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Recent immigrants to the United States differ from the last great wave of immigrants in their countries of origin and socio-economic diversity. Immigration to the Washington, D.C. area differs from national patterns in relative geographic dispersal, the wide range of immigrant groups, and the presence of large proportions of immigrants from El Salvador, Africa, Asia, and the Muslim world. This chapter profiles the new immigration nationally and in the Washington, D.C. area, and offers a brief profile of each of the immigrant religious traditions analyzed here: West African Protestants and Catholics; Chinese Protestants and Catholics from Taiwan, the mainland, and the larger Chinese diaspora; Hindus and Sikhs from India; Korean Protestants and Catholics; Muslims; and Salvadoran Protestants and Catholics.

This chapter explains how the respective political settlements came to shape associational and civic life in each case. It begins with an overview of the political settlements in each case. It then explains how the respective political settlements shaped the emergence of the different political tendencies, as well as the institutional openings of the legislative council and local government in each case. It concludes with an examination of electoral outcomes since the start of the conflict to peace transitions in the Palestinian territories and El Salvador

Chapter 5 examines Rodríguez’s work for the FPL/FMLN over the entire course of the Salvadoran Civil War, from 1980 to 1992. After the failed 1981 final offensive, Rodríguez was assigned to FPL-controlled territory in Chalatenango, just north of San Salvador, and was put in charge of building and strengthening Christian base communities. During this time, a number of priests, like Rodríguez, worked with the popular and politico-military organizations. Later Rodríguez was put in charge of organizing what were called Local Popular Powers (PPLs), the local governments that the FMLN formed in guerrilla-controlled areas. Eventually, in 1984, the FPL asked him to go to Mexico to work in the finance committee of the FPL and FMLN. From 1984 until the end of the war Rodríguez would travel to Latin America, the United States, and Europe to raise funds for the FMLN. An important theme in this chapter is the U.S. government’s decision to provide massive economic and military support to the Salvadoran regime and the argument that, without this support, the guerrillas and the popular organizations would probably have toppled the repressive government.

This chapter argues that Salvadoran migration is most certainly transnational. However, its main focus is on if and how gender relations have been transformed in northern La Union. The discussion pinpoints different discourses, practices, and processes that influence gender relations. It also argues that transnational influences are a major but not single agent for change. The chapter shows that multiple agents and agencies at the regional, local, and transnational levels affect gender relations. There are times when these work together, and there are other times when they work against each other. The chapter ends by addressing the attitudes of boys and girls in northern La Union with regards to migration, and considers how these have been shaped by transnational processes.

This chapter examines the murders of the churchwomen and how Reagan officials' critiques, which revealed that intra-Catholic conflict had become an integral part of United States–Central America policy with Reagan's ascension to the White House. It looks at remarks that bolster the Salvadoran junta's reputation or diminish the murders' impact on the protest movement against U.S. policy. It also discusses that the murdered churchwomen symbolized the church's championing of the poor and a U.S. foreign policy that was morally corrupt and politically unsound for training and arming their killers. The chapter cites that two murdered Maryknollers were members of a Catholic order and represented a dangerous trajectory for U.S. foreign policy and the church. It elaborates how the U.S. government aligned with conservative U.S. and Central American Catholics and amplified their perspective.

This chapter analyses health-care disagreements that reveal the continuing debates over women's role in the church but lacked the focus on Maryknoll. It discusses the Vatican's response to Central America and liberation theology that showed a marked changed from the 1980s just as U.S. domestic debates focused less on Maryknoll. It also recounts how Miguel d'Escoto successfully petitioned Pope Francis to reinstate him as an active priest in 2014 after being suspended in 1985 for refusing to give up his post as Nicaragua's foreign minister. The chapter mentions Maryknoller Roy Bourgeois that remained excommunicated for participating in a ceremony in which a woman was ordained. It investigates how the United States repudiated the human rights abuses of the Salvadoran civil war under Barack Obama.

This chapter explores and challenge the perception that immigrant parents demonstrate a kind of caring and advocacy that differs from dominant majority parents. It situates the case of one Salvadoran parent in the larger context of research that documents the differing communication practices of immigrant parents and teachers who teach their children. Teachers may misinterpret communication practices and participation in school events as a lack of caring. Using the story of Margarita, a Salvadoran parent of three children, the chapter demonstrates the experiences of one immigrant parent interacting with rural teachers to show how Latina/o parents are involved and actively advocate for their children’s academic futures. It concludes with a call to educators to adopt new visions of working with immigrant parents in jointly constructed activities where both parents and teachers assume shared roles of learning to solve problems, and to learn to work across diverse experiences.

Departing from professionalization explanations, this chapter demonstrates how the level of inclusiveness of the political settlement in each case shaped the impact of donor assistance on the women’s sectors. The chapter examines how the women’s sector was reconstituted in each case, focusing on the relationships that transpired with grassroots constituencies, as well as between the different tendencies of the women’s sectors. It also assesses the women sector’s engagement with legislative and local bodies of government in each case. It concludes with illustrations of donor-funded programs in each case.

The conclusion revisits the key arguments developed in the book. It expands the theoretical argument to other civil society sectors, focusing on the labor sector in each case. It then expands the discussion Iraq and South Africa to generalize the argument by examining the impact of the pervading political settlements and the mediating role of Western donor assistance. It concludes with a discussion of the theoretical impactions of the study.

Chapter 3 examines the crucial period of political awakening in Rodríguez’s life, an awakening experienced by many other priests and nuns in El Salvador. While serving as parish priest in Tecoluca, Rodríguez participated in the First Week of Pastoral Reflection (1970) that brought together priests, nuns, and lay workers in El Salvador to consider how to apply the conclusions of Vatican II and the Medellin Conference to the pastoral work in the country. At this meeting, the participants decided that the Salvadoran church should embrace the preferential option for the poor, train lay leaders, and build Christian base communities. Consequently, Rodríguez began to make changes in his parish, engaging a strategy of social mobilization that put him in direct conflict with the local landowners and with his bishop. Nevertheless, he and the other priest of the parish, Padre Rafael Barahona, continued to promote Christian base communities and organized the poor. Rodríguez also began teaching classes at a peasant training center in the nearby diocese of Santiago de Maria. The most important general themes in this chapter are the importance of Rodríguez’s conversion and the early stages of his leadership in the development of the popular movement in El Salvador.

Chapter 6 tells the story of Rodríguez’s move to democratic political leadership. Victory for the FMLN meant that they could now finally participate politically and bring necessary changes via the ballot box. Rodríguez tried to return to the church but conditions were placed on his that he found unacceptable and thus he returned to the FMLN to help establish it as a legal political party. Owing to his popularity and his longstanding struggles representing the interests of the campesinos, Rodríguez was nominated as a candidate for a legislative seat in the Department of La Paz, which was part of the diocese of San Vicente, a region in which he was well-known. He was elected in 1997 and re-elected in 2000; and then again in 2009 and in 2012, meaning that he will serve as a legislator until 2015. This chapter will highlight the difficulties in trying to bring structural changes to El Salvador via the electoral process. Part of the problem lies in the leaders themselves, who often become complacent once they win political office.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of repertoires of violence, which refer to the forms of violence frequently used by an actor. While political scientists have examined repertoires of violence during individual wars, none has theorized repertoires per se. This book aims to consider how, and how systematically, repertoires of violence differ from time to time, place to place, and group to group. Repertoires of violence may be narrow or broad. “Broad repertoire of violence” means a repertoire of violence in which many different forms of violence are represented, including both forms of violence that often require planning or infrastructure and are often ordered by commanders, and forms of violence that often happen in the absence of orders. The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), Shining Path, and Kamajors used narrow repertoires of violence in most times and places, contrasting with the Salvadoran Army, the Peruvian Army, and the Revolutionary United Front.

This chapter discusses the Commander's Dilemma framework that motivated the study of Salvadoran armed groups, examining literature from sociology, social psychology, and economics to understand why restraint is rare, and when it can succeed. This theoretical approach rests on four claims. First, to succeed, commanders must increase combatants' predispositions to violence. Yet—second—both training and combat durably increase combatants' predispositions to violence in general, not only their predisposition to perpetrate ordered killings of enemy soldiers. Third, commanders wish to avoid violence that appears likely to threaten the group's, or the commander's, survival, including some unordered violence against civilians. This imperative conflicts with the necessity to increase violent predispositions. These conflicting imperatives are referred to as the Commander's Dilemma. Fourth, purely extrinsic incentives are not sufficient to halt unordered violence in irregular war, because so many violence-causing factors are present in most conflict contexts. Violence is, in a word, overdetermined.

This chapter examines the social, political, and economic factors underlying the Salvadoran civil war, and the development of the organizations that ultimately contested the war. The military government's intense, disproportionate repression of even moderate reformers both accelerated progress toward war and served as a tactic of war. Similarly, the histories, and prehistories, of both state and rebel organizations informed their strategies and tactics in conflict. El Salvador's civil war featured well-organized, ideologically sophisticated Communist rebels, who sought control of the state, rather than resource wealth, secession, or ethnic domination. Facing them was a generally inept and brutal state force, which ultimately required vast amounts of assistance from the United States—military and otherwise—to avoid losing the war outright. Yet there was little demographic difference between the fighting forces, in terms of age, education, ethnicity, or other factors. The chapter then looks at some broad, structural similarities and differences between El Salvador's war and others.

This chapter demonstrates—to the extent that estimates of repertoires are available and believable for the Salvadoran case—that the Commander's Dilemma framework explains patterns of violence that other theoretical approaches cannot. Yet the patterns themselves are difficult, and in some cases impossible, to pin down. Some of the hypotheses laid out in the preceding chapters cannot be tested with confidence here. Thus, the chapter opens with a discussion of the difficulty of accurately estimating patterns of violence, and the tendency of political scientists—who are primarily interested in causal inference—to avoid the prior and more serious problem of descriptive inference. It then uses multiple systems estimation (MSE) and a variety of strategies to consider variations in repertoires of violence and restraint in the Salvadoran civil war.

This chapter examines the confounding effects of deportation. The analysis draws upon interviews conducted in El Salvador during the summer of 2008. As part of a larger project examining the experiences of 1.5 generation Salvadorans—that is, Salvadorans who migrated to the United States originally as children—researchers interviewed 41 deportees, most of whom had migrated prior to the age of 13 and had grown up in the United States. The experiences of deportees and their families are varied and complex. Some deportees adjusted successfully to life in their country of origin. Others suffered from depression and alienation, which may be exacerbated by the negative reactions of fellow citizens, discrimination, and harassment because they were perceived to be foreign, and from loss of custody and sometimes even communication with their children. Some deportees remained in El Salvador; others defied their deportation orders through unauthorized re-entry or by recreating U.S. communities on small scales in El Salvador.

This chapter asks what happens when transnational migrant families own homes, plant trees, and establish businesses in small-town America but still lack a viable path to legal residency. Based on extensive fieldwork in small, rural Arkansas communities with Salvadoran transnational migrants, the author explores the contradictory dynamics between a growing identification with local geographies and continuing legal exclusion. Most Salvadoran migrants are caught between categories of national belonging; classified as either “illegal” or “temporary,” they lack rights to political participation either in the United States or in El Salvador. These legal exclusions create a mobile space of exception around the body of the migrant, which facilitate the exploitation of migrants' labor. Legal exclusion also contributes to social exclusion through the contradictory production of both invisibility and hypervisibility. Despite this, transnational migrants continue to put down roots in their new places of settlement.

This chapter evaluates how the counterinsurgency campaign during the Salvadoran civil war provides support for the compellence theory. In El Salvador from 1979 to 1992, the U.S.-backed government fought the Communist and nationalist insurgency to a draw, preserving the government from an insurgent takeover. Elite accommodation took place largely among civilian and military officers in the government as hard-liners and slightly more liberal political and military entrepreneurs jockeyed for influence. The Salvadoran government resisted U.S.-pressed reforms but accepted U.S. efforts to strengthen its security forces. It used its increased fighting ability to clear civilian areas, creating vast refugee flows that reduced provision of material support to the insurgency. It also used U.S.-provided air power to break down the insurgency's conventional formations but was never able to successfully pursue and destroy the smaller bands of insurgents or gain more popular support than it began the war with. Continued insurgent political and military strength, along with the end of the Cold War, forced the United States and the hard-liners within the military to accept peace talks and a political settlement to the war rather than the military victory they had pressed for.