Re/membering the Nation: Gaps and Reckoning within Biographical Accounts of Salvadoran Émigrés

In the aftermath of the 1980–1992 Salvadoran civil war, biography and history have become linked, as the Salvadoran state reclaims its dispersed citizenry, and as Salvadorans who emigrated as young children reclaim their own pasts. Such reclaimings compel biographies as part of state neoliberal financial strategies that encourage remitting, but also as collective history projects that challenge injustice. Juxtaposing state narratives, in which war and violence are often elided, with immigrant youths’ accounts, which seek accountability, reveals how biographies narrate yet disrupt neoliberal notions of the self.