Mario Bencastro's novel Odyssey to North (1998) opens with body of an unidentified immigrant on hot cement of a Washington DC street where he has just fallen to his death while window washing. No one can or is willing to answer paramedic's questions: Who is he? What is his name? A few bystanders conjecture that, judging by what is left of his facial features, he looks Hispanic and that he is probably Central American since many live in that barrio. Poor devils, replies another paramedic, They die far from home, like strangers (3). Faceless, nameless. The scene is emblematic of a central thread running through all of Bencastro's fiction, question of identity. Who am I? Do I even have an identity? Am I still Salvadoran? What does it mean to be a Salvadoran living in United States? Is it possible to be both Salvadoran and American, or must one assimilate, as did many immigrants of past, to find success? To help answer these and other questions, it is helpful to understand terms. The word derives from Latin identidem, an adverb meaning repeatedly, again and again, which, of course, informs its meaning in English. Webster's defines in several ways, two of which illustrate my argument: 1) the state or fact of remaining same one or ones, as under varying aspects or conditions; and 2) the sense of self, providing and continuity in personality over time (950). How then, we might ask, is a Salvadoran immigrant able to maintain sameness in conditions of diversity and hybridity? In this paper I will examine Bencastro's synthesis of identities as it unfolds over course of production of his four major texts. He concludes that identity is never fixed but fluid and that immigrant does not need to sacrifice his past to demands of present. Part of Bencastro's preoccupation with identity is personal, and so one can consider autobiographical elements of his writing. His own transformation in face of new circumstances mirrors that of many of characters he depicts. He changed careers and domiciles, from an abstract painter in El Salvador to realist storyteller in Washington, DC, where he has resided for over twenty years. He confronts dilemmas and responsibilities of artist in a society in crisis, changing his own identity in process to be able to document upheavals and follow his compatriots in their displacements. In his first two books, a short story collection, The Tree of Life: Stories of Civil War (1993), and novel, A Shot in Cathedral (1996), Bencastro records Salvadoran myth and history in order to prevent these stories from slipping into oblivion (Hood 576). His two most recent novels, Odyssey to North and Viaje a la tierra del abuelo (Journey to Land of My Grandfather), are epics of migration of a people forging a new identity from their experience in a new land. (2) The young protagonist of Viaje completes cycle as he travels back to El Salvador, a country he scarcely knows, in search of roots. Both these novels also highlight continuing exchanges occurring between homeland and diaspora. For Bencastro, literature offers salvation. Literature is a repository of human values, and he has faith that en ultima instancia, sea la literatura la que salve a la del caos [in last instance it will be literature that saves human species from total chaos] (translation mine, Hernandez Martin 60). Here we might translate especie not only as human species, but also as a specific ethnicity. Through literature, Bencastro constructs ethnic identity by preserving myth and memory of historical events, negotiating cultural politics, recording narratives of nostalgia, and deconstructing old assimilationist myths, following all while processes of globalization and transnationalism. Salvadoran-ness transcends national space, and we can state, a la Foucault, that both nation and its diaspora constitute a discursive formation, but one that is in constant flux. …