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…
López Vallecillos and the novelist Manlio Argueta founded La Pájara Pinta in January 1966 as a literary newspaper, but it soon took a more political bent as El Salvador's society grew more polarized in the face of state repression of unions and…
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.
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"…
This is the document issued by Nicaragua's Central Migration Office to López Vallecillos in 1961 certifying that he had been granted asylum. López Vallecillos had been expelled from El Salvador after an arrest for supposed political crimes, during a…
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…
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…
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…
This is the cover of López Vallecillos's widely cited history of journalism in El Salvador, published in 1964, in which he traces the history of news-writing and commentary from Spanish colonial times until the advent of television journalism in the…