SALVADORAN RENAISSANCE
THE DIASPORA IS HAVING A BIG LITERARY MOMENT, FROM A BESTSELLING MIGRATION MEMOIR TO AN ACCLAIMED NOVEL OF SUBURBIA.
THERE’S A MOVEMENT AFOOT —ifyouknowwheretolook. For too long, the American literary industry has discussed El Salvador and its people through the gaze of cultural outsiders. But that has started to change, with an explosion of writing by Salvadorans in the United States — especially those with ties to California.¶ These works range from a memoir detailing Central American migration to a novel of suburban reckoning, from essays and poems to academic works and even a cookbook. The past couple years have led up to what Felix Cruz, a publicist for Random House, calls the “Salvadoran Renaissance in literature.” To Cruz, what matters most is “moving beyond tropes and monoliths” to tell stories from within the community. “With nuance and nerve, these writers are articulating both the depth of wounds and the integrative power in healing our community yearns for.”
In 2022, this renaissance became undeniable. Javier Zamora’s “Solito,” a debut memoir following his trek to the United States at age 9, hit the New York Times bestseller list in September. Like all successes, it was years in the making — built in part through Zamora’s work as co-founder of Undocupoets, a much-needed beacon and resource for migrant writers.
Even as “Solito” was topping the lists, another breakthrough writer was announced as a National Book Award finalist. “The Town of Babylon,” a debut novel by Salvadoran Colombian Alejandro Varela, follows a queer man confronting his past during his 20th high school reunion in his suburban hometown. Varela’s second book, “The People Who Report More Stress,” a short-story collection, will be out this April.
These bigger releases only scratch the surface of the Salvadoran Renaissance, which spans not only experiences but regions, including El Salvador itself. Poet Alexandra Lytton Regalado grew up in Miami and then moved back to El Salvador — where she continues to write, edit and organize spaces for writers across borders and languages. ast year she published her second book of poems, “Relinquenda,” a meditative collection written after her father’s death, which won the prestigious National Poetry Series competition.
Raquel Gutiérrez, born in Los Angeles to Mexican and Salvadoran parents, recently published their debut, “Brown Neon,” a collection of essays on topics including the border wall and the relationships among L.A.’s punks and artists. Gutiérrez writes of the American Southwest with care, precision and a wealth of knowledge that enriches the canons of queer, Latino and Los Angeles literature.
L.A. is a particular hotbed of Salvadoran literature. Among its other standouts is Cynthia Guardado, a poet from Inglewood who published her second collection, “Cenizas,” last year. Her verse mixes family and personal histories, bounces between nations and covers the U.S.-funded civil war in El Salvador, which lasted though the 1980s. At its core is an essential question: How should the generation after a war relate to the violence that has preceded us, and where do we go next?
Forthcoming releases promise to keep up the momentum. Last October, Ruben Reyes Jr. made a twobook deal to publish a set of stories, “There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven,” and a novel, “Archive of Unknown Universes,” which will employ surrealism and dystopian tropes to explore
Central American identity.
And this April, Seven Stories Press will publish “Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle,” a bilingual collection of work from the late, celebrated poet Roque Dalton. It feels apt that, nearly 50 years after his death, Dalton’s work is being reprinted alongside a burgeoning generation of Salvadoran writers. He was a revolutionary poet and part of La Generación Comprometida, one of the most important literary movements in Salvadoran history.
The successes of this new generation, along with a revival of the last, represent a potential reversal in the way American readers have encountered the country. For decades, the literary establishment has amplified non-Salvadorans as the key voices on Salvadoran life and hardship. The most respected to this day are Joan Didion and Carolyn Forché. In 1982, Didion spent two weeks in the country before going on to publish “Salvador,” in which she declared, “Terror is the given of the place.”
In response, Roberto Lovato — author of “Unforgetting” and another writer at the vanguard of the diaspora — wrote, “Didion’s writings about us forgot a foundational fact of Salvadoran life: our humanity.” The Hammer Museum just concluded an exhibition titled “Joan Didion: What She Means,” which displays the work of renowned Salvadoran artist Ronald Morán. Yet Morán has never met or read Didion. There has often been a disconnect between Salvadorans and those writing about them.
Forché, whose portrayal of El Salvador teeters between spectacle and saviorism, is another example of this disconnect. After visiting the country, Forché wrote one of her most famous poems, which details a conversation with a colonel who appears with a sack of human ears. The opening line of “The Colonel” was subsequently used as the title for Forché’s memoir, “What You Have Heard Is True,” a 2019 finalist for the National Book Award.
“I was told that in the United States Forché is relevant, but for writers here in El Salvador — people don’t know her,” said Alberto López Serrano, director of the Amada Libertad International Poetry Festival in El Salvador. (Amada Libertad was the pseudonym for poet and guerrilla fighter Leyla Patricia Quintana Marxelly, who was assassinated during the war.)
None of this is to say that people without strong relations to El Salvador cannot write about it, especially regarding events that demand our attention. “In moments where there are human rights abuses, such as what is occurring in present-day
El Salvador, we need everyone to speak up,” said economist Tatiana Marroquín. According to Human Rights Watch, under current President Nayib Bukele, “state security forces have committed egregious abuses, including extrajudicial executions, sexual assaults, and enforced disappearances.”
The more poignant question may be: When does a laureled outsider drown out the literary voices of the people being discussed? Fortunately, this much is starting to change. Salvadoran American writers are now telling their own stories, and they are bridging connections to writers in the homeland too.
In part, that change is a product of migration. In 1980, near the start of the civil war, there were approximately 95,000 people of Salvadoran origin living in the United States. Today the Salvadoran diaspora constitutes one of the largest Latino populations in the United States — even though El Salvador is smaller than Massachusetts.
With so many living abroad, especially in the United States, contemporary Salvadoran literature is a transnational conversation encompassing myriad hybrid experiences. “We’ve had a very rigid concept of nation in the past,” said Lucia de Sola, an editor of the San Salvadorbased literary publisher Editorial Kalina. “The El Salvador of today transcends borders: We have writers who live all over the world. … Our concept of a national canon is changing, which is a great thing, and long overdue.”
THIS SHIFT inunderstanding didn’t occur overnight. It took years of groundwork and dedication from writers who have looked past their own books to also bring other voices to the forefront.
In 2017, Central American editors published the cutting-edge anthology “The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States.” One of its editors, Leticia Hernández-Linares, explained the gaps she was hoping to fill: “I was always curious about what my history was, as someone who didn’t grow up in El Salvador. I didn’t really see myself in the history of the United States either.”
That same year, the Tierra Narrative collective was founded to foster “conversations and collaborations between the Central American diaspora and the homelands.” This collective has hosted transnational and bilingual literary programming with organizations such as the Poetry Project in New York City, featuring writers based in El Salvador including Kenny Rodríguez and Lauri García Dueñas.
In the past five years, Salvadoran American writers have increasingly risen up to mainstream literary recognition in the United States. Claudia Castro Luna served as the poet laureate of Washington state. In L.A., celebrated poet Janel Pineda published “Lineage of Rain,” and Yesika Salgado amassed a large social media following, published three collections and became one of the most recognized poets to come out of L.A. spoken word community.
Literary journals, meanwhile, provided space for Central American writers. La Piscucha Magazine was founded in 2019 by editors in El Salvador and the U.S. And last year, to mark the 200th anniversary of the Federal Republic of Central America declaring independence from Spain, Bomb Magazine created a folio of writers from the Northern Triangle (El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras), introduced by poet and filmmaker Daniel Flores y Ascencio. Today’s literary movement is the product of both individual talent and vast communal effort.
Jorge E. Cuéllar, a professor at Dartmouth, reflected on this generation of diasporic Salvadoran writers. “In one sense,” he said, “these works showcase the incredible talent of U.S.-based Salvadorans — the displaced, forcefully relocated, some in exile — that have taken up the literary and aesthetic traditions of their home country, sometimes their parents’ home country, as their starting point. From here, they are intervening into the U.S. literary and cultural landscape, challenging tightly held fictions . ... Without hesitation, these writers are speaking truth to power, without the need to mediate themselves through a white, U.S.-centric gaze.”
In El Salvador, it is still very difficult for writers to find readers in the United States even among their diasporic kin. Books published in the country usually have small print runs and face hurdles in shipping. Governmental and societal persecution of writers continues to this day. In 2015, when Jorge Galán, one of El Salvador’s most esteemed writers, published his novel “Noviembre,” a series of death threats forced him to temporarily flee the country.
Last year, Bukele’s administration effectively criminalized writing about gangs — making it illegal to reproduce “statements originating or presumably originating from said criminal groups, that could generate anxiety and panic in the population.” Salvadoran writers persisted despite the censorship.
There is also a strong feminist movement in El Salvador. Poet Marielos Olivo has spoken out in defense of women imprisoned for having spontaneous abortions, and Elena Salamanca’s “Siemprevivas” has documented extraordinary women in Salvadoran history.
Salvadoran editors, including Josué Andrés Moz and Miguel Huezo Mixco, continue to publish chapbooks and anthologies that represent the finest work in Central America and the diaspora. From El Salvador to the U.S., writers are pushing against systemic barriers that work to limit their reach.
Despite the obstacles, optimism feels like the only logical conclusion. We are living through one of the largest movements of Salvadoran literature in history, one that is beyond the reach of any single government or language. It is no exaggeration to call that a renaissance — just a plain fact.
30 3½ MINUTES, TEN BULLETS 2015 Rated 13+ HBO Max: Included | Apple TV+: Rent/Buy | Prime Video: Rent/Buy
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Directed by Marc Silver
A documentary that shouldn’t have to be made, about a law that needn’t exist, explored via a crime that could have been avoided: “31⁄2 Minutes, Ten Bullets” is a thoughtprovoking, mournful experience. The film’s focus is the trial of Michael Dunn, a middle-aged white man who on Nov. 23, 2012, in Jacksonville, Fla., shot and killed black teenager Jordan Davis at a gas station during an argument over the decibel level of the rap music coming from the SUV that Jordan, 17, and his buddies were in.
Director Marc Silver won approval to film the trial, and the sobering narrative his fixed cameras capture — of a tragedy parsed for some measure of institutionalized justice — extends to the more personal connecting tissue of interviews with Jordan’s family and friends. Silver artfully layers that, coolly and calmly, so the weight of the issues — namely how racial profiling and a self-defense law like “stand your ground” malevolently feed each other — sinks in. The heartache and outrage are there already. The movie wisely doesn’t force it. And if you don’t know the outcome, the suspense may prove to be unbearable. —Robert Abele
29 AILEEN: LIFE AND DEATH OF A SERIAL KILLER 2003 Rated R
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Sundance Now: Included | Apple TV+: Rent/Buy | Prime
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Directed by Nick Broomfield
Controversial documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield’s first film on Florida serial killer Aileen Wuornos, 1992’s “Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer,” was a biting critique of the ascendant tabloid media culture and portrayed the accused killer as the most honorable and clear-eyed person involved in her unseemly tale. Broomfield’s second, “Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer,” finds him and his footage subpoenaed for one of Wuornos’ death-row appeals. Broomfield, then 55, conducted Wuornos’ final interview the day before she was executed in October 2002. —Mark Olsen
28 TALES OF THE GRIM SLEEPER 2014 | TV-MA Plex: Included
Directed by Nick Broomfield
“Tales of the Grim Sleeper,” from British documentarian Nick Broomfield (“Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer,” “Biggie and Tupac”), probes into what, on the surface, seems like the underzealousness of police tracking a Black serial killer. The reason it only “seems” that way is that the neglect stems from the same cultural pools of racism: In the case of the Grim Sleeper, the victims were all Black women, many of them sex workers and/or addicts.
Broomfield tells us that for years the unofficial police designation for such victims was NHI — no humans involved. In this case, a dozen murders received less official attention and press coverage than the death of any single upper- or middle-class white victim.
The perp was given his nickname by L.A. Weekly, which revealed that, based on DNA evidence, the same man was probably responsible for almost a dozen killings in the mid’80s and then, after a 13-year hiatus, more killings between 2001 and 2010. No one knows the exact number of lives he took. The evidence connects the one killer to roughly 20 murders. But Lonnie Franklin Jr., who died in 2020, had photos — often sexually explicit — of hundreds of women, many of whom have yet to be identified. —Andy Klein
27 FYRE: THE GREATEST PARTY THAT NEVER HAPPENED 2019 | TV-MA Netflix: Included
Directed by Chris Smith
It was announced as “the cultural experience of the decade,” and it was — just not in the way anyone anticipated.
As detailed by director Chris Smith in the compulsively watchable documentary “Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened,” what started out being touted as “Coachella in the Caribbean” ended up as pure chaos that reminded participants of “a scene from a horror movie.” The wreckage of 2017’s Fyre Festival was so compelling that this documentary, which opened simultaneously in theaters and on Netflix, was released in the same week as a Hulu doc on the exact same topic.
Documentary veteran Smith, whose earlier films include “American Job” and “Jim & Andy: The
Great Beyond,” does an expert job here, talking to some 50 folks, including festival employees, consultants, would-be revelers and unwitting residents of the Bahamas who got caught in the event’s momentous undertow. These interviews, along with vérité footage shot as the event was coming together and falling apart, are briskly edited by Jon Karmen and Dan Koehler into a fast-moving narrative that has the fascination of the bad traffic accident you just can’t turn away from. —Kenneth Turan
26 ATLANTA’S MISSING AND MURDERED: THE LOST CHILDREN 2020 | TV-MA | 1 Season
HBO Max: Included | Apple TV+: Rent/Buy | Prime Video: Rent/Buy Created by Joshua Bennett and Sam Pollard
Anthony Terrell is grateful that HBO’s “Atlanta’s Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children” brought a new spotlight to the terror that gripped Black residents of Atlanta in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when dozens of children and young adults were murdered or disappeared without a trace. Terrell is also thankful that the five-part documentary allowed him to discuss the pain and trauma he has suffered all his life as the survivor of one of the victims of the brutal crime wave — his 10-year-old brother, Earl, was murdered after going to a neighborhood swimming pool. But in the end, he worries it is not enough.
Although Atlanta native Wayne Williams was prosecuted for two of the crimes, the remainder of the cases were closed without being thoroughly investigated. Painful questions have lingered for many of the survivors, who maintain that the real truth behind the murders has never been uncovered. “Atlanta’s Missing and Murdered” presents strong evidence that the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacists belonging to the National States’ Rights Party may have been involved in the killings and the disappearances. The series, the nonfiction “Atlanta Monster” podcast and Season 2 of Netflix’s “Mindhunter” have renewed public interest in the case in recent years. —Greg Braxton
25 SURVIVING R. KELLY 2019 | TV-MA | 3 Seasons Lifetime: Included | Netflix: Included | Apple TV+: Rent/Buy
Created by Dream Hampton
Lifetime’s documentary series “Surviving R. Kelly” was instrumental in taking the singer down after decades where the star appeared untouchable. Through its blockbuster debut season, sequel “The Reckoning” and a third installment, “The Final Chapter,” it used firsthand accounts, police investigations, court documents and more to chronicle the “I Believe I Can Fly” singer’s increasingly disturbing pattern of sexual, mental and physical abuse of underage girls over two decades. Women who fell under Kelly’s spell, some who were as young as 13, speak out for the first time here, illustrating the dark side of fame, the perils of celebrity worship and double standards when it comes to race in the #MeToo era. In-depth interviews with alleged victims, Kelly’s ex-wife, his brothers, former insiders, friends and journalists who’ve covered the Chicago songwriter and producer paint a picture of a predator whose behavior was consistently overlooked by the industry, his peers and the public while his spiritual hit was sung in churches and schools. —Lorraine Ali
24 KEEP SWEET: PRAY AND OBEY 2022 | TV-MA | 1 Season Netflix: Included
Created by Rachel Dretzin
The crimes of Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of LatterDay Saints leader Warren Jeffs are explored through the firsthand accounts of his former followers in “Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey.” This four-part documentary series chronicles Jeffs’ rise in the FLDS and the crimes he inflicted on the flock who resided in his settlement on the Utah-Arizona border. Exmembers — mostly women — tell the stories of Jeffs forcing them into underage marriages, placing rigid restrictions on their lives, and vowing to destroy them if they ever dared to leave. This documentary gives his victims the chance to tell their own stories, and to explain what really happened inside the twisted world he created. Jeffs was sentenced to life in prison plus 20 years in 2011 for sexually assaulting two girls, but his reign of terror continues to haunt his former followers.
23 TED BUNDY: FALLING FOR A KILLER
2020 | Rated 18+| 1 Season Prime Video: Included Created by Trish Wood