The Unforgetting of Claribel Alegría

Abstract This essay examines women’s perspectives on Salvadoran memory struggles that reckon with enmeshed military repression and US colonial capitalism. The two texts by Central American writer Claribel Alegría investigated here, the novel Ashes of Izalco (1966; trans. 1989) and the testimonio They Won’t Take Me Alive (1983; trans. 1987), expose the entanglements of state terror and foreign interests, providing an opportunity to critique the coffee regimes in the 1930s and the intimate apparel industry in the 1960s and 1970s, respectively. The author claims that both of Alegría’s texts can be understood as narrative acts of “unforgetting” that not only recuperate neglected labor histories often overshadowed by militarized spectacles but also break seeming silences. Consolidating critical interventions in memory studies and Marxist feminisms, the author argues that Alegría’s narratives invite an undoing of the memory paradigm premised on transnational oblivion.