Over the past month, my research partner Joseph and I have been furiously reviewing the existing literature on the Salvadoran diaspora in the United States. This has included several weeks of reading in silence beside one another for hours at a time, one or the other of us occasionally reading an interesting passage aloud to the other, or noting a common theme. Much of our work has looked at the scholarship of Cecilia Menjivar and Sarah Mahler, two of the most prominent researchers in the field of Salvadoran migration writing in the late 90s through the mid 2000s. We’ve found thus far that our research operates as a nice check-up to the respective works of Menjivar and Mahler, in that their work trailed off before the last ten years of highly policed immigration across the southern border, the unaccompanied children crisis, and the current anti-immigrant rhetoric and incessant scandals of the Trump administration. Our hope is that our work will follow up on their theories in the context of the Trump era.
After having done weeks of background research through existing literature and census data about the Brentwood community, Joseph and I began reaching out to prominent organizations and members of the community. We emailed several non-profits that work with the immigrant population in New York and Long Island in the hopes of arranging meetings to learn more about their experiences with this community. We also read a 2004 article in the New York Times which detailed the work of Luis Montes-Brito, a Salvadoran community organizer at the time and now a local county employee. He works as the Hispanic Liaison for the Legislator in the 9th District, Suffolk County. And excitingly, Mr. Montes-Brito was very eager to speak with us about our research. Montes-Brito spent an hour and a half of his Monday speaking warmly and passionately with us in his office in Brentwood, telling us his own immigration story, as well as more contextual information about Salvadoran migration moreover than we could’ve ever hoped. He told us about the details of the Civil War, about the human face to the IRCA and TPS laws passed in the U.S. in the 80s and 90s, and about the issues he saw his community struggling with today. We were caught up in his storytelling and his wealth of knowledge, and were fascinated by how much of our background research he confirmed in his own terms, and even was able to elaborate on and deepen. Time flew by as Mr. Montes-Brito continued to talk about such a personal topic, and even provided several local contacts he believed could further help us. Finally, the warm older man promised to be in touch and kindly offered to drop us of at his favorite local spot for pupusas –
–They were delicious, and the perfect end to the day as we chewed on the treasure trove of knowledge that had just been gifted us.
