American Value

Migrants, Money, and Meaning in El Salvador and the United States

David Pedersen

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780226922775
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Over the past half-century, El Salvador has transformed dramatically. Historically reliant on primary exports like coffee and cotton, the country emerged from a brutal civil war in 1992 to find much of its national income now coming from a massive emigrant workforce—over a quarter of its population—that earns money in the United States and sends it home. In American Value, David Pedersen examines this new way of life as it extends across two places: Intipucá, a Salvadoran town infamous for its remittance wealth, and the Washington, DC, metro area, home to the second largest population of Salvadorans in the United States. Pedersen charts El Salvador's change alongside American deindustrialization, viewing the Salvadoran migrant work abilities used in new lowwage American service jobs as a kind of primary export, and shows how the latest social conditions linking both countries are part of a longer history of disparity across the Americas. Drawing on the work of Charles S. Peirce, he demonstrates how the defining value forms—migrant work capacity, services, and remittances—act as signs, building a moral world by communicating their exchangeability while hiding the violence and exploitation on which this story rests. Theoretically sophisticated, ethnographically rich, and compellingly written, American Value offers critical insights into practices that are increasingly common throughout the world.

PART I

Brushing history against the brain, [our] task is to examine what has been recorded and uncover what has been silenced, bringing to light possible histories.
—Fernando Coronil, 2011

The three chapters that follow all open with a focus on words written and uttered in the 1980s and 1990s about El Salvador, especially the town named Intipucá. Recorded and transmitted from one source to another, these descriptors join the larger constellation held still under the designation Intipucá-DC Connection Story, itself a constituting part of the more general and widely circulating model-like tale of El Salvador’s progressive reorganization around migration and remittances. The chapters begin with these words, understanding them as intimations or signals of other concepts or notions, which themselves have been socially pressed out of a much larger interactive and dynamical reality. Inquiring into this process of expressive transmission yields a historical account or, more properly, a composite history in the conventional sense of the term. In tracing out and telling this history, however, the chapters follow a less conventional approach, signaled by the epigraph from Venezuelan-born anthropologist Fernando Coronil’s assonant ad-lib on Walter Benjamin’s seventh of eighteen “Theses on the Concept of History.” Benjamin’s famous criticism of mainstream German historiography is built around a notion of oppositional co-inclusion, illustrated when he forcefully writes:

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is never free of barbarism, so barbarism taints the manner in which it was transmitted from one hand to another. The historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from this process of transmission as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.

That documents or any social phenomena could be composed of opposing qualities or be the co-instantiation of them is not a habitual way of working in the mainstream of the humanistic and social scientific disciplines, which for the most part are informed by the under-labor of formal logic and mathematics.

Coronil’s riff on Benjamin makes clear that there is a quality of relative discontinuity between subjects and objects, would-be critics and what comprises their accounts. While Benjamin emphasizes the capacities and more so the responsibilities of “historical materialists,” Coronil’s phrase seems to underline the brute actuality of the world as it forces itself upon cognition.¹ While “brushing against” is the operation, the truth of the matter (its epistemic authority) lies neither wholly in immediate perception nor wholly in seamless collective thought.

Taking the perspective on the co-inclusion of opposites to heart, part 1 examines the historical processes through which the keywords have come to present their most immediate objects, which themselves had been abstracted from a larger open whole. Moving into this historical content shows the way that the words represent things in certain ways and not in others, leaving this larger content as the open domain of “possible histories.” By illuminating these possibilities alongside the many actualities and generalities that work to silence them, the original words become transvalued, destabilized by their own contradictory content.

CHAPTER TWO

Brushing against the Golden Grain

Intipucá owes both its progress and its predicament to the migration, which began when . . . a field hand ended up in Mount Pleasant and inadvertently blazed a path to the “gold mine,” as Washington has come to be known.¹
—Gabriel Escobar

Before, we were malformado (malformed, poorly educated); now we are civilized. People have respect for each other. There is money, nice houses, roads, water, electricity.

—Sigfredo Chávez

This chapter begins with two epigraphs. The first is the written words of Gabriel Escobar, a DC-based journalist who was born in Bogotá, Colombia, and migrated with his family to New York City in 1964. The second is the spoken observations of Sigfredo Chávez, the resident of Intipucá described in Gruson’s New York Times essay, who had migrated to the United States two years after Escobar in 1966. Escobar visited and wrote about Intipucá in the 1990s several years before Sigfredo and I spoke there in person about it. Despite these different contexts and their respective backgrounds, both Escobar and Chávez described a dramatic transformation of life in the town, which they organized rhetorically around a notion of historical “progress” and the arrival of widely recognized metrics of “civilization.”

The three defining terms, “civilization,” “progress,” and “predicament,” present specific objects to their would-be interpreters. Sigfredo specified some of this when he mentioned money, houses, roads, water, electricity, and manners of comportment and social interaction, glossed as “respect.” Although Sigfredo described Intipucá’s figurative arrival at a more desirable place and time, Escobar was less sanguine, suggesting that along with “progress” comes a “predicament.” Elsewhere in his article, Escobar pointed out that although Intipucá and other towns like it in southeastern El Salvador appeared relatively flush with consumer goods and the kinds of local infrastructure that Sigfredo referred to, at the edge of such municipalities the residents confronted deteriorated public roads, bridges, and public services. The region around Intipucá struggled with limited electrical capacity, inadequate sources and supplies of potable water, and occasional shortages of fuel and basic foodstuffs. Escobar highlighted the contradiction that while many people had refrigerators, televisions, and VCRs, they often could not use them for lack of sufficient amperage.

Both Escobar’s and Sigfredo’s accounts suggest that from the perspective of the pueblo in the 1990s, there has been a relatively rapid and dramatic transformation. By noting Intipucá’s “predicament,” however, Escobar broadened the scope of his story. He identified not only the contradictory intersection of Intipucá with its immediate periphery, but also the collision of the past and present in El Salvador, by way of fuzzy TV screens, exhausted automobile shock-absorbers, and the rising cost of red beans. Expanding further the geographical and historical scope of analysis in order to understand more of what is contained in Sigfredo’s utterance of “civilization” and Escobar’s categories of “progress” and “predicament,” this chapter asks, what are some of the most important and necessary determinants upon which the narratives rest and which lie dissimulated within them? Just as silver mined in the New World under Spanish dominion later created the possibility for English industrial expansion, the “gold mine” of Washington, DC, as well as “civilization,” “progress” and the “predicament” of Intipucá, all rest on another kind of gold: El Grano de Oro (the Golden Grain), what Salvadorans have called coffee since the late nineteenth century. The potent bean structurally mixed with and invaded daily life across both countries between the 1930s and 1950s, providing the shared grounds of later migration and remittance transfer as well as the outpouring of accounts much like and including Escobar’s and Sigfredo’s above, even as the sun, rain, soil, and beans together with aspects of the lives of thousands of people who helped produce coffee dissolved into and became invisible in these stories.

After an overview of coffee in El Salvador before this history and then beginning to rub against it, the chapter considers in detail the words and experiences of Sigfredo and the way that he described the pueblo’s “escape” from underdevelopment in eastern El Salvador. The chapter explores his autobiographical account, situating it within a broader history of the pueblo. It traces how the pueblo was integrated into the Salvadoran nation through the circulation of money, especially during the 1930s and 1940s. This money, together with people who left the pueblo to work on coffee fincas (farms), linked the town not only with areas of production elsewhere in El Salvador but also to parts of the United States where most of the coffee beans were imported, roasted, and ground after World War II. In spite of its appearance throughout the twentieth century as a relatively isolated pueblo without the trappings of “civilization,” by the late 1940s Intipucá was wrapped up in a complex array of coffee, labor, and money circuits that extended across El Salvador and to the United States.

After moving outward and backward from Sigfredo’s account in 1996 to this more circuitous geographical and historical perspective, the chapter considers two important crises in 1948 when competing class fractions in both countries struggled and coalesced in separate attempts to alter some aspects of the coffee circuit and to control the forms of wealth that it generated. In El Salvador the struggle took the form of a coup d’état, while in the United States there was a less dramatic but equally significant shift in the relative power of US capitalist and state military factions. These two events rippled across the circuit during the early 1950s, directly affecting the lives of Intipuqueños like Sigfredo as well as residents in DC and its suburbs, significantly shaping the conditions within which people orchestrated their daily lives across both places. The chapter concludes by tracing how Sigfredo’s narrative rests upon but also dissimulates this broader transnational coffee circuit. Finally, the chapter argues that the trappings of wealth and the ways of life that define “civilization,” as well as their absence and their opposite, have arisen together in a pooled and patchy process.

Overview of the Context of Sigfredo’s Appearance as Author and Agent

Among El Salvador’s most important literary figures, Francisco Gavidia was born in the eastern city of San Miguel in 1863 as this notoriously hot and humid region of El Salvador slipped into relative decline with the demise of the Central American indigo trade.² Like Cuba’s José Martí and Nicaragua’s Rubén Darío, Gavidia wrote prodigiously; his writings placed El Salvador amidst the powerful currents of literary modernism.³ During his long life of nine decades he wrote fiction and a work of nonfiction important at the time, Historia Moderna de El Salvador, published in 1917. Through all his work he explored immediately perceivable changes in El Salvador as the country left behind the last vestiges of that colonial-era export crop, the source of blue dye for North American and European textile industries, to become one of the most productive coffee growing nations in the world.⁴ By the twentieth century El Salvador’s washed green arabica bean exports were second only to those of Colombia in their quality and in the price that they garnered on the New York Coffee and Sugar Exchange.⁵ Throughout most of the twentieth century, these coffee export earnings purchased El Salvador’s future, even if the price fluctuated and many of the accoutrements of progress arrived cloaked in European garb, such as the Italian architecture of Salvador’s great theatrical stage in the western city of Santa Ana.

By the middle of the century, measures of the modern in El Salvador tended to come from the United States in the form of manufactured commodities imported and paid for with the hard currency earned from selling almost all of each year’s coffee harvest to several US roasting companies. Gavidia’s hometown, San Miguel, and the surrounding countryside beneath the volcano Chaparrastique remained places largely devoted to domestic food production and to the recovery and reproduction of the abilities of the many thousands of people who worked part of each year in the central highland regions of Occidente (western El Salvador) tending the coffee plants and harvesting their ripe cherries. In spite of the consistent labors of these people and a brief boom in cotton production for export during the 1950s and 1960s around San Miguel, the trappings of civilization—money, houses, roads, respect, as Sigfredo called them in the opening passage—appeared to be relatively less present and widely available in the Oriente (eastern El Salvador) during most of the twentieth century. They were perceivable elsewhere in Santa Ana, in the capital city of San Salvador, and in other metropolitan centers throughout the world.

At the edge of the twenty-first century, Gavidia’s San Miguel, known as the “Pearl of the Oriente,” and its nearby departments came alive again, flush with indicators of progress obtained from selling not primary agricultural crops but abstracted and objectified efforts and capacities of Salvadorans working in the United States. As in times past, the majority of this labor force hails from the Oriente, but unlike those in the previous century, these people currently provide far more US dollars each year (by sending home to their friends and family and also by spending in the context of return visits) than the total amount of foreign currency generated by the still active Salvadoran coffee trade.

One perspective on this transformation may be found in 1996 in the front room of Sigfredo Chávez’s home on a tree-lined road popularly known as Los Laureles in Intipucá, just 28 miles south of Don Gavidia’s birthplace.⁶ At this time and place, Sigfredo delivered the statement excerpted at the beginning of the chapter as part of a long personal account and analysis of changes in the town that he had experienced. As I have mentioned, he told of a simple conjuncture where “civilization” arrived in the pueblo as the result of the movement of Intipuqueños to the Washington, DC, area, their hard work there, and their transfer of money back to the town. He defined civilization as the presence of specific objects such as money, houses, and roads, and of subjective habits, especially respeto (respect), which he defined as a quality of deferential regard for others. He also stressed that the arrival of these things was the outcome of a chain of events that he helped initiate in 1966.

First Level of Authorship

Like many Intipucá homes in the late 1990s, Sigfredo’s front door was answered by a young woman servant who had grown up in one of the small settlements on the outskirts of the pueblo. The muchacha (young woman servant; literally girl) Maria was from Santa Juliana, a worker settlement adjacent to land owned by the Hernández family of Intipucá south of the pueblo. The front door led into a tile-floored sitting room with wooden and wicker-seated chairs and couch facing a large varnished wood shelf and cabinet ensemble along one wall. On one shelf sat a television set and videocassette player/recorder. On the other shelves Sigfredo had displayed color photographs of his children from his second marriage: his daughter was smartly dressed in her US Marine uniform and his son was pictured in a US high school photograph. Sigfredo explained that his son lived in New York, and although his daughter currently resided in Maryland, she had lived for some time in California where she received military training “in communication and computers.” Sigfredo’s older son, from his first marriage, was Marvin, who was living at that time in the pueblo. Sigfredo kept no picture of him on display in his house and frequently was critical of his lifestyle and work habits. From this tranquil locus Sigfredo talked about his hometown of Intipucá and its 30-year history (at that time) of ties to the DC area.⁷ Like the published writings and popular discussion of the town, he offered evidence of a strong contrast between a past that lacked the congealed habits of civilization and a present inundated with them. Sigfredo compared the years he spent growing up in the pueblo with the important changes that had come about as a result of his initial move to DC in 1966–67 and his subsequent visits for extended periods, which formed part of the general movement of Intipuqueños to the DC area over the ensuing decades. In a well-spoken and nearly rehearsed manner, Sigfredo recounted his decisions and actions, presenting himself as an important historical agent of this broader shift.

In 1966, I went to the United States. I was the first from here. I was working in San Miguel and making 120 colónes a month. My friend Luis had gone to Los Angeles and he told me that it was easy to get a visa. I went to the [US] Consulate in San Salvador. At that time it was just a little room with a desk—no more. It is not like that now. At that time only the very rich Salvadorans and business people traveled to the United States. They gave me a five-year visa!

Sigfredo smiled broadly. To obtain a visa in 1996 from the US Consulate was considerably more difficult and the legal document usually restricted one’s travel to a period much shorter than five years. Sigfredo noted the different situation and stressed the work habits of fellow Intipuqueñ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Series Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Characters
• Preface
• Prologue
• Introduction
• One. A Roadmap for Remittances
• Part I.
• Part II.
• Part III.
• Finale
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index