Inequality and Intimacy Between Sister Cities in El Salvador and the United States

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Inequality and Intimacy between Sister Communities in El Salvador and the United States

Ellen MoodieUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign1

AbstractIn this article I consider the desires of participants in a particular sister-community relationship. I suggest that experiences of Illinois parishioners who have been visiting, and assisting, rural Salvadorans over the past 20 years may help us to understand both the possibilities and the limits of such encounters. I probe the limits by examining an incident that took place in July 2010. In thinking through my discomfort with a request for money, in the context of a larger history of global relationships and the ethics of such missions, I have come to believe that the disparities between the visitors and visited—economic, geographic, cultural, political—is not something to overcome. Rather, these differences are necessary for sister-community relationships.

KeywordsCatholic, Christian base community, El Salvador, inequality, money, poverty, medical mission, sister-community, volunteer tourism

It was so simple. Someone asked me for money. It has happened countless times in my years in Central America—children on city streets, friends in trouble, strangers in need. Why was it different this time? Why did I feel even more uncomfortable than usual? I started to avoid Leopoldo’s eyes. Whenever he would reach out to guide me through the more treacherous turns along the mountain paths, I pointed him back to Liz, who had a bum knee.2

Corresponding author:Ellen Moodie, Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA Email: [email protected].

475167 MIS41210.1177/0091829612475167MissiologyMoodie2013

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Moodie 147

Leopoldo was accompanying us across La Cruz, a canton (or township) spread out over five hamlets in the center of Morazán, a department in northeastern El Salvador.3 He was part of a group of men and women from the five different communities we were visiting, helping to lead the mules lugging our backpacks, and suitcases stuffed with medical supplies, through the steep muddy trails. Many others walked along with our group throughout that wet July week: spry former guerrilla combatants, slowing their pace for us; laughing children, scurrying ahead and then running back to gaze once more at the big, mostly mute, smiling ladies; emaciated yet jaunty dogs, trotting along the edges. As we navigated cow pastures and trudged up mountains, aided by the long walking sticks fashioned for us from tree limbs, we would later appear, in hundreds of digital photos, to be very much part of a kind of pilgrimage to which Brian Howell and Rachel Dorr compare many short-term Christian missions (STMs) (2007).

We were a group of seven women, a delegation from a small church in downstate Illinois. More than 20 years earlier, in the midst of the (1980–1992) Salvadoran civil war, the Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church had organized a hermanamiento (sister-community relationship) with La Cruz through APDES, the Association for Salvadoran Development.4 Members of the church have traveled to El Salvador at least once a year since then. APDES, a non-governmental organization linked to liberation theol-ogy and the formation of Christian base communities (comunidades ecclesiales de base) in the 1970s and 1980s, now organizes solidarity tours and facilitates community development through hermanamientos in two areas of the country.5 (One Salvadoran doctor participated in the trip, too, funded by the church.) I had joined them that July 2010 as a translator (I am not a member of the church: this was a research trip for me). With another member of the delegation, Maritza, the daughter of a Salvadoran immi-grant parishioner, I interpreted the Salvadorans’ Spanish as they consulted with Mimi or Linda, the English-monolingual doctor and nurse. All of the Illinois delegation members knew that I was also an anthropologist from the University of Illinois already in the country on a project unrelated to the STM. I have been carrying out research on postwar politics and violence in El Salvador since 1994 (Moodie, 2010).6

In this article, I suggest that ongoing experiences of Illinois parishioners who have been visiting, and assisting, rural Salvadorans over the past 20 years may help us to understand both the hopeful possibilities of such encounters and also the limits. I argue that in many ways, the inequality that U.S. Americans attempt to overcome through such relationships in fact structures such encounters.

Enchanted Internationalism?

I had long been curious about the burgeoning numbers of people on short-term mission and service trips I kept on meeting on flights to El Salvador.7 I was interested in learn-ing about relations among people from what I could only assume were radically differ-ent backgrounds. What happens in those brief moments together while people are painting walls, digging latrines, adjusting blood-pressure cuffs or sharing fellowship? What is exchanged, what is produced, in moments of immediate encounter? What mutual understandings and misunderstandings may result in something conceived of as a shared imaginary?



148 Missiology: An International Review 41(2)

As an anthropologist, I wonder at my need to find something profound, in the sense of self-transformative and ethical, in those moments. Perhaps my quest to understand trips in this way has roots in a retrograde desire in the Internet social-networking era to privilege an ineffable something in presence, in face-to-face intimacy. It is a desire shared by many, of course, especially Christians of all denominations. Many proclaim the “transforming power” of STMs, at least in terms of a relationship between the self and Christ (Dearborn, 2003); many tell stories, present slide shows, and sing songs of how they “went there to meet [the poor] and returned changed forever” (McAlister, 2008: 876). Melani McAlister points to a striking intensity of longing for connection with the world among contemporary Evangelical Christians (and I would extend this claim to include Catholics), describing an “enchanted internationalism,” which she defines as a historically located “feeling-practice,” or “an orientation, a stance toward others and an expectation for the self” (878). This yearning for authenticity also shapes much non-religious/volunteer and service tourism. “All tourists desire [a] deeper involvement with society and culture to some degree,” Dean MacCannell writes in his classic work The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. “It is a basic component of their motivation to travel” (1989 [1976]: 10).

Many scholars and journalists and religious leaders have critiqued the inevitably scripted, predictable nature of interactions—characteristics typical, again, of almost any tourism encounter (Bruner, 2005). Brian Howell (2009) has pointed to how the language of STMs can “homogenize locality” and produce people who are “undif-ferentially poor.” If I’m honest with myself, my feeling was that the narratives of brief encounters structured in service-learning and STMs didn’t seem real, genuine, somehow. I recognize that this stance reveals an intellectual lapse on my part. In my past research I studied narratives of postwar crime experiences in San Salvador—which, told as an encounter between perpetrator and victim, are quite predictably scripted (Moodie, 2010). Still, I never doubted the genuineness of those encounters—of people’s narratives of fears while they were assaulted. Philosophers, linguistic anthropologists, and other scholars tell us how most interactions are inevitably framed, or scripted, or narrativized, in familiar ways. As in other kinds of travel, STM encounters are heavily structured by national/cultural metanarratives and by the stories they hear from other travelers and or read in websites and brochures, as well as by their religious expectations—literally, perhaps, in scriptures (Phillips, 1990).8 The Sacred Heart-La Cruz script draws heavily from the tenet of liberation theology to take the “preferential option for the poor” (see Gutiérrez, 1971; Hefferan, 2007).

The effect of the very naming of “the convergence of people or cultures as an ‘encounter’ can sometimes be to divest a social interaction of its power and render invisible the historical legacy of political or economic domination of one group by another,” as Florence Babb (2011: 4–5) reminds us. Anthropological uses of the term “encounter” point to long-term, politically structured relationships between differently empowered and culturally distinct populations, such as the colonial encounter (Asad, 1973), the development encounter (Escobar, 1995) or, indeed, the mission encounter (in the traditional sense of the word) (Keane, 2006). The discrete encounter event, situated within ongoing historical encounters, could be described as a momentary assemblage



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of different temporal rationalities and different contexts of origin, in which residual, emergent, and dominant modes of cultural and political forms must be analytically disentangled (Williams, 1978). One key element of all these encounters is how they are almost always contoured by money—“so often seen as the ‘universal’ commodity, a medium of exchange that honors no local particularity” (Senders and Truitt, 2007: 2). Money is thus frequently the very source of the experience of encounter.

Even before I began to interview participants in STMs, in the casual conversa-tions with travelers I met on flights returning to the United States, I sensed the repro-duction of an us/them binary precisely in the moment that people were trying to overcome distance (Howell, 2009). For example, a member of an Assemblies of God congregation in my Illinois town, a retired African American janitor, told me in an interview that he had been motivated to get involved with the church’s Salvadoran sister community after his first trip outside the U.S.A. three years earlier, to Cairo. The child beggars there had shocked him and his wife. They resolved to go to El Salvador. “We wanted to show them we cared,” he explained.9 Such common inter-changeability of “Others” in the Global South denies people’s cultural and political particularity—their difference is collapsed into a “not us” category.

As an anthropologist I could be overly sensitive to that toggling self/Other rela-tionship. Today we try to avoid the trap of our predecessors, who historically juxta-posed their object, the primitive, with modernity itself (Fabian, 1983). The use of money helped define that difference. As such, in our texts we denied “coevalness” or co-existence in the same time, to our interlocutors, placing them “behind us,” back-wards. Still, perhaps that binary, as well as the denial of coevalness, and possibly even the predictable scripts of experience (and even the common lack of knowledge of language and history and culture in the country!), would not be problems in STMs, if the focus is on work to be done. But many critics decry the dubious quality of STM or service-trip “help” which can often be performed by local people for much less money (see Van Engen, 2000, Ver Beek, 2006). Even medical missions, which seem to bring in needed resources and expertise, rarely can do more than apply proverbial and literal Band-Aids and perhaps create more dependence on outsiders (Korten, 1990: 141, 143; see McLennan, 2005 for a scathing critique of short-term medical missions, in a Master’s thesis by a nurse who had participated in a number of such activities).

Nonetheless, as I prepared to accompany the Sacred Heart delegation to La Cruz, I couldn’t help but ponder the possibilities for something new and unexpected to emerge, as embodied proximity overflows the constraints of habitual practices and carefully structured itineraries. I am a teacher, after all; I cling to the perhaps naïve hope that simple information presented in a lecture and discussion might transforms minds. I also first traveled to El Salvador in a delegation of (political) believers. Following the anthropologist Anna Tsing, I wanted to see how aspirations for global connection come to life in “the sticky materiality of practical encounters” (2005: 1). What better place to seek out productive friction than in the universal dreams of spiritual and humanistic commonality in the midst of dramatic economic, political, and cultural contrasts: impoverished, often rural Central Americans, defined by outsiders through their (undifferentiated) poverty and need, on the one hand; and middle-class, usually




white suburban or urban North Americans, defined through their relative wealth and desire to help, on the other (see Howell, 2009)?

Still, my unease with Leopoldo, the young man from the La Cruz community who aided the delegation (to which I will return soon), may demonstrate that the very structures of such encounters almost ensure their “failure,” or at least their limitations. In thinking through my odd discomfort, I have come to believe that the disparities between the visitors and visited—economic, geographic, cultural, political—is not something to overcome, a gap to be filled (even if in sticky, awkward, friction-gener-ating ways). Rather, these differences are necessary for the relationship. The relation-ship would not exist without the existence of those differences, without the inequality. Indeed, the money that brings STMs to far-flung locations is also what differentiates participants: “Money allows proximity, even as it establishes distance,” Stefan Senders and Allison Truitt write (2007: 8). As such, then, inequality is not only a pre-requisite for hermanamientos and other, similar, ventures, but must be reproduced in such encounters in order for them to have meaning.

“Knowing” Central America

When I began teaching my own university classes on Central America a decade ago, I assumed few students would be familiar with the region. During the 1980s, the cinched waist between Mexico and Colombia had been thrust into political promi-nence in a last gasp of the Cold War. By the early 1990s, history had “ended” (Fukuyama, 1992), and so, it seemed, did global and media interest in the Central American isthmus. A college student in Indiana and then local New Jersey journalist in the 1980s, I felt I had been called to activism (a related but different kind of faith than that of STM travelers) by news of human-rights violations, by stories of the mur-ders of students, nuns, and priests, including that of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero (his assassination, while saying mass in a hospital chapel, has been linked to figures in El Salvador’s U.S.-trained and -supported military). After years of reading and talking, and attending many Central American solidarity events, I finally visited the country as part of a delegation from New Jersey that had established a sister-community relationship with a repopulated village in Chalatenango, still devastated by the battles of the 1980s. By then, the Berlin Wall had fallen. El Salvador’s war ended in 1992; Guatemala’s in 1996. Global attention turned elsewhere, to conflicts in Bosnia and Somalia, later Afghanistan and Iraq.

But to my surprise, ten years later and beyond I have found out that many more students than I would have expected did know Central America, in a manner of speaking. Today many of them, even those at my secular state university, first encounter much of the world (or rather, confront “living” versions of particular patches of earth) through STM or service trips, many of them to Central America. Scholars and activists and others have begun to speculate how this kind of interaction may well be contribut-ing to a new kind of sense of global citizenship, or transnational subjectivity—though what these potentially emergent new ways of seeing and being in the world exactly are, and what they may mean, is far from clear.



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As I have mentioned, I had long been aware of these missioners in El Salvador; unaware of their global magnitude, I just had not connected them to my students in Illinois. I often ran into them in El Salvador’s Comalapa International Airport, either in the baggage claim areas, ready to venture out, or outside the gates, preparing to fly home. In their (often) shockingly pale or pinkish flesh, their matching T-shirts, and their simple mass (both the fact of their physical size—so much taller and broader than the average Salvadoran—and the fact that they usually moved in big crowds), the groups were to me Susan Harding’s “repugnant cultural others” (1991). Until recently, I admit, I have acted something like a latter-day follower of the anthropologist Franz Boas, who was known to blot out images of the modern world in his photographs of Native Americans in the early twentieth century, trying to “salvage” what remained of their imagined untouched cultures. I was blotting these mission-trip groups out of the images of El Salvador that I presented at conferences and in classrooms. Undoubtedly I’m not in their images of the country, either. Who wants to include the frowning, white middle-aged professor lady typing furiously on her laptop? She/I contrast/s viv-idly with the joyful throngs of (often literally dancing) brown children that populate the shots they post on Flickr or Tumblr or Facebook.

During that summer of 2010, when I first joined the Sacred Heart-La Cruz delega-tion, I was carrying out rural research with former guerrilla combatants in the town of Perquín, near the Honduran border. There, I saw more of these kinds of “voluntour-ists” and STM groups in action (in my past urban work I rarely saw foreigners after I left the airport). Most of them passed through the Perkín Lenca, the rustic eco-hotel where I stayed for two months. A burly ex-pat from Ohio built and runs the place. As a former Lutheran Church worker in Honduran refugee camps during the war, undoubt-edly his encounters, in the midst of human-rights violations and war, changed him. The involvement of these visitors follows a continuum of service and spirituality—but all appeared to be motivated to understand and possibly help the poor in some way. There were the 20 or 30 Methodists from Dallas, led by a professor of religion with kind eyes, who told me they split time between a Catholic school in a poor San Salvador neighborhood (they had just painted it) and a spot in the Philippines (several missioners and a portion of the congregation were Filipino). There were the boisterous middle-schoolers from Cambridge, Massachusetts, many Latino and African American, who had spent a week shadowing students in rural San José Las Flores, Chalatenango, their sister community. There was the large group of media studies majors from San Francisco State University, seemingly all in skinny jeans and loose black sweaters, there as part of a course charged with making some kind of public service video about natural disaster prevention (lucky for them, a couple of floods awaited filming; it turned out to be the rainiest rainy season in 30 years).

None of the groups I encountered in Perquín, I should say, seemed to be proselyt-izing in the traditional sense. They were doing good deeds, trying to understand, soak-ing up experience.10 Perquín’s fame as a rebel stronghold, now home of the “Museum of the Revolution,” as well as its proximity to the site of the El Mozote massacre (in which a thousand civilians were killed by U.S.-trained soldiers in 1981 [Binford, 1996]), possibly attracts more liberals than other sites of such trips—Timothy Wadkins




suggests El Salvador’s iconic position as “a tiny laboratory of poverty and social revolution” itself draws more left-leaning visitors (2008: 32). Indeed, short-term mission trips are a diverse phenomenon. In their plurality and hybridity they exhibit something of the fluidity and complexity of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century globalization, whether of religion, humanitarianism, or simply the movement of peo-ple, capital, objects, and ideas. At least, that is how it looks from the North American side. My experience in La Cruz, especially with Leopoldo, however, reminds me of how the effects of this late-capitalist process are uneven and particular; they are not, as we know, just flowing and global.

From Sanctuary to STM

I believed, and perhaps still hope, that the Sacred Heart hermanamiento offers particu-lar promise for the potential of such trips. Sacred Heart’s relationship with El Salvador began in the early 1980s, as did mine, when it participated in the Sanctuary Movement to protect Central American refugees (described in Coutin, 1993). As the parish’s (recently retired) priest, Father Dan, describes it, the decision to reach out directly to Central Americans was “the next step, beyond the local.” Like me, and like many soli-darity activists, the parishioners were moved by the plight of El Salvador’s peasants during the 12-year civil war (1980–1992) in which 75,000 people died. They were particularly drawn to Morazán, the birthplace of the Revolutionary People’s Army (the ERP or Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo, one of five factions of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation front, the FMLN guerrillas) and site of much war-era con-flict. It is one of the poorest parts of an already poor country. I realize, talking to Salvadoran friends and acquaintances in Perquín and San Salvador, that in some sense La Cruz could be considered “El Salvador’s El Salvador.” To many Salvadorans, it seems remote and alien (at least those who don’t actually come from there): “Ah yes, they’re really poor there”—or “They talk funny there—there they’re really Indian.” Father Dan and Liz, a piano teacher, first traveled with a translator to meet people from La Cruz in 1990.11 Morazán was still under guerrilla control at the time. The first parish delegation visited in 1992, eight months after the peace accords; in 1994 they began medical clinics as an annual, separate “working” delegation, usually arriving in July. Father Dan performs Mass in each of the five communities in pastoral delega-tions that visit in the dry season, often in January.

The sister-community relationship between the parishioners of Sacred Heart and the people who live in La Cruz has changed over more than two decades, Dan tells me. It has moved from “crisis” mode, in which they helped people reestablish themselves on bomb-scarred, napalm-denuded grounds, to ongoing support, as mediated through APDES, the liberation theology-linked organization that originally partnered the Illinois church with the Salvadoran community and continues to manage the herman-amiento. Sacred Heart has helped with a number of initiatives, including a nutrition program, a hammock project, the construction of a cable bridge crossing the Torola River, the building of a church roof, a chicken cooperative, a sewing cooperative, a water project, and a few others. Some of these initiatives are doing well; others have



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failed. Father Dan often referred to La Cruz in his Sunday homilies, telling stories of individual struggles and community solidarity as he exhorted his congregation to remember the poor in the Global South as well as in Illinois and throughout the world. The church bulletin still regularly reminds parishioners to pray for the people of La Cruz. The church website updates them about droughts and floods and epidemics there as well as graduations and new schools.

In other words, Sacred Heart’s commitment to La Cruz seems to have overcome some of the problems critics point to in relationships between North American short-term missioners and the people they visit. Though not every delegation member can mentally string together Father Dan’s homilies to construct a coherent history of the area (indeed some members of the delegation are not Sacred Heart parishioners, or not regular churchgoers), by now the communities share a kind of history. Father Dan has baptized babies in La Cruz who are now parents themselves. The delegations are led by people who (often informally) guide newcomers in the history and culture of El Salvador and La Cruz, as well as in respect for local customs and practices. In a second trip I took with them, in July 2011, one of the participants, Emily, a 23-year-old medical student, said she had felt connected to El Salvador since her earliest childhood, listening to Father Dan’s sermons. Most church members do not visit in the small delegations, but rather contribute money and materials to the committee that directs the various initiatives ($20,000 to $30,000 a year).

Given the incredible diversity in mission/service trips, La Cruz cannot be consid-ered representative, even as it offers clues to possibilities for groups that continue contact over time. I should stress that I am a cultural anthropologist oriented to inter-pretive analysis. I perform close readings of empirical research. The moments I exam-ine may appear to be discrete and exceptional, but they are embedded in long-term engagement within a cultural context. In my research I seek out clues to larger possi-bilities in the odd detail, in the incongruous or resistant moment. In El Salvador in the summer of 2010, I took seriously the words of Manuel, the APDES organizer who accompanied the Sacred Heart delegation that July. He told me one evening, as we set up our hammocks in the first house after a two-hour hike,

This group is special. They have been coming back, year after year. The people love Father Dan. When he returned this May [after a two-year lapse; he had been ill], he wept, they wept, everyone wept. I almost cried. It was so moving. It is something unusual, people returning this way. We have other groups that have been coming for a while, but none like this.12

The next year, accompanying Father Dan with another delegation, I would see how the presence of the Catholic priest, and the Masses he performed in each community, form a crucial element of the Sacred Heart-La Cruz connection.

In the July 2010 trip, I too had almost cried when the eight of us (Manuel and the seven women) arrived at the initial meeting place after a five-hour drive from San Salvador. We disembarked from the minivan to be greeted by about 60 community members. Some of them had walked four hours through the mountains to get there. Someone read a small speech welcoming us. Others held up placards with the names




of their communities and of our Illinois town and Sacred Heart Church. They per-formed several songs, accompanied by a guitar. Most of the women wore plain cotton knee-length skirts, their dusty feet in thin rubber or plastic sandals. Most of the men wore broad hats or baseball caps and jeans, with work boots. Many of them seemed both shy and excited, everyone smiling, looking at each other, some reaching out their arms to Manuel, as well as to Liz and Linda, who had been there before. To me it was simply so unexpected—all these campesinos (a words usually translated as “peasant,” or small-scale farmer), so humble, so much darker and smaller than the population of (urban) San Salvador that I knew better after nearly 20 years traveling there. I don’t know what it was, but tears just filled my eyes. As I joined the crowd to walk to the first hamlet, I was shocked to realize that I too had fallen into the very predicable STM and traveler’s narrative from which, as an anthropologist, I had exempted myself (and critiqued in others).

There is something going on. La Cruz, I decided, might well offer a glimpse of one possible way of interacting. It represents a sustained effort at contact between groups from radically different backgrounds. And yet at the same time, after my experience on the trip, I am not at all convinced that either “side” “gets” the other in terms of traditional frameworks we may have of how one knows. The dinner conversations, for example, were often quite awkward for me, as I sat between the Illinois women and the community members at the meal. The missioners one night, for example, discussed in English the number of calories in all the starchy food we were eating (spaghetti, French-fried potatoes and thick tortillas, along with truly free-range chicken), and whether or not we should be taking antibiotics preemptively (Linda, the nurse, had brought the drug Cipro for everyone), and why some North American parents refuse vaccinations for their children (as the parents of Maritza, the other translator on the trip, had done). The schoolteachers and community leaders invited to the meal sat quietly or commented on the day’s activities in Spanish. There was almost no interac-tion. When one side or the other laughed, I tried to translate the jokes—not easy.

Behind the scenes, of course, things are much more complicated. Katherine Denise Daly has written a Master’s thesis for the University of Toronto based on ethnographic research with APDES carried out in May through December 2008 (Daly, n.d.). Herself a confessed veteran of service trips and “voluntourism,” she began to have doubts about the value of such encounters despite her own life-changing experiences. She accompanied the Sacred Heart delegation to La Cruz in July 2008. She describes an uncomfortable hierarchy among the participants in the trips, with the visitors and APDES “above” the community members. La Cruz residents provide free labor, in her view, guiding the visitors, protecting them (important in El Salvador, with one of the highest crime rates in the world), providing accommodations, and cooking for them (the per diem payments made by the missioners pays for the food but not the preparation). They depend on the groups’ decisions on whether or not to support different initiatives. One interviewee told her, “We have to know how to care for this connection with the sister community, know how to stay in contact, never lose contact because if we lose it, the children won’t be able to study and we won’t see the students moving up in life.” Further, the resources can cause conflict. When one group of



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visitors brought five giant plastic bags of donated goods to APDES, Manuel, the APDES organizer who had accompanied us on our trip as well, told her, “When they bring stuff, they bring bickering.” “People in some of the communities fight intensely over donations left by delegations,” she writes, arguing

over who got the best pair of shoes or the most items … Some people derive some monetary benefits from the visitors when the visitors give money directly to people that they feel close to in the community. This can cause problems as it creates a scramble to be involved with the visitors. (Daly, n.d., ch. 8: 6)

Such observations underline the importance of rules against individual giving set by APDES, and many organizers of STMs. Sacred Heart organizers stress that members of the delegations should not carry money with them, and should not offer individual gifts to people.

Other Scripts

One model I have for this kind of research on potential—not from representative sam-ples (“the average experience is…”) but from a few exceptions that suggest alternative ways of encountering the other—arises from a very different context: that of Jewish tourism to Poland studied by anthropologist Erica Lehrer (2013). While the vast majority of Jewish visitors to Poland (and there are many) come expecting and almost wanting to find anti-Semitism, and seeking only cemeteries and sites of death, a few seek connections with the living descendants of a historical Poland whose intellectual life was richly intertwined with Judaism. Any encounter has limits, of course—there are constraints on what might happen. Perhaps it is not that people can leave the script in the end; it is that they find ways around it—other, less common scripts, or even occasional ad libs. And that is where my encounter with Leopoldo comes in.

I can’t remember now if Leopoldo approached me or I began talking to him. He told me he had been participating in activities related to the delegations coming since he was 10 years old (he was now 29). He said that he had always been curious about these big, strange white people. He had always wanted to be near them, even if he didn’t understand what they were saying. “I was so impressed that they came from so far, to see us,” he told me. I had heard the same words from several others; “People from our own country ignore us, but you come every year.” I heard his comments echoed by others, as have other delegation members over the years.

Leopoldo eventually decided to go north himself, while he was still a teenager. He ended up in northern New Jersey, a place that draws many Salvadorans from this part of Morazán. As it turns out, I was once a newspaper reporter in that part of the coun-try, at the Jersey Journal in Hudson County. In fact I was quite familiar with the very street corner where he had lived—at 41st Street and Bergenline Avenue in Union City. We shared memories of the densely populated area, still politically dominated by Cubans (New Jersey’s Cuban-American Senator Bob Menendez began his career in local Union City politics).




Leopoldo had been deported two years earlier. He said his boss, at a marble factory, went to the police to accuse him of breaking his car windows and puncturing its tires (charges he emphatically denies). Leopoldo said he spent eight months in a prison in Passaic. It was frightening, he admitted, especially because in the politics of prison alliances he, as a Salvadoran, ended up being protected by members of the notorious gang the Mara Salvatrucha.

For two or three days as we walked along the mountainous paths between hamlets he told me his story (each night he returned home, taking steep shortcuts through the hills that we never would have been able to navigate). He was an orphan, his guerrilla father killed in battle. An elderly great-aunt raised him. He now lives with his former in-laws and three children—Virginia, the oldest at 15, is “white like you,” he told me proudly (their mother left him for someone else and remains in New Jersey). One day as we all rested near a large, smelly pig enclosure on the way to the next community, he pulled out a little plastic bag with photos of his children.

By then, however, I did not want to hear any more or share that kind of intimacy. I quickly called over Liz, Maritza, Linda, and Mimi, to look at the pictures. Everyone oohed and aahed. We moved on.

The previous evening, he had asked me for money. He had been struggling since deportation. He seemed deeply self-conscious, looking down, shifting uncomforta-bly. I did not doubt his need, or the desperation that likely compelled his request. (Salvadoran friends to whom I have since told this story have been much less sympa-thetic. They place his story in a completely different frame than I do, one in which the vast majority of people need money.) How could I not respond? I had spent the past few days translating in the medical clinics. I had heard over and over, in intimate, intensely embodied detail, people’s stories of physical suffering. Their problems were in some ways so simple—symptoms inscribed on bodies that worked too hard, too long, with so little sustenance. Some people were clearly hungry. I remember several young women telling us they simply couldn’t concentrate. Others had head-aches, or were dizzy. There were many other problems, some quite serious, though like most medical missions there was little we could do beyond take blood pressure, distribute pills, offer the occasional inhaler for asthma (see McLennan, 2005). I was shocked at what I saw in La Cruz, I have to say, and sheepish. As I noted above, I have traveled throughout El Salvador, doing research there since 1994, and have seen much poverty. But never this way, never this close, and, frankly, never this much. La Cruz is, indeed, one of the poorest parts of El Salvador.

Inequalities and Economics

I had no doubt Leopoldo needed money. I had no doubt that his appeal arose from desperation. Though not unheard of, such requests weren’t on the typical script between delegations and host communities in which Leopoldo had been participating in for many years. But his petition also responded to the invitation I gave him, unwit-tingly (or not?), as we spoke as coeval residents of a transnational North–South world, both of whom knew the corner of 41st Street and Bergenline Avenue in Union City. We



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spoke as if we might have encountered each other face to face not only as Sacred Heart delegation member and La Cruz community participant on the uneven, rocky terrain of Morazán, El Salvador, but also as ordinary, harried pedestrians waiting for the bus in metropolitan New Jersey. As Anna Tsing points out,

Even the most out-of-the-way cultural niches are formed in world-crossing dialogues … Cultures are always both wide-ranging and situated, whether participants imagine them as global or local, modern or traditional, futuristic or backward looking. The challenge of cultural analysis is to address both the spreading interconnectedness to the world and its exotic distinctiveness models and the inextricability of interconnection and location. (2005: 122)

And, indeed, the best STMs should be framed in economic, social and political as well as religious contexts, recognizing the cultural specificity of the participants as well as the global links—rather than the us/them Global South interchangeability of Others. As an anthropologist, I, like Tsing, nod enthusiastically at such rhetoric as I sit composing essays on my Macintosh computer. But in the real world, it was Leopoldo who dared to acknowledge our coevalness and global interconnectedness—not me. When he asked for money, he suddenly, explicitly, pointed to both our differences—as wealthy and poor—and our similarities—as existing within the same economic struc-ture and, presumably, within the same spiritual community of compassion.

At that moment, I was, in fact, carrying cash. I had about $300 with me. It would have been so very easy to slip him some bills—whether $1 or $10 or $100. It would have helped him. It would not have hurt me. But I understood that doing such a thing would have violated the very ethic of the mission, of the collective purposes of the hermanamiento. This the leaders had stressed: the sister-community relationship was not about individual relationships (like the remittances some people in the region, and many people throughout El Salvador, often receive from relatives in the United States). Still—no one would have known. He would have had some relief; I would have felt a little guilty for breaking the rules, but also good about helping someone.

I didn’t do it. I felt too conflicted over what it would mean. Anthropologists are often embarrassed by money exchanges in fieldwork, which is commonly predicated on intimate encounters. To exchange money within ethnographic relationships seems to commoditize them, to turn them into something less personal (Senders and Truitt, 2007). But then Leopoldo’s request for financial help took place in a different context, part of an STM. Beyond my discomfort with money in the field, I was uneasy about undermining the mission (especially as an outsider to the church, there as a translator-anthropologist). I confided in Liz. She told me several past translators, more able to directly communicate with people than most Sacred Heart visitors, had been put in similar situations. Later I would learn through Daly’s work that La Cruz community members also perceive that individuals in delegations do give personal donations, gen-erating envy and even conflict. Two of the other men who were accompanying us between communities—both older than Leopoldo, both former guerrilla combatants




(and both of whom had also shared some of their own stories with me)—seemed to sense something going on, and walked closer to me the rest of the way.

Now what of this mundane little encounter? Why am I suggesting that it can help us learn something about the dynamics of STM and service trips? It is hardly novel in a global geopolitical sense of neocolonial relations between people of unequal status. As a gringa who has lived in El Salvador for a cumulative total of four years, I can’t tell you how many times people have asked me for money or favors. I have written about this in the past, describing how my desire to help those who asked conflicted with my Salvadoran former in-laws’ efforts to protect me (they were terribly skeptical of others’ motives, much like the Salvadorans to whom I described Leopoldo’s request) (Moodie, 2007). At the same time, I had not heard of these kinds of experiences in the many stories of mission trips I had listened to or read. They are made invisible, as if their presence would sully (or commoditize) the encounter. On reflection, I realized that in sharing my own experiences with the STM, I had not told many people about Leopoldo’s request for money. When I had, it had been in a separate accounting.

I wonder, now, if what happened simply could not fit into the shape of such a trip, into the prescribed and apparently almost compulsory narrative of such travel. Like any encounter—whether “colonial,” “developmental,” “touristic,” or “missionary”—all parties most likely have their pre-conceived ideas of what will happen, ideas that help define what might happen, what does happen, and how people describe what happens. In other words, the experiences are mediated. In many ways these narratives contain what can happen on mission trips. And an explicit, personal request for money, which would directly point to inequality and difference, is not supposed to be part of the experience. In some ways, bringing money into the equation violates the separation of spheres, whether private/public (in which family and intimacy is separated from commerce) or sacred/profane (in which money, of course, belongs outside of the church or spiritual encounters).

People, at least Northerners on mission or service trips arriving at far-flung desti-nations, desire connection. They want to do more than send money or write letters (though many people can only do that—such as the parishioners at Sacred Heart, who cannot travel to El Salvador but who contribute much money and donate many goods). They want to see, to feel, to experience. They want act on their concern, their caring. They want to help, but, as McAlister describes, they also want very much to feel. Their desire is precisely to overcome difference and distance. What they want might be described as a yearning for authenticity. But what would reaching those desires actu-ally mean? What would knowing the other consist of? This desire is predicated on the existence of difference. On an us and them, or self and other, binary. To overcome this distance is to obliterate desire, to rub out the reason for taking the trips. In mission and service trips particularly, yearning is inevitably structured on inequality. The hope to fulfill this desire to feel and know exists in direct tension with the need for the distance.

(What, indeed, if STMs became LTMs? If Sacred Heart residents could see the bickering over black plastic bags of goods, the maneuvering for hosting privileges, the arguments over who is going to do the cooking, the accusations of side-benefits?)



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From the minute I stepped off that minivan, I participated in that narrative, that script, that desire to feel and know and connect, despite myself. Emotions filled me; tears flooded my eyes, more than once. To be honest, throughout the trip, I was so involved in the physical “being there,” experiencing the difference in my bones, I barely had time to take notes. My ongoing conversation with Leopoldo during the walks between hamlets had been exciting. It had brought together my present life as an anthropologist in El Salvador with my past life as a journalist in New Jersey, where I had known many Salvadoran migrants and had taught English to many people from Morazán, some likely even from La Cruz. Here was a child orphaned by the war, a follower of liberation theology, a man who had trekked the risky migrant route through Guatemala and Mexico, an undocumented worker who had polished marble in New Jersey, an illegal alien deported after eight months of prison. What a story, I thought. We are connecting! In the end, my desire for connection echoed that of any delegation member.

And then he asked for money. My response was not the same as it would have been after several years living in San Salvador, though, like many people, I still struggle over how to respond to all the need I see around me. I know, as a gringa in El Salvador, my pale skin and accent categorize my body as rich. So I am frequently judged by whether I help or withhold the money everyone assumes I have (Senders, 2007: 84). But within the Sacred Heart-La Cruz hermanamiento, I had entered a new set of rela-tions, I thought; a different script. I agonized. I wondered, that evening, “What did he mistake my interest for?” My response to myself came almost involuntarily: for something real?

I speak Spanish. I know the history and politics of not only El Salvador, but of Salvadoran migration to the United States, pretty well. If every short-term missioner or service-tripper knew the worlds they were visiting as well as I know El Salvador, it would seem that many current critiques—the superficiality, the short-term nature of it all, and so forth—would fall away. And yet. In the end, I could only withdraw—as if I had hit a wall, a limit, a no-human’s land of possibility.

If Leopoldo had not asked me for money, I might still be living with the hope that the La Cruz group offered exciting possibilities for alternative globalization. I might hope that the La Cruz–Sacred Heart relationship, linking this small hard patch of remote volcanic earth in Morazán with the flat corn- and soybean fields of downstate Illinois, may at least momentarily point to a way of transcending, through human intimacy, the uneven effects of current late-capitalist processes. We can meet and share as Christians, as humans seeking solidarity and face-to-face intimacy, despite evident inequality. And momentarily … we can.

But Leopoldo made me see the limits to such illusions. I did not hand over $300, or $30, or $3. It wasn’t just “the rules.” I sensed that I would have broken some-thing, momentarily severed the illusion that we (in the North) need in order to desire connection—that we were meeting in a separate sphere of spiritual community and solidarity. In some strange way, it would have briefly put us on equal ground. It would have placed us in the world of profane exchange, one that can never really be overcome by small contributions or short-term trips. The reason I couldn’t seem to




talk about Leopoldo when I told most people about my mission trip (or the reason that I isolated my telling of that part of my experience) was that I did not want to break the illusion either.

The trips will continue, from Illinois, and from other places across the world. The church contributions will keep on flowing into medical clinics and school supplies and fellowships for a few students to study high school. People will continue to meet, they will feel like crying, they will describe a deep sense of intimacy even as they don’t understand each other. These are mostly good things, at least they seem to me to be, even if they do not fix the larger, long-term problems. But as they inevitably reproduce inequality, do they block bigger changes? I do not know. The thing is, the “encounter” demands that the gap between north and south never be filled. The gap is necessary.

Notes

1. Thank you to Brian Howell and Robert Priest for inviting me to participate in the 2010 American Anthropological Association panel that led to this article. Thank you also to Rupert Stasch for his insightful comments on the conference paper, to William Girard for his crucial critique of a draft of that paper, and to Kathleen Carey O’Brien for research assistance, and to three anonymous reviewers whose skepticism pushed me to hone my arguments (though am not sure I will have satisfied them). A grant from the University of Illinois Research Board funded the fieldwork that girds this analysis.

2. All the names of the people involved in this research, as well as the names of the organizations, churches, and communities, have been changed in this article to protect confidentiality.

3. A departamento (department) is an administrative division, like a state or a country. El Salvador has 14 departments. A canton (which I have translated as township) is a smaller, territorial subdivision of a municipality; it is made up of a number of caserios (hamlets). The delegation I accompanied works with five different caserios.

4. This sister-community relationship links a church with the people who live in a geographic region, the majority of whom suffered greatly during the war, and many of whom are practicing Roman Catholics. There is no church in La Cruz, however, just small chapels in which catechists hold services. It is important to note that the Sacred Heart clinics and other services (such as scholarships, the nutrition program, etc.) attend to all people in La Cruz, without regard to religion.

5. Interviews at APDES, July 2010; thanks also to Katherine Denise Daly, who shared her unpublished University of Toronto Master’s thesis on this organization with me. This organization is not formally linked to the Catholic church and works with many Christian Protestant denominations as well as secular groups. More and more Salvadorans, like many Central Americans, claim Protestant affiliation, though the communities in La Cruz remain largely Catholic. For a consideration of transformations of Christianity in El Salvador, see Wadkins, 2008, which reports on the dramatic growth of Evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity (a 2008 survey reports that 30% of Salvadorans identify them-selves as Protestant [IUDOP, 2008]), especially among the poor.

6. Not all people in La Cruz knew that I was an anthropologist; I only told those with whom I had conversations.

7. Statistics on the number of people (usually from the “developed,” First World) traveling the world (overwhelmingly to the “developing” Global South) on short-term missions vary, but most observers agree on a dramatic increase in the past quarter-century, from perhaps



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540 people in 1965 to 120,000 in 1989 (figures cited in Christianity Today [February 2001], as well as lausanneworldpulse.com/perspectives) to more than 1.6 million a year today (see Priest et al., 2006).

8. Take, for example, this fragment of testimony, by Karla, 23, of Scottsdale, Arizona. It is clearly shaped by “scripts” or perhaps better said, biblical verses: “When I was 15, I made the most important decision in my life. I choose Spiritual Bootcamp over pursuing my career in soccer. I had realized I wanted more than the average Christian who is content with church, and their walk with Christ. I am like Moses, Enoch, and John the Beloved [who] desired to see the face of God, and know Him intimately. For 3 weeks we ministered in churches, served the homeless, and reached the lost. By the end of bootcamp, I had a Damascus road encounter with God, just like Paul. God changed the way I walked and talked. I will never forget the opportunity given to me that summer to see the face of God” (electronic document, www.elijahgeneration.org/testimonials.html, accessed 29 January 2012).

9. Interview, Champaign, Illinois, September 2009.10. As William Girard, an anthropologist of Christianity whose field site is in Honduras,

points out, though people may not be explicitly preaching religion, they are modeling a certain kind of modern (Christian, European) subject (personal communication) (see Asad, 1996: 263).

11. Interviews, December 2008, July 2010, July 2011.12. All quotes and accounts in this article are reconstructions from field notes taken either dur-

ing the mission trip or shortly thereafter, upon reflection.

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Author biography

Ellen Moodie is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has been visiting and carrying out research in El Salvador for 20 years, since 1993.



Inequality and Intimacy Between Sister Cities in El Salvador and the United States

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