How to Cite
Abstract
This paper focuses on UK-based cultural expressions of international solidarity with El Salvador either side of the end of the Cold War and El Salvador’s civil war. The article centres on a mural titled Changing the Picture, painted in Greenwich from 1985, which depicts a message of hope for overcoming state repression sponsored by multinational capital and Western powers; and Music for Hope, an ongoing musical education programme beginning in 1996-7 based in the Bajo Lempa, a coastal region of El Salvador, but set up and supported by a British solidarity network. After exploring the political meanings and initiatives of solidarity in the UK during the Salvadoran civil war, we analyse Changing the Picture’s central message of anti-imperialism, the depiction of collective popular struggle and the artwork’s place within the cultural politics of London in the mid-1980s. The paper then examines how the communitarian message of popular democracy present in the mural has been articulated in new cultural forms by Music for Hope, particularly through the latter’s pedagogical, horizontal and prefigurative practice of teaching music to children and adolescents and encouraging the formation of musical groups. As such, this paper foregrounds cultural and artistic practice as a central but underexplored dimension of international solidarity. Highlighting the literature on the shift in political culture, produced by the culmination of the Cold War, from a frame foregrounding revolutionary or political struggle to one centred on trauma, we explore how Changing the Picture and Music for Hope reflect different historical conditions. If the solidarity depicted in Changing the Picture reflected the final years of a period in which the revolutionary horizon was considered possible, Music for Hope emerged at a time that forced the initiative to confront the traumatic legacies of the civil war years. Despite these differences, the article argues that there is far more that connects the two examples, especially their emphasis on community agency. In doing so, we show that artistic expression can not only represent a powerful medium through which solidarity politics are communicated, condensing both local and international contexts in a radical vision of hope, but that cultural action can also structure the participatory practice frequently at the heart of international solidarity politics.
References
Adams, J. (2013) Art Against Dictatorship: Making and Exporting Arpilleras under Pinochet. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Allison, M. E., and Alvarez, A. M. (2012) ‘Unity and Disunity in the FMLN’, Latin American Politics and Society, 54(4), pp. 89–118. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23322102.
Amnesty International (1984) Extrajudicial Executions in El Salvador: Report of an Amnesty International Mission to Examine Post-Mortem and Investigative Procedures in Political Killings 1-6 July 1983. Nottingham: Russell Press.
Amnesty International (1975) Report on Torture. London: Amnesty International Publications.
Arnaiz Quintana, A. (2012) Tierras pagadas a precio de sangre: testimonios y retratos del Bajo Lempa usuluteco, El Salvador, CA. San Salvador: Impresos El Rosario.
Atashroo, H. A. (2018) ‘Weaponising peace: the Greater London Council, cultural policy and “GLC peace year 1983”’, Contemporary British History, 33(2), pp. 170–186. doi: 10.1080/13619462.2018.1519420.
Barba, M. and Martínez, C. (eds.), (1997) De la memoria nace la esperanza. San Salvador: Cooperativa Nueva Vida.
Barba, M. and Martínez, C. (eds.), (1999) Like Gold in the Fire: Voices of Hope from El Salvador: War Exile & Return 1974-1999. Birmingham: Nueva Esperanza Support Group.
Binford, L. (2016) The El Mozote Massacre: Human Rights and Global Implications. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Booth, W.A. (2021) ‘Rethinking Latin America’s Cold War’, The Historical Journal, 64(4), pp. 1128–1150. doi:10.1017/S0018246X20000412.
Byrne, H. (1996) El Salvador’s Civil War: A Study of Revolution. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Cagan, B. and Cagan, S. (1991) This Promised Land, El Salvador. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press.
Crandall, R. (2016) The Salvador Option: The United States in El Salvador, 1977-1992. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dunkerley, J. (1982) The Long War: Dictatorship and Revolution in El Salvador. London: Junction Books.
Fairley, J. (1985) ‘Yolocamba I’ta: The Rebellion and the Song’, Index on Censorship, 14(2), pp. 46-48. https://doi.org/10.1080/03064228508533874
Fassin, D. and Rechtman, R. (2007). An Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Field, T. C., Krepp, S., & Pettinà, V. (Eds.), (2020) Latin America and the Global Cold War. University of North Carolina Press.
Folgarait, L. (1998). Mural Painting and Social Revolution in Mexico 1920-1940: Art of the New Order Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Francis, H. (2012) ‘¡Que se rinda tu madre! Leonel Rugama and Nicaragua's Changing Politics of Memory’. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 21(2), 235-252, DOI: 10.1080/13569325.2012.694812.
Franco, J. (2002) The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin American in the Cold War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Gammage, S. (2007) ‘El Salvador: Despite End to Civil War, Emigration Continues’, Migration Policy Institute, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/el-salvador-despite-end-civil-war-emigration-continues/ [Accessed: 17 November 2023].
Goett, J. and Bran Aragón, F.S. (2021) ‘¡Matria libre y vivir!: Youth Activism and Nicaragua’s 2018 Insurrection’, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 25(4), pp. 532–551.
Goodfriend, H. (2018) ‘El Salvador: Blood and Solidarity’, NACLA Report on the Americas 50(3), pp. 252-257.
Gomez, M. (2003) Human Rights in Cuba, El Salvador and Nicaragua: A Sociological Perspective on Human Rights Abuse. New York: Routledge.
Gould, J. L. (2009) Solidarity under Siege: The Latin American Left, 1968. The American Historical Review, 114(2), pp. 348–375. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30223783.
Graeber, D. (2002) ‘The New Anarchists’, New Left Review, 13, pp. 61-73.
Grimaldi, A., & Gukelberger, S. (2023) ‘Reawakening Cold War Social Movements Through Memory Work and Archival Performance’, Bandung (published online ahead of print), pp. 1-37. https://doi.org/10.1163/21983534-20230003.
Harmer, T. (2014) ‘The Cold War in Latin America’, in Kalinovsky, A. and Daigle, C. (eds.), The Routledge handbook of the Cold War. Abingdon: Routledge.
Hatherley, O. (2020) Red Metropolis: Socialism and the Government of London. London: Repeater Books.
Iber, P. (2015) Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Janssens, J. F. (2020) ‘Stumbling Among Giants: Europe’s Frustrated Solidarity with Guatemala, 1979-1996’ Bulletin of Latin America Research 39(5), pp. 598-613.
Jeffery, L. and Candea, M. (2006) ‘The Politics of Victimhood’, History and Anthropology, 17(4), pp. 287-296. DOI: 10.1080/02757200600914037.
Kenna, C. and Lobb, S. (2019) For Walls with Tongues: An Oral History of Street Murals, 1966-1985. London: Greenwich Mural Workshop.
Landau, S. (1993) The Guerrilla Wars of Central America. New York: St Martin’s Press.
Latin America Bureau, (1979) Violence and Fraud in El Salvador: A Report on Current Political Events in El Salvador. London: LAB.
Leu, L. (2006) ‘Music and National Culture: Pop Music and Resistance in Brazil’, Portuguese Cultural Studies, 0(1), pp. 36-44.
MacDonald, N. (1990) Central America: Options for the Poor: An Oxfam Report. Oxford: Oxford.
Marty, S. (2024) ‘On Weathering: Anti-Imperialist Solidarity Struggles Around the Nicaragua Mural in Berlin After 2018’ Alternautas, 11(1).
McIndoe, E. (2023) British Aid to El Salvador, 1970-2009: Foreign Policy, Humanitarianism, and Solidarity. PhD Thesis, University of Liverpool.
McClintock, M. (1985) The American Connection Volume 1: State Terror and Popular Resistance in El Salvador. London: Zed Books.
McSherry, J. P. (2017) ‘The Political Impact of Chilean New Song in Exile’. Latin American Perspectives, 44(5), pp. 13–29. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44645766.
Menjívar, C. and Gómez Cervantes, A. (2018) ‘El Salvador: Civil War, Natural Disasters, and Gang Violence Drive Migration’, Migration Policy Institute, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/el-salvador-civil-war-natural-disasters-and-gang-violence-drive-migration (Accessed 17 November 2023).
Montoya, A. (2018) The Violence of Democracy: Political Life in Postwar El Salvador. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Music for Hope (no date). Music for Hope – Our Story [Online]. Available at: https://musicforhope.org.uk/music-for-hope-our-story/ (Accessed: 1 November 2023).
Music for Hope (2013). Music for Hope 01: Origins [Online]. Available at: https://musicforhope.org.uk/mfh-the-story-so-far/ (Accessed: 5 December 2023).
Music for Hope (2013). Music for Hope 02: Origins to the Present [Online]. Available at: https://musicforhope.org.uk/mfh-the-story-so-far/ (Accessed: 5 December 2023).
Music for Hope (2013). Music for Hope 03: Origins to the Present Part 2 (Formation and Prevention) [Online]. Available at: https://musicforhope.org.uk/mfh-the-story-so-far/ (Accessed: 5 December 2023).
Negroponte, D. (2012) Seeking Peace in El Salvador: The Struggle to Reconstruct a Nation at the End of the Cold War. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
O’Sullivan, K. (2021) ‘The Turn to Human Rights, El Salvador, 1979 – 1984’ in O’Sullivan, K. (ed.), The NGO Moment: The Globalisation of Compassion from Biafra to Live Aid. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 137-155.
Power, M. and Charlip, J. A. (2009) ‘Introduction: On Solidarity’, Latin American Perspectives 36(6), pp. 3-9.
Rancière, J. (2013) The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. London: Bloomsbury.
Randall, M. (2017) Exporting Revolution: Cuba’s Global Solidarity. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Rocha et al. (2023): Debunking the Myth of Nicaraguan Exceptionalism: Crime, Drugs and the Political Economy of Violence in a ‘Narco-state’ Journal of Latin American Studies, 55(3)
Rochfort, D. (1993) Orozco Rivera Siqueiros, Mexican Muralists. London: Lawrence King.
Rolston, B. (2011) ‘¡Hasta la victoria!: Murals and Resistance in Santiago, Chile’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 18, pp. 113-137.
Serafini, P. (2018) Performance Action: The Politics of Art Activism. Abingdon: Routledge.
Sitrin, Marina (2006) Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina. Oakland, CA and Edinburgh: AK Press.
Smith, D. (1994) ‘Signs of Resistance, Voices of Dissent: The Political Graffiti of El Salvador’, Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, 13(1), pp. 154-159. doi: https://doi.org/10.17077/2168-569X.1184.
Stanley, W. (1996) The Protection Racket State: Elite Politics, Military Extortion, and Civil War in El Salvador. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Stites Mor, J. (2013) Human Rights and Transnational Solidarity in Cold War Latin America. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press.
Todd, M. (2010) Beyond Displacement: Campesinos, Refugees, and Collective Action in the Salvadoran Civil War. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Todd, M. (2017) ‘“We Were Part of the Revolutionary Movement There”: Wisconsin Peace Progressives and Solidarity with El Salvador in the Reagan Era’, in Journal of Civil and Human Rights, 3(1), pp. 1-56.
Guardado Torrez, C. and Moodie, E. (2020) ‘“La línea, los Indignados”, and the Post‐Postwar Generation in El Salvador’, The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 25(4)
Traverso, E. (2016) Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History and Memory. New York: Columbia University Press.
van Ommen, E. (2023) Nicaragua Must Survive: Sandinista Revolutionary Diplomacy in the Global Cold War. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Wetherell, S. (2013) ‘Painting the Crisis: Community Arts and the Search for the “Ordinary” in 1970s and ’80s London’, History Workshop Journal, 76(1), pp. 235–249.
Wiedel-Kaufmann, B. (2020) To the Wall: London’s Murals and ‘the Left’, 1975-1986. PhD Thesis, University of Plymouth.
Williams, P. and Walter, K. (1997) Militarization and Demilitarization in El Salvador’s Transition to Democracy. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Wilson, T., and Favoretto, M. (2015) ‘Making the “Disappeared” Visible in Argentine Rock’. Lied Und Populäre Kultur / Song and Popular Culture, 60/61, pp. 351–364. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26538873.
Winton, A. (2007) ‘Using “Participatory” Methods with Young People in Contexts of Violence: Reflections from Guatemala’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 26(4), pp. 497-515.
Wood, E. J. (2003) Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Copyright (c) 2024 Pablo Bradbury, Andrew Redden, Emily McIndoe