Poets and Prophets of the Resistance offers a ground-up
history and fresh interpretation of the polarization and mobilization
that brought El Salvador to the eve of civil war in 1980. Challenging
the dominant narrative that university students and political
dissidents primarily formed the Salvadoran guerrillas, Joaquín
Chávez argues that El Salvador's socioeconomic and political crises
of the 1970s fomented a groundswell of urban and peasant
intellectuals who collaborated to spur larger revolutionary social
movements.
Drawing on new
archival sources and in-depth interviews, Poets and Prophets of
the Resistance contests the idea that urban militants and Roman
Catholic priests influenced by Liberation Theology single-handedly
organized and politicized peasant groups. Chávez shows instead how
peasant intellectuals acted as political catalysts among their own
communities first, particularly in the region of Chalatenango, laying
the groundwork for the peasant movements that were to come. In this
way, he contends, the Salvadoran insurgency emerged in a dialogue
between urban and peasant intellectuals working together to create
and execute a common revolutionary strategy--one that drew on
cultures of resistance deeply rooted in the country's history,
poetry, and religion. Focusing on this cross-pollination, this book
introduces the idea that a "pedagogy of revolution"
originated in this historical alliance between urban and peasant,
making use of secular and Catholic pedagogies such as radio schools,
literacy programs, and rural cooperatives. This pedagogy became more
and more radicalized over time as it pushed back against the
increasingly repressive structures of 1970s El Salvador.
Teasing out the
roles of little-known groups such as the politically active "La
Masacuata" literary movement, the contributions of Catholic
Action intellectuals to the New Left, and the overlooked efforts of
peasant leaders, Poets and Prophets of the Resistance
demonstrates how trans-class political and cultural interactions
drove the revolutionary mobilizations that anticipated the Salvadoran
civil war.