Resurrection in El Salvador - Travel as a Political Act - page 115

Reading about events in faraway lands in the newspaper, you learn what
happened. h en you can l ip to the sports pages or comics. But hearing the
story of an event from people who lived through it, you feel what happened.
Right there behind the bedrooms of those professors, the smell of the l ow-
ers, the hard labor of the man bent over in the garden, the quiet focus of
students whose parents lost a revolution, the knowledge that my country
provided those exploding bullets...all combined to make this experience both
vivid and enduring.
Lie Flat and Strum Your Guitar
Gathering at a hotel on the last night of our educational tour of El Salvador,
we enjoyed a trio of guitarists. h ey were “100 percent popular” (the safe
term used for anything perfectly in tune with the peoples' struggle). Enjoying
their performance, I thought of the guerillas who once lay l at on the l oors
of their shacks under l ying bullets. Strumming guitars quietly on their bel-
lies, they sang forbidden songs. Music is the horse that carries the message
of poems—weapons of a people's irrepressible spirit.
Listening to their music—love songs to their country—I stared at the
musicians and considered the ongoing struggle. While troubadours sing of
Christ's “preferential option for the poor,” the forces of globalization relent-
lessly restructure Salvadoran society with a preferential option for the wealthy.
Watching those slender Latino i ngers crawl between the frets like guerillas
quietly loping through the jungle, I thought of the courageous advocates of
the people throughout the developing world, not running from the forces of
globalization but engaging them.
h ey sang, “Our way of life is being erased…no more huevos picados , we
now have omelets…no more colones , we now have dollars.” h ey wondered
musically, “How can a combo meal at a fast-food chain cost $8, while $20 gath-
ered at church feeds 200 hungry mouths? Why did God put me here?”
Behind me sat Fernando Cardenal, white and grandfatherly in his well-
worn blue jeans. As the minister of education of Nicaragua's revolutionary
Sandinista government back in the 1980s, he fought the US and lost. Today
his country—the revolution purged from its economy—is even poorer than
El Salvador. But his bright eyes nodded to the beat and message of this new
generation's musical call to action.
Wrapping up my El Salvador visit with this inspirational concert, I con-
sidered how the superstars of nonviolence (Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr.,