Scholars have worked diligently to create space for a field that decades ago was considered irrelevant
It was a rare thing, a few decades ago, to hear anyone in academia talk about Central Americans.
Hondurans started arriving in the late 1800s in New Orleans, where bananas and other fruit from Central America entered the U.S. Salvadoran and Nicaraguan coffee producers began settling in small numbers in San Francisco in the early 1900s. And during and after World War II, U.S. wartime industries recruited scores of Central American workers.
Menjívar began studying the topic as a grad student in the 1990s. By then, hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans had arrived in the U.S., seeking refuge in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. They escaped a brutal 12-year civil war that the U.S. government fomented and sponsored in the 1980s, spending billions of dollars to help support government oligarchs and right-wing death squads.
Over the years, she and a small but committed number of scholars — several of them Central Americans — have worked diligently to create space for the field. They’ve published articles and books, created panels at academic conferences and began teaching courses at universities. The conference, planned about a year in advance, coincidentally took place the same week as a nationwide outcry erupted over another sort of migrant storytelling.
Late last year, Trejo, whose mom is Salvadoran, and other graduate students established the Central American Isthmus Graduate Assn. or CAIGA, a group that promotes Central American research on campus. They work side by side with the Central American Student Union, UNICA, an organization made up of undergrad Central American students.Both groups are quite active at UCLA. Among other things, they want university research on Central Americans to be more accessible to the outside world.
“It’s the so-called ‘me-research’ argument,” Hernández-León said. “Some think you’re too close to the subject to be objective. You don’t have the distance to do the cold, scientific research.” Floridalma Boj Lopez, an assistant professor at Cal State Los Angeles, talked about Guatemalan Mayans, a community she knows well from growing up Mayan in Los Angeles. Boj Lopez explored the indigenous group’s traumatic history of genocide, war and poverty. She said when Mayans cross into Mexico, they face a disproportionate level of racism and struggle to find anyone who understands their language.
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