SUEÑOS SALVADOREÑOS: STRUGGLES TO BUILD OTHER FUTURES IN EL SALVADOR’S MIGRATION LANDSCAPE Joseph L. Wiltberger A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Anthropology Chapel Hill 2013 Approved by: Arturo Escobar Dorothy Holland Charles Price Altha Cravey Hannah Gill © 2013 Joseph L. Wiltberger ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT JOSEPH L. WILTBERGER: Sueños Salvadoreños: Struggles to Build Other Futures in El Salvador’s Migration Landscape (Under the direction of Arturo Escobar) Since El Salvador’s 1980-1992 civil war, the Salvadoran state has embraced a discourse and political economic strategy that favor international migration and remittances for development. Born out of El Salvador’s long history of inequality, memory erasure, and exclusion of marginalized populations, this state-led project of “migration and development” assumes that the economic changes and identities linked to international migration and remittances are a sign of “progress,” as long as migrants and their communities appropriately engage with global capitalist flows to benefit development, mainly through “productive” remittance investment in places of origin. This dissertation examines how this project, and the developmentalist and neoliberal logics and practices that guide it, are contested and challenged in networked and community-based ways. It uses a networked ethnographic lens that follows the experience of one rural community in northern El Salvador and its migrants in the United States, who come from a region known for both community organizing and displacement, to highlight the existence and potentiality of diverse logics and practices linked to migration and development, including those that take on non-capitalist, collectivist, and communal forms. This research shows how people continue to make and reconstitute community, by networking across borders, engaging in communal practices, and rooting iii community in place and in a sense of collective history, even as they navigate conditions of international migration and displacement that are not of their choosing. These practices and logics of community, this dissertation argues, challenge the state’s developmentalist framework on international migration, and they make way for other kinds of futures than undocumented emigration and remittance-led development. Based on engagements with cross-border networks of political actors and migrant-community activists, this study suggests that these practices are tied to a broader political shift recently to push for alternatives to undocumented emigration, to rework the state’s approach to migration and development, and to rethink the meaning of Salvadoran migration in national discourse. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the support of many people. I could not have asked for a more supportive group of mentors. I would like to thank my advisor, Arturo Escobar, for his intellectual guidance, optimistic spirit, and for the inspiration he has brought to so many of us. He is among the most generous and humble individuals I have known, and he brings a remarkable passion and creativity to his work. I have also greatly benefited from the guidance of Dottie Holland, who has an extraordinary enthusiasm for mentoring students and for doing so with great care. I thank Hannah Gill, Altha Cravey, and Charles Price for their invaluable support and advice over the years and especially for encouraging and modeling engaged approaches to research and creativity in teaching. There are so many colleagues and friends at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who have also selflessly encouraged and supported me during this journey, whether or not they are aware of it. Together they have helped make Carolina a community and one that is uniquely supportive, challenging, creative, and caring. I am lucky to be a part of it. In particular, I would like to extend my thanks to Courtney Harrison, Eloisa Burman, Laura Gutuierrez, Georgina Drew, Courtney Lewis, Malena Rousseau, and Caela O’Connell for their long-lasting encouragement. The company, accountability, and support of Russell Bither-Terry and Annelies Groger made the dissertation writing process more enjoyable and achievable. I am fortunate to take part in v a writing group with two good friends, Alice Brooke Wilson and Holly Worthen. Their advice played a crucial role in shaping and improving this project. I thank them for their compassion and demand for intellectual rigor. Dissertation field research was generously supported by an International Dissertation Field Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council, a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation, a Grassroots Development Fellowship from the Inter-American Foundation, and a Dissertation Fellowship and a Pre-dissertation Fieldwork Grant each from the Institute for the Study of the Americas at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I want to express my heartfelt gratitude to those in El Salvador for their patience, humor, support, and outreach in the time that I have shared with them there. Amparo Marroquín, Gilma Pérez, Kay Andrade-Eekoff, Virginia Quintana Salazar, and Alejandro Alvarez Ramírez each reached out to me based on their commitment to furthering meaningful scholarship on Salvadoran migration. I am thankful to Anne Schaufele, Jason Cross, Paulita Pike, Catalina del Cid, and Mauricio Alarcon, for our lively conversations, for their support, and for the work they do to understand and improve conditions in El Salvador and for Salvadorans. Among those from El Salvador, I want to particularly thank those from Guarjila. Elva, Manuel, Neto, John and Teca, and many others from the community have helped to make Guarjila, in El Salvador and in the United States, a second home for me over the course of many years. Finally, I am thankful for the enthusiastic support of my family. My parents, Jeanne and Mario, Tom and Donna, and Mark and Jennie have been immensely patient, understanding, and encouraging, each in their own way, over the years. Young Keuka, vi Maihue, Ada, and Max, unknowingly, have helped give me the energy I needed to reach the finish line. I hope that I can recover time missed with all of them while working on this project. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................ XI LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ...................................................................................... XII CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................... 1 THEORETICAL CONTRIBUTIONS ........................................................................................ 7 TOWARD OTHER POSSIBILITIES ...................................................................................... 14 CONTRIBUTIONS TO SALVADORAN STUDIES .................................................................. 16 IN “THE FIELD” ............................................................................................................... 20 ROAD MAP ..................................................................................................................... 25 CHAPTER 2 DESTIERRO ............................................................................................ 29 THE COFFEE REPUBLIC .................................................................................................. 32 INTRODUCING NEOLIBERALISM ...................................................................................... 35 SENDING EMIGRANTS, HARNESSING REMITTANCES ....................................................... 37 ERASING TROUBLED HISTORIES ..................................................................................... 42 HEROIZING EMIGRANTS ................................................................................................. 51 THE PROJECT OF MIGRATION AND DEVELOPMENT ......................................................... 54 CHAPTER 3: MAKING LO COMUNAL ..................................................................... 60 THEORIZING LO COMUNAL .............................................................................................. 64 ROOTS OF THE CAMPESINO MOVEMENT OF CHALATENANGO ........................................ 70 GUINDAS ......................................................................................................................... 76 viii MESA GRANDE ............................................................................................................... 79 MAKING COMMUNITY IN GUARJILA ............................................................................... 88 CHAPTER 4 POSTWAR DILEMMAS ....................................................................... 98 CONCEPTUALIZING POSTWAR COMMUNITY-BUILDING ................................................ 102 IDENTITIES AND IMAGINATIONS OF “REVOLUTIONARY” CHALATENANGO ................... 109 SHIFTING POLITICAL IMAGINARIES .............................................................................. 112 THE GROWTH OF MIGRATION ...................................................................................... 118 COLLECTIVIST PRACTICES OF MOBILITY ...................................................................... 126 MIGRATION AND (HI)STORIES OF STRUGGLE ..............................................................