To Rise in Darkness

Lauria-Santiago Aldo A. Lauria-Santiago, Gould Jeffrey L. Gould

Description

To Rise in Darkness offers a new perspective on a defining moment in modern Central American history. In January 1932 thousands of indigenous and ladino (non-Indian) rural laborers, provoked by electoral fraud and the repression of strikes, rose up and took control of several municipalities in central and western El Salvador. Within days the military and civilian militias retook the towns and executed thousands of people, most of whom were indigenous. This event, known as la Matanza (the massacre), has received relatively little scholarly attention. In To Rise in Darkness, Jeffrey L. Gould and Aldo A. Lauria-Santiago investigate memories of the massacre and its long-term cultural and political consequences.Gould conducted more than two hundred interviews with survivors of la Matanza and their descendants. He and Lauria-Santiago combine individual accounts with documentary sources from archives in El Salvador, Guatemala, Washington, London, and Moscow. They describe the political, economic, and cultural landscape of El Salvador during the 1920s and early 1930s, and offer a detailed narrative of the uprising and massacre. The authors challenge the prevailing idea that the Communist organizers of the uprising and the rural Indians who participated in it were two distinct groups. Gould and Lauria-Santiago demonstrate that many Communist militants were themselves rural Indians, some of whom had been union activists on the coffee plantations for several years prior to the rebellion. Moreover, by meticulously documenting local variations in class relations, ethnic identity, and political commitment, the authors show that those groups considered "Indian" in western El Salvador were far from homogeneous. The united revolutionary movement of January 1932 emerged out of significant cultural difference and conflict.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Cultural studies
• Latin America
• History of the Americas
• El Salvador
• Salvador

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 09 juillet 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822381242
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

To Rise in Darkness

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Jerey L. Gould and Aldo Lauria-Santiago

Duke University Press Durham and London 2008

∫2008 Duke University Press All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper$ Designed by Jennifer Hill Typeset in Quadraat by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

To the memory of William Roseberry: committed and pioneering scholar, extraordinary human being

Contents

Preface

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Garden of Despair: the Political Economy of Class, Land, and Labor, 1920–1929

A Bittersweet Transition: Politics and Labor in the 1920s

Fiestas of the Oppressed: The Social Geography and Culture of Mobilization

‘‘ Ese Trabajo Era Enteramente de los Naturales’’: Ethnic Conflict and Mestizaje in Western Salvador, 1914–1931

‘‘ To the Face of the Entire World’’: Repression and Radicalization, September 1931—January 1932

ix

1

32

63

99

132

viii

Six

Seven

Eight

Red Ribbons and Machetes: The Insurrection of January 1932

‘‘ They Killed the Just for the Sinners’’: The Counterrevolutionary Massacres

Epilogue

Memories of La Matanza: The Political and Cultural Consequences of 1932

Afterword

Notes

Bibliography

Index

170

209

240

275

281

291

343

355

Preface

When Reynaldo Patriz was a young child, his father took him to a small finca at the edge of the cantón. Stretching his hand over the barbed wire fence, he pointed down toward some underbrush and said, ‘‘That’s where your uncles are.’’ A few years went by before his father again spoke of his dead brothers. He explained that the family had been ‘‘tricked by ladinos’’ who had promised all kinds of things like land to farm and new houses. Then the National Guard came in and shot all the males over the age of twelve in all the cantones ∞ of Nahuizalco. ‘‘The just were killed for the sinners.’’ These were the same lines that Reynaldo’s elderly neighbors used on those rare occasions when they mentioned ‘‘el Comu- nismo.’’ That’s what they called the events of January 1932. When the National Guard had beaten Reynaldo’s cousin, Juan Antonio, in a sugar mill at Izalco in 1978, his father, normally impassive in the face of bad news, became visibly upset. He took Reynaldo aside after dinner: ‘‘Look, don’t you ever get involved in any organization. I mean it. Never! Remember what happened withel!oinmsoCum’’