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From the series in progress Pulse: New Cultural Registers/Pulso: Nuevos registros culturales
Is it possible to trace our journey through a visual record of the land’s pulses? Can we metaphorically mark our personal and cultural legacies onto the land and in the process make it our terruño and diasporic homeland?
“Pulse: New Cultural Registers/Pulso: Nuevos registros culturales” recognizes the cultural legacy of El Salvador during the 1980s and 1990s using personal and historical archives. It imprints the rescued archive of the renowned Galería el laberinto⎯an epicenter of cultural activity in El Salvador during its civil war, founded by Janine Janowski, my mother⎯along with my own photographic archive of the time (which includes images of refugee camps, street scenes, landscapes, and portraits of artists who worked with the gallery in San Salvador) onto the national seismographic record of El Salvador. The constructed photographs transform the land into a fully lived and witnessed “thirdspace” of memory and “vivencias,” while mapping personal and collective history into a new meeting ground for the future.
In 2017, while researching at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, I encountered two recordings of interviews conducted by art critic and activist Lucy R. Lippard in El Salvador, during a trip that she made in 1984, as part of Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America. They were labeled “Political Art Documentation/Distribution discussion with unidentified Salvadoran artists, 1984.”
“Unidentified.” How did Salvadorans and Salvadoran-Americans become unidentified? Are we unworthy of remembrance?
To find a recording of “unidentified Salvadoran artists” in the Archives of American Art is, to say the least, an unfortunate reality. In spite of Artists Call’s charge for “Central American artists to create the sketches, the scores, the new monuments and images with which to frame the issues and color public opinion,” Lippard’s statement in the recording that “in the United States, El Salvador is nothing but war,” seems to have persisted. Indeed, two million Salvadorans in the U.S. continue to be represented by reductive and dehumanizing narratives of war, violence, and migratory “illegality.” And, their cultural heritage remains largely unknown or “unidentified.”
In his moving autobiography The Line Becomes a River, former border patrol agent Francisco Cantú quotes British journalist and historian Frances Stonor Saunders to say that “Identity is established by identification.” Lippard insists in her book Partial Recall: Photographs of Native North Americans that others should be represented from their own point of view. Today, more than ever, we need to create spaces for Salvadorans (the third largest Latinx immigrant population in the United States) for self-actualization and representation.
“Pulse: New Cultural Registers” offers a template for doing so. As an act of resistance, it repairs the general misrepresentation and erasure of our own cultural expressions and identity. As an act of solidarity, it traces the sinuous and angular spikes of our homeland pulsing together with the images and bodies portrayed by Salvadoran artists who worked during the civil war. And by actively remembering, it invigorates our journey forward on and through the land of our terruño, embodying a more connected, nuanced, dignified, and restorative future.