Re/membering the Nation: Gaps and Reckoning within Biographical Accounts of Salvadoran Émigrés

In the aftermath of the 1980–1992 Salvadoran civil war, biography and history have become linked, as the Salvadoran state reclaims its dispersed citizenry, and as Salvadorans who emigrated as young children reclaim their own pasts. Such reclaimings compel biographies as part of state neoliberal financial strategies that encourage remitting, but also as collective history projects that challenge injustice. Juxtaposing state narratives, in which war and violence are often elided, with immigrant youths’ accounts, which seek accountability, reveals how biographies narrate yet disrupt neoliberal notions of the self.

Re/memberirig the Nation: Gaps and Reckoning within Biographical Accounts of Salvadoran Émigrés successful migrants. These accounts represented El Salvador as a parent to which émigrés owed continued loyalty (Baker-Cristales 2004) rather than as a place where neoliberal economic strategies have devastated traditional economic pursuits and have thus led increasing numbers of citizens to migrate (Gammage 2006, Silber 2010). On the other hand, interviews with Salvadorans who were born in El Salvador but who lived the majority of their lives in the United States suggest that these migrants have used biography, both in public testimonials and private encounters, to recover and record historical memory and, in the process, to recuperate their own pasts. Juxtaposing state and émigré efforts to forge reconnection reveals the indispensability of biography to national history, an indispensability in which personal and collective histories can play a highly subversive role. I use the term "biography" here, rather than "autobiography," to situate these "war stories" (see also Bowen 2006) within a broader field within which the following circulate: 1) statist celebrations of multiculturalism and difference, 2) Central American oppositional narratives known as testimonio, and 3) ethnographically elicited life histories (e.g., Behar 2003).
First, as John and Jean Comaroff (2009:28) note, "commodity exchange and the stuff of difference are inflecting each other"; thus, the post-war Salvadoran state promulgated a "neoliberal" notion of Salvadoranness as an essence that links diasporic citizens while also enabling them to progress economically abroad. Treating difference as part of a marketable "skill set" is linked to "'neoliberalism,' in which all possible forms of sociality and being are treated as market exchanges" (Urciuoli 2008(Urciuoli :212, 1999. Second, in contrast to this neoliberal focus on difference as "background" and a basis for individual success, testimonio is a collective project in which the experiences of marginalized groups are recounted in an effort to challenge official histories and to advocate for more just futures (Arias 2001, Rodriguez 2009. The narrative stances taken by Salvadoran youth who seek accountability for past injustices resonate with this tradition. Third, many of the narratives analyzed here were elicited as part of an ethnographic strategy that privileges narrative as a means of understanding the ways that life histories are embedded in social and historical dynamics (Greenhouse 2008). This research strategy treats narratives as both ethnographically "found" and "created" objects.
Émigrés' biographical narratives necessarily engage the Salvadoran civil war, which "dismembered" in multiple senses. Bodies were literally severed by bombs, mines, assassination, and torture, even as the nation was divided between the guerrilla and government forces-with civilian all too often caught in the middle (Binford 1 996, Byrne 1 996, Montgomery 1995, Schwarz 1 991 ).1 Forced recruitment, roadblocks, and widespread surveillance treated the entire population as suspect and led to a geo graphic dismemberment of the polity, such that an estimated one-fourt of the population of El Salvador is now outside of the country (Byrne 1 996, Dirección General de Atención a la Comunidad en el Exterior 2002).2 Th Salvadoran civil war also "dismembered" by separating persons and history, such that violence and human rights violations were forgotten or denied by many US and Salvadoran officials from the war's outset. For example, in 1982, after journalists and the Salvadoran guerrilla forc reported that some 900 civilians had been massacred in El Mozote, U Ambassador Deane Hinton stated, "I certainly cannot confirm such reports nor do I have any reason to believe that they are true" (as quoted in Binford 1996:49). Such official ignorance, a failure to recognize or r member, continued throughout the 1980s and affected the reception of Salvadoran émigrés in the United States. Because the US governmen was providing military and economic support to the government of El Salvador in its war against guerrilla insurgents, granting safe haven to Salvadorans would have tacitly admitted that a US ally was commit ting human rights violations. The US State Department, which was required to weigh in on asylum cases, routinely advised INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) district directors to deny Salvadoran an Guatemalan asylum cases. These recommendations were generally fo lowed. During the early 1980s, asylum applications filed by Salvadorans and Guatemalans were denied at rates of 97 percent and 99 percent respectively (US Committee for Refugees 1986).
These forms of dismemberment removed lives, bodies, and beings from the time and place they occupied before-a time and place characterized, perhaps, by wholeness, unity, or, at the very least, connection.
Of course, as Brian Axel (2004) points out, the identification of a key moment, event, or place as an "origin" can occur after the fact. The temporal and spatial gaps that are produced by dismemberment are nonetheless powerful. Not only do they exclude, destroy, hide, and disperse, in addition, they cry out to be overcome.3 Salvadoran activists have used biography to challenge both the erasure of the history of the Salvadoran civil war and the criminalization and devaluing of immigrants in the United States (Perea 1997;Chavez 2008;Inda 2006;Nevins 2002;Kubrin, Zatz, and Martinez forthcoming). Biography promises to re/member the nation in that such accounts can seemingly traverse the gaps created by dismemberment. Yet, and seemingly paradoxically, war can also be elided Instead of being a source of division, the civil war was depicted in this speech as a tragic event that all endured. The murals commemorating the war's martyrs were also redefined as a source of commonality, as even the vice president, who was a member of the right-wing ARENA party, located his own relative's name in the list of the dead. And, in the process, the war was positioned squarely in the past as a "memory" and as "history," but not, as in the historical memory projects discussed below, as an event to be commemorated due to its critical content. The lesson of this speech was to not dwell on the past, but rather to move beyond it into the future.6 In fact, embassy staff in Washington, DC had told me that one of their goals was to improve the image that people have of El Salvador in order to promote tourism and investment: "When people think of El Salvador," an official said, "they remember the civil war. Which was 20 years ago. But people don't realize that. So it is important for us to work on the institutional image." This strategy of situating the war in the past made it possible for Salvadoran officials to reclaim emigrant citizens as "kin" ("hermanos"), petitiveness in the global market. Salvadorans living abroad were seen as sources of remittances, a market for Salvadoran goods (particularly "nostalgic products"), individuals who would use their talents for the good of El Salvador, and tourists who would visit the country.7 Therefore, the Salvadoran state had an interest in inculcating a sense of Salvadoran identity among those living abroad and of reincorporating these citizens, albeit at a distance. In so doing, the government participated in the "marketing of ethnic identity" and "the creation of target markets for consumer goods along ethnic lines" (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009:26, 16).
This focus on recuperating, and in the process, redefining the Salvadoran population living abroad is evident in the "Comunidades" website pro- issue featured stories about a Salvadoran sculptor living in France, a Salvadoran artist (also living in France) who had won first prize in an international art contest, and a woman of Salvadoran and Italian descent who had won an Italian beauty contest (see Revista Virtual 2003a, 2003b, 2003c. The biographical accounts that appeared in such stories generally either left the reason that the protagonist came to be living abroad unstated, or depicted emigration as a matter of personal choice. In the stories cited above, the sculptor left El Salvador because his father was Guatemalan and then was drawn to France in order to study art. The artist moved to France after falling in love with a French teacher, and the beauty contestant moved to Europe in order to study. Such accounts elided histories of the civil war and depicted Salvadoranness as a basis for success.
The sculptor, for instance, is quoted as saying that his art reflected Central American and Mayan influences (Revista Virtual 2003c). When asked what message she would like to send to Salvadorans in the world, the beauty contestant replied "We always must feel proud of our country, and even though persistently there is one or another difficulty, I know that we are going to progress, as invariably we have done!" (Revista Virtual 2003b).
The five-part series, "Salvadorans with a History in the United States of America" also exemplifies the understandings of history that are at work within these state biographical accounts (Revista Virtual 2002a, 2002b, 2002c, 2002d. This series drew on Spanish-language newspapers in the United States to excerpt and reproduce "personal histories of Salvadorans who have advanced and stood out in their workplaces and businesses" (Revista Virtual 2002a). Stories discussed a seamstress who had worked for Nancy Reagan (  talents (a section of the Comunidades website was entitled "talentos") resonates with neoliberal notions of individuals as made up of skill sets.
Instead of being a site of violence and rupture, as in émigrés' accounts, the nation appeared within state-sponsored narratives as having sent its "children" (emigrants) into the world, where their achievements reflected positively on the state and contributed materially to national wellbeing.
The state sought to facilitate the expression of Salvadoran cultural identity outside of El Salvador, guide remitting, facilitate the "return" of goods, and acknowledge Salvadorans throughout the world. State-sponsored biographies realized national history in that they demonstrated the capacity of Salvadorans, but these narratives did not attempt to create historical memory as a critical social project.
Claiming these emigrants as kin, as a source of national pride, deployed biography to redeem the nation. Salvadorans thrived in France, Italy, and elsewhere because of their Salvadoranness, and therefore prefigured the future of the nation itself. Through the use of kinship terminology, Salvadoranness became an ethnicity, something that was both portable and commodifiable (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009 and legal circumstances that led Salvadorans to be denied asylum here and to experience the social and economic marginalization associated with being undocumented (see Coutin 1993Coutin , 2000Menjivar 2000). For interviewees, biographical accounts promised to fill these gaps by returning speakers to their earlier lives-before emigration, before the Peace Accords, before they became themselves. Such narrative returns held out the possibility of reconnecting speakers to their subsequent selves, quilting fragments of memory into a broader history, one that their generation, and indeed Salvadorans in the United States, would own as part of their own cultural production. Such quilting was considered key to recuperation, to re/membering (as in "putting back together") the past, self, community, and nation. For interviewees, biography had a subversive quality in that it could disrupt received accounts and thus intervene in or re/member history. Understanding the self as a product of history also conferred a potential agency within history, the ability to become "conscious" and to take the actions that consciousness implied. and community networks that sought to publicize immigrants' "stories" in order to promote immigration reform and social justice more broadly (see also Aparicio 2007;Brodkin 2007;Garrod, Kilkenny, and Gómez 2007) Interviewees included members of the California DREAM Network, a coalition of student groups that seeks the passage of the DREAM Act, which would create a path to legalization for undocumented college students (Ábrego 2008 In seeking to publicize and thus "own" their own history, youth sought a right that those who occupy privileged positions-and who are defined more as "individuals" than as members of ethnic groups (Tsan et al. 2003, Rong andBrown 2002)-might take for granted (cf. Macpherson 1962, Collier et al. 1995. As Karen Brodkin notes, "Becoming the author of one's own life is part of becoming a political actor" (2007:14). The exhortation to "tell one's story" presumes that people "have" stories to tell prior to the moment of narration, which in turn creates a need to recuperate the past, to situate memories as part of broader, collective trajectories, to examine the political and social circumstances that surrounded events, and to overcome dismemberment by answering the most fundamental questions posed by interviewees: "Who are we?" and "How did we come to be?" Some interviewees linked "that push to try to want to understand more of my history," as one interviewee put it, to being "conscious," that is, to having a critical social and political awareness. Such awareness made their own lives a means of accessing national histories, even as a deepened understanding of national histories were also needed to make sense of their own lives. Thus, one Central American college student told a story in which she commented that she had asked her brother, "Remember when I wrote a paper about Mom?" Upon hearing this comment, it struck me as significant that "Mom"-an individual whose (sometimes hidden or unknown) life history and immigration experiences presumably held keys to youths' past and to national history-could become a paper topic without the need for the student to provide any

Historical Memory
The sense that a knowledge of national history, and particularly of the Salvadoran Civil War, was elusive and yet key to unlocking their own biog raphies emerged in my interviews with Salvadoran youth who, for the most part, were students, activists, or community organizations' clients (see also Delugan 2010, Duany 2000, Espíritu and Tran 2002, Hintzen 2004 Although they were elicited during interviews, the narratives that I analy here-and indeed, the decision to participate in an interview-were linked to the advocacy work described above. One interviewee, an electricia who had never attended college, likened being interviewed to marching Milda also said that while she was in El Salvador, her family sometimes attended meetings of the FMLM the rebel organization. For Milda, "it was scary seeing people with weapons." She said, "I developed a defense mechanism. I used to cross my eyes, so then they would think that I couldn't see very well, and they wouldn't take me." For Milda, the war was not only located in the past, but also was an on-going presence that shaped her life and her own parents' actions. As a teenager, she said, she "had nightmares, awful dreams. I had selfhate thoughts. I just hated everybody." Later, she concluded that she was probably suffering from PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). Whispered accounts of the war also had a tremendous impact on Sandra Mejillas, a Salvadoran artist who had immigrated to the Unit States in 1974 at age four and who was in elementary school in the US when the war began. Her parents did not talk to her about the war directly, but she nonetheless overheard conversations, and she knew that one of her uncles was being persecuted. Sandra found that these half-heard con versations worked their way into her dreams, creating nightmares abo war, tanks, and fighting. Although she did not experience the war directly, these not fully understood accounts were deeply disturbing, leading her to view El Salvador as a site of male violence. Even in her 20s, long after the war had ended, she was afraid to return.
Like Milda Escobar, Adrian Arroyo, who had fought in El Salvador and who worked with a Salvadoran NGO, found that the older generation denied his experiences. Adrian worried that a historical amnesia about the civil war had led Central Americans to avoid asking questions that would have identified the historical roots of current social problems, such as gangs that, in his view, grew out of the trauma of war and migration. Similarly, Marta Dominguez, a 28-year-old woman who worked at a university in Southern California, and who immigrated to the United States at age eight, traced her own biography not only to Salvadoran but also to US history. For Marta, the Salvadoran Civil War created a disjuncture that could not be crossed, transforming her identity. Such disjunctures are common among children of immigrants (Karakayali 2005, Kim et al. 2003, Louie 2000, but may be exacerbated among those fleeing war. For Marta, like Sandra, Adrian, Milda, and Cecilia, the Salvadoran civil war was a temporal and spatial origin, making El Salvador a place that was both feared and yet was key to individual and collective biographies, a time that was both unknown and yet manifest in dreams, nightmares, psyches, and the social landscape. This origin, however, was cut off, giving rise to gaps between the selves that were, that might have been, and that could still develop. These gaps gave rise to the desire for knowledge that would fill or bridge gaps, but also to a fear of what that knowledge might entail-the painful story that Cecilia's family did not want to recount, the whispered conversations that Sandra's parents did not want her to hear.
Manuel Cañas, who immigrated to the United States in 1986 at age nine and who, at the time of our interview, worked as a baggage handler, experienced what seemed to me to be a different sort of denial. When I asked him whether or not he had been affected by the war, Manuel replied, "I guess where we were, the civil war didn't affect us that much. We didn't hear the rebels and stuff. I do remember that once when I went to a garbage dump that was near where we used to live, I found a hand of a guy sticking out. I didn't make a big deal out of that. I came right back and I told my aunt. To be honest, the town where we were living wasn't really affected by the war." To Manuel, finding a hand in a garbage dump was not particularly significant, not a "big deal." Later in the same interview, Manuel told me that when he had moved to South Central LA, he had been frightened by a drive-by shooting. Manuel remarked, "The funny thing was that I had heard gun shots before in El Salvador, because of the war. But I hadn't been scared, there." Struck by this comment, I asked Manuel about the seeming discrepancy between his claim to not have been affected by the war, and his familiarity with gun shots during the war: Susan: And you said that before the war didn't really affect your town, and yet you heard gunshots?. ..Or they were so far away that they didn't scare you? Manuel: No, sometimes they weren't that far away, but I would go out with my cousins, and my older cousin would tell us, "You know, that's the war, don't be afraid." My older cousin would tell us not to be afraid.
Susan: That's interesting. "That's the war, don't be afraid"? Because to me, that would seem real scary. Your cousin was probably trying to protect you.
Manuel: Yeah, he was. He would say, "Everything's going to be alright." Susan: And so you believed that and you weren't scared.
Manuel: Mm-hmm. We would continue what we were doing. And then I remember my aunt used to tell us, "Don't go outside! They just killed somebody!" And then for like a week or two weeks, she wouldn't let us go out. There was always somebody... who got killed. Who would be dead, in our little town... Unlike Milda and Cecilia, who sought knowledge of Salvadoran national history and of the civil war in particular, Manuel sought to forget the war, to "block it out" as he put it, describing deaths, gunshots, finding a hand in a garbage dump, and having to hide from danger as experiences that "didn't affect him much." Manuel may have been basing this claim on his knowledge of others who were affected more severely, who may have fought, been injured or tortured, witnessed the assassination of family members, or even lost their own lives. When violence becomes commonplace, perhaps only the most extraordinary violence is noteworthy.

Susan
Nonetheless, the civil war served as a point of comparison for the (to him) more unexpected violence that Manuel experienced in the United States. Furthermore, when, at the beginning of our interview, I asked Manuel how his family had come to the United States, he replied, "My mother immigrated in 1982, because she was part of the rebel group, and she learned that they were going to kill her." Deeply affected or not, Manuel cited the civil war as a component of his family's history.
In these narratives, the civil war was granted an explanatory power in the development of the self. Milda Escobar believed that she suffered from PTSD, Sandra Mejillas had nightmares of tanks, and Marta Dominguez acquired an education in the United States after her family had to flee the war. Politics was at the surface of some of these stories, such as Marta's criticism of the United States for penetrating El Salvador and creating a war, but in many instances, the past was cited in order to understand the present or future (see also Briggs 1985). Within narratives, past trauma was seen to have produced subsequent effects and thus to explain, for example, why abuse occurred, why alcoholism was prevalent, why an individual became a gang member, why youth were violent (Fuchs et al. 2007), or why parents would not talk about the war.
Such explanations were available, however, only after the fact, when violence was recounted.
Narratives of violence returned speakers to the nation, both figurativel and literally. Some, such as Milda Escobar, returned on delegations in a attempt to encounter Salvadoran history. Others wanted to go back, bu were prevented from doing so by their immigration status. At the tim of our interview, Sandra Mejillas had not returned, but she lived with th sense of El Salvador as a traumatic site. Enrique Lemus had returned, b as a deportee. His experiences suggest the difficulty, perhaps impossibi ity, of a complete retracing. Enrique, for example, reencountered his chil hood girlfriend as a stranger whom he somehow knew: "And she sai 'So, that's you, right? You left!' She's like, 'Wow! I can't believe I see yo again! I thought I'd never see you!' It was very different because I felt t same little emotion that I had for her when I was six, seven years old. felt warm again. But she had three kids. So, wow, things change! It wa kind of exciting to have that little experience of seeing someone you kne but not knowing who she is." But when he returned to the home of hi grandmother, who had raised him, Enrique was almost killed: "That wa the main 1 8th Street [gang] corridor that they have. When I first got there, they put a shotgun to my head and looked at my tattoo." In Enriqu experience, violence literally prevented the "past" from being completel retraced, even as the pull of the past-his encounter with his former girlfriend-led to an uncanny reliving.
Enrique's experiences and the other narratives discussed here reproduce gaps in a way that demanded reckoning. In seeking to answer the questions, "Who are we and why are we here?" youth sought not only to understand their own histories, but also to subject existing social problems, such as gangs, to social and historical analysis. They sought knowledge of the past not to remain in the past, but rather to make something of it, to recuperate its explanatory power, and to recognize the past's unruly character. In their accounts, biographical and national histories of violence refused to stay behind or before and instead re-emerged in ways that were both desired and feared-in beatings, physical punishment, and fears of the unknown and unstated. The unruly character of a past that refuses to stay put disrupts state and other efforts to elide youths' experience of violence.

Reckoning
Deploying biographical narratives within efforts to reconnect Salvadorans living abroad with the nation of El Salvador both avoided and sought reckoning. On the one hand, the Salvadoran state's cultural work deemphasized the civil war to construct Salvadorans living abroad as good sons and daughters of the nation. State biographies thus reproduced the spatial and temporal gap entailed in emigration-émigrés were "hermanos lejanos," distant brothers whose origin continually drew them "back" as an absent presence in national territory. State-sponsored biographies depicted successful Salvadoran émigrés as the realization of Salvadoran history, and encouraged expatriate citizens to use their goods and talents to benefit El Salvador. The very people who, as victims of political violence, normally would be the beneficiaries of reparations were themselves encouraged to "repair" El Salvador by sending remittances.13 On the other hand, Salvadoran emigrant youth developed and, in some instances, publicized accounts of their own experiences of political violence as part of efforts to recuperate their own pasts and to create a more just future. The need to produce these narratives derives from multiple sources, including historical memory projects, political advocacy work that relied on publicly narrating stories of affected individuals, and individual desires to uncover history, identify injustice, and bridge disjunctures. In contrast to the state, youth invoked history to draw attention to injustices and to seek redress, such as acknowledgement, legal recognition, greater respect for human rights, or a voice in government policies. Youths' deployments of biography were collective actions, in that these accounts were about more than the individual narrator and were developed in dialogue with mentors and other youth. Their biographies were incited by an unknown, the rupture occasioned by war-emigration, family separation, transformation of the person, the "before" that cannot be reached (or escaped) but that was both desired and feared. This gap is a void, an unknown, an empty space that is difficult to traverse. But the reproduction of this gap through biographical accounts is a call for reckoning, in that biographies call attention to the rupture itself, and to all that rupture implies.
The "return to origin" that biography promises is therefore future-oriented (Nelson 2009). By linking biography and history, seemingly idiosyncratic "facts" of youth's own biography become evidence of their presence within history. Presence in history calls for accountability, for rectifying the omissions that left youth undocumented, temporarily authorized, misrecognized, and supposedly "unaffected" by the civil war. When youth wrote poetry (Chinchilla and OI iva-Al varado 2007, see also Rodríguez 2009), founded student organizations, published books (Madera et al. 2008), participated in interviews, and publicly recounted their biographies at rallies, they located both memory and membership in the future, not only as origin but also as destination. In so doing, they demanded the opportunity to realize their potential as a generation. ■ ENDNOTES 1FMLN forces also committed human rights violations, though these were f Commission on the Truth for El Salvador documented cases of summary executions cial executions, and abductions by FMLN members. This commission nonetheless of human rights abuses committed during the civil war to the Armed Forces or squads (Kaye 1997).
2For additional population estimates, see Aguayo andFagen 1 988, Montes Mo 1988, andRuggles et al. 1985. 3ln the social sciences, to note a "gap" in the literature is to suggest that this gap m have devoted considerable attention to "closing" gaps between representation and sion, "law-on-the-books" and "law-in-action," to give but a few examples (Calav notes that narratives mediate distinctions between the "before" and the "now," leave neither intact.
4There are also moments when Salvadoran political parties resuscitate wartime memories for national consumption, either to invoke the specter of communist subversion or to remind the populace of sacrifices made by martyrs.
5AII translations of Spanish material are the author's, and pseudonyms have been used for all interviewees.
6lt is important to note that another use of biography, a damning one, was deployed by the ARENA party during elections periods, that is, the resuscitation of the FMLN as a guerrilla movement, committed to violence and terrorism. ARENA party candidates emphasized FMLN candidates' biographies in order to suggest that if the FMLN prevailed, history would repeat itself, and the country would fall once more into violence and chaos. In particular, ARENA candidates suggested, the FMLN would allow gangs and criminality to flourish. 7Baker-Cristales (2008:358) defines such tactics as "disciplinary-transnational," in other words "strategies... to control moving bodies by rewarding mobility-extending voting rights to migrants living abroad, transnationalizing political parties to include migrants, granting migrant social entrepreneurs the status of representatives of migrant populations, promoting remittances and migrant investment through monetary and social incentives, and so forth." 8Of course, as Kim Scheppele commented to me, it is probably not only that the older generation can't talk but also that the younger generation can't hear.
9I thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing my attention to this connection.
10lndeed, I myself have assigned undergraduate students the task of interviewing someone about their experiences as an immigrant and, invariably, a number of students write about interviewing their own parents or grandparents. 11 Cecilia Menjivar (2002, see also Levitt 2002 points out as well that class differences can be important to whether or not immigrant youth maintain ties with their country of origin. Disadvantaged youth are less likely to be transnational. 12On children's experiences of the Salvadoran Civil War, see Dickson-Gómez 2003. 13l thank Bill Maurer for suggesting this line of thinking.