Amando Argueta-Vogel, PhD Candidate in Latin American and Latino Studies, UCSC
The Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Américas at UC Santa Cruz supported the early stages of my dissertation project, “Migration Justice: Borders, Enforcement, and Central American mobility,” through their Graduate Student Research grant. The funding enabled a trip to San Salvador, El Salvador to conduct archival research at the Archivo Histórico del Conflicto Armado Salvadoreño (Ahcas). This archive is an especially important repository of documents related to the country’s armed conflict that developed and raged throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
At the time, I was at the early stages of my research and broadly seeking historical documents that would shed light on return migration among Salvadoran refugees during the 1980s. In particular, I wanted to understand why and how some refugees fought and won the right to return to their rural communities of origin in 1988 and 1989, several years before the formal end of the armed conflict. The empirical insights I gained on this trip helped ground my exploration of “migratory justice,” offering a vital connection between theory and the lived experiences documented in the archives. I even had the opportunity to present some of my preliminary findings from this trip at the April 2024 Latinx Studies Association conference as part of a “Latinx Past” discussion panel on archival methods. I have since returned to El Salvador during the summer of 2024 to more deeply mine archival collections related to refugee communities at Colomoncagua, Mesa Grande, and San Antonio in Honduras during the 1980s.
The archives related to these communities tell stories of organization and struggle that are often overlooked in discussions of Salvadoran refugee experiences. The way these individuals and communities position themselves as migrants and refugees offers a provocative case from which to analyze discourses related to migratory justice produced by migrants themselves. One of the central themes to emerge is the right of return—not just as an individual act, but as a collective movement tied to justice, dignity, and identity. Why did certain groups insist on returning when so many others remained abroad? What might their voices teach us about how migrants themselves theorize justice?
As revealed through various documents, throughout the 1980s the refugees at the camps were focused upon asserting their status and rights as refugees. Through campos pagados (paid spaces) in newspapers and other communiques they attempted to intervene in local, national, regional, and global public discourses. For example, a revista made by the “Comité de madres de Colomoncagua” (Committee of mothers of Colomoncagua) asserts in October 1988 that despite pressure from the Honduran government and military, “No to forced relocation or repatriation! We will return when there is peace with justice and human dignity! You will not move us!”
It would not be until a year later in July of 1989 that the refugees of Colomoncagua announced their intentions to return to their communities. Published in English in a ‘Voices of the Border’ bulletin in August of that year, the refugees express “to the international community” their request “to return in community to our places of origin” and to maintain the programs they had developed in the camps which they saw as necessary for maintaining and reproducing life in these communities.
These publications also documented abuses against refugees. In 1988, the Comité de Madres released a two-page denunciation accusing Doctors Without Borders and the UNHCR of neglect that led to the death of Teresa de Jesús Hernández, a committee founder. Similarly, the Comité Cristiano Pro-Desplazados de El Salvador (CRIPDES) served as a key outlet for documenting human rights violations during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Their reports detailed widespread abuse—kidnapping, torture, disappearance, and murder—perpetrated by the Salvadoran military and its allies. Despite ongoing repression, including a 1990 military blockade of its headquarters, CRIPDES continued publishing reports and organizing in support of refugee and returnee communities. It remains active in El Salvador today.
Importantly, these refugee publications were more than just denunciations. They were also spaces for critical reflection, consciousness raising, celebration, and imagining liberation. In the section of one of the revistas titled, ‘Crónicas de nuestro campamento’ (Chronicles of our camp) refugees discuss the possibility of a ‘verdadera segunda independencia’ (real second independence) while commemorating the 167th anniversary of Central America’s ‘first’ independence from Spain in 1821. The authors begin by stating that the arrival of the Spanish in 1523 imposed (Spanish) domination over ‘el pueblo’ (the People, the communities, the villages). Like critical and decolonial scholars of the 21st century, the revista authors describe how Central American criollo elites maintained their hold on power and domination over ‘el pueblo’ after independence. The authors connect the forms of domination and repression throughout these epochs to those of the present day, including but not limited to, U.S. imperialism.
Reflecting upon the concept of sovereignty they ask: “Is it sovereignty and independence when there are more than a million refugees living outside their homeland? Is it sovereignty and independence when there are half a million internally displaced peoples? Long live the pueblo’s (Peoples’) fight for true independence!
The same revista that denounced Teresa de Jesús Hernández’s death also honored her life. A description near the back reads: “Teresa was a humble woman who…made ever greater contributions to her community, demonstrating her firm resistance to every plan imposed upon us. She was a woman full of human values, Christian faith, and a living Hope.”
Gender equality was a central theme in the publications of the Comité de Madres. In 1988, the Comité de Mujeres de Colomoncagua declared: “Our transformation is a walk toward liberation, filled with justice that reflects the value, decision, and participation of women in all work.” These feminist articulations, rooted in lived experience, add another layer to the archives’ value as sources of theory from below.
Taken together, these archival materials help us reconceptualize migratory justice—not just as a legal or policy matter, but as a set of practices and discourses emerging from refugee communities themselves. These documents capture demands for dignity and survival in the face of state violence, often voiced in real time, and often dismissed or denied by both Salvadoran and U.S. governments.
Today, many of the abuses documented by groups like CRIPDES are acknowledged in academic work (Alvarado et al. 2017, Menjívar & Rodriguez, 2005), but were actively and violently repressed at the time of their creation. Their struggles exceeded the bounds of nation-states and citizenship, aligning with broader movements for human rights, women’s rights, refugees, the displaced, the damnificados. They saw themselves as part of a wider pueblo Centroamericano and global poor, engaging in solidarity across borders and identities.
In this way, these archives suggest that work of constructing migratory justice may have at least two important elements. First, the ongoing struggle to construct a more just world for people who migrate. Second, the work of preserving and keeping alive the historical memory of migration and struggles for migratory justice.These histories are not just narrative backdrop, they are essential tools for imagining and enacting justice in the present and future.
References
Alvarado, K. O., Estrada, A. I., & Hernández, E. E. (Eds.). (2017). U.S. Central Americans: Reconstructing memories, struggles, and communities of resistance. The University of Arizona Press.
Menjívar, C., & Rodriguez, N. (Eds.). (2005). When states kill: Latin America, the U.S., and technologies of terror (1st ed). University of Texas Press.
Documents Consulted in the Colección histórica del conflicto armado salvadoreño del Centro de Información, Documentación y Apoyo a la Investigación (CIDAI).