I exit the plush theatre seats into a walkway of semicircular neon tubes and out into a parking lot. The images on screen matched the popular image of Central America, and what I will see in El Salvador when I go out to the mountains. At this mall in San Salvador, however everything in my field of vision could be in the states: the parking spaces, the new cars in them, the streetlamps shining down, the bushes at the edges, even the rounded metal bollards on the sidewalk, seems pasted from the US design book. This was the type of development I helped build when I worked at an engineering firm in New England. In front of the mall is Boulevard de los Heroes, a four lane road full of traffic and lined with a Blockbuster, an Office Max, a Texaco, a Wendy’s and a Toyota dealership. Walking down the sidewalk for these six blocks, it really does feel like California, except that the billboards advertising plane flights are in Spanish.
The other difference is the bus system: there are lots of silvery minivans and minibuses waiting at the mall entrance to whisk you away to the rest of the city. Buses come by every minute, which goes a long way to making service reliable, and drivers duck in and out of traffic like New York taxi drivers. In fifteen minutes you can be in other parts of the city, upscale restaurants in Zona Rosa, 1960s concrete housing projects in Zacumil, or tin roof shacks, and people making a living selling dvds from 3 by 5 foot blankets on the streetcorner in the center. When streetcars were replaced by buses in the United States, the transit companies claimed it was to provide better service, but in the end the automobile companies which owned the transit companies just encouraged people to buy their cars. In Central America there are no consolidated transit companies to be bought out, and in any event the people are too poor to afford cars. In any event, considering the frequency and coverage of transit service, it occurs to me that while the idea of replacing streetcars with buses may have been a trojan horse for the Automobile in places like Los Angeles, it doesn't seem to be the case in the Spanish-speaking world.
I ate most of my dinners at a sidewalk comedor just off the Boulevard. Actually it's just a few plastic tables and gas grills that get unloaded from a pickup truck every night at seven. They set up on the sidewalk in front of an ATM, where the Mariachi musicians wait in their distinctive uniforms in hopes of being hired to play parties. I enjoy the food, and watching the musicians, and it costs about $1.40 for a complete meal. El Salvador now uses dollars as the official currency, and food at the Wendy's or Pizza Hut on the boulevard costs almost as much as in the states. The food costs almost as much, but the people who work there earn much less.
On the bus from Guatemala I met a young Salvadoran muralist who offered to show me around his town. One of my favorite places was the church of the Rosary. From the outside it looked like an ugly concrete stairway. Inside, however, the horizontal parts of the “steps” in the roof contain stained glass panels which made the space feel much lighter and larger than it looked from outside. In one corner is a series of abstract twisted iron sculptures representing the stations of the cross. Unlike most churches, the building is wider than it is long, so that most congregants will be close to the altar. I sit and enjoy the ambience from the rainbow of translucent panels arching above me. As we leave Ivan tells me that army snipers once used the top of the church to fire on demonstrators in an adjacent city square.
Downtown I also visit the tomb of Archbishop Romero, assassinated twenty five years ago March 24. His image is ubiquitous in church murals and bus stops, along with the motto “I will be reborn in the Salvadoran people.” He was assassinated near the beginning of the Salvadoran Civil War, as assassination of other priests occurred near its end. I also visit the house where six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter were killed. The daughter was a year younger than I would have been when they were shot by a death squad in 1989. On the airline to Guatemala I encountered one of the University students who encountered their bodies, and helped clean blood and brains strewn on the grass where there is now a rose garden. You can read his version of events at
Many on the right saw the Jesuits as the ideologists of the guerrillas, which is why they were killed. However the Jesuits themselves argued that violent revolution was not the way to reform to El Salvador, and maintained dialog with and critiques of both the left and the right. A Shakespeare character speaking in the time of Caesar says “The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.” In El Salvador, the deaths of the Jesuits helped complete the work they began in their life. The outcry helped bring international pressure to bear and force the government to negotiate, leading to peace accords, the reduction of the army, and turning the guerrillas into the second largest political party. As in Nicaragua, the United States occasionally has to remind El Salvadorans that, although we believe in democracy, their might be “unfortunate consequences,” should they actually elect the leftists. [since this was written the former guerrillas in both El Salvador and Nicaragua have taken power—through the ballot box instead of the bullet. Meanwhile in Guatemala the left remains fragmented as a nation-wide movement, although individuals have built local power bases.]
Ivan also suggests a couple of places in the countryside I should go. One is Suchitoto, a beautiful colonial city overlooking a lake. There are a few restaurants and a cafe selling handicrafts and sepia-tinted postcards of local scenes, but there aren't many tourists on a Wednesday morning. This and the similar La Palma seem aimed as much at rich Salvadorans on day trips from the capital, as at foreign tourists, which are much less common in El Salvador than elsewhere in Central America. Later I head out to the mountainside. There are coffee plantations, small villages grouped around a town square, dusty shops where it sometimes looks like things have been on the shelf for years. Men walk through the unpaved streets with machetes, coffee beans are set out to dry on plastic tarps. In the short time I am there, all I can really say is that these areas seem a lot like rural Guatemala, but with no indigenous dress, and few indigenous faces.
When I get back to the city, Ivan and I end up meeting at the Texaco station on Boulevard de los Heroes and walking down the boulevard to a local park. We talk about women, and education, and dreams while SUVs rush by the convenience stores. From what we talk about, I feel like I could be back in my hometown haunting Timberlake road with a high school buddy, there is one huge difference. When I was in High School worrying about what music was popular and shopping at the mall for posters to put up, Ivan could be locked up for listening to the wrong radio station (Radio Venceremos), or for publicly supporting what is now the second largest political party in the country.
Obviously that is a huge difference between our experiences. Reflecting on it, however, I wonder if my first reaction “oh that must have been strange growing up in a war zone” isn’t as facile as the people who used to ask me about what it was like growing up Chinese. It is strange to the questioner, but to the person who lived it, it is the only reality they know. Turn the question around and many people throughout the world might ask people from the country I was raised in “Is your view of the world distorted by living in a country which hasn't had a war fought on your soil for five generations?” And it's been even longer north of the Mason-Dixon line.
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