This panel explores the collaborative research, design, and realization of massacre maps, memorials, community books, local museums, and diaspora memory projects by the Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador team, emphasizing survivor-led grassroots memory work, participatory methodologies, and international solidarity. Surviving Memory (www.elsalvadormemory.org) is an international partnership of survivors, scholars, artists, lawyers, museums, architects, community organizers, municipal governments, civil society organizations and mental health professionals who are committed to documenting the history of the Salvadoran Civil War (1980-1992) and preventing future violence. Funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, the Ontario Research Fund, and 8 universities, our goal is to engage in high-impact, community-driven research and commemoration projects, oral histories, and accessible knowledge sharing activities that approach historical memory work holistically through the intersections of justice; art, music, and theatre; intergenerational education; documentation and testimonies; mental health and healing; commemoration; environmental reparation; and local economic reconstruction. Together, we work to realize the recommendations of the UN Truth Commission for El Salvador which, in its final report From Madness to Hope (1993), held Salvadoran state agents responsible for 85% of war-time violations. Although the Commission called on the Salvadoran government to pursue reparations and erect monuments with the names of victims, national commemoration efforts have been woefully inadequate. Our research team includes 24 institutional partners and more than 100 survivors, researchers, students, and local collaborators from more than 10 countries. As an example of “research as accompaniment,” our memory projects amplify the voices of massacre survivors, emphasize intergenerational participation, and fortify local efforts to commemorate the history of the Salvadoran armed conflict and its aftermath.
Dr. Amanda Grzyb
Mapping the Chalatenango Massacres: Collaborative Documentation with Survivors
During the Salvadoran Civil War (1980-1992), the government armed forces and allied militias massacred thousands of civilians as part of their brutal counterinsurgency operations. This paper focuses on a collaboration between massacre survivors, Asociación Sumpul (El Salvador), and scholars at Western University (Canada) to document more than 60 massacres across the department of Chalatenango and create an interactive online map as both a form of commemoration and an educational tool. As one project of the Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador research partnership (www.elsalvadormemory.org), the map includes precise GPS coordinates, historical data, and survivor testimonies that are video recorded at the massacre sites. In addition to demonstrating the map, I will reflect on our team's research objectives, methodologies, technical processes, and community impacts of the team’s collaborative mapping work.
Dr. Adriana Alas
An Alternative Justice in Postwar El Salvador: the Intergenerational Production of Community Books
El Salvador has undergone a complex and lengthy transition from war to peace due to an Amnesty Law that precludes any possibility for formal justice. The victims of the war are forced to live together with perpetrators in the same communities, and some are even part of the same state reparations programs. Communities in the department of Chalatenango that were repopulated in 1987 have initiated several memory projects that work towards an alternative form of community justice. Our community books series is a part of that process, acknowledging war crimes and documenting victims’ testimonials. According to our participatory/co-creation methodologies and informed by local cultural practices, the community books address community interests, such as the transition from war to peace, collective resilience, specific events during the war, and the reconstruction of communities after the war. The books are co-created in collaboration with younger generations from the community, addressing youth requests to be incorporated into war memory projects and, simultaneously, opening spaces to rethink their communities and strengthen their solidarity with the victims.
Prof. Giada Ferrucci
Trauma-Informed Memorialization in El Salvador: A Collaborative Research-Creation Approach to Shaping Architectures of Memory
This paper explores the intersection of trauma-informed practice, research-creation collaboration, and the dynamics of memorialization. By focusing on the traditional understanding of monuments as embodiments of the past, reinforcing collective identities, and contributing to the transmission of memories, this paper critically examines the contested nature of memorialization processes, acknowledging the fluidity and power dynamics inherent in spaces of memory. Introducing the Sumpul Massacre Memorial Park project, I emphasize its collaborative and workshop-based design process involving survivors and a team of architects from the Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador project. The proposed design features symbolic elements, including Árboles de Fuego, handmade ceramic tiles bearing victims' names, an open plaza, benches for commemorations, a statue of Saint Romero, and a roofed structure with a mural. Among the diverse range of building methods employed in the Sumpul River Massacre Memorial project, I focus on traditional building methods, exemplified by the use of on-site clay for constructing adobe brick walls; methods fostering participation and social diversity, including collaboration with students from the School of Arts of the National University of El Salvador (UES) in San Salvador and community tree planting initiatives; and the restoration of the original monument from 1993. I emphasize co-creation, collaboration, and empowerment that acknowledges the expertise of the team of architects and communities members in the project, emphasizing the practical implementation of concepts like liberatory memory work. The discussion extends to the role of research-for-creation initiatives, highlighting the significance of participatory design, and an iterative process of experimentation as the team is currently working on new memorials, community historical memory museums, and memory route projects.
Dr. Tania Cañas
Memoria as creative practice: centroamericanista y localista perspectives across the Salvadoran diaspora in Canada and Australia
How do we remember within displacement and in the context of ongoing dispossession? Australia is home to the third-largest Salvadoran diaspora, primary established in the 80s through the Refugee and Humanitarian program. Australia is also a settler colonial site in which colonialism persists daily as a structure with ongoing First Peoples land and language struggles (Moreton-Robinson 2015, Wolfe 2016). How does the Salvadoran diaspora engage in memory-work while situated within a settler-colonial nation-state, in ways that do not to perpetuate the colonial project at the expense of Sovereign Indigenous histories and futures? The focus of the presentation is the work of Melbourne (Australia) based, Archiving the Present (AtP), a multi-site community archive project from a Central American perspective, that seeks to develop alternative practices of remembering in ways that do not conform to the aesthetics of colonial forms of remembering. The project’s initiatives include: quick-response creative works to counter the destruction of a Salvadoran community mural, site-responsive activations at a former migrant hostel where Salvadorans were initially assigned upon arrival, a community curated library as well an eight month introduction to Náhuat for the Salvadoran diaspora. The presentation raises critical questions such as: who gets to be remembered and what gets to be persevered in settler-colonial Australia? How does memory and embodied archiving occur for sites deemed to have no “heritage significance” by national and state-level heritage institutions? What does it mean to engage in acts of creative remembering that sit outside of heritage regimes? The presentation concludes by expanding beyond the conventional views of unidirectional sites of expulsion and settlement, to look transnational relationship building through between diasporas, in this case Australia and Canada. I will share the initial collaborative efforts of memory exchanges with key project partner the Salvadoran Canadian Association in ways that contribute to collective yet hyper localised understandings of living memory within diasporic contexts.
20240718T141520240718T1545America/LimaSurviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador: Collaborative Memory Projects with Communities A308, Building AMSA Conference Lima 2024conference@memorystudiesassociation.org
