“Buscamos un Hombre (¡y una Mujer!) Nuevo": Negotiating Gendered Norms in Salvadoran Community Organizing, 1968–2001

In the late 1980s, the Association of Communities for the Development of Chalatenango (CCR), an organization created to protect civilian populations from army attacks as refugees began repopulating abandoned towns, created a pamphlet that described the creation of a ‘new’ man after the FMLN gained state power. The pamphlet included a drawing of a man and the characteristics he should possess while a woman creeps in from the margins to be included in this new society. This inclusion, even if an afterthought, is telling, for women’s participation in the Salvadoran revolution was arguably one of the highest in Latin America.
Scholars have demonstrated that thirty percent of the FMLN were women, yet this number does not account for non-combatant women. While recent scholarship documents the participation of women in the revolutionary movement, both as formal guerrilla members and informally as supporters, there is little to no research on a distinct segment of women, maestras populares, or female educators that practiced popular education, and in particular on their changing status as activists when they migrated to the U.S. after the war.

By focusing on maestras populares and other Salvadoran community organizers both in El Salvador and its U.S. diaspora, this paper examines the changing role of leadership in popular education movements. While women were at the forefront of molding critically conscious individuals through literacy, as they migrated north to the U.S., their participation as leaders dwindled. What accounts for these changes? Despite having higher rates of social mobility and feminist consciousness after women migrate, as some sociologists have argued, women in popular education movements are still not fully represented in leadership roles. By examining how communities and organizations have defined popular education in relation to gender equality, we will begin to understand these changes.