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49 La verdad circula por todas partes” (“truth circulates everywhere”), La Prensa Gráfica proclaims in a publicity campaign. A 2003 advertisement from that campaign is particularly striking. The photograph shows a group of young men wearing caps and carrying backpacks, barely discernible in the darkness. The men are jumping on a train, presumably on their way north, toward the MexicoU .S. border. One of the migrants points and looks directly at the camera— perhaps with a mixture of defiance and fear—while his companions are busy finding their footing. The staff and readers of La Prensa Gráfica meet his gaze, the captured moment in a full-color, two-page advertisement—the uncertainty of migration, the instability of a moving train, the darkness and danger associated with undocumented travel. “To search within and outside our borders, to follow the facts no matter what the consequences, to transmit the news with actuality is our job” the advertisement states next to the photograph.1 A second image evokes similar uncertainty—a news crónica, this one by Óscar Martínez of the digital newspaper El Faro, chronicles only a few of many nights in the centros botaneros (bars and dance clubs) of Chiapas, Mexico. Also in the darkness, undocumented Central American girls and women (most of them between the ages of ten and thirty-five years) work as waitresses or dancers , and in many cases are forced into prostitution. Most of the young women interviewed by Martínez left extremely abusive conditions in their homes in Central America. Coming from a context where domestic violence was the most common familial relationship (something witnessed and experienced since their childhoods), women like “Keny” and “Erika” intended to make their way through Mexico, and eventually to the United States. Instead, somewhere after crossing the border between Guatemala and Mexico their bodies acquired a different value as single migrant women, and, significantly, as Central American 2 The Desperate Images “ 50 SALVADORAN IMAGINARIES women. They are the victims of violence and sexual assaults, their money and identification documents are stolen, and all that remains is a body to be traded for an existence now far from their migrant aspirations. The trade is elemental, merchandise reduced to bare life, and Martínez describes it eloquently in his chronicles: “There is . . . an expression coined in this path of the undocumented: cuerpomátic. It refers to flesh as a credit card with which one can obtain security on the journey, some money, so your travel companions will not be killed, a more comfortable train ride . . .” (Martínez 2010, 86; emphasis added). The migrant body is likened to a credit card, even to an automated teller machine. The word cuerpomátic suggests hybridity of body and machine. It also suggests the possible and real dehumanization of migrants, as if somehow they are commodities and able to readily set their feelings aside for the sake of mere survival during their journey. These bodies are used and burdened with emotional and physical pain, and with debts that sometimes are deferred into uncertainty and eventually cannot be repaid. Through textual analysis of news items and the images they evoke, this chapter takes a closer look at histories of violence and family separation, and also examines media portrayals of amputated and repatriated bodies as contested symbols of social relationships and migration in the Salvadoran transnational imaginary. Many of these news stories are drawn from the section “Departamento 15” of La Prensa Gráfica and from the news section “En el camino” (a title that can be translated as “On the Road” or “On the Path” or “On the Journey”). “En el camino” is the result of in-depth reporting carried out primarily in 2008 and 2009 in southern Mexico, produced by journalists and photographers of El Faro—a Salvadoran online newspaper founded in 1998, and Latin America’s first completely digital newspaper. This section of El Faro includes investigative news stories, chronicles, interviews with migrants and Mexican authorities, photo essays, and editorials. A book of chronicles and a photography book, based on the reporting and photo essays, were published in El Salvador in July 2010 (Mart ínez 2010; Ponces, Arnau, and Soteras 2010). This discussion of “En el camino” is of significance for developing an analytical understanding of competing narratives and imaginaries of Salvadoran migration. I also discuss an Internet forum/bulletin board. On this site, Salvadorans in the diaspora engage in “crime storytelling” (Moodie 2010) and develop emerging ways...

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