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15 1 Remapping the Tierra Olvidada Lost Peoples, Forgotten Lands El Salvador is an agrarian society. Generations of inhabitants of the region, as well as outside observers, have been able to agree on this. What has proven more difficult to define is the role of the campesino in that society. For the most part, characterizations of Salvadoran rural folk—both indigenous and ladino—have long been coarse. In step with his compatriots throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, the Spanish Crown representative to San Salvador in 1814 reported that the natives of the region had “no culture nor religious or social knowledge.”1 Salvadoran government and commercial publications continued to draw similar conclusions throughout the first century of independence. According to an 1854 Diario Oficial entry, “They remain as always, rude and superstitious. . . . Without social needs, without a wish to improve their condition . . . they do not pursue progress nor do they seem to consider the wellbeing of their descendants.” Twenty-five years later, the same journal critiqued “the majority of the inhabitants of our villages” for being “content to grow crops of maize and beans that will never raise this miserable people above their sorry position.”2 More than fifty years later, in 1932, a Salvadoran Coffee Association bulletin claimed that the nation’s rural population was “infinitely low and remote . . . that is, they have no civilization.”3 And as late as 1973, Ignacio Martín-Baró, a scholar and priest at San Salvador’s Universidad Centroamericana (Central American University, El Salvador, UCA), concluded that campesinos assumed a passive, fatalist stance before the world: “They feel yoked to their destiny.” As a result of this fatalism, Martín-Baró continued, campesinos perceived themselves “not as  subjects capable of directing and modifying at the very least their own personal history” but rather as an object or, even worse, “a social plague.”4 In short, both colonial and contemporary elites often have characterized rural inhabitants as poor, passive, backward, and ignorant. A similar tendency is visible in representations of El Salvador’s geography. Most studies simply have dismissed the northern sector of the country— largely comprised of the departments of Chalatenango, Cabañas, and Morazán—as isolated and backward. Data compiled by the Salvadoran government confirm that throughout the twentieth century the northern departments had limited infrastructural development in comparison with other departments. Relying on such data, it became easy for analysts to dismiss the north and its population as superfluous. A 1965 Salvadoran daily, for example, characterized the region as the tierra olvidada (forgotten land).5 The World Bank subsequently assessed it as follows: “The land is marginal, the terrain is difficult, farming is by and large subsistence with relatively small acreages put out to permanent crops; uncontrolled land-use has led to serious soil exhaustion and erosion problems.”6 Scholarship on El Salvador has only further substantiated the north’s peripheral position. Many studies have focused on the development of systems and structures, for example, centralization of the state, the formation of an export-oriented economy, and the organization of national security forces. Others sought understanding of the civil war period through a similar macrolevel approach, highlighting explicitly political actors, in particular, the Salvadoran government and armed forces, opposition political parties, the FMLN, and the United States. Scholars have also paid significant attention to the 1932 uprising of indigenous and ladino agriculturists in western El Salvador and the government’s violent quashing of the rebellion, known as La Matanza (the slaughter). Until recently this subgenre, too, found explanations in the country’s socioeconomic and political systems and the actions of the government , the armed forces, and the Partido Comunista de El Salvador (Salvadoran Communist Party, PCS).7 David Browning, for example, in his now classic text El Salvador: Landscape and Society, concluded, “Little affected by the sweeping agricultural change across the centre and south of the country, . . . this northern third of the country, with its thin soils de-forested, misused, exhausted and eroded, its primitive agriculture unassisted by capital investment or modern supervision, and its social cohesion weakened by economic decline, dispersal of settlement and migration, gradually became the country’s poor, backward, and neglected tierra olvidada of the present century.”8 Other authors preceded brief notes about the north with phrases such as “only in zones that were backward and on the periphery.”9 16 R e m a p p i n g t h e T i e r...

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