The historiography of Central America has been so improved in recent decades that one might easily talk of it being ‘revolutionised’ in a manner that has conspicuously failed to occur in the region's political life. The end of the civil wars in the 1990s did not, of course, remove all forms of social conflict, or still less markedly reduce poverty, but it did enable a return to archives that were often reorganised by professionals with advanced training and a fresh sensibility as to the richness and consequence of official and other papers. At the same time, at least one political and scholarly generation had, often at appreciable cost, learned about the insufficiencies of concepts and methods prevalent in the 1970s, and was actively seeking in the Americas and in Europe to generate a more original and inquiring research agenda, beyond the clarion calls of partisanship that had been all but inevitable at times of war, horrible repression and quite open intromission on behalf of powerful external forces. In terms of history and the social sciences, this principally meant a reinterrogation of convictions passed down the structuralist lineage, particularly with respect to dependency, to macro-economic certainties and to hard-edged categories of identity, agency and sociability. Many ideas were up for grabs anew. At the same time, the highly fashionable tide of post-structuralist theory, which had thrust a tenured salient out of cultural studies into seemingly inoculated disciplines like geography, exercised a relatively modest impact on Central American scholars or work on the region, which remained small, poor and almost as marginalised after international political attention moved on as it had been under the Spanish monarchy. One area where cultural studies had registered an impact was in the field of ‘testimonialism’, that form of often self-consciously political subjective narrative, which, as in the case of Rigoberta Menchú, readily lent itself to a full rehearsal of academic disciplinary demarcation (in that case over ‘truth’ in both a narrowly empirical and a broadly epistemological sense).
The present, remarkable and thoroughly impressive volume combines all the benefits of this new intellectual horizon. It rests upon scrupulous investigation of primary documentary evidence at local, regional, national and international levels. Indeed, Aldo Lauria-Santiago's contribution goes far beyond primary responsibility for the writing for the sections of the volume on political economy; he has clearly played an important role in assisting the revival of the Salvadorean National Archive. This is a service that deserves commendation and that all scholars should, when able, seriously consider as part of their basic duties, especially if they are to found a well-paid Northern career on the basis of papers derived from and supported by mostly poor taxpayers in the South. Such a sensibility is even more acutely expressed in the book's finale, where Gould considers critically and compellingly the development and showing of the film Cicatriz de la memoria (1932), a critical popular-outreach project that stands very much as the twin of this book. That discussion is understandably not without a certain self-consciousness, but it also embodies a welcome reconsideration of the standard methodological and conceptual challenges to researching, writing and presenting contemporary history on and around instances of social violence and trauma. Perhaps most prominent in that regard here is the encountering by the authors (and their clearly vital assistant, the FMLN militant Reynaldo Patriz) of a strange mixture of responses in their 200 interviews centred on the infamous uprising and massacre of January 1932. In addition to strategic silences similar to those worked so brilliantly by Luisa Passerini for fascist Italy, they are presented with versions that don't readily square either with the official left- and right-wing versions or – and this is the key interpretative axis of the work – the notion that indigenous and communist movements were quite distinct and poorly coordinated. I actively dislike the term ‘prosthetic memory’ that the authors have taken from Alison Landsberg; I remain to be convinced that it is an original addition to this field and would have liked more discussion of the wider interpretative issues, especially the full gamut of psychological, cultural and political factors that bear on the very rich material to be found here. On the other hand, one of the most compelling elements of a book that is extraordinarily clearly written and beautifully designed to hold the reader's attention as well as to develop their understanding lies precisely in an un-self-regarding approach, an unworried combining of narrative with analysis, and an interpretative strategy that is lucid, distinct – debates will assuredly continue among the small but significant group of scholars working this subject – and entirely free of the pusillanimous circularity that so often infects modern history-writing. As a bonus, broad statements made ex cathedra are emancipated from extended ‘block footnotes’ lacking specificity and simply book-listing for effect.
If the core argument of the book rests on the true ‘messiness’ of the landmark ‘event’ of 23–4 January 1932, this is shown in a series of sharp vignettes for the municipio involved, producing a species of tragedy-as-local history in the penultimate chapter. Here, the research and writing capture a scene of rising discontent, complications of interest and conflict that is sometimes accidental as well as intended, quite like, say, that depicted for the southern Andes in the 1780s. Indeed, when the rebels took the town of Juayúa, the shout was for ‘cabildo abierto!’, and were the machetes not accompanied by the odd Mauser, the event might well have taken place in any of the last five centuries. Although the final chapter inevitably tells a harrowing story and depicts scenes of abject horror, it does serve a proper purpose of revising downwards some of the numbers cast around over recent decades regarding the extent of the casualties. Equally, the account of the revolt vividly depicts precisely that – a real revolt, with settlements taken by force, occasional killings, and radical intent (although the declaration of ‘soviets’ seems unlikely as well as unsubstantiated by any written record). Before all this, we are given a careful assessment of El Salvador's agricultural development in the early twentieth century; this persuasively revises the notion promoted by amateurs, such as myself, that an exceptional and exceptionally severe set of social relations obtained in the country when compared to the rest of the region. This was only true in some ways and for some places. Less explicitly revisionist in character – because there is far less material out there in need of revision – is the nuanced and detailed consideration of the mutable frontiers of indigenous life and identity (‘identity’ being a term not overused here).
One could readily imagine a graduate class in historiography in which the students are required to read and compare sections of Roque Dalton's Miguel Mármol (so enterprising and original at its publication in 1972, and still important today), the 1998 JLAS article ‘Indians, the Military and the Rebellion of 1932 in El Salvador’ by Erik Ching and Virginia Tilley, and the present volume. They would gain a good sense of evolving intellectual paradigms as well as political sensibilities, complementary research agendas and true debate. This, then, is a book for more than specialists, but it certainly provides a distinguished contribution to the history and historiography of Central America.
