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.

Paintings, Pots, and Pillows: A Review of "Vistas"

"Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820" is structured as an online exhibit. It includes images as diverse as a coffee pot, a coin, a feathered portrait of Jesus, a Northern mission in Texas, an oil painting of the Virgin Mary, and a coca-leaf bag. Created in the late 1990s by two art historians frustrated with how difficult it was for their students to have access to a broad range of visual materials from Colonial Latin America, "Vistas" tends to have the tone of a lively lecture; it points to difficult, open-ended questions but provides no space for the visitor to engage with them. Every image is accompanied by a link labeled "discussion." The discussion simply provides more detailed context regarding the image, like the plaque with a block of text next to paintings in museums. These are, however, exceptionally well-written plaques.

The site is thus aimed primarily at students of Colonial Latin America in both the United States and Latin America. Its main purpose is not archival; its contents are not comprehensive but carefully chosen for its particular features that fit the themes of the website. However, if one would want to look investigate a given theme or time period further, "Vistas" offers an extensive searchable bibliography that both stands alone and is divided up into individual entries accompanying every image. There is also a comprehensive list of museums and exhibitions, with links, in the U.S. and Latin America.

The visitor can choose between two organizational styles on the website, as well as between English and Spanish (which opens it up to a much broader audience outside of the United States). She can choose between navigating the site thematically or chronologically. Choosing to do it thematically is simply more fun, particularly the section entitled "Patterns of the Everyday." Given the great emphasis historians tend to give to textual sources and ideas, it is quite refreshing to see how the creators prompt us to imagine how these objects--a beautifully worked silver coffee pot, a portrait of Jesus made by an indigenous man using a pre-Columbian technique of putting together a mosaic with feathers, or an embroidered shirt--shaped the perceptions people living in Guatemala or Argentina hundreds of years ago; and more importantly, how ideas can be communicated quite effectively visually (and in many cases, better than textually).

The careful choice of themes and of the objects themselves point to an underlying argument regarding the importance of everyday visual culture from a variety of social vantage points that the creators of the website hope to communicate not only to students, but also to their colleagues. Art history of Latin America in general, they explicitly argue, tends to be crowded with elite artifacts that obscure the importance of the visual culture of non-elite members of society. The creators juxtapose a portrait of an elite Peruvian in an elaborate dress to a beautifully crafted basket from California made by a woman who wrote her name into the decorative edges. The visitor is prompted to imagine what these women's worlds might have looked like. The differences in color, texture and function throw off balance any of the homogenizing presuppositions we might have brought with us regarding Spanish America in the first place. The aim is to provide the visitor with an inkling of the great diversity of Spanish America, in spite of the preponderance of the canonically sanctioned art derived from Spain in the scholarship and in the archives themselves.