This feature on El Salvador originally complimented the story on Home Care Aide Isabel Palma in the Spring 2015 issue.
Though Mexican-Americans are the largest and most visible immigrant community in the United States, nearby El Salvador has a unique and lesser-known history and culture.
The country is the smallest and most densely populated in Central America – home to 6.3 million people. Imagine the entire Washington state population living just on the Olympic Peninsula.
Salvadoran cuisine features rice, tropical fruits, coffee, sugarcane, and a Central American staple: maize, or corn. With these ingredients, El Salvador has become widely known for its signature dish, pupusas.
Try your hand at making Pupusas here. Photo by Paul Joseph Brown.
The majority of El Salvador’s population is Christian, largely divided between Evangelicals and Roman Catholics. Many of the country’s iconic figures have been beloved religious leaders, such as Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was assassinated after speaking out for farm workers and for justice.
In the wake of a bloody civil war, a slew of natural disasters, and a recent exodus of unaccompanied minors, there are now over 2 million Salvadoran immigrants currently living in the United States.
After independence from Spain in 1821, El Salvador built up an elite oligarchy that centered around the main agricultural exports: indigo and coffee. The Salvadoran Civil War in 1979 sparked a surge of refugees fleeing violence and economic turmoil.
The conflict began between the military-led government of El Salvador and the guerilla groups of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). The war saw nearly 12 years of violence using tactics such as death squads, kidnappings, and child soldiers. Over 75,000 were killed, and thousands disappeared.
By the end of the war, nearly 30 percent of Salvadorans had fled their country, nearly half of them to the United States.
The United States played a large role in the conflict, seeing the war as an arm of the Cold War with Communism to defeat. As a result, U.S. presidents continued funneling aid to a Salvadoran army that kidnapped and murdered thousands and trained the army at the School of the Americas.
At the end of the Cold War, the United States saw El Salvador as less of a strategic interest and began to cut military aid, and finally put pressure on the government to negotiate a treaty to end the war.
Today, Salvadoran communities in the U.S., like Home Care Aide Isabel Palma and her family, come largely from this time period. The conflict left a generation of children marked by war, nearly 2,500 of who were sent to the U.S. as orphans.
HCA Isabel Palma and her family escaped civil war in El Salvador in the 80s. Photo by Paul Joseph Brown.
Many young men came as refugees, hoping to escape inevitable draft into the military or as guerilla fighters. Researchers are now looking at the psychological impacts this has had on a generation of Salvadorans with post-traumatic stress disorder.
On Sept. 1, 2013, the Salvadoran Attorney General’s office announced it would open investigations into key wartime massacres. That same year, the University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights launched an ongoing project, Unfinished Sentences, to bring international awareness to the wartime crimes.
Director Angelina Snodgrass Godoy is currently working with Salvadoran groups to reunite children of war who grew up in the United States, with their families in El Salvador.
“Some of them have been searching for nearly 30 years,” Godoy says, who noted that though Americans adopted children out of blind faith, many were forcibly removed from families as agents of war. “It’s an honor to be just a small part of that.”
