Beyond Displacement: Campesinos, Refugees, and Collective Action in the Salvadoran Civil War (review)

In 1993, just after peace accords ended the 12-year civil war, I joined a group of activists from New Jersey in a visit to Los Amates, a repopulated community in Chalatenango, El Salvador. I remember being flummoxed by some exchanges with the people there, many of whom had been active in a faction of the FMLN (the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) and some of whom had lived in Honduran refugee camps. After they showed us bomb craters and fed us iguana, we sat in a circle under the flowering trees of an adobe house. There they told us about current projects (a water system) and proposed future initiatives (a school). They did not offer the emotion-laden testimonials I knew from U.S. solidarity events.

Reading Molly Todd's thorough and engaging book brought me back to Los Amates. It helped me understand those interactions, as it will do for any reader who participated in 1980s solidarity movements with Central America. Todd's goal is to counter images of refugees and campesinos as victims. She aims to show they were often agents able to plan and organize—as New Jersey activists saw in those sober meetings under pink-tufted branches. Experienced in transforming "their often grim reality into an advantage" (playing the victim) while in refugee camps in Honduras (p. 129), these men and women we met in 1993 were strategizing for a new reality.

Todd documents how during the war, refugees called attention to injustices and forced changes in policies or gained more aid. But savvy self-portrayals comprise only one way that campesinos from the northern departments (Chalatenango, Cabañas, and Morazán) exercised agency. In each chapter, Todd describes different aspects of organization and mobilization. She suggests that their agency was not just resistance to state repression, but also the outgrowth of a paradoxical freedom they had had before the war; living in the economically marginal tierra olvidada (forgotten territory), these campesinos had developed their capacities in part because of lax state surveillance.

When the state's attention did turn north and it began persecuting suspected insurgents, many campesinos abandoned their homes. Todd endeavors to show the "conscious strategies" of flight in which they formed "mobile communities." Eventually many participated in mass border crossings into Honduras. There, housed in refugee camps and not allowed to work, they survived on aid and developed skills with the support of Christian groups and the United Nations. Many learned to read. They studied and wrote their own histories, challenging elite versions of events and asserting Salvadoran citizenship. Finally, in the most dramatic demonstration of agency, they set the conditions for their return—before the war ended and in defiance of the desires of the Salvadoran state.

Todd provides rich detail and some surprising revelations distilled from a diversity of sources, including government, human rights, and U.N. archives, as well as private collections. She effectively incorporates media and literature research and draws on powerful oral history interviews. She enhances interpretations with songs and poetry as well as art and posters produced by Salvadorans in exile. At the same time, however, she herself acknowledges her study as "flat." In stressing northern Salvadoran campesinos' historical agency, Todd says she is echoing essentialist identities created by all social movements (p. 226).

I am not sure that such a celebratory strategy is necessary or advisable today. Anthropologist Irina Carlota Silber's recent work with campesinos in Chalatenango, Everyday Revolutionaries (2010), for example, offers a complex portrait of contemporary disillusionment in a neoliberal present without diminishing past accomplishments. Todd might have told us a bit more about the context in which her interviewees remembered the past. She notes at the beginning and end of the book that conditions remain difficult. Certainly, many international supporters have turned elsewhere (water systems and schools are not as dramatic as massacres). Through her clear...