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Monument or memorial? Defeat or withdrawal? The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC pays tribute to more than 58,000 Americans who died fighting an unpopular war. Yet today the ‘Wall’, as it is known to most Americans, is the most visited site managed by the US National Park Service. Weekend visitors will happen upon an almost festive place as thousands of people pass by looking at the names – what do they think, imagine? This chapter discusses not only the story and controversy behind the building of the ‘Wall’, but also how it reflects the collective memory of a society and its values, and how these are constructed.

During the 1980s, the Washington DC metropolitan area was especially attractive to lenders of U.S. dollars and major U.S. banks that were seeking access to the regional money market. The largest Salvadoran banks began to consider how to move up the trail of remittances to obtain the U.S. dollars earlier in an effort to better control the market of floating exchange rates in El Salvador. Two such banks were Banco Cuscatlán and Banquito. This chapter examines competing conceptualizations of the pueblo of Intipucá in El Salvador, showing that they grew out of the contradictions of the remittance and migrant circuit which itself was a product of the coffee and cotton systems in the country. It looks at the collapse of Banquito and numerous other DC banks, along with the real estate market collapse in the DC area, pending changes in U.S. immigration law that threatened to deport illegal migrants in DC, and the violence which erupted in Mount Pleasant in May 1991 following the shooting of a young Salvadoran named Daniel Gómez.

In his 2004 book Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity, Samuel P. Huntington argued that America's national culture was at risk due to the recent decades of large-scale population migration from Latin America, particularly Mexico. As an example, he noted that 20 percent of the town of Intipucá in El Salvador lived in the Washington DC, neighborhood of Adams Morgan, suggesting that the town appeared to have “colonized” part of America's capital city. This book investigates the relations between El Salvador and the United States during the past five decades. It examines how and why El Salvador has shifted from growing and exporting high-quality coffee beans to sending remittances of more than two billion US dollars annually, courtesy of migrants living in the Washington DC, metropolitan area. Drawing from Karl Marx's approach to capitalist value determination and Charles Peirce's semeiotic logic, the book explores how people and the objective expressions of their social world have together helped shape the overall hemispheric transformation.

This chapter begins with the accounts of two authors, Francisco Gavidia and Manlio Argueta, who provided two dominant perspectives of El Salvador at the end of the 1970s. In particular, it explores the rise of cotton production and trade in El Salvador out of the earlier coffee era, and the development of suburbs in Washington DC and Northern Virginia. The chapter shows that these two larger processes are related, including early migration between El Salvador and the United States starting in the 1960s. It examines the impact of U.S. defense spending, especially after the success of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, on both processes, and demonstrates how “economic” immiseration, “political” violence, and “cultural” domination are internally related.

This chapter looks at the reflections of two immigrants—Gabriel Escobar and Sigfredo Chávez—who describe a profound transformation of life in the town of Intipucá in El Salvador. Escobar, a Colombian-born journalist who migrated with his family to New York City in 1964, and Chávez, a resident of Intipucá who migrated to the United States in 1966, talked about how life in Intipucá was transformed in the context of historical “progress” and “civilization.” The chapter first provides an overview of coffee in El Salvador before examining in detail the words and experiences of Chávez, and his account of how the pueblo “escaped” from underdevelopment in eastern El Salvador. It then focuses on the coup d'état in El Salvador and its impact on Intipuqueños such as Chávez, as well as on Salvadorans in Washington DC and its suburbs.

This chapter examines wealth in the pueblo of Intipucá in El Salvador and among Intipuqueños living in Washington DC. It focuses on the story of Marvin Chávez, the son of a Salvadoran migrant in the United States, based on a short essay on Intipucá written by Lindsey Gruson and published on July 18, 1989 by the New York Times. Gruson's narrative draws upon prevailing notions of several important categories and concepts such as violence, emigration, work, money, and wealth. Earlier that year, U.S. President George Bush's newly appointed “Drug Czar,” William Bennett, spoke at a national press conference and declared that Washington DC would become an exemplary case of the new U.S. “war on drugs.”

This chapter examines contemporary social relations in the pueblo of Intipucá in El Salvador, and how the country's president, Armando Calderón Sol, attempted to link a national project of governance with the particularities of the pueblo and its connection to Washington DC. Before he was elected president in 1994, Calderón Sol served two terms as the mayor of San Salvador, first in 1988 and then in 1991. The chapter first looks at Sol's visit to Intipucá in 1995 and the short speech that he delivered, focusing on its main rhetorical features. It then considers three sets of events to assess why Sol failed to link this national project with the specificity of Intipucá. Finally, the chapter reflects on the paradoxical situation he confronted and highlights the sort of crisis faced by the Salvadoran state in the contemporary period.

During the 1860s and 1870s the US Post underwent a period of breakneck, unstable expansion in the western United States. Chapter 3 details the efforts of postal administrators to track all of these changes through a new mapmaking initiative under a cartographer named Walter Nicholson. The Topographer’s Office offers a window into the efforts of government officials in Washington, DC, to administer the nation’s western periphery. Nicholson’s postal maps were highly sought after across the federal government, offering valuable spatial information about the region that was often in short supply. Yet the struggles of Nicholson and his employees to keep pace with the never-ending flurry of changes to the region’s postal network is a testament to the ongoing barriers to centralized oversight imposed by the geography of the American West.

As a way to highlight the agency of Latino migrant activists and the resiliency of the state in the face of pressures from below, chapter 5 draws on interviews with Latino migrant rights activists and policy makers in Washington, DC, and in New York City during the first term of President Obama. Looking at migrant activists’ responses to New York senator Charles Schumer’s blueprint for comprehensive immigration reform in 2010, it examines how some groups within the movement (the oppositional forces) resist hegemonic proposals and how others lend them active support (immigration reformers).

This book has explored how and why certain dominant but highly partial accounts of life have formed and circulated across El Salvador and the United States, concealing the complete history from which they emerged, including other stories that are entirely at odds with theirs. Aside from these stories, it has considered value forms, discursive categories, doctrines, everyday practices, and patterns of social relations around the Intipucá–Washington DC connection. The book has shown how Intipucá and other rural regions of El Salvador have become modern as a result of migration and remittances out of Washington DC where Intipucá's farm workers and peasants had settled as “illegal” migrants to escape the civil war back in their homeland. It has also discussed El Salvador's systemic transition from coffee to cotton to labor-power as dominant exports and sources of national wealth in the twentieth century.

Chapter 4 examines the transportation of mail in the western United States. During the 1860s and 1870s the Post Office Department contracted with private stagecoach companies to carry the mail on its behalf, allowing it to extend mail routes across the region without establishing its own costly public infrastructure. Government mail contracts effectively subsidized the western stagecoach industry and facilitated the region’s breakneck growth during these decades. But staging companies began to lobby, collude, and bribe their way into exorbitant contracts worth millions of dollars, and by the end of the 1870s the situation had devolved into a full-fledged institutional crisis. This chapter is a story about mismanagement, fraud, and corruption, but it also speaks to the federal government’s lack of centralized administrative capacity. The decentralized agency model may have allowed the US Post to rapidly spread across the West, but this frenetic regional expansion project came with considerable costs.

This chapter describes a model of counterinsurgency warfare that has guided U.S. policies in Iraq since the latter was invaded by the United States in 2003. It highlights the public appearance of El Salvador as the source of an exemplary model of warfare and considers some of the historical content of this warfare doctrine, including an explicit link to Intipucá. The chapter then examines a dominant U.S. development and foreign aid strategy that also has connections to Intipucá and Washington DC. It argues that the two U.S. foreign policy projects, counterinsurgency warfare and grassroots entrepreneur-based development, are complementary strategies which characterize America's revitalized interventionist policy in the twenty-first century.

This chapter focuses on the grassroots arena of mission, homing in on the experience of twelve congregations involved in sister church relationships. As a way of comparing these relationships among Christian traditions with different theologies, cultures, and types of ecclesiastical polity, three Roman Catholic, three mainline Presbyterian, three evangelical Anglican, and three African American Baptist congregations—twelve congregations in all—are studied qualitatively. This chapter tells the story of each of these twelve relationships from the perspective of respondents from the Washington, DC–area congregations.

Early twentieth-century philanthropists and governments on both sides of the Atlantic, newly aware of the economic value of research, poured money into academic organizations. However, in the emerging competition between Germany and America for research hegemony, leaders made divergent choices about where that research should occur and how it should be governed. Chapter six shows how the simultaneous influx of private money and debate about research organization led to the founding of new extra-university institutions, specifically, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in 1910–1911 and the Carnegie Institution of Washington DC, in the US. With this model, Germany moved much research outside the university, while Carnegie supported research within it—decisions that had divergent consequences on research productivity, inclusivity, and global competition.

The first chapter traces Davis’s social and intellectual influences in the first third of his life, from 1902 to 1931. In 1902, Davis was born into a relatively affluent black family in Washington, D.C. Though his family suffered from Woodrow Wilson’s segregation of the federal government, Allison nevertheless achieved a first-rate education from Dunbar High School and was firmly part of the black middle class. After graduating as valedictorian, Davis studied English literature at Williams College from 1920 to 1924, again graduating as valedictorian. Then, he completed a master’s degree in English literature from Harvard College in 1925, where he was influenced by the New Humanism of Irving Babbitt. In 1925, Davis took a job as a professor of English at Hampton Institute in Virginia, where he worked until 1931. During these years, he contributed to the New Negro Renaissance while encouraging students to protest the administrative paternalism at Hampton and other white-run black colleges.

Chapter Ten details the improbable achievement of the conciliators during the last week of the congressional session in late February and early March 1861 as they assembled wafer-thin two-thirds margins in both the House and the Senate. Majorities of Republicans in both chambers opposed the amendment, but conciliatory leaders, aided covertly by Lincoln, supplied just enough Republican votes to enable it to squeeze through. The pattern of Republican votes had a pronounced regional skew. The amendment fared poorly in the Upper North but was salvaged by support from the Lower North.

This chapter explores the development of golf clubs in black communities during and after the Great Migration surrounding World War I. By the 1920s, golf had become a frequent pastime in many black communities as well as a symbol of northern possibility and the promise of economic mobility for southern migrants. While some intellectuals associated with the Harlem Renaissance (like W. E. B. Du Bois) struggled to detach the game from its deep ties to white colonialism and racial exclusion, others saw the growth of predominately black golf courses and country clubs as embodying the Jazz Age and a new era of black respectability. The narrative explores certain regions and cities—such as Chicago, Cleveland, or New York City—where golf’s popularity grew in black communities because the game was more “open” to black players, as well as other hot spots for black golf—Atlanta, Jacksonville (Fla.), Baltimore, Washington, DC, and New Orleans— that flourished in the heart of segregation.

This chapter discusses the creation of the first generation of ABMC sites. By the end of the 1920s, it had begun work on the erection of monuments in Europe and had hired fourteen architects for the construction of the approved eight chapels and fifteen monuments (only eleven would be completed). This chapter discusses some of the minute decisions that needed to be made before the memorials could be erected, explains many of the controversies that needed to be resolved, and examines the tension that sometimes developed between agency personnel and the architects and artists.