Salvadoran History Becomes Real

The world remembers the assassination of Monsignor Oscar Romero, Archbishop of El Salvador, in 1980. But not many have the opportunity to visit the cathedral where he said mass regularly on Sundays, and where he is now buried. The beautiful National Cathedral, the focal point of a plaza in the center of San Salvador, has a crypt where the monsignor is buried under a stunning sculpture of black granite, denoting the priest lain to rest. Two photos of Romero are posted at his feet, and there is a tile likeness of the Archbishop that hangs on the column above the grave. The BECA 580 students shot video of the burial site and took time to remember, as well.

We began the day at the Museo David Guzmán, an anthropology museum that details Salvadoran history from the Olmecs through to the present time. It is a beautiful museum, and its exhibits make clear the multitude of cultures that have passed through El Salvador, and the number of natural disasters that have hit this small piece of earth and caused people to flee.

Perhaps the visit to the "wall of names" in Cuscutlán Park was the highlight of this heavy production day; it certainly was the most sobering moment. Parque Cuscutlán is a lovely, lush park near the center of San Salvador - the kind of place you stroll with your first love. In that park is a granite wall not unlike the Vietnam War Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C.. On the wall are carved some 30,000 names, divided by year of death and by category: "assassinated" or "disappeared." We found the names of Oscar Romero, and his friend, Padre Rutilio Grande, who was assassinated in 1979, the year before Romero's death. And then, under 1981 and "asesinado," we found the name of Hugo Mendoza, the uncle of Sarah Mendoza, one of the students on this trip and the brother of Francisco David Mendoza, the head of Manos de Esperanza, the organization for which we are producing our video. David is traveling with us on the trip.

After Hugo was assassinated, David's mother was able to obtain visas to the United States for the rest of the family. It was then, in 1981, that David moved to the United States. There, he has stayed to live and raise a family, while his mother returned to El Salvador where she still resides. Although David has returned to the country many times, the Saturday trip was his first visit to the memorial wall.

It is difficult to grapple with number of names carved into that wall. More difficult, still, is to comprehend that another 50,000 names are missing from the wall because their identities are unknown.