Cooked by fire, filled with memory

In the late morning, as the sun starts to burn hotter over the Sierra Madre mountains and the streets begin to fill with people, fragrant plumes of smoke rise from griddles all around La Palma, El Salvador.

It’s breakfast hour, time for pupusas—those succulent pillows of masa stuffed with cheese, beans and more.

My companion Luis and I settle onto stools at a garage-sized stand for the classics—queso y frijolesand revueltas, which have chicharrones added to their molten centers. A curly-haired woman with a bright orange apron expertly forms the stuffed masa rounds and tosses them onto the hot black griddle to sizzle in oil.

These days, a similar experience is possible without a plane ticket to El Salvador, where pupusas are the national dish. In the past couple decades, the centuries-old tradition has migrated north from the time-marred streets of this tiny nation, and found a second home in the United States. Restaurants now sell pupusas in cities from Los Angeles to New York—and with enough fervor that they’re now landing on trend lists. This summer, Leonardo DiCaprio declared pupusas superior to tacos in an interview with Univision.

Clearly, the Salvadoran street food is having a moment.

But this seemingly sudden emergence isn't random. Before pupusas made their journey north, their makers did: from 1981 to 1990, as many as one million Salvadoran migrants arrived at the U.S. border, according to the Migration Policy Institute. They were fleeing war with the kind of urgency that compels months-long journeys with no guarantee of survival or asylum, and they arrived at the only destination that felt like hope.

“Fue ironico,” said Ovidio Dubon, an ex-guerilla fighter who spent a couple years in Maryland, speaking from his home in Arcatao—a small, war-crushed town near the Honduran border.

It was ironic.

“Because the United States had so much to do with why we left.”

“They killed them all.”

The rain was coming down in sheets as we climbed the hill in El Mozote, but it didn’t seem to faze Eduardo Angel Márquez as he trudged through the thick grass in flip flops. Behind us, a mango grove abutting the mountains of Morazán framed the village church. From here, El Mozote was so beautiful, it looked like a painting—a reverie that vanished the moment I noticed the scars of heavy artillery fire slashing a hearty old tree.

When we reached the hilltop, Márquez pointed to a crumbled stone foundation. Weeds grew over the remains of a house. Goats grazed at its edges.

“They ordered the people inside,” Márquez said in Spanish. “And then they killed them all.”

“They” were the Atlacatl Battalion, a faction of the Salvadoran military during a 12-year civil war that would take the lives of more than 75,000 civilians—most at the hands of the government—and displace a quarter of the population, according to Geoff Thale, Vice President for Programs at Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).

The insurgency the government was fighting began as most do: a collection of civilian groups, outraged and desperate over growing socio-economic inequality fueled by an oppressive military state, created an alliance to fight the status quo.

The U.S. government took notice. Revolutions in Cuba and Nicaragua had left the superpower worried about the spread of Communism in Latin America, and it quickly backed the Salvadoran army, dispatching U.S. military personnel to train and command local soldiers and as much as $2 million a day to fund the efforts under Presidents Carter and Reagan. All told, the U.S. sent more than $6 billion, estimates researcher Adán Quan, in what would be the country’s greatest counter-insurgency campaign after Vietnam and before Afghanistan, according to the National Defense Research Institute.

In tiny El Mozote, on Dec. 11, 1981, the conflict was only beginning. Atlacatl—believing villagers were protecting guerrilla soldiers—murdered all but a handful of villagers.

Some of the men were taken to their deaths on the hill where I stood with Márquez. Many young women were raped in the hillsides before their murders. And the children were corralled inside a convent next to the church. Once all the adults were dead, the soldiers fired round after round through the windows and walls, then torched the convent. Days later, when neighboring villagers discovered the massacre, they went through the hills, respectfully covering half-naked corpses. To this day, skulls are still being pulled from the clay.

Including the casualties from massacres that occurred in surrounding towns over the next three days, more than 1,000 people were killed. Márquez’s grandfather, who had been away working the coffee harvest, told his grandson that he had returned to a “carpet of bodies.”

Márquez looked straight into my eyes. The Atlacatl Battalion, he said, “were trained in the U.S. School of the Americas. The United States was sponsoring the army.”

That powerful support, many historians say, surely contributed to the brutality and length of the war. “If not for the U.S. government, I don’t think there’s any doubt that things would have been really different,” Thale said. “Likely the Salvadoran government would have collapsed, or entered into serious negotiations much earlier.”

Everyone left

Survivors of battle-torn villages in this part of the country tell tales of bombed bridges and electrical systems, of bus stop executions, of bodies piled on the side of the road, of cowering on the floors of their homes while bullets flew. Alma Palencia told me about a night in La Palma, when a troop of guerrillas used her house as a point of attack.

She had just finished feeding a rebel on lookout—just a kid, no older than twelve, she says—when he was killed by the government’s La Guardia Nacional. “When they laid him down, I could still see the cheese on the edge of his mouth,” she recalled.

The fighter’s youth wasn’t an anomaly. Children who lived in certain areas of the country were at risk of being kidnapped and transformed into soldiers. “When a kid turned twelve, the army took him, or the guerrillas did,” Martha Janeth Diaz told me at her pupusería in Ataco.

So many fled, often to the U.S.—with or without their parents.

Victor Manuel Leiva, sitting on a bench facing the majestic white church in Citala, swept his arm toward the converging streets.

“See these houses?” he asked. “There’s no one in them. Everyone left.”

Leiva himself sent his sons away to escape the threat in the early 1980s. They embarked alone, with no money in their pockets, beginning the long journey to the U.S. border at ages sixteen and twenty.

“A father didn’t want his sons to live here,” he said, tears in his eyes. “The better option was to go away.”

Back in El Mozote, Márquez and I visited the memorial where hundreds of victims’ names and ages are inscribed on squares of black granite. The zeroes—dozens and dozens of them—represent babies killed inside their mothers wombs, sometimes before the mothers themselves were killed.

Márquez, who was born after the massacre but returned to the town with his family at age two, pointed at one name after another. “I will never know them,” he said. “I don’t know my family.” More than 30 of his family members, a whole family tree, were lost to a squad that took its orders from the U.S. government.

WOLA’s Thale was blunt: “The U.S. uncritically sided with the Salvadoran government,” he said, “and funded them, helped train them, and supported them in whatever tactics they chose to use.

“We bear a deep moral responsibility for some of the very ugly things that happened there.”

A dangerous journey; $2.50 pupusas

Ana Maria Mendes eyed the pale rice flour cakes (some parts of El Salvador use rice in addition to masa) as she nestled a log beneath the comal, a flat griddle common in Central America. Flames licked up over the round edges, kissing her worn hands, evidence of more than half a century at the helm.

This Olacuilta pupusería—believed to be the first in all of El Salvador—is still going strong, more than 60 years after Mendes’ mother opened a stand on the site. During the war years, both government and guerrilla soldiers would come by between battles, grabbing a canasta (a blanket-covered basket) of pupusas for their journeys.

“They couldn’t agree on much,” Mendes said in Spanish. “But they all liked the pupusas.” She smiled pridefully, flipping the cakes and scraping bits of char across the griddle.

For Mendes, it’s a passion—and a source of celebrity, now that she’s recognized as a pioneer. But for most Salvadorans, pupusas are simply a way of life.

Pupusas often sell for $.75 or .80 apiece, and in the early mornings, pupuserías are packed with workers grabbing a quick, cheap breakfast. Most people are quick to name their favorites: besides revueltas and beans and cheese, fillings like loroco (a local flower blossom), chipilín (an herb), and ayote (a type of squash) are common. Almost everyone has a childhood memory about eating pupusas with their families.

Most, too, are eager to share with outsiders—a pupusa maker in Ataco boasted about offering a menu in English, though English is rare here.

“When you’re this small, when you don’t produce things related to sports or exports, you have to have something,” said Alejandro Rivas, a San Salvador native. “It’s one of the things we’re most proud of. If you go to the U.S., you find pupusas and everyone knows where they’re from.

“People get to know El Salvador through pupusas.”

And people in the U.S. know pupusas because of the civil war.

Before 1975, there were fewer than 95,000 Salvadoran nationals in the U.S., according to the Migration Policy Institute.

José Miguel Cruz is the Director of Research at Florida International University’s Latin American and Caribbean Center, and a Salvadoran immigrant whose family lived in the West Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles at that time—today, a strong Salvadoran community. But in the 1960s and ‘70s, “it was a very white world all around us,” Cruz said.

“There wasn’t a Salvadoran community then,” he said. And Salvadoran food? “There was nothing, none of that.”

Then the war began, prompting the country’s dramatic out-migration.

Without the time to obtain visas, many left in a hurry. They walked, took buses, and boarded the roof of La Bestia, the notorious train that treks through parts of Mexico.

“The journey to the U.S., it’s dangerous,” said Mendes, the pupusera. “And not just because of what happens along the way, but what happens when they get there.” Most entered the U.S. illegally, scraping together whatever life they could.

Comparatively speaking, though, opportunity was abundant in the U.S. Many began making pupusas and other Salvadoran food.

“In the States,” Mendes said, “they sell pupusas for $2.50.”

The first wave of Salvadoran immigrants landed on the west coast.

“In L.A., suddenly, there were new excluded and marginalized communities with increased levels of inequality and problems of assimilation,” Cruz said. “The only way to be integrated into the system was on the streets.” And that’s where the notorious MS-13 gang was formed.

Eventually, many MS-13 and other gang members were deported—effectively “exporting” gangs back to El Salvador, as Cruz says, where they thrived amid weaker enforcement. The gang crisis plaguing El Salvador today owes mostly due to internal influences, according to Cruz. But without the U.S. acting as a prime incubator, Cruz isn’t sure the gangs, as a powerful factor of Salvadoran society, would have ever emerged.

“When they went back to El Salvador, what allowed them to have this sort of clout was the whole [U.S.] cultural system behind them,” he said. “The TV shows, the music, the movies that glorify gangs back in the U.S.—it all provided a cultural framework that allowed them to be respected and admired.”

Soon, the maras, the Salvadoran word for gangs, were entrenched in Salvadoran society, too, sending scores more to the U.S. border. The Salvadoran population in the U.S. grew again. And so, again, did the presence of pupusas.

In the last five to ten years, as street foods of all types have gotten more attention, pupusas have found their way into a new sort of limelight. Suddenly, they’re the subject of restaurant reviews. They’re mainstays in popular food halls. Leo DiCaprio’s into them. In 2018, the National Restaurant Association named pupusas as one of the trending “authentic street foods.”

Cruz jokes the best he’s ever eaten come from a restaurant in Miami. “Pupusas are everywhere,” he said. “But if not for the war, who knows. It’s hard to know what would have happened without the civil war, without all the political history behind it and all it led to.

“Maybe we wouldn’t know the pupusa.”

Everlasting wounds

Ruta de Paz, a two-lane throughway in northeastern El Salvador, winds its way up from San Miguel and into the mountains, the air growing fresher with every kilometer.

Glistening corn fields and morro groves line the sides of the road. Cattle and horses graze, sometimes venturing into traffic. Around each corner, the views of the lush green fields backdropped by the blue-gray mountains of Morazán grow more dramatic.

Eventually, just before the highway ends near the Honduran border, those who take Ruta de Paz will arrive at the small exit that connects two tiny villages. The last is El Mozote.

“The Route of Peace” leads to the site of the worst massacre in modern Latin American history.

Even when it’s not raining, El Mozote feels weighted by its history. A passing glance at the granite memorial betrays the nature of this village: most of the victims share the same handful of last names. After the war, relatives returned to the village, rebuilding houses on the streets where their families were slaughtered.

“Everyone here has family names on the memorial,” said Maria Delfina Argueta, who fled after a similar attack in a nearby village in the ‘80s. These days, Argueta works as a visitors’ guide. She sits patiently in a plastic chair beside the park, waiting to tell this terrible story to the strangers who pass through.

Leading us through the sober central plaza, Argueta told it all, reciting figures and details by memory.

But when I asked her how she had felt when she learned of the massacre in El Mozote, her stoicism broke, and tears fell from her face. I thought she might collapse.

“The moment I heard about it, I wanted to die,” she sobbed. “It’s terrible. Thirty-eight years have passed, but the wounds won’t close until we die.”

She pounded the memorial’s iron gate with her fist.

“To touch this,” she said, “is to touch that moment. For this reason, I don’t give personal answers. I tell this sad truth, but I can’t tell my feelings.”

After the village massacres, many others left out of fear, out of grief, out of the guttural need to escape a place of pain.

In many cases, the U.S. would be a complicated haven for the people and culture it helped to displace. But our enthusiasm for street foods—for delicious Salvadoran pupusas—is almost entirely divorced from history. All of the civil war researchers I spoke to in the States agreed that current awareness about the Salvadoran conflict is extremely low.

“Most people now,” University of Scranton professor and former El Salvador Fulbright Scholar Mike Allison said, “know nothing about it."

“There are no caravans to China.”

In the early afternoon, the sun absent over the stormy mountains of Morazán, it was time for pupusas.

At the village’s single tienda, a young woman silently flipped the masa cakes as fragrant plumes of smoke rose from the griddle. She didn’t want to talk to me about the war, or the massacre, or her family. Many don’t. The wounds are too fresh, even four decades later.

Perhaps, eventually, some of those who resettled here will leave, too, bending to the long arc of trauma, to the scars that now pass from generation to generation.

Some of them, maybe, will end up in the U.S., like so many others. The Salvadoran community will continue to grow. The culture will flourish.

The pupusas, certainly, will be wonderful.

Back in Arcatao, Ovidio Dubon mulled the irony of the migration, of giving the gift of pupusas and Salvadoran culture to a country that caused so much pain here.

“Yes,” he said. “We went to the U.S., and we still go to the U.S. But where do you want me to go? We couldn’t go to Cuba, to Venezuela—there’s no money.”

He laughed.

“And there are no caravans to China."

This story originally appeared in print in Issue 1 of Meal Magazine. Order your copy here.