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

41 3 The young priest Padre José, the son of peasants from Ojos de Agua, traveled throughout Chalatenango’s rural communities in a small white jeep.1 Usually dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, he put on only a white cloak tied with a simple length of twine to hold mass in churches still half rebuilt, some with benches, some without benches, or sometimes under trees. He celebrated first communions with children dressed in white and led in other ritual celebrations. After a year of attending these different events by Padre José, who was trained in and practiced the teachings of liberation theology, I felt ready, and he agreed to speak candidly with me about the hegemonic discourse circulating at the time: that communities were in crisis, dangerously forgetting their past in the context of encroaching neoliberal capitalism. Implicit in this critique from within leadership in communities, and across NGOs and grassroots groups, is a vision of repopulated communities in the northeast of Chalatenango as uniformly revolutionary . Explicit in this critique is a mourning for this loss and an anxiety over how to reclaim the revolutionary spirit. Specifically, in the region of Chalatenango that I focus on “history,” the “past,” or the “story” that repatriated residents are called upon to remember as social or collective memory is a heroic representation of the recent struggle.2 To be sure, a majority of the people who live in the northeast of Chalatenango, a wartime conflict zone or “liberated” territory, depending on perspective, lived the war deeply. Men and women, young and old, able-bodied or not, infants, toddlers, and children who “missed” their youth, all experienced violence and Rank-and-File History The postwar is a hard, difficult time. It is like trying to find one’s lost voice. It is about trying to make the connection between 1979 and 1997 . . . and since the Chalateco and Salvadoran peasants, they like to live in the present, and not remember the past, because of the pain. And we have to understand that as well. The anguish, the sadness, so much that was lived . . . but historical memory gives us meaning. It helps us put our feet on the ground. Interview with a Las Vueltas priest, October 1997 oppression firsthand. Many organized around their human rights beginning in the early 1970s. In the aftermath of the Salvadoran civil war, what it means to have been a revolutionary carries meaning for individual trajectories, community organizers, political parties, international development organizations, and so on. This chapter foregrounds Chalateco recollections of the past and grants people intellectual agency as makers of their own analyses. To do so, I concentrate on what I see as a process of becoming or “being revolutionary.” This process is located in people’s practices and talk and is often described as a shift or as a moment of clarity, for some more gradual than others, where a realization takes place, where injustice is reinterpreted, and where people identify their own changed consciousness as born from a feeling of agency that is physical , intellectual, and religious. For example, Hugo, a longtime participant of the struggle for human rights, what some describe as a campesino social movement (Lara Martínez 2005), reflects on the beginning of his own involvement in organizing for justice. Hugo joined the FPL in 1972 but dates his theorizing earlier: “In 1970, I started to understand things. I was already an adult, and those pamphlets started appearing, thrown around by the group that was born the first of April of 1970. The group was the FPL, the first group that would become FPL. I started reading those pamphlets that talked about social classes in the country, who are the poor campesinos, the jornales, the middle campesinos, and the rich campesinos. Y éso lo fue iluminando la idea. ¿Verdad? Y pegababa con la realidad que nosotros vivíamos. O sea la hoja era buena. (And that illuminated the issue, right? And it matched the reality of our lives. That was a good pamphlet.)” Being revolutionary , for Hugo and for others, took place in the face of unspeakable horror and the everyday violence of surviving. This history or, perhaps more importantly, people’s memories and the resulting expectations born from this relationship to the past come to characterize the regional transition to peace building. It is to this that I turn, a politics of memory, which I frame as rank-and-file history. Specifically, I take up historical recollections of prewar communal life...

Share