Mapping Memory

Visuality, Affect, and Embodied Politics in the Americas

Kaitlin M. Murphy

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780823282555
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Teoria della critica letteraria

In Mapping Memory, Kaitlin M. Murphy investigates the use of memory as a means of contemporary sociopolitical intervention. Mapping Memory focuses specifically on visual case studies, including documentary film, photography, performance, new media, and physical places of memory, from sites ranging from the Southern Cone to Central America and the U.S.–Mexican borderlands. Murphy develops new frameworks for analyzing how visual culture performs as an embodied agent of memory and witnessing, arguing that visuality is inherently performative. By analyzing the performative elements, or strategies, of visual texts—such as embodiment, reenactment, haunting, and the performance of material objects and places Murphy elucidates how memory is both anchored in and extracted from specific bodies, objects, and places. Drawing together diverse theoretical strands, Murphy originates the theory of "memory mapping", which tends to the ways in which memory is strategically deployed in order to challenge official narratives that often neglect or designate as transgressive certain memories or experiences. Ultimately, Murphy argues, memory mapping is a visual strategy to ask, and to challenge, why certain lives are rendered visible and thus grievable and others not.

CHAPTER 1

Affect, Haunting, and Memory Mapping

Baseball cap propped over thick black hair, thin button-down shirt opened to expose a worn black undershirt, coil of yellow rope encircling his left shoulder, the middle-aged man walks. The narrow dirt path he traverses cuts through thick, verdant grass, the sparkling sunlight marred only by intermittent shadows cast by the lush foliage that frames the small meadow. In a voice-over, we hear, They say what I’ve got is insomnia.¹ He continues forward, his gaze focused downward at where he places his feet along the path. His mouth does not move, nor does he look at the camera. I sleep very little. I don’t know if it’s a habit left over from war. Maybe so. The camera angle shifts to follow him from behind; he continues up the path through the meadow away from us. I’m going to tell you about a time I went mad. About seven years ago, I went mad. I had hallucinations. I kept seeing the army. Ugly men with glasses and gold teeth. They’re devils, they are, is what I would say. When I saw the troops, I ran away. The man sits in the shade of a large tree in a lush, grassy field and watches over a small herd of grazing cows. The voice continues: And in the nightmare, I see them set the dogs on me, and they follow me. I feel their teeth eating into me. ‘We’ve come to kill you.’ I was punching, kicking . . . fighting them. I grabbed the machete. I was convinced I was lopping their heads off. My kids said, ‘Dad, let us sleep!’ And there I was, brandishing the machete in the middle of the room! He finishes with a small, flat chuckle. The man continues to sit calmly, unmoving, staring off into the horizon. Finally, I still have nightmares. Because even though the war is over, the gunfire—I still hear it all the time. (Pause) There’s no fixing me. There’s just no fixing me.

This scene appears early on in the documentary El Lugar Más Pequeño (The Tiniest Place, 2011), which takes place in Cinquera, a small village deep in the jungle-covered mountains of El Salvador. After unabated assault, brutal occupation, and slaughter by the Salvadoran military during the violent twelve-year civil war (1980–1992), the small village of Cinquera had ceased to exist, literally erased from official maps and swallowed by the jungle. The majority of Cinquera’s residents were killed or disappeared; those who remained fled, often into the jungle, where they hid for extended periods of time, concealed in caves and among the trees. After the war ended, five families returned on foot through the jungle to rebuild Cinquera and live among their dead. The Tiniest Place, made by Tatiana Huezo Sánchez, whose grandmother was from Cinquera, explores this story of return.

Through the lens of these villagers’ lives, The Tiniest Place examines the ongoing impact of recent historical violence, the challenges of rebuilding postconflict, and the relationship between memory, place, and people (both living and dead). Visually and affectively breathtaking, testimonial memory narratives provide the backbone of the film. These narratives are presented in an unusual manner: with almost no exception, each person, not looking at or acknowledging the camera in any way, is filmed going about their quotidian lives as their testimony is shared in voice-over.² The jarring contrast between the vibrant, visible present and traumatic aural memories of the past renders the testimonies both ambient and haunting. Blurring the lines between what was and what is, it is as though we observe the villagers from the perspective of the ghosts themselves, hearing stories that could just as easily come from the mouths of the dead.

The Tiniest Place presents a largely unseen perspective on the aftermath of the civil war and the everyday work of survival for villagers who live far from the capital and the reaches of official transition processes (which, in any event, were lacking: El Salvador’s truth commission worked for just eight months under a mandate to investigate only “serious acts of violence” whose “impact on society urgently demands that the public should know the truth.” Five days after the publication of the final report, which found government forces responsible for 95 percent of the abuses, a sweeping amnesty law was passed, resulting in minimal consequences for the vast majority of perpetrators. Four months after the report, a number of officials known to have been directly involved in major atrocities retired with full military honors, with then-president Cristiani praising them for having performed with “merit, efficiency, and loyalty to the highest duties that the nation can demand” [Hayner 2011, 50–51]). In places and times where political processes neglect justice and comprehensive reconciliatory efforts, art can shed light on the complexity of survival, providing insight into the individual and collective experience of trauma and survival that official narratives so often elide.

In this chapter, I investigate how The Tiniest Place depicts the ongoing negotiation of living in the aftermath of conflict. Through analysis of the film’s depiction of those living in the material, spatial, and affective residues of mass atrocity, I argue that The Tiniest Place strategically maps memory onto and through bodies, objects, and places. I also investigate how the film portrays the lived experience of memory and affect in order to think more broadly about the relationship between the two. Ultimately, I contend that the combination of testimonial narratives, the ghostly presence of the dead, and the embodied, everyday practices of the living shed new light on the affective complexities of rebuilding in the aftermath of trauma, on the performative possibilities of the visual to serve as witness, and on the theoretical intersections between affect, memory, visuality, and place.

Legacies of Violence

Similar to neighboring Guatemala, the conflict in El Salvador originated in struggles over land and power. Starting with the Spanish conquest in the 1600s, land was seen as the most important resource in El Salvador. When El Salvador gained independence from Spain in 1821, power shifted from the Spanish to those of mixed European blood. Ninety-five percent of El Salvador’s population was forced into serfdom, and a small group of wealthy landowners, known as the Fourteen Families, ruled through a long series of military dictatorships. The cycles of violence caused by this system of repression eventually erupted in January 1932 with a farmworker revolt led by labor leader Agustín Farabundo Martí. Two weeks after it began, the revolt was crushed in a massive military reprisal known as La Matanza. An estimated thirty thousand indigenous citizens were massacred during La Matanza, and the Salvadoran military ruled the country from that point onward. The political instability of the 1970s eroded any hope of democratic reform, and those on the Left became convinced that the only way to create change would be through armed insurrection.

During El Salvador’s civil war, fought between the right-wing military government and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), a coalition of five leftist guerilla groups, more than 75,000 people were killed (equivalent to 1.4 percent of the population), more than half a million were displaced, nearly one million fled the country, and countless thousands more were tortured and/or disappeared (Hayner 2011, 49; Studemeister 2001, 7). In terms of population, the total number of confirmed deaths “would be proportionately equivalent to 3.2 million US citizens, or, seen another way, the total population of the second largest city in the US: the entire population of Los Angeles, California” (Katovich 2011, 13). As has been meticulously documented elsewhere, this war was heavily impacted by US intervention.³ The combination of Cold War fears and interest in Latin America as a testing ground for US imperialism that played out across the region was magnified in El Salvador, resulting in the tiny country becoming the site of the United States’ longest and most expensive military intervention during the period between the Vietnam War and the Persian Gulf conflict (LeoGrande 1998). Under the auspices of “nation-building,” the United States sought to fundamentally repress any possibility of communist revolution; the result was not just the political backing of sadist military forces but sustained support of their campaign of violence in the form of $4.5 billion in military and other aid (Hayner 2011, 49). The military’s terrorizing and forced disappearances of civilians by death squads, recruitment of child soldiers, and other gross human rights violations were not hidden. Indeed, one of the military’s notorious killing strategies included using a meatpacking plant to dispose of human remains (Amnesty International 1982, 136). With the help of the United States, the Salvadoran armed forces adopted a “scorched earth” approach similar to the one employed in Guatemala (tactics that were primarily derived and adapted from US military strategy during the Vietnam War and subsequently taught to the Salvadoran military). This approach of “draining the sea to catch the fish” involved the massacring of whole villages, including Cinquera.⁴

Finally, after twenty months of UN-brokered negotiations between the government and the FMLN, peace accords were signed on January 16, 1992. These accords included an agreement to hold a Commission on the Truth for El Salvador.⁵ The commission, which was given only six months to work, gathered testimony from more than two thousand survivors and collected extensive information from secondary sources, including national and international human rights groups, on more than twenty thousand additional cases. In addition, they met quietly with several senior members of security forces who were willing to provide key information and brought in the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team to exhume the remains of the notorious massacre of the town of El Mozote.⁶ The commission ultimately concluded that the government forces had been responsible for 95 percent of the abuses committed during the twelve-year period of war (Hayner 2011, 51). Unfortunately, five days after the release of the commission’s final report, El Salvador’s parliament passed a sweeping amnesty law, and, aside from the removal of several high-level perpetrators from the armed forces, there were minimal consequences for the guilty, including those who had been explicitly identified in the report. Over the following years, little effort was made toward reparations or justice. As a result, in villages like Cinquera, once the violence ended, the few who had survived were left alone to pick up the broken shards of their former lives.

Many of those who went into exile in neighboring countries and further abroad never returned, permanently altering El Salvador’s social fabric in unforeseen and ultimately catastrophic ways. As is well documented, many Salvadorans fled as refugees to the United States, and particularly to Los Angeles, where they were often victimized by Mexican gangs. Groups of Salvadorans organized into protective gangs in response, taking over a number of Mexican gangs and creating the Mara Salvatrucha gang, also known as MS-13. This gang is now widely considered one of the most notorious and violent gangs in the Western Hemisphere. After the civil war ended, many of these gang members were deported from the United States back to El Salvador, where they continued their gang warfare, only now linked to a transnational network of violence. This brought to El Salvador a level of violence the country had never seen, one that continues to far exceed both the homicide rates of the war and the country’s capacity to control it in any meaningful way. While the contemporary gang violence and refugee crisis is not the focus of this chapter (I return to this issue in the final chapter), it serves as a devastatingly sharp reminder of the United States’ influence on both the war and postwar period, and the enduring, fecund nature of violence.

The life of the film’s director, Tatiana Huezo Sánchez, was shaped by the war. She was born in El Salvador but moved to Mexico with her mother when she was five to flee the violence. (Her father stayed in El Salvador and lived through years of the war.) Although physically at a distance, Huezo Sánchez was personally impacted by the war—an uncle was killed, other family members disappeared, and she had cousins who became orphans (Ponce 2011). Huezo Sánchez periodically returned to El Salvador; on one visit, her grandmother, who had since moved to the capital city of San Salvador, asked Huezo Sánchez to accompany her to her hometown—the small, remote town of Cinquera. They traveled for three hours on increasingly smaller roads from the capital into the jungle before arriving in the quiet, nearly empty town. When Huezo Sánchez arrived, an elderly woman came up to hug her and said, “Rina! You came back! You look the same!” Huezo Sánchez told the woman she was mistaken, but the woman did not believe her—Huezo Sánchez shared an uncanny resemblance with someone who had been killed in the war (Ponce 2011). Following that encounter, she walked into a church, but instead of the religious symbols she had expected to see, the tail of a military helicopter hung on one of the walls, and the church was lined with rows and rows of portraits of young guerrilla children and teenagers, all killed in the war. The more Huezo Sánchez learned about Cinquera and became acquainted with her grandmother’s friends, the more she wanted to make a film about Cinquera. Her dream became possible several years later when her project was selected in a contest for graduates of her film school, the prestigious Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica (CCC) in Mexico City (Katovich 2011). Her resulting film, The Tiniest Place, joins a rich field of sociopolitical and human rights–oriented documentary filmmaking in Latin America.

Documentary in El Salvador

As has been explored at length within existing scholarship, documentary film has long played a critical role as chronicle of and sociopolitical commentary on the politics of the times. Since the mid-1950s, Latin American political documentary filmmaking has flourished, perhaps more so than in any other region.⁷ New Latin American Cinema, a filmmaking movement shaped by postcolonial struggles for autonomy and empowerment in the face of underdevelopment and dependency, became known for exploring themes such as poverty and inequality, oppression, and life under dictatorship. As Julianne Burton argues, “nowhere have the manifestations of documentary been as multiple and their impact so decisive as in Latin America,” and these films were “almost invariably circumscribed by inescapable social, economic, and political realities” (1990, 6, 18). Indeed, many documentary theorists claim that the goal and import of documentary film (in, but not limited to, Latin America) is “to describe and interpret the world of collective experience” (Nichols 1991, 10), and that it “can provide cultural spaces for audiences to contemplate the ethical and moral questions raised by the repetition of trauma and the violation of human rights” (Hesford 2011, 91). Overall, the role of documentary film as testimonial evidence against human rights abuses and in advancing human rights agendas in Latin America has been profound.

And yet, with the exception of a small number of documentaries that focus on the violence, human rights abuses, and political maneuverings of the Salvadoran conflict, documentaries about El Salvador are few and far between. There were three largely anonymous Salvadoran political filmmaking groups—El Taller de los Vagos, Cero a la Izquierda, and Radio Venceremos. The most well-known of the three, Radio Venceremos began as the clandestine radio of the Popular Revolutionary Army, one of the five guerilla forces that united to form the FMLN coalition. In addition to radio broadcasts and print materials, Radio Venceremos produced films and videotapes made in 16 mm, Super-8, half-inch, and three-quarter-inch video (Hess 1990, 174). The footage came from a wide mixture of people, including combatants, journalists, tourists, and foreign supporters, and sound was recorded with cheap pocket recorders. All of this material was then taken out of the country to be edited and distributed (175). These films had an extremely rudimentary, journalistic style and targeted an “already committed community of political activists and socially concerned religious and community groups” (158). The challenges of filmmaking during the war were numerous. As Hess explains, artists

had to develop, just as the guerrillas did, supply lines to get film, tape, cameras, and sound equipment in and the film footage out for processing, editing, and distribution. They had to rethink the purpose of their films. Without the large popular organizations as a logical distribution and exhibition structure, they had to address and figure out ways to show their work to mostly illiterate rural audiences, usually in areas without electricity, and also to get the work out to an international audience. These changes can be seen clearly in the films. (176–177)

Beyond these three guerrilla groups, whose films were not widely seen or known, the majority of documentaries on El Salvador from this time period were made in the United States (e.g., PBS’s Enemies of War [2001], which is about the 1989 murder of six Jesuit priests and their housekeeper). These films were geared toward shaping US public opinion and, in turn, US involvement in the conflict.⁸ Beyond these political pieces, however, documentaries about El Salvador are relatively rare.

It is surprising, then, to note the absence of academic scholarship on The Tiniest Place. No doubt this dearth is partially due to the relatively recent release of the film and the fact that it has not been widely available beyond...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Affect, Haunting, and Mapping Memory
• 2. The Materiality of Memory: Touching, Seeing, and Feeling the Past
• 3. Performing Archives, Performing Ruins
• 4. The Politics of Seeing: Affect, Forensics, and Visuality in the US-Mexico Borderlands
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index