Central America’s story is much more complex than meets the eye. The region’s cultures are not mere analytical shorthand—peoples fissured by colonialism, imperialism, and mestizo nationalism—nor can they be reduced to narratives symbolized by flags, food, and folklore. Foregrounding such perspectives leaves out practices of everyday being and self-making, ignoring how groups, collectives, and individuals produce themselves, preserve their ancestral traditions, construct community, defy anti-Black and anti-Indigenous policies, and offer standpoints that exceed and belie these reductive portrayals.
From the Mayan Highlands to the borderlands of La Moskitia, from Brooklyn living rooms to the port cities of New Orleans, Colón, and Baltimore, Central America is, for us, a nexus of cultures and geographies, an expansive meeting point of knowledges or saberes. Crisscrossed by territory, language, resistance, queerness, and memory, these saberes are actively constituted through acts of isthmian and diasporic creation. To this end, this special issue of the NACLA Report explores the forms by which Central Americans produce the region and its knowledges, underscoring ongoing contestations over memory, history, and self-description in the pursuit of belonging and the articulation of collective futures.
Together, we ask: Who decides what counts as knowledge in and of Central America? How has knowledge been created, challenged, and imagined on the Central American isthmus and across its vast diasporas? In positing these questions, we sought to invite accounts of creative resistance, to reveal neglected archives, and to foreground Black, Indigenous, queer, and diasporic subjectivities in order to think about and through Central America, critically reflecting on the strictures produced by the nation-state. In so doing, we aim to trouble the accepted parameters of regional narration and imagine knowledge mosaics of isthmian origin—worlds otherwise, yet to come.
The authors, practitioners, poets, and creators represented in these pages responded generously to these provocations, opening these themes in powerful and unexpected ways. Their contributions poignantly and strikingly remind us of the pluralities of knowledge, the politics of knowledge-production, and ongoing struggles over who determines what are legitimate and permissible ways of knowing. As a collective, they locate possible answers through and beyond the institutional, and remind us that embodied practices, community and family archives, oral histories, and digital repositories can and must be used to challenge epistemicide.
This Report highlights the heterogeneity of Central American knowledges, offering a sampling of research, narrative, poetry, and dialogue as entry points into the region’s epistemological multiplicity. From the depths of Guatemala’s conflict archive, María Aguilar Velásquez speaks back to the void of violence through an interactive poetics that uses the work of a disappeared Kaqchikel Maya writer to challenge the criminalizing logics of photographic archives kept by the state. Tracing the living history of the Moskitia, Melanie White urges us to reconsider the very idea of Central America through the broadcast practices of local communities that use radio and social media to challenge present day imperial, linguistic, and nation-state histories predicated on Moskitia erasure.
Going to El Salvador, Grazzia Grimaldi and Yanci López examine the work of mothers and family members whose loved ones have been deprived of their liberty by President Nayib Bukele’s interminable state of exception. Through this grueling look at the intimacies of incarceration, the authors remind us of the urgency of care, of protest, and of drawing our attention to the transgressive power of truth-telling to counter state-enforced silence. Focusing on the experience of Salvadoran migrant workers in Albany, New York, Ruth Murcia’s report offers a poignant account of how the local labor movement, initially in solidarity with the peoples of El Salvador, gradually adopted anti-migrant rhetoric against undocumented laborers who found themselves in Albany as a direct result of U.S. imperial violence. A prescient historical analysis, Murcia reveals that solidarity, inclusion, exclusion, and xenophobia often coexist on a razor’s edge.
Moving from institutional spaces to the politics of self-archiving, Maya Doig-Acuña examines the collecting practices of Black Panamanian women in Brooklyn, New York, powerfully reminding us that the objects that narrate our histories might not be located in official repositories but rather on our family’s walls, tucked away in shoeboxes, or embedded in the Afro-Caribbean kinship networks cultivated by our elders. In turn, Nicole Ramsey pinpoints the unconventional archival strategies of Creole communities, who preserve Kriol language materials through radio, music, digital narrative-making, and an open-access, community-generated dictionary—upholding these identities in Belize and in diaspora.
With a similar focus on community-centered preservation, Daisy E. Guzman Nunez reflects on the leadership and entrepreneurship of Garifuna women in Guatemala, who contest the touristic gaze and state-sanctioned anti-Blackness through embodied links between remembering, culinary traditions, social media, and music. Transversing nations, Nahil Zerón and Edith Romero recount the creation of the Archivo Honduras Cuir, locating its genesis in the streets of Tegucigalpa and Buenos Aires and finding resonance in Honduran New Orleans. Through this transnational voyage, Zerón and Romero situate the archival project as a living testament to queer practices of collective dissidence, forged in the struggle to survive ongoing erasure.
In a stimulating dialogue, Nyasha Warren and Kaysha Corinealdi reflect on what it means to do community-centered research on and with Afro-Panamanians, tracing their personal sources of inspiration for embarking in this ethically-grounded, public-facing work. Together, the conversation meditates on trust, responsibility, reciprocity, and self-discovery, underscoring that knowledge is an intergenerational practice of care, curation, and respect. In honoring those passed, Wanda R. Hernández reflects on the murals and memorials commemorating the Central American workers who tragically lost their lives in the 2024 Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore, Maryland. In this piece, Hernández looks courageously at the collective grief among impacted migrants and diasporans who, with nowhere to mourn, devise their own forms of remembrance—acts of care and memory-keeping that honor the lost in direct solidarity with their families and communities.
Returning to Panamá’s Caribbean, Laura Zornosa engages two environmental activists and former state workers to demonstrate how community history and climate justice are culturally, politically, and ancestrally intertwined. Rooted in Guna and Congo traditions, innovation, and worldviews, Zornosa reveals how those most impacted by climate disruption offer urgent, grounded lessons for confronting a rapidly changing planet. Past Chiriquí and into Costa Rica, guest editors Jorge E. Cuéllar and Kaysha Corinealdi connect with Epsy Campbell Barr for a critical conversation on the long arc of Afro-diasporic politics in this exceptionalist white-mestizo nation. In this dynamic exchange, Campbell Barr offers deep, unflinching reflections from her experience as a government official, international human rights defender, and the first Afro-Costa Rican woman elected Vice President of the Republic. Situating herself historically, she offers insight into the institutional workings of Costa Rican democracy.
Across the contributions for this special issue, it is abundantly clear that telling one’s own story is a vital technique of truth, fundamental to Central American narration, knowledge-making, and self-archiving. Attending to the work of popular educators, Stephanie M. Huezo describes the ongoing battles over memory in El Salvador, highlighting the pivotal role of community theater and performance via historic re-enactments that stage the intricacies and embodied afflictions of loss and survival that permeated the Salvadoran Civil War. In another instance of self-definition and curation, Nicolás de León guides us through the zine-making practices of LGBTIQ+ Maya and mestizo Guatemalans from the short-lived Organización de Locxs Centroamericanxs y del Caribe (ODELCA), who created accessible yet disruptive aesthetic forms to reckon with the legacy of Guatemala’s internal armed conflict.
Closing out our reports, we as guest editors engage in an immersive discussion with Felene M. Cayetano, a Principal Librarian of the Belize National Library Service. In talking with Ms. Cayetano, we learn how local librarians are taking on the task, often without adequate funding or training, of promoting citizen literacy, gathering oral histories with aging elders, and offering culturally-responsive community care—for children and adults—in an under-resourced, multilingual, multiethnic, and changing Belize.
Linked to our print issue, we have put together three web exclusives that extend our discussion of Central American knowledge practices. John Kennedy Godoy writes on the seminal zine La Horchata and the queer, diasporic imaginings found in its pages that have transformed our sense of intergenerational artmaking. Paula S. Ayala offers part analysis and part experiment of how the sonic as collage and as a collection of knowledge frequencies located in audio remain indispensable for mapping alternative, unconventional Central American cartographies. To end, Dash Harris raises key issues upheld by Afro-Panamanian youth today who are reevaluating the strategies of inherited activisms while defining new platforms and political horizons to challenge ongoing colonial racial capitalism in Panamá.
Our poetry section features contributions from Irma A. Velásquez Nimatuj, Shirley Campbell Barr, and ignacio carvajal. These works remind us of the centrality of embodiment in knowledge-making and the power of the word, of art, of culture and creation for pushing the boundaries of what we understand and recognize as knowledge. Our featured cover artist, Giana De Dier, whose collage work traverses time, space, language, and geography, is an invitation to (re)consider futures past and join us in envisioning the ones still to come.