Salvadoran Americans

Internal Migrations

Most Salvadorans are descendents of the Pipils, a subgroup of the Nahuas that migrated to Central America about 3000 BC. In 1523, the Spanish conquered Cuzcatlán, a region they dubbed El Salvador, or the savior. The scarce precious metals in the new colony made land and labor the main exploitable resources. In the late 15th and mid-16th centuries, the Spanish crown distributed appropriated lands through the systems of encomienda and repartimiento. These systems vested grantees with the right of collecting tribute from the native inhabitants and regulating their work and treatment.

The appropriation of land and its distribution among the Spanish and their descendents became the basis of the country's economic and social structure. In the process, settlers displaced natives from their traditional communal land production systems to colonial enclaves and made them laborers. Concentration of land tenure and available laborers facilitated the cultivation of a single export commodity; cacao in the 16th century and indigo in the 18th. As El Salvador achieved independence from Spain in 1821, the production of synthetic dyes forced the new state to adopt an alternative monoculture export commodity, coffee.

In the late 1800s, laws permitting the seizure of land further concentrated land ownership among a few families. Eight of the fourteen provinces that compose El Salvador became engaged in profitable coffee production. Landowners and the state used some of the coffee earnings to develop the capital city, San Salvador. Other agricultural regional towns became small industrial bases and commercial and service establishments. A small middle class emerged from participation in municipal services, communications, and the transportation infrastructures that had been established to support the agricultural export trade.

A large number of people migrated to coffee plantations and the newly developing cities. Some of the dispossessed peasants initiated the yearly ritual of searching for seasonal work in the central coffee regions. San Salvador attracted more than 90% of those migrating to urban areas, which offered greater employment opportunities in the construction and service industries. Reliance on coffee as an export [Page 1186]agricultural product de-emphasized cultivation for subsistence and economic diversification, making the country's economy vulnerable.

The coffee panacea was shattered by the 1930s economic depression, making living conditions progressively poorer among agricultural and urban workers. In 1932, Farabundo Martí led a peasant insurrection aimed at replacing the government and improving living conditions. In response to the insurrection, the government killed tens of thousands of people. As a result, about 7% of Salvadorans migrated to neighboring Honduras. The increasingly repressive regime prevented further organized dissidence. By the 1950s, cotton and sugar cane supplemented coffee as major agricultural products, increasing local seasonal migration at harvest times.

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