Faith, Trauma, Resistance, and Resilience in the Revolutionary Songs of Civil War El Salvador

Abstract During El Salvador’s civil war (1980–92), campesinas and campesinos (subsistence farmers) articulated their experience of the conflict in a folk music genre known as revolutionary song. Here we examine the revolutionary songs of one singer-songwriter, Norberto “Don Tito” Amaya. Don Tito was well known to campesinos and campesinas, especially those residing in the Honduran refugee camps where he lived and performed during the war. This article offers an introduction to the genre of revolutionary song in El Salvador, which has received almost no musicological attention, and a detailed analysis of some of Don Tito’s songs and their social and psychological functions for Salvadorans. We argue that these songs served to bolster resilience in response to trauma and unimaginable suffering, while simultaneously building the collective spirit that enables political action, thereby addressing psychological and political needs in tandem. To better grasp this interaction in protest music as it plays out in the Salvadoran context, we draw from scholarship on religion, education, and trauma from both the Global North and South. In so doing, we offer an intervention into trauma studies, which, with its individualist bias, has not yet found effective mechanisms to understand music with goals that are simultaneously psychological and political.