El Salvadorans
- José Cartagena (1963?–present)
- EL SALVADOR
José Cartagena was a 17-year-old-university student in El Salvador on May 14, 1980, when the Salvadoran military stormed the university, opening fire on unarmed students and killing more than 600 of them. Many of those killed were Cartagena’s classmates. The students’ only crime had been to fight for better conditions in Salvadoran schools and bring about a more just Salvadoran society.
At the time El Salvador was being ripped apart by civil war, the result of more than a half century of repressive military dictatorships, social inequities and economic hardships. The Salvadoran government, backed by the United States, ruthlessly repressed dissent through a network of military-sponsored death squads. Activists, peasants, religious leaders, and everyday citizens were killed in broad daylight. By the end of the war in 1992, 70,000 people had lost their lives in this small country.
After the 1980 massacre at the university, Cartagena thought he could be next because of his connection with the student group. “When the military started looking for me,” Cartagena said, “my parents made the difficult decision to live without me rather than to see me dead.”
In 1980 Cartagena left El Salvador for the United States. With him were 42 other Salvadorans. The group enlisted the help of “coyotes,” guides that help illegal immigrants cross the border. Their journey was treacherous. They spent three days and three nights walking through the desert to reach the border. Originally, they were told the trip would take 12 hours. “In El Salvador, we were used to walking, and 12 hours seemed like nothing to us,” Cartagena said. “We had no idea it would take six times that long.”
“Each person was given just a gallon of water,” Cartagena remembered. Some individuals had no other recourse but to drink their own urine to survive. For food, people ate cactus if they could find any, and some became so desperate that they ate their deodorant.
Twelve people died during the journey. Those remaining finally crossed the border into Arizona. Cartagena was in a coma when found by immigration officials. Luckily, people showed up to help him. They were from an Arizona congregation affiliated with the sanctuary movement, a network of 500 churches in the United States that provided humanitarian and legal assistance to Central American refugees. The sanctuary workers organized families to take Cartagena and each of the other refugees into their homes.
Two years later, Cartagena traveled to San Francisco to participate in a hunger strike calling for a change in the U.S. policy toward Salvadoran refugees fleeing violence and repression. At the time, the U.S. government systematically denied asylum to tens of thousands of Salvadorans seeking a safe haven. As a result, many Salvadorans remained in the country without documents.
In 1986, Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which gave legal status to some 140,000 Salvadoran refugees. But it wasn’t until a lawsuit was filed in 1991 accusing the U.S. government of discriminatory treatment of Salvadoran (and Guatemalan) refugees that thousands more Salvadorans were given asylum.
The civil war in El Salvador lasted until 1992. Cartagena is now a U.S. citizen. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he coordinates a program to provide housing assistance to San Francisco residents. He is married and has three children.