On Friday, we visited the sites of Monseñor Oscar Romero, Archbishop of El Salvador 1977-1980.  He is now San Romero de America, canonized in 2018.  Romero was a pastor to the poor whom he adored, and they loved him back.  Rather than accepting a fancy house from the oligarchs, he chose to live in a modest space at the Hospital Divina Providencia, which still offers palliative care to cancer patients.  Romero demanded in his national radio broadcasts for an end to the violence of the military.  For this they killed him in the small chapel at the Hospital while he was celebrating mass.  He now rests in the Cathedral.  In the evening, we visited the UCA students who hosted us for a meal and sang songs to us – “Cambia Todo Cambia,” “El Sombrero Azul,” “Casa Abierta,” and a few others.  It was a magical ending to what had been at times a grim day.

The photos below are of the chapel at Hospital Divina Providencia where Romero was shot, a painting of Romero outside his residence, now a museum, and a stone with the title of one of the songs the students sang to us.

If you had asked me before I left why I was going to El Salvador, I would have said that first of all I was going to see the shrines of the martyrs at the UCA and Romero’s chapel.  Obviously, I was going for additional reasons, but the martyrs were front of my mind.  They never moved far from there, but on the last day something changed for me, which was the UCA’s vigil for the martyrs.

We arrived on campus early so we could help make salt rugs so we could walk on them during the evening procession – thus it was described to me, and I was confused until I arrived and began the work.  Here’s how it worked.  The students had made a design and we were to take dyed salt to make the different colors of the design, which was a bordered image of hands holding a heart above which was a cross with the UCA martyrs on it, all of which was on a blue and black background.  They call this an alfombra.  I helped fill in the blue and yellow border, one of the hands, and a couple words ‘justa, la,’ which helped spell the expression for this year’s vigil: porque la luche es justa, la esperanza non desfallece – because the struggle is just, hope will not fail. I found the work meditative, and something about the idea that we would walk on these tonight set me at peace.  Our alfombra would be an ephemeral work of art. So there we were in the hot morning sun, old people like me and young students from the Programa Romero and the Casa de las Americas on our hands and knees, elbow to elbow with our hands dyed all different colors.  And it was then that I realized why I came to El Salvador. 

Soif you ask me now why I went to El Salvador, in the end my answer for you is this: I went to make art as an expression of solidarity with some Salvadoran artists.

The pictures below are of our alfombra in various stages of completion.