Erasure in the Margins: Historical Memory and Amnesia Surrounding Violence in El Salvador

This thesis explores the logic of violence and identity politics applied to Salvadoran history shows increased repression as state response to these insurgencies as rooted in the goals of maintaining the status quo by providing an overarching identity and the subsequent erasure of insurgent identities, to function as an amnesia that rhetorically undermines the status quo of inequality. El Salvador carries a legacy of violence rooted in a high concentration of land and wealth protected by elite control over the military and politics. The insurgencies of 1932 resulting in the massacre of up to 30,000 Indigenous campesinos, the Civil War of the 1980s resulting in the death of 74,000 civilians, and Gang Violence resulting in a continuous militarized State of Emergency all reflect a legacy of violence manifested from continuous tension between amnesia and memory, between the aims of the elites to achieve certain goals through repressive control over the nation and identity and a resistance to erasure by such targeted identity groups that remain socioeconomically marginalized. Archival and ethnographic research show how space has been made in the margins to mobilize resistance around a counter narrative to historical amnesia, centered on historical memory and lived experiences, offering an avenue for pressuring for socioeconomic change.