In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Stitching Wounds and Frying Chicken It was supposed to snow on the evening of the thirteenth of January, and I was hoping for enough snowfall to arguably keep me home. I had that familiar eve-ofbus -ride-to-Chalatenango feeling—anxious, looking for excuses to visit NGO offices in the capital rather than travel to El Rancho and traverse the Troncal del Norte. Only this was the New Jersey Transit bus system, and I was leaving from New York City. Why the nerves? I decided upon another route and took the train instead. It was bitter cold, and Chayo was waiting for me at the station, woefully underdressed in a light jacket and no sweater, gloves, or hat. While our first meeting in November 2007 was characterized by a rush to tell stories, this day together had a slower pace as we reflected upon El Rancho circa 1998. We shared a territorial distance from an imagined El Rancho, mine a decade old and Chayo’s coming upon five years. There were many silences throughout the day. Methodologically attentive to democratizing “anthropological findings,” Chayo and I read together from a transcribed audio-taped conversation from 1997. This very document is now woven into the heart of the forthcoming argument on Chalatecos positioned as not revolutionary enough. The excavation of the past, while supporting my analysis, also raised new perspectives and recontextualized reflections. For example, Chayo had never spoken so candidly about her desertion from the FPL in 1985 because she just could not stitch one more wound of battle, place another I.V., or give another injection—and she was pregnant. Like so many Chalatecos, she lived in Mesa Grande refugee camp until she repopulated Las 90 EVERYDAY REVOLUTIONARIES Vueltas. Proudly, describing her current responsibilities as head chicken chef at a national fast-food chain where we sat together to share a meal, she places her past experiences nostalgically. “Ay, cuánto sabía Lotti—Oh, I knew so much Lotti. How I wanted to work with the women. But I had the children.” The night before our visit, in looking through my albums, I come across a picture of her eldest daughter, Victoria. She is squatting in a blue dress with a yellow slip showing slightly, barefoot, her hair up in a clip, smiling beautifully with a nineyear -old toothless grin. In the photograph, Victoria is leaning against the adobe wall of their home. The picture is either from the summer of 1993 or 1994, just when Chayo’s local store was taking off. Crates of Coke bottles are on the floor, and there are no ceramic tiles, just earthen floor. Electrification had not yet come to El Rancho. Victoria is now twenty-three years old and living alone with her fouryear -old son in an extraordinary red-brick and red-tiled-roof home built over the last year at a cost of thirty-five thousand dollars. This is the third home for Chayo’s family built since repopulation in 1987. Over the last year, Chayo has spent hours designing the house, creating discrete rooms such as bedrooms and kitchen, incorporating features such as arched entrances and hallways. Before sitting down to watch several hours of home videos regularly sent by Victoria of local events such as the celebration of the patron saint, the building of the house, and the stuff of daily life—Chayo’s grandson’s first steps as he shoos chickens out of the kitchen and blows kisses to the camera to his grandparents in New Jersey—I hand Chayo the photograph of her daughter Victoria. Time, materiality, so much has changed. Chayo at first laughs and says she still has the names of people who bought groceries on credit and never paid up. Still staring at the photograph, she says about her daughter, “Ay, pobrecita—poor little thing,” the whispered words of a mother. What exactly does that photograph conjure for Chayo? I cannot answer that. I will not ask her to reflect further. Instead, one needs to ponder the silences and the gestures (Das 2007) and query, just as in 1998, how much memory can be asked of people? Pobrecita for the poverty of wartime return? Pobrecita for the injustices of democracy that mediate paths from war to migration? To answer, let us turn to Chayo and her women neighbors’ negotiation of gendered revolutionary participation and postwar development. ...

Share