I.This Country of Mine

This Country of Mine

A.  Tales of Clay (Cuentos de barro)

     Luis Salvador Efraím Salazar Arrué spent his early childhood in Sonsonate and Santa Tecla, rural

towns with a strong indigenous presence.  He attended local primary and secondary schools and

loved nothing more than wandering in the hills and farmlands, observing nature, talking with the

farmers and laborers and Indians, daydreaming in the shade of a mango tree, listening to the

warbling of the pucayo and the clarinero and making up stories to entertain his friends

In 1916 he was awarded a scholarship by the Salvadoran government that enabled him to study

English at Rock Hill College in Maryland and art at the Corcoran Institute in Washington, DC.

During a visit to New York he was browsing in Brentano’s Book Store and came across a copy of

Arturo Ambrogi’s  Cuentos del Trópico.  It was first been published in 1915 and although Ambrogi

was Salvadoran, the young Salvador had not read his collection of lyrical sketches and regional

vignettes of rural El Salvador.  Ambrogi’s descriptions of the landscape are painterly and his

characters’ speech is colloquial and colorful.  Although Salvador loved the cosmopolitan excitement

of New York and Washington and his English was improving quickly, he felt nostalgic for the warm

sun and bright colors of El Salvador.  He later described finding Ambrogi’s book as a kind of

epiphany.  He read it again and again and even committed to memory the titles of the selections; it

was poetry to his homesick ears. Ambrogi’s style of costumbrismo was popular throughout Latin

America so it was not the book’s uniqueness that impressed Salvador but rather its familiarity. 

Surrounded by the culture of an international metropolis, reading and savoring Cuentos del trópico

felt like rediscovering his homeland.

          
    El Salvador is a diminutive country, so small that when Gabriela Mistral visited for the first time in 1927, she playfully called it “el pulgarcito,” the smallest finger of the hand of Central America.  During that visit she toured the country in the company of a group of writers, who treated her with the deference and respect they showed all visitors whom they regarded as distinguished figures in the world of letters.  They showed her their volcanoes and rivers and introduced her to their writers and artists.  One of the writers she met in 1927 was Salvador Salazar Arrué, who had started signing his work “Salarrué.” 

            When Salarrué met Gabriela in 1927, he had already made a name for himself in literary circles in El Salvador.  His poems and stories appeared in the country’s newspapers and magazines and his first novel, El Cristo negro/The Black Christ, had been published in 1926.  But it was Gabriela was introduced him to an international audience.  An accomplished poet herself, in 1945 Mistral would become the first and to date the only Latin American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but she was already widely known and respected in Latin America as an educator, an ambassador of culture and good will and a defender of children, women and indigenous peoples.  Salarrué showed her some of his stories whose characters were the rural and indigenous inhabitants of El Salvador, of that small parcel of land called Cuscatlán by the Pipil people, for whom it was the land of the jewel.   She loved the stories and subsequently sent a few of them to Costa Rica to Joaquín García Monge, the founder and editor of the weekly literary publication Repertorio Americano.  The Repertorio was read throughout Latin America and because of its open-door editorial policy, it welcomed the work of established as well as new writers.  Two of Salarrué’s stories, accompanied by Gabriela’s praise, were published in the Repertorio in 1931. This endorsement encouraged Salarrué to publish a collection of 34 stories, Cuentos de Barro/Tales of Clay in 1934.  “La Honra” (Honor) and “Noche Buena” (Christmas Eve) are from this collection.