Trauma, Healing, and the Ties That Bind

Written by Edward Anthony Polanco, director, Indigenous Studies, and associate professor, Department of History, Virginia Tech

Trauma can lead to disease and illness, but healers can often restore health by knowing and working in their environment. Guadalupe Maravilla, displaced from El Salvador and now living in the United States, depicts these tensions of illness and healing in his work. His art illustrates migration, trauma, illness, and healing, an unfortunate reality of El Salvador. This reality has become intertwined with the United States in the last century.

El Salvador, Spanish for “The Savior,” is the smallest — and most densely populated — nation in Central America. Virginia, with a population of 8.9 million people, has a landmass that is roughly 4.9 times larger than El Salvador, whose population is around 6 million. However, there are close to 2.5 million Salvadorans living in the United States of America. Before the 1960s, less than 10,000 Salvadorans lived in the U.S.; yet, by 1989, about one million Salvadorans had entered the U.S., seeking refuge from the political and economic instability created by the U.S.-backed Salvadoran Civil War (1979-1992), which ultimately claimed more than 75,000 lives. Like both of my parents, Maravilla is part of the millions who fled their homelands to find safety and income in the U.S. as undocumented immigrants. The U.S. ammunition, weaponry, and intelligence provided to the Salvadoran government, along with the flight of more than one million people, has tangled the two nations in deep and powerful ways that we are still uncurling and understanding.

Unfortunately, colonialism and its foreign-instigated violence, displacement, and instability is something we have been facing since 1525, when Spanish invaders and their Central Mexican Indigenous allies first arrived to what is now El Salvador under the command of Pedro de Alvarado.  In 1525, the settler name “El Salvador” was not yet imposed, and Kuskatanchanejket (Nahuas), Lencas, Kakawira, Xinca, Maya Poqomam, and Chorotega peoples had territories of varying sizes in the area. This is when colonial trauma and displacement began. For instance, historical sources show that by the 1530s, Hernán Cortés used enslaved Nahua children from Kuskatan for labor in his hacienda (estate) in Central Mexico.

My ancestors are from Kuskatan (Nawat for “In the Necklace or Jewel”), a term that was transformed to the Central Mexican Nahuatl “Cuzcatlan” and later used by Spaniards and the Salvadoran settler state to denote all of what is today El Salvador. I was born in Los Angeles (Tongva-Kizh territory), an area that some now call “el departmento 15” (department 15) since it contains the largest population of Salvadorans living outside of El Salvador, which is divided into 14 departments (administrative divisions).

Kuskatan, like the other Indigenous territories in what is now called El Salvador, has a deep and long history of knowledge and healing. Settlers have used broad and flattening terms when referring to Nahua, Maya, and other Mesoamerican healing specialists, such as “shamans” (a Siberian term and concept) or curanderos (a Spanish term for unsanctioned healers). Outsiders have also used more pejorative terms like hechizeros (sorcerers) or brujos (witches). Nevertheless, communities had, and continue to have, terms in their own languages. For instance, in Kuskatan the Nawat term tapajtiani signifies “people healer.” Nahuas from Mexico use related terms in their variants like tepajtiani and tepajtiquetl. Throughout Mesoamerica and the diaspora in the United States, healers such as tajtapajtiani (pl. of tapajtiani) keep communities whole and ensure that tejemet tinemit yek (we are well, or healthy). Healers like Maravilla also keep communities bonded and help retain ancestral cultural practices in the face of forced assimilation. In fact, in the colonial period Spanish ecclesiastical and lay authorities targeted Indigenous healers because they helped maintain communal connections to pre-invasion knowledge and beliefs.

Indeed, Guadalupe Maravilla’s work highlights networks of trauma and illness. The distress of seeing — or hearing about — violence close at home, and fleeing to other territories, with other languages, for safety. But more importantly, his work also shows the regenerative properties of healing and inspires hope.

Header: Tijuana Retablo, 2023/2026 (detail); oil on tin, cotton and glue mixture on wood; 79 x 78 x 19 inches; photo by Ian Edquist.