Norberto Amaya, Songwriter

In 1981, at the beginning of the Civil War in El Salvador, Norberto Amaya, a peasant farmer or campesino, was forced to leave the country. Like many thousands of other Salvadorans, Norberto accompanied his community to UN refugee camps in Honduras. In this new context, this former community organizer became a singer-songwriter, documenting experiences of war and displacement through powerful folk songs.

Norberto Amaya, Songwriter is a documentary that tells the story of this musician. The production of the film is an outcome of a collaborative pilot research project, “Surviving Memory in Post War El Salvador”, supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Western University.

Directed by Juan Andrés Bello Produced by Triana Media

Research: Amanda Grzyb (Faculty of Information and Media Studies, Western University) and Emily Abrams Ansari (Don Wright Faculty of Music, Western University).

Watch the Documentary

Silenced Memories (Exhibition)

In this exhibition, former refugees, massacre survivors, and their younger relatives tell us about their wartime experiences of violent repression, massacres, and forced exile by the US-backed Salvadoran military.

Silenced Memories complements a series of collaborative endeavors presented by Ulises Unda during his PhD studies in the Department of Visual Arts at Western University, and reflects on the political intentionality of listening. In this reflection, listening with/in the body is assumed as a mode of knowing in relation with others, and is thus capable of crafting resonant public spaces where the return of subaltern and silenced voices becomes possible. 

The photo-narratives and soundtracks included in Silenced Memories were produced during a community curation workshop (October 2017), and a soundscape workshop (April 2018) that Ulises Unda led in Suchitoto and Copapayo, El Salvador, respectively.

https://ulises-unda.squarespace.com/exhibition-silenced-memories

Memoria Viva Community Book

One of the major outcomes of our 2017 SSHRC pilot project in Milingo is Memoria Viva: Fotografías y testimonios sobre la vida en los campamentos de refugiados en La Virtud y Mesa Grande, 1980-1992 / Photographs and Testimonies About Life in La Virtud and Mesa Grande Refugee Camps, 1980-1992, a community book published by Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen in San Salvador in 2021. It consists of 45 community-curated photographs of La Virtud and Mesa Grande accompanied by quotations and testimonies from our refugee memory workshops. The process was led by Salvadoran community leaders Ángela Velasco, María Alba Serrano, Sonia González Castellano, and Noé Vladimir Hernández, Jaime Brenes Reyes, Ulises Unda Lara, and research teams from Western University and Montana State University. You can preview an English version of the book here.

Doors Open London

On September 14, 2019, the Western University research team welcomed 120 visitors to the Faculty of Information and Media Studies during Doors Open London, an annual event in which institutions open their doors to the public. The Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador display included a pop-up exhibition of our refugee memory photo collection, a re-installation of Ulises Unda Lara’s Silenced Memories exhibition, screenings of our documentary film, Norberto Amaya [Songwriter], and copies of the architectural plans for the Sumpul Massacre Memorial Park at Las Aradas.