- Between weeks 8 and 14, each student should provide a weekly reflection (500 words) on the data you have collected to date.
- What data did you collect?
- What is your initial impression of the data?
- How have the data you have collected this week changed/progressed your thinking about your research project?
- What challenges did you encounter while collecting the data?
- What are your next steps?
In order to begin narrowing down my topic, I started by looking for sources with information about the Salvadoran Civil War which occurred from 1979 to 1992. The civil war is a good way to contextualize a major struggle in the experience of many Salvadorans. Growing up I heard many stories about the violence and atrocities that my parents and other family members witnessed. Both sides of my family had different experiences with the war because they are from different regions in El Salvador. Carlos Cordova’s (2005) book Salvadoran Americans highlights how all Salvadorans were (in)directly affected by the war and for many, their only way to live was to leave their home country. The United States financed the death squads that were combatting the leftist party, FMLN, in El Salvador yet they did not offer asylum to the thousands of Salvadorans forced to leave.
Reading about the war and the trauma it caused across multiple sources made me realize how much these academic accounts align with many of the stories that I heard growing up. However, it is important to note that the United States’ intervention in El Salvador is often left out of the narrative. Instead, the United States tends to be painted as the hero, especially in political science journals. After collecting data for this week, I will continue looking a bit further into the Salvadoran Civil War and the causes for migration. It would be interesting to see how much, if at all, the United States is blamed for the violence in the civil war. Although this was not an angle I originally thought I would pursue further, I think it would be valuable to talk about who has been shaping the narrative of what happened in the war and why this caused the migration of so many Salvadoreans.
A challenge that I encountered while collecting the data is that there were not many personal accounts about the war. The sources I have found so far mostly come from an outside perspective. A lot of what I know about the civil war and its details actually comes from oral stories in my family. I will look into other types of sources like interviews and documentaries to get a different perspective besides my family and academics. After finding enough sources about the civil war and causes of migration, the next topic that I will start researching is assimilation. The civil war lends itself as a good transition into assimilation because it is directly associated with immigration. Although there is overlap in the reasons for migration across Latinxs, the civil war is what distinguishes our experience which is worth spending time on especially at the beginning of my paper.