This path was created by Nora Mabie.  The last update was by Claudia Portillo.

Silencing Memories: The Workers' Movement for Democracy in El Salvador, 1932-1963 Main Menu Welcome! Reflections of the life and times of Felíx Panameño: The Workers' Struggle in El Salvador, 1920 - 1934. Table Of Contents TOC Let them be heard! Introduction Methodology Chapter Overview The Roots of Forced Labor A Point of Departure Trade Unions and other actors New Era of Terror About Felix Social Control Transnationalizing Salvadoran Memories and Struggles Family Tree Felix Panameno Bio A Salvadoran Political Activist

Purpose of Study

8207 The Roots of Forced Labor
El Salvador has a long history of privileging one side of history—the side of the dominant class. There were two main forms of silencing that occurred in El Salvador during the twentieth century. The first method of silencing, for example, was the utilization of “official” records and media to document events by authorities who were selective in their decisions in terms of what was to become “official” information. This official information went into the records, and then made available to the public. The second method of silencing came from violence and repression that caused fear among its victims, who were less likely to speak out and much less to have their perspectives documented. The result of these practices have limited our understanding of El Salvador’s history and its people. With only a handful of testimonies surviving the initial anticommunist campaign of the early twentieth century, Felix Panameño’s narrative is a crucial profile of a political activist that counters the official narrative of communists and revolutionaries in Salvadoran history.

This study contributes to academia’s daunting task of collecting historical memories from the peripheries to challenge official histories in El Salvador. While Panameño’s oppositional narrative supplements history, the testimonials help identify changes in social practices in the United States and in El Salvador that have elevated critical consciousness to better understand the past, as well as El Salvador’s present socioeconomic crises. To better understand the importance of this thesis, it is necessary to reflect on scholarship around the process of silencing memories as well as those recuperating memories. I begin with anthropologist and historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot, whose book Silencing the Past examines the production of power and knowledge to illustrate how power can silence voices from history. I show his concept of erasure within the context of the national narrative of El Salvador in regards to its indigenous population and how it has been historically denied through various official outlets.

It was in the interest of state hegemony that the events of 1932, La Matanza, were trivialized, as were the atrocities of the Holocaust and slavery in America at different times in history by minimizing the number of victims or simply denying the atrocities ever happened. The government of El Salvador intentionally erased historical records that “dropped racial categories from the census and eliminated racial notations from the civil registry.” The “erasure” of these facts in official documents have helped support the national narrative that, “Indians assimilated and vanished as an ethnic group after 1932.”[1] We must also contend with the levels of state sponsored censorship throughout El Salvador’s history that produced and generated knowledge for the public, and what Martín-Baró calls the production of “collective lies” by the established power structures through their institutions. [2]

As Michel-Rolph Trouillot explains, the public must contend with fact “erasure” in dominant historical narratives. Trouillot refers to these tactics of denial or trivialization of facts as formulas of “erasure” or “banalization”. He addresses the importance of inspecting what has been understudied or excluded in order to unearth the silences that may be useful to break down knowledge and power.[3] “What matters most are the process and conditions of production of such narratives. Only a focus on that process can uncover the ways in which the two sides of historicity intertwine in a particular context. Only through that overlap can we discover the differential exercise of power that makes some narratives possible and silences others.”[4] Here, he provides a map to examine people’s narratives as products of power.

In El Salvador, the state-sponsored violence and repression that also ensued La Matanza silenced many of its victims and participants of the uprising. As noted by Lindo-Fuentes, Ching and Lara-Martínez, the challenge for a scholar today is the “lack of testimonies from participants of the rebellion;”[5] many were killed, some were illiterate, and others may have kept silent due to political persecutions and torturing. Furthermore, campaigns of fear disrupt lives, lead people to flee, and disconnect further disrupting memory. Under these conditions, the “official” narratives on behalf of the government have complicated national truths, and therefore, social memory work has become critical in broadening perceptions of El Salvador’s history.

However, as Trouillot points out, whether it is intentional or not, “any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences.”[6] This statement is pertinent in that my own study is a version of history which is limited in scope, facts, and therefore will have its own silences. But it is not a reason to dismiss additional historical narratives; on the contrary, I argue they must be written and published to broaden the discourse of this period in history, and as they are necessary to reconcile the process, the sources, and the conditions in which the narrative has been created. For my study, the latter helps address the importance of intergenerational exchanges of knowledge within the context of cultural identity.

From this point, I look at different scholarly work and public projects recuperating memories and creating space to engage in dialogue and advance knowledge in the studies of Salvadoran culture and history. Authors Roque Dalton and Rina Villars have written about Central American communists during the 1930s. While Dalton’s book is a testimonial based on Miguel Mármol’s first-hand accounts of the time period, Villars’ book is based on historical archives and the testimonials of family members. My thesis is similar to Villars’ work in that I’m drawing on historical archives and testimonials of family members, with the exception that I’m directly connected to the family providing the testimonials for this thesis. This personal connection allows me to pay specific attention to the storytelling process and its particular silences, the silences that inspired my curiosity and eventually my study. I also take a look at what scholars are doing through alternative public spaces such as museums, murals, and films in recuperating historical narratives that are challenging the dominant histories.
 
[1] Virginia Q. Tilley, Seeing Indians: A Study of Race, Nation, and Power in El Salvador (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), p. 31.
[2] Ignacio Martín-Baró, Writings for a Liberation Psychology, ed. Adrianne Aron, and Shawn Corne (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 188.
[3] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Beacon Press, 1995), Kindle 1533-1575.
[4] Ibid., Kindle 501.
[5] Héctor Lindo-Fuentes, Erik Ching, and Rafael Lara-Martínez, Remembering a Massacre in El Salvador: The Insurrection of 1932, Roque Dalton, and the Politics of Historical Memory (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007), p. 198.
[6] Trouillot, Silencing the Past, Kindle 563.

 

 

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  1. Methodology