- 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?
This week I continued collecting data to contextualize the Salvadoran Civil War. I was able to find sources that provided information about how the civil war shaped things like Salvadoran identity in El Salvador and abroad, migration patterns, and international relations with the United States. During the civil war, Salvadorans that lived in areas where guerilla forces were present and were in support of the leftist party FMLN were seen as traitors and enemies of the state. The targeting of these Salvadorans caused many to migrate in order to not be tortured or killed. When the peace accords were signed in 1992, even more Salvadorans migrated to the United States since the country was still very dangerous and the economy was going through a severe downturn. However, at this point Salvadorans officials realized how beneficial remittances were to El Salvador so they made an effort create a transnational Salvadoran identity. The transnational Salvadoran identity and the use of “hermanos lejanos” rhetoric was an attempt to fix the relationship between Salvadorans who migrated to the United States and El Salvador. Those who migrated were no longer seen as traitors and instead were seen as an extension of El Salvador and its identity. Place was no longer tied to Salvadoran identity. I found all this information about Salvadoran identity in Susan Bibler Coutin’s book Nations of Emigrants: Shifting Boundaries of Citizenship in El Salvador and the United States.
It was also interesting to see that after the peace accords were signed, the rhetoric around the war changed. During the war, rhetoric was extremely divisive. However, after the war rhetoric became more about unification and ‘forgetting’ the past. El Salvador still continued having close ties with the United States which also likely influenced how the rhetoric after the war changed especially since the United States was involved in financing a lot of it. The data that I collected this week confirms how important place-making has been for Salvadorans both living in El Salvador and in the United States. Both politics and the economy have shaped Salvadoran identity and were contributing factors for migration. This week there were not many challenges when its comes to finding data since I went in with a good idea of what type of information I was looking for. I will continue looking into how place-making has shaped the Salvadoran identity and what implications this has for assimilation. Next week, I anticipate moving on from contextualizing information. My next steps would be to look into how Salvadorans choose where to migrate and looking at immigration policies that have affected their legal status. Looking into Salvadoran immigration facilitates the transition into talking about assimilation and how Salvadoran identity has been crafted in the United States.