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In the aftermath of the 1980-1992 Salvadoran civil war, biography and history have become linked, as the Salvadoran state reclaims its dispersed citizenry, and as Salvadorans who emigrated as young children reclaim their own pasts. Such reclaimings compel biographies as part of state neoliberal financial strategies that encourage remitting, but also as collective history projects that challenge injustice. Juxtaposing state narratives, in which war and violence are often elided, with immigrant youths' accounts, which seek accountability, reveals how biographies narrate yet disrupt neoliberal notions of the self. [Keywords: Biography, history, neoliberalism, violence, El Salvador, memory, war]
In this essay, I examine biographical accounts of Salvadorans who emigrated, primarily to the United States, during the 1980-1992 civil war. In so doing, I analyze competing deployments of biography as a means of eliding versus demanding an accounting for the often violent disconnections that these émigrés experienced. On the one hand, the postwar Salvadoran government, well aware of the economic benefits of émigrés' remittances to family members, publicized biographical accounts of successful migrants. These accounts represented El Salvador as a parent to which émigrés owed continued loyalty (Baker-Cristales 2004) rather than as a place where neoliberal economic strategies have devastated traditional economic pursuits and have thus led increasing numbers of citizens to migrate (Gammage 2006, Silber 2010). On the other hand, interviews with Salvadorans who were born in El Salvador but who lived the majority of their lives in the United States suggest that these migrants have used biography, both in public testimonials and private encounters, to recover and record historical memory and, in the process, to recuperate their own pasts. Juxtaposing state and émigré efforts to forge reconnection reveals the indispensability of biography to national history, an indispensability in which personal and collective histories can play a highly subversive role.
I use the term "biography" here, rather than "autobiography," to situate these "war stories" (see also Bowen 2006) within a broader field within which the following circulate: 1) statist celebrations of multiculturalism and difference, 2) Central American oppositional narratives known as testimonio, and 3) ethnographically elicited life histories (e.g., Behar 2003). First, as John and Jean Comaroff (2009:28) note, "commodity exchange and the stuff of difference are inflecting each other"; thus, the post-war Salvadoran state...