Stories From El Salvador

She disappeared during the civil war and never returned.

This is the life of a refugee

I am the proud daughter of a Salvadoreño Father.

“So because I had shown to be a hard worker, he sent me off to one of the hardest jobs I’ve had.”

I never realized until I went to El Salvador for the first time what pedir de fiado was. It was like a mix of asking for a favor, a credit, and sometimes a paying it forward sort of thing.

Mi Abuelo Tanes
un corazón de campesino
pero de hierro.

My mother became a wife at the age of 14 years old.

My parents believed that when we came to the United States, it was better if I didn’t speak Spanish outside the house.

Our apartment in Queens, New York, was adorned by at least 10 rosaries, five portraits of the Virgin Mary and seven crosses.

I grew up being called la oveja negra.

“My right to hearing sounds and noises was taken from me during a war that I will never understand.”

My memories are broken and fuzzy blurs.

I’ve come to realize that maybe that’s why the pain visits us yearly, leaving us with the worse emotional hangover of the year.

I was an immigrant child, confused, unaware of why we had traveled so far from the world I knew.

Who doesn’t like pupusas, who doesn’t dance cumbias, who refused to have a quinceañera because I always disliked dresses and pink shit.

I’ve never understood my mother’s paranoia when she hears certain words.

El Salvador was the place where I saw my mother as she truly was.

Today we told our son that Salvadorans are Saints

I had been deprived from speaking Spanish because I was in an only-English mode.

That makes this the first story in Mama’s mythology.

We celebrate the universal legacy of a man whose actions have left most Salvadorans knowing that love is real and is worth fighting for.