Claudia Rivera Research Paper

From El Salvador to Canada: Claudia’s Journey of Home & Identity.

Muskan Bhandari History 30F-1 Ms. K. Pacheco April 28, 2024

Claudia Rivera was born in El Salvador (Figure 1). As a child, her earliest memories include spending time with her cousins, grandma, and beloved cat with aspirations to become a nun. She grew up with a Catholic upbringing, going to Mass occasionally. Growing up, Claudia was surrounded by many women, including her mother, four aunties and grandma. The only boys in her family consisted of her cousins and brothers. She remembers “everyone [having] a distinct laugh that [she doesn’t] have” and being a “girly girl, not running around with her cousins”, with her favourite pastime of listening to fairy tales on the radio and songs by Menudo (C. Rivera, "personal …show more content…
In 1977, Claudia’s grandmother, the head of the family, died, which led “everyone to go their own way”. Shortly, many members of the family left El Salvador, moving to other countries. Some went to Belize or Costa Rica, while others went to Mexico or the US” (C. Rivera, "personal interview", March 4, 2024). Two years later, when Claudia was still very young, a civil war began in 1979. The Salvadoran Civil War was “caused as a result of conflict between the left and right”, with social and economic inequalities dating back to the early days of the Spanish conquest (C. Rivera, "personal interview", March 4, 2024; CJA, n.d.). The civil war lasted for 12 years, from 1980 to 1992, with “over 75,000 civilians [who] died at the hand of government forces” (CJA, n.d.). Several events built up to the escalation of a civil war. In 1932, Agustin Farabundo Marti (Figure 2), a labour leader, “led a peasant revolt against the ruling dictatorship and the Fourteen Families” and was “crushed in a military reprisal, la matanza” (CJA, n.d.). In La Matanza’s operation, approximately 30,000 civilians were

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