the end of the armed conflict at a moment in which PHMC members noticed people from their generation were beginning to die. Therefore, they felt an urge to ensure that their memories would be preserved for future generations.

Although the public archive features only excerpts from the oral history interviews, the CHRUW provides access to the complete transcripts for research purposes. I was granted access on the condition that I preserved the anonymity of Arcatao residents. I accomplished this by omitting interviewees’ identifying information and any names mentioned during the interview. In addition, I excluded from my analysis publicly available excerpts.²

In collaboration with IDHUCA, the CHRUW obtained a grant to perform the oral history interviews. Upon reception of the funds, a team of researchers affiliated to the CHRUW traveled to Arcatao and conducted the first 5 out of the 50 records in the archive. These first experiences served as models and provided training in the process of oral history interviewing for the IDHUCA staff. Thereafter, members of the latter organization conducted the remainder of the interviews.³

Each interview session was divided into four segments. The first consisted of requesting the participant’s consent for recording their testimony. The second segment was a brief account of the participant’s life from birth until the start of the war. The structure of this segment varied in proportion to the participant’s age: people who were already in their twenties or older by the time the war started devoted more time than those who were still children or adolescents. The third segment consisted of the interviewee’s life experiences during the war. In the fourth segment, participants were asked to describe life in Arcatao after the peace accord, explain their current involvement in community-based initiatives, and add anything they deemed relevant.

The use of oral history records as primary sources has had an impact on the analysis. Unlike in ethnographic approaches, the amount of information is fixed. The researcher may interrogate the archive, but he cannot expect to find more information than what is already there. In the case of Unfinished Sentences, the individuals who contributed their testimonies are surely a subset of the entire population in Arcatao. Therefore, it is possible that other residents not included in the archive may remember the conflict differently. Despite these limitations, oral history records can be reinterpreted by asking different questions (Yin, 2009), and they may provide evidence not only by describing its contents, but also by detecting its omissions (Trouillot, 2015).

To analyze these records, I employed a grounded theory approach (Charmaz, 2001; Corbin and Strauss, 1990). I segmented my analysis along three interlocking phases: (1) first cycle coding, (2) second cycle coding, and (3) drawing conclusions. Writing memos (Emerson et al., 2011) served as an analytical bridge to connect the three phases. During the first cycle coding phase, I employed descriptive, attribute, in vivo, and process codes. During the second cycle coding phase, I employed focused and axial codes to select the most salient themes, and then describe their variations and bring them together into categories.

I found four categories as a result of my analysis: (1) community organizing, (2) repression, (3) exile, and (4) reconstruction. The first two categories operated transversally in most oral histories. Both categories influence each other. Categories 3 and 4, exile and reconstruction, are more closely aligned to the historical unfolding of the armed conflict and the peace accord. All four categories are influenced by historical events, but they are not chronological segmentations of participants’ stories. Instead, these categories are collected narrative patterns that aim to account for the most salient processes that participants narrate in their oral histories.

Finally, in the drawing conclusions phase, I drafted concept maps linking and contrasting categories. I wrote analytic memos about these visual displays, with the aim of arriving at a theoretical code; in other words, “an umbrella code that covers and accounts for all other codes and categories formulated thus far” (Saldaña, 2016: 250). I arrived at the code of exodus to encompass the experience of the community in Arcatao. This code covers the bond of people with their land; their pervasive desire to improve their living conditions; their drive to resist and survive military repression; and, their work to rebuild their lives which continues until the present.

Results

Community organizing

In these oral histories, the experience of community organization was a salient process. Even those who opted to not join a warring faction, experienced the impact of community organization in their lives. Most storytellers recognized their harsh living conditions, either because they lived with just enough to get by or because of their difficulty accessing basic services, such as healthcare and education. P17’s testimony illustrates this point:

So, what motivated people to organize, was because there really were unjust things going on. I mean, imagine, when we went to the coffee plantations to collect the harvest, well, we went to work, and really the food that we were given was only beans. To sleep, we would do so out in the open underneath coffee plants; and then, on top of the sleeping and food situation, they would steal you at the scale, so they would steal from your pay. Then, you maybe had an amount of money that you knew you had earned, but at the moment of getting paid, it turned out that you were missing some of that money, and that wasn’t just. (P17)

For those who joined an organization in the 1970s, they framed their journey as becoming aware that their living conditions were not just hard, but unjust, and thus began advocating for change. In this process of gaining awareness of injustice storytellers mentioned the church as a key player in their journeys of awakening. Arcatao residents remembered how, early in the 1970s, new, younger priests arrived at their communities and began preaching that God did not want their children to suffer, and that unjust living conditions were against His will. Those who “awoke” to injustice in this way began engaging in different forms of advocacy such as mutual aid for those with most dire needs (e.g. collecting money for people who had no means to buy their own food), and demanding better living conditions:

We organized to see if we there could be a change of life, because the big ones did not want to let go of anything, the rich folks. Those would impose tremendous repression to kill everyone, the rich and the armed forces. (P12)

Between the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the political crisis evolved into a state of war, people remembered new expressions of organization. If the prior ethos was advocating change, gradually, the primary drive became surviving military repression. At this point, organizing meant taking up arms. The activities within the insurgency were diverse and varied over time. However, the goals of most of such activities were threefold: (1) holding their ground to the Salvadoran armed forces, (2) ensuring the continuation of everyday operations at guerrilla camps, and (3) taking the initiative militarily, such as ambushing military units who entered guerrilla-controlled territory, capturing guns, and collecting supplies in neighboring towns. Some people assumed non-belligerent roles at guerrilla camps such as cultivating the land, treating the wounded, or digging “tatus” (bomb shelters) to take cover during air raids.

Those who did not join the insurgency movement similarly had a moment of becoming aware to injustice in the 1970s, save for those who were children in that decade, whose moment of political awakening came about in the 1980s, as the armed conflict unfolded. Their stories are very similar to those who did organize. However, nonaffiliated individuals chose not to take up arms. This did not necessarily mean that such individuals were unsympathetic or unsupportive of the revolutionary struggle, but that they did not want to fight themselves. They experienced pressure from both warring factions to the point where they had to flee to avoid being targeted by either side. State security forces treated people in the region as guerrillas, and insurgents suspected nonaffiliated noncombatants were potential spies. In this sense, people who took no sides in the conflict remembered being on a side of their own. The story of P23 exemplifies how unaffiliated individuals experienced pressure to take a side or get out of the way:

In those moments there was a lot of people that, maybe because of hatred and envy, would give the wrong information to . . . From the side to which they belonged . . . In those moments, since they were on the side of the authorities, they would attempt to make other people seem bad . . . They had envy or hatred towards them, so that the authorities would . . . Because that is how many people died, maybe unjustly. That’s why many people were forced to turn to one side or another, because if you didn’t turn to one, the other ones would kill you. Let’s say that’s what happened with us. (P23)

Finally, those who organized mentioned doing so throughout the 1980s at the latest. With the signing of the peace accord, when the insurgency movement disarmed and transformed into a political party, former combatants and sympathizers continued organizing at the local level. At this point, however, their focus shifted from surviving to reconstructing their community and improving their living conditions. Examples of reconstruction-oriented organizing included providing labor for infrastructural projects such as building houses and installing running water. By the end of the interviews, when storytellers brought their narratives to their present, they emphasized their current goal of commemorating the past. This meant both honoring their own experiences of struggle and resistance as well as remembering those who died during the conflict.

Repression

In these oral histories, repression appears repeatedly as a phenomenon that is multimodal, networked, transnational, and gendered. Storytellers remembered repression starting in the 1970s and lasting until the peace accord. State security forces inflicted repression through different modalities. The terms most frequently mentioned for these modalities are invasions or disembarkments. These modes would often result in massacres or guindas. While all these terms have points of overlap, they are not synonymous. Guinda is a Salvadoran slang term that means to escape hurriedly (RAE, 2016). However, when storytellers use the term in the context of the armed conflict, guinda refers to the experience of large groups of people running away from military operations, typically carried out via helicopters. People referred to such operations as invasions. As people in the Chalatenango region saw the invasions coming, they would begin running in masse:

They would really make us run, I mean, because they would bomb us, whether it be with the helicopters, because they were already throwing bombs from far away, but there we stayed until . . . all of the year 1980. Then, around the beginning of 81, they said: the invasion is coming. (P06)

On the ground, the people fleeing would sometimes have to sort through paramilitary groups positioned ahead and sniping at the people fleeing. These operations would pause in the evenings because soldiers could not aim in the dark but would resume the following morning. Thus, guindas could last several days or even weeks. Guindas were more common in the first 3 years of the war, when the army employed a scorched earth approach to combat the insurgency (Bourgois, 2001).

Another mode of repression that people remembered was disembarkments. Like the invasions, disembarkments were carried out through deployments of infantry troops via helicopters. However, unlike with invasions, storytellers described how disembarkments were not meant to exterminate everyone on sight. Instead, soldiers were deployed in search of enemy combatants. Storytellers recalled how the soldiers would apprehend people in the hamlets for questioning or have everyone gathered and separated by gender and age groups so that the soldiers could more easily interrogate everyone. In some instances, people recalled soldiers employing a carrot-and-stick pattern to their interrogations: the soldiers would offer snacks to the children such as candy or gum, while asking them for information about the guerrillas. The soldiers would then triangulate this information with what adult men and women had previously said and act accordingly. At the end of an interrogation, soldiers may accuse some people of being guerrilla fighters or supporters of the guerrilla movement, and then those accused would be either killed, taken prisoners, or disappeared after being dragged into the helicopters.

While military operations often resulted in massacres, the phenomenon of repression was not limited to such expressions of violence. Instead, storytellers described repression as a constellation of networked forms of violence with varying triggers and outcomes, and these forms were different for men and women. People remembered repression as networked because one form of violence, such as being accused of being an insurgent without proof could then lead to other expressions of violence. For instance, individuals captured were likely to be disappeared. Those disappeared—and lucky enough to survive—were tortured. Those tortured remembered that their risk of dying was higher, mostly because they saw people in their same situation who were killed during torture sessions or dying shortly after. The case of P18 illustrates this point. P18, an ex-combatant, was detained in 1986 in Honduras while on a mission to purchase guns for his organization. He was first, detained, then disappeared. Nobody knew where he was. The Honduran State did not acknowledge having him in custody. Thus, P18 was in a legal limbo. During this period the soldiers tortured him:

At 5 in the afternoon they threw me into a truck. They threw me face down and one said to the other: “Look at this one, put two quintales⁴ of sugar on his back and you climb on top of him and pull him by the hair!” I reached a point where I would no longer feel anything. I felt that my body was no longer mine because it had fallen asleep, everything from my column down. I could not even move my feet. I felt that we drove by parts that I already knew and then I noticed a turn where their base was located, [the base of] the territorial forces. They got me off [the truck] and said: “Now we are going to kill you.” “That is well,” I said to them. “I’m in your hands. You’ll do as you please.” (P18)

Through the intervention of the Red Cross, the Honduran government finally recognized P18 was in its custody. Thus, the armed forces eventually transferred him to a different facility. P18 remembers being placed under the jurisdiction of a judge. From this point on, he was no longer tortured, received regular meals, and was eventually released.

Women’s experiences of repression followed a similar path, but different in significant respects. Early in the war, women remembered living in houses in a hamlet in the mountains. This occurred in the second half of the 1970s, when community organizations were transitioning from strictly political goals into military ones and State security forces began scaling up their repressive tactics. While men were living in camps, and would only approach the hamlet in the evenings, women would stay indoors with the children. Things changed in the 1980s, when women remembered seeing their peers murdered. From this point on, women who were apprehended would not only be subject to disappearance, torture, and killing, but also rape and mutilation as P04 remembers:

Well, they took the women. They said that someone saw, maybe someone who was looking. They undressed them, took them to a pond, had them shower, and then took them, they took them like if they [the women] were cows being pulled by ropes. They arrived at my dad’s house. There, they got to the house. They [the soldiers] raped them [the women]. There he [his dad] had ropes still. He wasn’t there anymore, but everything had been left behind. They raped them and hung some. Two of them, they took them to a house to insert them in a wood press. They spread the timber with gasoline, and then, they added some more timber. We don’t know if they [the women] were still alive or dead, only that the scent could be felt . . . And others, they hung them, and they threw them to the side of a mountain, on the side of the stream. There they were found. To an old lady they took out, they carved her out, they took out the baby. She was on the verge of giving birth. (P04)

Women mentioned witnessing rape or having heard of women who had been raped. However, none in these oral histories mentioned having personally experienced sexual abuse.

Repression was also a transnational phenomenon. Both the Salvadoran and the Honduran armed forces harassed and killed people from the community. Early in the war, massacres like the one at Las Aradas in 1981 were joint operations where both armies collaborated in executing scorched earth campaigns. Repression was also multicausal because it could be triggered by different factors. People remembered how they began being threatened, persecuted, apprehended, and tortured as soon as they joined a political organization. Although those who did not organize were not immediate targets of the security forces, they could still be subject to different forms of repression. Starting in the late 1970s, state security forces began treating everyone in the northeastern Chalatenango region as insurgents, shooting first and asking questions later. For instance, P01 recalls how he, his sisters, and a few cousins survived a shooting. They were on their way to school one morning and stopped before a bridge that the guerrillas had bombed. The bridge was the connection between the nearest city and their hometown. When P01 approached the wreckage of the bridge, a group of national guards positioned at the opposite side of the river opened fire on them. They were not interrogated or warned to walked away first.

Storytellers repeatedly mentioned finding ways to reclaim the bodies of friends and relatives killed by state security forces. This task became high stakes in the late 1970s. When the national guard killed someone, the guards would accuse anyone who reclaimed the dead body as insurgents, and thus would capture and kill them too. Nevertheless, some people would still take the risk. P02’s father, for instance, went to the post of the national guard after one of his relatives had been killed. He claimed not knowing who the dead person was and argued that he was volunteering to bury the body to fulfill a Christian duty. The guards did interrogate him and threatened him, but ultimately allowed P02’s dad to reclaim the dead body. In reality, P02’s dad was in fact related to the murdered individual but knew that admitting their connection would not only prevent him from retrieving the body, but also ensure the guards killed him too. Likewise, during the 1980s, when the armed conflict erupted into an open military confrontation, the bodies of those killed during the guindas would be left on the ground. When the military operations concluded and the soldiers retreated to their bases, the relatives and friends of the fallen would trace back their steps in search of their dead. This was a dangerous task because paramilitary groups and soldiers could still be deployed nearby the bodies to capture those who reclaimed them.

Importantly, while most storytellers refer to instances of repression perpetrated by the armed forces, a few also recalled violence perpetrated by the insurgents. Such episodes are mentioned far less frequently than violence from State security forces such as the National Guard or the armed forces. For example, P02, who did not organize, recalls that early in the 1980s, a lookout from the guerrillas, who was also a neighbor, gave an ultimatum to P02’s family to leave the community permanently or risk being killed:

We were filling up the sacks, picking up my mom when I saw a bush of, of beans, and a rifle comes out towards my mom and I tell her: “mom, they are going to kill you!” And my mom turns and says: “but man, you?! How can you think this? Don’t you know me?” Well, the guy was blind in one eye, and he told her: “we have orders to kill everything that moves here. Things are not easy, and you already left. Stay where you are now. Don’t come back. So, fill up your sacks and don’t come back because today, it’s enough that I know you. But here, the order of the comrades, of the organization, is that everything that moves is to be killed.” (P02)

In some instances, insurgent repression stemmed from an attempt on the part of the rebels to impart justice within their ranks. For instance, one person recalled how one of his relatives, who had joined the insurgency, was “fined” and sentenced to be hit 30 times with the flat side of a machete for gambling away the money of her spouse.

Storytellers also emphasized how repression had a profound impact in their lives. They expressed pain for losing family members. In addition, people experienced personal and interpersonal conflicts. At stake in these struggles were competing goals in how to cope with their situation. Decisions that caused family conflict included whether to leave their homes and when to do so, attempting to move on with their regular lives or taking precautionary measures like stop sending their children to school, continuing to support the movement from the frontlines, or in supporting roles in the rearguard. These tensions increased in parallel with the escalation of repression, and the degree of engagement with the insurgency movement. Sometimes, tensions reached a climax and led to people making difficult decisions such as splitting the family unit to increase their chances of surviving or couples breaking up so that each person could pursue their preferred course of action.

Exile

People describe their experience of exile as a period of liminality. The experience of exile, that is, of leaving their communities against their will to save their lives, started gradually. At first, most storytellers remembered going to the hills near their community, where they would sleep in the open. They would occasionally return to their homes in the evening to gather supplies and check if the situation had improved. Eventually however, State security forces began searching for them in the hills. Some families split so that the men could stay and take up arms, whereas the women and children left for Honduras. Other families remained together in the guerrilla camps. Life at the camps was difficult:

Life there [at the camps] was like, we didn’t have the conditions of everything that . . . like we had been chased away from our bases where we lived and then, over there, we did see a critical condition of life. Because as you know we didn’t have the conditions such as food, right, then we couldn’t go downhill to the hamlets. There we had left all our belongings. (P21)

For those who stayed in the guerrilla camps, they would lead a life constantly on the move. When the armed forces launched large-scale operations, the guerrillas would retreat and return until the soldiers left. Noncombatants at the guerrilla camps would cultivate the land to ensure a food supply. However, sometimes large-scale military operations lasted for extended periods of time, and thus, combatants and noncombatants living at guerrilla camps would stay away longer. In these circumstances, people remembered starving until they either established a new camp elsewhere or returned to their original location, where they had provisions in stock and crops to tend to.

For those who left for Honduras, their situation in the early 1980s was also precarious. They had to fend for themselves, finding places to stay. As more and more people arrived, the Honduran government in coordination with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) concentrated refugees into the Mesa Grande area, where refugees established a camp. At Mesa Grande former refugees remembered organizing into committees to coordinate distribution of aid and improve their living conditions. This path was complicated by the fact that the Honduran armed forces kept the camps under surveillance 24/7 and would kill people who attempted to leave:

[In Mesa Grande], we were like in a cattle pen. We could not leave that pen because the Honduran [soldiers] were there. We had to remain clustered where we were. We had to get out of there and many people tried to. [Those who did] would not go back. . . they were later found. The Honduran soldiers beat them, killed them. Many people died that way in Mesa Grande. (P22)

The path less mentioned was that of migrating to another region within El Salvador, such as the regional capital of the Chalatenango department or San Salvador, the capital of the country. People who followed this path remembered contending with the suspicion of the armed forces, but they did not tell stories of other forms of repression such as being detained, threatened, or tortured.

Neither of these paths were linear. Some people who joined the insurgency would eventually lay down their arms but continued supporting the insurgency movement with non-belligerent tasks such as cultivating the land. Others who had originally settled in the refugee camps returned to fight alongside the insurgency. Some used the guerrilla camps as temporary stops along their way onto the refugee camps in Honduras.

Reconstruction

People described the reconstruction of their communities as a gradual process, a process that began even before the armed conflict ended. This happened because those who had settled in the refugee camp in Mesa Grande began resettling between 1987 and 1989 as P17 remembers:

We ran into another problem: that people were repatriating, they were repatriating individually. But when a person repatriated, they not only came to El Salvador, others went to Belize, others to Guatemala, like that. Individually. Then, the FMLN said: “well these people are repatriating.” Then they said: “we must offer an alternative, an alternative because it is not good that people repatriate individually. Then, we started to promote a massive repatriation, right. If they wanted to repatriate, they had to go in a large group, massive, in large quantities; I was there in that moment, when all of that occurred. (P17)

Upon their return, former refugees remembered being harassed by the Salvadoran armed forces. Probably because of this, storytellers talked about the reconstruction of the physical infrastructure of their community until after the conflict ended.

In contrast to the early return of former refugees, combatants went back to their communities until 1992, when they were demobilized as part of the peace accord. The now ex-combatants remembered feeling distrustful of the Salvadoran government and afraid for their safety. They feared that surrendering their weapons would leave them defenseless should the government betray the accord. However, most combatants and noncombatants expressed feeling exhausted after 12 years of the armed conflict and wanted to continue with their lives in peace.

Reconstruction also had a personal dimension since people began setting roots. Those who were single found partners, married, and had children. Others pursued personal projects such as academic degrees or vocational trainings. Interestingly, in their ongoing efforts to improve the living conditions in their community, some people drew a link between remembering their struggle for justice during the 1970s and 1980s and the socioeconomic development of their community in their present.

Discussion

Like other scholars who have explored the memories of the Salvadoran armed conflict (Binford, 2016; Ching, 2016; Lara Martínez, 2018; Silber, 2011), my work highlights the hardships of everyday life during the war such as starvation, the liminality of exile, and early reconstruction. Aiming to encompass these difficult experiences, I propose that people in Arcatao can be circumscribed within a memory community that I refer to as the exodus community. I drew from the concept of exodus as a metaphor to explain the relationship between Arcatao residents and their stories of struggle. The biblical story of exodus represents “the deliverance from oppression, the birth of freedom, and the divine sanction of human rights and responsibilities” (Hendel, 2001: 622).

The exodus metaphor decenters the militant intentionality of the revolutionary discourse as articulated by Sprenkels (2011, 2012). This is important because the oral histories I analyzed include people who were not combatants, some who organized within refugee camps but were not directly linked to the guerrilla movement, and some who were sympathetic to the revolutionary struggle yet opted not to join any community organization during the 1980s. Furthermore, the exodus metaphor affords interpretations of repression as martyrdom (Peterson and Peterson, 2008), which is congruent with the local culture identified in other communities in northeastern Chalatenango of valuing sacrifice for the revolutionary cause (Lara Martínez, 2018).

While the memory communities identified by Ching (2016) were solely predicated on the similarities of their narrative patterns, I articulate the exodus community both based on such similarities as well as the shared geographical location of storytellers. The lives of the people whose oral histories I have analyzed here began in Arcatao and revolved around the Chalatenango region during the conflict, a factor that partly shaped my findings. By exploring the exodus community, I have found some affinities and a few differences with Ching’s rank-and-file memory community. For instance, in the exodus community, nonaffiliated civilians remembered being pressured to choosing a side, leaving the area, or being killed. Likewise, some people in the rank-and-file community remembered being forced to taking up arms. However, unlike with Ching’s sources, I found stories of people who were pressured, but nevertheless did not join a community organization or the governmental armed forces. The consequence of this choice is that such individuals were suspected by both sides and had to navigate their exile on their own. By contrast, those who joined the insurgency, or who had relatives who had joined, recalled having peer support. The aspect of their experience that brings the exodus community together then, is not their decision to organize or not, but their shared experience of exile, even though that experience varied depending on their political affiliations.

Within the exodus memory community, the experience of community organizing appears transversally throughout their stories. This is a slight departure from what Ching found among the rank-and-file memory community, most of whom joined the insurgency’s ranks because they had no choice. In the oral histories of this study, people who joined the insurgency in the 1980s describe their affiliation as a better option than being killed. However, among the exodus memory community their organizing experiences preceded the conflict and continued after the peace accords. In other words, the armed struggle of the 1980s is remembered as one modality of community organizing that responded to the circumstances of escalating repression during this decade. This finding is consistent with the narrative of “La Palabra en El Bosque” where people from a different region of the country began demonstrating peacefully, were massacred, and gradually joined the ranks of the insurgency movement (Gould and Henriquez-Consalvi, 2011).

During the 1970s, the exodus community remembered their organizing efforts as taking different expressions such as public protests and providing mutual aid for those among them with the most difficult socioeconomic conditions. Then, after the peace accord, community organizing shifted its focus toward community reconstruction, and by 2014, when the oral histories were recorded, the focus had pivoted again, this time toward commemorating their shared struggle as well as honoring those who had been killed during the conflict. In that sense, the exodus memory community produced these oral histories as part of a long-lasting tradition of community organizing that is currently focused on memory work.

The notion of community organizing as transversal, and shifting modalities based on context, is congruent with prior studies exploring the role of peasant intellectuals in the 1970s in El Salvador (Binford, 2004; Chavez, 2017). These studies describe peasant intellectuals as assistant teachers in local schools, members of rural cooperatives, and catechists who played a pivotal role in promoting sociopolitical change during the 1970s in regions that later became battle grounds during the armed conflict in the following decade. Such peasant intellectuals are identified in northern Morazán (Binford, 2004) and northeastern Chalatenango (Chavez, 2017). In northeastern Chalatenango, where Arcatao is located, people engaged in community organizing because of a gradual transformation that started in the early 1970s with the implementation of peasant schools, increased unionization among plantation workers, and a shift in the Roman Catholic Church that favored advocating for structural changes inspired by the scriptures (Chavez, 2017).

The specific traits of the exodus memory community may be partially explained by the context surrounding the creation of their oral histories. The Unfinished Sentences archive was produced to allow Arcatao residents to share their experiences with a new generation, many of whom live in other countries, most commonly the United Sates. The fact that the exodus memory community engages in intergenerational memory transmission aligns its goals with Hirsch’s (2012) notion of postmemory. Writing about the case of the Holocaust, Hirsch notices how children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors developed deeply held feelings and beliefs about this historical event. In fact, Hirsch found that the survivors’ experiences had displaced descendants’ own memories, a phenomenon that descendants experienced as a loss. She refers to this phenomenon as postmemory. Because postmemory is mediated through artworks and personal records, descendants of Holocaust survivors experienced the gaps and silences in their memories as wholes and puzzles that necessitated ordering and completion.

A similar phenomenon could be at play with the exodus memory community. Through the oral history records of the Unfinished Sentences archive, those who grew up in post-conflict El Salvador are able to interact with the memories of their forebears. Exploring how post-conflict generations engage with and are influenced by the exodus memory community falls outside the scope of this work. However, early work in other communities in Chalatenango (Chacón-Serrano, 2020) and Morazan (Voigtlander, 2016) suggests that survivors’ memories inform how their children and grandchildren understand the conflict and that these memories also partially shape youth’s positionality toward present-day challenges in their communities, such as mismanagement of funds and autocratic decision-making by local authorities.

Another way in which the context of creation shaped the exodus memory community pertains to the educational aims of the Unfinished Sentences project. Members of the CHRUW, one of the project partners, wanted to use the oral histories from the project as documentary support for history lessons in K12 programs in the United States. The aim was to showcase, through oral histories, the impacts of the Cold War in Latin America. In this context, there may be topics that were included in the oral histories that would have not been considered in other types of sources, such as prompting interviewees to send a message to the countries that sponsor wars. Likewise, other topics, which may make sense in other formats, were not included as an interview topic. For example, Ching found some accounts of storytellers’ sexual experiences, but not pertaining to rape, and accounts of inner strife within the insurgency. By contrast, I found no evidence of such incidents in the oral histories I analyzed.

Another difference between the rank-and-file memory community and the exodus community is how the latter highlights instances of everyday resistance (Scott, 1985) to State repression. I follow James Scott (1985) in understanding everyday resistance as patterned sets of actions that allow some legroom to subordinate groups to exercise their agency in a context of oppression, thus partially and temporarily disrupting the power dynamic to which they are subjected. In the case of the Salvadoran armed conflict, State repression served many functions, such as exterminating people deemed as effectively or potentially linked to the insurgency, punishing though not always killing supporters and combatants, dissuading others from joining the insurgents, and forcing guerrillas to stop fighting out of fear (McClintock, 1987).

The goal of repression, as described in these stories, was similarly to instill fear and despair. However, when people went back to reclaim the dead bodies of their relatives, or when some individuals took action to alert their relatives of having been captured, they were taking steps to move against the very goals of repression. In taking these actions, people were aware that they were risking their own lives, and yet they still did so. I specifically refer to such actions as everyday resistance, and not as overt defiance, because such actions were meant as strategies to accomplish specific goals without directly confronting the state security forces. When P02’s dad feigned not knowing the people whose bodies he offered to bury, he was relying on a cultural norm about the proper way to honor the dead. He did not confront the national guards. Like P02’s dad, other acts of everyday resistance were described as means to carry out individual goals, namely, honoring murdered loved ones. These actions, while certainly challenging the political function of state repression, were not articulated in these oral histories as linked to the revolutionary struggle, but painful aspects of people’s everyday lives during the armed conflict.

Admittedly, the phenomenon of state repression should not only be discussed in functionalistic terms but also from an ethnographic and historical perspective, and account for how the culture of terror operated within the state security forces as well as how this culture impacted peoples’ lives (Lauria-Santiago 2005). My work contributes to this task by bringing attention to one aspect of this culture of terror. Namely, how people sometimes disrupted the political function of State terror through everyday acts of resistance. The fact that the most common act of everyday resistance found in these stories is related to grief (e.g. reclaiming the bodies of their murdered relatives, interring them in proper graves) is congruent with prior ethnographic work in a different community in northeastern Chalatenango, where Arcatao is also located.

Lara Martínez’s (2018) ethnographic research in Los Ranchos and Guarjila accounts for the intimate relationship of both communities with the notion of sacrifice, a relationship that Lara Martínez traces back to pre-Columbian times. Indigenous groups practiced animal and human sacrifices as a part of their rituals to ensure the continuation of life. After the Spanish conquest, this notion of sacrifice merged with Christian notions about the sacrifice of Jesus as a precondition for human redemption from sin. During the 1970s and 1980s, this Christian notion of sacrifice became merged with the revolutionary cause. Assuming that such understanding of human sacrifice is also at play in Arcatao, it makes sense how people’s desires to honor their relatives were a strong enough motivation to temporarily and partially resist state terror. In short, this everyday resistance consisted of people risking their lives for the sake of reclaiming the bodies of their murdered relatives, which people did not link to larger political goals but to their individual connections to those murdered. This form of resistance was both a means to perform grief work—enabling them to say farewell to their dead —and memory work—creating a physical site where mourners could henceforth remember their dead.

Admittedly, one limitation of my argument lies on relying on oral history sources which I did not produce. As a result, some of my claims could be later refuted or at least revised by studies relying on ethnographic fieldwork with Arcatao residents. Furthermore, because my analysis relies on oral histories from one single location, I can only infer that the traits of the exodus community are specific to the experience of Arcatao residents, at least to those whose oral histories are included in the Unfinished Sentences archive. While I identify some parallels between the exodus community and the history of northern Morazan, I cannot claim that the traits of the exodus community apply to people of Morazán or other regions of El Salvador. Regardless of these limitations, the exodus memory community is interesting enough to merit the attention from researchers. The insights from exploring this memory community expand prior research that highlights the agency of people in the face of state repression (Binford, 2016; Ching, 2016; Lara Martínez, 2018; Silber, 2011), and suggests avenues for future work, an issue that I address in the “Conclusion” section.

Conclusion

In this study, I drew from an oral history archive to explore how the collected memories contained therein compare with the rank-and-file memory community as described by Ching (2016). I also sought to understand how oral histories support inquiries into social memories of violence, such as those pertaining to the armed conflict of the 1980s in El Salvador. I propose that the metaphor of the exodus is useful to encapsulate these memories. Specifically, I suggested that the exodus memory community serves to understand how residents from a rural community in northeastern El Salvador remember the armed conflict.

The exodus memory community is characterized by the persistent interaction between community organizing and repression, which operated in a dialectical and escalating pattern. Within the exodus community, people became aware of injustice in the 1970s, which motivated some of them to organize. This was followed by State security forces repressing them. In turn, younger generations in the 1980s, and older ones who had opted not to organize in the previous decade, remembered the early 1980s as a critical moment where they had no choice but to fight for their lives, flee, or be exterminated.

Thus, as repression escalated, the goals of community organizing gradually shifted from protesting injustice through public demonstrations, to more belligerent forms of opposition such as burning buses, and at one point, even killing guards who had previously killed community members. State security forces in turn escalated their operations, first by increasing their troops as well as the frequency and intensity of their violence against the people in northeastern Chalatenango. This escalation included actions such as killing women, whom were previously not targeted, and launching massive raids since the late 1970s and until the mid-1980s, whereas before state security forces would have launched more targeted operations.

In the exodus memory community, the escalation of repression is remembered as the trigger of their shared experience of exile, because people had to flee their homes to save their lives. The destinations people mentioned upon fleeing were guerrilla camps, refugee camps in Honduras, and to a lesser degree other towns within El Salvador. This escalating repression, the constant mobility necessary to survive in exile, and the risks of living in the frontlines, led many people to experience internal crises and interpersonal conflicts within their families.

Although people remembered the process of reconstruction as gaining force until the peace accord, the reconstruction process began when those who had taken refuge in Honduras returned, years before the armed conflict ended. The reconstruction process included both material and personal dimensions. The material dimension consisted of repairing the physical infrastructure of the community, such as houses and basic services, and the personal dimension consisted of pursuing their personal projects, such as professional careers and reintegrating their families or starting new ones.

The exodus memory community is similar to Ching’s rank-and-file memory community in devoting a sizable share of their stories to explain their interactions with repression. At the same time, the exodus community is different because of the relative importance given to acts of everyday resistance. Furthermore, the exodus community, unlike the rank-and-file one, includes individuals who sympathized with the insurgent cause but did not engage with it. Finally, while the rank-and-file community remembered their incorporation to the guerrilla ranks as forced by circumstance, the exodus community viewed their struggle as a specific modality of organizing that was part of a longer story arc that preceded the armed conflict and continued after it.

Future work is needed to explore the connection between the cultural value placed on sacrifice and the everyday resistance against state repression highlighted in the exodus memory community. Similarly, future work may explore how community organizing is articulated in other territories that were controlled by guerrilla forces during the armed conflict. The parallels I found between the exodus memory community and the narrative of “La Palabra en el Bosque” suggests that there may be other regions where similar memory communities may be found. These other memory communities may be different from those found in urban areas, where the Sate remained in control throughout the war. Thus, future work could also rely on oral histories to probe for the possible existence of memory communities among other stakeholders of the conflict, such as former members of the armed forces, nonaffiliated city-dwellers, and inhabitants of territories that remained in dispute during the conflict such as the Guazapa hill or the volcano of San Salvador.

Furthermore, future research could explore how members of the post-conflict generations in Arcatao interact with the exodus memory community: are members of the post-conflict generation part of the exodus community or a different one? If the latter, how do both communities interact? What factors shape the generational boundaries of each memory community? Prior work in towns like Arcatao suggests that survivors’ memories play a role in how youth perceive and act upon their present, in ways that recreate and resignify the armed conflict. Thus, understanding the intergenerational dynamics among memory communities can shed light into avenues to de-escalate tensions in a post-conflict context and address the gaps and silences inherent to postmemory.

Beyond the Salvadoran case, future work may further explore the links between communities of memory and oral histories. While the oral histories I analyzed had been produced years before my study, future work may further explore the role of oral histories in identifying communities of memory. For instance, a future project could engage with multiple oral history collections to articulate a narrative that encompasses multiple geographical regions. Similarly, researchers could collaborate with residents at these sites to both produce and analyze their oral histories, thus creating opportunities for deepening our understanding in how oral histories shape social memories of violence. Future studies may also explore the experiences of women, possibly identifying the presence of memory communities along gender lines.

The results of this study are important because they highlight how the armed conflict is remembered at the micro-level, that is, within communities bound by both shared lived experiences within the same geographical region and similar narrative arcs. Specifically, the exodus memory community offers an entry point into the experiences of noncombatants and suggests there may be experiences that differ based on gender. Understanding how people remember historical episodes of violence, such as the Salvadoran armed conflict, represents an important source of contextual information to make sense of the ongoing legacies of violence in the present. In the case of El Salvador, these legacies have been recently on display given the ongoing authoritarian turn that begun in 2019.⁵ At the time of this writing, August 2022, the Salvadoran government has extended for the sixth consecutive month the state of emergency (Marcos Aleman, 2022). This means that certain rights remain suspended such as freedom of assembly, defense in court, limits to administrative detention, and the inviolability of correspondence and telecommunications. In addition, the government has deployed the armed forces to police impoverished neighborhoods where street gangs are present.⁶ The criminal violence to which the government is reacting in the present is different from the revolutionary violence of the 1970s and 1980s. Nevertheless, the political function of state repression is fundamentally aligned with the one seen in previous decades: instilling fear and punishing those deemed by the government as “the enemy,” as well as their collaborators and sympathizers. Understanding how Salvadorans remember the violent past is an important reference to make sense of present forms of violence. The sakes of studying social memories of violence then, lie in creating alternative futures where violence, both past and present, is finally overcome.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the following entities and individuals: Allan E Martell, Norma Pereira, Marcelina Murcia, Erika Murcia, Jose Martell, Amparo Marroquin, Jose Luis Benitez, Max Orellana, Fidel Quintanilla, Andrea Cristancho, Margaret Hedstrom, Amanda Grzyb, Adriana Alas, Andrea Thomer, Anthea Josias, David Wallace, Paul Edwards, Silvia Lindtner, Cindy Lin, Padma Chirumamilla, Ryan Burton, Heeryung Choi, Tamy Guberek, Angela Schopke, the Pro-Historical Memory Association of Arcatao, PROBUSQUEDA, and the Human Rights Center at the University of Washington.

ORCID iD

Allan A Martell

Notes

Author biography

Allan A Martell is Assistant Professor at the Department of Information and Library Science at Indiana University. His research leverages the process of information curation related to historical episodes of violence to promote critical, nuanced memories; redress victims; and promote transitional justice in post-conflict societies. Martell’s work has been published in Memory Studies, Archivaria, and a book chapter will be published in an edited volume titled “Historical Memory and Socio-Cultural Transformation” (UNAM/UCA Editores, 2023).

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