ABSTRACT
In the aftermath of El Salvador’s civil war (1980–1992), fresh attention to national culture, history, and identity ensued as state and society endeavored to create national unity by promoting pre-Colombian people while marginalizing contemporary indigenous populations. New historical memory sites emerged about an infamous 1932 violence in Western El Salvador under General Maximiliano Hernández-Martínez, wherein upwards of 40,000 indigenous people were slaughtered in a period of weeks. Following 1932, nation-building under a series of authoritarian governments claimed that El Salvador “no longer had Indians,” although it is a majority mestizo (Spanish and indigenous descent) population and discrete indigenous communities continued to exist. Memory projects involved museums, civil society actors, scholars, filmmakers, diasporic Salvadorans who represented and commemorated 1932, and United Nations agencies that made development aid conditional on the government of El Salvador improving its relationship to native populations and combatting racial and ethnic discrimination. Official apologies about 1932, changes to the national constitution, and new national policies developed to include the views of native populations in all levels of government policy are tied to the work of historical memory.
