Flight to Freedom

The Story of Central American Refugees in California

Pérez, Rossana, Villarroel, Carolina

• Publisher: Arte Público Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781611926217
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Hispanic American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

"They had been massacred, assassinated. [The death squad] had pulled off their nails. They had been burned with acid … shot in the head." In a provoking, first-person account of the horrors of war and political persecution, Salvadoran refugee and community leader Carlos Vaquerano remembers the day that his brother Marcial and seven others were brutally murdered by the death squads supported by his country's violent right-wing government.

When a sister in the United States offers to help him emigrate, Carlos and his family agree that he has no other options. So, like the more than one million Central American refugees fleeing the atrocities of war, Carlos makes the difficult journey through Mexico and into the U.S. Once here, though, he cannot forget his brother's admonishment: "Never forget that you have to fight so that justice exists in our country." Fulfilling his brother's plea, Carlos Vaquerano would go on to establish the Salvadoran-American Leadership and Educational Fund, one of the nation's leading Central American organizations.

Each of the eight people interviewed for this landmark collection—Carmen Alegría, Isabel Beltrán, Juan Ramón Cardona, Eduardo González, Javier Huete, Alicia Mendoza, Rossana Pérez, and Carlos Vaquerano—is a leader in the Salvadoran / Central American refugee movement. Consequently, this book offers insight into the early philosophy and framework of the movement as revealed by some of its pioneers.

Published as part of the Hispanic Civil Rights Series, this compelling and historically significant volume collects the personal narratives of Central American refugees who fled the violence in their homelands and became leading community advocates at the forefront of social justice.

Eduardo A. González, M.D.

My name is Eduardo Antonio González Martínez. I am from San Salvador, El Salvador. For a long time, when I worked in the Solidarity Movement and with allied aid projects, I assumed an alias to protect myself from possible retaliation by government agents and their reactionary supporters. During this period, many people knew me as Guillermo Rodezno. Today, some who knew me by this assumed identity still have a hard time getting used to my real name.

During my formative years, many events left an impression on me that bear on my ultimate experiences in Solidarity. It is hard to say which of these was the most important, but certainly one key factor that marked my early journey profoundly is that I grew up in a family headed by a single mother. Although my father was part of my life, for all practical purposes my mother was both father and mother. In our family, I was the only man. I was raised by my mother, my grandmother, a few aunts and some female cousins, all women. I think this marked me in more than one sense. Perhaps the most significant is that I have always been very sensitive to the needs of women and of their way of thinking, which has been a great asset because I have never had a difficult time adapting to the presence of women, whether in work or in other situations.

Another factor or life experience that marked me a lot early on was that my family was very religious. Since I was a child, I have been called to embrace the importance of not only thinking about myself, but also, and even more profoundly, the needs of others around me. In this sense, I grew up with a spiritual, religious, and social sensitivity. In addition, I came from a lower middle-class family that suffered hardships. We struggled at times. And yet we were not poor. In fact, we had some comparative privileges that created in us a sense of social responsibility. In spite of the needs with which we lived, we could clearly see in our community and nation that there were many people in even more difficult situations than we faced. As a result, I remember that my family was always trying to help those less fortunate; we made ourselves available to do something for others in need. I think that influenced me a quite a bit.

Another thing that was also very important is that I grew up in a family where stories of important historical and political passages were told and valued. My grandmother especially liked to tell these stories. I would listen attentively to her and by doing so I learned a lot about the history of El Salvador—things I would never really learn about at school. She would recount stories and memories from the era of early-to-mid twentieth century Salvadoran presidents: Martínez, for example, who became president of the republic during her young adulthood and his predecessor Dr. Molina, both of whom she actually met. She would speak of what life was like in El Salvador at that time. She would talk about things like the government-supported massacre of Indians that took place in 1932, which resulted in the deaths of people she knew personally.

I did not know at the time how much of my grandmother’s storytelling was fiction, imagination or hearsay. But her stories made me very curious about the history of El Salvador. When I later read books about El Salvador’s modern history as an adult, many of the events that my grandmother had told me about were chronicled. There were even some names referenced in these readings that she had mentioned during my childhood. For me, this was really important because, in an oral form, perhaps in the most traditional form of how history has been transmitted across the generations, my grandmother encouraged me to take an interest in our history and in how El Salvador had suffered, especially the population that lived through tyrannies, massacres and under the military governments of the 1930s.

The insights transmitted to me through my grandmother’s stories left an important mark on me. Over the years, they gave context to many of the experiences that ultimately led me and so many others to leave El Salvador during the 1980s. Ironically, I ultimately left El Salvador under circumstances comparable to those that marked my grandmother’s early life experiences. In the scheme of this reality, however, my story was quite simple and not nearly as dramatic or sad as the stories of many of my compatriots. In fact, my story and experience, at least to the point of my exodus from El Salvador, might be described as somewhat average. Each step in the process that led to my leaving my country added an additional layer

In 1970 I started studying in a Catholic school for boys. It was quite a shock for me to move from a home filled with women to an all-boys school where all the teachers, priests, were men. That is where I had my first social trauma; everything was different and difficult to adjust to. The school was very strict. Although my mother could at times be very stern, the school environment presented a much more challenging kind of strictness and discipline. For the first time in my life, a man could physically punish me, for example. In El Salvador, it was still common in those days for teachers to use corporal punishment, and they frequently did. I will never forget this: our teacher had several kinds of bamboo sticks. To discipline us, he would hit us on the front in the groin and then in the back on the buttocks several times. It was very painful. Also, on occasion he would require us to cluster our fingers and he would slam on our fingertips the wooden part of the blackboard eraser.

Such punishments were frequent in my early and middle school years, a common and accepted practice back then. In effect, they were small tortures. These early experiences exposed me for the first time to the power of group psychology. We never questioned any of it. Perhaps what is most important in all this was that it compelled me somehow to get more involved in religious education. At that time, liberation theology was at its peak in Latin America with the Second Vatican Council’s recasting of core church protocol and practice. I studied under Salesians, who are very conservative, at least in terms of the intellectual and spiritual development of their students. Compared to their Jesuit counterparts, they were not as involved in social movements or issues. But in the ensuing years in El Salvador, it became almost impossible to separate religious teaching and considerations from the nation’s growing social, economic and political problems.

In my subsequent years at Don Bosco during the 1970s, I started to participate in catechism classes that were offered on Sundays. There were buses and train stations in that area, all very close to the police and military headquarters. There were also a number of marginal neighborhoods in the vicinity. The school organized frequent sport activities, which they offered to attract young people from these surrounding neighborhoods and, before or after those activities, they would require participating community members to attend catechism classes. In these encounters, they would prepare children for baptisms, first holy communions and confirmations. I quickly became involved in these activities and as a result I started to discover facts of Salvadoran life that I had never seen or considered.

Because of my family’s lower middle-class status and the fact that I had attended a private Catholic school—something that gave me a certain status, aspirations, etc.—I knew early on that I was somewhat privileged. But in the inner city of San Salvador I came to understand for the first time that El Salvador’s poverty was much more widespread and problematic than I had ever known. To that point, I had been fairly spared the harsh reality that a majority of Salvadorans faced extreme poverty, hardship and lack of opportunities. This opened my eyes and redoubled my commitment to use religion as a vehicle to help those in need. So with other classmates, I started going to the marginal areas near the school to meet the people who lived there and to invite them to the school church.

Through this work, I met and learned from the people; I saw how they lived in what we know as champas (chanti towns). Aside from what I would hear from people—their stories, their dreams—I learned that they faced all kinds of very basic unmet needs. For me it was profoundly eye-opening. I started to ask myself: How could so much poverty exist in our country? As a result, we started a group in this community; it was like a Christian community, a community inside a community, a grassroots theological study group. Inside the Catholic Church we started to discuss and talk of gospel matters and what they meant in the context of the daily lives of the people. For me this was an important engagement that deepened my sense of connection between church teachings and the imperatives of real life public problem-solving.

Around that time, things took an unhappy turn in El Salvador. Latent economic, class and ideological conflicts began to inspire more and more evident social unrest. The government became heavy handed. Right-wing vigilante groups began to terrorize concerned, innocent and poor people suspected of being subversives. These developments took me unexpectedly back to experiences a few years earlier during my elementary and high school years, when the emergence of the conflicts that eventually led to the Central American wars of the 1980s first became visible.

During this earlier time, we had started a theatre group and staged a play called Luz Negra (The Dark Light) by Álvaro Menén Desleal, a respected Salvadoran author. The play was strange because the main characters were the heads of two decapitated men. We chose to modify the original text in important ways, adapting it to reflect what was beginning to happen in contemporary El Salvador and much of the rest of Latin America. It was a protest play. Our teacher, who had graduated from La Escuela de Bellas Artes (The School of Fine Arts) in El Salvador, was the director. Other members of the group included Julio, Jaime, Fredie and Margarita.

For many of us, though we did not know it at the time, the school drama project established a very important moment in the development of the artistic and political activism that later would raise awareness in and about El Salvador when widespread violence erupted in the ensuing years. The play offered an important way to raise public awareness of important social and political issues then beginning to affect our country; we presented it in several places and we gained a wide following.

We staged our first performance at the Universidad Nacional (National University). The play’s author came to the opening and participated in a post-performance discussion with cast and audience members. In the end, someone asked him what he thought of the modifications we made to his original work and the playwright reported that he thought they were excellent. It was a beautiful experience. Little did we know how relatively short-lived our great success would be. Within a few short years our nation was mired in conflict and mass death. Tragically, I later learned that the teacher who inspired our adaptation and group Director of Luz Negra was killed during the war.

In the years that followed my deepenin...