During the 1970s and ’80s, Central American witnesses to ethnic cleansing and genocide appropriated technologies from the global North to document atrocities that US foreign policy instigated in the region—including through the clandestine reproduction of DVDs and VHS tapes. Alejandro Villalpando, a professor of Pan-African and Latin American studies at Cal State Los Angeles, spoke with Paula Ayala, a member of the Salvi diaspora and a PhD candidate in Chicano/a and Latin American studies at UCLA, about these dual and competing appropriations of technology, which are instructive as we try to make sense of contemporary genocides being both enacted and live-streamed via digital technologies. Ayala theorizes Central America as an abyss—not a void, but an infinity that refuses borders, extending globally through the diaspora. She insists we remember histories of El Salvador as sites of armed resistance to empire and not just passive recipients of its imperial expansion. The neoliberal reforms imposed on El Salvador and broader Latin America were preconditioned on the forcible dismantling of these resistance movements and their widespread popular support. Critical engagement with technology in this region requires us to begin with the kinds of informal Salvi archives elevated in this discussion.
Alejandro Villalpando: Paula, tell me a little bit about yourself. Where did you grow up? Where’s your family from? And what would you consider your roots or your history?
Paula Ayala: My story begins in Southern California. My family was displaced in the ’80s from El Salvador during the civil war.1 My father was forcibly displaced by the Salvadoran military, and that landed him here in Southern California around 1980. My mother left around 1983, leaving behind her two children, my eldest sister and brother. My eldest brother passed away in El Salvador due to a really contagious fever that was going around at the time because of poor health conditions and malnutrition.2 It was during this time that dengue fever became an epidemic in the country.
My mother was going through the trauma of displacement and family separation via the death of her father and youngest son. This all was compounded by the intensity of the violence and what I imagine was the terror they were witnessing daily because of the war.
We then left for the Central Valley of California in hopes of finding more suitable economic conditions for raising three girls. What they saw in the Central Valley was something very close to what they remembered in El Salvador: a countryside featuring natural rivers and mountains. As one of the few Salvadoran and Central American families in the area, we also experienced a lot of cultural and community isolation. So, my roots are very dispersed across territories and land, but we’re never forgetting our Salvadoran beginnings.
Alejandro: For folks who don’t know, the US has been involved in Central America for a long period, and this leads to a lot of displacement, as you talked about. How does/did military technologies or technologies of war seep into and show up in everyday discussions of the political situation back in El Salvador?
Paula: As a Central American kid,3 there’s a certain understanding that many of our families have about what weaponry, warfare, and military-grade artillery means. I understood what those technologies were at such a young age because the circumstances of war made this a norm in our community. Being forced as a young girl to know what a military tank is, what a grenade looks like, and what it does is something that later made me understand that these things were introduced by US empire and wouldn’t have existed in El Salvador before the suppression of—particularly socialist and communist—dissident movements against state power intended to serve capitalist interests. In the 1970s and early ’80s, the movements for communism and a socialist bloc were already developed. The US was interested in squashing these movements to introduce neoliberal capitalism, which was implemented after the wars. The political economies that were imposed on the region have been enabled and expanded by military technologies.4
We can think of this point in El Salvador’s history, along with those of Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama, as a moment where the globalization of technology and access to visualizing war—whether through DVDs, photography, VHSs, or telephone communication—revealed the actual horrors of death and displacement facilitated by some of the same technologies, appropriated by the US military and its subsidiaries. The parallels are not lost on me that this is the case with the global genocides currently underway and streaming on social media platforms.
Alejandro: I’m curious, in your experiences traveling back and forth to different parts of Central America, whether you’ve had epiphanies like, “Oh, this happened here, and it was bigger than one can imagine.” Have there been any manifestations of that history while revisiting El Salvador, Guatemala, or Nicaragua where you see the history of US technological contributions to large-scale violence?
Paula: I want to give the credit to the people who have kept these archives through their memory, particularly through the reproduction of VHSs and DVDs of the war.5
Alejandro: Oh, bootlegs?
Paula: Bootlegs! We knew about warfare through VHS tapes and eventually DVDs produced in El Salvador and later brought to the US. There’s been people who showed them at our family parties openly, without censoring for the kids. We knew as young teenagers that this is what war looks like from DVDs brought from El Salvador. My curiosity would have me asking, “What am I seeing through the screen?” I’m seeing it. Partygoers made the connections to a place mentioned in the DVD and added who else was involved in this kind of warfare, who had been disappeared and never showed up, or got lost in one of those mountain ranges. I heard all of this growing up. So I wanted to look for that and go there myself to find it. I found out, in 2010, that the only way I could do that was by leaving the hellhole that is the US and going back to the town that my family is from.
I visited a very important site in Perquín, Morazán. It was one of the guerilla strongholds of the eastern region of El Salvador during most of the 1980s. It’s where I first saw the crater of a bomb left by the Salvadoran military, a US-made bomb. I saw this hole, and I saw this crater. I was told by locals that this was made by a bomb. Next to the crater, I also saw the helicopter that dropped the bomb.
The people of Perquín are strong and brave people who have held onto that helicopter with pride; they took down that technology, the technology of terror, in an effort to defend themselves. And that helicopter is there as a reminder to all the people of El Salvador that we can resist, and that resistance isn’t symbolic or abstract;6 resistance is something that you do, and your life will always depend on it.
Alejandro: Wow. Some of us choose to engage in the study of our past in places like Central American studies, anthropology, sociology, and so on. We work with our communities and our people through organizing, collaborations, cultural productions, and other forms of solidarity and activism. Some of us don’t even know what questions we’re about to meet as we take on this study, and it becomes kind of jarring because you’re having to relive it.
So, tell me: How do these memories shape your work, your position in academia, or just knowledge production in general?
Paula: The memories that I have are essentially passed down to me. They’re also very real and visceral memories for me because I tremble when I revisit them with the experiences of my family members. I tremble with them. And they shape my academic work by allowing me to hold on to the rage that I have, allowing me to use that rage to ask questions rooted in the aspiration for truth. A truth that explains why this has happened, who continues to be impacted, and who has benefited from our pasts. Sometimes, the last part gets sticky and complex for people in academia.
My work as an academic is to ensure that I never obfuscate the truth, no matter how messy, no matter how discomforting it may be for my community or for me! This is important because there’s an actual reality of trying to wipe out those memories, to establish a collective amnesia. So, part of my work is to work against that amnesia as well as the continual and active problematization of settler-colonialism, American exceptionalism, multicultural neoliberalism, and brazen mestizo and white nationalisms in the Central American context.
Thinking back to my life as a kid, I recall parties being a place that showed me so much. Get-togethers were spaces of joy and, in many ways, sites of recuperation of the joy of nostalgia. They were also a container where the family would gather to cry for the people they were losing in real time in the ’80s and the early ’90s—people they couldn’t get a hold of because the phone lines were down, with whom they lost communication because there were shootings that week in the small towns we were from. People couldn’t get to phones in war zones. We had to sit with the irony of parties being both joyous and sorrowful. Parties were places where I learned our general history and that it was never lost in our family.
Alejandro: How has coming into academia impacted the way you look back at those parties and memories?
Paula: With new lenses; because I’m lucky that I’ve been able to read and look at Central American scholars before me who have been able to put their experiences into a language that I understand. I’ve read these testimonies and academic works and have had the space to make sense of what that all has meant in my own life and my family’s lives. Reading works that explain the economic conditions, that understand the militaristic and political impositions of the US, has enabled me to theorize Central America as an abyss.
Central America, in my lifetime, has been thought of by those around me as an unknown place. If people did know something about the place, it was typically things like maras,7 pupusas, or pyramids. But there’s more to it than that. Questions have emerged for me through my studies, travels, and reflections that invite me to ask: What is it that I don’t know about this place? Why don’t I know this about this place? Why don’t more people know about this place like other parts of the world? And ultimately, what won’t we know, what can’t be known, and why can’t we know about this place?
Alejandro: What else is there in your conception of Central America as an abyss? Because when I think of an abyss, I think about vastness. So, what else is in that vastness of the unknown?
Paula: It’s tied with the 500 years of colonization that has happened in Central America and what we’re now confronting as a larger systemic project of massive expulsion through ecological displacement, or what many would call “climate change.” Really, it’s capitalist ecological displacement, as is the case in Honduras with hydroelectricity and African palm;8 the burning of an ecological reserve, Indio Maíz, in Nicaragua that propelled a national uprising against Ortega in 2018;9 and the depletion and contamination of Lake Atitlan in Guatemala.10 These are just some examples of the root causes of forced displacement managed by militarized corporations in tandem with the nation-states enforcing the repression of silence and, often, death. The intention is to eliminate whole populations and peoples, and that requires the elimination of their memory and a rewriting of Central American history. The questions then continue: Can we live in the abyss? Can we be in the abyss and not let those memories be lost? Can we also be in the abyss and live in the abyss and confront these realities in dignified ways?
So, the abyss is everywhere and manifests as the chaos that is settler colonialism and the multiplicity of ways that whole communities respond in defense—often by utilizing chaos itself. Central America is, for us, a place that is also everywhere. And in that “everywhere” that is Central America, I am rooted. The abyss is not a black hole that disappears the past. It is not abysmal. It’s infinite. And in that vastness, I come back to other diasporic-specific questions like: How do we survive? And I return to our people and their resistance; because they have always fought and have been fighting to survive. It didn’t start with the civil wars. The resistance, the struggle, the protests, and the dissidence are rooted in anti-colonial histories that the very guerillas of El Salvador, who dared to struggle, knew about and tapped into for their own strategies of guerilla warfare. Learning from our insurgent pasts and how our freedom fighters’ relationship to our ancestral links to anti-colonial resistance melded with practices of modern warfare and technologies, those things are an abyss that we can’t fully understand from afar and without guides. This is why I return to our people and the specific cosmological and geographical understandings of the depths of an abyss, much in the way that poet Ruben Dario describes as “the hope in the midst of doubt and obscurity”11—because in their hope and vastness, they do and can understand and offer these stories as our inheritance.
The abyss is everywhere and manifests as the chaos that is settler colonialism and the multiplicity of ways that whole communities respond in defense.
Alejandro: I’ve heard people talk about structural amnesia, especially among the Central American diaspora you talked about. These things that you saw in our families, like the crying—often the histories that animate the tears are unbeknownst to us, but they appear in those moments, in the community, in the convening, especially in the ’80s.
And back then, there weren’t a lot of lines of communication. I know everybody knows WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, and people are connected through these things, but that wasn’t the case back then. There might have been one phone line in a canton, which is like a small community, village, pueblo, or town. If it was down, it was down. You didn’t know what was happening. You knew your family was in the middle of a war. And you just didn’t know. That was super scary.
As we have talked about, some of us in the US are fighting against the forgetting, the collective amnesia. Is this also happening in countries like El Salvador, this kind of collective amnesia, or this structural forgetting? Is there a form of that happening right now that’s being instituted in El Salvador or wherever in Central America?
Paula: The institutional forgetting has become a tool of the fascist regime in El Salvador. One of its weapons is to create a condition of “unthought.”12 So we see things or places where major battles were fought, people resisted, or massacres occurred, and we do not think about any of that. New movements and actions that push forward and call for egalitarianism are simultaneously criminalized, delegitimized, and undermined at the behest of the neoliberal state. Then the lineages these movements belong to are disappeared in our collective psyche.13
It is a project of the Bukele regime to propagate discourse that justifies the sell-off of the country to outside investors and paints it as an economic opportunity for locals. I was just in El Salvador, and we visited a lake in the region my family is from—Laguna de Alegría. And that lake has a really incredible history and is very meaningful. The waters contain sulfur. It’s not a freshwater lake. And as we were going to the lake, my family members happened to recognize a site of clandestine graves used by the military during the 1980s. Now, it’s an industrial zone with large CAT construction vehicles that dig up the earth, and it’s being mined for cryptocurrency.14
It’s places like these that the state wants you to see through an “unthought” frame. The current regime does not want us to remember that some people’s relatives are buried there, and the survivors may not ever know where their loved ones are because they were disappeared during the war. To advance the desires of crypto bros and the national ruling class, lakes like Alegría are renewed places of displacement like they were during the war. The displacement happening now is a result of the privatization and destruction of water sources for local populations because mining for global capital is placed in front of the needs of the locals. People cannot have the water of that lake for their use; they have little to no electricity or energy produced by the megaprojects there.15 I am not able to understand this without the people and their memories and stories that become unofficial records. These are the people’s archives that you’ll only truly know through the people themselves and those relations.
Institutional forgetting has become a tool of the fascist regime in El Salvador.
Alejandro: What are some of those unofficial archives that you would talk about in people’s memories?
Paula: The lake in particular is a really important archive for my family because it tells us what’s happening now with the displacement because of the megaprojects. In 1932, La Matanza took place, which is an Indigenous genocide of El Salvador, during which Indigenous people from the west, places like Santa Ana and Ahuachapán, fled and made their way east toward the areas surrounding the lake.16 That unofficial record (memories and stories) explains part of my family’s history of internal migration.
Alejandro: When did you learn these things? How does one learn these things when one goes back, given the push to forget?
Paula: The military wanted control of that region because of the organizational power that the guerilla encampments had in the mountain regions surrounding the lake. I would have never known that history if I hadn’t gone back with my family. Even if my family had talked about it in passing, with me around, while in the Central Valley, I would have never known what questions to ask, because I could not visualize that place. The structures of forgetting depend on displacing us from those places so that we don’t remember.
So we are left with more questions: How do we even ask? When we learn more about what has happened, we hesitate because the stories are so harrowing. We have to be sensitive and mindful and—
Alejandro: Trust.
Paula: Yes. To ask questions about traumatic pasts to survivors means one has to have a deep level of care and mutuality in the relationship to people and places. Fascist regimes that don’t want us to remember dissident histories want us to not ask these things. So, when we do know, and we hear of a place, of a town, a town name, someone is opening up—that’s where the abyss opens up. You open an abyss that is unending and anything is possible there, the most horrible things and the most beautiful things; because resistance is also expansive. The lengths people will go to defend their families can be something unimaginable and beautiful and also harrowing. That’s the abyss.
Alejandro: Do you think that we always have to ask? What would you say to people about learning beyond a classroom? Are there other ways you’ve learned about these things without necessarily asking?
Paula: I’m a very sensitive person, and that always made me very quiet. This led me to be a good listener and very observant. I heard stories growing up that were so heavy and thick with detail that there was no longer a need to ask. A story that would be five minutes long would be so deep and heavy that I just sat with it. The intricacies would leave me trying to decipher a story for a decade. How is this possible? How can that happen to one person?
Alejandro: How do we learn to remember again?
Paula: I really want to honor the spirit of my late cousin. He was born to Salvadoran parents in Southern California and raised in the Central Valley. He always taught me through his words and actions, “No, I’m Salvi.” He wasn’t afraid to be himself. I loved that about him because he showed me I shouldn’t be ashamed of who I am. He was one of the youths who did not let the stigma and the shame that we’re supposed to have for being kids of exiles, refugees, and displaced people silence or erase us and our roots. Those are the people that society likes to throw away. Yet, those are the people that fight through whatever and with whatever is available, like dance or art, and I always knew that his movements and art were tied to something that I could not explain but had never forgotten.
People like my cousin, and so many others, have historically been criminalized and deported as deemed “gang members” from the late 1990s to the present day in the US, and they are the same people who Bukele is currently persecuting and targeting under the national “state of exception.” This authoritarian law grants state officials all rights for unwarranted arrests of anyone deemed suspicious, with the nullification of any sort of constitutional rights and extended periods of provisional arrests.17 So again, given the long history of catastrophe, survival, displacement, and autocracy in the country—and, by and large, the region of Central America—how does one live and feel identity/ies as diaspora and within the fight of survival? It is also imperative to note Bukele’s own identity as a member of the Palestinian diaspora in El Salvador, and what that means for these specific histories of displacement and outright betrayals of justice for oppressed people in favor of dictatorships across the Americas.18 Are they merely paradoxes of power? Do they continue to signal this notion of an abyss—especially and specifically given the country’s recent history with revolutionary dissidence?
Alejandro: The abyss.
Paula: The abyss!
Alejandro: With the new regime in El Salvador, has there been a kind of effort at forgetting the past officially—or to silence the past—to borrow from Michel Rolph-Trouillot’s famous work?
Paula: One can go through the eastern region of El Salvador and never know what happened there. You can just go through it. That region can be read as a desolate and abandoned place, and that’s that. The state has abandoned that place. But for us that remember—because we grew up listening—we know that when you cross the newest bridge across the Río Lempa, we know that remnants of the old bridge (Puente de Oro) were strategically bombed by the guerillas so that the military would have no access to the eastern region.19
For one that knows, you understand that when you go to small towns like El Mozote, San Francisco Gotera, Intipucá, Perquín, you know that this is where Black, Indigenous, and poor mestizo people have lived. They are also the places that were the most rebellious against repression. So when the state ignores and abandons these regions, it is also an attempt to silence the reality that these were beacons of dissidence and rebellion.
El Mozote is a place where over 900 people were massacred in less than two days. The Salvadoran military went in and gathered the community into buildings and fired at them from the outside until everybody inside died: women, babies, pregnant women, children, men. And very few survivors have lived to tell the story, Rufina Amaya being one of them. El Mozote is a place the state is trying to sanitize.20
Alejandro: In many ways, we see that stories of survivors tend to be more palatable, whereas stories of militant resistance become more complex and, therefore, difficult for people to affirm. We are here because people dared to resist. So how do we help people not forget or dismiss that?
Paula: We can all be more discerning with what we choose to accept as symbols for our communities. There are efforts to sanitize our pasts in the US through neoliberal schemes for inclusion and representation that fall flat and ultimately serve capitalist purposes. The desire for inclusion into the multicultural mainstream US obscures and, if we’re not careful, may erase our more radical histories of dissidence and dissidents.
To see what’s happening in Palestine and how people continue to resist within the occupied territories and in that diaspora, we as Central Americans have another example of how powerful never forgetting really is. And to see the reactions and attempted suppression of people in solidarity with Palestine and Palestinians reminds me of how we were also categorized as threats upon our mass arrivals in the 1970s and ’80s.
To call oneself a Sandinista was a dirty thing. When my family came here, you couldn’t say you were Salvadoran, because you were a communist. To soften and to play upon the tragedy of our past without acknowledging the militant and righteous resistance of the people of El Salvador is also why we are still here. It was never just the benevolence of an empire through peace accords that helped us survive.
Desire for inclusion into the multicultural mainstream US obscures and, if we’re not careful, may erase our more radical histories of dissidence and dissidents.
1. For more on the history of the Salvadoran Civil War and the involvement of the United States see “Civil War, Descent into Violence,” California Migration Museum, August 2, 2024, calmigration.org.
2. Before 1980 there were no reported cases of dengue fever in El Salvador. The epidemic advanced and took hold in the most abandoned parts of the country. See “Dengue in the Americas: The Epidemics of 2000,” Epidemiological Bulletin 21, no. 4 (December 2000).
3. “Central American” is used as a political identity in Central America—it refers to a once-unified nation, and to an identity that reemerged in Southern California during the 1980s anti-war and early immigrant rights movements. For more detailed arguments, see Maritza Cardenas, Constituting Central American-Americans: Transnational Identities and the Politics of Dislocation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018).
4. William J. Robinson, Transnational Conflicts: Central America, Social Change, and Globalization (New York: Penguin Random House, 2003).
5. Carlos Henríquez Consalvi, Broadcasting the Civil War in El Salvador: A Memoir of Guerilla Radio (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).
6. “U.S. Copters Entered Salvadoran War Zone,” Chicago Tribune, July 7, 1985, chicagotribune.com.
7. Steven Osuna, “Transnational Moral Panic: Neoliberalism and the Spectre of MS-13,” Race and Class 61, no. 4 (2020).
8. “Take Action: Garifuna Land Defenders Forcibly Disappeared,” School of the Americas Watch, July 31, 2020, soaw.org.
9. Josh Mayer, “Behind the Fire that Propelled Nicaragua’s Uprising,” North American Congress on Latin America, December 12, 2018, nacla.org.
10. Arwa Aburawa, “The Grandmother Lake: Conservation and Colonialism in Guatemala,” Al Jazeera, 2021, interactive.aljazeera.com.
11. Ruben Dario, “La Fe,” available at Ciudad Seva, ciudadseva.com.
12. Saidiyah V. Hartman, interview by Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Position of the Unthought,” Qui Parle 13, no. 2 (2005): 183–201.
13. Pedro Cabezas and Giada Ferucci, “Solidarity with El Salvador’s Santa Marta 5 Grows across Borders,” North American Congress on Latin America, April 19, 2024, nacla.org.
14. For more on water, labor, electricity, cryptocurrency, and El Salvador, see Abigail Paz, “Bitcoin Mining’s Toll on El Salvador Leaves Communities without Water,” Global Voices, May 31, 2024, globalvoices.org; Claudia Diaz Combs, “In El Salvador, Workers Fight to Protect Public Services,” North American Congress on Latin America, August 15, 2023, nacla.org.
15. Jorge Cuellar, “The Value of a Volcano,” North American Congress on Latin America, November 1, 2021, nacla.org.
16. See “Jan. 22, 1932: La Matanza (‘The Massacre’) Begins in El Salvador,” Zinn Education Project, n.d., zinnedproject.org.
17. “Salvadoran Resistance Bloc Denounces Recent Homicides, Repressive State of Exception, Failed ‘Territorial Control Plan,” Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, March 1, 2022, cispes.org.
18. Sophia Azeb, “Who Will We Be When We Are Free? On Palestine and Futurity,” Funambulist 24, June 28, 2019, thefunambulist.net.
19. Lydia Chavez, “Salvador Rebels Blow Up Bridge, Nation’s Biggest,” New York Times, January 2, 1984;John Newhagen, “Leftist Guerillas Bombed El Salvador’s Most Important Bridge Thursday,” United Press International, October 15, 1981.
20. See “El Mozote Massacre,” Centro por la Justicia y el Derecho Internacional, n.d., cejil.org.