The Academic Center for the Memory of Our América (CAMeNA) has been a fixture for students of Hispanic Studies at Lancaster. Based at the Autonomous University of Mexico City – a university which embraces a strictly public, humanist and egalitarian approach to higher education, catering specifically to socially and spatially excluded young people – the CAMeNA preserves the memory of Our América brings it to life in events, videos, and podcasts. The term Our América was coined by Cuban poet José Martí. It expresses a pan-American, internationalist, anti-colonialist and humanist approach to political projects of self-determination and liberation. Students from within the School of Global Affairs have the option of spending their International Project Year at the CAMeNA, and all students in Hispanic Studies work with some of the documentary collections during their 2nd year core course in Hispanic Cultures.

Over the past two years I have been working with the CAMeNA, with funding from the British Academy, for research on Critical Hope (Paulo Freire): hope that is built from a critical reading of the world, from the denunciation of none-egalitarian, none-critical educational and political projects, and through active, informed and critical intervention in the world.

During November and December 2024, I visited the CAMeNA for a month during my research leave, originally planning to work with documentary collections O and P, assembled by liberation theologist Sergio Méndez Arceo (1907-1992), Bishop of the Diocese of Morelos-Cuernavaca. But then, a comment in a conversation with staff members of the CAMeNA piqued my interest in an unexpected topic: members of the armed forces who, committed to Human Rights, their respective constitution or democratic liberationist principles, took an ethically grounded stance against official policy and orders from within the armed forces – a stance that many of them were made to pay for with disciplinary procedures, attempted expulsion from the armed forces and loss of income and pensions and, in some cases, imprisonment, torture, and or assassination. They, I learnt, were the last major topic researched by Gregorio Selser, the writer and journalist whose personal research archive laid the groundwork for the CAMeNA. These ‘other militaries,’ as Selser called them, are controversial. Many people reject them because they consider the armed forces and the State as oppressive per definitionem, by necessity, or by historical and contemporary precedent; for others, the ‘other militaries’ pose a threat because they put principles and constitutions above the armed forces’ esprit de corps and chain of command, and refuse to consider the armed forces as an autonomous political force. Many of them – especially in the case of Chile - were constitutionalists, and constitutionalism flies in the face of most Security Doctrines, which rely on exceptionalism.

The CAMeNA staff furnished me with the folders containing Selser’s research on the subject and I started working on a blog post, for my ongoing series with the Latin America Bureau. As well as the blog post, I started recording for an introductory PodCast episode on the CAMeNA, to be produced in partnership with CAMeNA Media and the Latin America Bureau. And finally, a potential new line of research opened, on the ‘lost poetry’ of El Salvador.

The emergence of this line of research illustrates the importance of personal presence, time, a situated command and understanding of the language, trust and intercultural competence. It emerged from a conversation about a project currently in preparation, the musicalization of (mostly anonymous) poems written during the Salvadoran civil war by teachers and students of Music for Hope, which will be released with an accompanying booklet. The person I was having the conversation with had preserved and donated the poems to the CAMeNA, alongside material on Resistencia Nacional, one of the political-military groups that formed part of the umbrella organisation FMLN. In our conversation she mentioned a book of poetry she had in her possession, El León de Piedra by Alfonso Hernández. While looking for it, she came across other poetry pamphlets. In front of me, on her dining room table, she spread treasure: a posthumous collection of poems by Roque Dalton, whose assassination in 1975 on orders of the leadership of the ERP led to the escision from this organisation by the group that became Resistencia Nacional; and collections by Alfonso Hernández, a commander of Resistencia Nacional who was killed in combat and posthumously beheaded by the armed forces in 1988, and by José Eduardo Sancho Castañeda, alias Comandante Fermán Cienfuegos, who survived and became one of the signatories of the Peace Accords. The pamphlets were published only with the name of the authors and a publication year because at the time, the small Salvadoran publishing industry had been all but crushed by censorship and by the repression against the people who had run it. Many (possibly most) had been assassinated or forcibly disappeared, were in prison, living in clandestinity or in exile, or were fighting with one of the political-military organisations that formed the FMLN. Poetry was nevertheless circulated: in pamphlets like the ones spread out on a table in front of me, lovingly designed and published by people who needed to remain anonymous, possibly by the communications commission of RN.

My stay at the CAMeNA brought home once again that important aspects of seemingly clear-cut topics and potential new line of enquiries often surface in personal conversations and arise out of casual comments and circumstantial finds. As a researcher, one has to have the patience and integrity to build trust, to learn how to talk to people, how to listen, and how to not slip into hungry listening (Dylan Robinson), projection, protagonismo or cultural extractivism; moreover, one has to know when to shut up, how to keep silence, and what to say No to.

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