Politics of Nation Building & Belonging: Democratization, Revolution, Civil War, & the Modern Salvadoran

The biggest challenge that contemporary liberals face globally today is counterbalancing the wider social and economic role of the state while guaranteeing civil liberties and a more robust social system of checks and balances. Trust in our governments is at an all-time low while social polarization continues to rise due to dogmatic individualism which has led to the abandonment of political cooperation. My study of the Salvadoran nation building process is essential for understanding both distrust of the state and social polarization because democracy without constitutional constraint infringes on freedom, prosperity, peace and in a broader context contributes to the erosion of a national sense of belonging. This project explores how although El Salvador was founded on constitutional republican principles, its social and governing practices in the latter half of the nineteenth century remained fastened to colonial structures of power. Thus, the nation building processes continued advancing through processes of deculturization, Ladinoization, the rapid disappearance of Campesino livelihood, which concomitantly augmented by the processes of centralizing power gave rise to capitalist nationalism and the hardening of the already existing class differences that severed the majority of Salvadorans from the national project. Notably, although the Salvadoran constitution was rooted in republicanism and democratic ideals it was subsequently misconstrued to subvert the tenuously established democratic system to emplace a decades long military dictatorship, demonstrating that democracy and democratic ideals are fragile because they are dependent on their interpretation of those in power. Nonetheless, it was amid the curtailment of freedoms, repression, and oppression in the twentieth century that Salvadorans committed to changing the narrative of belonging and what it means to be Salvadoran. Central to this project is the study of the history of ideologies and individual actions that constitute value for the purpose of historical change in relation to nation building and belonging, with a keen focus on global democratization in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the Salvadoran Revolution and Civil war, and the fruitless democratic enterprise in times of peace within El Salvador. Inherently, this project looks back at the history of nation building in the latter half of the nineteenth century to encapsulate how the discourse of nation building and belonging was contested and how the illegitimate political, economic, and social order that authenticated the concept of capitalist nationalism was put in place. Categorically, this project explores the complex narratives of modernity in El Salvador to accentuate the permanent changes accomplished through temporary revolutionary moments and their importance for democratization, peace, posterity, and engendering an ardent and alienating sense of belonging. This project examines a few of the complex narratives of modernity in El Salvador throughout the twentieth century in El Salvador to accentuate the permanent changes accomplished through temporary revolutionary episodes because it recognizes that generational social culture is produced through common experiences and through discourse about it. Via the examination of the common experience and the discourse about that experience this project finds important details about watershed moments of contention that begin decoding important fragments of this past rooted in the process of advocating for change and orienting the masses. Several of the foundational questions this project addresses are: How do we learn to draw distinctions between legitimacy and illegitimacy and how do these distinctions organize forms of social practice and memory? How was the concept of democracy understood by the stakeholders and used to incentivize socio-political modernity and distinction in El Salvador? How did the stakeholders perceive themselves as part of socio-political modernity in El Salvador? And what can we learn from the Salvadoran experience, its political overreaches, and the misinterpretation of their own constitution, to help us perceive the fallacies that can endanger the democratic systems that have endured in the post WWII world? More importantly, this project identifies transformational moments in the social and political history of nation building in El Salvador, exploring discourses of agency, power, legitimacy, nostalgia, and other transformational moments in the creation of memory. The ethnographic portion of this project focuses on testimonies of individual actors, adding the emotional register to the historical narrative. Comprehensively, my work contributes to the dynamic field of nation building history in Latin America and to the growing field of literature across disciplines engaging with the history of agency and memory through a social and political lens.

Author dc:creator

• José Luis Ramirez (10739322)

• El Salvador
• Nation Building
• Belonging
• Governing
• Democratization
• Political Legitimacy
• Enfranchisement

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.25417/uic.31451173.v1

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:figshare.com:article/31451173