On May Day of this year, images from MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, the heart of Salvadoran America, flashed across millions of TV screens. It was not a pretty sight. At the culmination of a rally commemorating last year’s immigrants’ rights marches, phalanxes of LAPD officers fired dozens of rubber bullets and used their nightsticks on a crowd that included grandmothers and babies. I watched the coverage and sighed. Little Central America never gets a break, either on the streets or in the media.
Some 15 years after the end of the civil war in El Salvador, most Americans still think of Salvadorans as either victims or perpetrators of violence. During the conflict, terror-inducing U.S.-backed death squads loomed large in our imagination. Today, the Salvadoran figure in the American media is the transnational gangbanger, as in the representation of the Mara Salvatrucha, the “most dangerous gang in the world,” in Lisa Ling’s recent National Geographic Channel “documentary.”
¡Ay, El Salvador! You deserve a great sad Mexican song that says ¡Ay, El Salvador! (You see, I am half Salvadoran, but I am also half Mexican; so I can patronize both peoples.) But El Salvador doesn’t really need anyone to speak for it. It is renowned in Latin America for its literature, in particular its poetry. Roque Dalton, the national bard, is revered for his exploits both on the page and off. (He survived prison, exile, and crude Marxist training only to be assassinated by leftist comrades a few years before the civil war broke out.)
So I will write you of Salvadorans not merely as war babies or gangbangers or revolutionaries stuck with a bad 1980s sound track and even worse haircuts. I will write you of how, in spite of conquistadores and fascists and U.S.-backed death squads in El Salvador, and of patronizing liberals and cutthroat conservatives and crooked cops in America, Salvadorans have resisted, have survived, and have established themselves in the heart of most of our cities and even in small towns—and especially in my hometown, the new-immigrant Mecca, the city led by a beaming, twinkly-eyed son of immigrants, the brown town of Los Angeles.
And I must emphasize just how brown this town is now. The 2005 Census estimate shows the city’s Hispanic population at 49 percent, and demographers agree that the plurality is now a majority, the official designation forthcoming in 2010. There are more than 600,000 Central Americans in Los Angeles County, the majority from El Salvador, a decidedly minority population relative to Mexicans, but a strong presence nonetheless in immigrant-heavy Southern California. There are more than one and a quarter million Salvadorans spread throughout the country; most arrived during the civil war, but they have continued to come.
With their numbers and urban energy, Salvadorans (along with their Guatemalan, Honduran, and Nicaraguan counterparts) are an integral part of the demographic revolution that has remade Los Angeles in the last generation. I grew up in a city that was utterly Anglo and whose rules were brutally enforced by a police department that brilliantly used the cover of the antiseptic image promoted by TV fantasies like Dragnet. (Realtors literally referred to Los Angeles as the “whitest” city in America, less than ten decades after the Mexican-American War and its aftermath of ethnic purging.) Although the LAPD can act as if we’re still in the mid-20th century—as the May Day debacle underscored—that city no longer exists. History has come full circle, moved by people on the move.
MacArthur Park was the gateway for the great influx of refugees in the early 1980s, a Los Angeles version of New York’s Lower East Side, with old brick-and-fire-escape tenements and a population density that, by the end of the decade, actually surpassed that of Manhattan. I was in my early twenties when the refugees began arriving, a young writer looking for a thematic home. I’d grown up middle-class, in rather bizarre cultural circumstances: the aforementioned Mexican-Salvadoran background set in the WASP city, an experience of far too many contradictions—those between Mexican and Salvadoran being just one of them. (Salvadorans resent Mexicans for the barbaric treatment Salvadorans receive as they pass through Mexico en route to the States; Mexicans tend to see all Central Americans as hicks.) In any event, punk rock was in the air (the Clash had recently released Sandinista!), and my yearnings found a place among the exiled militants and working-class heroes who were transforming MacArthur Park into Little Central America. I imbibed and imitated Roque Dalton’s revolutionary verse (“Poetry, like bread, is for everyone &”), declaiming at solidarity events and proselytizing crowds of bleeding-heart gringos. Ronald Reagan was right: The Communist hordes were at the gates; we’d even infiltrated Hollywood and gotten Oliver Stone to make a propaganda film. It was a very melodramatic, cold-war affair, and a very sexy one. The passion of meetings and demonstrations spilled over into bedrooms, and it was suddenly cool for crunchy tall blonde American girls to have short, indigenous-looking boyfriends with scruffy Che beards. The children that resulted from these unions—some of which lasted and some of which didn’t—are coming of age today. They are sandy-haired and cinnamon-skinned. They, too, are children of war.
In those early years, the focus was on the old country. The revolutionaries fervently believed they would soon return home, to a new El Salvador of redistributed wealth and of literacy campaigns for campesinos—of poetry for everyone. I, the Salvadoran-Mexican-American, dreamed I’d lead workshops on coffee plantations transformed into cooperatives. But Salvadorans increasingly began to have an impact on the politics and culture of their adopted home, including through the Justice for Janitors campaign (itself given the Hollywood treatment in Bread and Roses, starring Adrien Brody).
History was on fast-forward back then. Justice for Janitors won widespread sympathy and its union contract. A peace treaty was signed in El Salvador. Only a few weeks later, the war resurfaced in Los Angeles, as the flames of the Rodney King riots erupted around MacArthur Park. The violence had quickly spread from African-American neighborhoods to the immigrant barrios, where there was also terrible tension with a police force every bit as thuggish as the gangs it was meant to subdue. The conflagration burned with it all illusions, including the bridge between past and present—between homeland and adopted home. It was the Salvadorans’ baptism by fire. They had partaken of immigrant America’s most cherished traditions. They had formed unions. And gangs; they were running contraband between old country and new. And they were navigating and negotiating between the swirling signs of culture and economy: tastes in music, clothes, and food shifting, language accreting, demographics expanding.
From MacArthur Park, the Salvadorans moved to the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys; from Los Angeles, they moved to Orange and Riverside and San Bernardino counties—the classic American journey from inner city to suburb. An uncle who lived under the landing path of jets at LAX now had a two-story stucco 30 miles east in Rowland Heights, among Chinese immigrants who had undertaken the same pilgrimage before him. A cousin learned the language of New Age and offered a massage-and-counseling combo to refugees, who then came to understand the concepts of trauma and stress.
Others made do by keeping the old-world palate satisfied—opening pupuserías, restaurants featuring the pupusa, the Salvadoran national dish, everywhere paisanos either lived or passed through on their way to and from work. The grilled disks of masa harina stuffed with combinations of cheese, chicharrón (pork rind), loroco flower buds, black beans, and more adventurous fillings (mushrooms, asparagus, squash, even shrimp) had accompanied Salvadorans from the homeland, and these, too, had been transformed by the journey. In El Salvador, the pupusa tends toward a modest diameter and thickness, say four inches by a quarter inch. In bigger-and-better America they began to grow, approaching the size of IHOP pancakes, and the richer cheeses tended to ooze grease through the masa, something unthinkable and undesirable back home.
The only pupusería I remember from my childhood is the long-gone pioneer Café El Salvador, in the industrial flats near downtown, but the explosion of Little Central America and the subsequent out-migration sowed literally hundreds of them across Southern California and in cities (Dallas; Houston; Chicago; Minneapolis–St. Paul; San Francisco; Washington, D.C.; Miami; New York) with significant Salvadoran populations throughout the country.
It’s difficult to pinpoint the moment when the pupusa began to seriously cross over onto the gringo palate in Los Angeles, but it was surely during the optimistic, multiculti days of the 1990s, and in the mixed neighborhoods I grew up in and around—Echo Park, Silver Lake, Atwater, places that hold the last remnants of old Victorians, Craftsmans, and mid-century moderns. My father’s family (the Mexican side) arrived in the area in the late 1930s with my grandparents, who opened a Mexican restaurant that fared relatively well until grandfather’s bad heart forced it to close. By the time Mexican immigrants and Central American refugees settled on the south side of Sunset Boulevard (traditionally more working-class than the north side), the area had already seen several waves of migrants, including European expatriates and gay men. Silver Lake, especially, became something of an East Side version of gay-liberated West Hollywood until the 1980s and early 1990s, when AIDS wiped out the better part of a generation. The resulting vacuum was filled largely by Latin American immigrants—among them, a considerable number of Salvadorans—until the late ’90s, when a new phase of gentrification began in earnest. Today, there are about half a dozen pupuserías along Sunset Boulevard through Echo Park and Silver Lake, all of them ma-and-pa operations that have thus far survived rent increases and hipster invasions.
At Pupusería La Fé, in Echo Park, owner Elsy Reyes says her clientele includes a steady stream of “Americanos.” They are especially fond of her “jugos naturales” (of which I am urged to try number 7, a celery-orange-pineapple-carrot combo whose flavors tingle and tangle my tongue). And they order pupusas, of course, mostly the vegetarian variety of beans and cheese, or cheese and loroco flower.
“They know us better now,” Reyes says, peeking out from under her “Relax, God Is in Control” baseball cap—like many Salvadorans, she is an evangelical Christian. “They know us for the good things now, not just the bad.”
The irony is that it is precisely the “Americano” clientele that’s left Reyes and other immigrant store owners in a precarious situation. The immigrants are part of the diversity factor that attracted young “alternative” types back to central city areas abandoned by whites a generation ago, and they’re the most vulnerable to unscrupulous landlords and the speculation that’s rampant in today’s real-estate market. Several storefronts in the area have changed hands already—typically from immigrant-owned shops to white-owned hipster boutiques, or from old-school gay clubs to straight.
Elsy Reyes herself will have to move out of her Echo Park location within weeks, since the owners, Mexicans who live south of the border, sold to Mexicans of means playing the real-estate roulette wheel on this side. Yet another wrinkle to the tale of urban neighborhoods “in transition”: brown-on-brown gentrification.
For now, the pupusa remains in Echo Park and Silver Lake, alongside the gelato joints and the vintage-clothing shops, next to the French bistros and the Mexican places (and their cheesier north-of-the-border variants, Mexican-American, or “Tex-Mex,” restaurants). The pupusa is nowhere near as well known as the taco, and it may never be. They do share some history, though, these very “American” (in the indigenous, continental sense) foods, which predate contact between the Old World and the New. They both wrap masa around a portion of meat or cheese or beans or vegetables, turning the corn into a kind of edible utensil (in the case of the pupusa, you tear off a chunk and scoop up some encurtido, slightly pickled cabbage and carrot sometimes enlivened with chile). But the pupusa may have a symbolic edge. It has traveled farther. It has gone through more to get here. It is, like the pilgrims who brought it, a survivor.
When I began to write this piece, it had been quite some time since I’d focused on my “Salvadoran” side. Since the end of the war, I’d explored other realms that called to me, especially Mexico and the borderlands and, more broadly, the desert lands of the American West. I lived away from Los Angeles for nearly a decade and had only brief encounters with El Salvador during that time: a lonely pupusería in Albuquerque; hearing my aunt’s voice on the phone long-distance from Guatemala. A few months ago, I returned to my hometown and the circuit was restored. You can’t live in Los Angeles and not have contact with Salvadorans in some way—through the labor economy, through music or food, through the political impact their presence has had on the city.
The phone rang in my office one day while I was writing, and I heard the voice of a comrade from the solidarity days, a Salvadoran painter who was always there to offer a sketch for an event flyer. He rendered his subjects simply and clearly. He said that he’d heard I was back in town, and would I like to come to a celebration of the life and work of Roque Dalton that was happening in a few days? There would be poetry and music, he said, and plenty of pupusas.
Address Book
El Buen Gusto Restaurant 3140 Glendale Blvd. (323-953-9032). El Nuevo Rincón 1811 W. 7th St. (213-989-0559). Mi Querido Pulgarcito 2500 W. Pico Blvd. (213-388-6635). Pupusería La Fé 2827 W. Sunset Blvd. (323-912-1909).