Neoliberal Soils: Land, Society, and Everyday Life in Postwar El Salvador [electronic resource].

9781392328644

Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2019.

1 online resource (412 p.)

Access is available to the Yale community.

Neoliberal Soils is an interdisciplinary study of how social actors in El Salvador live and respond to the entangled crises affecting the majority of country's population in the present conjuncture: gang violence, terrestrial mobility, climate vulnerability, and food insecurity. It is an examination of the life-making strategies devised by Salvadoran communities wronged by development, those disproportionally affected by past and present violence. This project serves as an account of people living in captured worlds stunted by the short-termism of national and transnational politics that have all but enveloped contemporary El Salvador, and by extension, Central America.Part I's "Excavations" and the opening chapter situate the Salvadoran terrain by locating the importance of the socionatural as a critical category-an establishing shotfor what will follow. Chapter 2 theorizes El Salvador via a recovering of the spatial thought within the writings of Antonio Gramsci, placing him in dialogue with the Peruvian Jose Carlos Mariategui, and seminal decolonial thinkers like Anibal Quijano, the latter formative to a renewed hemispheric American Studies. Centering the analysis on the soils on which contemporary Salvadoran experience takes place, the third chapter offers an assessment of post-1992 Salvadoran history writing focused on the contemporary past, while Chapter 4 focuses on the pivotal event of La Matanza (1932) and its race laws (1933) as an interregnum that exposes El Salvador's modern mode of governance. In the five chapters that compose Part II's "soil samples," I analyze experiences by indigenous groups, popular educators, public transit workers and riders, a lone criminologist, as well as life possibilities related to age. These are the soil samples of everyday life in the world's most violent peacetime country.

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January 17, 2020

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2019.