Browse Items (18 total)

Abel Cuenca (1909-1975) was one of the Communist organizers of a 1932 peasant uprising in western El Salvador that was crushed by the military dictator Maximiliano Hernández Martínez. The mass murders carried out by army troops on the dictator's…

Born in 1943, David Escobar Galindo began publishing poems in his twenties and soon became one of El Salvador's most recognizable poetic voices. While others experimented with radical forms and unconventional subject matter, Escobar Galindo stuck to…

López Vallecillos published this volume of introspective, at times melancholic poetry in 1961, the year he turned 29.

This is issue no. 36 of La Pájara Pinta, an influential and pioneering literary and political journal that was published in San Salvador from 1966 to 1972. It featured poems and essays by left-wing authors, many of them in exile and others who later…

Eunice Odio (1919-1974) was a Costa Rican poet who lived most of her working life in Guatemala, New York, and Mexico City, where she died. Her work has come under renewed critical attention. She was an eccentric, prophetic poet who lived "outside the…

Fabio Castillo, former rector of El Salvador's national university, has been driven into exile in Nicaragua after the university was invaded and occupied by the army on order of the military government in 1972. The military believed the campus was a…

In this letter to the Salvadoran novelist and poet Claribel Alegría, addressed to her on Mallorca in Spain, López Vallecillos praises the recently published novel she wrote with her husband Darwin Flakoll, Cenizas de Izalco (Ashes of Izalco). The…

In this letter, López Vallecillos describes the wave of jingoism that has gripped El Salvador during its short war with Honduras in 1969. The war was provoked by Honduras's decision to expel thousands of Salvadorans who were living there, many of…

Jorge Arias Gómez (1923-2002) was a leader of the Salvadoran Communist Party, a prominent law professor at the University of El Salvador and a friend of many poets and writers. In this letter, he complains to López Vallecillos about "ultra-leftists"…

Cea, one of the poets of La Pájara Pinta, is visiting Chile and offers a vivid description of life under the Salvador Allende government in this letter written a few months before the Pinochet coup.