Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.insight From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: Ready for Healing, in New Home and Old Date: Mon, 23 Nov 92 11:35:36 EST Message-ID: \HD Ready for Healing, in New Home and Old \BY Christopher Caldwell \CR INSIGHT SUMMARY: El Salvador's civil war has brought a flood of refugees to the U.S. But the war's other effects on America are debatable: Some say the new immigrants brought violence here, others say the crucible for conflict was already in place, while still others say Salvadorans have gotten a bad rap. But there is no debating that here and in the homeland, Salvadorans are tired of the killing. TEXT: Sitting in El Papaturro, a Salvadoran restaurant in Los Angeles's Pico-Union district, Jorge Rivera is glad to talk about his native El Salvador. Though he arrived in the U.S. in 1968 at age 18 ("I felt like the only Salvadoran here"), he has always been an observer of Central American politics. Till now. He's tired of politics and of El Salvador's decade-long civil war, as are most of his countrymen - and many of those countrymen appear to be in Los Angeles, now the city with the second-largest Salvadoran population in the world. Rivera is ambivalent. He's planning to move back to El Salvador in two or three years - to be able to visit his parents. And for that very reason he is also committed to getting U.S. citizenship - so he can visit his kids, who will stay in the U.S. His half-Mexican son Jorge, who goes by George, is a U.S. citizen and a perfect example of a Latin-American American: politically aware, cheerily macho, fluent in Spanish and eloquent in English, a sports fan, a fan of ska music and not ambivalent at all about his feelings for the United States: "I love El Salvador, but my roots are, like, here. I was born here. I went to school here. I like it there, but you know, it's a different life. I don't think I could adjust." Jorge and George like to talk about the fact that Salvadorans in the United States are still living in a wartime society. "You've got a good example right now," says George. "One of the most dangerous gangs in Pico-Union today, and the one that kills the most, is MS." MS is legendary: La Mara Salvatrucha, which translates loosely as the Salvadoran Mob, is a fearless, heavily armed gang of Salvadoran immigrants in their late teens who went to war as children. "And it doesn't matter whether from the left or the right," says Jorge. "The two sides have come together north of the border." "Even the police are afraid of them," George continues. "They've killed before." "They've got the energy to get here," says Jorge, "and when they get here, they don't know what to do. They sell drugs and [things] like that. They've been through war and they don't care." Jorge sees the Salvadoran war as having created social problems that are going to persist in the United States for a long time to come. "You have cruel realities. For 14 years they've had a curfew in El Salvador from 6 o'clock at night until 6 o'clock in the morning. Now if you were unemployed there and came here to find work and found no one to give you a hand, you'd probably end up in prostitution or drug-selling. The worst of El Salvador is in Los Angeles. You go down there at Pico and Union in the nighttime - they rip your ass off." Further cause for alarm came in May, when the Los Angeles riots spread quickly from black South Central into the heavily Salvadoran Pico-Union area. Fifty-one percent of those arrested were Latinos, and the word quickly spread that most were from Central America. Some observers noted with irony the efforts of "Hispanic" politicians - who previously had represented themselves as leaders of a large, undifferentiated "community" of Spanish speakers - to draw distinctions for the first time between different groups, pointing out that Mexicans are not Salvadorans, who are not Puerto Ricans, who are not Cubans, etc. Such ethnic distinctions, which are real enough, had earlier been papered over by ethnic power brokers eager to maximize their political clout. Frank Acosta, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles, thinks Salvadoran immigrants were made the scapegoats of the riots and puts much of the responsibility on the established Latino interest groups. "One of the things that became glaringly obvious in light of the insurrection was that the mainstream Mexican-American organizations had lost touch with their immigrant communities," he says. A close examination of the arrest figures two months after the riot put the Salvadoran community in a less damaging light and backed up Acosta's claim that it had received a bum rap. Most of the "deportable riot aliens" were Mexicans, while others came from as far afield as Armenia, Trinidad, Russia, Vietnam or Italy. Only 108 of the 1,240 undocumented aliens arrested - or 8.7 percent - were Salvadoran. Mauricio Alarcon, director of the Washington-based Salvadorans United for Better Education, claims that the breeding ground for Salvadoran violence was Los Angeles's gang culture, not El Salvador's civil war. "You'll find any immigrant population with a large percentage of undocumenteds wants to blend in," says Alarcon, "and will mimic the community around it. There are Salvadoran gangs in cities where gangs are common and none in cities where they're not. Can you name a Salvadoran gang in Washington?" Metropolitan Washington has the second-largest concentration of Salvadorans in the U.S. In the space of a decade, Salvadorans have gone from political exiles to the newest big immigrant group on the American urban landscape. "We've entered a new phase as immigrants," says Alarcon. "Even those of us who came with mixed feelings know we're going to stay here now. The question now becomes leading a full life as Americans." A 1985 study by the Research Institute of the Central American University in San Salvador found that 71 percent of Salvadorans displaced by the war wished to return home. The institute's follow-up survey a year later found only 41 percent wanted to go back. A recent PBS special on the Salvadoran community was titled Here to Stay. Salvadorans have had a tougher time than many Latin American immigrants in gaining a foothold in the United States. Prior to the 1980s, their numbers were small in this country, so few Salvadorans qualified for working papers under the family reunification provisions of the Immigration Act of 1965. As the country's civil war heated up in the early 1980s, Salvadorans began fleeing in droves, but found the door of political asylum closed to them because the Reagan administration consistently classified them as "economic" migrants. There was a striking contrast between the reception accorded refugees fleeing the war in El Salvador, which pitted communist guerrillas against a U.S.-allied government, and that given refugees fleeing the war in Nicaragua, which pitted U.S.-allied guerrillas against a communist government. The latter group, like Cubans and others fleeing communism, had great success obtaining immediate residency rights as political refugees. The contrast became a cause celebre. Advocacy groups - from officially nonpartisan refugee groups such as El Rescate and the Central American Refugee Center to the pro-guerrilla Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador - claimed the Reagan administration was victimizing Salvadoran refugees, denying them political asylum only to avoid embarrassing the Salvadoran government, which the U.S. was supporting militarily. More likely, as throughout the history of asylum claims, Salvadorans were not so much victimized as subjected to a strict interpretation of the law. Refugee groups with greater clout in Washington typically have succeeded in getting special exceptions carved out for them. As did the Salvadorans, in the end. Though never acquiring the status of political refugees, they were given 18 months' "temporary protected status" under a bill sponsored by Rep. Joe Moakley, a Massachusetts Democrat, and Sen. Dennis DeConcini, an Arizona Democrat. Enacted as part of the Immigration Act of 1990, the temporary protection was extended another 12 months by the Bush administration and is due to expire in June. An unintended side effect of this law was to provide at least one hard number about the Salvadoran population in this country, which is otherwise measured by rampant guessing. The Immigration and Naturalization Service received 188,000 applications for temporary protected status and assumes that about 75 percent of Salvadorans eligible paid the fee and applied for the status. Working from its figures of applicants, border apprehensions and those who claimed amnesty under the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, the INS estimates that in November 1990 there were 350,000 to 400,000 Salvadorans in the United States, including 181,000 to 206,900 in Los Angeles; 20,300 to 23,200 in metropolitan Washington; 17,700 to 20,300 in New York; and 2,900 to 3,300 in metropolitan Boston. For Oscar Chacon, executive director of Centro Presente in Cambridge, Mass., which provides legal services and refugee assistance, the Boston figure is so low as to be refutable with his own eyes. "I've personally had contact with at least 3,200 Salvadorans in the area," he says, putting the Salvadoran population of metropolitan Boston in the 20,000 to 30,000 range. Higher estimates exist for the Washington population as well: In 1990 the D.C. Latino newspaper El Mundo set the area's Salvadoran population at 170,000, by a "conservative estimate." As for the national numbers, Chacon says: "I'll tell you that's way low. The INS counts basically anyone they have files on - through amnesty programs, arrests and border interdictions. That misses a lot. A lot of people never have any contact with them - for obvious reasons. Unfortunately, the experience of Salvadorans - like that of any other undocumented population - is that the INS is the enemy. I think 75 percent is a ridiculously optimistic number for applying for amnesty." Chacon's guess is 20 percent. Robert Warren, director of the INS's statistical division, defends his agency's figures, saying, "There are a lot of built-in incentives to increase these numbers." Politicians want more residents for their districts, interest groups want to claim a larger following, journalists want to feel their story is a big one. "Any time you see really high numbers," says Warren, "go back to the methodology." The most methodologically sophisticated survey to offer the higher numbers was done by demographer Segundo Montes Mozo, one of six Jesuit priests murdered by rogue army units at Catholic University in San Salvador during the big November 1989 offensive by guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front. In 1988, in conjunction with the Hemispheric Migration Project at Georgetown University's Center for Immigration Policy and Refugee Assistance, Montes did two family-by-family studies in El Salvador to calculate the number of relatives living in the United States and checked his numbers against a study done among Salvadorans living in Washington. Montes's work, available in typescript through U.S. human rights and refugee organizations, gives as detailed a picture as exists of Salvadorans in the United States, particularly in Washington, and is full of fascinating facts. For example, the core around which Washington's Salvadoran community was built is Intipuca, a southeastern town that is among the most conservative (and pro-army) in El Salvador. While only 5,000 people live in Intipuca, 15,000 intipuquenos live in Washington, according to Montes. Montes's studies also show Salvadoran immigrants to be slightly better educated than the Salvadoran population as a whole. The average Salvadoran immigrant comes with 8.7 years of education, compared with the national average of less than six years - but even this figure puts Salvadorans at the bottom of the educational heap in the U.S., along with immigrants from Mexico. Thirty-eight percent of Salvadorans are illiterate, according to a survey done by the Salvadoran Ministry of Education. Educating Salvadoran arrivals thus presents unusual challenges. According to Barbara Acosta, who taught bilingual classes until two years ago at a 45 percent Latino school in Washington's Mount Pleasant neighborhood, Bell Multicultural High School, "Many of the children we worked with in the D.C. public school system were coming in with no schooling, were unaccustomed to having books around. So you start where the children are. "Campesino culture has much of value to the teacher; we're not teaching empty vessels," says Acosta, who wrote her master's thesis on Salvadorans in the classroom and has cofounded a university in the rural district of Chalatenango. Ironically, the campesino culture is itself rigidly opposed to the sort of experimental, multicultural education often espoused by the teachers of immigrants. "Education is tied up with poverty and politics," Acosta says. "Even if the children haven't been to school, they bring expectations that are culturally bound - that academic learning will be rote, that the teacher will be authoritarian. "In my opinion," Acosta adds, "Salvadoran education has a lot of problems. There's a lot of emphasis on values. Education doesn't mean the same thing to a Salvadoran; when you say someone is bien educado, you're talking about a number of nonacademic things, social things." Salvadorans have excellent academic records when their talents are fostered. Bell Multicultural sends 29 percent of its students on to college, near the national average. But Alarcon, whose work at Salvadorans United for Better Education centers to a large extent on getting kids into college, sees cultural factors getting in the way of high educational attainment. El Salvador, with the most urbanized population in Latin America crammed into an area the size of Massachusetts, has a reputation universal among Central Americans for producing the region's hardest workers. Those sympathetic to the Salvadorans have called them natural capitalists trapped in a feudal economy. But Alarcon thinks some of their hard-earned gains are being misspent. "The parents had to act as a transitional generation, which was vital. But they have to realize that their children are Americans now. They can't use all their money for visits back, or for sending home in the form of remittances." This money sent back by immigrants is having an enormous economic impact on the old country. At $920 million a year, according to El Salvador's Central Reserve Bank, remittances constitute the country's largest source of foreign exchange earnings, far higher than the income from coffee exports, the country's only significant cash crop since the destruction of 71 percent of its southeastern cotton-growing land during the civil war. The average immigrant sends $117 a month to his relatives at home, according to a 1987 survey by Montes. Chacon of Centro Presente thinks the figure is nearly right on the money: He estimates it at $113. In a country whose per capita income is $854 a year, according to State Department statistics, the remittances must be a godsend. "Yes and no," says a skeptical Chacon. "In the immediate term, they're wonderful. They're money. Many families depend entirely on the checks they get from their relatives in the United States. "But the remittances have also produced a fear of challenging, a passivity, a complacency. People have lost their concern for human rights. Although the way of life has not changed substantially in Salvador in the last 10 years, people now seem less willing to do anything about it than they were then. So the government is not guaranteeing employment. And the people have no jobs, but they have money to spend. They sit around. I've heard that coffee growers are having trouble getting anyone to pick coffee. They'd rather just collect a check." When confronted with the resemblance of his arguments to those of American conservatives describing welfare dependency, Chacon only raises his eyebrows and nods. Although he wouldn't describe himself as a conservative, he embodies the complicated interplay between American and Salvadoran political styles. Chacon, for example, helps to run a food co-op, Cooperativa El Progreso, a half-mile east of Harvard Square. Is this project influenced by Cambridge, which seems to have a co-op on every corner? "Yes, our ability to do it has something to do with the receptivity of the community to cooperatives, and the cooperation we receive is certainly useful, but the cooperative was our idea, and it basically runs the way a cooperative in El Salvador would run." Will this political interplay lead to a strong Salvadoran role in U.S. urban politics? Political consultant Rick Swartz of Rick Swartz and Associates in Washington, once a prominent member of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and since 1982 active in Salvadoran immigration issues, was instrumental in building coalitions to secure the passage of the Moakley/DeConcini bill and knows as well as anybody how to build political clout from the grass roots. Asked whether Washington's large Salvadoran population could take a leadership role following the model of Cubans in Miami and Mexicans in Los Angeles, Swartz says: "There's a big difference. A significant majority of Salvadorans came undocumented. A good portion remain undocumented. Temporary protected status ends next June. They're nonvoters, noncitizens. The Miami population came with full-blown refugee status - the Salvadorans are in legal limbo." Lack of political clout would go a long way toward explaining why Washington's Salvadorans saw their reputation badly tarnished by three nights of rioting in the heavily Latino Mount Pleasant neighborhood in May 1991. Before that, Washington's Salvadorans had not had the violent reputation of those in Los Angeles, although some police expressed concern that La Mara Salvatrucha-style gangs could emerge. The Mount Pleasant disturbances followed an afternoon incident in which a black policewoman shot a Salvadoran man during a Cinco de Mayo celebration, allegedly after the man pulled a knife when she tried to arrest him for drinking in public. Although the local media studiously ignored the racial composition of the rioters, the Mount Pleasant disturbances are best understood as a Latino protest followed by opportunistic black looting, according to articles by Andrew Sullivan and Jacob Weisberg in the New Republic. Even so, the initial incident reveals a good deal about the Salvadoran temperament, according to Mauricio Alarcon. "What outraged the people who were gathered around watching this guy bleed on the sidewalk was the unfairness of it, the injustice," he says. "Regardless of the merits, he was handcuffed when the policewoman shot him. That's not a fair fight. "For North Americans," Alarcon says, "the leading ideal is freedom. For us, it is justice. That may come from the fact that we've had so little of it." It may take generations for the recriminations from El Salvador's civil war to end, but by the accounts of the immigrants themselves partisan violence has not been transplanted to U.S. soil. They attribute that theory to American social workers and politicians, who sometimes claim that gangs like La Mara Salvatrucha are angry at U.S. government foreign policy. "That's nonsense," George Rivera shoots back. "It's very unlikely." His father says, "Yeah, a lot of these people were just afraid of dying over there. A lot of soldiers just deserted, just like that. What are they gonna do to them? They're gonna get killed. So they come here. It's not that [the gangs] are really politicized. I don't believe that . . . they don't have the leadership for that." "Salvadorans are here because they're tired of the killing," says George, who thinks that army supporters and Farabundo Marti supporters have had no choice but to finally get along once in the United States. "They're just trying to find a life. If you ask them whether they were with the guerrillas or the army, they say, 'I don't care anymore. Whichever one wins. So long as we have something to call our own.' " *****SALVADORANS STRUGGLE FOR AMERICAN DREAM***** Orbelina Umanzor, born in Sonsonate, left El Salvador in 1982, the third brutal year in the Salvadoran civil war. She crossed illegally into Mexico, traveled overland to the border, swam the river into Texas and spent four days hiding in the brush by day and dodging the searchlights of U.S. Border Patrol helicopters after dark. In Houston, she worked for three months baby-sitting two children for $50 a week. "Things are better now," says Umanzor, who spent years doing undocumented housecleaning in Houston and Chicago before moving to Washington, where she gained the "temporary protected status" offered by the Immigration Act of 1990. Now she holds two jobs: cleaning offices five nights a week and cleaning houses three days a week. She lives in a two-bedroom Cape Cod in Falls Church, Va., just inside Washington's Capital Beltway, with her daughters, ages 13, 12 and 8, her brother-in-law and his two children. Killings and the dislocations of fleeing a war zone have made such rump, extended families the norm in the Salvadoran diaspora. Umanzor's friends, the Santos and Martinez families, share a three-bedroom town house in a housing project down the street. It's sparsely furnished - one couch, one settee and a tiny kitchen table (a dozen dinner guests have to be called to eat in shifts of two). The decorations are color photographs of flowers that look cut out of magazines and photographs of relatives and friends, living and dead. Ricardo Santos, a self-described campesino who worked harvesting sugar, coffee and cotton in El Salvador's east-central department of Usulutan, faced tough choices during the war. Although he tried to remain nonpartisan, he was located between two fronts in a five-front war. "I was near Tres Calles," site of major guerrilla offensives and brutal retributions by the army, he says. "To bribe is to live down there, and I wouldn't pay bribes to any of the soldiers, so they drove me off my little bit of land. Then, when the rebels took over, I came back to reclaim it. But they had already set someone up there who was farming it. They said, 'Only those who have fought for the country deserve to own land.' " Santos's plight sounds like that of one of the unfortunates in Voltaire's Candide, but it's a story common to many peasants who have come to the U.S. from the eastern and northern departments, including La Union and Chalatenango. They're inclined to view life as a random and Manichaean contrast between heavenly success and hellish failure. When a person on the street turns out to speak Spanish, it's el maximo; when there's no work by day, it's el minimo. And some members of the Santos and Martinez household have had spectacular ups and downs, even in this country. Edwin Martinez, just out of his teens when he crossed the border into Texas, arrived in the U.S. before the 1989 cutoff date for receiving temporary protected status. He went from Texas to Chicago, where he got a job at a candy company. Six months later, he was diagnosed with leukemia. He then spent five months at the University of Chicago medical center, paid for by company health insurance. Although still limping from chemotherapy, he says he considers himself "100 percent recovered." He's taking two courses in Washington - English by day and office skills by night - that he hopes will make him the first in his family to rise above the typical Salvadoran routine of day labor and break into office work. "We are proud of how hard we work, not of how delicate our hands are," says his mother, Rosa Martinez, a 48-year-old from San Salvador who has worked cleaning houses since she arrived in this country in the late eighties. "Not like the Puerto Ricans. Puerto Ricans ask for help. All we ask for is apoyo." Apoyo - or support - is a word one hears again and again from Salvadorans. For them it means primarily a recognition on the part of the United States that many still risk death if they return ("from specific enemies and from the generalized enemy of war," says Santos). But there's a difference between American and Salvadoran attitudes of what constitutes support. While Rosa would be too proud to accept direct handouts, she thinks government can help in less direct ways. "We could use some help on the rent," she says. Another issue on which a liberal political view seems to be developing among these largely apolitical people involves remittances. Like almost all Salvadoran immigrants, the Umanzors, Santoses and Martinezes do without many luxuries in order to send generous checks to relatives in the home country. They do not seem to regard the money sent as discretionary income, part of which could reasonably be expected to have gone for rent. A common argument raised is that money sent home to relatives is money the U.S. government saves in economic assistance. Of the 20 Salvadoran friends - and one Mexican, his son and one Dominican - who drift in and out of the town house on a Saturday night, none is drinking and none is smoking. No one seems able to afford it. Nor does the Salvadoran merchant who makes a house call with five 10-pound sacks of masa, the cornmeal the women of the house will use to make dozens of the pupusas on which Salvadorans subsist. Pupusas revueltas - thick corn patties stuffed with a dust of grated cheese and finely milled pork and covered with a dollop of cabbage - are a Saturday night delicacy. "It's a new life here, but you keep hearing stories about what's going on at home," says Ricardo Santos. This year's peace agreement between the Salvadoran army and Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front guerrillas "is not worth the paper it's printed on. There are still lots of killings." "But look around," says Santos. "You see poverty, but we have a wealth of optimism in our minds." Is it that the Salvadorans who have made it to the United States were blessed with a greater optimism than those left behind? "No," Santos says sadly. "The other way around: We're the ones who realized it was impossible to carry on." This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM