Re/Membering the Nation: Gaps and Reckoning Within Biographical Accounts of Salvadoran Emigres (Special COLLECTION: THE ETHICS OF DISCONNECTION IN A NEOLIBERAL Age) (Report‪)‬

In this essay, I examine biographical accounts of Salvadorans who emigrated, primarily to the United States, during the 1980-1992 civil war. In so doing, I analyze competing deployments of biography as a means of eliding versus demanding an accounting for the often violent disconnections that these emigres experienced. On the one hand, the postwar Salvadoran government, well aware of the economic benefits of emigres' remittances to family members, publicized biographical accounts of successful migrants. These accounts represented El Salvador as a parent to which emigres owed continued loyalty (Baker-Cristales 2004) rather than as a place where neoliberal economic strategies have devastated traditional economic pursuits and have thus led increasing numbers of citizens to migrate (Gammage 2006, Silber 2010). On the other hand, interviews with Salvadorans who were born in El Salvador but who lived the majority of their lives in the United States suggest that these migrants have used biography, both in public testimonials and private encounters, to recover and record historical memory and, in the process, to recuperate their own pasts. Juxtaposing state and emigr6 efforts to forge reconnection reveals the indispensability of biography to national history, an indispensability in which personal and collective histories can play a highly subversive role. I use the term "biography" here, rather than "autobiography," to situate these "war stories" (see also Bowen 2006) within a broader field within which the following circulate: 1) statist celebrations of multiculturalism and difference, 2) Central American oppositional narratives known as testimonio, and 3) ethnographically elicited life histories (e.g., Behar 2003). First, as John and Jean Comaroff (2009:28) note, "commodity exchange and the stuff of difference are inflecting each other"; thus, the post-war Salvadoran state promulgated a "neoliberal" notion of Salvadoranness as an essence that links diasporic citizens while also enabling them to progress economically abroad. Treating difference as part of a marketable "skill set" is linked to "'neoliberalism,' in which all possible forms of sociality and being are treated as market exchanges" (Urciuoli 2008:212, 1999). Second, in contrast to this neoliberal focus on difference as "background" and a basis for individual success, testimonio is a collective project in which the experiences of marginalized groups are recounted in an effort to challenge official histories and to advocate for more just futures (Arias 2001, Rodriguez 2009, Silber 2010, Stephen 1994). The narrative stances taken by Salvadoran youth who seek accountability for past injustices resonate with this tradition. Third, many of the narratives analyzed here were elicited as part of an ethnographic strategy that privileges narrative as a means of understanding the ways that life histories are embedded in social and historical dynamics (Greenhouse 2008). This research strategy treats narratives as both ethnographically "found" and "created" objects.