Salvadoran Imaginaries: Mediated Identities and Cultures of Consumption by Cecilia Rivas, and: Sacrificing Families: Navigating Laws, Labor, and Love Across Borders by Leisy Abrego (review)

The crisis of Central-American unaccompanied minors crossing the U.S.-Mexico border has dominated recent discussions of migration and refugee flows in the hemisphere. Two recent groundbreaking studies on the impact of migration on Salvadoran identities and familial structures offer critical background on the roots of the problem. The authors were both born in El Salvador and this connection informs their deep, highly intuitive observations and analyses of text, narratives, and institutions from their respective disciplines of communications and sociology.

Cecilia Rivas conducted ethnographic fieldwork during the period of 2005-2006, anchoring her focus and perspective from within El Salvador. Through archival and ethnographic methods, Salvadoran Imaginaries: Mediated Identities and Cultures of Consumption traces an outward journey through Mexico, taking us to complex and original sites of analysis such as Salvadoran malls, news media, and call centers serving U.S. companies in the capital, San Salvador. She argues that media coverage of migrant aspirations, consumption in shopping malls, and training in call centers highlight cultures of increasing consumerism, emigration, and dependence on remittances. For Rivas, these are the spaces where people learn to self-regulate and become subjects of a “Salvadoran imaginary” (5). She charts changes in Salvadoran quotidian practices and boundaries between Salvadorans at home and abroad.

In the first chapter, she examines how newspapers such as La Prensa Gráfica construct a transnational community through their stories in the supplement and digital section, Departamento 15, an imagined 15^th department (the national territory is comprised of 14 departamentos). The section highlights emigrants’ encounters with tragedy in the form of assault, death, mutilation, and rape aboard the freight train or “la bestia” as they cross through Mexico to the United States. Later, she interrogates the success/failure narratives in Departamento 15 against the acute aversion of all things Salvadoran in the novel El asco: Thomas Bernhard en San Salvador. Written by exile Horacio Castellanos-Moya, this novel caustically interrogates what it means to be Salvadoran. Whereas the supplement strikes an affinity for Salvadoran products/food and longing to return “home,” Vega, the protagonist, mocks all things Salvadoran. Exalting the intellectualism of the outside (i.e. Canada, where he resides), his observations of “Salvadorans” are emetic; from within a dive bar he expresses disdain/distaste for the country and its people. In other words, the scathing critique of identity/kinship in the novel throws the 15^th department into question.

Through observations at the mall and interviews with call center workers and Salvadoran journalists, Rivas examines what it means for individuals to be comfortable or socially versed with the crossings of a “global” economy. From the position of people living in El Salvador, Rivas points to the constructed nature of identities, particularly when call center workers deploy English language proficiency to connect themselves to a global terrain that makes them rethink their affiliations and social positions. Highly educated call center workers share space with deportees, and the government designs a sort of a study abroad program or paid internship experience at these centers (113-114) for children of emigrants. Rivas carefully argues that it is through these sites/places where interactions reframe narratives of connection and distance—sometimes inverting the relationship of interior/exterior in unexpected and productive ways.

How do the poor figure in or engage into spaces such as the mall? Rivas alludes to their exclusion, briefly focusing on market vendors without permits who carve out an uneasy permanence/presence in San Salvador’s streets. It would have been important to include some of their views on the malls, the informal economy in the streets, and their discussions of newspaper stories. Do ordinary...