Our Word Is Fire: Writers and Revolution at La Pájara Pinta, El Salvador, 1966–75

From 1966 to 1972, El Salvador’s most important anti-establishment writers and artists published their work in an influential magazine called La Pájara Pinta. Printed at the National University, this magazine both expressed and catalyzed the growing demands for radical change at a time when El Salvador’s social and political divisions were becoming chasms. Founded by novelist Manlio Argueta and essayist Italo López Vallecillos, La Pájara Pinta began as an avant-garde literary journal but turned increasingly bold in its criticism of the conservative order as military repression grew. The magazine attracted poets and essayists who later joined fast-brewing guerrilla movements, including poet Roque Dalton who, from exile in Prague and Havana, became its most distinctive voice. It strived also to end the parochialism and mediocrity of Salvadoran cultural life by engaging with global trends such as feminism, liberation theology and Cuban socialism. These were not elite musings. Rather, they were voices of dissent and mobilization that were critical to the development of a revolutionary climate and, taken together, form an important, neglected strand of the global ‘60s. The magazine died when the army occupied the university campus in 1972, vandalizing the building where it was published and sending editors and writers into hiding. With archival sources and interviews, this paper will show how a key, if largely forgotten voice of dissent contributed decisively to El Salvador’s revolutionary quickening.

This paper will explore also the role of the main establishment journal of the day, Cultura, which, although owned by the state, was editorially independent and published many opposition writers. By 1970, Cultura’s content had shifted to the right and stood in contrast to the irreverent spirit of La Pájara Pinta. The two operated in a kind of ideological dialectic that reflected the era’s sharp cultural crosscurrents, in El Salvador and beyond.