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Projections
of Homeland: Remembering the Civil War in El Salvador
For Salvadorans, the memory of El
Mozote and Rufina Amaya's story (the story of many rural Salvadorans'
experience during the eighties) have not been forgotten. A
number of Websites on the Internet with a greater number of
links attests to how remembering El Mozote has been adapted
by new technologies. More recently, Amaya's testimonio
has been reproduced in media forms such an electroacoustic,
ambient musical composition entitled “La Masacre del Mozote”
(JC Mendizabal @ 1999) and the film Homeland (Dir.
Doug Scott, 1999), both of which attempt to recuperate for
a U.S.-Salvadoran reception the primary trauma of that violent
past and to recall the memory of a war that cost the lives
of over 75,000 people and set off the great Salvadoran migrations
of the 1980s. For many Salvadoran immigrants, particularly
new generations of Salvadorans born outside of the country
who have no or very little memory of the Salvadoran Civil
War, El Mozote is a lost fragment of their history, the same
history that produced their diasporic condition today. Recovering the story of El Mozote and of the
Civil War in El Salvador, I argue, may enable an imaginary
recovery of the Central American homelands for those people
who may not have lived in the region during the 1980s. Through
a reading of hybrid, multimedia texts such as Mendizabal’s
CD La masacre del Mozote and Doug Scott’s film “Homeland,”
I intend to explore the transmission of the “memory” of war
to diasporic communities of Salvadorans through new technologies
and audio and visual scapes.
Copyright © 2003
Smithsonian Institution |