To Rise in Darkness

Revolution, Repression, and Memory in El Salvador, 1920–1932

Aldo A. Lauria-Santiago, Jeffrey L. Gould

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780822381242
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'America Latina e dei Caraibi

To Rise in Darkness offers a new perspective on a defining moment in modern Central American history. In January 1932 thousands of indigenous and ladino (non-Indian) rural laborers, provoked by electoral fraud and the repression of strikes, rose up and took control of several municipalities in central and western El Salvador. Within days the military and civilian militias retook the towns and executed thousands of people, most of whom were indigenous. This event, known as la Matanza (the massacre), has received relatively little scholarly attention. In To Rise in Darkness, Jeffrey L. Gould and Aldo A. Lauria-Santiago investigate memories of the massacre and its long-term cultural and political consequences.

Gould conducted more than two hundred interviews with survivors of la Matanza and their descendants. He and Lauria-Santiago combine individual accounts with documentary sources from archives in El Salvador, Guatemala, Washington, London, and Moscow. They describe the political, economic, and cultural landscape of El Salvador during the 1920s and early 1930s, and offer a detailed narrative of the uprising and massacre. The authors challenge the prevailing idea that the Communist organizers of the uprising and the rural Indians who participated in it were two distinct groups. Gould and Lauria-Santiago demonstrate that many Communist militants were themselves rural Indians, some of whom had been union activists on the coffee plantations for several years prior to the rebellion. Moreover, by meticulously documenting local variations in class relations, ethnic identity, and political commitment, the authors show that those groups considered "Indian" in western El Salvador were far from homogeneous. The united revolutionary movement of January 1932 emerged out of significant cultural difference and conflict.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• Garden of Despair: the Political Economy of Class, Land, and Labor, 1920–1929
• A Bittersweet Transition: Politics and Labor in the 1920s
• Fiestas of the Oppressed: The Social Geography and Culture of Mobilization
• ‘‘Ese Trabajo Era Enteramente de los Naturales’’: Ethnic Conflict and Mestizajein Western Salvador, 1914–1931
• ‘‘To the Face of the Entire World’’:Repression and Radicalization, September 1931—January 1932
• Red Ribbons and Machetes: The Insurrection of January 1932
• ‘‘They Killed the Just for the Sinners’’:The Counter revolutionary Massacres
• Memories of La Matanza: The Political and Cultural Consequences of 1932
• Epilogue
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index