Santa Clara University

Renewal and Regeneration

by Julia Orozco
Mother of Ana Orozco, Fall 2000

I am writing as a parent who thoroughly enjoyed visiting the University of Santa Clara’s study abroad program in San Salvador and getting to know the directors, Kevin and Trena, and the students living at the Casa de la Solidaridad during its initial semester. The following is an account of some of my memories that may be helpful to those considering the program. I wish everyone well and I hope that the program will continue and flourish.

My daughter Ana was a member of the first group of students from the United States to study with the Casa de la Solidaridad program in El Salvador during the Fall Semester of 2000. When she informed me that she wanted to study at the University of Central America in San Salvador, I had serious misgivings and I experienced bouts of near paralyzing fear. Ana’s father was born and raised in neighboring Guatemala, so Ana and I had graphic memories of the violence in Central America that raged throughout the 1980s.

I had reservations about Ana studying in El Salvador, an arguably Catholic country, in part, because the Catholic Church as institution had a track record of being either reluctant or unable to protect its own socially progressive clergy, let alone its young people and lay workers in El Salvador. However, I felt that the social and spiritual legacy of people like Oscar Romero, Rutilio Grande, Maura Clark, Ita Ford, Ignacio Ellacuria and of so many Salvadorans struggling for justice, had to be honored and passed on to a new generation of students. So Ana chose to participate in the study program and, after much deliberation and soul searching, I supported her choice.

Once she was living in San Salvador, I spoke with her regularly on the phone and from the tone of her voice, I knew that she was enjoying the program and making the most of her opportunities to learn from her professors and contribute her energies to the outreach program at a grade school in Las Brisas, a neighborhood on the outskirts of the Salvadoran capital.

I decided to visit Ana the first weekend of December of that year, which happened to be the 20th anniversary of the murder, by the Salvadoran military, of three U.S. nuns and a lay worker from Cleveland, Ohio. The lives of these women were being commemorated and honored by a mass at the Central Cathedral and this mass was attended by Salvadorans and people from around the world.

I remember feelings of great awe and respect as the ceremonial procession began to form in the crypt under the main altar, where martyred Archbishop Oscar Romero’s tomb is located. Hundreds of Salvadorans of all ages, who were carrying palms decorated with small pastel-colored paper flowers, began to sing hymns and pray a litany as we all slowly walked out of the crypt and on to the street in front of the steps leading up to the main cathedral entrance. My breath caught in my throat when I looked up at the huge arching entranceway, now decorated with brightly colored religious, folk-art motifs. I was in the midst of a crowd of over a thousand people making an entrance into the cathedral, and the only previous image I had of this sacred space, in the eye of my heart, was the TV news footage of the Salvadorans massacred on these very church steps, the day of Archbishop Romero’s funeral mass, in March of 1980.

As I paused on the cathedral steps, my memory flashed back to a time twenty years earlier—just two days before Romero’s assassination—when I had been standing on the steps of another imposing old stone Catholic church on Manhattan’s West Side, a block south of the Lincoln Center complex. Friends and family members were throwing handfuls of rice that fell on the church steps along with spring rain drops. My daughter’s father, Hugo, was wearing a jacket with traditional Guatemalan embroidery and I was wearing a hand-woven huipil from the Mayan Highlands. We had recited poetry by St. John of the Cross and Ernesto Cardenal to each other and to everyone in the church moments before. That was the third Saturday in March of 1980. On the following Monday, Archbishop Romero was shot in a hospital chapel in San Salvador as he raised a chalice to consecrate bread and wine during mass.

A few months before that fateful day, Hugo and I had gone to a mass at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. Archbishop Romero was to have come there to preach to the Latino community of the greater metropolitan area. Because of events in El Salvador, Romero was unable to leave his country and so he sent a recorded homily in his place. As I listened to Romero’s words of faith and encouragement, I felt such hope and happiness. I believed that Central America was at the threshold of a new dawn of social justice and human solidarity. The lives of the poor would be improved, and the horizons of possibility would be elevated for all of us. I looked at a sketch of a dove, printed on a mimeographed church flyer, and my spirit was in flight. That was November of 1979.

On December 3, 2000 I was in El Salvador for the first time and, while walking into the cathedral, I was having vivid memories of March 24, 1980. On the day of Romero’s assassination, my family was still visiting from out of state and, as we watched the televised evening news on the Spanish language station (a novelty for my relatives), we were stunned. Hugo and I knew immediately what the images and the accompanying report meant. By the end of the week more brutal images, this time of the massacre on the Cathedral steps in San Salvador, flickered on our TV screen.

Archbishop Romero’s death was a source of profound grief. Where we had found inspiration in his leadership along with faith, hope and encouragement, there was now a sense of unfathomable loss. It was March of 1980. The Contra War, the massacres of thousands of peasants by order of the Salvadoran military, the murder of tens of thousands of Mayan Indians by order of a sinister coterie of Guatemalan generals, and the brutal murder in 1989 of six Jesuits at the University of Central America along with their housekeeper, Elba and her daughter, Celina, was still to come.

But I was speaking of my experiences on December 3, 2000. As I was walking up the steps of the Cathedral in El Salvador’s capital along with my daughter Ana Paloma and so many other people, to a mass that would honor the lives of Maura Clark, Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel and Jean Donovan, four Catholic women who had come to El Salvador to break bread and share their faith and their love, my mind and my heart were filled with memories that I had not been able to forget. There was no gun fire in San Salvador on that December day in the year 2000, only mental echoes of ricocheting bullets, images of people rushing toward the church doors, or huddling, crouched down on the steps, or lying in pools of blood.

Ana and I were on sacred ground; we knew it. All those around us knew it. In order to honor the memories of those who perished in the violence of the past, it is important to make sure that they are not forgotten and it is also important to continue to seek justice and work to construct a lasting culture of peace.

At present, a long diplomatic and political struggle has resulted in peace for El Salvador. I believe that programs like the Casa de la Solidaridad project in San Salvador provide a variety of positive experiences for Salvadorans and for young people from the United States. These practical social experiences promote the kind of cultural evolution that can bring about transformations in the violent configurations of domination, militarization, and dependency that have characterized the region. These destructive configurations need to be replaced by relationships of mutuality, redemption and liberation. If this happens, it will be the result of serious long-term efforts at effecting such changes. These transformations would be beneficial in so many ways to both the United States and Central America.

What Ana communicated to me during my brief visit to the Casa Program gave me hope again that such a desirable outcome is possible. The program gives young people from the United States the opportunity to experience first hand the efforts of Salvadorans who are working to promote critical understanding of the underlying causes of a violent historical period, while at the same time, uniting to build a more just and peaceful society.

Some additional comments about the facilities and atmosphere of the Casa:

My few days in San Salvador allowed me to see this city in a new light. The Casa was a warm and welcoming place located in a neighborhood of modest but pleasant homes decorated with flowering plants and trees. The students were comfortable and knowledgeable about using either the public bus transportation system or the local taxi companies. Traveling around the city with Ana, I felt secure because people were friendly and gladly gave directions or offered helpful information. I even attended a seminar style language class at the university. The professor was quite knowledgeable and spoke easily with the students, praising their efforts or correcting their mistakes as needed.

The meals prepared at the Casa by Maria Julia were healthy, tasty and bountiful. There were frequent visitors at all hours of the day and there was always enough food for everyone, whether it was served at the long table in the dining room or carried outdoors to the patio. Someone would say grace and then conversation about daily routines and current events would begin to flow.

Somehow, the inviting atmosphere reminded me of the home of my Irish grandmother, but perhaps that is a New Yorker’s nostalgia for a kinder, friendlier and more personal way of living associated with rural life and the past.

My overall and most lasting impression of visiting El Salvador was that it offered an opportunity to connect with a powerful and inspirational form of popular religion which has been, and hopefully will continue to be, an invigorating source of renewal and regeneration, not only for Catholics but for all people of goodwill.