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Guatemala's Historical Rival
Tiny, densely populated El Salvador is a fertile piece of Central America's indigenous Pacific Coast heartland. The Spanish colonized it vigorously because of the presence of the Aztec-influenced, fully sedentary Pipil people. Unlike the other Central American countries, however, it has no sparsely populated Caribbean region into which its burgeoning population can expand. El Salvador's brief 1968 war with Honduras owed partly to the spillover of Salvadoran population onto Honduran land. El Salvador's large population made it a historical rival to Guatemala, both politically and economically. After independence, El Salvador became Central America's liberal stronghold, toe to toe in isthmian politics, with the Conservative stronghold in Guatemala. After 1870, El Salvador had the most dynamic economy in Central America, a showcase of intensive coffee production on modern plantations. But plantation agriculture enriches only plantation owners, and the chronic poverty of the Salvadoran countryside dates, ironically, from this period of neocolonial "prosperity." It is this long-term situation of population pressure on limited land, as well as the revolutionary uprising of the 1980s, that caused so many Salvadorans to emigrate to the United States, where they settled particularly in and around Washington, D.C.
Topics:
Questions for Analysis and Further Reflection:
- What allowed for the rise of coffee cultivation in El Salvador in the late nineteenth century, and what were the immediate and more long-term social, economic, and environmental consequences?
- What happened to El Salvador's large population of indigenous people?
- In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the U.S. intervened in a number of Central American countries and supported factions in civil wars. What were U.S.-Salvadoran relations like during this period?
Country Bibliography: (Titles with ** are good starting places. As is the case with the historiography of other Central American countries, there is a lack of recent, general histories of El Salvador in English.)
Baloyra, Enrique A. El Salvador in Transition. Chapel Hill: The University of North
Carolina Press, 1982.
Concentrates narrowly on the historical background to the civil war of the 1980s. Extensive notes, appendices, a bibliography, and an index are included.
Barry, Tom. El Salvador: A Country Guide, 2nd ed. Albuquerque: The Inter-Hemispheric
Education Resource Center, 1991.
A good source on the crisis of the 1980s. Notes, a chronology, a bibliography, and a handful of maps accompany the narrative.
Bethell, Leslie, ed. Central America since Independence. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1991.
The first three chapters deal with Central America as a whole. Chapter 5 deals specifically with El Salvador since 1930. A few maps are included, and an index and a bibliographical essay for each chapter follow the text.
** Browning, David. El Salvador: Landscape and Society. Oxford, England: Clarendon
Press, 1971.
A long-term study of how the Salvadoran landscape has changed over the centuries provides an introduction to the country's rural history.
** Foster, Lynn V. A Brief History of Central America. New York: Facts On File, 2000.
An accessible historical overview of Central America as a whole from the pre-Columbian era to the dawn of the present century. The book includes illustrations, tables and maps, a bibliography and index, a list of suggested readings, and appendices with basic facts for each country (including Panama and Belize) and a chronology.
Murray, Kevin, with Tom Barry. Inside El Salvador. Albuquerque, NM: Resource Center
Press, 1995.
An expanded version of Tom Barry's El Salvador: A Country Guide.
**Pérez-Brignoli, Héctor. A Brief History of Central America. Translated by Ricardo B.
Sawrey A. and Susana Stettri de Sawrey. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1989.
This slightly older book presents an overview of the region's history, beginning with the land and the people and ending with the political and social crises faced by many Central American nations at the end of the 1980s. Maps, a chronology, notes, a bibliography, and an index are included.
White, Alastair. El Salvador. New York: Praeger, 1973.
This is one of the few general histories of El Salvador in English.
** Woodward, Ralph Lee, Jr. Central America: A Nation Divided, 3rd ed. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999.
A solid and well-told overview with an extensive guide to further reading, a set of charts and tables with statistical information, and a political chronology.
Maps:
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