Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Landscapes of Struggle: Politics, Society, and Community in El Salvador

2007; Duke University Press; Volume: 87; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2007-065

1527-1900

William Stanley,

Historical Studies in Latin America

The comparatively sparse historical and social-science literature on El Salvador has tended to focus on national-level political and economic events, sometimes resulting in rather stylized characterizations of the country’s complex landownership patterns, oligarchy, military, and politics. This view from the capital city sometimes results in significant interpretive and empirical errors. In response to these shortcomings, Aldo Lauria-Santiago and Leigh Binford have assembled a valuable, organized sampler of 14 recent studies that focus on local attempts to pursue or cope with economic and political change. The diverse chapters are organized in three sections: prewar history, the civil war and its aftermath, and contemporary culture and ideology. Most chapters are condensed from larger works published elsewhere or in progress; the collection offers a useful overview of recent archival and fieldwork-based research for readers who wish to survey this body of work without tackling a large number of monographs. Drawing on the work of historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists, the book also powerfully demonstrates the value of interdisciplinary dialogue. The editors provide a succinct and effective introduction, as well as brief section introductions.Scholars who write about local processes in a small country face the challenge of making their accounts useful to readers whose interests are more general. The authors here sometimes struggle to connect their work to broader questions. The strongest chapters, including those by the editors themselves, argue convincingly that their findings either challenge or modify elements of conventional historiography, while acknowledging that the communities they studied may have been exceptional in some ways. Lauria-Santiago, for example, shows that (contrary to prevailing myths) in the municipality of Izalco in western El Salvador, national legislation regarding landownership did not strip indigenous communities of their lands in the late nineteenth century. The new laws did, however, divide communities and force the resulting factions to cultivate outside allies, sometimes leading to violence. Binford shows the central role of Catholic schools for lay catechists in forming the popular base for the 1980s insurgency in northern Morazán province. This corrects urban-centric accounts that understate the importance of the church in mobilizing the revolutionary popular base. It also shows the broader applicability of processes documented in Carlos Rafael Cabarrus’s account of revolution around Aguilares.In their efforts to respect the uniqueness of local experiences and highlight local-level agency over structural forces, the editors overlook opportunities to comment on common themes that are strikingly evident across the first two sections of the book. For example, the externally generated divisiveness that Lauria-Santiago finds in nineteenth-century Izalco foreshadows the disintegration of the repatriated-refugee community of Ciudad Segundo Montes, in Morazán, after the civil war. There, factions vied for external sponsors and fought for control over scarce capital in a context of declining economic prospects and broken connections to national political leadership (Vincent J. McElhinny). Even Carlos Benjamín Lara Martínez’s cautiously optimistic account of the experimental 1950s land-reform community Joya de Cerén, and Elisabeth Jean Wood’s account of the European-sponsored reconstruction of Tenancingo in the 1980s, demonstrate that prospects for local-level solidarity depended heavily on the context created by outside forces. Víctor Hugo Acuña Ortega suggests that middle-class “mutual” associations in the early twentieth century prospered mainly when financed by the state. Erik Ching’s chapter on patronage politics under dictator Maximiliano Hernández Martínez celebrates the scope of worker and peasant collective demands but also shows that these opportunities were largely created by the national regime. Irina Carlota Silber describes tensions in postwar Chalatenango between dogmatic directors of development NGOs who sought community advancement, on the one hand, and local project participants who often choose to focus on individual survival in the face of overwhelming resource shortages. Binford’s account of catechist training schools highlights the dramatic personal changes experienced by many participants, as well as the fundamental rethinking and political mobilization this led to in isolated communities. Yet his account makes clear that little of this could have happened without outside resources — including ideas, educational techniques, and leadership — brought by the international Catholic Church.Thus, ironically one comes away from these stories of local agency with an overwhelming sense that El Salvador’s communities face national and international problems that are inherently resistant to local agency. One is struck by the recurring themes of acute shortages of capital (including natural resources), lack of market access, lack of consistent and transparent representation in national politics, vulnerability of local leaders to financial temptation, and lack of sufficient information to resist swindlers. Overall, the book achieves its goal of illuminating El Salvador’s grim national experience by relating how pieces of that experience unfold in specific settings and moments.