Mark Menjivar’s Retorno and the Alternative Post-war Archive

• In Event: Alternative Views: Photography, Self-Representation and Fact in Contemporary American Art and Culture

Abstract

At the onset of the Salvadoran Civil War (1980-92) thousands of families afflicted by scorched earth policies fled across the border to Honduran refugee camps. After years of living in Honduras and long negotiations with authorities, they returned to their abandoned villages in one of the largest repatriation efforts in Latin American history. This paper examines the work of San Antonio-based photographer Mark Menjivar (b. 1980), who returned to document the history of the repatriated community of Santa Marta in El Salvador. The series Retorno, begun in 2010, consists primarily of landscape photographs taken in consultation with members of the community. These collaborative portraits typically show unmarked sites of historical relevance such as caves where families hid during raids, swamps created from mortar explosions, and aerial views that encompass the twelve miles they walked to the Honduran border. I position the series as an alternative post-war archive that departs from official histories of the Civil War, and reconstructs narratives of violence still hidden in the landscape. Menjivar’s subversive use of the 4 x 5 inch view camera, which often captures alluring photographs, asks viewers to see beyond the surface. The thread of autobiographical return in the series, both for the subjects as well as the artist who lived in El Salvador during the 1980s, while his father served as the head of the U.S. military in the country, allows one to consider how these landscape images invoke forms of self-representation, as well as to explore how that representation is read in the diaspora.

Author

• Tatiana Reinoza, Dartmouth College