pictures, still blurry

I grew up in El Salvador in the '80s. There was a civil war going on. I lived with my mother, my grandmother, and my great grandmother. We would hear bombs from time to time (ones closer than others). I took the bus to school and sometimes our bus full of third graders overtook a truck full of soldiers on the highway. Some of them were yawning (it was 6:30 in the morning); some of them sat at the very back with their legs dangling off the truck, looking bored; some waved. Because the war never affected me directly (or at least, not until much later), it always remained peripheral to the stories I told about my life until I started to read history books. I was lucky.

When I decided to become a historian, and particularly a historian of that part of the world in which I was born, it was partly out of a deep sense of unease at having such a blurry picture of the war. I wanted to fill in the blanks, and to fill them as far back as much as possible. Many books and many years later, and after talking to a lot of people about their memories, I have something of a narrative. It is disjointed and full of gaps. There are many things that we will never know. I have seen how the questions and consequently the narratives told have changed according to the priorities of the organizations giving out funding. What I always find interesting about linear narratives about something as messy as war is that no one experienced it the way it is told. Even those people in the thick of later became the major plot did not necessarily know what was going at the same time at another part of the country the way a history book does. Even in 1979, no one could have imagined that in 1980 someone could walk into a church and assassinate an Archbishop as he was consecrating the Eucharist; or that a battalion would kill every human being in a village; or that six Jesuit rectors of the Universidad Centroamericana would be assassinated one night in 1989. Does a linear narrative necessarily obscure the open-endedness of the past? Is history itself only possible because "we know what happened"? Why do I highlight moments of violence as turning points in the plot so readily and so exclusively? Is it because I have been trained in the U.S.?

The Salvadoran civil war is relatively recent history, and my research does not focus on it. But I confess that I do study the history of Catholicism in the country because of what happened in the 1980s. It is my (often unspoken) starting place. For this exercise I looked up Catholicism in El Salvador on Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britannica and Google, and compared it to a book a recently reread, Anna Peterson's Martyrdom and the Politics of Religion: Progressive Catholicism in El Salvador.

I often complain that when people talk about Catholicism in El Salvador, they usually mean the institutional Catholic Church in El Salvador. Wikipedia is no different. The entry focuses on the very highest levels of the clergy; the laity only appears as ahistorical percentages. It is interesting in that it appears to be trying to be neutral in regards to the political split within the clergy in the mid-1990s, and does not spend too much space on Archbishop Romero. That said, it was by far the most useful treatment of the topic, if only because of the links (like Landow suggests, it is so much easier to follow the bibliographic trail when they are embedded in the text). The entry in Encyclopedia Britannica was tiny and only mentioned, again, percentages and the fact that Protestantism has been gaining ground in the past few decades. I found it funny that although there is no entry for Archbishop Romero, he does appear under the article for Raúl Julia, who played him in the movie, Romero. In Google, the first hit was the U.S. State Department's section on El Salvador more generally. Again, percentages. All the other hits on Google were mainly for scholarly books written about El Salvador in the U.S. I decided to type in "Oscar Romero" to see what I got. A slew of U.S. based Catholic organizations and churches, with the familiar quotes and life stories -- Romero, the bishop of the poor. One web page from Creighton University actually cites the U.S. ambassador in 1980 blaming his assassination on a Cuban sniper! When I typed the same search in Spanish, however, the results were much more interesting; I found an ongoing blog based in El Salvador that deals with social justice issues from a Catholic perspective. It was very difficult to find any historical content at all; when I did it concentrated, like the wikipedia entry, on the hierarchical church.

When I compared these pages to the Anna Peterson's book, I was honestly struck by their lack of depth and their either elite-based historical narrative or their social-scientific graph-and-percentage approach. Peterson's is an oral history of how progressive Catholics (usually poor and urban) made sense of the repression during the civil war by appropriating symbols and rituals of martyrdom in their own political struggles. To be sure, they were influenced by the progressive clergy, but they mostly took theological matters into their own hands. People like those interviewed by Peterson are why Catholicism matters politically in El Salvador; the progressive church was driven by them, not just a few courageous priests. Her vision of things, however, hardly found its way into the more diffuse digital media that I encountered.

Although I found Keith Jenkin's smugness in regards to the end of History/history insufferable, I couldn't help but think that he was absolutely right when he wrote that, "both upper and lower case histories are, like all constructions, ultimately arbitrary ways of carving up what comes to constitute their field. Both... are actually just theories about the past and how it should be appropriated" (8). Catholicism in El Salvador is just not a hot topic anymore; in fact, neither is El Salvador. The 1980s saw a tremendous surge in publishing about Central America in general; now that things are relatively stable, it has decreased significantly. Taking Cronin's lead, I saw that the kind of history we have available about Catholicism during the civil war is dictated by who had a stake in it and why. Before the end of the war, the primary question asked by observers in the U.S. was regarding agrarian reform and revolution. Thus, for years, the historiography was dominated by studies of land tenure. Catholicism was important insofar as it related to "politicizing peasants" in relation to the land reform. Others who had a stake in it were members of the clergy themselves, who wrote abundantly and courageously about their murdered brothers and sisters. However, they did have a stake in presenting themselves as defenders of the poor. What I find in the digital sources is a kind of echo of these earlier books of the 1980s, but not of the later historiography of those who stuck around.