Writing From the Hyphen: Studying Salvadoran Literature as a Salvadoran-American Writer

My efforts to analyze the role of resistance and resilience in Salvadoran writing is both rooted in and inseparable from my own identity and relationship to these stories. My work to gain a better understanding of the country’s history, political climate, and particularly, of the Salvadoran Civil War, is as central to my academic project as it is to my understanding of myself, my family, and culture. This work is also foundational for my creative work, as I am someone that is not only invested in studying Salvadoran writing, but also a Salvadoran-American woman writing in the same tradition of the writing that I am researching and analyzing. What this brings to my literary analysis is a consciousness for how my own positionality and lived experiences shape my understanding and interpretation of these literary works.

I first came across Javier Zamora’s work in The Wandering Song—an anthology in which one of my own poems appears. Eager to read more work by contemporary Salvadoran writers, I went through the anthology’s author biographies and researched the writers whose work had been published. I was drawn to Zamora’s work after reading his poem titled “El Salvador” on the Poetry Foundation website. The poem also appears in Zamora’s poetry collection, Unaccompanied, which narrates his experiences migrating from El Salvador to the United States at nine years old. Zamora’s “El Salvador” personifies the country so as to begin a conversation that addresses the intricacies of the speaker’s relationship to it:

Salvador, if I return on a summer day, so humid my thumb
             will clean your beard of  salt, and if  I touch your volcanic face,

kiss your pumice breath, please don’t let cops say: he’s gangster. 

The poem is ultimately driven by the question of return, as the speaker analyzes his positionality in relation to the country’s sociopolitical climate. His characterization of Salvador’s face as volcanic evokes a recurring trope common to Central American writing that draws upon the isthmus’s geographic landscape to describe Central America and its people—a trope that my own writing has reflected. When the speaker begs, “please don’t let cops say: he’s gangster,” he begins a discussion of both criminalization and the militarized police force in El Salvador and focuses on that to convey his relationship to the country.

In my own positionality as a U.S. poet born to Salvadoran immigrants, my experience is a generation removed from homeland and has created a disconnect that I seek to bridge through both my studies and my poetry. This positionality means that when I sat down to write my own version of an “El Salvador” poem in my sophomore year poetry workshop, drawing from my own experiences was limited to envisioning El Salvador primarily through the perspectives of my six-year-old and ten-year-old selves (the ages during which I had visited El Salvador). Unlike Zamora and other Salvadoran writers like William Archila, Leticia Hernández-Linares, and Alexandra Relegado, my own life is rooted in the hyphen between my Salvadoran-American identity. I do not carry the same stories that these writers emphasize in their works, but I do maintain a consciousness for this via the stories shared within my family.

I read, write, and analyze Salvadoran literature through the lens of my own upbringing in U.S. culture and education as well as with understandings of my cultural heritage and family history. My personal connection to the work that I am studying shapes my scholarship in crucial ways: it is the reason for which I am able to engage directly with specific cultural references and experiences described in the literature I study. As I move forward with my research, it is as important that I consider my positionality and personal connection to the work, as much as it is that I engage critically through theoretical frameworks and approaches.

Zamora, Javier. “El Salvador” Poetry, November 2016.