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I write YA books; that is true. But I never write strictly and only of teens. I care about the sweep of generations. I think generations are relevant. Some of my very favorite characters are women even older (believe it!) than me. My Mud Angel and physician Katherine of One Thing Stolen. Stefan's East Berlin grandmother in Going Over. Old Carmen, the rugged beachcomber, of This Is the Story of You (due out next spring). And, of course, my Estela, the old Spanish cook in Small Damages—a character I lived with for a decade before she found herself inside that gorgeous cover.

But now look at the silver wing near the right upper edge of that cover. That is Estela herself, who came to me this afternoon by way of my husband's cousin, Myra. Estela in real life was my husband's father's mother—a loved, buoyant, life-affirming General Counsel in the United States who had also served as the Philippine ambassador to Portugal. I wear her ring as my engagement ring. I hear stories. And today I received this bookmark, which once clipped the pages of the books Estela read.

Myra's words (in impeccable handwriting):

This is an antique silver bookmark from El Salvador my grandmother Estela picked up—probably 50 years ago.... I decided it was time to send you this now. I always thought this should go to you—since you are the writer in the family and it came from William's home country.

 I am so in love with this gift. This piece of then. A bookmark shaped like a coffee bean that might as easily mark my third memoir about my marriage to this Salvadoran man, Still Love in Strange Places.

I thank you, Myra.

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Readers of this blog know that I married a man from a land that was foreign to me. El Salvador. That I traveled there. That I studied it. That I tried to make sense of that world in a memoir that took years to write, Still Love in Strange Places. I read every last news story I could find at the time, every antique coffee brochure, every photograph made available to me (this one, here, I especially love, featuring my husband's grandfather on the far right). I talked to dear Aunt Adela, my brother-in-laws, Mario and Rodi, my mother-in-law, anyone who had the time.

But the story is never over, and this morning I found myself spiraling back toward El Salvador while watching this New York Times retro reportage on the four American nuns who were murdered in December 1980. Their story horrified me when I first heard of it (a few years before I met my husband). I never could make sense of it. But love and memory keep a story alive, and justice finds its way.

For those interested in footage of El Salvador that I never saw and in a story that has many twists and turns, I highly recommend this story by Clyde Haberman and important video.

I am off to Masterman High, in Philadelphia, to talk with students about the Berlin Wall, about the world beyond, about risks and responsibilities. There is, I believe (I stake my small legacy on it), nothing like the real world to inspire meaningful conversations. 

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By Robert Brenneman

Both the President and Senate Republicans have recently weighed in on what to do about the “surge” in undocumented minors arriving at the US border. Many of these undocumented youth come from the northern countries of Central America: Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. Embedded in most arguments about what ought to be done are assertions about what prompted these minors to set out in the first place and what will become of them if they stay. But many of these assumptions miss the mark and the truth is a lot more complicated than the sloganeering that characterizes much of the debate.

Myth #1: The increase in migrating minors came about as a result of the rise of gang violence in Central America.

Gang violence in Central America is real and it has touched the lives of far too many Central American youth and families. But the gangs have been a major feature of urban life since at least the late 1990s and there is little evidence to argue that gangs have increased in strength, size, or activity during the past three years. Meanwhile, the increase in migration of minors has been stratospheric. Undeniably, some of the youth heading north are escaping gang violence or threats from the gangs, but even the UN’s special report Children on the Run found, after conducting interviews with a scientific sample of detained youth, that just under a third of the youth mentioned the gangs as a factor contributing to their decision to leave. Most of the youth citing gangs were from El Salvador and Honduras.

Myth #2: Violence is spiraling out of control throughout Central America.

Although they share a number of important characteristics, the governments of Central America have taken different paths in how to relate to gangs, drugs, and violent crime. These divergent policies have contributed to very distinct outcomes. Notably, Nicaragua, which never took an “iron fist” approach to the gangs, has a far lower homicide rate and lower gang membership than its neighbors to the north. But even Guatemala, which has been well-known for homicidal violence ever since the state-sponsored violence of the 1980s, has shown improvement in its violent crime rate. Homicides have generally declined in recent years, probably as a partial result of Guatemala’s efforts to improve its justice system. As the chart below illustrates, Honduras has more than double the homicidal violence of its neighbors:

Myth #3: Coyotes (sometimes called “human traffickers”) are “tricking” children into migrating by telling them that they will receive citizenship upon arrival in the United States.

This myth reveals the utterly low regard in which many North Americans hold the intelligence of Central Americans. Oscar Martinez, an award-winning investigative journalist from El Salvador, recently published a fascinating account of his interview with a Salvadoran coyote who has been guiding his compatriots to El Norte since the 1970s. (Oscar knows about migrating minors — he has written a celebrated book about his trips across Mexico in the company of Central American migrants.) Among other myths effectively debunked in that interview is the notion that Central Americans hold wildly optimistic views about Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In fact, most Central American youth and their relatives living in the United States are well aware that in all likelihood, they will, at best, become undocumented immigrants. But better to be close to family than suffer years of hardship while separated from parents, many of whom cannot travel “back” to their country of origin because of their own undocumented status. Of course, some of these youth are also escaping violence and the threat of violence as well as economic hardship and the crushing humiliation of living in generational poverty in some of the most unequal societies in the hemisphere. Thus, there are multiple factors at play when Central American youth (and their parents) consider whether or not to pay the US$7,000 charged by most coyotes for “guidance” across Mexico and over the US border. But few arrive under the illusion that they will attain legal status any time soon.

Myth #4: Central American youth who manage to stay in the United States as undocumented persons are likely to become part of a permanent underclass who represent a perpetual drain on the US economy.

Political conservatives often argue that our economy simply cannot sustain the weight of more undocumented Mexicans and Central Americans. In fact, research at the Pew Hispanic Center shows that 92% of undocumented men are active in the labor force (a higher proportion than among native men) and that most undocumented immigrants see modest improvements in their household income over time. Not surprisingly, those who eventually obtain legal status show far more substantial gains in their income and in the educational attainment of their children.

Myth #5: The situation in Central America is hopeless.

While it is true that many of the children who reach the US border have grown up in difficult and even dangerous situations and ought to be granted a hearing to determine whether or not they should be granted asylum, I have Central American friends (including some from Honduras) who might bristle at the suggestion that every child migrating northward is escaping life in hell itself. The idea that all Central American minors ought to be pronounced refugees upon arrival at the border rests on the mistaken assumption that these nations are hopelessly mired in violence and chaos, and it encourages the US government to throw in the towel with regard to advocating for economic and political improvements in the region.

True, a great deal of violence and hopelessness persists in the marginal urban neighborhoods of San Salvador and Tegucigalpa, but these communities did not evolve by accident. They are the result of years of under-investment in social priorities such as public education and public security compounded by the entrance in the late 1990s of a furious scramble among the cartels to establish and maintain drug movement and distribution networks across the isthmus in order to meet unflagging US demand. At the same time as we work to ensure that all migrant minors are treated humanely and with due process, we ought to use this moment to take a hard look at US foreign policy both past and present in order to build a robust aid package aimed at strengthening institutions and promoting more progressive tax policy so that these nations can promote human development, not just economic growth. It is time we take the long view with regard to our neighbors to the south.

Robert Brenneman is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Saint Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont and the author of Homies and Hermanos: God and the Gangs in Central America.

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By Erina Duganne

Many hope, even count on, photography to function as an agent of social change. In his 1998 book, Photojournalism and Foreign Policy: Icons of Outrage in International Crises, communications scholar David Perlmutter argues, however, that while photographs “may stir controversy, accolades, and emotion,” they “achieve absolutely nothing.”

In my current research project, I examine the difficult question of what contribution photography has made to social change through an examination of images documenting events from the Central American civil wars — El Salvador and Nicaragua, more specifically — that circulated in the United States in the 1980s. Rather than measure the influence of these photographs in terms of narrowly conceived causal relationships concerning issues of policy, I argue that to understand what these images did and did not achieve, they need to be situated in terms of their broader social, political, and cultural effects — effects that varied according to the ever shifting relations of their ongoing reproduction and reception. Below are three platforms across which photographs from the wars in Central America circulated and recirculated in the United States in the 1980s.

(1)   In the early 1980s, the US government adopted a dual policy of military support in Central America. In El Salvador, they provided aid against the guerilla forces or FMLN while in Nicaragua they backed the contra war against the Sandinistas. Many Americans learned and formulated opinions about these policies through photographs that circulated in the news media. The cover of the 22 March 1982 issue of Time, for instance, featured a photograph of a gunship flying over El Salvador. Taken by US photojournalist Harry Mattison, the editors at Time used the photograph as part of their cover story questioning the use by the US government of aerial reconnaissance photographs of military installations in Nicaragua to establish a causal link between the leftist insurgents in El Salvador and Communist governments worldwide.

(2)   In addition to these reconnaissance photographs, the Reagan administration also turned to photography in an eight-page State Department white paper entitled Communist Interference in El Salvador, which was released to the American public on 23 February 1981. In this white paper, the US government included two sets of military intelligence photographs of captured weapons, which they believed would help them to further provide the American public with “irrefutable proof” of Communist involvement via Russia and Cuba in Central America, and thereby justify the escalation of US military and economic aid to the supposedly moderate Salvadoran government. The aforementioned article in Time also questioned the validity of the sources used in this document.

(3)   While photography played a prominent role in debates over the existence of a communist threat in Central America, beginning in 1983, a number of artists and photographers — Harry Mattison, Susan Meiselas, Group Material, Marta Bautis, Mel Rosenthal, among others — put photographs from the Central American conflicts, some of which had circulated directly in the aforementioned contexts and others which had not, to a different use. Rather than employ photographs to perpetuate or even question the accuracy of communist aggression in the region, these artists and photographers instead used the medium to examine the imperialist underpinning of the Reagan administration’s foreign policy in Central America as well as the longstanding geopolitical and historical implications of US involvement there. To this end, they produced the following: the 1983 photography book and exhibition El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers, which was edited by Harry Mattison, Susan Meiselas, and Fae Rubenstein and toured various US cities in 1984 and 1985; Group Material’s 1984 multi-media installation Timeline: A Chronicle of US Intervention in Central and Latin America, on view at the P.S. Contemporary Art Center in Queens, New York, as part of the ad hoc protest organization Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America; and the exhibition The Nicaragua Media Project that toured various US cities in 1984 and 1985. Together these three photography books and art exhibitions provided, what I call, a “living” history for photographs from the Central American civil wars.

In his 1978 essay “Uses of Photography” that was anthologized in his 1980 book About Looking, cultural critic John Berger argues that for photographs to “exist in time,” they need to be placed in the “context of experience, social experience, social memory.” Using Berger’s definition of a “living” history as a model, my research project offers a novel way to think about how, within the contexts of these exhibitions and books, photographs from the conflicts in El Salvador and Nicaragua functioned as dynamic, even affective objects, whose mobility and mutability could empower contemporary viewers to look beyond the so-called communist threat in the region that was perpetuated through the Reagan administration as well as the news media and begin to think more carefully about past histories of US imperialism and global human oppression in Central America.

Erina Duganne is Associate Professor of Art History at Texas State University where she teaches courses in American art, photography, and visual culture. She is the author of The Self in Black and White: Race and Subjectivity in Postwar American Photography (2010) as well as a co-editor and an essayist for Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain (2007). She has also written about her current research project for the blog In the Darkroom.

Oxford Art Online offers access to the most authoritative, inclusive, and easily searchable online art resources available today. Through a single, elegant gateway users can access — and simultaneously cross-search — an expanding range of Oxford’s acclaimed art reference works: Grove Art Online, the Benezit Dictionary of Artists, the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, The Oxford Companion to Western Art, and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms, as well as many specially commissioned articles and bibliographies available exclusively online.

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Yesterday in class, after teaching ourselves the memoir Drinking: A Love Story (Caroline Knapp), we allowed music to take us on a journey. Three different pieces—a touch of Cuba, a touch of tango, a touch of reggae. I wanted the students to find within the rhythms some memory of movement—of their own bodies taken across place and time. What is it to walk, to run, to drive, to jolt, to slide forward? How do we find the language that moves a passage ahead while at the same time unblurring the particulars of place, weather, mood? It was, in part, a lesson in verbs, or it might have been.

Later, coming home, I tried to remember my own journey language. How might I have attacked the assignment I gave to my own students? I recalled this passage from my third memoir Still Love in Strange Places. It is an odd thing to read your own work, years on. But this day at St. Anthony's farm, my husband's home, is still alive in me.

Wanting time to myself before I surrendered to the Spanish, I slid out of the tree and set off across the courtyard and out through the crooked, metal gate, calling to no one in particular that I wasn't going far. I went down the dirt road between the two dug-out walls of earth that towered above my head. Hiking up the road while I was hiking down came two brightly dressed women, their hair the color of ink, their postures accommodating the pitch of the road as well as the woven baskets in their arms and the plastic water jugs that sat on the yaguales upon their heads. One jug was blue and one was orange, and the women kept their eyes low as they passed, not meeting mine, not inviting inquiry, not keen, I sensed, on my camera.

I hadn't gone far before the dogs found me, an ugly, snarly pack, half starved and probably only partly sane, three or four, maybe, I can't remember. Mongrels. Their coats short, sparse, bristly as a wild pig's hide, their ears angered flat against their heads. They had nothing between them but their hunger, no reason not to attack the thin, white American girl-woman who had come among them accidentally and who now stood, grossly transfixed, as they blasphemed her through yellow teeth. I was aware of a broken tree limb on the road. I picked it up. I heeled my way up the incline, holding the stick out before me like some kind of Man of La Mancha warrior. I inched backward. Jowl to jowl, the dogs howled forward. I wondered if Bill would hear, if I'd be rescued, if I should turn and run like hell.

But before I could act, I was saved by a barefooted boy who out of nowhere appeared with a fistful of dog-deterring rocks. He hurled. The dogs scattered. The dogs returned. He hurled again. In the dissipating dust, I gestured my thanks, then half walked, half ran to the place I'd come from. I held the camera tight against my chest. I cursed the country, and I blessed it. I hurried past the gate of St. Anthony's, past a herd of wild chickens, past more women bearing jugs. I kept on walking until I came upon a path cut into the high wall of earth beside the road. The path rose vertically on tight, hard, dirt steps, and it was at the end of this path, as I'd been told, that the peasant dead were laid to rest. I swung my camera onto my back and pulled myself toward them with my hands.

To be among the dead at St. Anthony's is to enter into communion with wild turkeys....

For more thoughts on memoirs, memoir making, and prompt exercises, please visit my dedicated Handling the Truth page.

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I am always surprised—and, indeed, why shouldn't I be?—when I find myself in conversation with anyone making sweeping generalizations about "certain" types of people.   

Of course he would do that, the person will say.  He's from (name a country).

Of course she would say that.  She's... Latina. 

I find generalizations of any kind both treacherous and appalling.  I have been squeamish around bucketing, categories, labels (applied to people, literature, opinions, persuasions) for as long as I can remember.  But it's personal, too, for me, for I married a Salvadoran man, and I have raised a beautiful half-Latin child, and any bracketing, tiering, or typing assigned to "those Latinos" is an assault of sorts against my family.

This image, above, is El Salvador, years ago.  It is my husband's childhood home, and it is home, still to Nora, my mother-in-law, and to Bill's aunts Adela, Ana Ruth, and Marta, and to his uncle, and to my husband's best friends, and to a gardener named Tiburcio, and to so many more.  Nora's first language isn't English, far from it, but Nora has taken such an interest in my writing life that she has asked three times already for a copy of my newest book, which was only released a week or so ago.  It will take her a long time to read it, but she will.  She's interested in the stories I tell, even if I'm not "from her country" and was not, perhaps, the kind of woman she first imagined her son saying yes to, and do happen to have skin that is lighter than her own.

We are a web, we are human, we are mutual planet dwellers.

Sweeping generalizations don't help a soul.

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My Life in the United States ~ by René Colato Laínez

Part 2 of 3 (Read Part 1 here)

For Christmas of 1984, my mother sent me a new pair of shoes from the United States. I still remember my father’s words, “These are good gringos shoes. These are very good shoes for the trip to the United States.”

On February 17 1985, my father and I left El Salvador. Two days later, we arrived in Mexico City. Then, we were stuck in Mexico City for almost two months. We could not continue our journey because Mexican immigration took all the money from my father. It wasn’t until April that my mother sent us more money for our trip. During my journey, my father and I crossed three countries and climbed the mountains from Tijuana to the United States. But we made it to Los Angeles. My shoes were not new anymore. They had holes everywhere. One shoe was missing the sole.

There are certain moments that mark your like forever. My journey and my new life in the United States as a new immigrant created a big impact in me and in my writing. In my book, My Shoes and I, I tell the story of my journey and in my other books I write about the new immigrant child in the United States. Most of my books are based in my life and some are autobiographical just like René Has Two Last Names/René tiene dos apellidos and I Am René, the Boy/ Soy René, el niño.

I experienced the silent period and many culture shocks. In El Salvador René is a name boy. I could not believe it that in the United States my beautiful name was a girl’s name, Renee. Children not only laughed because I had a girl’s name but also because I had two last names, “Your name is longer than an anaconda” “You have a long dinosaur’s name.”

I was able to adapt to the new country. I studied really hard and graduated with honors from high school. Then, I went to college and became a teacher. But I did not have legal papers yet. My mother became a resident thanks to the amnesty program. She applied for my papers but it was 1993 and I had not received my green card. I started to work as a teacher because I got a work permit. For two years, I received letters from LAUSD, “We need to have evidence of your legal status. Your work permit will expire soon.” But finally in 1995, I received the famous immigration letter. Yes! I had an appointment to get my green card. It was not green after all. It was pink!

The ideas to write many of my books are born in the classroom. One day, a first grader told me, “I want to write a letter to my mamá. She is in Guatemala and I miss her so much.” That night I wrote a story named

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