Campus Ministry
Portland Magazine
October 27, 2019
By Maria Echenique and Karen Eifler
Illustrations by Neto RodrÍguez
Some stories from the 12 years of armed conflict in El Salvador throughout the 1980s have made their way to the wider consciousness of the United States; some have not. We know about St. Archbishop Óscar Romero, the four church women, six Jesuit priests, and two of their female colleagues, all who were assassinated by trained military death squads for standing firmly on the side of the poor and powerless. We know the civil war was fought between the right-wing government and the leftist guerillas. We know that the US stood with the Salvadoran government. But we don’t know the full effect of that support. We don’t know all the stories. We also don’t know all the ways in which the war has lasting effects today.
In May 2019, University of Portland’s Office of Campus Ministry sponsored a pilgrimage to El Salvador. We walked in the footsteps of martyrs. At each stage of our pilgrimage, the twelve of us were reminded that El Salvador does not need people from Los Estados Unidos to come down and build schools or paint orphanages. They have all the laborers they need to re-build their country. Talented, resolute human resources abound in El Salvador. The land itself is verdant. El Salvador does need—we were told again and again—people to listen to the stories of crushing misfortune and injustice, resilience and faith that teem in every pocket of this Central American country that has known war of one kind or another for most of a century.
One story we heard was Tomasa’s.
Her home is in the tiny village of Arcatao, in the department of Chalatenango, bounded by small forested mountains that form the border with Honduras; in fact, our cell phones all thought we were in Honduras during our stay there. While there are many trails up those mountains, there are no switchbacks; you get to the top of La Cañada by walking straight up. It takes eight hours round trip.
Thirty years earlier, Mamita (“little mother”) Tomasa made the round trip to La Cañada countless times during the civil war, always at night and always with two small children bound to her back and chest with rags (while she held the hands of at least two slightly older children), almost always with bullets flying over her head and often in bare feet, because when the soldiers started firing, shoes got abandoned. Today Tomasa is a revered village elder, with a stately gait and a serene face, waist-length white hair and steady chocolaty eyes that give no hint of the torments she endured and witnessed during the civil war. We sat for several hours with Tomasa in her kitchen in the immaculate cinderblock house with the sheet tin roof she shares with her youngest son—who was born on that mountain—his wife, and their impish four-year-old son whom we called El Coqueto because of his incessant flirting.
“Enséñanos, Tomasa—teach us, Tomasa,” we asked and scribbled as quickly as we could the words that cascaded from her. In a voice that never trembled, she recounted her days as a young mother of four, then five, and ultimately eleven children. These are Mamita Tomasa’s words, edited for length and translated from her Spanish.
“I hope I can make you understand what it is like to be at war forever. I loved learning but left school in fourth grade. Even then, the soldiers from the government could not tolerate the songs the catechists taught us. One I remember had the chorus ‘Peace and learn to read, Peace and learn to write. If you read and study, you have the land where you can sow.’ We didn’t want mansions; we wanted a little milpa (cornfield) where we could grow our own food. Hearing that song was too much for the military, so they captured some of our teachers and tied them against a tree and tortured them with cigarette burns.
“After that, teachers and catechists wouldn’t come anymore. Then the horrors started. My husband and brother were captured and tortured and miraculously returned, but they had to go into hiding up in the mountains. By then I was carrying our fifth child, scurrying between my village and my husband’s to stay ahead of the soldiers, who were always kidnapping people to get information about the guerillas. We lived on handfuls of beans, and maybe because of so little food, that baby was premature and died right after being born.
“For a while after that, we lived behind some animals in a barn in an abandoned village. I snuck out to take care of our tiny milpa, but then the soldiers came and killed my mother and mother-in-law and made it clear we couldn’t stay there.
“Then things got worse: babies ripped from their mothers and bayoneted. We kept going higher and higher up the mountain to stay ahead of the soldiers. We grabbed whatever grain we could, and for a while I went back down the mountain to retrieve some of the food we had left behind. We just put the maize in water and ate it that way. If we heated it, the soldiers would see the smoke and come for us. My husband and others dug caves into the mountains, and we hid in there, once for twenty-two days, fourteen of us. They had to make a hole for air. In that stretch, we had no food, just a capful of water for each person to drink. No bathing. The smell was horrible. We had to sit silently against the wall—no standing up to stretch was permitted— and keep our children from making any noise, because the soldiers were always looking for us, and any sound would give us away. Some mothers accidentally smothered their children, keeping their mouths and noses covered too tightly. Many times I went to sleep and did not even care if I woke up, or think it was possible to wake up.
“I had another baby in the mountains, and he died because I could not give him any milk. The young sanitarias (nurses who trained in the hills at night) gave him sugar water, which we knew wasn’t nourishing, but it’s all we had. It was so hard to watch my children endure this malnutrition and not be able to help them. And the bugs that drilled into our ears day and night! But la vida continúa. Telling you my story keeps memories of the seven children I lost to the war flickering. Many others lost so much more than I did. You will meet my four children tonight at the fiesta we are hosting to honor your visit with us.”
Three sons and a daughter, their spouses, and boisterous children, who all know the unrivaled scrumptiousness of Mamita Tomasa’s pupusas, crammed the kitchen a few hours later. The gentlest, wisest of queens reigned quietly over it all.
MARIA ECHENIQUE teaches in UP’s international languages and cultures department. KAREN EIFLER co-directs UP’s Garaventa Center for Catholic Intellectual Life & American Culture.
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