The Coloniality of Violence in the 1932 Massacre of the Pipil and Art for Healing

This thesis project is composed of two parts: a research portion and a series of four paintings researched, created and described by the author all as a response to the violence that the Indigenous peoples of the Pipil/Nahuat nation of El Salvador underwent in the 1930s. Chapter one is composed of research about the 1932 genocide in which the nation state of El Salvador, headed by the dictator Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez, massacred over 30,000 Indigenous people in western El Salvador. The late 1800s up to the Massacre of 1932 signaled a period of dramatic transfer of land from Indigenous to non-native hands. My work's primary objective is to reveal that, violence during this time period was used to advance capitalist and racial agendas and aided in further destabilizing a space for Indigenous sovereignty in the years to come. Chapter 2 describes four paintings that stem out of these violent historic experiences. The paintings incorporate Nahuat --Pipil oral tradition, historical revisionism, and testimonies of the 1932 and 1980s survivors to reclaim a space for Native visual sovereignty. The painting "Seeding Mourning", acrylic on canvas 48"x 60", incorporates traditional Pipil mourning elements to address a safe space and time for mourning and healing. The painting's description includes an analysis of post-massacre trauma and the factors that impeded survivors and relatives of victims to properly mourn their dead. The painting titled "Timeless Warriors", acrylic on canvas 90"x 45", is about the invocation of animal spirits by guerrilla fighters during times of armed conflict. El Salvador endured a twelve year civil war from 1980 to 1992 in which the government launched a war against leftist guerrillas, activists, and the civilian population. This scene breaks away from the stereotype of FMLN (Frente Farabundo Marti de Liberacion Nacional) guerrilla fighters as moved only by leftists/communists doctrines, and shows them backed by a jaguar spirit used as an animal protector and parallels the native warrior role as protectors of the people. This painting's main purpose is to prove that there is a continuity of Native resistance prior to ideologies such as Marxism, communism, or capitalism for that matter. The painting titled "Tzinakantli" acrylic on canvas 68.5" x 56.5", is based on a Pipil oral tradition about the bat as keeper of cosmic equilibrium. My purpose with this piece is to connect with traditional stories and use them as the basis for concretely thinking about current environmental problems. The fourth painting titled "Targets of Manifest Destiny", acrylic and mixed media 36" x48", uses the dehumanizing and xenophobic labels published by the Salvadoran government during the Massacre of 1932 to justify the killings. In this painting, these labels are superimposed onto the repeated reproductions of a photograph of a Pipil man. With the title I make a relationship between the Manifest Destiny agenda of North American settlers and the genocidal agenda of the Martinez's government of 1930s Nation State of El Salvador. My point is to show that no matter what label the government used for Natives, their agenda was to appropriate and steal indigenous communal lands and control indigenous populations. By means of my work, I manifest new paradigms which are inclusive of Indigenous experiences to explain and address violence, cross-generational trauma and its residual effects.