This panel explores the collaborative production of massacre maps, memorials, community theatre, and participatory photo workshops by members of the Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador team, emphasizing the power of survivor-led grassroots memory work, participatory methodologies, and international solidarity. Surviving Memory (www.elsalvadormemory.org) is an international partnership of survivors, scholars, artists, lawyers, museums, architects, community organizers, municipal governments, civil society organizations, and mental health professionals dedicated to documenting the history of the Salvadoran Civil War (1980–1992) and preventing future violence. Our community-driven research, oral histories, and commemorative projects approach historical memory work holistically through the intersections of justice; art, music, and theatre; intergenerational education; documentation and testimony; mental health and healing; and local economic and environmental reconstruction. Together, we work to realize the recommendations of the UN Truth Commission for El Salvador (From Madness to Hope, 1993), whose calls for reparations and public commemoration remain largely unfulfilled.
The four presentations in this panel highlight distinct yet interconnected forms of survivor-led remembrance that reimagine transitional justice beyond legal frameworks. Amanda Grzyb’s paper, “Commemoration as Justice,” examines collaborative memorial design projects in Chalatenango that transform sites of violence into spaces of dignity and healing, framing commemoration as the “fifth pillar” of justice. María Laura Flores Barba’s “Mapping as Bearing Witness” explores participatory mapping as an ethical and embodied practice that connects technological tools with lived experience, turning the documentation of massacres into acts of witnessing and emotional repair. As a civil war survivor, Reynaldo Hernández's paper, “Photographs That Returned Home,” reflects on the repatriation of refugee-camp photographs and participatory photo workshops in repopulated communities that generate new forms of solidarity and reciprocal research between survivors and scholars. Finally, Fran Mejía’s “Embodied Testimony” analyzes the work of Raíces and Memoria Viva theatre groups, whose performances transform commemoration into a dialogical and embodied act of justice, fostering intergenerational healing through art.
Together, these papers demonstrate how survivor-led collaborations grounded in reciprocity, creativity, and care document history from the bottom up, foster transnational solidarity, and model “research as accompaniment.” Through collective remembrance and collaborative projects, Surviving Memory seeks to recover the past and support just futures built on truth, dignity, and resilience.
NAME: Amanda Grzyb, Ph.D. / Professor of Information and Media Studies, Western University
TITLE: Commemoration as Justice: Collaborative Memorial Design in Postwar El Salvador
ABSTRACT: In this presentation, I reflect on the significance of commemoration and the co-design of memorials as vital components of historical memory and postwar recovery in El Salvador. Drawing on my experience as part of the Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador team, I discuss three recent projects developed through collaboration between survivors, local organizations, and international partners: the Sumpul River Massacre memorial (completed in 2025), the installation of plaques listing the names of civil war victims in the Sanctuary of Arcatao (2025), and the ongoing co-design of a memorial at the site of the El Higueral massacre. These initiatives approach remembrance as a collective and creative process that centers the voices, memories, and artistic visions of survivors and community members. Through participatory design, dialogue, and collaborative decision-making, these projects transform sites of violence into spaces of dignity, testimony, and intergenerational healing. I situate these practices within the framework of transitional justice, emphasizing commemoration as its often-overlooked fifth pillar—alongside truth, justice, reparations, and guarantees of non-repetition. Acts of remembrance, I argue, are not symbolic gestures but essential forms of justice that acknowledge suffering while affirming resilience and community strength. Finally, I reflect on the importance of international collaboration in these processes, showing how solidarity across borders can help restore memory, accompany survivors, and strengthen local capacities for ethical, community-led remembrance.
NAME: María Laura Flores Barba, Ph.D. / Postdoctoral Scholar, Western University /
TITLE: Mapping as Bearing Witness: Embodiment, Memory, and Community Collaboration in Postwar El Salvador
ABSTRACT: This presentation explores participatory mapping as an embodied and ethical practice in postwar El Salvador. Drawing on my work as a researcher with the Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador project, I reflect on the process of documenting over forty massacres and two hundred points of memory through community consultations, field interviews, and digital mapping. Mapping, in this context, is not only a technical exercise but a relational and dialogical process where the social life of data reveals itself: coordinates, elevation data, and documents acquire meaning only when connected to people’s memories, emotions, and relationships to place. Community consultations mark the starting point of every project. Survivors guide us through former sites of violence, narrating their memories of displacement and loss, while younger generations join as caretakers and transmitters of those stories. These encounters turn mapping into a cyclical process that nurtures both individual and collective well-being. Acts such as revisiting a childhood site or retracing a village trail become embodied forms of remembrance and emotional repair by creating knowledge as technological tools meet lived experience. Framed by theories of testimonial justice (Fricker, 2007) and radical community development (Ledwith, 2020), this work positions mapping not as data collection but as an ethical act of witnessing. Through participatory reconstruction, survivors reclaim agency over their narratives and transform spaces of trauma into hubs of learning and transmission. Ultimately, this paper argues that digital memory practices, when grounded in community agency and care, can foster intergenerational resilience, challenge epistemic injustice, and contribute to the collective reconstruction of postwar societies.
NAME: Reynaldo Hernández / Civil War Survivor and Co-Founder of Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador
TITLE: Photographs That Returned Home: A War Survivor’s Reflections on Solidarity, Memory, and Postwar Recovery in El Salvador
ABSTRACT: In this paper, I reflect on the significance of cross-sector collaboration and international solidarity in documenting human rights violations, forced migration, and postwar recovery—processes that I have lived through and later returned to as a researcher and collaborator. My work revisits the history of the Salvadoran refugee experience through the repatriation of photographs of the La Virtud and Mesa Grande refugee camps, taken by solidarity workers in the 1980s, and their return to the communities that once lived there. Together with repopulated communities in El Salvador, we organized participatory photo workshops where people shared memories, contextualized archival images, and reflected on their significance. These collective encounters led to the co-creation of a community book called Memoria Viva that weaves together testimonies, photos, and reflections on survival and return. The process revealed not only the emotional weight of recovering these visual traces, but also the power of collaboration between survivors, community leaders, and scholars in reconstructing wartime histories. Drawing on these experiences, I explore what kinds of participatory methodologies and research practices community members and scholars can build together, methods rooted in reciprocity, trust, and care. I propose reframing research as "accompaniment" rather than extraction: an ethical stance that centres the agency of communities and recognizes knowledge as something made with people, not about them. Through this work, I reflect on how memory, solidarity, and creativity can contribute to processes of healing and an alternative form of justice.
NAME: Fran Mejía / Community Leader / RAICES Theatre Group
TITLE: Embodied Testimony: Community Theatre and the Healing of Transgenerational Wounds in Postwar El Salvador
ABSTRACT: This presentation examines the work of Raíces and Memoria Viva, two networks of community artists from ten villages in northeastern Chalatenango, El Salvador, whose performances reimagine memory work as a collective and embodied form of justice. Composed primarily of youth who are children and grandchildren of survivors of the Salvadoran Civil War, these groups create theatrical and dance performances that engage the history of wartime massacres and repopulations through participatory, intergenerational dialogue.In their early years, Raíces recreated scenes of the massacres in vivid, realistic detail. However, after survivors expressed that these performances could trigger traumatic memories, the group transformed its approach. Guided by conversations with elders, they shifted toward more symbolic and poetic representations centred on resilience, rootedness, and remembrance. Their guiding motto, “art for memory and healing”, reflects a commitment to dignifying testimony rather than reproducing violence. Framed through theories of cultural memory, performance, and alternative justice, this paper argues that the work of Raíces and Memoria Viva embodies a community driven model of transitional justice that operates outside formal legal frameworks. Their performances generate spaces where emotions, bodies, and stories can converge to process trauma and reaffirm collective identity. Through dance, song, and movement, these youth enact a living archive of survival that resists historical erasure and offers pathways for intergenerational healing. Their practice demonstrates how embodied performance can transform commemoration into a dialogical act, one that not only remembers the past but also reclaims the power to narrate it. In doing so, Raíces and Memoria Viva show how art, when rooted in community ethics and memory, becomes a vital tool for justice, resilience, and continuity.
20260730T140020260730T1530America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires6.4. Collaborative Memory Projects: Community-Based Documentation and Commemoration of Mass Violence as an Alternative Form of JusticeSV204MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
