Hijas de Sobrevivientes: Daughtering as Intergenerational Healing Praxis in Salvadoran Families and Community

By Joanna Beltrán Girón & Alexis Meza

Abstract

This mixed-media article is concerned with intergenerational healing and historical trauma through testimonios, daughtering, and healing-centered artistic practices. As children of survivors of the U.S.-backed civil war in El Salvador and their parent survivors themselves, the authors of this article use trauma-informed and healing-centered approaches to explore the possibilities of intergenerational healing and transcending our respective experiences of state and colonial violence.

We consider the Indigenous’ philosophies of soul loss (Duran 2006) and ethnostress (Antone and Hill 1992) to describe the trauma and collective wounding that resulted from the war and that remains present in our lives. We see the war as a series of events of state violence that are rooted in coloniality. Emotional-psychological-political wounding produces a culture of silence and isolation, thus when parents share their testimonios with their daughters about their experiences during the war, this sacred intergenerational exchange breaks the silence, allowing the daughters to assist their parents in collectively transmuting war trauma – for us this is a method of daughtering, and thus of grandmothering. Healing is not linear. Through our personal healing, we pass back wisdom, medicine, and healing to our parents and pass forward more healed relationships to our future generations.

When our parents pass down their testimonios and the emotions that are attached to those stories to us, we, the daughters, bear witness, hold, and carry their experiences that have otherwise been historically undermined, and at worst denied, by the state. The authors provide personal reflections on how their participation in a healing-centered art project – the Círculos de Sanación para la Justicia, a project by The Mauricio Aquino Foundation/Our Parents’ Bones – facilitated a supportive space for the sharing of their stories not only between each other but among other survivors and parent-daughter duos that the authors suggest played a critical role in facilitating our collective grieving and healing 40+ years delayed.

This article is not an analysis of the Círculos; instead, it offers the personal reflections of two daughters of survivors who participated in the Círculos alongside their parents. We intentionally take on different writing tones that reflect the authors’ scholarly decisions and creative expression: historical-theoretical-poetic, artistic, personal, and intergenerational accounts. The experiences of daughtering, which emerged from the Círculos, reflect alternative healing practices in response to the denial of justice, accountability, and repair. Thus, these intergenerational stories become embodied archives that seek justice and reconciliation through the practice of personal-collective healing.

In Press. Feminist Formations.