The Home I Know: Equity
Chapter 8
Thank you for your interest in the section of my memoir below. If your email server clips the message, then you can read the full post on Substack. You can also listen to the post by clicking the audio button at the top of this page. When needed, visit the Bibliography and Support Resources. This post mentions incest abuse. If you’re seeking resources, head over to Incest AWARE or Sibling Sexual Trauma.
My daydreams began to weave images of what it might be like to study abroad for a semester in the country called, “The Savior.” I could envision myself falling in love with a fellow classmate from the United States, growing intellectually in class, and intimately connecting with local communities through service opportunities. I could imagine myself feeling better, establishing a life, and actually living in this country I had just learned to locate on the map.
I could imagine myself healthy, happy, and whole.
~ ~ ~
Where’s my seat?
I squeezed my body and carry-on bags through the airplane aisle until I found my assigned row. Adam awaited me, he being another student who chose to study abroad in El Salvador his second semester of Junior year. His plane stopped through LA on the way from Wisconsin to the Central American country that hugged the Pacific Ocean.
“Hi, I’m Anne.” I extended my hand.
“Hi, I’m Adam. It’s nice to meet you.”
The red eye flight between LA and San Salvador took to the skies late at night. At first, Adam and I discussed our trepidations and anticipations for the next four months. Together, with 22 other college students from the United States, we committed to spending a semester in El Salvador and learning its history, listening to the stories of its people, and singing their litanies for healing and hope.
Adam’s shoulder sat at the perfect pillow height for my head, so as I grew tired I asked if I could rest on him. He said yes and the time progressed more quickly. When the plane landed early the next day, Adam gently shook me awake. We hustled off the plane, walked to the baggage claim, scooped up our luggage, passed through customs and received “El Salvador” stamps on our passports, then found the bus filled with other students.
On our way, I peered out the windows and couldn’t help but marvel at the beautiful fullness of the clouds, the sun streaking through the bright sky, the mountains flowing like waves as the views passed by. While our eyes took in the sites, the students and I introduced ourselves and shared our mutual excitement of this next stage of life. Suddenly, the scene shifted from the countryside to a city composed of simple square cement buildings with tin roofs. On the streets, people peddled sweets, while others tried to wash the windows of vehicles to acquire a few extra cents.
The bus dropped us all off at the entrance of Casa Romero, a former convent. A man named William awaited us there. William means, “Protector,” and he was to be ours. He stood outside the black iron gate of the house all night to keep us safe. William swung open the large garage door and welcomed us in. Immediately, the scents of boiling beans, roasting rice, and frying plantains overwhelmed my senses with delight. We made our way through the house and into the courtyard. Between two tall avocado trees rested a hammock woven in dyed materials of red and purple, blue and green. A few iron bistro tables dotted the margins of the common area, so that all of the students who had just arrived could form a circle in between.
The US family who ran the program invited us to gather and hold hands. Adam stood by my side and reached for the hand on my right. Then the kids of the family guided us in a Spanish song1 that we would all come to sing together as a prayer before every meal:
“Vamos todos al banquete, “Let us go now to the banquet,
a la mesa de la creación, to the table of creation,
cada cual con su taburete, the table’s set and a place is waiting,
tiene un puesto y una misión.” Come everyone with your gifts to share.”
After dinner, tired from jet lag and full of food and excitement, we headed to our assigned houses all located near the same street. I remained in Casa Romero and found the small room that would be mine for the next few months. A twin bed sat to my right covered in two colorful blankets, a narrow closet stood upright near the back, and a desk and chair rested against the front wall with a window over both that stayed open to the elements. The day ended with my usual recitation of nightly prayers, while the gratitude exercise felt nothing but authentic in this new way of life in a place called, “The Savior.”
The next morning I arose ready to explore. My head lifted from the pillow, my body jumped off the mattress, and I threw on a pair of long shorts and a t-shirt. My feet felt for the flip-flops that I had slipped under the bed the night before. I opened the door, walked to the iron gate, slid it open, greeted William, then headed to the University of Central America (UCA).
Churches, stores, and pupuserias surrounded me in this city, as I strode to the bottom of the steep hill where the university awaited me. People shuffled through the sidewalks, as cars drove a bit more wildly than I was accustomed to down the two lane streets. I made my way carefully to the front gates of the UCA that were also guarded by a vigilante.
As I walked onto campus, I felt immediately as if I were in Eden. The university’s buildings sprinkled throughout the grounds with openings for windows without screens so the air could flow through the buildings naturally and cool the students from the tropical heat. Resplendent flora with white and pink flowers arose from the land to transform the very urban environment into a gardened sanctuary.
My soul felt satiated like this place was the paradise I had been longing for, guarded by humans instead of angels, who let some people in. Signs that said, “Capilla,” directed my steps toward the chapel to the right until it stood erect before me with an A-framed roof made of reddish-brown clay tiles. My hand reached toward the glass front doors.
Not unlike the parish at the bottom of the hill of my childhood home, or the Sacred Heart Chapel that I sat in alone so many nights at LMU, this church too had a number of wooden pews, organized in rows, with an aisle through the center that led to the altar, above which a cross rested on the back white wall. But otherwise, this place of worship looked different.
The shape of the building opened more like a half circle than the traditional rectangle. The altar, shaped simply of wood, sat in the center, while the cross hung without Jesus’s body. The wood bore colorful paintings that told of the history of the Salvadoran community sketched by the famous artist, Fernando Llort.2 To the right and the left of the cross on the walls hung more symbols of the stories of the country’s people, as well as two angels: the guardians of the chapel.
I turned around to view the rest of the building before me and immediately lost my breath. On the back brick wall rose what should have been the 14 Stations of the Cross. But instead of the traditional images that told the tale of Jesus’s condemnation to death, his walk up the mountain, and his last breath, these pictures depicted the torture of 14 Salvadorans during the Civil War.
Fought between 1979-1992, the war arose from the struggle to end the manufactured starvation waged on the poor by the Salvadoran Government and 14 families, known as “Las Catorce”, who owned most of the country’s wealth.3 A local artist Roberto Huezoof found tortured civilians and sketched them in black charcoal on white paper to memorialize the horrors perpetrated against the bodies of so many Salvadoran people by a U.S.-backed government in a flawed effort to fight communism.4 During the Civil War, Salvadoran soldiers murdered 75,000 civilians, many often raped and tortured beforehand.5 Then I saw her.
One woman on her knees, topless with her breasts exposed, her hands tied with barbed wires at the wrist, her mouth open in a desperate and silent scream. I heard her, I felt her deeply resonant in my body. As if somewhere, somehow she belonged to me, and I belonged to her.
What is her story? I wondered, as a deep recognition shook beneath my skin.
It was as if a part of me awakened and began to tremble: my own inner silent screamer. This intense energy that kept me in bed in a deep depression, or pressured me to pick and scratch at my skin, or made me shake with anxiety while simply managing day to day activities, or isolated me from college parties. It was as if the charcoal drawing of this nameless woman wailing on the wall introduced me to a mirrored image nailed to my interior. But this secret solidarity between the silent screamer and me felt perplexing, as I could not see any similarities between her story and mine.
I walked back to Casa Romero feeling the secondary weight of these wounds and a new wonder about my first encounter with my inner silent screamer. My feet shuffled beneath me seemingly without my agency, tracking my own footsteps back past the glass doors of the chapel, through the flowers, to the iron gates with the guard. I slipped through them then slowly made my way back up the hill, where I found Adam awaiting me. As soon as I saw him, my inner screamer settled.
It only took a few weeks for the shoulder I rested my head on during the flight to become the chest I leaned against throughout the day and kissed sweetly before bed each night. Adam and I began dating quickly. It all felt too good to be true. He, whose name matched the first man created in Eden, held my hand to join me for what felt like the Eve of my life: a new beginning in this strange paradise, with a community devoted to collective healing, with peers who sang together in prayer before shared meals, where the love of this man held my hand and told me boring stories before bed to help me rest. This temporary lift from the depressiveness gave me hope and helped me cope.
~ ~ ~
Quickly, all of us students fell into our weekly routines. Together every Tuesday and Thursday, my praxis partner, James, and I traveled from Casa Romero to La Chacra: a cement city on the outskirts of San Salvador. As soon as we arrived, we could see the tiny houses built side-by-side made of four walls and wavy tin roofs, small pools and pipes that pulled water through the community, and laundry basins that disposed right into the river with the rest of the trash. The town stank like a neglected garbage can, especially on hot days, and I came to quickly love that place.
James and I taught English in the Kindergarten and the primary schools. Then we joined a priest for lunch and followed him around town to listen to parishioners’ stories of suffering and resilience. Presently, the country managed gang violence that began back in the US. When many asylum seekers returned to El Salvador after the Civil War, they brought the same gangs so prominent in LA back to the streets of San Salvador, introducing a new kind of decentralized violence. Much of what the priest could offer the community was accompaniment: to be with them in their suffering. And so James and I were learning how to accompany those with very different stories than our own.
Some of our most intimate moments in this community were late in the afternoon with the elders who gathered at the church to learn embroidery that they could sell for a little extra money. They sat around a long white, plastic pull out table and chatted through their mostly toothless smiles. I tried to comprehend the power of what they were saying with my broken Spanish, but mostly we all enjoyed just gathering. This proved to be a different way of being than I felt accustomed to. Without the constant need to achieve or consume, I could simply receive the presence and beauty of their company. Create. Be. I felt relieved by this simplicity, but reality was much more complex than I perceived it to be.
Between the taxi rides, the teaching, the meals, and the sitting with the elders, James and I would talk, often argue. He shared his story with me as a first generation Vietnamese immigrant born and raised in the United States: how he overcame so much to land in the place where we both stood now; how he labored to help me comprehend the power I had in my social privilege as a white woman from a wealthy family. Of course, I didn’t understand.
How could I be this depressed and still be privileged?
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to take responsibility and do what I could to make the world a more just place for everybody. Instead, even though this pedagogy taught me that I had more power than others in society, I felt void of it. Entirely empty and powerless.
On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, my peers and I all attended classes at the UCA. In them, I learned more about the history of white supremacy — spread globally through imperialism and colonialism — as well as the various exploitative economic structures that created systems to care for those on top of the social hierarchy, while taking advantage or directly oppressing those born below.
The power of privilege that US citizens had in El Salvador — especially those who were or presented as white — could be seen in the US dollars we used to pay for everything and the American flags flown all over the country. Most importantly, North Americans were rarely the victims of physical violence in El Salvador, which then was the most dangerous peace-time country in the world. While I was frequently catcalled on the streets by boys and men who saw me as a beautiful woman from the US, James was named either ignorantly or derogatorily, “Chino.”
I returned to Casa Romero after class that day feeling sick to my stomach. I went to the bathroom and looked at my white face in the mirror. A skin I had always struggled to believe in its beauty. With its high and wide forehead, its paleness, its freckles, its developing fine lines, its acne, I always saw myself as a problem. As if my face had no right nor reason to exist, a body forever sick.
The idealism of my days continued to be met with a mysterious duplicity at night. The rape dreams that haunted me back at Loyola Marymount University began to include stories of state-based wars that ravaged communities. I frequently woke up in a sweat or entirely frozen, shaking myself to remind my brain that what happened in the last few hours was only a terrifying dream…at least for me. My inner screamer, now ever present, wanted to live outside my body.
~ ~ ~
One morning, the other students and I arrived just outside the gate of Casa Romero to board the bus that headed toward the heart of the capital. The Metropolitan Cathedral of the Holy Savior in downtown San Salvador awaited us. The front reflected those same symbols on the back wall of the UCA chapel, art by the famous artist Fernando Llort, that gave homage to the peace accords signed in 1992 to end the Civil War. The dove, the corn, the Campesinos, all pieced together in a mosaic that told the story of the Salvadoran people. The inside though, reflected the faith of the Conquistadors.
Roman Catholicism arrived to El Salvador in the 16th century through the violence of the Spanish, robbing the land from Native communities. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, rural uprisings were met with brutal resistance leading to “La Matanza” (The Slaughter) in 1932, when 10,000-40,000 Native people were murdered, imprisoned, or exiled. All of this compounded to cause the Salvadoran Civil War.6
In the church, I approached a portrait of the face of a familiar man: Saint Msgr. Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, a Spanish priest and the founder of Opus Dei. I immediately recognized the saint’s face from the holy cards sprinkled across Grandma Joan’s house. Opus Dei is a Latin phrase that means, “The Work of God.” It is the only Catholic Personal Prelature, an institution including clergy and lay members that carry out specific pastoral activities.7
Opus Dei is controversial in the church, often being accused of recruiting the wealthy, preferring right-wing politics, and acting on a cult-like agenda. Escrivá’s own writings in his publication, The Way, focused on subjugation and suffering as the means to salvation:
“Obedience, the sure way. Blind obedience to your superior, the way of sanctity. Obedience in your apostolate the only way, for in a work of God, the spirit must be to obey or to leave.”8
Opus Dei asks the faithful to wear shirts made from coarse animal hair to irritate the skin, or a cilice — a light metal chain with prongs — around the thigh, or to whip themselves until they cry. Less extreme tasks include taking cold showers, sleeping without a pillow, or fasting before receiving the Eucharist to remember the importance of hungering for God. The goal was to achieve holiness by aligning oneself to the suffering of Christ — to carry the crosses of one’s life without complaint.9 A glorification of suffering as a means of sanctity.
Joan and Pops were Opus Dei, as well as a few aunts and uncles. It was at an Opus Dei Girl’s camp that I signed that Abstinence ‘Til Marriage (ATM) card I stored in the wallet in my back pocket. Grandma Joan dressed modestly in moo-moo like outfits and demanded her granddaughters do the same. She tried to use shame to encourage us to cover our bodies bearing bikinis on the pool deck, or our shoulders with the spaghetti straps that sat directly next to our bra lines.
“You are responsible for the sexual sins of men when you dress like that!” She scolded us repeatedly.
Growing up, I heard my father echo this same profession of beliefs in statements like, “I can’t believe a woman would tempt me like that, wearing a shirt that draped so far below her cleavage.” By women he often meant girls under the age of 18, including my friends who came over to visit. Whenever I tried to discuss challenges I confronted, he would say, “Take your cross and carry it like Jesus!”
Escrivá’s face in the Metropolitan Cathedral of San Salvador filled me with rage.
What’s he doing here on the top floor of the Cathedral? Where’s the body of Archbishop Oscar Romero?
Oscar Romero was murdered in 1980 by the Salvadoran Government for defending the rights of the poor at the start of the Civil War.10 Romero and Escrivá had been friends, both deeply committed to a life of sacrifice, but for different reasons. The Archbishop’s body laid in the basement downstairs. Justice in the homilies of Romero sought to break the cycle of violence and injustice by dismantling exploitative systems. It disempowered the oppressor and empowered the oppressed. His faith desired to initiate a new cycle of safety where the dignity of all people was upheld in equity. Romero preached:
“A church that doesn’t provoke any crises, a gospel that doesn’t unsettle, a word of God that doesn’t get under anyone’s skin, a word of God that doesn’t touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed — what gospel is that?”11
In religion class at the UCA, I learned there was a term for Romero’s interpretation of the gospel: Liberation Theology. The Jesuits of El Salvador had written a new theology with others like Gustavo Gutiérrez, who believed deeply in God’s “preferential option for the poor.”12
In this framework, Jesus was murdered unjustly for being a political subversive, not intentionally by God the Father to save us from our sins. Humanity needed not to bear our burdens like Jesus carried his cross, but instead be relieved from our crosses caused by individual and systemic injustices. God desired to protect us from unnecessary suffering through justice and accompany us in the process of liberation. But this version of the story was not present on the top floor of the cathedral.
El Salvador’s Catholicism was as split as mine. Divided down the lines of white, European paradigms and the preferential option for the poor. One side devoted to Opus Dei, that sought to give charity to those in need in El Salvador since 1958,13 without any social or structural change; and the other to Oscar Romero, a martyr for the freedom from oppression through justice to peace. The former held the upstairs, living in plain sight at the level of my eyes, while the latter remained buried in the basement beneath. Both pedagogies now took up space in my body alongside my inner screamer who craved unity. This internal trinity created a new pressure that sought to be relieved. They could not co-exist within me. Soon, I knew that I would have to choose.
Guillermo Cuellar, “Vamos Todos Al Banquete.”
“Fernando LLort.”
“History of El Salvador — Teaching Central America.”
Doll, “The Stations of the Cross.”
“Murder of Jesuit Priests and Civilians in El Salvador: The Jesuits Massacre Case.”
“History of El Salvador — Teaching Central America.”
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Opus Dei”.
Escrivá de Balaguer, The Way. Maxim 941.
“Corporal Mortification – ODAN Opus Dei Awareness Network.”
Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. “St. Óscar Romero.”
Romero, The Violence of Love.
Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation.
“History of Opus Dei in El Salvador.”
I just now read chapters 2-8, now it’s going to be hard to wait! I love your writing style Jo, I really feel like I am there with you from the Olympic pool to Central America.
I appreciate the care you give to the discussion of politics interwoven with religion and how it informs your thinking and your story. This chapter really grounds things and helps me understand you at the time of your sojourn to El Salvador.