Dividing the Isthmus: Central American Transnational Histories, Literatures, and Cultures

CHAPTER 7. Wasted Opportunities: Central America after the Revolutions

We do not know where we are going. We only know that history has brought us to this point and—if readers share the argument of this book—why. However, one thing is plain. If humanity is to have a recognizable future, it cannot be by prolonging the past and or the present. If we try to build the third millennium on that basis, we shall fail. And the price of failure, that is to say, the alternative to a changed society is darkness. —Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes T he passing of the twentieth century provided Central Americans in and outside the geographic isthmus with the opportunity not only to examine their condition after decades of armed conflict and destruction but also to begin a political, economic, and social reconstruction of their societies. Fast on the heels of the signing of the Peace Accords in El Salvador in 1992, a number of books on the construction of peacetime civil societies were published. These books included América Central hacia el 2000 (Central America toward 2000) (Torres Rivas 1989), Forjando la paz (Constructing Peace) (Fagen 1988), De la locura a la esperanza (From Madness to Hope) (Comisión de la Verdad 1993), Esquipulas, diez años después (Esquipulas, Ten Years After) (Ordo ñez and Gamboa 1997), and Traspatio florecido (Regenerated Backyard) (Cuevas Molina 1993). These texts not only assessed the period of civil unrest in the region but also provided a prognosis for Central America in the twenty-first century. Invoking a violent past indelibly etched into the isthmus, these publications foreshadowed the critical challenges that Central America, as a whole, would face as it entered the neoliberal era and resituated itself within the economic and political realignments of a globalized world. CHAPTER 7 Wasted Opportunities: Central America after the Revolutions 196 Dividing the Isthmus In Traspatio florecido, Rafael Cuevas Molina explains that at the turn of the millennium there was an urgent need to examine the state of postrevolutionary cultural realities in Central America, as well as a need to forge a regional Central American cultural imaginary. For Cuevas Molina, the imperative was to bring to the fore connections between the peoples, histories, and societies of the isthmus and to underscore the differences among them (1993, 14). In his view, the wars of the last decades generated new heterogeneous cultural forms that offer sites for critical study. In Central America, where cultural exchange and communication among Central Americans themselves have been limited, transisthmian cultural linkages become increasingly necessary in order to offset homogenizing cultural trends brought on by economic globalization . Cuevas Molina explains: Tal descuido permite que, incluso en círculos de intelectuales preocupados por la temática de la identidad cultural, prevalezca el desconocimiento mutuo de lo que ocurre en países vecinos del istmo, de lo que en ellos se produce, se publica, etc. y se reproduzcan, en formas bastante acrílica, estereotipos, mitos, prejuicios provenientes del sentido común respecto a los otros países de la región. (13) [Such neglect, even among intellectuals who are concerned with the issue of cultural identity, permits a lack of mutual awareness of what goes on in neighboring countries of the isthmus, of what is produced there, of what is published there, to prevail. It also foments the reproduction of uncritical stereotypes, myths, commonsense prejudices against the other countries in the region.] To offset these biases, the construction of postwar cultures in the region requires the promotion of mutual recognition among Central Americans and the production of an extended Central American imaginary, a project in which cultural texts are indispensable. The integration of Central American cultures into a regional imaginary might serve as a defense against further cultural memory loss and as a front against cultural homogenization induced by the expansion of global (cultural and economic) capital in the region. As Cuevas Molina suggests, Central American communities would benefit from composing a transisthmian cultural field,1 which promotes awareness of a common history and the coexistence of cultural differences, histories, and identities throughout the region (16–17). Indeed, at the turn of the millennium, Central American cultures Wasted Opportunities 197 are not the national cultures imagined by nineteenth-century liberals and federalists, nor are they the revolutionary cultures projected in the late twentieth century. Furthermore, they are no longer strictly located within national geographic boundaries, as we have seen in the previous chapters. Central...