Yo Canto a Mi Pueblo: Salvadoran Migration, Activism, and Diaspora in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1900-1992

Abstract

“Yo canto a mi pueblo” demonstrates how migration experiences and United States intervention in Central America (both real and imagined) generated the ideological, political, and cultural material from which Salvadorans drew to imagine and reimagine hemispheric identities. At the same time, the culture and politics these Salvadorans created and participated in were directly informed by their experiences as refugees who engaged with successive asylum regimes in the United States and Mexico. As a result, the Salvadorans who arrived during the 1980s are members of what I call the “refugee generation.” Not every Salvadoran who arrived claimed they were a refugee, nor were they recognized as such by the U.S. government. The legal, social, and political context of refugeedom, however, informed understandings of their migration and arrival. The city of San Francisco first became part of the fabric of Salvadoran social and cultural life as a hub for investment in coffee cultivation, transport, and processing. These early, primarily affluent, migrants envisioned hemispheric capitalism as the key to their future success. They reasoned that business ties with San Franciscan industries would provide the resources to implement unfettered capitalism in El Salvador. From the 1940s to 1970s, a subsequent generation of Salvadoran migrants from working-class backgrounds came to dominate the Salvadoran community in San Francisco. These Salvadoran transmigrants—including many who had come of age amid racial justice movements of the 1960s—became a vital means of survival for the Salvadoran left and its revolutionary nation-building project when repression in El Salvador reached its apogee at the end of the 1970s. As a growing number of Salvadorans fled violent conditions, a great many embarked on a perilous trek toward San Francisco. In Mexico, state archives and oral histories reveal violence and human rights abuses as they attempted to navigate their way through the country, highlighting the tension in Mexican policy between expressed sympathy for political asylees and commitment to human rights. After crossing the U.S. border, Salvadorans were met with asylum denial and long-term detainment. They were among the key groups through which immigration authorities came to criminalize asylum-seekers. Salvadoran migration generated border “crises” because they headed to San Francisco rather than remain in agricultural communities as farm laborers, and they were prepared to make asylum claims. The existing strategies of racialization and policing developed over decades in the context of Mexican migration were put to the test. This dissertation demonstrates how the practices and policies used against Salvadoran migrants laid the foundations of the present-day binational migration control system. In the face of this criminalization, established Salvadoran San Franciscans, new arrivals, and their allies founded ethnic organizations and worked with religious organizations to provide refuge and relief for the Salvadorans who arrived daily throughout the 1980s. For movement leaders, refugee subjectivities became central to articulating and furthering the movement’s goals of national liberation and creating a new democratic society. While working towards these goals, Salvadoran activists helped create filters for who was a “good” refugee and who was a “bad” refugee. Through public testimonies and asylum hearings, Salvadorans engaged in strategic performativity to access the social, political, and legal resources denied to them by the United States government officials who reasoned they were not in the country for humanitarian reasons but because of economic reasons