I feel that within the imagination of most people who are neither Salvadoran, of Salvadoran descent, or Central American, El Salvador as a nation, people, and culture is a blank book with only four bookmarks for reference: the civil war, present-day mass migration, MS-13, and pupusas.
One of the greatest misconceptions and purposeful misrepresentations that has been constructed around El Salvador (and in general, Guatemala and Honduras) is a perpetual and contradictory dichotomy of simultaneous victimhood and criminality.
In the United States we are either pitiable victims of war, political repression, or poverty as long as we remain within our lands. But the moment we migrate, we become MS-13 terrorists and invaders that merit no asylum.
What is known about Salvadoran history and culture, even among progressive or leftist circles in the U.S., is largely informed from solidarity work around the 1980s civil war and interactions (between mostly white college students) and representatives of various liberation fronts.
Today, at times, it feels like many of our friends and allies still don’t know us.
This characteristic of being unknowable is not of our choosing or making. It is an unfortunate side-effect of the willful ignorance that comes with being absorbed into and propagating the hegemonic white supremacist culture of the United States.
Which is unfortunate, because to know us is to understand that Salvadorans are born fighters. Resistance is in our blood, from the anticolonial rebellion led by Anastasio Aquino in the 19th century, to the 1932 Indigenous Uprising, to the 1944 National Strike that brought down a dictatorship; we are a people in continuous mobilization for justice.
