Radio Clásica in San Salvador interviewed me about my book on revolutionary poets and politics at La Pájara Pinta, a legendary magazine in El Salvador in the late 1960s and early ’70s where radically experimental poets found that breaking with literary conventions soon implied breaking with the country’s conservative political and economic order as well. An extraordinary number of them joined the guerrilla groups that were already organizing against the military government, whose main lifeline was the Johnson and Nixon administrations. (Lyndon Johnson even came to El Salvador to show his support for El Salvador’s military regime in 1968, visited a TV studio, and met government cultural officials. Everybody understood, it seems, that media and culture mattered intensely in the larger ideological battle.)
Elizabeth Trabanino and Emilio Delgado and I had a long, rich discussion, framed by their probing questions about the legacies of some of the key Salvadoran writers of those years, such as Roque Dalton, Italo López Vallecillos, Claribel Alegría, Matilde Elena López, and of course Manlio Argueta who is still very much alive and writing.
Entitled Nuestra palabra es fuego: La Pájara Pinta y los poetas de la revolución en El Salvador, 1965-1975 (Our Word is Fire: La Pájara Pinta and the Poets of the Revolution in El Salvador, 1965-1975), the book was published in 2024 by the National University of El Salvador and was the fruit of many years of archival research, reading, and interviews. Hear the interview (in Spanish) here.