Shining a Light on Modern Central American Life

Jorge Cuéllar was four years old when his family made the difficult and life-changing decision to leave their home in El Salvador and relocate to Los Angeles. It was 1992, and El Salvador had just experienced 12 years of a brutal civil war that killed more than 75,000 people and displaced more than 1 million more—roughly one-fifth of the country's population at the time.

Cuéllar and his family spoke no English, but they landed in a welcoming, supportive community of other Central American immigrants, many also from El Salvador. The experience of growing up in this community, along with an "immersive humanities-focused curriculum" through a magnet program in high school, cultivated Cuéllar's deep interest in Central American history and culture.

This passion was ignited further at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where Cuéllar pursued a dual undergraduate degree in Latin American and Iberian studies and film and media studies. A course on Central American life in the United States gave him a sense of "feeling seen in this classroom," Cuéllar says. "The course told a story that I had lived but never had moments to reflect on. It was the first time I really encountered myself in a classroom—or stories of my people and my culture, my heritage."

The course introduced Cuéllar to poetry by Roque Dalton, a Salvadoran poet and political activist, and films about the region from the 1980s that addressed "all the conflicts that my family and I had been displaced as a result of," he says. "That class began to fill in these important blanks for me. It filled in some blanks, but it created others."

Cuéllar realized he wanted to spend his life trying to fill in those blanks. He earned his PhD in American studies from Yale and joined Dartmouth last year as an assistant professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies. His research and teaching examine the politics, culture, and daily life in modern Central America, with a special focus on race, migration, and critical social theory.

His current book project examines how average citizens of the country experience postwar life. 

"My family and I were traveling back to El Salvador often to see other family members, our elders. That movement back and forth between California and El Salvador was really pivotal for me," Cuéllar says. "I had access to the country in the years where many people weren't traveling back, in this weird moment of transition. This is why I'm really interested in what happened to all those folks who did not migrate. What did they end up doing? What kind of lives were they able to carve out for themselves?"

Cuéllar examines the ways in which average Salvadorans find value in their lives—working rewarding jobs, creating families, building communities, and fostering a sense of hope—in a postwar reality of crime, gang membership, migration, poverty, rampant inequality, and state corruption. "What are they doing to repair and mend the social fabric of the place that they live in, that they care about?"

He explores how this optimism and fortitude is expressed across communities and sectors, from efforts to improve foodways and agriculture in rural areas to informal networks created by mothers to search for family members missing as a result of gang and state violence and ways in which communities rushed to fill gaps in educational opportunities that resulted from the government's divestment from public education.

"You have efforts at popular education, open schools, adult education, and the establishment of community centers that become a sort of counterweight to that structural divestment," Cuéllar explains. "Despite all the challenges that a society might be undergoing, people's creativity allows them to find spaces of refuge and solidarity. That speaks to the dignity of the Salvadoran people. These ethical concerns drive my research."

Understanding El Salvador's 2024 Elections

In February, El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele handily won re-election and his ruling New Ideas party won a supermajority in Congress, giving the president the ability to run the country without opposition. Bukele, who proclaims himself the "world's coolest dictator," is massively popular in his home country but remains a controversial figure. His aggressive war on gangs has significantly decreased crime, but his authoritarian bent and tactics have drawn deep criticism from pro-democracy groups.

"I'm not in the business of predicting the future, but if history tells us anything, it is that there's a repression and retaliation cycle in El Salvador that has dominated the politics and social dynamics of the country," Cuéllar says. "So we'll see where this goes."

The elections and Bukele's popularity are a perfect example of how Central America plays a key role in global politics and culture, Cuéllar says.

"I have always thought what happens in El Salvador has repercussions all over the world. It's like an echo," says Cuéllar. "You don't hear it sometimes, but you know the sound has traveled far. El Salvador's challenges are connected to all these other issues in the Near East, Europe, the Americas, and in Asia with the question of China and Taiwan. There are all these ways that this little country is an important piece of the puzzle."

He adds that despite Bukele's "strongman" persona, the U.S. has refrained from commenting on his administration—likely a result of American immigration issues, Cuéllar says. "The United States is worried about migration. So U.S. foreign policy looks the other way when it comes to Bukele because this kind of figure appears useful for migration control. Because if you have a guy like that who has everything under his control, even despite democracy's total erosion, it looks like effective governance for curbing migration."

Cuéllar adds that Bukele serves as a model for other world leaders in how he has "curated himself as this incredible, transformative, infallible leader while maintaining incredibly high levels of popularity, around 90%." 

Centering Central American Studies

Bukele's global influence reaffirms Cuéllar's commitment to emphasizing modern Central American studies in academics and beyond.

"It's really part of a multi-institutional effort in the United States and elsewhere to put Central America back into the curriculum in a way it hasn't been before," he says, noting that studies on the region have historically focused on the 1980s. 

"We have to figure out what happened in between then and now," Cuéllar says. "What were people doing? How has the culture changed?"

A frequent contributor to modern public discourse about the region, recently commenting on NPR about El Salvador's elections and interviewed by the North American Congress on Latin America about protests in Panama over a Canadian copper mine, Cuéllar has made it his mission to bring Central American studies into the present era.

In addition to his teaching, Cuéllar advises the Central America Project, a student-driven public humanities initiative focused on drawing attention to Central American scholarship, analysis, and culture in the U.S. The initiative produced the bilingual exhibition Bolas de Fuego: Culture and Conflict in Central America at the Hood Museum of Art in 2022. Focused on the 20th and 21st centuries, the installation examined turning points in the political and social histories of Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Panama.

"How can we understand the world from these countries that are spotlighted only in moments of crisis?" Cuéllar asks. "This is the kind of question I'm really interested in bringing to the classroom and thinking about with students, because it's at the heart of global problems and questions of ethics, too."