Writing the Identity of the Homeland: Indigeneity and National Identity in Salvadoran Literature

Abstract

Before the 1990s, El Salvador’s national identity had long been characterized as completely miscegenated through the claimed disappearance of all indigenous people by the state. Strongly reinforced through an ethnocide in 1932, the myth of complete mestizaje in El Salvador was cemented in the Salvadoran imaginary and beyond, aligning with Eurocentrism and neoliberal policies that structured dominant concepts of nation-building in Latin America at the time (DeLugan 2012). After the end of El Salvador’s civil war, the emergence of a regional transnational indigenous movement (Tilley 2002) marked a new period of nation-state and collective identity construction where the Salvadoran state no longer outright denies the existence of indigenous peoples in El Salvador, but continues to have inconsistent approaches, attitudes, and formal narratives regarding indigeneity and indigenous history. With formal and informal sites of cultural knowledge transforming under international networks and standards, sites of cultural production like national literature provide a point of reflection for the Salvadoran imaginary’s construction of, and relationship to, indigenous and nation-state identities. Through the poems of the Salvadoran anthology Tzuntekwani, I analyze the rhetoric of contemporary national literature that constructs indigenous identity around specific sites of state violence, certain Mesoamerican and local cultural markers, geographic location and environment, and socioeconomic marginalization. This thesis aims to understand the relationship between collective conceptualizations of national identity, or identities, in El Salvador’s formal state rhetoric and national literature in the 20th and 21st century.