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  • From Beneath the Volcano: The Story of a Salvadoran Campesino and His Family
  • Laura Castillo Romero and Alexander Freund
From Beneath the Volcano: The Story of a Salvadoran Campesino and His Family. By Michael Gorkin and Marta Evelyn Pineda. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2011. 201 pp. Hardbound, $55.00; Softbound, $24.95.

A civil war between a military-run and U.S.-backed government and a broad coalition of guerrillas tore apart the small Central American country of El Salvador throughout the 1980s. In From Beneath the Volcano, nine people— friends and family of Luis, a campesino (farmer)—tell us about their lives during and after this civil war. Luis and his third, common-law, wife, Julia, joined the guerrillas under the leadership of the FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) and fought in the mountains of El Salvador for over a decade. Others, like Luis’s parents and teenage sisters, supported them as couriers, cooks, and cleaners. They knew of the danger. Three of Luis’s sisters were captured, tortured, and, in the case of two sisters, murdered. Yet others tried to stay out of the conflict or, like Julia’s oldest brother, fought for the Fuerza Armada (government troops), not always voluntarily. Several of the narrators spent many years in cramped refugee camps in neighboring Honduras. The next generation, the first “postwar generation,” represented by Luis’s oldest son and Julia’s oldest daughter, know very little about their parents’ war experiences.

The narrators speak eloquently about their lives. They give those who were not there—other and younger Salvadorans, as well as the general English-reading public—an intimate, local, and broad insight into lives and social relations shaped but not determined by war. We learn about life in guerrilla camps in the monte (wilderness) and in refugee camps in Honduras. Fighting with the guerrillas demanded great sacrifices, leaving behind children, parents, spouses, brothers, and sisters for long years. Luis left behind his wife and children and they eventually became estranged and divorced. Julia was only fourteen when she left her family to fight in the mountains. There are stories of fighting and ambushes, captures and escapes, and injuries and losses. Julia tells the story of becoming a woman, fighting to be promoted from cook to radio operator and of intimate relations, pregnancies, and living with her baby daughter in the monte. [End Page 374]

As the war drew to a close, the guerrillas began settling the land around Guazapa Volcano, where much of the fighting had taken place. We learn about the settlement in these small, poor communities and their steady improvement over two decades. Long negotiations with the land owners and government after the peace accords of 1992 provided land for every settler. Luis and Julia separately moved to Comunidad Guazapa, one of the small settlements around the volcano. Although Luis claims he had seen Julia during the fighting years, she says she does not remember him. Luis eventually split from his second wife and convinced the much younger Julia to live with him. Together, they built a new life and had several children. Their house, like those of their neighbors, slowly improved, and the communities built schools, stores, and even medical clinics. While Luis and Julia had almost no schooling, their children graduated from high school and even university. Except for the rise of maras, the violent youth gangs that increasingly terrorize the campesinos, they have hopes of a better future for themselves and their children.

The stories are rich in detail and at times contradict each other. This is the nature of subjective stories. Gorkin and Pineda talk about these contradictions in their epilogue but otherwise do not intervene. They consciously—and to great effect—leave it up to their readers to make sense of the contradictions of lives and stories.

As much talk as there is about the past and the present in these stories from beneath the volcano, there is also much silence. Not everyone wants to or can talk about the difficult times. Luis’s neighbour Joaquín fought with the guerrillas but speaks only about the time after the peace accords. Marina told her brother...

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