The politics of Salvadoran refugee popular religion

This dissertation explores the role of Salvadoran refugee popular religion in processes of sociopolitical change underway in El Salvador. Using the approach of culture history it examines the civil war against the material social process and political developments of Salvadoran society. It focuses on how the civil war produced refugees and catalyzed a new expression of Christianity which I term the religion of martyrology. The symbol system and discourse of the religion of martyrology as expressed in ritual events and refugee testimony are of special concern to this inquiry. The testimony of three men and three women form part of this study's ethnographic representation. Salvadoran refugee testimony draws together the themes of popular religion in the setting of the civil war to effectively give shape to an oppositional identity that functions as a basis to judge and criticize political domination and economic exploitation. Salvadoran refugee testimony is part of a discourse of power that uses culture and the symbol system of the religion of martyrology to activate alternative political values and behavior aimed at establishing democratic rule in El Salvador. Salvadorans exist in a state of liminality in the States given their "illegal" status. Salvadoran refugees as a liminal group demarginalize themselves by building a cross-cultural and multi-class solidarity movement and remaining connected to the democratizing imperative characteristic of El Salvador's confrontational culture. From liminal spaces such as mutual assistance organizations and small Christian communities, refugee contestational identity is shaped and amended. Popular religion constitutes refugee identity and culturally reconstructs the experience of powerlessness in U.S. society into a distinctive social force.