I was in San Salvador this week to speak at the 17th Congress of Central American Historians on my book “Nuestra Palabra es Fuego” (Our Word is Fire) on poets and politics in 1960s El Salvador. The book focuses on an influential magazine called La Pájara Pinta, where radical poets distilled and cross-hybridized their art against a backdrop of social crisis and polarzation that presaged the armed conflict of 1980-1992. It was a well-organized, well-attended conference — a great forum for historians, writers, socal scientists, and students from all over the Central American isthmus and beyond to learn about the latest scholarship.
Coincidentally, Georgetown just revived this website I created some years ago on Italo López Vallecillos, co-founder and editor of La Pájara Pinta and intellectual motor of the Generación Comprometida, one of the most consequential avant-garde literary movements in Latin America in those years. I was gratified to see how much attention and comment the site got in El Salvador when it first launched. Thanks to Georgetown for bringing the site back after a year’s absence, but I promise to find it a more permanent platform.