charles@cmmstudio.com

Children of the Diaspora: For Peace and Democracy (2013), a film directed by Jennifer Cárcamo and produced with the support of the Centro de la Memoria Histórica Salvadoreña, documents the journey of a group of university students from California to El Salvador, the homeland of their parents and for some of them their own birthplace. The students are members of the Unión Salvadoreña de Estudiantes Universitarios, a transnational organization committed to political consciousness-raising among Salvadoran youth. The film documents the group’s trip to El Salvador as part of a delegation invited to observe the 2009 presidential campaign. This election, in which Mauricio Funes won the presidency, would turn out to be historical because, for the first time, a member of the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional won the office. The opening sequence of the film, set to Silvio Rodriguez’s “Sueño con Serpientes,” makes the goals of Cárcamo’s project clear: to gather the evolving perspectives of this group of young students (from schools such as the University of California and the California State University system) as they confront the troubled narratives and, in some cases, the historical lacunae passed down from their parents. In their testimonies, many of the students describe the climate of fear in which they grew up, especially around the topic [...]