Finding Ourselves in the Archive: Eighteenth-Century Maps of El Salvador

• In Event: Optimisms of the Will: Central America Beyond the Image of Crisis

Abstract

As Central American scholars working within the U.S. academy we often struggle to negotiate between the demands of our institutions and the demands or necessities of our communities. This problem becomes especially apparent when taking up historical projects that examine the Spanish colonial period in Central America, where the line between our communities and the supposed chronologically “distant, impartial” subject matter of our research is blurred. While the academy demands that we operate “objectively” in our investigations, as descendants of the very peoples wounded by the legacies of colonialism that constitute our studies it is in fact our goal to produce work that will also empower ourselves and our communities. Indeed, this is the ever-evolving project of Decolonial Studies/Methodologies as they have emerged in the Western academy.

This paper explores this utopic goal and its possibilities for (re)constructing notions of historic community and collective memory by examining Central American colonial materiality. In particular, I will consider a series of highly-detailed aerial maps of El Salvador taken from a 1768 atlas-census produced by the Catholic Church. These maps are useful when considering the notions of reconstruction and remembering, as some of these images provide among the earliest cartographic information for some of the most rural communities in El Salvador. How do we, as scholars working in the twenty-first century “inherit” such colonial artifacts and move beyond the narratives of oppression they tell us at first glance?

Author

• Carlos A Rivas, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)