Escape From El Salvador

pictures I've ever seen of my dad. He looks rebellious, fearless. It's like he's on top of the world. After leaving in a fifteen, l A became his second home. He had a girl fast, but he still kept a sense of adventure. When I was growing up, he got so excited talking about his childhood and Las Deliciastan it sounded idyllic. That's where he climbed tall mango trees to pick the juiciest ones, where he swam against the tides of the flowing rivers. In his colonna, where he helped harvest and

cultivate coffee with his bare hands. He was also kind of mischievous, like when he used the slingshot to kill iguanas to roast and eat them. He loved to tell tall tales about the elaborate pranks he pulled on his friends. Recalling these stories always filled him with childlike joy. But that place, it's just a memory now because my dad hasn't been back to a Santrador since the nineties, before I was even born. I always hope to see the paradise he described. He promised me and my whole family

that he would show us one day. That day has yet to come. When I interviewed my dad for this podcast, I accidentally revealed something that I don't think he ever really thought about. See, my mom is Mexican, and most of the culture I inherited, like food, music, and traditions, came from my mom. She learned to make bussas, pan guomboyo, and salvitamalis to expose us to a piece of my dad's culture. So when I told him that culturally I identified more with my Mexican side, I caught him off guard.

I could see the frustration move across his face. I think I wounded him. He didn't necessarily avoid introducing me to his culture. I just think he was guarded. It took me a long time to understand the cultural shame associated with being Central American in this country. It was dangerous to be Salvadoran when he was growing up. To survive, he traded climbing mango trees for climbing tall building thousands of miles from home. He had to shed who he was and become a new person in America. It was

easier that way. Growing up path Salvie and Mexican was a little confusing. I felt like I didn't know a part of myself. My dad's stories gave us an idealized version of polished to focus on the good parts. I think he was doing it to shield us from the brutality of the Civil War or how unwelcome he felt

being Central American in the US. But interviewing my dad for this podcast, I was able to witness his real feelings about leaving home, growing up in our own country, and how he was forced to hide parts of himself from his family from me. I'm Karen Garcia and I'm a child of eighty six and this is Out of the Shadows, a podcast about the legacy of the Amnesty Bill known as Urka. Immigrants and their children have long

lived in the shadows of America. Their destinies aren't just shaped by where they come from, but by their particular place in history. In the lives of millions of immigrants and their children were changed by one lucky stroke of a pen by an unlikely allied President, Ronald Reagan. This podcast examines the ripple effects the bill had on first generation kids of immigrants, who are navigating intergenerational mobility and

transforming the cultural landscape. This is an untold story of luck, timing, triumph, opportunity, survival, and of course hope. My dad goes by many names. I didn't even know his name was us until I was eight. Chungo is what they called him in the States. They didn't call him us or Chewi, but Jesse that's what my mom called him. My dad migrated from Rador to this country in ninety nine, about a year before the Civil War started, and it was by pure luck

that he managed to escape that violence. Julio, If you ask him why he came, he'll tell you a bunch of different reasons. One of those was that his family was too poor to pay for school books, but he heard from a cousin who was in the police force that the government was forced to enlisting kids into the military. Daniel and la policia. You may say, um, jo let me say I think we star can say as you

have a completely this his face. He was only fifteen when his cousin advised that it would be best to disappear and leave in Savador, because when the military sets stuff like that, they're not bluffing. See okay, says those condo complain. So he came up with a plan. I have to stop for a second and say that, to this day, it's still one of the wildest things my dad has ever told me. His plan was just to leave. He didn't leave a note, he didn't say any goodbyes.

He just left. I guess it would be weird to say, hey mom Um, I'm scared for my life and I'm leaving forever. No, you can't stop me. What he did say, though, is the wild part. Hey mom, I'm going to the river. Words that live in infamy in my house. There's a lot to impact in that simple phrase. More than anything, it says a lot about my dad and how bullish he can be. Once he's made up his mind, no one can stop him, and sometimes Rio becomes the abridged

version of his migration story. There's another element to this story, his sense of adventures. He was a kid who didn't let the looming threat of war stop him from seeing the world. So he convinced a friend to tag along, and off they went to see the metaphorical river. First, they made their way through Gatemala, working odd jobs as day labors for a few days, then went NORTHWRD to Mexico. Eventually they hopped on a cargo train into the capital,

Mexico City. That train is now infamously known as Lavestia the Beast, and it's how many Central Americans travel to the border. Tempo, it's a temple. No, it's I didn't have that reputation yet, and my dad says it wasn't as dangerous as it is now. In Mexico City, he was able to survive by begging for food and the kindness of strangers. He met a couple who offered him work and a place to sleep. Remember how comediaempo you. On his journey, my dad heard about the wondrous things

that awaited everybody in the United States. He heard that you can make money just by sweeping. It must be paradise, he thought, in a guilty and yeah, barriendos los Yeah, yeah, assume is here. Whenever he was asked, he used to say he was Mexican, keeping his identity close to his chest just in case. They left Mexico City and made their way to Tijuana on a cargo train with little more than a gallon of juice and a gallon of milk.

On that lonely, bumpy ride, he thought about his mom and what she must be thinking when perimente is a moment and a moment. Yeah so it it the way he rationalized it, and all of his fifteen year old wisdom was now. His family had one less mouth to feed out of. The shadows will be right back now, back to the show. The train ride from Mexico City lasted about a month, and once they got to Tijuana, they tried to cross the river not once, not twice,

but three times. The first two times without a coyote, they got caught and sent back to Mexico. This is where costs playing as Mexican came in handy. They waited a few weeks across the third time. They used the money from panhandling to hire a coyote and it was pretty smooth sailing from there. After crossing into Sunny Serro, he made his way to Sunny Los Angeles, where he

met my mom a year later. They had their first kid two years later and named her Sandy, after the Olivia Newton John character in Greece, the first movie my dad watched when he came to the States. The influx of Salvadoran's really started to grow in the nineteen eighties, when the region was further destabilized by a civil war. Many landed in l A, making them one of the largest Latino demographics in the city, but Salvadorian start the

second most largest growing Latino demographic across the country. The state of California is home to more Salvadoran Americans than anywhere else the remit instance, and the economic power between California and salvador is very real and very tied together. That's in the Caio. She is a California assembly member and a Salvadoran child of eight six assemblywoman for the Northeast and East Los Angeles. Like my dad, she also

had to grow up quickly. She distinctly remembers what crossing felt like, down to what she was wearing in night five eight six, crossed over with a coyote from Tijuana to sanny See Little to San Diego and ended up in Boil Heights. I was five years old, and I remember wearing a Mickey Mouse shirt with little red sleeves back in the day, which was the style, and my hair was in pigtails, and I remember being told to be very quiet while we crossed the border. The violence

forced her and her family to leave. My family lost everything during the Civil War, like a lot of families did, and it was a matter of you try to survive and live in a country ats in turmoil, or you try to relocate your family for their own safety, for yourself and and it was a really tough choice. It was a choice that many Central Americans faced. If you lived indor Ga, Nicaragua, you could stay in your home

and live in fear of dying or leave. Compared to the Mexican experience with immigration, Central Americans are an entirely different category. They're not recognized as people seeking economic opportunities or political refugees, but have characteristics of both well and Whatatemala and Al Salvador. The United States had allies in the government. Here's cal l a professor of Latin American studies, Alejandro. They were authoritarian dictators, sometimes military autocrats, right, that the

United States supported financially and ideologically. So when the United States is supporting their homies in those countries, they can't acknowledge that the people that are fleeing and coming to the United States saying that your homies are killing me, right, They can't say, oh, yeah, you're right, because that would implicate the United States in the genocidal violence that was occurring in places like what the Milan. My dad very

narrowly escaped the horrors of that war. A few years after he arrived in l A, he caught a phone call that the military had palmed schools in his town. Yok Those America Midas spoiler. I would h w Colonia, um um oh Martine La yeah, La Colonia. You're looking. His schoolmates were bombed, he says, their bodies found in pieces. Many others disappeared, never to be heard from again. Their names were Suyapa, Natural and Martin. Hearing my dad retelling

these events and such painful detail was surreal. It was like as he was saying the words, he was grappling with his mortality, as if it had just hit him that he could have been one of those kids. If my dad hadn't listened to his cousin, he would have been another tragic death caught in a military bombing. So will cause Central Americans to start coming to the US.

After World War Two, Central America experienced rapid modernization and industrialization, which was fueled by foreign investment, and the region has a history of money and power being held by wealthy elites or oligarchs. This aggressive industrialization displaced impoverished Campesinos and indigenous peoples. Any form of protests or organizing was met with government suppression and in tens of thousands of cases death. People were kidnapped out of their homes, tortured, and murdered

by death squads. Sympathy of your resistance groups swelled and death tools mounted, leaving citizens little choice but to join the resistance and fight, or abandoned their homes. The seventies marked a long decade of government assassinations of progressive priests, journalists, and anyone pleading for basic human rights. Large scale massacres took place in Guatemala in that same period. Bodies of victims were piled in mass graves, left in ditches, or

dumped on the side of the road. In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas replaced a dictatorship with the socialist government, and the US didn't like that because it was fighting the Cold War against communism. In America's eyes, the Sandinista victory started to feel a lot like the Cuban Revolution. They feared that Central American countries would be infected with ideas communism. The US government invested billions to stop the spread, especially

in the eighties. Once Ronald Reagan was elected president, his administration supported the right wing contras who opposed the elected Sandinistas and Nicaragua, all while funneling arms and money to the Salvadoran government fighting its own citizen rebellion. Some of that financial support came through congressional funding, but not all of it. In Nicaragua, Reagan administration officials secretly provided aid to the contrast by selling arms to Iran against its

own embargo. In Guatemala, Reagan's people continued to supply weapons and training to the Guatemalan army, covertly supporting acts of genocide against indigenous people. Since I have been so closely associated with the cause of the Contras, the big question during the hearings was whether I knew of the diversion. I was aware of the resistance was receiving funds directly from third countries and from private efforts, and I endorsed

those endeavors wholeheartedly. But let me put this in capital letters. I did not know about the diversion of funds. Indeed, I didn't know there were excess funds. Things heated up with the assassination of Bishop Oscar Rometro Frometo, spoke out against the death squad slaughters and fought for the rights

of poor Salvadoran people. He was publicly shot while saying mass in the Savadoran army killed more than eight hundred civilians in the town of venost These events represented the Salvadoran government's forceful retaliation against anyone pleading for human rights, all underwritten by the US. In a slick spokesman for anti communist resistance in Central America, was elected president with

full support of the Reagan administration. It's always a pleasure to welcome President Duarty, a close friend the United States will continue to working with President Duarty to build peace, prosperity, and freedom in his own land and to bring stability throughout Central America. It's been a great pleasure to exchange views with him today. In what thea a civil war began percolating in the sixties and lasted over thirty years,

devastating the country. I believe the number is the famous number is eight of the people who were killed during the US backed and supported civil war in Gatemala were indigenous people. More than half a million indigenous people were killed de plassified. US documents show that the CIA collaborated in training pro government troops to target, torture and eliminate civilian dissidents. Right, those numbers are are are absurd. You

know the result is was a genocide. When everybody's favorite President Ronald Reagan comes into office, he just starts rolling over and forking over mad money to the Watermelond military and the Watermelond government. The US government under Regan led to seven point nine million dollars in military funding, despite the mounting reports of human rights violations. Margarita Valencia fled

Guatemala for the United States. In her plan was to use a borrowed green card to cross, but her odyssey veered off course when she landed in a Tijuana jail cell Inmala and I don't there are two ways to cross, she says, one by plane and the other by bus, which was longer and more dangerous. She flew to Tijuana and she tried to cross that day, pero the sae no. Sadly they were caught. She had to spend the night in jail, where she told people she was Mexican, but

someone cut on don't isn't American guy? And then Aligasna. She recalls the cell being packed and full of children. There wasn't even a place to sit dar Ea Guando Embarrassed. One of the guards came and asked for a hundred bucks in exchange for letting her go, So she paid and she was free. After that, she just waited in a hotel until the coyotes helped her cross the border. She remembers a visceral image being on the other side.

Ela had just rained, she says, so the gusts of wind were so powerful that they stretched out a giant American flag. She took the billowing flag as a symbol, saying welcome. Three years later, she raised enough money to bring her children to the US. She used money from a gundina, which is like a money lending agreement where each person agrees to pitch in the same amount of money and you take turns receiving it. It's like the Latino version of crowdfunding. Using those funds, she was able

to pay to cross her kids. Her son, Elmer Roldan, an education advocate, remembers how desensitized everyone was to the war in Guatemala. The war is something that was so normalized. For Elmer, the sudden loss of his mother is still palpable today. I remember the day my mom left. I remember her saying words to me and kneeling and being emotional, and me understanding that I wasn't going to see her for a long time. I didn't understand that that long

time would mean three years. Elmer, his cousin, and his niece all journeyed together to cross the border. I remember once being inside of a trunk for Lord knows how long. It felt like an eternity. It could have been thirty minutes, but you know, when you're nine years old, everything feels like forever. But two days into their journey, they were

robbed of everything. I remember the military stopping the buzz and two soldiers getting in and basically telling people, you give us all your money now or owls, we take you in. Right And the military was feared, and a

lot of it. It goes back to the earlier topic of the war, right Like, everybody knew you don't mess with the military because they were killers, right Like, that's what they did, right Like, they were trained to do one thing, and that was to kill, and so you wouldn't think twice about giving them your money if they asked for it. They had no one to turn to for help. They had to sleep with pigs, suffering the smells.

And at that time, I guess the still a law that if you were a miner, you could be crossed into the US with the with a birth certificate. And it was like maybe six am. My, you know, my aunt and uncle went. They picked me up, They gave me my cousin's clothes and then put me in the back of an astro van. We crossed the border, and I remember falling asleep on the journey here and then waking up and ban around the city. Fortunately, once they got to the border, they were able to cross without

any more pitfalls. It's one thing to cross and leave your home, but it's an entirely different thing existing as a Central American in the US. Out of the Shadows will be right back now, back to the show. Growing up here, Elmer felt pressured to erase is true heritage.

I understood that later on, but at the time, as a child, all it felt like was Mexican hegemony is being forced upon me, and my own Central American identity isn't welcomed in that because unless I'm willing to fully identify as Mexican and let go of my roots, then I don't really fit into Matcha and fit into um whatever is being created over here south Central. It was just easier to you know, to gravitate towards Black culture

than it was to gravitate towards Mexican culture. At the time, he wasn't alone Grian Guatemalan in South Central, Alejandro noticed that Central Americans were treated differently. I remember specifically that the reason that a lot of the Latino kids would bully him is because he was from O Salvador, and I remember that being a lesson for me as a kid to be like Yo, this is what a moling thing, and this whole thing that like how my mom talks and how my family talks. We gotta keep that stuff

in the house, you know. That stuff don't don't belong out here, because these Mexicans they're mean. The social threat of being Central American was deepened by the larger political

context driven by Reagan administration rhetoric. The first kind of interpretations and introductions of Central Americans to the United States on television, to the popular American media was through Ronald Reagan's presentation of how dangerous we were right as communists and leftists, you know, leftist socialists right like, who were seeking to overthrow democracy in Central America, and that we

were so close to the United States. Right. So the figure is already imprinted in the national imagination of US as threats right like and then communist stress at the at the height of the Cold War. My dad has sus was one of those he doesn't like to talk about his first few years in the States. He was a teenager with out any parental supervision, forced to grow up in a country that didn't see him as a kid,

but as a threat. It was a normal Friday night my dad had just finished a long shift working in a sweatshop making jeans. His friends invited him out and they were going to meet up at a friend's house in Koreatown. But this friend was taking a while. Five minutes turns to ten minutes, and he still won't come out. They noticed an empty parked car with the windows rolled down, and my dad's friends dared him to haunt the horn. Always looking for an opportunity to make his friends laugh.

My dad agrees, just as it hanks the horn that he's shouting from a nosy neighbor, not wanting to get caught. My dad and his friend's book it just as they started running. The cops cool. They didn't see him as a kid playing a dumb joke. They saw a brown kid running away from a potential grand theft auto, a thug, a gang member. They shouted at him with guns drawn, put him and all his friends and handcuffs and took

them in at the station. He was scared and alone, desperately trying to tell the cops that he was a miner, he was in the wrong place. The cops didn't care. Instead, they jammed a baton in his stomach, knocking the air out of his lungs. My dad had never so alone. His parents were so na thousands of miles away. While he was alone, gasping for air in a jail cell, he was assigned a public defender who only spoke broken Spanish, advising him to plead guilty so he could be released.

He had no one to call, no one to turn to for help, no one to even post bail for him. It was his only choice. If I plead guilty, I can leave, he thought, not considering how that would impact his future. He didn't know that he was signing away his freedom. The irony is my dad didn't even know how to drive. But that arrest resulted in a felony that he forcibly pleaded guilty too. That felony still haunts him today, like a shameful shadow, following him wherever he goes.

By the time IRKA came around a few years later, that felony, well, it automatically disqualified him. He heard that if you were a felon, you couldn't apply. He was scared that if he did, he would be deported. The struggle for a lot of Central Americans to get IRKA was real. You remember Margarita, the Guatemalan refugee, well, she didn't get IRKA either. In fact, she didn't get her legal status until almost a decade later, when she could finally come out of the shadows. Mistis. She felt really

happy and calm, she says. The first thing she did buy a ticket to go back to Guatemala. But there were Central Americans who applied for IRKA and got it, like Sonja Escobar who came from Servador. Oh, I can't believe in myself. I was, I was grateful. I was crying. I was. I remember, I want to meet President Ringer. I want to go see him. She was so moved by it that she and her co workers sent Reagan a personal letter what he did to them and signed him.

We make a letter. I remember, we make a letter and we all signed the letter and send it to him. We didn't know he received it, but we were so grateful. That was It was just the best thing in the right time. I wish they can do it again for so many people like me. But there were multiple realities for Central Americans under IRKA. My dad couldn't apply for the American Dream because of some ship he did as

a kid. He went from a starry eyed adventurer, hopeful and excited to watch American movies, listen to rock and roll, and hang out with friends, to being on the outside looking in the illusions of a new paradise that he heard of on his journey started to crumble. It was like he was in a gilded cage, never allowed to leave, stuck in a continuous purgatory of being undocumented, never allowed to show his children where he was born, only sharing

glowing memories of his youth. The promise my dad made to his kids about showing them as avallor never came true. He missed growing up with his siblings and friends, and missed his parents funerals. He's still in that cage today, still undocumented. So when I think about the shame my dad feels associated with being Central American, I understand it.

My dad came to this country because of men like Reagan, who further destabilized and tore apart Central America, then denied people like my father a chance to build a future here. Urica was a blessing for my mom, who was able to apply and get amnesty, but accursed from my dad. A reminder that he's still in the cage inside Paradise. When my mom applied and got her green card, it felt like a weight had been lifted. I felt freer. She says, like there was more security here, but she

knows how lucky she was. A few years later, she was able to become a citizen, something that she could never have imagined in her why eldest streams. She was able to go back to Mexico and visit her family. She was able to attend my grandparents funerals and grieve with their siblings and their childhood home. My dad, on the other hand, never got to say goodbye to his parents. As kids, my siblings and I naively thought that my dad kept us from knowing him and where he came from.

But looking at the photo of my dad on the rooftop, I still see the kid in him, the one who swam in rivers and climb mango trees and scaled tall buildings. Even if he had to leave those parts of himself in Osa, He's still full of adventure. Now. When I hear my dad say that he wanted to adventure, I believe him. It's like he's focusing on the rosy parts of his youth, because no matter what, they can never

take that away from him. And someday soon, when my dad is ready and able to go back to it, Sador, We'll go to the river, except this time not to escape, but together as a family's coming. Next time I'm Out of the Shadows, we look at the immediate and long term impacts of Urka. If you love this podcast, please help us get the word out by following, rating, reviewing, and sharing it with your friends. This episode was written by Caesar Hernandez and me Karen Garcia. I also guest

hosted the episode. It's also written, edited, hosted, an executive produced by Patti Rodriguez and Eric Galindo. It's produced by Betticrdanas, Karen Lopez and Gabby Watts. It's sound design, mixed and mastered by Jesse nice Longer. Our studio engineer is Clay Hillenburg. Out of the Shadows is a production of Seeing Me, Other Productions and School of Humans in partnership with I

Hearts Michael Tura Podcast Network. The podcast has also executive produced by Giselle Bantes, Virginian Prescott, Brandon Barr, and Chad Crowley. Our marketing and our team is led by Jasmine Mehea. Original music by a Arenas, and if you loved his cover of Los Caminos La viva this podcast theme song, you can live in to it on all music platforms. Historical audio for Out of the Shadows comes from the

Reagan Presidential Library and the National Archives. Special thanks to Ian Vargas, Alex and Ali, Caitlin Becker, gob Chavran, Daisy Church, Angel Lopez Glendo, Julianna Gamis, Ryan Gordon, Brian Matheson, Claudia Marti, Corna, Oscar Ramirez, John Rodriguez, Juan Rodriguez, Joshua Sandoval, Eric Sclar, Tony Sorrentino, and Megan tan