Article

ACTS O F WAR , ACTS O F MEMO RY: D E A D - B O DY P O L I T I C S I N U S L AT I N A N OV E L S O F T H E SALVADORAN CIVIL WAR

Kelli Lyon-Johnson
Miami University Hamilton, Hamilton, OH

A b s t ra c t
The violence and displacement of the Salvadoran civil war not only destroyed lives, but by dispersing the agents of collective memory it also threatened the foundations of community and identity. US Latina writers Demetria Mart nez, Sandra Ben tez, and Graciela Limo n have begun to reconstruct the memory and history of El Salvador as a way to build a Latino/a community in the United States across national, cultural, and ethnic borders. They transform the Salvadoran body into a representation of the disappeared Salvadoran collective memory, an act of cultural restoration that illuminates the political meaning of the body in contemporary Latino/a literature. These novels point to an emerging intersection not only between art and war but between literature and human rights activism.

Key wo rds
US Latino/a literature; El Salvador; civil war; desaparecidos; disappeared; collective memory; body The Salvadoran Civil War of 19801992 left more than 75,000 dead and 500,000 displaced or homeless. Many of those refugees fled to the United States, where the vast majority were denied asylum and deported, often to face death squads who had been tipped off by the US State Department.1 Violence on this scale not only destroys lives, but by dispersing the agents of
c 2005 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1476-3435/05 $30.00 Latino Studies 2005, 3, (205225)  www.palgrave-journals.com/lst

1 Robin Lorentzen (1991)

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reveals that the Catholic Church documented at least 12,000 murder victims, whose murderers went unindicted, among the dead (11). Ann Crittenden (1988) found that between 1982 and 1987, only 906 Salvadoran applications for asylum about 4% were granted while 21,250 were denied (341). During the height of the civil war, between 1980 and 1986, 48,209 Salvadorans were sent back to El Salvador (361).

2 A few recent works on the politics of memory include Raul Hilbergs The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian,

collective memory it also threatens the foundations of community and identity. In the face of such violence and repression, collective memory must be recreated. In one such very conscious act of collective memory, leftist revolutionary forces in the Civil War claimed the name of Agust n Farabundo Mart , who was killed by General Maximiliano Herna ndez Mart nez during the political upheaval of the 1932 communist uprising. By becoming the Frente Farabundo Mart para la Liberacio n Nacional (FMLN), this group of leftist revolutionaries sought to draw on the struggles of previous generations to unite their forces and effectively recreate community and identity compromised by civil war. Recent debates on collective memory, emerging primarily out of European scholarship on the two World Wars, have centered on the location of collective memory. Although Maurice Halbwachs is credited with first exploring the social nature of memory (1992), most recent theoretical work on collective memory hinges on Pierre Noras lieux de me moireFsites of memory. Collective memory, Nora suggests (1989), is attached to that is, contained, evoked, and preserved in these sites (22), which include ruins, cemetery markers, and war monuments. In contrast, historians like Susan Crane (1997) have argued that remembering is, in fact, an individual process, located in those who do the actual work of remembering (1381). In this perspective, the body becomes an intensely political location of memory, and perhaps no more so than in theoretical constructions of collective memories of war. Recognizing the body as a site of memory, US Latina writers Demetria Mart nez, Graciela Limo n, and Sandra Ben tez explore what Katherine Verdery has called the political lives of dead bodies in their novels of the Salvadoran Civil War. In The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (1999), Verdery elaborates a theory of dead-body politics that illuminates the writings of Mart nez, Ben tez, and Limo n. By using Verderys dead-body politics model of analysis, we can focus on the ways that these writers seek both an accounting of historical truth (Verdery, 1999, 38) and a redefinition of the significance of the Salvadoran body, particularly the anonymous or disappeared body. These bodies must be remembered and revalued because not all bodies and objects are equally worth retrieving. The ones that are, however, are usually the bodies of persons thought to have contributed something special to their national history or culture (Verdery, 1999, 4849). The contribution, the culture, and the body all have political underpinnings a dead-body politics of value. Much has been written about the politics of memory,2 but I argue that these novels hinge on the dead-body politics of memory. Collective memory is contingent on the politics of who and what is remembered, who does the remembering, and how those memories are used in the name of national, ethnic, and cultural identity. Dead bodies also have political uses. The Salvadoran government exploited, tortured, murdered, and disappeared Salvadoran bodies during the Civil War, agents of Salvadoran

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Jane Kramers The Politics of Memory: Looking for Germany in the New Germany, Joan B. Wolfs Harnessing the Holocaust: The Politics of Memory in France, M. Nolans The Politics of Memory in the Berlin Republic, Rolando J. Romeros The Alamo, Slavery and the Politics of Memory, P. Lundy and M. McGoverns The Politics of Memory in Post-Conflict Northern Ireland, and Andreas Huyssens Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory.

collective memory. Ben tez, Limo n, and Mart nez retrieve and reanimate Salvadoran bodies through narrative acts of memory. In doing so, they create a memory community in the United States across national, linguistic, and cultural boundaries. Limo n, Mart nez, and Ben tez must transcend national, linguistic, cultural and other boundaries themselves because they are US Latina writers, not Salvadorans. Still, the dead-body politics of these US Latina writers emerges from personal experience: Mart nez reported on and was indicted for Sanctuary work in 1987, Limo n worked with a US delegation in 1990 investigating the assassination of Jesuit priests in El Salvador, and Ben tez spent much of her childhood in the country of her novels. Although each of these writers has a strong commitment to and experience with El Salvador, they do not have personal memories of the Salvadoran Civil War. They thus occupy a subject position that risks further erasure of the Salvadoran body in US literature and the appropriation of Salvadoran stories. I argue, however, that these writers, in the tradition of testimonio, seek to expand the literary space already asserted in the works of Central American writers like Claribel Alegr a and Manlio Argueta, who have long documented Salvadoran collective memory in their works. Jara Rene and Herna n Vidal (1986) define testimonio as a narracio n de urgencia (1), a story that must be told, and these three US Latina writers ensure that the story of the Salvadoran body is both told and remembered. Moreover, Limo n, Ben tez, and Mart nez introduce into US Latino/a literature and Latino/a Studies both Central Americans and Central American history. Other writers have taken up the question of the political meaning of the body in contemporary US Latina literature. Cherr e Moragas bodyless Cerezita in Heroes and Saints, the problem of sexual violence that pervades the novels of Ana Castillo, and the developing and sometimes victimized bodies in Sandra Cisneross The House on Mango Street suggest the body as a site of traumatic collective and individual memory for the US Latino/a community. In a nation in which concerted and often violent efforts are made to homogenize the cultural, racial, sexual, and socioeconomic composition of the United States, the Latina body serves as a reminder of survival and struggle as well as violence and oppression. The body in the novels of the Salvadoran Civil War considered here extends the debate about both collective memory and the body to include the body as both a site and a mechanism of memory. Through their own deadbody politics, Limo n, Ben tez, and Mart nez have begun to reconstruct the memory and history of El Salvador as a way to build a Latino/a community in the United States. These authors transform the disappeared and the tortured Salvadoran body into a representation of the disfigured and disappeared Salvadoran collective memory, an act of cultural restoration that ensures the survival of the collective memories of the people who have been displaced by the events of Salvadoran history and who find themselves distant in both time and space from their homeland. Rejecting the invisibility of Salvadorans in US

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literature and in US geography, Limo n, Mart nez, and Ben tez recover bodies that could be lost to the US Latino community, especially the Salvadoran community, because of migration and violence. Ana Patricia Rodr guez (2002) has also emphasized the necessity of such narrative recoveries in her work on the massacre of El Mozote during the Salvadoran Civil War. Recovering the story of El Mozote and of the civil war in El Salvador, Rodr guez argues, may enable an imaginary recuperation of the Central American homelands for those people how have little or no memory of the Salvadoran Civil War (1). The novels of Ben tez, Limo n, and Mart nez similarly recover memories of the Salvadoran Civil War for their entire reading communities. These writers confront the problem of the disappeared and deceased body with such passion in part because of the way the displaced Salvadorans were disappeared into the geography of the United States, their depoliticized bodies labeled illegal. In the 1980s, Salvadoran and other Central American refugees were rendered invisible with each stroke of the sponge or rake they used to clean motel rooms and yards and porches (Mart nez, 1994, 56). As Rodr guez (2001) has noted, the refugees were economically exploited until it was expedient to deport the body, the name, and the story to other territory in the Americas. Invisible in the United States without documents, these Salvadorans become ghosts of the economic and political systems that enacted their displacement (389). To relocate those bodies within the Latino/a community, Ben tez, Limo n, and Mart nez document the undocumented bodies of those lost to the Civil War of El Salvador and its aftermath. They write a variety of bodies into their novels the injured body, the disappeared body, and the phantom body but they primarily focus on the dead body and its political role in 20th century history in the Americas. These writers reveal the dead, disappeared, and tortured body which, in the hands of government soldiers, interrupts collective memory as a means of preserving and recreating collective memory through literary production. The dead body in these novels is a political body. Both Ben tezs The Weight of All Things (2000) and Limo ns In Search of Bernabe (1993) begin with the funeral of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, who was assassinated while celebrating mass on March 24, 1980. Romero had been widely hailed as El Salvadors most outspoken advocate of peace and human rights (Something Vile, 1980, 61; Salvador Archbishop, 1980, 1), and his funeral drew more than 50,000 mourners. When security police opened fire on the crowd, the frenzy that followed left 35 dead and 185 in hospital with serious injuries. The traditional commemorative function of the ceremony was transformed through violence: the funeral is remembered for bloodshed and death rather than Romeros deep commitment to peace, equality, and justice. Romeros body thus evokes violence twice, through his assassination and then his burial, and its presence in these novels creates a site for remembering both his life and his death, a means of focusing Salvadoran collective memory on peace and social

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justice. Romeros dead body is precisely the kind of body that, Verdery argues, yok[es] past with present and thus emerges as effective symbols for revising the past (1999, 52). Romeros body has what she sees as symbolic effectiveness insofar as it derives meaning through culturally established relations to death and the way a specific dead persons importance is (variously) construed (28). Moreover, as Marita Sturken (1997) argues in Tangled Memories, [b]odies are often perceived to speak without words: The bodies of Vietnam veterans speak of guilt, forgiveness, and accusation in their very presence; the bodies of people with AIDS speak of suffering, anger, resilience, protest. Bodies are social texts whose meanings change in different contexts (220). In the context of the Salvadoran Civil War, many people often had difficulty making their voices heard. Ben tez, Limo n, and Mart nez, in the tradition of testimonio, speak for all those oppressed, disappeared, and imprisoned without a name (Rice-Sayre, 1986, 63). The political lives of Salvadoran bodies have also been used to promote forgetting. In the hands of the Salvadoran government during the 1980s, the dead body interrupted memory by eliminating many individuals who would remember. Today, Salvadoran forgetting would benefit both its government, which seeks to recreate a unified nation, and the US government, complicit in the decade-long conflict, which it subsidized by providing the military with money, weapons, and training. Forgetting in this context is active, not passive, enacted through a variety of mechanisms. In Mart nezs Mother Tongue, for example, Mary tells Salvadoran refugee Jose Luis Romero that his testimonio his story of what he endured at the hands of his own government will be manipulated linguistically as it is reported in the newspapers. She tells him, because your skin is brown, what you say will be followed by words like Romero claimed. Whereas, if you were white, it would read, Romero said. That is how they disappear people here (Mart nez, 1994, 33). This disappearance is tied to memory, as Susan Brison (1999) points out in Traumatic Narrative and the Remaking of Self, because [a]s a society, we live with the unbearable by pressuring those who have been traumatized to forget and by rejecting the testimonies of those who are forced by fate to remember (49). Forgetting through silence and absence is an act of political oppression and violence. In contrast, remembering becomes an act of political agency and cultural survival. To counter forgetting, Sandra Ben tez in Bitter Grounds (1997) resurrects Salvadoran history leading up to the Civil War of the 1980s, beginning with the massacre of 1932 and ending just prior to 1980. The novel follows three generations of women: Mercedes Prieto; her daughter, Jacinta; and Jacintas daughter, Mar a Mercedes. These peasant women are presented in opposition to the wealthy Elena de Contreras; her daughter, Magda; and Magdas daughter, Flor. Ben tez begins her story with la matanza the massacre of 1932, the first peasant rebellion in the country and the first uprising in Latin America overtly

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backed by communists (Anderson, 1992, 14). Ben tez suggests that this massacre had long been disappeared from Salvadoran history:
La matanza. Mar a Mercedes knew its realities because both her mother and Basilio had spoken it. The carnage. The senseless, tragic destruction. When she studied history in school, shed searched for explanations in her books, but all shed found were cryptic descriptions such as: In January 1932, the first communist uprising in the Americas occurred in the southwest region of the country when campesinos rose up violently against patrones. In three days, the insurgency was completely put down. In no book had she seen the words la matanza, the massacre. (1997, 356)

3 See Thomas Andersons excellent assessment of studies of the dead in Matanza (1992, 174176).

4 Erik Ching and Virginia Tilley (1998) found no government order to kill Indians

Ben tez contrasts Mar a Mercedess history lesson of silence about the ethnocide of 1932, in which as many as 30,000 Indian peasants were murdered,3 to the actual circumstances of the violence. The matanza initiates the culture of violence that has pervaded Salvadoran culture for the last 70 years, and as la matanza attests, that culture of violence hinges on ethnicity. In the aftermath of the violence, a member of the guardia tells Mercedes husband, you indios have forgotten your place (23). That place is at the bottom of the social, political, and economic hierarchy that defines El Salvador. The penalty for forgetting that place is death. The massacre of indios following the rebellion served as a warning to survivors, a precursor to the corporal warnings that have characterized many Latin and Central American civil conflicts in the 20th century. Thomas P. Anderson (1992) argues in Matanza that the ruling military powers have deliberately tried to keep the true nature of the events of that year from the people (205), an imposed amnesia that Ben tez seeks to redress in her work. In her rendering of la matanza, Ben tez portrays the guardia as unthinking machines of violence. Although their initial task after the matanza had been to dispose of dead bodies, the guardia eventually began to participate in the violence themselves. Class, racial, and cultural hatred motivated the resulting ethnocide, and this ethnocide prefigured the overlapping ethnic and socioeconomic contestations of space that continued into the 1990s. At the beginning of Bitter Grounds, Mercedes and Jacinta have just left their hut one morning to fetch the days water when they come across the dead body of a guardia. The guardia, they observe, has no head (6). This headless body serves as a symbol of both the guardia members loyalty to the government and their inferior status in the very social structure that uses them as instruments of violence. Mercedes and Jacinta perceive this dead body as a threat of violence to the local indios; retaliation will follow its discovery despite any stated governmental policy prohibiting retribution.4 Mercedes and Jacinta must hide the body. As they drag it into the underbrush, they realize that the body was heavy (8), and Mercedes understands that the weight of the body comes not merely from the pounds of flesh and bone and blood that threaten the safety of them but from the very

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during the 1932 uprising and contradict later impressions that the military waged a campaign against indigenous ethnic identity. The assailant was instead the ladino civil elite, responsible for much of the violence against the Indians following the uprising (147).

knowledge of the severed head (9) and the retribution that will inevitably follow its discovery. The dead-body politics of the matanza interrupt traditional cultural rituals of mourning. As a result of the large number of victims, burial was often impossible, thus precluding traditional outlets for mourning and healing, not only because the body is often absent, but because there is also no marker, a traditional site of both memory and mourning. Festivals of community, such as the D a de los Muertos, which would normally serve to heal the horrors of such violence, instead only underscore the destruction of traditional culture in El Salvador. Mercedes envies the fortunate who could visit their dead. Since la matanza, this comfort had been denied to her and Jacinta. The graves marked with the name Prieto were back in Izalco, and these, like all their past possessions, were but a memory in a faraway place (Ben tez, 1997, 54). The absence of the marker interrupts collective memory, cultural identity, and community. Noras theoretical paradigm of collective memory les lieux de me moire here cannot account for the process of remembering in the absence of the site of memory itself; instead, the novel itself works as a location of collective memory as Ben tez inscribes the lost bodies in the text, facilitating both mourning and remembering. Ben tez ultimately reveals how the dead-body politics of the government merely served to radicalize its people to rebellion. Bitter Grounds ends in the years leading up to the Civil War, focusing on the radicalization of Mar a Mercedes, Mercedes granddaughter who joins the rebel forces. Through Mar a Mercedes, who adopts the name Alma soul for her work in the FMLN, Ben tez tells us how to read the narrative. Contrasting the wealthy and the poor, the urban and the rural, the idle and the working, Ben tez reveals binaries that have real consequences in the racial and class stratification of El Salvador. [A] growing awareness of disparities opened Mar a Mercedes eyes, forcing her to realize that [b]etween the two, theres a chasm with no bridges to link them (347). Ben tez emphasizes this disparity in the way she structures the novel. She divides the book into three sections, one for each generation of women, and titles those sections for the corresponding pairs of women, one from the wealthy, privileged family of Elena de Contreras and one from the family of Mercedes Prieto, who serves Elena. Ben tez thus throws into sharp relief both the socioeconomic divide between these pairs of women and the dependence of the countrys social stratification on the labor of the working classes. These social disparities play an important role in Mar a Mercedess choice to join the rebel forces, but the decision ultimately rests on memory and on bodies. She remembers that as she stepped gingerly over the corpses at El Playo n, something inside her began to change. After El Playo n, the image of corpses sprung up in her head by day and filled her dreams at night (411). The bodies serve the militarys purpose of warning the people not to join the rebel cause, but, paradoxically, the corpses also radicalize Salvadorans to that cause. The

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very bodies that were meant to threaten them inspired people like Mar a Mercedes to join the rebels in fighting for social justice. As Ben tez reveals in Bitter Grounds, during the years leading up the Civil War, the dead indigenous body served the government in several ways. First, the dead indigenous body could not fight with the leftist revolutionary forces, and the threat of death also deterred some from joining the uprising against the countrys oligarchy. Second, the dead body interrupts the transmission of memory across time and space. Third, and most important, was the dead bodys mnemonic role a reminder to the surviving peasants of the violent fate of those who demonstrated opposition to the countrys socioeconomic hierarchy and stratification. One witness to the matanza testified that mass shootings took place. The bodies were left exposed on the streets. Some communists were hanged by the tens and their bodies remained hanging for a few days (quoted in Ching and Tilley, 1998, 139), and Anderson (1992) also writes that [t]he roadways were littered with bodies in many areas (171). In such displays, the dead body represents a warning for the armed rebels once its own dissenting tongue has been silenced in death, grisly reminders of the consequences of dissent. During la matanza and the Civil War of the 1980s, the dead body frequently served as a warning to the leftist guerrillas and the Salvadoran people who might be sympathetic to the revolutionary cause. As James LeMoyne (1989) observed, One could not drive around the capital of San Salvador between 1979 and early 1982 without finding tortured bodies of men, women, and sometimes children littered along the road (118). These bodies both create and interrupt memory. They are reminders of violence to Salvadorans, thus creating a new memory for survivors. At the same time, the trauma of these deaths interrupts memory, and the survivor experiences a figurative dismemberment a shattering of assumptions, a severing of past, present, and future, a disruption of memory (Brison, 1999, 48). In these novels, such disruptions point to a fragmentation of identity and memory, explicitly inscribed on the Salvadoran body. Nine-year-old Nicola s Veras in The Weight of All Things observes that warfare placed corpses in unexpected places (Ben tez, 2000, 69). Corpses appear in a variety of places in these novels, drawing together the various experiences of war into the location of the body, which becomes a site of war, a site of memory, and, ultimately, a site of mourning. The bodies become part of the setting, attesting to the historical period, the geographical location, and the social circumstances of the characters both living and dead. Ben tez also locates the dead body in language, creating a new world of war in which painful connections exist for those who survive. When Nicola s finally understands that his mother had been killed at Romeros funeral, [h]e couldnt bear to be in a place where the words mother and killed had been spoken together (1415). These words hovered like threats in the air (15), reminders not only of his

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mother and her death but also of his own dangerous plight. Nicola s meets a mother who tells him the story of her sons body, which had also been used to speak to other Salvadorans. She tells Nicolas that her son, Joaqu n, had been killed in his own bed, from which the guardia took him and cut off his head. La Guardia stuck my sons head on a post for the town to see. To teach them all a lesson, they said (22). As dead bodies are used to communicate threats to survivors, torture is used as a language in which to communicate with the victim. Ben tez writes the story of
el padre Rugelio, a devotee of the Churchs reform theology [who] had been accosted by a group of Guardia and beaten so severely his mind was never the same. Worse yet, there was this awful truth about the assault: to teach the queer communist a lesson, the Guardia bragged, a branch of jocote, thick as a wrist, had been thrust up his rectum. (19)

The violation of Rugelio points to Ben tezs contention that the experience of war is gendered in itself. One mother similarly describes the death of her pregnant daughter:
Truth is, they ripped her open. Sons of bitches, they just ripped her apart. Wasnt enough to kill her like she was some kind of pig. No. They had to rip her open and pull the baby out. Left it lying in the road. A little bundle of blood. He was a boy. I saw this for myself. His little peepee, it was as big as this. Oh, well. Its probably for the best. Another boy brought into this world. Paque? What for? For joining the army? For joining the people in the hills? (74)

The body politics of the military regime force its soldiers to view this womans body as a threat during wartime the threat of womens creative potential. Not only is this woman punished for her revolutionary activities, but her unborn son also threatens the army with his mere existence, a potential body to fill the ranks of the rebel forces in the ongoing Civil War. Ben tezs gendered dead-body politics, in which womens differential experience of war is paramount, also addresses the perpetuation of collective memory. Women are charged both with cultural preservation and transmission, part of their role as caregivers, but that transmission is threatened by womens differential experience in war. In Mother Tongue, Mart nez connects the Salvadoran body to the Civil War in significant ways. Through her work with the Sanctuary movement of the 1980s, Mary takes the role of caregiver with Jose Luis. She helps him with shelter, food, employment, forged documents, transportation, information, and translation. Jose Luis, however, has much to teach Mary. Although he remains silent on the topic of his own body for much of the novel, Jose Luis must find ways to educate the na ve Mary about the violence of his country and her own governments role in it. Salvadoran stories, suggests Mart nez, must break the A, enforced silence in both countries. Jose Luis writes a poem, FOR MARI

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which is the name he calls Mary and the name that transforms her consciousness about both bodies and politics: how your eyes hold me, eyes where relief and fear reside as in a cease-fire. my rib throbs beneath your palm, the rib they fractured with a rifle, the rib that if taken into the body of America might make it new a country where mercy and nobility reside, where the shattered bones of my people teach your people about strength. (132133) In this poem, Jose Luis speaks his body not only to Mar a but also to the United States and its people. The imagery of war cease-fire, rifle parallels the imagery of the body eyes, ribs, bones. The rib, in particular, suggests the Genesis story of creation and recreation, broken by one people with the potential to be healed by another, if they would only reform their political policies in Central America and for Central Americans. Mart nez writes the body as nation, but that body is male in her novel, a deviation from many colonial and imperial constructions of the nation. Jose Luis look[s] in the mirror and see[s] a map of El Salvador (Mart nez, 1994, 105). He understands that neither the help of the Sanctuary workers nor Marys love will be able to heal the national wounds of his body. He realizes that Mary believes if she loves me enough the scars inside me will disappear (8485). The scars inside are reflected in Jose Luis flesh as well. On his back, Mary finds a pattern of scars, the legend to the map of his life 1982, someone had branded those numbers into his back. These scars speak for others without a voice [n]ineteen eighty-two was the year he was tortured, that thousands were tortured (134), and Jose Luis body comes to represent the thousands of others wounded, murdered, and disappeared. The connection between mapping and scarring bespeaks the colonial legacy that Salvadorans continue to live five centuries after the arrival of the Spanish in the Americas; the destruction of the Americas is enacted on Jose Luis skin. These scars also support Brisons (1999) assertion that memories of traumatic events are experienced by the survivor as inflicted, not chosen (40), creating of the trauma a collective memory because the trauma is culturally produced and also culturally perceived (41). In Mart nezs novel, the character of Mary and, ultimately, the readers themselves stand in for

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agents of cultural perception, and their empathy for the trauma victim shapes how others in the survivors culture respond over time (42). Jose Luis story and his body are destined to be a statement about the times (Mart nez, 1994, 36). His body must speak, for Jose Luis remains silent, unable to articulate the violence that occurred in a country with a politically mandated silence, one enforced with dead bodies hung from trees, left on the side of the road, mounted for display. Mary understands his silence because [t]o tell another person about what was done to your body in the name of politics is a frightful act of intimacy (134), an intimacy that Jose Luis cannot afford after the murder of his Salvadoran fiance e, Ana. The transformation from Mary gringa americana to Mar a is completed as she learns more about El Salvador through her work with the Sanctuary movement. Robin Lorentzen (1991) identifies Sanctuary as the largest grassroots civil disobedience movement since the 1960s (14). Sanctuary work was largely the work of women, who outnumbered men by two-thirds at every level of the organization (Lorentzen, 1991, 3). Unlike Mart nezs Mar a, however, most of those workers where white and middle-class women (Lorentzen, 1991, 6). Through her use of the characters Mar a and Soledad, Mart nez writes Chicana Sanctuary workers into history into peace and human rights activism and thus suggests the power of the Latino/a community in the United States. Mart nez herself was indicted in 1987 on charges related to smuggling two Salvadoran women into the United States; her poem Nativity: For Two Salvadoran Women was presented as evidence against her during the trial. She was acquitted on First Amendment grounds when her poetry could not be used against her in a court of law. Mart nez grants Mar a agency through Sanctuary work and writing, countering victimization as womens primary role in war and creating Latina bodies as agents of historical change. Mart nez locates Sanctuary work in the home, focusing on the home space, rather than churches, which were also instrumental spaces in Sanctuary efforts to shelter and protect Central American refugees. Mar a describes her Sanctuary work as what liberation theologians said was Gods way of acting in history (Mart nez, 1994, 72). In Mother Tongue, it is women who are acting in history. Because Jose Luis is a man, Mar a sees him as an actor in history, believing that hes actually done something with his life, tried to become a subject, not an object, in history as he said the other day (39). She wants to emulate him because [h]is words and those of the poets he admired made me want to sell my belongings, smuggle refugees across borders, protest government policies by chaining myself to the White House gate romantic dreams, yes, but the kind that dwell side by side with resistance (69). Marys initial conception of political action is limited to the public arena national borders, the White House rather than the home, which she ultimately comes to see as a space of transgressive political action in the important work of organizing, translating, cooking, and loving.

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Mar as increasing radicalization, like that of Mar a Mercedes in Bitter Grounds, is connected to the body. She reads in some newsletter about how the Salvadoran police outline in chalk the bodies they find, documenting the mysterious deaths they themselves plan and carry out (Mart nez, 1994, 129). She reads an Associated Press article about nuns bodies which were found in a shallow grave [and] appeared to have been mutilated (119). These nuns had worked closely with the Mothers of the Disappeared, a group the Salvadoran government says has strong ties to the guerrillas (122). Despite her increasing consciousness, Jose Luis remains convinced that Mar a does not know what its like to suffer (123). She realizes that Jose Luis saw in me an image of a gringa whose pale skin and tax dollars are putting his compatriots to death. My credentials, the fact that Im Mexican American, dont count now; in fact, they make things worse (123124). The story of the nuns makes the disjunction between their experiences more visible, and the image of their mutilated bodies becomes a turning point for Jose Luis, for their relationship, and for Mar a. She understands that [e]arlier in the morning, he had made love to a Chicana. However, after telling him the news of the nuns deaths, I am transfigured. For a terrible, disfigured moment, I am a yanqui, a murderess, a whore (124). She increasingly realizes that love could not be divorced from history, that his war had to become my war (44) in order for her to elude the complicity of her national identity in favor of her cultural one. Jose Luis insistence on and Mar as realization of this disjuncture of experience and identity mirror the disjunction between Salvadoran and US Chicana and Latina depictions of the Civil War in El Salvador. Mart nez chooses to bridge that gap, at least in part, through traumatic memory. The violence done to Jose Luis body stirs Mar as own memory: Nobody told me that the war left his body by way of mine, that currents of memory were moving through me at dangerously high voltages (Mart nez, 1994, 103). The transformation of body for Jose Luis becomes a transformation of memory for Mar a. After Jose Luis suffers an episode of post-traumatic stress, violence fueled by his own memories, Mar a has her own transformation: Then, I remembered (164). She remembers the abuse her own body suffered as a small child. She remembers hands crawling up my things, thumbs under panties. A finger in a place you hardly know exists is like a knife. A knife in the place for which you have no words is the most lethal of weapons. It carves words on your inner walls to fill the void. Words like chaos, slut, dont tell, your fault (165). Like the map of his life burned into Jose Luis flesh, so is the memory of this abuse inscribed on Mar as body. Her body becomes both the site and the record of the violence, a political statement of the times. The story of Mar as body is identical to the story of Jose Luis body insofar as it must be told. Mar a writes in her journal, Like snake venom, this storys medicine had to be drawn from my own body (163). The worse thing, Soledad tells her, is not remembering (169). Memory for Mart nez is the only way that politics might be transformed, so that the

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depoliticized Salvadoran body may reside in the political context that has wounded and disappeared it. The body, absent from memory, has merely been disappeared through yet another method and from yet another location history. It is not until Mar a sets out to tell her son about his father that she recognizes the value in the political action she has taken in the home as a Sanctuary worker. Mar as true political work, however, comes from the telling of her story and that of Jose Luis. Mar as own story about the violation of her body is a testimonio, a story that must be told, because stories exorcise the inner authorities that say quiet, dont tell, that keep women like me from speaking the truth about their lives (Mart nez, 1994, 9495). For Mar a, telling the story becomes political action. The structure that Mart nez uses in telling Mar as story reflects not the fragmentation of the body but the fragmentation of memory. Mar a recounts the events that she can remember nearly 20 years after Jose Luiss flight from El Salvador, supplementing the blank spaces of her memory with her journal from the time, postcards, descriptions of photographs, poems, newspaper articles, a transcription of an audio tape, letters, recipes, and Jose Luiss journals. Mar as son, Jose Luis, even narrates a section of the novel. These artifacts are all I have left to fasten my story to reality. Everything else is remembering. Or dismembering (12). Mart nez dismembers the text, simultaneously creating gaps in Mar as memory and a polyvocal, multi-genre novel that emphasizes the importance of multiple voices and versions in the creation of collective memory. Fragmentation also characterizes Graciela Limo ns In Search of Bernabe as she repeatedly includes images of fragmented bodies. The story centers on Luz Delcano, who has two sons, Lucio and Bernabe , on opposite sides of the war seminarian Bernabe , a rebel in the mountains, and Lucio, a colonel in the army. These two men represent the conflict of brothers compatriots fighting against one another in a war for whom the beneficiary is often unclear. Beginning with Archbishop Romeros funeral, the novel seeks also to correct Salvadoran history as it has been reported in the United States. As the mourners gather in the plaza outside the church where Romeros funeral mass is being celebrated, gunfire and explosions rock the crowd. Bernabe Delcano sees bodies crashing in on him, pinning him down (Limo n, 1993, 24) as the dead and wounded fall and the living try to flee. As with Nicola s in Ben tezs The Weight of All Things, Bernabe is crushed by the corporal weight of his own compatriots as [y]oung men, mostly guerrillas, pulled out hand guns, then fired indiscriminately into the crowd in an attempt to hit members of the death squads with their random bullets. Uniformed soldiers suddenly appeared, also firing automatic weapons into the crowd (Limo n, 1993, 23). The presence of soldiers at the funeral was repeatedly denied by the government, who insist that the leftist guerrillas took advantage of the funeral as an opportunity for

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violence. Limo n includes the uniformed soldiers in her version of the event in order to reflect popular testimony of what actually occurred at the funeral. Dead-body politics shape Limo ns novel as bodies, mutilated beyond recognition, were being discovered daily (Limo n, 1993, 55), creating a fragmentation of the body politic. In the fear and chaos generated by the violation of these bodies, the Salvadoran government sought to divide and thus defeat leftist revolutionary forces. Many of those revolutionary groups also depended on help from Salvadoran campesinos, aid that the military also sought to forefend a unified Salvadoran body politic with its own economic and political power. The fragmented humanity that Bernabe observes in the plaza at Romeros funeral mass reminds him of Guernica, Pablo Picassos 1937 painting of the attack on the Spanish town of Guernica in that same year during the countrys civil war. Spains insurgent generals had ordered the attack, the goal of which had been the slaughter of civilians and the destruction of homes, schools, businesses, and churches (Martin, 2002, 3). As Limo n describes it in her novel, the painting contains fragments of human beings. Bernabe comes to understand that, for the Spanish and for Salvadorans, each in their own civil wars, those broken pieces of human beings could not be brought together again. Even before the outbreak of violence in the plaza, Bernabe realized that these people around him were really fragmented: faces, eyes, cheeks, and arms (Limo n, 1993, 22). They are fragmented by oppression and poverty, a rent in the social fabric of the nation that cannot be mended through violence. Bernabe s brother, Lucio, experiences a similar fragmentation in his dreams. In one recurrent dream, he finds that I am always a twisted, ugly creature. My limbs are in pieces, and the parts are in the wrong place. My legs are where my arms should be. They grow out of my shoulders, and my arms are down there, where my feet should be, and in place of my head are my testicles. I am indeed a monster (Limo n, 1993, 43). As the instigator of the unspeakable violence committed against his own people, the colonel is indeed a monster, his own humanity fragmented by violence. That his sexual organs have replaced his head suggest the unthinking violence that is motivated by social constructions of masculinity. Lucio understands his own twisted monstrosity; as long as he continues to be violent, he will always be inhuman. When he finally orders the murder of his own brother, he also plans his own murder, ordering a subordinate to kill him, because he sees death as the only salvation from the fragmentation of his soul. A living Guernica, Lucio embodies war. As its title suggests, In Search of Bernabe is structured around a mothers search for her son. In the reality of the Salvadoran Civil War, Luz realizes that she may be searching not for her son but for her sons body. She ultimately finds that body in a dump outside the citys center, which she carr[ied] from the mount [of garbage] to a secluded place. There, she and strangers scratched out a hole deep enough to bury his body (Limo n, 1993, 165). The garbage dump recalls Sturkens assertion (1997) that in war, the human body becomes

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subject to dismemberment, relegated to the dump, to a kind of antimemory (73). Without narratives to retrieve bodies from that dump, the collective memory of the Civil War will disappear as did the bodies of thousands of Salvadorans. As a result of their dead-body politics, the Salvadoran military refused any knowledge of bodies, which often were permanently disappeared. Marjorie Agos n (1987) sees disappearance as [p]erhaps the most diabolical invention of the Latin American dictatorships. The word
disappearances was used for the first time to describe a governmental practice which was applied on a wide scale in Guatemala after 1966, in Chile toward the end of 1973 and in Argentina beginning in March 1976. To disappear means to be snatched off a street corner, or dragged from ones bed, or taken from a movie theatre or a cafe either by police, soldiers, or men in civilian clothes, and from that moment on, to disappear from the face of the earth, leaving not a single trace. It means that all knowledge of the disappeared is totally lost. (34)

The Salvadoran government continued this grisly practice in the 1980s, creating an official policy: No lo tenemos (Montgomery, 1995, 81) we dont have him. Disappearances affected countless families. Young men died at the hands of death squads. Scores of Salvadorans fled the city and headed for the countryside hoping to distance themselves from the shootings and kidnappings (Limo n, 1993, 165). In The Weight of All Things, Ben tez (2000) describes a scene familiar to many Salvadorans. As Nicola s rides a bus between cities, some soldiers take a young man off the bus at a roadblock. For the young man, it would be todays date that family and friends would give when telling the story of his disappearance (24). These novels replace those bodies with stories and emerge themselves as sites of mourning, not only in El Salvador but also in the United States. Ben tez, Mart nez, and Limo n have reappeared the stories of Salvadorans through their own dead-body politics. The narrative work of these novels stems from another Latin American female tradition of telling, naming, and remembering: the Mothers of the Disappeared. The Salvadoran mothers emerged soon after the first group of mothers in Argentina who organized during the countrys Dirty War. The Madres of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina took their name from the site of their first protest in April 1977, the Plaza de Mayo in the capital city of Buenos Aires. With no public support within or without Argentina, the Mothers of the Plaza began to demonstrate weekly on behalf of their disappeared children and grandchildren, seeking their bodies and their stories. In her history of the movement, Nora Femen a (1987) traces the techniques that the Mothers invented to rescue the disappeared from obliteration in the public memory (15). They created life-sizes silhouettes and inscribed the names of the disappeared on them, connecting names and bodies in a way that resisted the

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official narrative of ignorance and denial. They made paper cutouts of hands and tied names to balloons. For both survivors and families, the insistence on the specific naming of the disappeared reminds us of the need to know our own history (Miller, 1991, 1). Feminists have long viewed naming as an act of empowerment and conquest usually reserved for males in the patriarchy. Naming also resonates in the colonization of the Americas, a legacy that directly resulted in conflicts like El Salvadors Civil War and Argentinas dirty war (LeMoyne, 1989). During the colonization of the Americas, the Spaniards would impose [a] name on the place, inflict it. Like Adam, they think God has given them the right to name a world. And the world never recovers (Mart nez, 1994, 15). While naming is empowering both for self-definition and for a cultures collective memory, Jose Luis points out that naming can also be dangerous. Upon his arrival in Albuquerque, he asks Mar a to choose a name for him, an ordinary name that might protect him. He tells Mar a, in my country names turn up on lists. Or in the mouths of army officers at US embassy parties. A few drinks later, someone, somewhere, disappears (13). When Jose Luis disappears, Mar a suffers the loss of both the person and the name, which she had not known. She can, however, participate in naming; when Mar a gives Jose Luis invented name to her son, she makes the name real, attaching a true name to the appropriate body (Castillo, 1997, 18). Mar a thus joins the traditions of the Madres in naming what she has lost. The Madres also shared their individual losses with nations collective loss. They made masks to wear during demonstrations, illustrating the common plight of those disappeared without a name. Femen a outlines their gradual progression in their choice of symbolism for the loss of their children, from highly individualized representations like photographs to impersonal ones like masks. As this occurred, the individual nature of their losses was transformed into a collective loss (Femen a, 1987, 15). In this way, individual memory is transformed into collective memory for all Argentineans. Salvadorans have their own tradition of activist mothers in CO-MADRES, the Comite de Madres y Familiares de Presos, Desaparecidos y Asesinados de El Salvador Monsen or Ocsar Arnulfo Romero. Members of this group confronted the tortured, raped, and maimed bodies of their own and others loved ones found on train tracks and in clandestine cemeteries. Its work was fundamental to the resistance movement because it was confronting the Salvadoran and US governments regarding heinous human rights violations that were supposedly not happening (Shayne, 1999, 9091). Ben tez, Mart nez, and Limo n also confront this history in their novels, which consequently extends the memory community to US readers as well, many of whom are capable through their privilege of effecting change. For the Mothers, their work continues the work of expanding the memory community in the name of those who disappeared, years after the end of these civil wars. The mothers continue to believe that [t]he guilty must be punished so that no mother anywhere in the

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world has to suffer what we have suffered since the disappearance of our children. We will never forget (Femen a, 1987, 1718). Remembering the disappeared is closely related to the process of mourning. The novels of Ben tez, Mart nez, and Limo n seek to commemorate those who disappeared during the Salvadoran Civil War and thus facilitate the ability to remember and mourn. Mart nez (1994) uses the image of the Mothers explicitly in Mother Tongue, as Mar a hangs a poster of the Virgin Mary, the ultimate mother, inscribed as la madre de los desaparecidos on her wall. Mar a believes that the Mother of the Disappeared is forever remembering (186). Unlike Luz in her search for Bernabe , Mar a is not the mother of the disappeared Jose Luis but of his son, named to honor his missing father. Mar a for many years is unable to accept his absent body and has avoided calling Jose Luis by his true name, desaparecido, disappeared one (88). It is not until Mar a begins writing her story and Jose Luiss story that she is able to recognize him as desaparecido. Mar as writing reflects the work of these three novelists for whom narrative becomes a means for working through traumatic memories to heal and to create a collective memory that is simultaneously less painful as for Mar a and more inclusive as for readers of these novels. To counter the risk of appropriation, these novelists foreground the Salvadoran body to ensure its rightful place as the center of Salvadoran collective memory in the United States. Rather than relying on Noras lieux de me moire often absent in civil conflicts or Cranes notion of the individual, Ben tez, Limo n, and Mart nez honor the bodies that also speak for and to the community of displaced Salvadorans in the United States. Mart nez explicitly emphasizes the primacy of Salvadorans in their own story when Jose Luiss surname is revealed at the end of the novel: Alegr a. Mart nez has made him a namesake of the Salvadoran poet Claribel Alegr a, who has long chronicled the story of my country El Salvador (Alegr a, 1997, 302). Even, or perhaps especially, when absent, bodies convey messages. As Mar a is haunted by her Salvadoran ghost, so too are the characters in Limo ns novel. Father Hugh is haunted by his business partner, Augie Sinclaire, with whom he has been selling guns to the Salvadoran military. Ghosts, like memory, can haunt us, Luz tells Father Hugh. These ghosts come back to pick at us with their sharp edges. They never let us forget anything. Theyre everywhere, hiding around corners, crouching in little niches where we least expect them (Limo n, 1993, 126). The ghosts are transitional figures between the body and the way it is remembered. Remembering is to make a body complete (Sturken, 1997, 72), to transform it from ghost into story, to retrieve it from the dump of forgetting. To remedy forgetting and foster healing, these writers are speaking for the dead, the disappeared, and the survivors of the Salvadoran war who cannot tell their stories. The survivor is one who remembers and it is ultimately through survivors that cultural memory is reinscribed, actively

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produced, and given meaning (Sturken, 1997, 254). By counting themselves among those survivors, these writers extend the memory community to include Latino/as and Anglo readers in the United States. They also invite the reader to participate in the act of testimonio. Dori Laub and Shoshana Feldman (1992) suggest in their work on Holocaust testimonies that testimony must include the listener. For the testimonial process to take place, there needs to be a bonding, the intimate and total presence of an other in the position of the one who hears (70). In this way, the listener to trauma comes to be a participant and co-owner of the traumatic event (57). Sonia Sald var-Hull (2000) has argued that testimonies and the literary texts produced by the Chicana feminists on the border [share] their purpose for writing their challenge to the reader to act (171). The body in these novels speaks of Central American traumatic experiences to readers who might be moved to action. In Mother Tongue, Jose Luis is a classic political asylum case, assuming he decides to apply openly. Complete with proof of torture. Although even then he has only a 2% chance of being accepted by the United States (Mart nez, 1994, 7). These words, written by Sanctuary worker Soledad, indict the US governments refusal to see Central Americans as political refugees, a category that would force them to admit that their funding of the Civil War is resulting in torture and murder. In Jose Luis, Mart nez creates a body that speaks to borders both the US Mexican border across which many of these refugees arrived and the border between the US and Canada across which many refugees could find safety. The body speaks to the moral borders crossed by the Salvadoran government, its army, and, sometimes, its rebels as well as by the US government, which has also participated in the destruction of the Salvadoran body. Jose Luis body crosses borders: His was a face Id seen in a dream. A face with no borders: Tibetan eyelids, Spanish hazel irises, Mayan cheekbones. Jose Luis face speaks to the post-colonial legacy of corporal mestizaje, repudiated by the US governments refusal to accept such faces across US borders. His face, ultimately, is a warriors face. Because the war was still inside him (4). With the US governments financial and moral complicity, the Salvadoran war does not remain within the confines of its own national borders; the war crosses with Jose Luis into the United States. Mart nez underscores the role of the United States in the Civil War by pointing to the source of the armys weapons. Before beginning the narrative of Mother Tongue, Mart nez (1994) writes, More than 75,000 citizens of El Salvador died during a twelve-year Civil War, which officially ended in 1991. Most died at the hands of their own government. The United States supported this effort with more than $6 billion in military aid. US citizens who have traveled to El Salvador on humanitarian aid missions find bullet casings imprinted with the name of a US city (71), material evidence of their own governments complicity in the violence and destruction. Such trips to El Salvador were not isolated incidents but formed what became a movement of

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sorts, of US citizens taking an option for the poor, which liberation theologians said was Gods way of acting in history. These conversions could be traced to the stories of Salvadorans, stories about torture, dismemberment, hunger, sickness (72). For these US Latina writers, their option for Salvadorans takes shape in narrative. Literature, for these Chicana writers, ultimately becomes a new body itself a gendered body politic one of agency and self-definition. Telling their stories becomes part of what theologian Ada Mar a Isasi-D az (1993) calls annunciation, which is the reality in our struggle to find or create spaces for selfdetermination (36) as part of womens struggle for peace in a society in which their bodies are not safe. The body in these novels, far from being focused on the individual, is indeed a collective body politic because [p]eace, justice, love and freedom are not private realities; they are not only internal attitudes. They are social realities for Latino/as everywhere (Gutie rrez, 1988, 97). These novels point to an emerging intersection not only between art and war but between literature and human rights activism. In the same way that the dead bodies serve the interests of war, the dead bodies in these novels serve the interests of peace. In contrast to the dead-body politics of a government that uses the body as both warning and reminder, the dead-body politics of Mart nez, Ben tez, and Limo n are a politics of commemoration and community, as they render visible through narrative the bodies missing from collective memory.

A b o u t t he a ut h o r
Kelli Lyon-Johnson is Assistant Professor of English at Miami University Hamilton where she teaches US multi-ethnic literature, womens literature, and writing. In addition to her book Julia Alvarez: Writing a New Place on the Map, her work on US Latina writers has appeared in The Bilingual Review/La Revista Bilingu e, Frontiers, and Mosaic.

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