![Sample our Area Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5922/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Area-Studies.jpg"})
Abstract
This article examines the Salvadoran documentary El Lugar Más Pequeño (The Tiniest Place, 2011) and argues that the film gives new insight into the complicated spaces and practices of memory post-transition and post-conflict through a process I call ‘memory mapping,’ which I define as the aesthetic process of representing the affective, polyvocal, layered relationship between past, present, and place as experienced by individuals and the communities in which they live. Engaging primarily with affect and memory theory, I contend that the film maps post-conflict memory in two specific ways: first, through testimony, and second, through an exploration of the relationship between memory and place. Ultimately, I argue that memory mapping sheds new light on how the aftermath of conflict – the physical, but also the emotional ruination caused by violence – is negotiated in the everyday of human life.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Latin American scholarship on affect has only recently started to emerge (see, for example, El Lenguaje de las Emociones (Moraña and Sánchez Prado Citation2012)), and it will be interesting to chart its development. Nevertheless, I would argue that, while the theory I engage with here was written in a US context, it is still felicitous and relevant to a Latin American study.
2. Although El Salvador’s civil war is generally considered to have started in 1980, it was preceded by decades of violence and political instability.
3. Similar to neighboring Guatemala, starting with the Spanish conquest in the 1600s, land has been seen as the most importance resource in El Salvador. The country was organized as a giant plantation, one that became almost entirely focused on coffee in the 1800s. Independence from Spain in 1821 shifted the power from the Spanish to those of mixed European blood. Ninety-five percent of El Salvador’s population was forced into serfdom, and the 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 erupted in a January 1932 peasant 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 30,000 indigenous citizens were massacred. The El 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.
4. It’s important to note that Cinquera was one of the towns in El Salvador that was very influenced by liberation theology, which arose principally as a reaction to the poverty and social injustices in Latin America. While these politics are not foregrounded in the documentary, there is one man, Pablo, who speaks about when the villagers became aware of their own oppression. Before the war, there was a paramilitary organization created by the far-right and military governments called ORDEN, and all men were required to belong to it. Cinquera was one of the first towns where the men, including Pablo, went to the chief of ORDEN to announce their intention to quit. He denied their request and claimed that participation was mandatory. From that point forward, the military started tracking Cinquera, and then eventually invaded the town. This invasion, and the subsequent brutal persecution of villagers, is what led many of Cinquera’s inhabitants to flee into hiding, and, in many cases, to join the guerrillas (http://www.zyzzyva.org/2011/05/05/the-strength-to-endure-the-worst-a-qa-with-filmmaker-tatiana-huezo/).
5. It’s interesting to note that these accords were initially agreed to in April 1991 – just a year after the first Chilean commission released its report. Hayner notes that the Chilean report was a point of reference and the origin of the idea for peace negotiators in El Salvador (Hayner, 50).
6. Unlike many other villages in the area, which were Roman Catholic and therefore often influenced by liberation theology, El Mozote was largely Evangelical Protestant and thus had a reputation for political neutrality. The army reportedly told the villagers that they would be passing through, but so long as they stayed in place they would not be harmed. However, on December 11, 1981, the Salvadoran army’s Atlacatl Battalion (which was trained by US military advisors) brutally tortured, raped, and massacred more than 800 civilians, including babies and young children.
7. As Julianne Burton writes, ‘nowhere have the manifestations of documentary been as multiple and their impact so decisive as in Latin America’ (Citation1990, 6), and these films were ‘almost invariably circumscribed by inescapable social, economic, and political realities’ (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 Citation1991, 10), and that documentary film ‘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 Citation2011, 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. For more on this topic, see Michael T. Martin (Citation1997), and the numerous essays and books by Michael Chanan.
8. In ‘Left, Right, and Center: El Salvador on Film,’ Pat Aufderheide analyzes the US media coverage of the El Salvadoran civil war in the 1980s, noting that US public opinion on involvement in the war was understood as critical by both the left and the right, and both saw the US mainstream news as being ‘deliberately (rather than structurally) biased – ‘toward the other side’’ (Citation1990, 154).
9. Visions du Reel, Nyon, Switzerland, April 2011, Grand Prix La Poste Suisse, Best Feature Film, Jury’s Award (SIGNIS); Documenta Madrid, May 2011, Audience Award; Lima International Film Festival, Perú, August 2011, Best Documentary Award; Monterrey International Film Festival, August 2011, Best Mexican Film; DOCSDF, Mexico September 2011, Best Mexican Documentary, Best Cinematography; José Rovirosa Documentary Award, Mexico, September 2011, Special Mention; Festival Biarritz Amérique Latine, France, October 2011, Special Mention; Morelia International Film Festival, Mexico, October 2011, Documentary Special Mention, Woman’s Association in Film & TV Award; Abu Dhabi Film Festival, United Arab Emirates, October 2011, Jury’s Special Award; DOK Liepzig, Germany, October 2011, Best Documentary, Verdi Award; Viennale International Film Festival, Austria, 2011, Standard Readers’ Jury Award; Mar de Plata International Film Festival, Argentina, November 2011, Fipresci Award, Documentary Special Mention; Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal, Canada, November 2011, Women’s Inmate Award, International Feature Special Mention; Icarus Film Festival, Guatemala, December 2011, Best Central American Documentary, Best Editing; Cinematropical Awards, USA, December 2011, Best Direction, Best First Feature; Atlantidoc Documentary Film Festival, Uruguay, December 2011, Best Documentary, Best Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Original Music, Best Sound; Palm Springs International Film Festival, USA, January 2012, John Schelesinger Award for Best First Feature Documentary; Spotlight Award, Cinema Eye Honors, USA, January 2012 (http://tiniestplace.weebly.com, accessed April 11, 2016).
10. See Eric Kohn (Citation2011), Robert Koehler (Citation2011), and Sheri Linden (Citation2011).
11. We might also reflect on the post-conflict Southern Cone receiving far greater attention than Central America when it comes to memory and cultural production.
12. Scholarship on postwar El Salvador predominantly focuses on politics, violence, and the law. See, for example, Post-transitional justice: Human Rights Trials in Chile and El Salvador (Collins Citation2010), Landscapes of struggle: politics, society, and community in El Salvador (Lauria-Santiago and Binford Citation2004), Freedom of expression in El Salvador: the struggle for human rights and democracy (Ladutke Citation2004), Peace without Justice: Obstacles to Building the Rule of Law in El Salvador (Popkin Citation2000), and El Salvador in the Aftermath of Peace: Crime, Uncertainty, and the Transition to Democracy (Moodie Citation2010).
13. This took place in the early 1990s.
14. The documentary is in Spanish with English subtitles; henceforth I will include only the English translation.
15. She had previously made a fiction short entitled El Ombligo del Mundo (2001), and another short, Tiempo Caustico, in 1997. She received cinematographer credit on a number of other fiction shorts and documentary shorts, including Niño de Mis Ojos (2008), Barrio (2006), and others (Ponce Citation2011).
16. For more on the controversy that surround this text, see Arturo Arias’s The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy (2001).
17. It should also be noted that el nuevo cine latinoamericano is often divided into genre subcategories, one of which is cine testimonio, or testimonial film. The two major contributions to this subgenre are the works of the Mexican documentarist Eduardo Maldonado and the Cuban films that grew out of the literature de campaña (campaign literature) of the 19th-century Cuban wars of independence. (For more on cine testimonio, see Chanan Citation1990, 40–2.).
18. In For Space, Doreen Massey advocates the recognition of space as ‘the product of interrelations, as constituted through interactions, from the immensity of the global to the intimately tiny’ (Citation2005, 9). She continues that space is ‘always under construction. Precisely because space in this reading is a product of relations-between, relations which are necessarily embedded material practices which have to be carried out, it is always in the process of being made. It is never finished; never closed. Perhaps we could imagine space as a simultaneity of stories-so-far’ (ibid.). Pierre Nora is well known for his lieux de mémoire (sites of memory), which attend to the various ways in which memory is spatially constructed (specifically in France). Grounded in a strongly nationalistic perspective, Nora argues that memory can be attached to physical sites, including burial places and battlefields, and also non-material sites, such as celebrations, rituals, and so on. While his work has had indisputable influence, I’m drawn more to the memory work that takes the relationship between memory and place as a starting point to think more broadly about themes of politics, identity, temporality, and human rights. Karen Till writes, ‘places are never merely backdrops for action or containers for the past. They are fluid mosaics and moments of memory, matter, metaphor, scene, and experience that create and mediate social spaces and temporalities. Through place making, people mark social spaces as haunted sites where they can return, make contact with their loss, contain unwanted presences, or confront past injustices’ (2005, 8). Steven Hoelscher and Derek H. Alderman argue that the relationship between memory and place is a performative one. They write, invoking Paul Connerton, ‘Through bodily repetition and the intensification of everyday acts that otherwise remain submerged in the mundane order of things, performances like rituals, festivals, pageants, public dramas and civic ceremonies serve as a chief way in which societies remember .… [These practices are] always embedded in place and inevitably raise important questions about the struggle of various groups to define the centre of urban politics and public life’ (2004, 350). The majority of scholarship on the relationship between place and memory focuses on more formal and easily identifiable memory landscapes, such as memorials, monuments, and sites dedicated to victims, such as Villa Grimaldi in Santiago, Chile, and the Parque de la Paz in Buenos Aires, Argentina (see CITE.). As James Young has argued in the context of the Holocaust, the most basic function of memorials is to ‘create shared spaces that lend a common spatial frame to otherwise disparate experiences and understanding … monuments propagate the illusion of common memory’ – a function of monuments that, he notes, ‘is clear most of all to the governments themselves’ (Citation1993, 6). Likewise, Jens Andermann notes that in the debates on postdictatorial memory in the Southern Cone the role of landscape is understudied in comparison to the more familiar models of commemoration, such as archives, museums, and monuments, and he advocates thinking about landscape as a ‘critical interruption of monumental re-inscriptions and emplacements,’ and as ‘spaces of itinerance with a potentiality for moving beyond the temporality of trauma or at least of rethinking the latter in terms of present political practices’ (Citation2012, 165).
19. For a more developed theorization of trauma, see Cathy Caruth’s Trauma: Explorations in Memory.