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176 One of the first interviews I ever conducted with immigrants in the United States was with Rosario, a woman in her early twenties I met in San Francisco. She was born into a poor rural family in central El Salvador and started working as a housekeeper in San Salvador, the capital city, right after finishing sixth grade, from the time she was twelve years old. When we met, she seemed soft-spoken and pensive, and at first I was not sure whether we were going to be able to converse. As we talked, she struck me as thoughtful and cautious with her words; she would use similes and metaphors to express apprehensions, sadness, joy, and a plethora of emotions she had experienced since she had embarked on the journey north. Instead of simply recounting the difficulties and tribulations she had experienced in the United States, and how unattainable the American dream seemed to her, she said, “life in the United States is like a rose full of thorns because you can see it, and see that it’s beautiful, but never get to touch it to enjoy it.”1 With time we got to know each other and she confided that she kept a small notebook in which she wrote her thoughts: “I don’t know, like poems, you could say, but not poems, poems, like the ones poets write. I am not famous and what I write is mine.” She smiled as she recounted that she often wrote late at night, after a back-breaking day of cleaning living rooms, kitchens, and toilets. When I asked her how she mustered the energy to do so, she said, “[Writing] serves me to console myself.” In turn, my conversations with Rosario made me realize that there was a vast realm of her “immigrant experience” that eluded my in-depth interviews and participant observation, the methods I have used to tap various aspects of immigrants’ lives. Central American immigrant artists express this other realm vibrantly in Immigrant Art as Liminal Expression the case of central americans Cecilia Menjívar c h a p t e r 9  poems, music, lyrics, performances, dance, and painting. The characters in their novels, pictures, films, and songs flesh out a violent history of displacement, a complex identity and status, a harsh adaptation to life in the United States, the uncertainty of Central Americans’ legal status, the nostalgia that often accompanies their situation, and the vitality of still-unresolved events back home and in the United States. In this chapter I explore how Guatemalan and Salvadoran immigrants express aesthetically the emotional space of their still unresolved legal status. In my view, this uncertain legal status is so fundamental to these immigrants and their incorporation in U.S. society that it not only shapes the lives of the first generation but also seeps through to shape the identities, views, and dreams of subsequent generations. Thus, I examine how ambivalent legality is articulated in the art of first-generation Central Americans and how it emerges, in combination with other themes, in the work of these immigrants’ children. Although ambiguous legal status is by no means the only theme that Central American artists capture in their work, it is a persistent one that surfaces forcefully, often in combination with its twin developments, civil war and political conflicts in Central America, even in the aesthetic expressions of artists who have lived in the United States all their lives. Thus, this examination allows us not only to reveal the multifaceted links between immigration and artistic production, but also to understand from a novel angle the profound and lasting effects of complex legal positions that affect the immigrants’ lives and those of their children. A handful of themes in Central American migration (particularly Guatemalan and Salvadoran) to the United States have captured scholarly attention. Early studies concentrated on resolving whether this migration was political, economic, or a combination of both (Hamilton and Chinchilla 1991; Jones 1989; Menjívar 1993; Stanley 1987); on the trauma and stress involved in this migration and on the effects the war had on these immigrants (Aron et al. 1991; Guarnaccia and Farias 1988); on their economic incorporation (Mahler 1995; Repak 1994); and on comparisons with Mexican immigrants (Chávez, Flores, and López-Garza 1989; Wallace 1989). More recently attention has been given to these immigrants’ efforts to remain connected with their communities of origin (Baker-Cristales 2004; Hamilton and Chinchilla 2001; Landolt, Autler, and Baires 1999...

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