Oral Histories from El Salvador: Disrupting the Official Narrative, Uncovering Forgotten Histories

• In Event: Listening to El Salvador: Oral Histories for a New History of El Salvador

Abstract

In this presentation I explore how oral histories have led me to discover a facet of the history of El Salvador that is never talked about in the dominant narrative held by both state institutions and the academic world. Specifically, my research re-examines the history of El Salvador during the years 1948-1975. This period remains under-studied, yet the dominant historical discourse regards it as part of an uninterrupted sequence of oppression and underdevelopment under authoritarian military rule that existed in the country since the early decades of the twentieth century and that eventually drove the people to declare civil war in the 1980s. People sixty years or older relate a much different history than the one widely assumed. They remember a country with abundant employment in diverse agricultural areas; they speak of a burgeoning industrial sector that was even producing cheap local-made automobiles for the working classes; they describe an excellent health care system, and educational opportunities reaching remote rural places and peoples. Unused primary sources corroborate these oral histories, and contribute to an alternative historical account. While episodes of violence and neglect have their place in the annals of Salvadoran history, there was a time when El Salvador was considered “the bright spot of Central America.” There is an urgency for this forgotten history to find a new audience. Academics and ordinary Salvadorans assume only an ugly past and therefore imagine a future without hope of anything better. This presentation challenges a monolithic view of the past that may inspire new possibilities for the future as well.

Author

• Pedro J. Quijada, University of Minnesota