Que No Se Vuelva a Repetir

“The National Guard would arrive at our doors with a list of people to kill, interrogating us.” All images are from the December 2006 performance of ¡Qué No Se Vuelva a Repetir! in El Salvador.

Since 2000, ArtCorps has been sending international volunteer artists to Central American nongovernmental organizations to use art to promote their social and environmental messages and engage communities in shaping their own futures. Partnering with experts in environmental conservation, community building, public health and women’s and children’s rights, ArtCorps strives to demonstrate that art and culture are powerful tools that transcend communication barriers and inspire local communities to be active agents of change. Here is a story from Aryeh Shell, a 2006 ArtCorps theater artist.

I woke up to a day that seemed like every other day. The sun was already burning the sky. The roosters were crowing. But on this day I was going to listen to stories that no one should ever have to tell. I would hear testimonies from survivors of the massacre of La Quesera, a military invasion in El Salvador that took place October 20-24, 1981, and brutally took the lives 600-800 innocent people, mostly women, children and elders. The massacre was called Tierra Arrasada, or Scorched Earth, so-named because along with widespread rape and torture, the government burned everything to the ground: crops, homes, animals and people. The Salvadoran government had initiated its new American-learned policy as a means to uproot popular dissent.

The survivors did not talk about it, the government certainly did not talk about it, and the memory was buried under the scorched earth for 20 years. One day in 2001, a local priest, Padre Pedro, was preaching about the importance of commemorating the martyrs of the infamous massacre of El Mozote. A woman bravely spoke up and said, “When are we going to talk about our massacre?” Padre Pedro asked, “What massacre?” and the wounds of an unspoken history were opened.

For this project I selected a group of youth from four different communities who called themselves Teatro de Jóvenes Luchadores or Revolutionary Youth Theater.

A group of survivors have been meeting for five years now in a support group to process the trauma. They have exhumed some of the mass graves in order to rebury the remains and restore dignity to the dead. They have purchased land on the Loma de Pájaro, one of the hills where the massacre took place that now contains a small monument and a mural under a dove-shaped roof. For the last five years, they have come back to this land to pray and commemorate their loved ones. Currently, they are working with Tutela Legal del Arzobispo del San Salvador to demand that the government legally recognize the massacre and hold the military personnel accountable for the operation.

The horn beeped and I ran out to join Gigi, the Maryknoll social worker, who had helped me to organize this project. We rode down the dirt road in a dusty white pickup truck, collecting the survivors one by one. Maria. Elsa. Irma. Luisa. Lencho. Chici. All clamored into the back of the truck, chatting about this and that, their laughter filling the sweltering air around us.

While I looked out the window at the withered cornfields, I thought of how I had arrived at this opportunity to direct a group of youth in the creation of a theater production that would commemorate the 25th anniversary. One of the goals of the project is to tour the performance nationally as a means to reconstruct the country’s historical awareness and declare that this massacre indeed took place.

I had come to El Salvador as a volunteer with ArtCorps, an organization that places artists in residence with Central American communities for one year. Their mission is to share art as a tool to engage participation and more effectively raise awareness of social and environmental issues. I lived in the rural flatlands, forming popular theater groups with youth to develop their skills as community leaders and actors for social change. Through theater skits, we engaged our audiences in reflection and dialogue about issues ranging from global warming, gang violence, the impacts of CAFTA on employment and poverty, the prevention of AIDS and youth pregnancy to disaster preparedness and the importance of a unified community.

For this project, I selected a group of youth from four different communities who called themselves Teatro de Jóvenes Luchadores or Revolutionary Youth Theater. I watched their faces while they rode in the back of the pickup, their eyes pensive and full of questions as the survivors talked and laughed amongst each other.

We arrived and sat down in a circle. Luisa began with her hands and voice shaking.

“We lived in conditions of extreme poverty. We didn’t have any rights, not even to education or health care. Although we were illiterate, we knew the word of God.”

We lived in conditions of extreme poverty. We didn’t have any rights, not even to education or health care. Although we were illiterate, we knew the word of God. We worked long hours to feed our families. They were killing people in the streets. We were so afraid that we couldn’t leave our houses. We thought, “Things are going to pass” but they only got worse.

Marina continued:

They killed our animals. They burned our crops. The National Guard would arrive at our doors with a list of people to kill, interrogating us.

And the words continued to spill along with the tears….

We found my brother’s body without his head. We could only recognize him by the pants he was wearing. The air was filled with a horrible smell because the river was full of bodies.

I asked them what gave them the strength to finally speak out and why did they decide to break the silence after 20 long years? We heard many responses.

We couldn’t allow for our people to be erased from memory.

We have to name the injustice.

We never want it to happen again.

This was echoed many times throughout the room.

We never want it to happen again.

We never want it to happen again.

This became the name of our theater piece: ¡Qué No Se Vuelva a Repetir!

“We never want it to happen again. ¡Qué No Se Vuelva a Repetir!”

The youth listened to their elders with respect, awed by what they had survived. So many of these second-generation youth carry similar legacies. Most of them are the sons and daughters of guerrilleros and have family members who were also tortured, disappeared and killed.

The rehearsal process was both challenging and transformative as the youth learned to trust each other and meet the demands of working with such stories of horror. They began to assume more responsibility for the sacred task they had been given and allowed themselves to open to the pain and the struggle that the survivors had shared. Step by step, the piece began to take shape.

Shortly before the event, we met again with the survivors so that the youth could look into the eyes of those they would be representing. Through the artistic process of honoring the stories of their elders, the youth would find their own voices in claiming and creating history. Art would become their weapon to demand justice.

The day of December 28th, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, had arrived. Amidst a crowd of 500 people, the survivors were seated directly in front of the stage and the air was thick with anticipation. The youth were nervous and we quickly formed a circle backstage to do our warm-up exercises, to breathe and to connect to each other by weaving an invisible piece of thread through our hearts.

Their performance was powerful and the message rang out over the blood-soaked land. I imagined that their voices were reaching to the other side where the ancestors dwell. The survivors watched their suffering being transformed into an act of creation and witnessed their own courage and dignity with tears in their eyes. Theater opened a space for the community to remember together, to heal and commit to creating a world where this would never happen again.

This article first appeared in art’ishake, Issue No 5 Winter-Spring 2007, an e-publication that addresses interdisciplinary, cross-cultural and intersectoral issues in tandem with arts and development, published by Art4Development.Net.

Aryeh Shell is a theater artist, popular educator and cultural activist who has worked throughout the United States and Latin America using the arts for social transformation. She most recently spent a year in El Salvador as a resident artist through ArtCorps, developing a theater and social-arts program for youth. She now leads the Community Engagement program for Somos Mayfair.

Original CAN/API publication: May 2008