Everyday Revolutionaries provides a longitudinal and rigorous analysis of the legacies of war in a community racked by political violence. By exploring political processes in one of El Salvador''s former war zones-a region known for its peasant revolutionary participation-Irina Carlota Silber offers a searing portrait of the entangled aftermaths of confrontation and displacement, aftermaths that have produced continued deception and marginalization.
Silber provides one of the first rubrics for understanding and contextualizing postwar disillusionment, drawing on her ethnographic fieldwork and research on immigration to the United States by former insurgents. With an eye for gendered experiences, she unmasks how community members are asked, contradictorily and in different contexts, to relinquish their identities as 'revolutionaries' and to develop a new sense of themselves as productive yet marginal postwar citizens via the same 'participation' that fueled their
Trade Review
"This is a stunning book. Silber is brilliantly able to ground her scholarly arguments in extensive ethnography, based on long-term research in a community with which she has deep ties." -- Ethel Brooks * author of Unraveling the Garment Industry *
"In this deeply insightful ethnography of post-war El Salvador, Silber successfully captures the hopes of Salvadorans for change and revolutionary times. She unmasks how these hopes are often challenged by the reality of poverty and continued social, economic, and gendered inequalities." -- Lynn Stephen * University of Oregon *
"This preceptive ethnography not only captures memories, sentiments and hopes, but also examines strategies of managing the present, including the paradox of mass migration to the US. Silber has made a major contribution to the study of postconflict societies, as well as to the centrality of gendered experience. Highly recommended."
* Choice *
"Silber provides great detail on the postwar lives of a few handfuls of people in this inquiry into everyday life, historical memory, NGOs, and gender relations. Everyday Revolutionaries is notable for its honesty and openness."
* Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology *
Table of Contents
Entangled aftermaths
Histories of violence/histories of organizing
Rank and file history
NGOs in the postwar period
Not revolutionary enough?
Cardboard democracy
Conning revolutionaries
The postwar highway
Epilogue: amor lejos, amor de pendejos
