When Retirement is Simply Continuation: My Work with the Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador Project
Bernie Hammond, PhD
Professor Emeritus, Sociology/Social Justice
and Peace Studies, King’s College, Western U
The Meaning of Retirement
After an academic career spanning 40 years and at the age of 73, I began to contemplate retirement. Many of my friends both academic and otherwise had already retired and to a person they recommended the experience very highly. But what would I do? Uniformly, friends reassured me that they were so busy in retirement that they couldn’t understand how they had ever found time to work! So, in 2015 I took the plunge. Now almost 11 years hence, I am living proof of the truth of those reassurances I had received from so many friends.
A Word About My Academic Work
By way of explanation and before I recount what it is that currently keeps me busy, a word or two about the nature of my work in academia is warranted. I am a sociologist and I had the good fortune to work for an institution that valued and supported the fact that my passion in academia was to write and teach about issues of social justice and to convey that enthusiasm to my students. I believe strongly in the concept and practice of experiential learning and to that end I built opportunities into my teaching for my students to travel to Global South countries and to learn first-hand about the structural injustices people faced, how they dealt with them and how in many cases those problems could be traced back to our own political realities.
Although I arranged for my students to travel to many parts of the world, I personally supervised those students who chose to travel to the Caribbean and Central America, specifically to the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Guatemala and El Salvador. During the first few years of retirement, I taught English to mostly youth from low-income backgrounds at a small language school in Guatemala. I also travelled frequently to the Dominican Republic to investigate the deleterious impact of a Canadian mining company on local communities. Additionally, I continued to present papers on a variety of Canadian social justice issues at an annual conference at the University of Holguin in Cuba. Then in 2017, I was offered the opportunity to participate in an extraordinary, brilliantly conceived project that investigates and supports the experiences of survivors of the civil war that ravaged El Salvador from 1980 until 1992.
El Salvador’s Civil War (1980-1992)
This 12-year conflict was stimulated by the extreme poverty brought about by a maldistribution of land and held brutally intact by an authoritarian government. This government was strongly backed by the Salvadoran military and supported by the United States in the context of the fear of Communism characteristic of the Cold War. These conditions led to the eventual formation of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), a coalition of leftist groups bent on changing Salvadoran social reality. The military responded with vicious repression including the formation of death squads and the employment of scorched-earth tactics developed by the US military in Vietnam. One of the consequences was the widespread displacement of people who frequently sought refuge in the mountains. The UN estimated that approximately 75,000 died over the course of the war. They heard 22,00 complaints of violence and attributed 85 percent of wartime violations to the Salvadoran Armed Forces . Peace Accords were signed in 1992; however, countless families were left to mourn men, women and children who not only did not survive the war but died horrendous deaths following unspeakable torture. These deaths scar the memories of a generation of Salvadorans who to this day struggle to come to terms with their loss and to remember their history through local associations dedicated to this task. These community associations are key partners in the Surviving Memory in Post-War El Salvador project.
The Project
The project was initiated in 2017 by a group of civil war survivors, architects, social movement leaders, and my colleague, Dr. Amanda Grzyb in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University. So far, the project has focused on communities in the northern department of Chalatenango and Cuscatlán in whose mountains many sought refuge during the war. Unfortunately, these same mountains frequently became the site of many of the most atrocious massacres civilians suspected of assisting or even sympathizing with leftist groups. The project began modestly by mounting a display of photographs taken by Canadians from Oxfam Canada and other sympathizers during the conflict. This provided living relatives with the opportunity to see for the first time photos of the war time experiences of loved ones, many of whom had not survived the war. My task was to help set up the photo displays in several communities and assist local survivors to identify relatives and friends, thus giving them new insight into their experience of the war.
In doing so, I was and remain deeply impressed with the healing potential of memory in coming to terms with tragedy and suffering often buried, consciously or not, deep in one’s subconscious. Psychological services from local health care providers and mental health professionals from Western University were provided to assist those who wished them as these memories emerged. The profound healing nature of survivor memory as became evident in responses to the photographic display left me even more admiring of and committed to this overall project.
Gradually, with generous funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, other granting organizations, and many other community and religious organizations, the scope of the project expanded. It now involves an array of dozens of academics and other professionals from many countries who assist in locating and recording the music of the revolution, in building museums devoted to preserving memories of the war, creating a memorial park at the site of one of the major massacres, and even an embroidery project stitching war memories into garments, cushions, and wall hangings. We have moved from accompanying survivors to document massacre sites with GPS to the use of drones, LIDAR surveys of destroyed villages, and Ground Penetrating Radar to locate unmarked graves . In the latter case, the team has learned directly from the Six Nations Survivors’ Secretariat, a survivor-led Indigenous organization recovering the truth about the former Mohawk Institute residential school.
My Compensation
On a personal level, this project has seen me hiking through forests and up mountains while fending off mosquitos and tics, assisting in setting up interviews with survivors, checking Spanish to English translations, participating in meetings of survivor associations, and walking many kilometers over rough terrain to participate in annual commemorations of massacres. I have often joked that for me retirement has meant simply continuing to work but without a salary. I must confess, however, that whatever humble contributions I have made to the success of this project have been dwarfed by the immense pleasure of seeing its success and the satisfaction and sheer fun of working with the brilliant and congenial team responsible for its achievements.
My colleague Dr. Amanda Grzyb has a way of drawing to her people who are not only immensely talented, but who have proven to be some of the most congenial and engaging people I have ever had the pleasure of working with. Her own talents are evident, of course, in helping to conceive this project and collaborating with others to bring it to the level of success that it has achieved. Her many contributions to academic life and to the community generally are no doubt reflected in her much-deserved recent appointment to the Order of Ontario!
Co-Creating Youth Mental Health Support in Arcatao
Since 2023, the Global Minds Collective has collaborated in Chalatenango, El Salvador, with young adult community leaders to identify mental health priorities and bring to fruition the organization’s Mindful Social Innovation Lab (MSI) programming to local communities. Over a two-year period, Global Minds, through the collaboration of researchers Alejandra Aguilar and Juan Carlos Jimenez, have led key informant interviews, focus groups, and co-design workshops with young adult leaders in the communities and districts of Arcatao, Nueva Trinidad, San Jose las Flores, Guarjila, Guancora, Las Minas, and Las Vueltas.
Through this collaborative work, community leaders identified significant stressors in the lives of young people in Chalatenango, and the absence of mental health support for the general population. Despite these limitations, leaders also identified a key asset in this region; community organizations and programming for young adults have been a vital space for young people to find community and belonging and have served as important vehicles for facilitating communal wellbeing in times of stress and crisis.
Photo 1. Participants and facilitators during a Mindful Social Innovation Lab session in Arcatao.
Working with Medios de Vida
In November 2025, our team began working in Arcatao with a local program called Medios de Vida Sostenibles para la Juventud [Sustainable Livelihoods Initiative], to co-facilitate the Mindful Social Innovation Lab. Medios de Vida Sostenibles para la Juventud is a local program in Arcatao that supports young people in creating livelihood opportunities by providing seed funding for small business incubation, entrepreneurial training, and emotional accompaniment as young people begin their businesses.
Medios de Vida was born out of local community efforts and collaboration between the local Catholic Church and its sister parish in Seattle, Washington. The program supports young people in their life trajectories and provides a credible option for staying in the community without having to migrate illicitly to the United States or leave the community for livelihood. Our intention in working with Medios de Vida in Arcatao is to implement a prototype of the Mindful Social Innovation Lab (MSI)that can be replicated with other community organizations in Chalatenango.
What Happens in the MSI Lab?
Our sessions have brought participants in Medios de Vida’s programming, and other young adults involved in local community organizations, together to learn about and practice mindfulness, finding ways to incorporate mindfulness in our daily lives, community engagement, and activism.
Participants come together and practice breathing exercises, gratitude, equanimity, conscious listening of our surroundings and our bodies, and peaceful meditation. Participants in our sessions have been very keen in collaborating with us, sharing beautiful anecdotes of their community activism and their means of practicing mindfulness and gentle meditation in their daily lives.
Young people have also shared important memories of past hardship, and as a group, we have been able to hold space to process these difficult emotions. These sessions have served as a space for emotional support amongst participants and a means of sharing happiness, resilience, and meaningful community building. These sessions are also accompanied by snacks, coffee, a warm lunch, and often done in spaces close to nature.
Photos 2-3. Young participants engage in mindfulness and collective reflection activities during an MSI Lab session.
Co-Designing Community Mental Health Interventions
The Mindful Social Innovation Lab, along with mindfulness and meditation, also provide space for imagining and planning a social innovation that responds to mental health needs identified by community leaders and participants through this programming and previous field work.
In these sessions, after having practiced mindfulness and meditation as a group, our participants and facilitators then begin co-imagining potential community projects that could be done to support mental health and wellbeing in the community. This is done through a variety of co-design strategies, including community mapping, brainstorming activities, storyboarding, and learning about trauma informed approaches and community-based programming, Given the fact that many participants are community leaders involved both in Medios de Vida and other community spaces, including women’s and young adult associations, participants have come up with a flurry of possible mental health interventions, based on the realities and needs of the teritory.
Looking Ahead
The Mindful Social Innovation Lab is coming to its mid-way point in Arcatao. Participants have come up with brilliant intervention ideas, many of whom emphasize the need for recreational community spaces for young people in Arcatao, especially a community center with a gym, library, recreational programming for young people and other community members.
Continued facilitation of a space of mindfulness, healing, peace is envisioned, along with uplifting the ideas and approaches of local community activists in Arcatao. The incorporation of additional community-recreation activities is also plannedas part of our Mindful Social Innovation pedagogy, in collaboration with Medios de Vida Sostenibles para la Juventud.
Photos 4-5. Community-based learning, reflection, and connection remain central to the MSI Lab process in Arcatao.
The Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador research initiative is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Western University, the Global MINDS Collective, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, and the Ontario Research Fund.
Food in Chalatenango: Stories of Plants and Chalateca Foods
What if we told stories of the Civil War in El Salvador alongside plants and food ingredients? What kinds of stories would be written? A multidisciplinary team made up of academics and local Salvadoran leaders is exploring these ideas in a community-based project in Chalatenango.
Memory and food recipes
Since 2025 we have been exploring the role that plants and ingredients used in the preparation of local food recipes play in the expression and reactivation of personal or collective memory in Chalatenango.
In the literature on memory, it is widely recognized that smell links odors to memory, and that olfactory memory is more lasting and intense than memory related to images or sounds.
The stories we are writing reflect people’s everyday lives before, during, and after the Civil War. Stories of people intertwined with the stories of cultivated and wild plants. Stories of suffering, but also of the resilience of both humans and nature.
The project will conclude in 2027 with the return of the information to the communities through the publication of a community book. We hope this book will help people understand the Salvadoran Civil War from a different perspective.
About the authors
The research team is composed of Alain Carretero (ethnobotanist at Aarhus University), Adriana Alas Lopez (anthropologist at Western University), Carlos Alberto Elías Ortiz (botanist at the University of El Salvador), Rosa Lilian Lopez (social worker at the Association of Communities for the Development of Chalatenango, CCR), and Meilyn Leiva (nutritionist, independent professional).
The Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador research initiative is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Western University, Aarhus University, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, and the Ontario Research Fund.
“Embroidering absence, expressing sorrows, weaving hope,” a Paper by Dr. María José Méndez
In the darkest years of El Salvador’s Civil War, when cameras and notebooks were banned from refugee camps, Salvadoran women turned to one of the few tools they still had: embroidery. What had once been a domestic craft — stitching rural motifs like flowers and birds onto flour-sack blankets — became a powerful way to record the terror the world refused to see. Women who were displaced to the Mesa Grande refugee camp in Honduras, began embroidering scenes of burned homes, massacres, and frantic escapes, which were then sent abroad to denounce human rights violations. These cloths traveled in secret, smuggled out under clothes and in bundles of laundry, sometimes even appearing as evidence in asylum hearings when photographs were unavailable.
The paper by María José Méndez, published in MUPI’s Trasmallo magazine, draws on oral histories with Salvadoran women who took refuge in Mesa Grande to trace the story of these embroideries. It shows how women’s memory work functioned on multiple levels: as political denunciation, as historical record, and as a form of community therapy. In group embroidery sessions, women, children, and elders turned unspeakable memories into images, releasing grief and piecing together a sense of belonging and hope in the midst of trauma. Decades later, the same practice continues in Chalatenango, El Salvador, through groups like Mujeres Vueltenses Bordando Historias [Women from Las Vueltas Embroidering Stories], where mothers, daughters, and grandmothers embroider scenes from the war together. By foregrounding women’s memory work and treating these textiles as historical documents that center everyday life, the essay invites us to expand the understanding of the history of the war and who gets to write it.
The Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador research initiative is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Western University, University of Toronto, the Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, and the Ontario Research Fund.
Río Sumpul Massacre Memorial: Trails and Voices – book launch and exhibition
On March 19, the book Rio Sumpul Massacre Memorial: Trails and Voices will be launched alongside the opening of an exhibition at the House of Compassion, which is located in the Saint John the Baptist at the Béguinage Church in Brussels, Belgium.
The exhibition invites visitors to discover the creation process of the Las Aradas monument, along with the stories, voices, and relationships that underpin it. It is an open moment for everyone to share, listen, and engage in dialogue. Several of the documents on display have travelled back from El Salvador, where they were exhibited last year in San Salvador, Suchitoto and San José Las Flores.
The book presented at the opening sheds light on the memory and resilience of the affected communities. It brings together the voices of survivors, community members, architects, artists, and researchers from various universities.
Through these intersecting perspectives, the book showcases a collaboration between Asociación Sumpul [Sumpul Association], the Faculty of Architecture of KU Leuven, the School of Art of the El Salvador University, Western University, Colectivo Matiz [Matiz Collective], and AgwA architecture.
The Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador research initiative is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Western University, KU Leuven, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, and the Ontario Research Fund.
Environmental Memory and Justice in Post-Conflict El Salvador
Over the past year, Giada Ferrucci – Western University Postdoctoral fellow in the Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador project – has worked with community members to explore how landscapes hold memories of war and environmental change in the departments of Cuscatlán, Chalatenango, San Vicente, Morazán, and Cabañas. This work has been carried out in collaboration with Agustín García from Future Watch.
Through workshops, interviews, and participatory mapping activities focused on the long-term ecological consequences of the civil war — including forest loss, river pollution, and land degradation — Civil War survivors and community leaders reflect on how climate change is intensifying environmental damage that began during the conflict. Additional workshops on environmental memory were organized through embroidery (bordado) activities with community members in Las Vueltas, Chalatenango, and at the Museo Tierra Prometida [Promised Land Museum] in Morazán, creating spaces for participants to reflect collectively on landscapes, memory, and environmental change through creative practices.
These activities complement the design of an Atlas of Environmental Memories, a bilingual community-based resource that documents ecological knowledge, historical memory, and environmental justice struggles in El Salvador.
The Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador research initiative is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Western University, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, and the Ontario Research Fund.
Book Launch: Trails and Voices on the Río Sumpul Massacre Memorial
The launch of Río Sumpul Massacre Memorial: Trails and Voices, part of the Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador initiative, will take place on March 19, 2026, at 6:30 p.m. at the Church of St. John the Baptist at the Béguinage / Begijnhofkerk, in Brussels.
Developed through a multidisciplinary and international collaboration since 2017, the book documents the creation of the Río Sumpul Massacre Memorial in Las Aradas, Chalatenango, El Salvador. It centres the voices of survivors who have carried this history across decades and traces the memorial’s development from early sketches to completion. The book brings together testimonies, historical context, and reflections on participatory design.
The memorial commemorates the massacre of May 14, 1980, when approximately 600 civilians were killed near the Río Sumpul, on the border with Honduras, in one of the defining early atrocities of the Salvadoran Civil War.
Rooted in the organizing of the Sumpul Association and local communities, the project also brought together a wider network of researchers, artists, architects, and institutional partners, including KU Leuven and Western University.
The event will feature a panel discussion with Gretel Mejía (Guatemalan lawyer and postdoctoral researcher at UGent’s Human Rights Centre), Amanda Grzyb (professor at Western University, Canada), Evelia Macal (urbanist, architect, and ceramicist, El Salvador/Belgium), and Thomas Montulet (engineer-architect at AgwA and PhD candidate at UCLouvain, Brussels), moderated by Hülya Ertas, curator and architecture critic at VAi.
The event is free, with registration available here.
The Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador research initiative is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Western University, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, and the Ontario Research Fund.
Deborah Canales joins Surviving Memory for a six-month placement focusing on Salvadoran women
Social Work master’s student Deborah Canales (York University) has begun a six-month placement with Surviving Memory in January 2026. Her work will focus on the violence inflicted on Salvadoran women during the Civil War (1980–1992) – a subject tied to her family’s history, who fled El Salvador during La Ofensiva [The Offensive], when guerrilla forces entered the capital, San Salvador, in 1989.
As the practical component of her degree, Canales will support interviews that document the lives of Salvadoran women who migrated to Canada: the violence they experienced, how displacement shaped their lives, and how they redefined their trajectories. Canales will also analyze archives and related materials collected by Surviving Memory and York University. As she states: “I’m really interested in the violence these women experienced because of the Civil War, and the governments of El Salvador for decades, and how it is connected to the process of colonization and neoliberal politics.”.
Canales first connected with Surviving Memory during her undergraduate Sociology studies at King’s College, when she took project co-founder Amanda Grzyb’s field course in El Salvador in February 2025. She has followed the project’s work since then. Reflecting on this new step, she said “this placement is a great way to connect my studies with the history that affected my life and so many Salvadorans in the diaspora.”
Mapping Massacres in Postwar El Salvador: Surviving Memory team presents at University of Toronto
On March 5, 2026, four members of the Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador mapping team spoke about their collaborative massacre mapping initiative in the Speaker Series of the Center for Diaspora and Transnational Studies (CDTS) at the University of Toronto. María Laura Flores Barba, Amanda Grzyb, Reynaldo Hernández, and Zack MacDonald shared the challenges of documenting in the interactive map the civilian massacres and other war-era human rights violations, a project led by Salvadoran Civil War survivors in Chalatenango and Cuscatlán.
The CDTS Speaker Series holds guest lectures from scholars around the world on topics related to the themes of diaspora and/or transnationalism.
The mapping work is supported by equipment and infrastructure funded by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI), the Ontario Research Fund (ORF), and Western University.
“Voices in Ink”: Drawing Memories in Las Vueltas, Chalatenango, El Salvador - Exhibition February 2026
On February 27, 2026, the Las Vueltas Research Team opened “Voices in Ink” at the MacOdrum Library, Carleton University (Canada). The team includes community organizers Heidi Calderón, Nelson Rodríguez, Marvin Alas, and Juan Carlos; Salvadoran-Canadian artist Jessica Larios; Nicaraguan-Canadian research assistant Sabrina Del Bello Guatemala; and assistant professor of Anthropology Beatriz Juárez-Rodríguez (Carleton University).
The exhibition marks the culmination of seven months of collaborative creative work. “Voices in Ink” showcases the power of community-based comics as a medium for storytelling and advocacy, one that bridges personal memory, community history, and political struggle.
The opening event brought together scholars and students from Carleton University. In a conversational panel, Prof. Beatriz Juárez-Rodríguez, Joint Chair Prof. Marie-Ève Carrier-Moisan, and illustrator Jessica Larios discussed collaborative ethnography, participatory and decolonial methodologies, and the role of visual storytelling in sustaining memory and deepening intergenerational conversations about justice in El Salvador.
The event concluded with a reflective wall activity, inviting participants to draw or write responses to the question: “What story, memory, or struggle from your community or lived experience would you like to see told as a comic, graphic narrative, or illustrated piece?"
The Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador research initiative is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Western University, Carleton University, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, and the Ontario Research Fund.