UC Merced

This study is an anti-colonial response from the global South to an enduring epistemicide attempt in El Salvador, initiated by the Spanish invasion and occupation of Kushkatan in 1524, which has perdured for nearly five centuries through the dynamism of the modern/colonial logics of U.S. empire and new forms of war that are not over. This Nawat-Pipil project of cultural and spiritual repertoires is interested -- politically and discursively -- in a recovery of Indigenous critical theory through different cultural forms such as music, song, poetry, performance, agriculture, ceremony or what I refer to as “poetics of embodiment”, as concept-bearing practices that help us understand Indigenous presence in El Salvador, today. In this light, in Chapter 1, I make meaning of the current state of the Nawat-Pipil language through an analysis of three contemporary Nawat-Pipil songs using the coloniality of power (Quijano 2000), testimonio, critical ethnographic methods, Indigenous epistemologies, and the sacred energies of ejekat (aire/air) as methods to critically analyze the poetics and the politics of the sonority of a ‘moribund’ language. Despite the precarity of the Nawat-Pipil language today, Nawa-Pipil women are continuing to re-affirm Native presences in the Kuhskatan territories and beyond and defying the limitations imposed by the biopolitics of the state and the logics of neoliberalism. In chapter 2, I trace the forced migratory journey of a Salvadoran family to the U.S.-Mexico border. Through the coloniality of migration (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2015) and newspaper reports, I examine the connections between the media, racial capitalism, and the asylum-migration policies that, through the Steinle case (2015), re-activated a specific conjuncture of racism in the 2016 presidential elections, resulting in harsher migration controls that placed the family in the Rio Grande’s waters, resulting in their death. I conduct an Indigenous reading of their tragic drowning, using ancient stories, poetry, Indigenous epistemologies, and the sacred energies of tal (land) and at (water) to offer alternate readings of their tragic fate, to help us re-envision a more humane hereafter. In Chapter 3, I analyze the brutal murder and disappearance of policewoman Carla Ayala by several male police officers in 2017, in El Salvador. I juxtapose her heinous killing to the Nawat-Pipil story of creation, Nanahuatzin being retold through a play titled Nusiwapiltzin to show Indigenous conceptions of womanhood in ancient Nawa texts. Through the coloniality of gender (Lugones 2007), I unpack the concept of feminicide, to shed light on the violences of the modern/colonial gender system that have resulted in El Salvador having one of the worst feminicide rates in the Western hemisphere, in contemporary times. The metatextual reading of Nanahuatzin through Nusihuapiltzin sheds light on the colonial connections between a woman’s body and the territory, and the sacred connections that exist between agriculture, astronomy, and womanhood.