Emotional histories: A historiography of resistances in Chalatenango, El Salvador

Abstract

Pearce explores the idea of a “historiography of resistances” based on Walter Benjamin’s Concept of History. It recounts a process of building history from memory between the historian and the peasant subjects in Chalatenango, El Salvador. Unable to read or write their own history, these peasants are often invisibilized as the “peasant base” of the guerilla insurgency in the 12-year Salvadoran civil war between 1980 and 1992. However, they were able to build their own form of self-government in the midst of savage violences. They are an example of infinite uncounted and discounted memories of resistance in Latin America, sources of contingent agency for political and social change, but “fleeting moments” which are lost to history if historians do not act.