Copyright by Brandt Gustav Peterson 2005
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Copyright by Brandt Gustav Peterson 2005 The Dissertation Committee for Brandt Gustav Peterson Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Unsettled Remains: Race, Trauma, and Nationalism in Millennial El Salvador Committee: Charles R. Hale Supervisor Richard R. Flores Edmund T. Gordon Jeffrey L. Gould Suzanna B. Hecht Kathleen Stewart Unsettled Remains: Race, Trauma, and Nationalism in Millennial El Salvador by Brandt Gustav Peterson, B.A.; M.A.; M.S. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December, 2005 Dedication To the memory of Begoña Aretxaga. Acknowledgements It was my pleasure and good fortune to accrue a great many debts in researching and writing this dissertation, debts that emerged within and alongside friendships and commitments. I have tried to live up to those multiple commitments in producing this document, an effort that has created much of what I regard as most fruitful and successful in this work. In El Salvador, I am deeply thankful to the people of Tacuba who shared with me their town, their rural landscape, and their experiences. I am especially grateful to the people of the three coffee cooperatives who welcomed me into their homes and communities, patiently and with great good humor listened to my endless questions, and shared their experiences and hopes with me. I am equally indebted to the activists who admitted me to their world, sharing with me their everyday practices and their candid sense of the trials and successes of their projects. Amadeo Martínez, Nubia Martínez, Betty Pérez, Guillermo Tesorero, Fidel Flores, Ricardo Maye, Felipe Sánchez, Nelson Pérez, Ricardo Najo, the Alcaldía del Común of Izalco, and the other members of CCNIS all gave generously of themselves. v I thank Ileana Gómez for directing me to Tacuba and introducing me to Ernesto Méndez. I cannot adequately convey in the space here how deeply grateful I am to Ernesto. His generosity of spirit, his intellectual curiosity and acuity, his tireless energy, his deeply compassionate and committed approach to his work, to the rural poor of Central America, to social justice, and to the land that sustains us all inspire me and influenced this project throughout. Thank also to the mara in San Salvador: Doribel Herrador, Leopoldo Dimas, Cecilia Carranza, all supported this dissertation project with their intellectual resources, and also supported me with their solidarity and wonderful friendship. Gracias, doctor y doctoras. The Arias and Vásquez families treated me as their kin, for which I am forever grateful. Lito, mil gracias. América Rodríguez, Sajid Herrera Mena, Leda Peretti, Carlos Lara, Santiago and Georgina from El Museo de la Palabra y el Imágen, the helpful people at the Archivo General de la Nación, and everybody in CONCULTURA’s Jefatura de Asuntos Indígenas: all gave generously and patiently of their time and knowledge. In Tacuba, I thank Saúl and Tancho, América, Edgardo, Moises, Ciro, don Luigi, Mac, Carlos, and all the others who made staying in their town a pleasure. I thank my committee, a collection of wonderful scholars whose work and teaching have shaped my intellectual formation. Charlie Hale and Ted Gordon have been teachers and mentors since I began my academic career. They pushed me to bring a realist sense of political commitments into contact with the theoretical challenges I pose to realist modes of understanding and representationin this work. Kathleen Stewart and Richard Flores taught me new ways to understand culture and the political. Suzanna vi Hecht’s was the first dissertation I ever read, and I am grateful for her participation on this committee, where she generously shared her insights about rural society in El Salvador. Jeff Gould provided guidance and insight with research in El Salvador. His work is a singular influence for this project, as it is for anyone working on mestizaje and power in Central America. Finally, I thank Charlie Hale for his engagement and mentorship over the past eight years. Dan Sharp patiently read early drafts of much of this dissertation. Christine Labuski, Liz Lilliott, and Nick Copeland likewise gave me helpful comments and suppport along the way. Shannon Speed, Kamran Ali, and John Hartigan all helped me beyond the call of duty. Aldo Lauria-Santiago shared his energetic passion for the history of El Salvador’s rural poor with me, and sent me after some absolutely fascinating wild geese. James and Judy Brow have been wonderful friends and supporters. I thank my family: Judith, Anna, Warren, and Chad Peterson, Manuel Vásquez, and Bernard and Wanda Williamson. To Anna Peterson in particular, I am grateful for years of support and guidance from a sister and scholar. Finally, I thank Catherine Rose Williamson, who has endured this dissertation with love and patience and guided me through it with wit and affection. vii Unsettled Remains: Race, Trauma, and Nationalism in Millennial El Salvador Publication No._____________ Brandt Gustav Peterson, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2005 Supervisor: Charles R. Hale This dissertation explores the sudden and unexpected emergence of indigenous activism in El Salvador following the 1992 peace agreement that ended 12 years of civil war. Salvadorans have long seen theirs as the most thoroughly mestizo or mixed-race country in Central America, an imaginary unity forged through a history of state violence. They have regarded Indians as a vanished part of the past, and the appearance of more than a dozen indigenous rights groups in a few short years has produced significant cultural and political frictions. The rise of Salvadoran indigenous identity politics is analyzed in relation to wider processes of governmental and economic transformation, with a close focus on the particular conditions in which the Indian in El Salvador has been produced as an absence, or a subject of loss. Rather than ask whether there are “authentic” Indians in El Salvador, this essay addresses what is felt as lost in national discourses of the vanished Indian, and by whom. This ethnography shows that while many of the people indigenous activists regard as Indians today reject indigenous identity, they also experience forms of oppression that cannot be fully addressed without viii recourse to concepts of race and racism. The Salvadoran case points to new possibilities for an antiracist politics that challenges the limits imposed by prevailing models of multiculturalism, at the same time it highlights the risks those models pose to historically marginalized peoples. Drawing on theoretical innovations from feminist, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic cultural theory, this work contributes to the ethnography of Central America as well as theories of nationalism, race, and identity politics. ix Table of Contents Introduction: Unsettled Remains ..........................................................................1 Outline of the Chapters................................................................................4 Research Methodology................................................................................6 Chapter One: Production and the Spaces of Salvadoran Nationalism..................13 “The Golden Bean” ...................................................................................16 The End of the Agricultural Export Economy............................................20 Globalization.............................................................................................24 Tacuba ......................................................................................................26 Monuments to absence ..............................................................................28 An absent monument.................................................................................30 Mestizaje, Loss, and Indians in the National Imaginary .............................32 Why Race?................................................................................................40 Cultures of neoliberalism/ “culture” in neoliberal times.............................43 Conclusion ................................................................................................45 Chapter Two: Blood, Terror, and Fire: Narrating the Real..................................47 Narrating La Matanza................................................................................51 First Wave: Defining the Story..................................................................53 The second wave: 1932 as seen from the tumultuous hinterlands...............58 of the Cold War.........................................................................................58 The third wave: reading 1932 as racial conflict..........................................64 Fictional realities: narratives within the massacre ......................................69 Chapter Three: Two Faces Turned Toward the State ..........................................80 Rationalism versus Rationalization: Learning the Lessons of La Matanza .82 Responses to Collective Trauma................................................................86 The all-pervasive state...............................................................................90 Trauma and community.............................................................................95 Division and Ambiguity in La Matanza.....................................................97