Commemorating from the Margins of the Nation: El Salvador 1932, Indigeneity, and Transnational Belonging

Recent public commemorations in the US and El Salvador for the 1932 state-sanctioned killing of thousands of indigenous Nahuat in western El Salvador involve Native communities and diasporic Salvadorans who thereby bring attention to the continued marginalization of Native people and cultures. Salvadorans in the US express personal and collective indigeneity while contributing to memory and justice efforts in Izalco, the epicenter of the 1932 violence. Multi-sited ethnography illustrates how Native populations and diasporic others, two publics at the margins of the nation-state, engage popular social memory to acknowledge and commemorate a national tragedy in a process that reconfigures and remakes the meaning of national belonging.