Ordinary Salviness and the exceptional everyday

My dissertation, Ordinary Salviness and the Exceptional Everyday, explores how families and communities in the Salvadoran diaspora work to assert, shift into, pursue, and embody notions of “ordinariness” in the context of ongoing violence and exception. My field site is Los Angeles, which holds the largest Salvadoran migrant population in the United States: more than 425,682 Salvadorans live in the Los Angeles county, many of whom arrived during the 1980s and 1990s (US Census Bureau 2019). My ethnography investigates this concept, the ordinary, by examining the ways that diasporic Los Angeles Salvadorans participate in everyday, seemingly mundane and pedestrian activities such as eating food, going to work, and/or attending school. I argue that while engaging in basic modes of living, diasporic Salvadorans reconceptualize troubled cultural productions and upsetting memories; produce and circulate intergenerational knowledges of survival and existence through war and postwar violence; and advocate for practices of kinship and belonging in the context of family separation and loss. Such basic modes of living allow for deeper analyses of the ordinary, ordinary Salviness, and the exceptional everyday. My dissertation points to these untold stories of un-exceptionality and banality to illuminate how Salvadorans in the diaspora understand and (re)imagine what constitutes (extra)ordinariness, trauma, and reconciliation in their past and present lives.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Anthropology

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Maldonado, Beatriz Esmeralda

Contributors dc:contributor

• Moodie, Ellen
• Ruiz, Sandra
• Maldonado, Korinta
• Manalansan, Martin

• ordinariness
• Salviness
• diasporic Salvadorans
• postwar narratives and memories
• cultural productions
• intergenerational knowledges
• kinship practices
• Los Angeles
• Covid-19 pandemic

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2022 Beatriz Esmeralda Maldonado

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/115820

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F115820