Digging Up the Past and Surviving El Salvador’s Phantoms: Salvadoran-American Post-Conflict Traumatic Memory and Reconciliation

Authors

  • Yvette Aparicio Grinnell College

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18192/rceh.v44i1.5906

Abstract

This article focuses on Salvadoran-American poetry that explores Salvadorans’ national traumas of war and displacement. In these poems, war trauma evolves into a post-conflict, post-migration trauma that calls for reconciliation with war memories as well as with a violent, unstable present. This study focuses on the poetry of Jorge Argueta (1961), William Archila (1968), and Javier Zamora (1990), three poets born in El Salvador and immigrants to the US. Studies of trauma and reconciliation in post-conflict societies frame the analysis of poetry that digs up and reconstitutes the dead for a Salvadoran diaspora still un-reconciled with its trauma.

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Published

2021-05-23