acts of war, acts of memory

Article

ACTS OF WAR, ACTS OF MEMORY: DEAD-BODY POLITICS IN USLATINA NOVELS OF THESALVADORAN CIVIL WAR

Kell i Lyon-JohnsonMiami University Hamilton, Hamilton, OH

Abstract

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 Martnez, Sandra Bentez, and

Graciela Limon 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.

Keywords

US Latino/a literature; El Salvador; civil war; desaparecidos; disappeared;collective memory; body

The Salvadoran Civil War of 1980!1992 left more than 75,000 dead and500,000 displaced or homeless. Many of those refugees fled to the UnitedStates, where the vast majority were denied asylum and deported, often toface 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 of1 Robin Lorent-zen (1991)

Latino Studies 2005, 3, (205225) "c 2005 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1476-3435/05 $30.00www.palgrave-journals.com/lst

collective memory it also threatens the foundations of community and identity.In the face of such violence and repression, collective memory must berecreated. In one such very conscious act of collective memory, leftistrevolutionary forces in the Civil War claimed the name of Agustn FarabundoMart, who was killed by General Maximiliano Hernandez Martnez during thepolitical upheaval of the 1932 communist uprising. By becoming the FrenteFarabundo Mart para la Liberacion Nacional (FMLN), this group of leftistrevolutionaries sought to draw on the struggles of previous generations to unitetheir forces and effectively recreate community and identity compromised bycivil war.Recent debates on collective memory, emerging primarily out of European

scholarship on the two World Wars, have centered on the location of collectivememory. Although Maurice Halbwachs is credited with first exploring thesocial nature of memory (1992), most recent theoretical work on collectivememory hinges on Pierre Noras lieux de memoireFsites of memory. Collectivememory, Nora suggests (1989), is attached to that is, contained, evoked,and preserved in these sites (22), which include ruins, cemetery markers, andwar monuments. In contrast, historians like Susan Crane (1997) have arguedthat remembering is, in fact, an individual process, located in those who do theactual work of remembering (1381). In this perspective, the body becomes anintensely political location of memory, and perhaps no more so than intheoretical constructions of collective memories of war. Recognizing the body asa site of memory, US Latina writers Demetria Martnez, Graciela Limon, andSandra Bentez explore what Katherine Verdery has called the political lives ofdead 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 thewritings of Martnez, Bentez, and Limon. By using Verderys dead-bodypolitics model of analysis, we can focus on the ways that these writers seekboth an accounting of historical truth (Verdery, 1999, 38) and a redefinition ofthe significance of the Salvadoran body, particularly the anonymous ordisappeared body. These bodies must be remembered and revalued becausenot all bodies and objects are equally worth retrieving. The ones that are,however, are usually the bodies of persons thought to have contributedsomething special to their national history or culture (Verdery, 1999, 4849).The contribution, the culture, and the body all have political underpinnings adead-body politics of value. Much has been written about the politics ofmemory,2 but I argue that these novels hinge on the dead-body politics ofmemory. Collective memory is contingent on the politics of who and what isremembered, who does the remembering, and how those memories are used inthe name of national, ethnic, and cultural identity. Dead bodies also havepolitical uses. The Salvadoran government exploited, tortured, murdered, anddisappeared Salvadoran bodies during the Civil War, agents of Salvadoran

reveals that theCatholic Churchdocumented at least12,000 murder vic-tims, whose mur-derers wentunindicted, amongthe dead (11). AnnCrittenden (1988)found that between1982 and 1987, only906 Salvadoran ap-plications for asylum about 4% weregranted while 21,250were denied (341).During the height ofthe civil war, between1980 and 1986,48,209 Salvadoranswere sent back to ElSalvador (361).

2 A few recent workson the politics ofmemory includeRaul Hilbergs ThePolitics of Memory:The Journey of aHolocaust Historian,

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collective memory. Bentez, Limon, and Martnez retrieve and reanimateSalvadoran bodies through narrative acts of memory. In doing so, they create amemory community in the United States across national, linguistic, and culturalboundaries.Limon, Martnez, and Bentez must transcend national, linguistic, cultural

and other boundaries themselves because they are US Latina writers, notSalvadorans. Still, the dead-body politics of these US Latina writers emergesfrom personal experience: Martnez reported on and was indicted for Sanctuarywork in 1987, Limon worked with a US delegation in 1990 investigating theassassination of Jesuit priests in El Salvador, and Bentez spent much of herchildhood in the country of her novels. Although each of these writers has astrong commitment to and experience with El Salvador, they do not havepersonal memories of the Salvadoran Civil War. They thus occupy a subjectposition that risks further erasure of the Salvadoran body in US literature andthe appropriation of Salvadoran stories. I argue, however, that these writers, inthe tradition of testimonio, seek to expand the literary space already asserted inthe works of Central American writers like Claribel Alegra and ManlioArgueta, who have long documented Salvadoran collective memory in theirworks. Jara Rene and Hernan Vidal (1986) define testimonio as a narracion deurgencia (1), a story that must be told, and these three US Latina writers ensurethat the story of the Salvadoran body is both told and remembered. Moreover,Limon, Bentez, and Martnez introduce into US Latino/a literature and Latino/aStudies 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. Cherre Moragas bodyless Cerezita inHeroes and Saints, the problem of sexual violence that pervades the novels ofAna Castillo, and the developing and sometimes victimized bodies in SandraCisneross The House on Mango Street suggest the body as a site of traumaticcollective and individual memory for the US Latino/a community. In a nation inwhich concerted and often violent efforts are made to homogenize the cultural,racial, sexual, and socioeconomic composition of the United States, the Latinabody serves as a reminder of survival and struggle as well as violence andoppression. The body in the novels of the Salvadoran Civil War considered hereextends the debate about both collective memory and the body to include thebody as both a site and a mechanism of memory. Through their own dead-body politics, Limon, Bentez, and Martnez have begun to reconstruct thememory and history of El Salvador as a way to build a Latino/a community inthe United States. These authors transform the disappeared and the torturedSalvadoran body into a representation of the disfigured and disappearedSalvadoran collective memory, an act of cultural restoration that ensures thesurvival of the collective memories of the people who have been displaced by theevents of Salvadoran history and who find themselves distant in both time andspace from their homeland. Rejecting the invisibility of Salvadorans in US

Jane Kramers ThePolitics of Memory:Looking for Ger-many in the NewGermany, JoanB. Wolfs Harnessingthe Holocaust: ThePolitics of Memory inFrance, M. NolansThe Politics of Mem-ory in the BerlinRepublic, RolandoJ. Romeros TheAlamo, Slavery andthe Politics of Mem-ory, P. Lundy andM. McGoverns ThePolitics of Memory inPost-Conflict North-ern Ireland, andAndreas HuyssensPresent Pasts: UrbanPalimpsests and thePolitics of Memory.

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literature and in US geography, Limon, Martnez, and Bentez recover bodiesthat could be lost to the US Latino community, especially the Salvadorancommunity, because of migration and violence. Ana Patricia Rodrguez (2002)has also emphasized the necessity of such narrative recoveries in her work onthe massacre of El Mozote during the Salvadoran Civil War. Recovering thestory of El Mozote and of the civil war in El Salvador, Rodrguez argues, mayenable an imaginary recuperation of the Central American homelands for thosepeople how have little or no memory of the Salvadoran Civil War (1). Thenovels of Bentez, Limon, and Martnez similarly recover memories of theSalvadoran 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 weredisappeared into the geography of the United States, their depoliticized bodieslabeled illegal. In the 1980s, Salvadoran and other Central Americanrefugees were rendered invisible with each stroke of the sponge or rake theyused to clean motel rooms and yards and porches (Martnez, 1994, 56). AsRodrguez (2001) has noted, the refugees were economically exploited until itwas expedient to deport the body, the name, and the story to other territory inthe Americas. Invisible in the United States without documents, theseSalvadorans become ghosts of the economic and political systems that enactedtheir displacement (389). To relocate those bodies within the Latino/acommunity, Bentez, Limon, and Martnez document the undocumentedbodies of those lost to the Civil War of El Salvador and its aftermath. They writea 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 itspolitical role in 20th century history in the Americas. These writers reveal thedead, disappeared, and tortured body which, in the hands of governmentsoldiers, interrupts collective memory as a means of preserving and recreatingcollective memory through literary production.The dead body in these novels is a political body. Both Bentezs The Weight

of All Things (2000) and Limons In Search of Bernabe (1993) begin with thefuneral of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, who was assassinated whilecelebrating mass on March 24, 1980. Romero had been widely hailed asEl Salvadors most outspoken advocate of peace and human rights (SomethingVile, 1980, 61; Salvador Archbishop, 1980, 1), and his funeral drew morethan 50,000 mourners. When security police opened fire on the crowd, thefrenzy that followed left 35 dead and 185 in hospital with serious injuries. Thetraditional commemorative function of the ceremony was transformed throughviolence: the funeral is remembered for bloodshed and death rather thanRomeros deep commitment to peace, equality, and justice. Romeros body thusevokes violence twice, through his assassination and then his burial, and itspresence in these novels creates a site for remembering both his life and hisdeath, 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 revisingthe past (1999, 52). Romeros body has what she sees as symboliceffectiveness insofar as it derives meaning through culturally establishedrelations to death and the way a specific dead persons importance is (variously)construed (28). Moreover, as Marita Sturken (1997) argues in TangledMemories, [b]odies are often perceived to speak without words: The bodies ofVietnam veterans speak of guilt, forgiveness, and accusation in their verypresence; 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 haddifficulty making their voices heard. Bentez, Limon, and Martnez, in thetradition of testimonio, speak for all those oppressed, disappeared, andimprisoned 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, thedead body interrupted memory by eliminating many individuals who wouldremember. Today, Salvadoran forgetting would benefit both its government,which seeks to recreate a unified nation, and the US government, complicit inthe decade-long conflict, which it subsidized by providing the military withmoney, weapons, and training. Forgetting in this context is active, not passive,enacted through a variety of mechanisms. In Martnezs Mother Tongue, forexample, Mary tells Salvadoran refugee Jose Luis Romero that his testimonio his story of what he endured at the hands of his own government will bemanipulated linguistically as it is reported in the newspapers. She tells him,because your skin is brown, what you say will be followed by words likeRomero claimed. Whereas, if you were white, it would read, Romero said. Thatis how they disappear people here (Martnez, 1994, 33). This disappearance istied to memory, as Susan Brison (1999) points out in Traumatic Narrative andthe Remaking of Self, because [a]s a society, we live with the unbearable bypressuring those who have been traumatized to forget and by rejecting thetestimonies of those who are forced by fate to remember (49). Forgettingthrough silence and absence is an act of political oppression and violence.In contrast, remembering becomes an act of political agency and culturalsurvival.To counter forgetting, Sandra Bentez in Bitter Grounds (1997) resurrects

Salvadoran history leading up to the Civil War of the 1980s, beginning with themassacre of 1932 and ending just prior to 1980. The novel follows threegenerations of women: Mercedes Prieto; her daughter, Jacinta; and Jacintasdaughter, Mara Mercedes. These peasant women are presented in opposition tothe wealthy Elena de Contreras; her daughter, Magda; and Magdas daughter,Flor. Bentez begins her story with la matanza the massacre of 1932, the firstpeasant rebellion in the country and the first uprising in Latin America overtly

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backed by communists (Anderson, 1992, 14). Bentez suggests that thismassacre had long been disappeared from Salvadoran history:

La matanza. Mara 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)

Bentez contrasts Mara Mercedess history lesson of silence about the ethnocideof 1932, in which as many as 30,000 Indian peasants were murdered,3 to theactual circumstances of the violence. The matanza initiates the culture ofviolence that has pervaded Salvadoran culture for the last 70 years, and as lamatanza attests, that culture of violence hinges on ethnicity. In the aftermath ofthe violence, a member of the guardia tells Mercedes husband, you indios haveforgotten your place (23). That place is at the bottom of the social, political,and economic hierarchy that defines El Salvador. The penalty for forgetting thatplace is death. The massacre of indios following the rebellion served as awarning to survivors, a precursor to the corporal warnings that havecharacterized many Latin and Central American civil conflicts in the 20thcentury. Thomas P. Anderson (1992) argues inMatanza that the ruling militarypowers have deliberately tried to keep the true nature of the events of that yearfrom the people (205), an imposed amnesia that Bentez seeks to redress in herwork.In her rendering of la matanza, Bentez portrays the guardia as unthinking

machines of violence. Although their initial task after the matanza had been todispose of dead bodies, the guardia eventually began to participate in theviolence themselves. Class, racial, and cultural hatred motivated the resultingethnocide, and this ethnocide prefigured the overlapping ethnic and socio-economic contestations of space that continued into the 1990s. At the beginningof Bitter Grounds, Mercedes and Jacinta have just left their hut one morning tofetch the days water when they come across the dead body of a guardia. Theguardia, they observe, has no head (6). This headless body serves as a symbolof both the guardia members loyalty to the government and their inferior statusin the very social structure that uses them as instruments of violence. Mercedesand Jacinta perceive this dead body as a threat of violence to the local indios;retaliation will follow its discovery despite any stated governmental policyprohibiting retribution.4 Mercedes and Jacinta must hide the body. As they dragit into the underbrush, they realize that the body was heavy (8), and Mercedesunderstands that the weight of the body comes not merely from the pounds offlesh and bone and blood that threaten the safety of them but from the very

3 See ThomasAndersons excellentassessment of studiesof the dead inMatanza (1992,174176).

4 Erik Ching andVirginia Tilley (1998)found no governmentorder to kill Indians

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knowledge of the severed head (9) and the retribution that will inevitablyfollow 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 oftenimpossible, thus precluding traditional outlets for mourning and healing, notonly because the body is often absent, but because there is also no marker, atraditional site of both memory and mourning. Festivals of community, such asthe Da de los Muertos, which would normally serve to heal the horrors of suchviolence, instead only underscore the destruction of traditional culture in ElSalvador. Mercedes envies the fortunate who could visit their dead. Since lamatanza, this comfort had been denied to her and Jacinta. The graves markedwith the name Prieto were back in Izalco, and these, like all their pastpossessions, were but a memory in a faraway place (Bentez, 1997, 54). Theabsence of the marker interrupts collective memory, cultural identity, andcommunity. Noras theoretical paradigm of collective memory les lieux dememoire here cannot account for the process of remembering in the absence ofthe site of memory itself; instead, the novel itself works as a location ofcollective memory as Bentez inscribes the lost bodies in the text, facilitatingboth mourning and remembering.Bentez ultimately reveals how the dead-body politics of the government

merely served to radicalize its people to rebellion. Bitter Grounds ends in theyears leading up to the Civil War, focusing on the radicalization of MaraMercedes, Mercedes granddaughter who joins the rebel forces. Through MaraMercedes, who adopts the name Alma soul for her work in the FMLN,Bentez tells us how to read the narrative. Contrasting the wealthy and the poor,the urban and the rural, the idle and the working, Bentez reveals binaries thathave real consequences in the racial and class stratification of El Salvador. [A]growing awareness of disparities opened Mara Mercedes eyes, forcing her torealize that [b]etween the two, theres a chasm with no bridges to link them(347). Bentez emphasizes this disparity in the way she structures the novel. Shedivides the book into three sections, one for each generation of women, andtitles those sections for the corresponding pairs of women, one from thewealthy, privileged family of Elena de Contreras and one from the family ofMercedes Prieto, who serves Elena. Bentez thus throws into sharp relief boththe socioeconomic divide between these pairs of women and the dependence ofthe countrys social stratification on the labor of the working classes.These social disparities play an important role in Mara 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 Playon,something inside her began to change. After El Playon, the image of corpsessprung up in her head by day and filled her dreams at night (411). The bodiesserve the militarys purpose of warning the people not to join the rebel cause,but, paradoxically, the corpses also radicalize Salvadorans to that cause. The

during the 1932uprising and contra-dict later impres-sions that the militarywaged a campaignagainst indigenousethnic identity. Theassailant was in-stead the ladino civilelite, responsible formuch of the violenceagainst the Indiansfollowing the uprising(147).

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very bodies that were meant to threaten them inspired people like MaraMercedes to join the rebels in fighting for social justice.As Bentez reveals in Bitter Grounds, during the years leading up the Civil

War, the dead indigenous body served the government in several ways. First, thedead indigenous body could not fight with the leftist revolutionary forces, andthe threat of death also deterred some from joining the uprising against thecountrys oligarchy. Second, the dead body interrupts the transmission ofmemory across time and space. Third, and most important, was the dead bodysmnemonic role a reminder to the surviving peasants of the violent fate of thosewho demonstrated opposition to the countrys socioeconomic hierarchy andstratification. One witness to the matanza testified that mass shootings tookplace. The bodies were left exposed on the streets. Some communists werehanged by the tens and their bodies remained hanging for a few days (quoted inChing and Tilley, 1998, 139), and Anderson (1992) also writes that [t]heroadways were littered with bodies in many areas (171). In such displays, thedead body represents a warning for the armed rebels once its own dissentingtongue has been silenced in death, grisly reminders of the consequences ofdissent.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 whomight be sympathetic to the revolutionary cause. As James LeMoyne (1989)observed, One could not drive around the capital of San Salvador between1979 and early 1982 without finding tortured bodies of men, women, andsometimes children littered along the road (118). These bodies both create andinterrupt memory. They are reminders of violence to Salvadorans, thus creatinga new memory for survivors. At the same time, the trauma of these deathsinterrupts memory, and the survivor experiences a figurative dismemberment a shattering of assumptions, a severing of past, present, and future, a disruptionof memory (Brison, 1999, 48). In these novels, such disruptions point to afragmentation of identity and memory, explicitly inscribed on the Salvadoranbody.Nine-year-old Nicolas Veras in The Weight of All Things observes that

warfare placed corpses in unexpected places (Bentez, 2000, 69). Corpsesappear in a variety of places in these novels, drawing together the variousexperiences of war into the location of the body, which becomes a site of war, asite of memory, and, ultimately, a site of mourning. The bodies become part ofthe setting, attesting to the historical period, the geographical location, and thesocial circumstances of the characters both living and dead. Bentez alsolocates the dead body in language, creating a new world of war in which painfulconnections exist for those who survive. When Nicolas finally understands thathis mother had been killed at Romeros funeral, [h]e couldnt bear to be in aplace 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. Nicolas meets amother who tells him the story of her sons body, which had also been used tospeak to other Salvadorans. She tells Nicolas that her son, Joaqun, had beenkilled in his own bed, from which the guardia took him and cut off his head. LaGuardia stuck my sons head on a post for the town to see. To teach them all alesson, they said (22). As dead bodies are used to communicate threats tosurvivors, torture is used as a language in which to communicate with thevictim. Bentez 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 Bentezs contention that the experience ofwar is gendered in itself. One mother similarly describes the death of herpregnant 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 womansbody as a threat during wartime the threat of womens creative potential. Notonly is this woman punished for her revolutionary activities, but her unborn sonalso threatens the army with his mere existence, a potential body to fill the ranksof the rebel forces in the ongoing Civil War. Bentezs gendered dead-bodypolitics, in which womens differential experience of war is paramount, alsoaddresses the perpetuation of collective memory. Women are charged both withcultural preservation and transmission, part of their role as caregivers, but thattransmission is threatened by womens differential experience in war.In Mother Tongue, Martnez connects the Salvadoran body to the Civil War

in significant ways. Through her work with the Sanctuary movement of the1980s, Mary takes the role of caregiver with Jose Luis. She helps him withshelter, food, employment, forged documents, transportation, information, andtranslation. Jose Luis, however, has much to teach Mary. Although he remainssilent on the topic of his own body for much of the novel, Jose Luis must findways to educate the nave Mary about the violence of his country and her owngovernments role in it. Salvadoran stories, suggests Martnez, must break theenforced silence in both countries. Jose Luis writes a poem, FOR MARIA,



which is the name he calls Mary and the name that transforms her consciousnessabout both bodies and politics:

how your eyes hold me,eyes where relief and fearreside as in a cease-fire.my rib throbs beneathyour palm, the ribthey fractured with a rifle, the ribthat if taken intothe body of Americamight make it newa country where mercyand nobility reside,where the shatteredbones of my peopleteach your peopleabout strength. (132133)

In this poem, Jose Luis speaks his body not only to Mara but also to the UnitedStates and its people. The imagery of war cease-fire, rifle parallels theimagery of the body eyes, ribs, bones. The rib, in particular, suggests theGenesis story of creation and recreation, broken by one people with thepotential to be healed by another, if they would only reform their politicalpolicies in Central America and for Central Americans.Martnez writes the body as nation, but that body is male in her novel, a

deviation from many colonial and imperial constructions of the nation. JoseLuis look[s] in the mirror and see[s] a map of El Salvador (Martnez, 1994,105). He understands that neither the help of the Sanctuary workers nor Maryslove will be able to heal the national wounds of his body. He realizes that Marybelieves 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 findsa pattern of scars, the legend to the map of his life 1982, someone hadbranded those numbers into his back. These scars speak for others without avoice [n]ineteen eighty-two was the year he was tortured, that thousandswere tortured (134), and Jose Luis body comes to represent the thousands ofothers wounded, murdered, and disappeared. The connection between mappingand scarring bespeaks the colonial legacy that Salvadorans continue to live fivecenturies after the arrival of the Spanish in the Americas; the destruction of theAmericas is enacted on Jose Luis skin. These scars also support Brisons (1999)assertion that memories of traumatic events are experienced by the survivor asinflicted, not chosen (40), creating of the trauma a collective memory becausethe trauma is culturally produced and also culturally perceived (41). In Martnezsnovel, 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 shapeshow others in the survivors culture respond over time (42). Jose Luis storyand his body are destined to be a statement about the times (Martnez, 1994,36). His body must speak, for Jose Luis remains silent, unable to articulate theviolence that occurred in a country with a politically mandated silence, oneenforced with dead bodies hung from trees, left on the side of the road, mountedfor display. Mary understands his silence because [t]o tell another person aboutwhat was done to your body in the name of politics is a frightful act ofintimacy (134), an intimacy that Jose Luis cannot afford after the murder of hisSalvadoran fiancee, Ana.The transformation fromMary gringa americana to Mara is completed as

she learns more about El Salvador through her work with the Sanctuarymovement. Robin Lorentzen (1991) identifies Sanctuary as the largest grass-roots civil disobedience movement since the 1960s (14). Sanctuary work waslargely the work of women, who outnumbered men by two-thirds at every levelof the organization (Lorentzen, 1991, 3). Unlike Martnezs Mara, however,most of those workers where white and middle-class women (Lorentzen, 1991,6). Through her use of the characters Mara and Soledad, Martnez writesChicana Sanctuary workers into history into peace and human rights activism and thus suggests the power of the Latino/a community in the United States.Martnez herself was indicted in 1987 on charges related to smuggling twoSalvadoran women into the United States; her poem Nativity: For TwoSalvadoran Women was presented as evidence against her during the trial. Shewas acquitted on First Amendment grounds when her poetry could not be usedagainst her in a court of law.Martnez grants Mara agency through Sanctuary work and writing,

countering victimization as womens primary role in war and creating Latinabodies as agents of historical change. Martnez locates Sanctuary work in thehome, focusing on the home space, rather than churches, which were alsoinstrumental spaces in Sanctuary efforts to shelter and protect Central Americanrefugees. Mara describes her Sanctuary work as what liberation theologianssaid was Gods way of acting in history (Martnez, 1994, 72). In MotherTongue, it is women who are acting in history. Because Jose Luis is a man,Mara sees him as an actor in history, believing that hes actually donesomething with his life, tried to become a subject, not an object, in history ashe said the other day (39). She wants to emulate him because [h]is words andthose of the poets he admired made me want to sell my belongings, smugglerefugees across borders, protest government policies by chaining myself to theWhite House gate romantic dreams, yes, but the kind that dwell side by sidewith resistance (69). Marys initial conception of political action is limited tothe public arena national borders, the White House rather than the home,which she ultimately comes to see as a space of transgressive political action inthe important work of organizing, translating, cooking, and loving.



Maras increasing radicalization, like that of Mara Mercedes in BitterGrounds, is connected to the body. She reads in some newsletter about how theSalvadoran police outline in chalk the bodies they find, documenting themysterious deaths they themselves plan and carry out (Martnez, 1994, 129).She reads an Associated Press article about nuns bodies which were found in ashallow grave [and] appeared to have been mutilated (119). These nuns hadworked closely with the Mothers of the Disappeared, a group the Salvadorangovernment says has strong ties to the guerrillas (122). Despite her increasingconsciousness, Jose Luis remains convinced that Mara does not know what itslike to suffer (123). She realizes that Jose Luis saw in me an image of a gringawhose pale skin and tax dollars are putting his compatriots to death. Mycredentials, the fact that Im Mexican American, dont count now; in fact, theymake things worse (123124). The story of the nuns makes the disjunctionbetween their experiences more visible, and the image of their mutilated bodiesbecomes a turning point for Jose Luis, for their relationship, and for Mara. Sheunderstands 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 aterrible, disfigured moment, I am a yanqui, a murderess, a whore (124). Sheincreasingly realizes that love could not be divorced from history, that his warhad to become my war (44) in order for her to elude the complicity of hernational identity in favor of her cultural one.Jose Luis insistence on and Maras realization of this disjuncture of

experience and identity mirror the disjunction between Salvadoran and USChicana and Latina depictions of the Civil War in El Salvador. Martnez choosesto bridge that gap, at least in part, through traumatic memory. The violencedone to Jose Luis body stirs Maras own memory: Nobody told me that thewar left his body by way of mine, that currents of memory were moving throughme at dangerously high voltages (Martnez, 1994, 103). The transformation ofbody for Jose Luis becomes a transformation of memory for Mara. After JoseLuis suffers an episode of post-traumatic stress, violence fueled by his ownmemories, Mara has her own transformation: Then, I remembered (164). Sheremembers the abuse her own body suffered as a small child. She remembershands crawling up my things, thumbs under panties. A finger in a place youhardly know exists is like a knife. A knife in the place for which you have nowords is the most lethal of weapons. It carves words on your inner walls to fillthe void. Words like chaos, slut, dont tell, your fault (165). Like the map of hislife burned into Jose Luis flesh, so is the memory of this abuse inscribed onMaras body. Her body becomes both the site and the record of the violence, apolitical statement of the times. The story of Maras body is identical to thestory of Jose Luis body insofar as it must be told. Mara 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). Memoryfor Martnez 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 haswounded and disappeared it. The body, absent from memory, has merely beendisappeared through yet another method and from yet another location history.It is not until Mara 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.Maras true political work, however, comes from the telling of her story andthat of Jose Luis. Maras own story about the violation of her body is atestimonio, a story that must be told, because stories exorcise the innerauthorities that say quiet, dont tell, that keep women like me from speaking thetruth about their lives (Martnez, 1994, 9495). For Mara, telling the storybecomes political action.The structure that Martnez uses in telling Maras story reflects not the

fragmentation of the body but the fragmentation of memory. Mara recounts theevents that she can remember nearly 20 years after Jose Luiss flight from ElSalvador, supplementing the blank spaces of her memory with her journal fromthe time, postcards, descriptions of photographs, poems, newspaper articles, atranscription of an audio tape, letters, recipes, and Jose Luiss journals. Marasson, Jose Luis, even narrates a section of the novel. These artifacts are all I haveleft to fasten my story to reality. Everything else is remembering. Ordismembering (12). Martnez dismembers the text, simultaneously creatinggaps in Maras memory and a polyvocal, multi-genre novel that emphasizesthe importance of multiple voices and versions in the creation of collectivememory.Fragmentation also characterizes Graciela Limons In Search of Bernabe as

she repeatedly includes images of fragmented bodies. The story centers on LuzDelcano, 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 fightingagainst one another in a war for whom the beneficiary is often unclear.Beginning with Archbishop Romeros funeral, the novel seeks also to correctSalvadoran history as it has been reported in the United States. As the mournersgather in the plaza outside the church where Romeros funeral mass is beingcelebrated, gunfire and explosions rock the crowd. Bernabe Delcano seesbodies crashing in on him, pinning him down (Limon, 1993, 24) as the deadand wounded fall and the living try to flee. As with Nicolas in Bentezs TheWeight of All Things, Bernabe is crushed by the corporal weight of his owncompatriots as [y]oung men, mostly guerrillas, pulled out hand guns, then firedindiscriminately into the crowd in an attempt to hit members of the deathsquads with their random bullets. Uniformed soldiers suddenly appeared, alsofiring automatic weapons into the crowd (Limon, 1993, 23). The presence ofsoldiers at the funeral was repeatedly denied by the government, who insist thatthe leftist guerrillas took advantage of the funeral as an opportunity for



violence. Limon includes the uniformed soldiers in her version of the event inorder to reflect popular testimony of what actually occurred at the funeral.Dead-body politics shape Limons novel as bodies, mutilated beyond

recognition, were being discovered daily (Limon, 1993, 55), creating afragmentation of the body politic. In the fear and chaos generated by theviolation of these bodies, the Salvadoran government sought to divide and thusdefeat leftist revolutionary forces. Many of those revolutionary groups alsodepended on help from Salvadoran campesinos, aid that the military also soughtto forefend a unified Salvadoran body politic with its own economic andpolitical power. The fragmented humanity that Bernabe observes in the plaza atRomeros funeral mass reminds him of Guernica, Pablo Picassos 1937 paintingof the attack on the Spanish town of Guernica in that same year during thecountrys civil war. Spains insurgent generals had ordered the attack, the goal ofwhich had been the slaughter of civilians and the destruction of homes,schools, businesses, and churches (Martin, 2002, 3). As Limon describes it inher novel, the painting contains fragments of human beings. Bernabe comesto understand that, for the Spanish and for Salvadorans, each in their own civilwars, those broken pieces of human beings could not be brought togetheragain. Even before the outbreak of violence in the plaza, Bernabe realized thatthese people around him were really fragmented: faces, eyes, cheeks, and arms(Limon, 1993, 22). They are fragmented by oppression and poverty, a rent inthe social fabric of the nation that cannot be mended through violence.Bernabes brother, Lucio, experiences a similar fragmentation in his dreams.

In one recurrent dream, he finds that I am always a twisted, ugly creature. Mylimbs are in pieces, and the parts are in the wrong place. My legs are where myarms 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 amonster (Limon, 1993, 43). As the instigator of the unspeakable violencecommitted against his own people, the colonel is indeed a monster, his ownhumanity fragmented by violence. That his sexual organs have replaced his headsuggest the unthinking violence that is motivated by social constructions ofmasculinity. Lucio understands his own twisted monstrosity; as long as hecontinues to be violent, he will always be inhuman. When he finally orders themurder of his own brother, he also plans his own murder, ordering asubordinate to kill him, because he sees death as the only salvation from thefragmentation 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 thatshe may be searching not for her son but for her sons body. She ultimately findsthat body in a dump outside the citys center, which she carr[ied] from themount [of garbage] to a secluded place. There, she and strangers scratched out ahole deep enough to bury his body (Limon, 1993, 165). The garbagedump 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 collectivememory of the Civil War will disappear as did the bodies of thousands ofSalvadorans.As a result of their dead-body politics, the Salvadoran military refused any

knowledge of bodies, which often were permanently disappeared. MarjorieAgosn (1987) sees disappearance as [p]erhaps the most diabolical invention ofthe 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, creatingan official policy: No lo tenemos (Montgomery, 1995, 81) we dont havehim. Disappearances affected countless families. Young men died at the handsof death squads. Scores of Salvadorans fled the city and headed for thecountryside hoping to distance themselves from the shootings and kidnappings(Limon, 1993, 165). In The Weight of All Things, Bentez (2000) describes ascene familiar to many Salvadorans. As Nicolas rides a bus between cities, somesoldiers take a young man off the bus at a roadblock. For the young man, itwould be todays date that family and friends would give when telling the storyof his disappearance (24). These novels replace those bodies with stories andemerge themselves as sites of mourning, not only in El Salvador but also in theUnited States. Bentez, Martnez, and Limon have reappeared the stories ofSalvadorans 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 theDisappeared. The Salvadoran mothers emerged soon after the first group ofmothers in Argentina who organized during the countrys Dirty War. TheMadres of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina took their name from the site of theirfirst 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 Plazabegan to demonstrate weekly on behalf of their disappeared children andgrandchildren, seeking their bodies and their stories. In her history of themovement, Nora Femena (1987) traces the techniques that the Mothersinvented to rescue the disappeared from obliteration in the public memory(15). They created life-sizes silhouettes and inscribed the names of thedisappeared on them, connecting names and bodies in a way that resisted the



official narrative of ignorance and denial. They made paper cutouts of handsand tied names to balloons. For both survivors and families, the insistence onthe specific naming of the disappeared reminds us of the need to know our ownhistory (Miller, 1991, 1). Feminists have long viewed naming as an act ofempowerment and conquest usually reserved for males in the patriarchy.Naming also resonates in the colonization of the Americas, a legacy that directlyresulted in conflicts like El Salvadors Civil War and Argentinas dirty war(LeMoyne, 1989). During the colonization of the Americas, the Spaniardswould impose [a] name on the place, inflict it. Like Adam, they think God hasgiven them the right to name a world. And the world never recovers (Martnez,1994, 15). While naming is empowering both for self-definition and for acultures collective memory, Jose Luis points out that naming can also bedangerous. Upon his arrival in Albuquerque, he asks Mara to choose a namefor him, an ordinary name that might protect him. He tells Mara, in mycountry names turn up on lists. Or in the mouths of army officers at US embassyparties. A few drinks later, someone, somewhere, disappears (13). When JoseLuis disappears, Mara suffers the loss of both the person and the name, whichshe had not known. She can, however, participate in naming; when Mara givesJose Luis invented name to her son, she makes the name real, attaching a truename to the appropriate body (Castillo, 1997, 18). Mara thus joins thetraditions 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 commonplight of those disappeared without a name. Femena outlines their gradualprogression in their choice of symbolism for the loss of their children, fromhighly individualized representations like photographs to impersonal ones likemasks. As this occurred, the individual nature of their losses was transformedinto a collective loss (Femena, 1987, 15). In this way, individual memory istransformed 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 ElSalvador Monsenor Ocsar Arnulfo Romero. Members of this group con-fronted the tortured, raped, and maimed bodies of their own and others lovedones found on train tracks and in clandestine cemeteries. Its work wasfundamental to the resistance movement because it was confronting theSalvadoran and US governments regarding heinous human rights violations thatwere supposedly not happening (Shayne, 1999, 9091). Bentez, Martnez, andLimon also confront this history in their novels, which consequently extends thememory community to US readers as well, many of whom are capable throughtheir privilege of effecting change. For the Mothers, their work continues thework of expanding the memory community in the name of those whodisappeared, years after the end of these civil wars. The mothers continue tobelieve 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 ourchildren. We will never forget (Femena, 1987, 1718).Remembering the disappeared is closely related to the process of mourning.

The novels of Bentez, Martnez, and Limon seek to commemorate those whodisappeared during the Salvadoran Civil War and thus facilitate the ability toremember and mourn. Martnez (1994) uses the image of the Mothers explicitlyin Mother Tongue, as Mara hangs a poster of the Virgin Mary, the ultimatemother, inscribed as la madre de los desaparecidos on her wall. Mara believesthat the Mother of the Disappeared is forever remembering (186). Unlike Luzin her search for Bernabe, Mara is not the mother of the disappeared Jose Luisbut of his son, named to honor his missing father. Mara for many years isunable to accept his absent body and has avoided calling Jose Luis by his truename, desaparecido, disappeared one (88). It is not until Mara begins writingher story and Jose Luiss story that she is able to recognize him asdesaparecido.Maras writing reflects the work of these three novelists for whom narrative

becomes a means for working through traumatic memories to heal and to createa collective memory that is simultaneously less painful as for Mara andmore inclusive as for readers of these novels. To counter the risk ofappropriation, these novelists foreground the Salvadoran body to ensure itsrightful place as the center of Salvadoran collective memory in the United States.Rather than relying on Noras lieux de memoire often absent in civil conflicts or Cranes notion of the individual, Bentez, Limon, and Martnez honor thebodies that also speak for and to the community of displaced Salvadorans in theUnited States. Martnez explicitly emphasizes the primacy of Salvadorans intheir own story when Jose Luiss surname is revealed at the end of the novel:Alegra. Martnez has made him a namesake of the Salvadoran poet ClaribelAlegra, who has long chronicled the story of my country El Salvador(Alegra, 1997, 302).Even, or perhaps especially, when absent, bodies convey messages. As Mara

is haunted by her Salvadoran ghost, so too are the characters in Limons novel.Father Hugh is haunted by his business partner, Augie Sinclaire, with whom hehas been selling guns to the Salvadoran military. Ghosts, like memory, canhaunt us, Luz tells Father Hugh. These ghosts come back to pick at us withtheir sharp edges. They never let us forget anything. Theyre everywhere, hidingaround corners, crouching in little niches where we least expect them (Limon,1993, 126). The ghosts are transitional figures between the body and the way itis remembered. Remembering is to make a body complete (Sturken, 1997,72), to transform it from ghost into story, to retrieve it from the dump offorgetting. To remedy forgetting and foster healing, these writers are speakingfor the dead, the disappeared, and the survivors of the Salvadoran war whocannot tell their stories. The survivor is one who remembers and it isultimately through survivors that cultural memory is reinscribed, actively



produced, and given meaning (Sturken, 1997, 254). By counting themselvesamong those survivors, these writers extend the memory community to includeLatino/as and Anglo readers in the United States. They also invite the reader toparticipate in the act of testimonio. Dori Laub and Shoshana Feldman (1992)suggest in their work on Holocaust testimonies that testimony must include thelistener. 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 whohears (70). In this way, the listener to trauma comes to be a participant andco-owner of the traumatic event (57). Sonia Saldvar-Hull (2000) has arguedthat testimonies and the literary texts produced by the Chicana feminists onthe border [share] their purpose for writing their challenge to the reader toact (171).The body in these novels speaks of Central American traumatic experiences to

readers who might be moved to action. InMother Tongue, Jose Luis is a classicpolitical asylum case, assuming he decides to apply openly. Complete with proofof torture. Although even then he has only a 2% chance of being accepted by theUnited States (Martnez, 1994, 7). These words, written by Sanctuary workerSoledad, indict the US governments refusal to see Central Americans as politicalrefugees, a category that would force them to admit that their funding of theCivil War is resulting in torture and murder. In Jose Luis, Martnez creates abody that speaks to borders both the US Mexican border across which manyof these refugees arrived and the border between the US and Canada acrosswhich many refugees could find safety. The body speaks to the moral borderscrossed by the Salvadoran government, its army, and, sometimes, its rebels aswell as by the US government, which has also participated in the destruction ofthe Salvadoran body. Jose Luis body crosses borders: His was a face Id seen ina dream. A face with no borders: Tibetan eyelids, Spanish hazel irises, Mayancheekbones. Jose Luis face speaks to the post-colonial legacy of corporalmestizaje, repudiated by the US governments refusal to accept such faces acrossUS borders. His face, ultimately, is a warriors face. Because the war was stillinside him (4). With the US governments financial and moral complicity, theSalvadoran war does not remain within the confines of its own national borders;the war crosses with Jose Luis into the United States.Martnez underscores the role of the United States in the Civil War by

pointing to the source of the armys weapons. Before beginning the narrative ofMother Tongue, Martnez (1994) writes, More than 75,000 citizens of ElSalvador died during a twelve-year Civil War, which officially ended in 1991.Most died at the hands of their own government. The United States supportedthis effort with more than $6 billion in military aid. US citizens who havetraveled to El Salvador on humanitarian aid missions find bullet casingsimprinted with the name of a US city (71), material evidence of their owngovernments complicity in the violence and destruction. Such trips to ElSalvador 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 liberationtheologians said was Gods way of acting in history. These conversions couldbe traced to the stories of Salvadorans, stories about torture, dismemberment,hunger, sickness (72). For these US Latina writers, their option forSalvadorans 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 storiesbecomes part of what theologian Ada Mara Isasi-Daz (1993) calls annuncia-tion, which is the reality in our struggle to find or create spaces for self-determination (36) as part of womens struggle for peace in a society in whichtheir bodies are not safe. The body in these novels, far from being focused on theindividual, is indeed a collective body politic because [p]eace, justice, love andfreedom are not private realities; they are not only internal attitudes. They aresocial realities for Latino/as everywhere (Gutierrez, 1988, 97). These novelspoint to an emerging intersection not only between art and war but betweenliterature and human rights activism. In the same way that the dead bodies servethe 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 bothwarning and reminder, the dead-body politics of Martnez, Bentez, and Limonare a politics of commemoration and community, as they render visible throughnarrative the bodies missing from collective memory.

About the author

Kelli Lyon-Johnson is Assistant Professor of English at Miami UniversityHamilton where she teaches US multi-ethnic literature, womens literature, andwriting. 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 RevistaBilingue, Frontiers, and Mosaic.

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