The Heart of the Mission by Cary Cordova

Author:Cary Cordova
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2017-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

The Activist Art of a Salvadoran Diaspora: Abstraction, War, and Memory in San Francisco

Martivón Galindo fled El Salvador in 1982 because she knew she would die if she stayed.1 As she put it, “The police made that decision. They said you are out of the country or else. I didn’t make that decision.”2 The threat of violence during the Salvadoran civil war led Galindo and thousands of other Salvadorans to seek refuge.3 In the United States, the Salvadoran population skyrocketed from a little under one hundred thousand people in 1980 to well over half a million people—in fact, some estimate closer to a million—by 1990.4

When Salvadorans fled El Salvador in the 1970s and 1980s, San Francisco served as a logical destination for many because of kinship networks, and for others because the city welcomed the kind of leftist politics that had forced their exile from El Salvador.5 The majority of Latino migrants to San Francisco made their home in the Mission District, which served as a space of de facto segregation and a place of community formation.

The scale of 1980s migration obscures a much longer interconnectivity between El Salvador and the United States, and especially between El Salvador and San Francisco. As Ana Patricia Rodríguez noted, “The history of Salvadoran transnational migration to the United States . . . dates to the nineteenth century, when Salvadoran émigrés began to travel to U.S. industrial centers tied to agricultural production in Central America.”6 Cecilia Menjívar argued that San Francisco has had “the longest, yet least studied history of [Salvadoran] migration in the United States.”7 Indeed, while the majority of people caught in El Salvador’s 1980s Great Migration to the United States landed in Los Angeles, in some ways the smaller size of San Francisco meant that migrants not only had a more immediate impact on the local culture but also encountered a city already grounded in Salvadoran culture.8 As Carlos B. Córdova pointed out, earlier professionals “paved the way for others that would follow during the Civil War and thereafter.”9

The number of Salvadorans present in San Francisco during these years is difficult to determine, since the 1980 census did not count Salvadorans separately and since the 1990 census is contested for undercounting Salvadorans, many of whom were undocumented. The 1990 census indicates a minimum of 17,979 Salvadorans out of 100,717 Hispanics within the city of San Francisco, or at least 34,000 Salvadorans out of 233,000 Hispanics in the metropolitan area. At that time, the city of San Francisco counted around 11,000 Nicaraguan residents and close to 4,000 Guatemalan residents, so Salvadorans emerged as the largest demographic from Central America by 1990. Using these numbers as a rough guide, estimates suggest Salvadorans represented close to 20 percent of San Francisco’s Latino population by 1990, and that altogether, Central Americans made up around 35 percent of San Francisco’s Latino population by 1990.10 Although a preponderance of San Francisco’s Hispanic demographic identified as Mexican or Mexican American (around 38,000 residents or 38 percent of

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