UC San Diego

This dissertation examines the experiences of Salvadoran migrants, refugees, and their children in the diaspora to explore how the legacies of the Salvadoran Civil War shaped cultural and political trajectories. While the legacies of the Salvadoran Civil War have manifested as “silence” and political aversion for many, for others, they have fueled their continued political commitments. I focus on Salvadoran migrants, refugees, and their children who expressed radical imaginaries defined as articulations, visions, and politics that drew on historical, political, and cultural genealogies associated with the struggles of the Revolutionary Democratic Front - Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front during the Salvadoran Civil War and the broader Third World Left. This dissertation begins with the revolutionary mobilizations in El Salvador in the years leading to the outbreak of the war and ends with the contemporary multi-generational efforts to acknowledge the lasting impacts of displacement from war and towards building a movement against forgetting in the diaspora. I draw on archival research, oral history, and analysis of cultural expressions such as testimonies, poetry, and political graphics to situate Salvadorans as political subjects, highlight their self-representation and narrations, and offer an alternative account of the war that centers the creative forms by which migrants, refugees, and their children reckon with the omnipresence of the memory and legacy of the war. I highlight Salvadoran radical imaginaries in three main sites: the Solidarity Movement of the 1980s; the life story and posthumous heroinism of Salvadoran political refugee, poet, and anti-imperialist activist Maria Guardado; and the stories of second-generation Salvadorans in Los Angeles. By doing so, I show how the legacy of the Cold War has shaped silence, politics and memory in the diaspora and how radical Salvadoran subjects can be “known” in the historical record, appear in the historiography, and are remembered in historical memory.