Adriana Alas Lopez

Twenty-five years after the Peace Accords in El Salvador, the basic wartime opposition between insurgents and right-wing supporters continues to inform social relations. Using recollections of the 1980-92 civil war, this research analyzes how El Salvador’s national project in the post-insurgency period takes shape as people differentially value memories of the war. The project emphasizes tensions between how former insurgents, right-wing supporters, and the children of each understand the war in La Ceiba, a rural community of former insurgents in Chalatenango. On the one hand, I want to document how people make pragmatic use of their war memories, particularly using material objects linked to those times to support claims to belonging in the post-insurgency national project. As they narrate their war experiences, I argue, former insurgents measure their narratives of suffering and the pain of their war injuries against those of right-wing supporters living in the same community. On the other hand, I want to understand how this measurement fails with former insurgents’ and right-wing supporters’ children, mostly born in the postwar period (1992). These young people, I contend, refuse to measure war suffering or war pain because they did not experience the war; they invoke their parents’ memories, but they do so in order to introduce the more inclusive category of ‘war survivors’. By tracking war memories invoked by former insurgents, right-wing supporters, and young people in their daily interactions in post-insurgency spaces like La Ceiba; this project examines the renegotiation of the post-insurgency national project between two generations