Molly Todd: Beyond Displacement: Campesinos, Refugees, and Collective Action in the Salvadoran Civil War.

Hellman, Judith Adler

Molly Todd

Beyond Displacement: Campesinos, Refugees, and Collective Action in the Salvadoran Civil War

Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010, xviii + 286 pp.

In this impressively researched and finely written study, Molly Todd, Assistant Professor of History at Augustana College, draws on her previous experience in solidarity work in Central America and combines the techniques of ethnography with those of oral history and documentary archival investigation to bring us a compelling study of campesinos from the northern border region of El Salvador, the "tierra olvidada," an area of subsistence cultivation relatively independent of the influence of commercial export agriculture. These are people who, the author notes, live on both the figurative as well as the literal margins of El Salvador. They provide Todd with rich narratives and direct testimony of their experiences of poverty and exclusion, their sufferings in the face of state violence, and their responses to their victimization both in their "pre-flight" situation in El Salvador and the world they came to inhabit as refugees in neighbouring Honduras as their own country was engulfed by civil war in the 1980s.

In a book that is a model of all that a flexible interdisciplinary approach can achieve, Todd challenges what she regards as an "essentialized" portrait of refugee populations that is drawn not only by conservative detractors who depict these campesinos as failed, would-be insurgents, but also by humanitarian aid personnel who often see refugees as passive victims, as discarded objects, as the flotsam and jetsam of political change. With this study Todd works to correct a portrayal of refugees that overlooks the degree to which such people are not simply "displaced" but rather capable of rooting themselves firmly in new, if temporary settings in which they manage to exercise a great deal of human agency.

In short, Todd is determined to contest the image of refugees as "ragged and poor, mute and dependent on the good will of others" (4) and to provide a more detailed and nuanced picture of people who were activists in the period before state violence forced them into exile--rural people who had worked with progressive priests, trade unionists, students, and political movements like the Popular Revolutionary Army or ERP (Ejercito Revolucionario Popular) and the Popular Liberation Forces or FLP (Fuerzas Populares de Liberacion) to form their own Rural Workers' Federation. While the civil war eventually prompted these campesinos to flee to Honduras, they retained their organizational impulse and skills. As a consequence, they managed to use their years of exile in Honduras to regroup and survive to struggle another day once it would be feasible for them to return to their homes. In essence, Todd argues against the notion that the violence of wars necessarily creates refugees who are nothing more than "uncategorizable peoples: the dis-placed, uprooted, stateless" (51).

Through her use of the direct testimonies of those who were active both before and after their flight from ravaged villages in El Salvador, Todd demonstrates the many ways in which the refugees in Honduras retained a sense of themselves as Salvadoran. They celebrated national holidays and commemorated the dates related to the worst moments of the war that had precipitated their flight. They worked to retain autonomous decision-making capacity in their lives as refugees and struggled to establish control over the spaces to which they were assigned in refugee camps. They formed communal structures of self-governance and organs of local popular power. They forged alliances with both international organizations and the national liberation forces, even while managing to keep their links to the FLMN largely secret from even the most sympathetic international aid workers.

Relating their histories from the bottom up, Todd shows us how Salvadoran campesinos actively analyzed and interpreted their condition as poor peasants in El Salvador and as exiles in Honduras. She details the ways in which popular education programs and the creation of grassroots movements that asserted their identity as Salvadorans in the refugee camps became, in the Gramscian sense, the prefiguration of the society in which they hoped to live when, as they always assumed, they would finally return to "repatriate" their own country. This effort involved the articulation of commitment to broad principles of unity, equality, and social justice. It also depended on meticulous attention to documentation that led to their efforts to secure official birth certificates, photo ID cards, and other papers that would enable them to assert both their legal rights as Salvadoran citizens and official recognition of their status from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Finally, Todd looks at the mobilization of refugees around "repopulation" as yet another form of resistance, a movement for retorno that involved pressuring the UNHCR and other international organizations, but above all the regime in power in El Salvador to bring an end to the war.

In one of her most interesting findings, Todd notes that the period of exile reinforced what she calls the "communal ethos" that the refugees brought with them from El Salvador. Indeed, through the grassroots organizations they formed as refugees and the popular pedagogy they practiced in the camps, they worked to reinforce principles of full participatory democracy, solidarity, unity, and equality. However, Todd does acknowledge that the communal ethos was also enforced through a strict code of conduct with its own set of sanctions that included public denunciation and incarceration in prisons set up within the refugee camps, as well as through what she delicately refers to as "peer-enforced repatriations" and "rumors of murder" (226).

These findings inevitably raise the question of what would be the impact on repatriated Salvadoran peasants of a refugee experience of communal practices reinforced through punitive measures. Do coercive measures that correspond to the exigencies of survival in a refugee camp necessarily carry over into the lives of people who have returned to their homeland? This is a question that Todd may be able to answer in the future once more documentary evidence is released, particularly FMLN writings about the refugee camps and the security issues that arose in the camps. In the meantime, what we do have with this excellent book is a wealth of material on a range of issues central to any consideration of life prospects of the marginal peasantry, the nature of the refugee experience, the development of social movements, the repatriation of exiled populations, and the prospects for democracy and stability in El Salvador and more broadly in Central America.

Judith Adler Hellman, York University