Category: El Testimonio
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Finding My Latino Roots in a War Zone
Michelle and I flew into Nicaragua in the fall of 1985, a country that gringos weren’t supposed to visit. Ronald Reagan was at war with the country. The Nicaraguans had run Somoza out of the country, the bloody dictator whom the United States had propped up for decades. The Sandinistas were now in charge. And…
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El Testimonio, capítulo 1: El Nacimiento del Pocho
¡El primer podcast en español! (But, like any Salvadoran party, everyone is welcome) Aquí hablo de la vida del pocho–que significa, una fruta podrida, y un Latino que no sabe nada de su cultura, que no habla español, que está lejos de sus raíces. Pero, este pocho decidió, en su juventud, meterse en la cultura salvadoreña para…
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A Check-Up at the Home Asylum
It’s now been two months since my psyche broke with reality, on Christmas morning. I started feeling better about three, four weeks ago; at least, I started functioning again. My family and I know this pattern all too well, one that began when I turned seventeen, almost forty years ago. In my first journal, in…
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Surviving Madness, Salvadoran-Style
Last week I wrote about my Uncle Paco, who had played a big role in me finding my Salvadoran roots. He helped me see that I was a guanaco (the nickname for Salvadorans), and in doing so–though he didn’t know this–he helped keep me alive. Three years after meeting him, Michelle and I, newly-married, moved…
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Gracias, México, for Saving My Salvadoran Soul
Once my Uncle Paco–the pain-in-the-ass Salvadoran revolutionary in exile in Mexico–saw how much books meant to me, he backed off. After I shook the novel Cien años de soledad in his face and swore I’d read it until I understood it, I holed up in his guest bedroom and started on the first paragraph, with a…