Amidst all the calamities, I want to share a breakthrough with y’all. For the past few months I have gradually been working towards reflecting, processing and creating with intention and purpose. In the same way, I have been on a journey exploring and defining my own identity and culture and what it means to be Salvadoran along with deconstructing this concept. With such, I formally introduce you, La ultima de los nonualcos (The Last of the Nonualcos). The Nonualcos are what make up my ancestral bloodline on my father and grandfather’s side. We are a people of volcanic and kindled origins where we have traversed the dense jade mountainsides, valleys and rivers of central El Salvador stewarding our lands since time and memorial. 

This project documents the many months spent with my great aunt, Tía Genovina, my grandfather’s oldest sister. As an indigenous woman born in the early 20th century, she did not learn how to read or write. This was customary for many indigenous women of her generation in El Salvador. Thus, this was an imperative calling for a historian and photographer as myself to document her stories and  wisdom utilizing an oral history paradigm ( I thank my graduate school colleagues and advisor Max Krochmal for teaching me the ropes). Not only do I want to make this a piece of family history but want to position this work within the milieu of Salvadoran national history. This work will ultimately contribute to a visual ethnographic body of El Salvador more specifically, the central El Salvador region in the hamlet of Comalapa, La Paz, El Salvador. Marked by the Chichontepec (San Vicente) volcano, Jiboa Valley and dry savannah that stretches South to the warm waters of the Central American Pacific Ocean.