The exodus memory community: Leveraging oral history records to understand collected memories of violence

Abstract

Memories about historical episodes of violence are a window not only into experiences of people’s past struggles but also about their aspirations for the future. In this article, I focus on memories about the armed conflict in El Salvador (1980–1992) to better understand how sets of individual recollections reveal collected patterns in the narrative arcs of those who personally lived through the conflict. In so doing, I aim to expand prior works that have explored communities of memory in El Salvador. To accomplish this goal, I rely on an oral history archive. Using a grounded theory approach, I investigate how people in a rural community in northern El Salvador remember the armed conflict, how their collected memories compare with prior research about life stories of former members of the guerrilla movement and the armed forces, and finally, how oral histories contribute to a scholarly understanding of social memories of violence. I find that, within this archive, people’s recollections of the armed conflict can be organized around four themes: (1) community organizing, (2) repression, (3) exile, and (4) reconstruction. I suggest that the metaphor of the exodus serves to understand how individuals from this region remember the armed conflict. I argue that the exodus memory community reveals the importance of acts of everyday resistance to state repression, sheds light on how noncombatants remember the conflict, and suggests a larger and ongoing trajectory to community organizing in which the war is an important chapter, but not the only one.