Kevin Ramirez

My dissertation examines the history of Indigenous communities in western El Salvador throughout the twentieth century, challenging the longstanding narrative that they disappeared following La Matanza (The Massacre) of 1932. On January 22, 1932, Indigenous people and communist sympathizers in western El Salvador rose against the authoritarian regime of General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez in response to decades of exploitation and worsening economic conditions during the Great Depression. The government's violent suppression of the uprising resulted in the massacre of as many as 10,000 Indigenous people and peasants, a bloody episode that became central to the construction of El Salvador's national narrative. By tracing the experiences of Indigenous communities from the aftermath of La Matanza through the Salvadoran Civil War (1980–1992), my dissertation demonstrates that, despite sustained state violence, discrimination, and cultural erasure, Indigenous people continued to organize, preserve their cultural practices, and shape the country's social and political history. In doing so, the dissertation challenges the enduring "myth of mestizaje" (national unity through race mixture) that has portrayed El Salvador as a homogenous mestizo nation and rendered Indigenous communities largely invisible in both public memory and historical scholarship.

Drawing on critical readings of state and institutional archives alongside oral histories collected during Fulbright-supported fieldwork in El Salvador, the dissertation examines how power has shaped both the historical record and the writing of Salvadoran history. I analyze archives not only as repositories of information but also as sites where political power determines what is remembered and what is silenced. Oral histories provide a crucial counterpoint by centering Indigenous memory and lived experience, allowing me to reconstruct histories that were omitted from official narratives. Ultimately, the dissertation argues that Indigenous communities in western El Salvador, particularly in Sonsonate, persisted across generations of political violence—from La Matanza to the civil war—and that their experiences fundamentally reshape our understanding of state formation, memory, and Indigenous survival in modern El Salvador.