We Went for Six Months but Stayed for Ten Years

In this excerpt, Miguel tells us how he decided to leave El Salvador during the Civil War.
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(And things get a little tough in 1979?)

Yes, very. They got very tough, principally for me. Why? Because I was fully bilingual, you could say, and they were starting to—you know, I was lighter [skinned] and I had a better education and I had probably a better social position than ninety-five percent of teachers there [the University]. And there were students that were already very leftist, and professors that were very leftist, so I had to quit. I didn’t want to continue studying—working. I started working on the farms with my father, but also we were kidnapped inside the farm and all this stuff of the time.

(You were kidnapped inside the farm?)

Yes. The first day—yes, it was 1980, and the first day of coffee picking, and when we came in, they didn’t let us into the Casco de la finca, the main part. My father said, “Why so many people?” I said, “I don’t know.” We just wanted two hundred or so, a hundred and fifty to two hundred. There were more than three hundred. So we walked, “Good morning, good morning, good morning!” with money in an envelope. They probably didn’t think it was money. And all of a sudden, the guerilla was there. So they had us for about eight to nine hours on the farm until they let us go, but we had to give a job to three hundred and some-odd people. That destroyed the farm. That started the destruction. Then they started letters of ransom, and said they were gonna kidnap the kids. So my father decided, “Let’s go for six months.” We went for six months and it turned out to be ten years.

(When they had you in custody, did they treat you well?)

Yes. Well, they kept on giving us threats. “If you all don’t do it by the good side of things, there’s always, we could burn the house—with you inside, naturally.” That type of thing. Intimidation more than anything else.

(And when you got out of there, did you think, “That was a close one!”?)

Yes. But we had—no, they told us we had to go there every week and we couldn’t tell the police anything or security anything. So we’d go every week, and we encountered big, enormous problems and they’d throw ants at us. It was very, very sad. It was sad.

(So you basically left, and you left your farm?)

Yes.

(You didn’t have anybody looking after it?)

No. Yes and no, but the person looking after it was not very good. And to make a long story short, my mother was getting old. Ten years after, my father had already passed away, and he was either staying in the States and working or coming back and getting back the farms and start working. So I decided Mom is not getting any younger, she’s already 85 or 86, we might as well go back to El Salvador and make our lives there and see the farms. And we did, and thank God, because my mother spent the last years of her life very happy here. Not that she wasn’t happy in the States. She was happy wherever we were. She was happy. She was not—she would conform, she would be happy, but she was happier here, sitting in this chair, for instance, and she would say, “This is the biggest terraza I know.” And I would say, “¡Ay, Mami! I wish it was true, but it isn’t!” (laughs) But she’d say, “Oh, it’s so beautiful sitting here.” So she really had a good time. She had a very good old age in El Salvador. So I’m very happy. I’m very happy to be back here. I wouldn’t go back to the States for the world.

Transcript by Sandy Adler, Adler Enterprises LLC