UCLA

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

Reframing Salvadoran Modernity: A Political and Cultural History of Power and the Dialectics of the Hegemonic Bloc in El Salvador, ca. 1850-1944

by

Raul Ernesto Moreno Campos

Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science

University of California, Los Angeles, 2015

Professor Raymond A. Rocco, Chair

This dissertation analyzes the development, relationship, and intersection of the economic-political and cultural-intellectual axes that defined modernity in El Salvador roughly from the period of 1850 to the end of the General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez’s regime in 1944 and examines the manner in which this historical process shaped the contours of power in Salvadoran society. Using an interdisciplinary methodology and drawing from a variety of archival sources, my study frames the concept of modernity from the perspective of post-colonial societies and the Global South and reframes prevailing analyses of Salvadoran economic and political development by interrogating dominant narratives of underdevelopment, state violence, and facile understandings of political consent. Hence, the central problematic that organizes this study is explaining the process by which the constellation of leading classes within the axes of economic-political and cultural-intellectual activity, who were manifestly in tension by pitting the forces of modernization against the modernist movement, amalgamated into a coherent group under the leadership of the military regime in the 1930s. Its central question asks: how were these classes able to surmount their differences and transform from a loose coalition, whose interests were at times at odds, into a coherent, ruling group that went on to dominate Salvadoran politics for six decades and defined an enduring nexus of power and domination in El Salvador?

Using a Gramscian theoretical framework, I advance three principal claims. First, I contend that despite the apparently incongruent aims espoused by the forces of economic and political modernization and the cultural movement of modernism, all of these processes were in fact premised upon a fundamental set of presuppositions that reified Western ideas of progress. Second, I posit that the manifest tension between these groups was in fact symptomatic of the dialectical unity between the state and the productive base or society, or what Gramsci termed the historic bloc, and that this dialectical relationship was a central component of the historical process of modernity along its economic and political vectors, and which were mediated by the cultural sphere. Third, the historical processes by which these forces and their representative classes amalgamated into a dominant group was facilitated by the consolidation of the Salvadoran military as a class in a position of leadership within the constellation of dominant classes. The process of hegemonic consolidation thus depended upon a careful balance of consent and coercion, and such a balance helps in part explain the extraordinary longevity and resilience of the Salvadoran military regime. My research reveals that civil organizations, such as the Salvadoran Athenaeum and the country’s theosophical lodges, were important interstitial institutions that forged links between the state and the civil sector, and served to legitimize and generate consent for the military regime. This project represents a contribution to both Gramscian theory, the critique of modernity from the perspective of coloniality, and the analysis of power in El Salvador along its economic, political, cultural, and intellectual vectors