gringo iracundo, el padre de dalton

8/7/2019 Gringo iracundo, El padre de Dalton

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GRINGO IRAGUNDORoque Dalton and H is Father

Roger AtwoodIndependent Scholar

Abstract: Inprose and poetry and throughout his career, Roque Dalton used thelife story of his U.S. migr father to explore the themes of power, dependency, andidentity that interested him and other Salvadora n intellectuals of his era. Yet itwasa theatrical image ofWinnall Dalton, that of a mara uding, gunslinging coioboy, thatother writers took as fact and that became part of the poet's posthum ous reputation.I show here that the image of a western outlaw is wrong and that Winnall Daltoncame from a comfortable, Mexican Am erican family in Tucson that had fallen onhard times just before he migrated to Central America around 1916. Dalton delvedinto the paradoxes of his own upbringing raised in a working-class neighborhoodas the illegitimate offspring of a millionaire, a Marxist revolutionary who w as theson o f pure c apitalism almost until his death in 1975. Taken together, the shiftingdepictions of his father all point to a fuller, m ore mianced und erstanding ofDalton'sviews on power and the nature of identity than previously understood in the con-text of the revolutionary struggle that ultimately consumed him.

Roque Daltonpoet, journalist, essayist, and legendary literary fiame-outwrote often about his U.S.-born father Winnall Dalton and his mi-gration to El Salvador. Through the figure of his father, and through animage of his father th at evolved from that of a distant, deep-pocketed pa-triarch to acaricatured cowboy figure, Dalton developed his ideas aboutoppression, identity, and the relationship of the excluded to the pow erful.The father often personified the unqu estione d class hierarchy that Daltonand other writers of his generation sought to expose and bring down intheir revolutionary critique of Salvadoran society. The depiction ofDal-ton's father thus linked the personal and the political inways that wereunusual for Latin American writers of the day, although the depiction

An earlier version of this article was presented at the Twenty-eighth Interna tional Con gressof the Latin Am erican Studies Association, in June 2009.1 condu cted the research for this


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itself was in many ways quite subtle and nuanced> as this article shows.Along with violence and cruelty, Dalton ascribed also to his father a cer-tain tenderness. 'His father's domineering presence was one of many autobiographi-cal elements in Roque Dalton's work from which he tried to sift meaningand hum or alm ost un ti lh is death in 1975 at the age of thirty-nine. D altonnever se ttled on one image of his father, going back and forth betw een sev-eral contradictory portrayals in ways that reflected the contradictions ofhis own feelings at different junctures in his life. After Roqu Dalton'sdeath, the image of his father m orph ed into the violent, threaten ing gu n-man of the American VVest that has appeared in numerous books andessays and at least one film about the life of the poet. The notion thatDalton was descended from a band of frontier bank robbers has beenwidely disseminated and has become, in fact, an ingrained part of thepoet's reputation.In this article, I show first that Roque Dalton's descent from Americanoutlaws is entirely fanciful, with as much historical accuracy as a spa-ghetti western, and that Dalton's father hailed from a conventional, Mexi-can American family that was prominent in the civic and cultural life ofhis native Arizona. The fact that Roque Dalton seems to have promotedthis legend d ur ing the last years of his life does not make it any m ore true,or rather any less untrue. Then I show how his father, Winnall Dalton,did indeed become something of a gunslinger, but only after he left theworld of bourgeois respectability in which he had been raised in Tucsonand established himself in El Salvador. Through ou t the article, I touch onhow Roque Dalton's portrayal of his father reflected his evolving viewson imperialism and the exercising of power on the personal and politicallevels. I propose a new understanding of Dalton's relationship with hisfather based on biographical data and that, in turn, raises the possibilityof a new read ing of some of his w orks.

The elusive nature of identity and the intentional blurring of bound-aries between myth and fact in Dalton's own construction of his life storyhave been consistent themes of the interpretive literature about his work.Rafael L ara-Martinez (2000,60) ma inta ins that, in his prose , Dalton "showsthe need to fictionalize himself and tu rn him self into a novelesque charac -ter. Roque Dalton reinvents his past by 'remembering,' years after declar-ing them forgotten, significant details that could no longer be concealed."His interpreters have viewed skeptically specific events attributed to


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128 Latin American Research ReviewCon sidering the im portan ce of his father as a them e in Roque Dalton'swork and in later biographical treatments, it is surprising how little re-

search has been conducted into the elder Dalton, the circumstances ofhis migration from Arizona, and his relationship with his illegitimateson. Th is article, pa rt of a larger biographical project on the life of R oqueDalton, is based in part on the results of research into Winnall Dalton(1894-1962) at the Arizona State Library, the Arizona Historical Society,and the University of Arizona Library Special Collections in Tucson, aswell as at archives in El Salvador, and on interviews with Dalton's friendsand family m embers, including with the poet's widow and tw o su rvivingsons and Winnall Dalton's sole known surviving son.The poet Roque Dalton was a key figure in the cultural avant-gardethat developed in El Salvador in the late 1950s around a loose circle ofw riters and artists that become kno w n as the generacin comprometida. Tgroup's political leanings ranged from center-left to Marxist, but its mem-bers shared a critical view of El Salvador's established order and a desireto modernize its modes of cultural and social expression and to breakw ith its repressive traditions . Led by Dalton, the novelist Manlio Argu eta,the essayist talo Lpez Vallecillos, and the playwright Alvaro Menn-dez Leal, among others, the group developed a stark and unflinching vi-sion of El Salvador's past that rejected the conventional view of a happyam algam of the indige nou s and H ispanic and posited instead a history ofclass violence, exclusion, and elite mediocrity (Hernndez-Aguirre 1961).Although trained as a lawyer in Chile and El Salvador, Dalton workedas a news reporter and editor in San Salvador until the early 1960s. Hewas arrested no fewer than four times for left-wing political activity.Waves of antileftist political repression forced him into exile in Mexicoand Cuba from 1%1 to 1964, in Czechoslovakia from 1965 to 1968, andfinally in Cuba from 1968 until 1973. He began p ub lish ing po etry in hislate teens. Early poems showed the influence of Pablo Neruda, but laterwork achieved an extraordinary clarity and originality of language thatincorporated common speech and urban slang and left a deep mark onSalvadoran literature (Vsquez Olivera 2005). A continual innovator, hewa s never content to pen p oetry alone and w rote one of the seminal textsof the Latin American testimonial, Miguel Marmol, and two popular histories of El Salvador in a "collage" style that w as influenced by his friendEduardo Galeano. Although a dedicated com munist, he grew deeply dis-


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The idea that Roque Dalton, the doomed intellectual-turned-gu errilla,had a father who hailed from a family of American outlaws, and specifi-cally a band of notorious Kansas ban k robbers know n as the Dalton brotb-ers, has worked its way into many accounts of Dalton's life. Some writerssensibly add a note of skepticism to the story; others do not. Julio Cortzar,in a eulogy to his friend Dalton, wrote, "None of his friends will forgetthe perhaps mythical stories of his ancestors, the prodigious vision ofthe pirate Dalton, the adventures of his family members" (Cortzar 1986,556). In Days and Nights of Love artd War, Galeano (2000,95) recounted howDalton told him about "the famous Dalton brothers, movie screen gun-slingers, who had been h is ancestors." Accounts pub lished in El Salvadorenla rged the story of the Dalton family's life of crime on the pra iries. TheSalvadoran critic Luis Alvarenga (2002), in probably the m ost wide ly readand incisive critical study on Dalton's work, recounts over three pagesthe story of the Dalton brothers of Coffeyville, Kansas, and their crimi-nal exploits in dra m atic detail. This version may be the source of a nothe raccount, written by the Salvadoran artist and poet Armando Solis (2005,14-15), who recounted how the "prolific Dalton family was born in thestate of Kansas, and the four brothe rs, w ho w ould later devote themselvesto robbing their peers of their property, found work as representatives ofthe law. This overlapping of the forces of order and ba nd its hap pe ne d fre-quently throughout the history of the conquest of the Far West."

Whatever the history of the West, the story of Roque Dalton's descentfrom the Dalton broth ers of Kansas is complete fiction. They are of no rela-tion whatsoever. The father of Roque D alton, W inna ll Dalton Jr. (or W innallDalton Vsquez, as he sometimes called himself) was bornjn Tucson in1894. His father, Winnall A. D alton, was a successful horse-carriag e m akerand blacksmith, the eldest son of a British shipping entrepreneur namedH enry Dalton wh o had em igrated to Peru, where he served as British con-sular agent and then moved no rth to Los Angeles, arrivin g in 1843, shortlybefore the Mexican-American War. Henry Dalton was a British citizen(not Irish, French, or Austrian, as some writers have claimed) and musthave been successful at his trade, because he quickly bough t an eno rm ousam ou nt of landone de scenda nt described it as seventy square milesinw hat is now eastern Los Angeles Coun ty but was the n still und er M exicanauthority. Dalton lost title to his holding s du rin g the w ar for rea sons thatare not entirely clear; contemporary accounts are contradictory. What isclear is that after the fighting, the new U.S. authorities did not recognize


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130 Latin American Research Reviewa horde of squatters after nearly 30 years litigation."' Henry Dalton diedpoor in 1884, still a British subject. As late as 1937, the D alton family w asstill writing letters and newspaper articles about what they consideredthe unjust takin g of their land in the M exican-American War.Thus, the Dalton clan's life in the United States began with a deep-seated an d m ultigenerational grievance against the U.S. government overits expansionism into Mexico. According to his descendants, the NorthAmericans suspected Henry Dalton of sympathizing with the Mexicanside in the war and therefore dragged their feet in compensating him.^Indeed, he did win a small amount of compensation from fhe Mexicangovernm ent in a separate case involving other lands in n orth ern Mexico,according to the 1915 document written by his son that gives the terms ofthe settlement in detail."*

The claim over Henry Dalton's land was the first of several lengthylegal battles, usually over property rights, that the Daltons enjoined inCalifornia and Arizona. They seem to have been a litigious bunch , aga inin contrast to the outlaw im age. In one court case, W innall D alton Sr. filedsuit against a neighbor by the name of Samuel Hughes, whom Daltonhad accused of siphoning off water to which Dalton felt he was entitledto irrigate crops on his ranch. The case meandered through the Arizonalegal system until the territorial supreme court ruled that the statute oflimitations had run out on Dalton's claim and sent it back to local court,wh ich, in 1889, finally dism issed it.' All these legal w rang les, occurring asArizona was quickly losing its frontier character and bringing its politi-cal and legal systems in line with U.S. norms, mu st have drained W innallDalton Sr.'s finances and likely con tributed to his decline in Tucson soci-ety. They may have eventually con tributed to his nam esake son's em igra-tion to El Salvador.By 1890, W innall Dalton Sr. had sold his half share in his h orse-carriag ebusiness to a longtime family friend nam ed Fred Ronstadt and emb arkedon a series of unsuccessful farming ventures, followed by a disastrousmining investment in northern Mexico in which he was said to have

1. "Henry Dalton. From a book of original letters by Winnall Augustin [sic] Dalton ofTucson, Arizona, to C. C. Baker of Az usa, California, reg ardin g h is father, H enry Dalton,"unpublished document, Ronstadt Family Papers, University of Arizona Library SpecialCollections (henceforth RFP-UA), Box 2, File "Family His tories ."


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lost about $20,000 (Sherman and Ronstadt 1975). His fortunes stood insharp contrast to those of Ronstadt, who embraced change and turnedthe horse-carriage business he had boug ht from Dalton into a dow ntow nautomob ile and ha rdw are ven ture, the first of its kind in Tucson. Ronstadtwas the Mexican-born son of a Ge rma n im m igrant, a canny busine ssm anand prominent bandleader who strived to raise Tucson's cultural stan-da rd s an d wa s patriarch to a long line of figures in the arts. He later w rotea vivid, affectionate portrait of his brother-in-law and business associateWinnall Dalton Sr., in his memoir Borderman. Ronstadt (2003, 78) wrotethat Dalton was a "a fine specimen of manhood"photographs show atall, han dso m e cha p with sm oldering da rk eyes and a fashionably bushymoustacheand his "Spanish was pure, without a trace of an accent."The Ronstadts and the Daltons were extremely close and intermar-ried on at least three occasions. Fred Ronstadt's second wife was LupeDalton, the daughter of Winnall Dalton Sr. and his Mexican wife, MariaJess Vsquez. Despite their Anglo-sounding names, both families wereconsidered part of the Mexican-blooded elite of Tucson and felt stronglyabout preserving their Mexican traditions (Sheridan 1986). Prominentand intermarried Mexican families like the Daltons and Ronstadts "ad-m ired the technological prog ress of the United States, [yet] m any of the mdespised the more crassly materialistic aspects of U.S. society and cul-ture. They were also deeply disturbed by the rising tide of discrimina-tion against Mexicans in the Southwest. More than anything else, theseinuential individuals strove to nourish a sense of Mexican identity incities like Tucsoh, to offer Mexicans an alternative to either subordina-tion or assimilation in the southwestern United States" (Sheridan 1986,99-100).This story of binational identity on th border is important to under-standing Winnall Dalton Jr., Roque Dalton's father, because it suggeststhat when he left Tucson for Mexico and then Central America, the worldhe entered was considerably less foreign than the image of a maraudingAmerican cowboy looking for adventure would suggest. Although a U.S.citizen, he had a Mexican mother, was raised in a household where bothhe and his pare nts spoke fiuent Span ish, and came from a city in which hewas considered Mexican. Both sides of his family had quite literally seenthe border cross them and, at least on his father's side, had a deep andpersonal sense of grievance against the U.S. governm ent because of it.As the Ronstadts rose in wealth and prom inence in Tucson society, the


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132 Latin American ResearchReviewmasse.^ The next year he was listed as a woodw orker in Ronstadt's shop.He died in 1917 at the age of sixty-seven, of what his death certificate de-scribed as acute gastritis.All this suggests that young Winnall Dalton Jr. had good reasons toleave Tucson. His father, embittered to the end by the loss of the familyestate in the Mexican-American War, as shown in a series of letters hewrote in his last years of life, had himself lost a successful business andthen been reduced to the status of shop employee.^ Evidence survives tosuggest that his son Winnall was a restless and quarrelsome young m anwho, very early on, wanted out of humdrum Tucson society. In 1912, atthe age of eighteen, he was working as a railroad clerk.* Neither he norhis father had any criminal record. Around this time, he started a cattle-raising business near Tucson with his older sister Hortense and her hus-band, Pepe Ronstadt. The business failed, and young Winnall took theblame .' The details are lost, but the experience con tributed to his perm a-nent estrangement from Tucson, which he left around 1916, apparentlynever to return. He does not seem to have been much missed; his namebarely appea rs in the reams of letters, docu ments, and other archival ma-terials that the Dalton and Ronstadt farnilies accumulated over decades.He went first to Mexico, then embroiled in revolution, but did not takelong to reach Cen tral America.

The first documentary evidence we have of Winnall Dalton in CentralAmerica dates from July 17, 1917 This piece of evidence is a U.S. WorldWar I draft registration card (now at the National Archives western of-fice in Laguna Niguel, California) in which Dalton, age twenty-three, listshimself as a self-employed miner in Yoro Departm ent, H ond uras . Daltonand a U.S. consular agent signed the card. Und er previous m ilitary service,he lists that he served for one year as a major in the cavalry div ision of theMexican army of Venustiano Carranza. We need not take this particularclaim at face value, althoug h he did make it on a sworn and witn essed U.S.governm ent docum ent. Still, it is not the only indication that D alton pa r-ticipated in the fighting in Mexico. He and his older brother Henry (whostayed in Tucson and later was elected to its city council) we re involved in6. Ronstadt Family Papers, Arizona Historical Society, Tucson (henceforth REP-AHS),Box 2, File 177. See correspondence between Winnall Dalton Sr. and historian C. C. Baker of San Pe-dro, California, wh om Dalton seems to have hired to write a history of Hen ry D alton's life


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GRINGO IRACUNDO I 3 3ship ping small aircraft from the United States to the Mexican Army at thebehest of Carranza loyalists, according to Winnall's son.'"

Dalton's connection to the Carranza army might, in part, account forone of the more e nd urin g stories about Roque Dalton, that his father andtwo uncles had smuggled weapons to Pancho Villa during the revolu-tion and then cheated the revolutionary leader of a large sum of money.In Roque Dalton's (1994, 115) posthumously published autobiographicalnovel Pobrecito poeta que era yo, the narrator says:This is the way Pancho Villa must have died, bullet after bullet, that's right, com-padre, and there goes the next shot, not just for him but one or the other of mydesperate uncles who robbed him of the money for the weapons, peso after peso;not to mention my father, since a son shouldn't judge the actions of his bosses,and they split, each one with ten thousand bucks in his pocket, quicker than aChihuahua rooster can crow.

This passage comes in the middle of a rambling, fifty-page stream ofconsciousness narra ted by the character Roberto del Mon te, who is looselymodeled on Roque Dalton himself, as he awaits the start of a press con-ference in about 1960. Who will speak at the press conference? We arenever told, but the writer-journalist's own imagination becomes the keyvoice as he rurnin ates on everyth ing from W. B. Yeats to Frank Sinatra andwhether he shou ld drink less to be a better co mmu nist. Voices of p eoplearound him drift into the mix now and then, but the central voice of thischapter involves the me ntal mean dering s of the narrato r himself, wh o is apublic figure (Dalton was a news repo rter at the time) wh o ironically m ustconceal a key activity in his life, his involvement with a semiclandestinepolitical group .The preceding passage thus opens a windo w into how Dalton regardedand might have discussed the subject of his parentage with other people,including the other reporters around him as they wait for the press con-'ference to start. The passage shows that he saw his father as a da ring andintrepid gangster, an outlaw who was not intimidated by the famouslyviolent leader of the Divisin del Norte Army and able to make off with$10,000 in his pocket through deceit. With pop culture references includ-ing John Wayne, Red Skelton, and Gregory Peck, the passage also givesWinnall Dalton's life a certain cinematic quality.Dalton referred later to his father's p urp ort ed relationship w ith P anchoVilla in much greater detail in the work "Dalton y Ca.," which straddlesthe bo un da ry b etween novel and person al essay, a fragment of which w as


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134 'dtin American Research Reviewlasted from 1968 to 1973 (although he had visited on numerous earlieroccasions). In this work, he writes tha t his father and his father's tw o o lderbrothers Frank and Garand ran a large arms-smuggling business on theU.S.-Mexico border, selling hu ndreds of Springfield an d Rem ington rifies,Colt revolvers, and tho usa nd s of bullets to Villa's army un til finally theyswindled Villa out of $30,000 and, fearing reprisal, fled south. The talerecounts the passage of Winnall and Frank (by then G arand had gone hisown way) through dingy Mexican towns and, raucous cantinas as theytried to stay one step ahead of Villa's vengeful henchmen. Frank, the ac-count says, had a punch like the kick of a mule, whereas Winnall wasadept at shooting out lightbulbs whenever he needed sudden darkness.They are the archety pal ug ly Am ericans, never pay ing the ir bills, deflow-ering girls whose fathers then come chasing after the Americans with ashotgun, and pu nch ing out people so ha rd that the victim s' faces becomeunrecognizable. They do have a more circumspect side, however. Bothbrothers can recite Shakespeare sonnets, although they do not completelyunderstand them, and they both know that "life without an orderingprinciple is pointless" (Dalton 2005b, 31)except that, in their case, theordering principle is to make m oney at the expense of everyone arou ndthem. They head south and reach Chiapas before slipping across the bor-der into Guatem ala, where, it says, they m ake the acqu aintance of the dic-tator to-be Jorge Ubico (Dalton 2005b).

It is hard to tell whether Dalton intended this colorful account to beinterpreted as literal fact. Despite the racy subject matter, much of thisnovel-cum-essay is w ritten in a n opaque, convoluted style. He w rote it inlate-night sessions at a time of great turmoil in his life, in 1973, when hehad recently divorced, had severed h is relations with Casa de las Americasover a personal disagreement with its director Roberto Fernndez Reta-mar, and w as only a few m on ths from retu rning to El Salvador for his ill-fated tu rn in the guerrilla m ovem ent. He was, as the essay says, dri nk ing"ms de la cuenta" (Dalton 2005b, 29). In any case, I find no doc um entaryevidence that W innall Dalton had any relationship w ith Pancho Villa, andhe certainly had no brother nam ed G arand (actually the nam e of a brandof rifle). He d id have a younger brothe r na m ed Frank, wh o indeed lived asan adu lt in Guatem ala, but Frank D alton w as still living in Tucson in Sep-tember 1917, long after he had sup posed ly hig hta iled it to Central Americafleeing Pancho Villa's heavies an d at least three m on ths after his b rotherwas established in Honduras." In 1920, Frank Dalton was still living in


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GRINGO IRACUNDO I 3 5layed personally by Winnall for Roque Dalton to know about it, yet noneof Winnall's other family me m bers men tioned it in their abun dan t corre-spondence or in later interviews. W innall Dalton's surv iving son told m ehe had never heard it.This story might be rooted in a well-publicized case involving Win-nall's nephew Fred Ronstadt Jr. and three other people who were indictedfor attem pting to smuggle arm s to Mexico in Augus t 1917. The case in-volved a fairly small amount of hardwaretwo pistols and 750 roundsof amm unition , discovered by a U.S. customs agent in Nogales and waslater dismissed in federal court. There is no indication the conspiracy in-volved Winnall, who by then was living in Honduras, but it is possiblethat the case was the ounce of tru th on w hich the story of his involvem entwith Pancho Villa w as built, possibly even throug h W innall's ow n retell-ing of it to his son R oque."Bearing in mind all this evidence, one is tempted to regard the storyof Winnall Dalton's swindling of Pancho Villa as confabulation or atleast exaggeration. Still, Roque D alton told the story in so many differentmediain a novel, an essay, and a play as I discuss later, and in personalconversationsand in such consistent detail that one is reluctant to dis-miss it entirely. Anglos in the U.S. Southwest loathed and feared PanchoVilla following the attack on Columbus, New Mexico, in 1916, whereasCarranza was recognized by the U.S. government and admired by muchof the educated U.S. public, so one might expect Winnall Dalton to keepquiet about any connection to the former w hile freely adm itting a nd evenexaggerating his involvement in the army of the latter. In the previouslyrnentioned essay, Roque Dalton refers somewhat cryptically to "intimateletters" his father w rote about h is journey from Mexico to Central A mer-ica; I have been unab le to find any such letters or other references to them .But the larger subject of Winnall Dalton's involvement in the MexicanRevolution merits further research, in particular his involvement withCarranza's forces.

Also worth further inquiry is the possibility, which the draft card Ime ntioned earlier suggests, that W innall Dalton stayed ou tside the UnitedStates to avoid military conscription in World War I. The United Statesinstitu ted the draft in 1917, and althou gh W innall Dalton wa s in H on-duras by then, he might have been subject to obligatory military servicehad he gone home. The possibility that he stayed in Central America toavoid the draft is, thus, a distinct possibility supported by the fact that


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136 Latin American Research Reviewhe returned to the United States shortly after the war ended. After working for the Cuyamel banana company in Honduras, severe illness struckhim, possibly yellow fever, and he migrated to El Salvador, where he meand married Ada UUoa Main, who hailed from a prominent Salvadoranfamily, and then by steamer to the United States. The 1920 U.S. censuslists them as married and living together in San Francisco. By July 1923Winnall Dalton was back in El Salvador and well established, as attestedby a letter in La Prensa in which h e offered $3,000 to the w inn er of an avition acrobatics contest (Cornejo 2002). W ealthy and socially prominent, hand his first wife ha d five children wh o survived to adu lthood .

W innall D alton boug ht h is first tract of land in El Salvador arou nd 1930near the village of Coln in the Zapo titn Valley west of San Salvador. Hebegan growing cotton and was successful from the first year, branchinglater into sugarcane and coffee. He got along well with the Salvadoranrural oligarchy, but he ha d the sp irit of innov ation and flexibility of a moremodern, dynamic style of capitalism than wealthy Salvadorans were accustomed to seeing. At a farm he had co-owned with a Salvadoran businessman on the coast of Usulutn some years earlier, Dalton had used asmall plane he imported from the United States to dust crops with pesticides, supposedly the first time anyone had performed such a feat inEl Salvador." This may have been the same plane he donated in 1925 tothe embryonic Salvadoran Air Force, which crashed the next year, killing one of the cou ntry's aviation p ionee rs, Ricardo Aberle (Cornejo 2002)Although most of the rural elite raised coffee almost exclusively, Daltonpride d himself on experim enting w ith different cash crops, dep en din g onsoil and market cond itions.

A businessman of Winnall Dalton's savvy m ust certainly have kno w nthat he had b oug ht his estate at a time an d place of fast-brewing anger ovelabor conditions and land-tenure patterns among farmworkers. The ex-plosive resentm ent th at led to La Matanz a, as Gould and Lauria-Santiago(2008) show, was widely known and reported by 1930. Its roots could betraced to the gradual elimination of com m una l pea sant agricu ltural landsa sharp decline in wages and living conditions for the rural w orking clasafter 1929, violent repression of political dis sen t th ro ug h the 1920s, an dsympathy for Utopian communism among much of the rural poor. Gouldand Lauria-Santiago document the merging of ethnic, class, and gendeconflicts that contributed to the anger, and they argue that one factor wasthe sexual exploitation of indigenous and Ladina women by landlords, a


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GRINGO IRACUNDO I 3 7and government offices in seven towns across southwestern El Salvador,killing several dozen people. The reaction from the recently installedmilitary dictator, Maximiliano Hernndez Martnez, was swift and piti-less. His army troops killed "thousands and perhaps tens of thousands ofpeople" in the space of about three weeks, effectively cru shin g th e rebel-lion and leaving a deep and perm ane nt scar on the national psyche of ElSalvador (Lindo-Fuentes, Ching , and Lara M artinez 2007, 23).The epicenter of the rebellion and brutal repression, or La Matanza,that followed wa s fewer, than twe nty m iles west of the Dalton estate, inthe town of Izalco. A significant outbreak of violence occurred in Coln,less tha n a mile east of his farm. Fighting also briefly reached the outskirtsof Santa Tecla, the tow n in the cool, luxu riantly green hills above th e val-ley where Dalton's family lived. Dalton's son, eight years old at the time,recalls how his father turned the estate into a virtual armed camp: "Hefortified the farm. I don't know where he got all those gu ns , but he forti-fied the place, and he was not afraid."'"* With the repression still underway, Dalton ventured from his farm and traveled to a nearby barracks tofetch "h is" peasants among the hu na red s who had been detained in armysweeps. His son described the scene: "Other landowners were there too,identifying which ones they knew, which ones they did not know. . . . Sohe went down the lines, saying 'This one's mine, this one, that one.' Hetook about 100 of them and brough t them back to the farm and pu t the mback to work. But he warned them, you cannot pass that fence because ifyou do, you'll be picked up by the army or killed. The army was liable topick up anybody on the road.""

It should be noted here that the recollections of Winnall Dalton's sonabout these events, though plausible and consistent, are not firsthand andwould be difficult to corroborate ind ependently at- this dista nt rem ove.They belong to a family's memory bank, the body of stories that descen-dants tell mostly to one another and occasionally to outsiders, about thelives of their parents and grandparents. At certain points, such as his fa-ther's relationship with Roqu Dalton's mother, Maria Garcia, the youngerWinnall Dalton's accounts of his father's life do corroborate and coincidewith those of other sources. Still, mem ories can bend and be emb roideredwith age, and some skepticism is in order when co nsidering them as par tof the historical record.Given Roque Dalton's critical engagement with the history of La Ma-tanza through Miguel Marmol, it is surprising that he never explored his


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138 Latin American ResearchReviewbaron going down a line of cowed campesinos inside an army base andpicking out his own as if they were stray farm animals while outsidethousa nds m ore were being slaughtered w ould have had a powerful holdon Roque Dalton's poetic imagination and his revolutionary conscious-ness. Maybe he did not kno w about hi s father's role. Yet Dalton definitelyknew that his father had a large estate in the region affected by the vio-lence of La M atanza and , according to the poet's widow , even visited thefarm with his father as an adult. Dalton never mentions his father in hiscelebrated book about the insurrection of 1932, Miguel Marmol, a searintestimonial based on extensive interviews with the communist organizerand survivor of the book's title.

A restless, adaptable m an, W innall Dalton had spent his life tryin g ou tdifferent businesses and different countries. By the mid-1930s, his firstwife, Ada Ulloa, had died; he had sent their five children to school in theUnited States; and he had remarried. He was, by then, an unusually suc;cessful farmer at a time of economic ma laise in El Salvador, bu yin g tractsthat bordered his original estate near Coln until he had amassed about3,500 manzanas, or about 5,000 acres, in some of the country's best farmland. He liked to gamble, and his nickname was "Gana Todo"that is,"Win All," or literally "Winnall" in Spanishbut friends called him Jack"He learned the negocio," his son said. "He wa s very quick-witted. He w asharp. And he had a terrible temper. It was like" and he snapped hisfingers. "And he always had a gun. H e was g ood w ith a gun."'*

It was well known that Winnall Dalton regularly carried a firearmHe must have had enemies, and people seem to have genuinely fearedhim and his red-hot temper. In fact, only in this period does the imageof Roque Dalton as the son of a gunsling er attain a measu re of historicaaccuracy. Some might find a certain poetic justice, a satisfying historicasymmetry, in the fact that this man who always carried a pistol tuckedunder his belt engendered someone who also took up a gun but in thenam e of wh at he an d m any others believed to be the liberation of the Salvado ran p eople. Maybe this continuity of violence is w hat a ttracts peo pleto the image of Roque Dalton as the pro gen y of a violent outlaw. Yet theirrelationship with firepower w as starkly different. R oque Dalton was us eless w ith a weap on, a "total klu tz" ("era todo tata rata") w ith a rifle, as oneof his comrades in training in Cuba said (Alvarenga 2002). As an armedguerrilla, Dalton played a minor role and w as reported to have taken pa rin only one m ilitary action, the seizure of a radio station an d the broad cas


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continuation of debate by other means" was actually more characteristicof Roque Dalton's eventua l assassins th an of the poet himself.Roque Dalton, the ferocious voice of revolution in Latin America, wasliterally bo rn of the violence of his father. W innall D alton had bought landfrom one of El Salvador's ruling families, the Dueas clan, in part witha loan from the Banco Occidental, owned by Benjamin Bloom, anotherAmerican transplant. At some point, Dalton and Bloom quarreled so vio-lently over the loan's repayment terms that one of Bloom's bodyguardsfired three bullets into Dalton, who survived the attack and was takento a hospital for several weeks of recovery. One of his nurses there wasMaria Garcia Medrano, a woman of about thirty from a humble, rural

background, a devout Roman Catholic who put herself through nursingschool and w as so well rega rded as a nu rse tha t elite Salvadoran familiessought her out for medical services. She was not married, and wantedto have a child, as she told acquaintances years later. One day, the richAmerican patient pulled the sheet off his stitched-up body and madelove on the hospital bed with Maria Garcia. The fruit of their (by all ac-coun ts consensual) ho spital tryst w as Roque alton G arca, bo rn M ay 14,1935.'^So far, I have discussed works by Roque Dalton that concern his fa-ther's life before Roque Dalton's birth, or at least as Roque imagined it.Yet Dalton's most important works regarding his father actually refer totheir own interactions d uring the poet's youth and to the paradox of be-ing raised by a hum ble nurse as the son of a rich foreigner. Roque Daltoninhabited this contradiction for his entire lifepoor but privileged, Sal-vadoran b ut foreign, revo lutionary but the offspring of pu re capitalismand turned it into the thematic motor of some of his best work. Raisedby his mother in a working-class neighborhood of San Salvador, he was

known as Roque Garca until the age of seventeen, because up to thattime, his father refused to recognize him publicly. His status as the sonof an American terrateniente was well known, however, in his neighbor-hood of workshops, bars, and auto-repair shops. His father would dropby his former paramour's house now and then to leave an envelope fullof money for their son's upbringing or would send his driver around todrop off cash. The Salvadoran essayist and poet David Escobar Galindolived in the same neighborhood and, though a few years younger thanDalton, recalls the neighborhood chatter about Dalton's rich father andhow local boys wo uld h it him up for money because of it.'* Over the years,


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140 Latin American Research Reviewwhich survive in the Dalton family archive in San Salvador) in whichMara hankered and cajoled for more money for the upbringing of theirson; W innall usually ans w ered in terse little notes written w ith a fountainpen under the letterhead of the Casino Salvadoreo, begging her to bepatient.

Maria Garcia, the dowdy nurse, comes across in this and other cor-respondence as absolutely devoted to the interests of her son. She seemsto have been the only pe rson capable of intim idating W innall D alton, ex-tracting money from him to pay for their son's upbringing during all ofRoque's childhood and even into his early adulthood. They had no otherchildren together or appare ntly any further rom antic involvement. MariaGarcia's constant companion throughout those years and during most ofRoque Dalton's life w as Fidelia M artinez, a wo m an of indigen ous featureswho "wore patiently her face of a man" (Dalton 1996, 134) and who wasalso a single mother. She, M aria G arcia, and youn g R oque lived togetherin a rented row house that had a small variety shop and bar facing thebusy corner of Segunda Avenida Norte and Calle 5 de Noviembre. Thissmall establishment, c onnected to the hous e, acted as a com bination gen-eral store and wa tering hole, a place where taxi drivers w ould drop in fora cold drink, maids would catch up on the neighborhood gossip, and lo-cal me n w ould dro p by for a beer or buy supplies. This w as the place, ina scruffy neighborhood of San Salvador a few blocks from the cathedral,where Roque Dalton developed the witty, urban tone of his best poetryand prose.

In this neighborhood, the adored son Roque Dalton w as one of the veryfew boys to attend the elite Jesuit high school, the Externado San Jos,tha nk s to Maria Garcia's success in persu ad ing W innall Dalton to pay thetuition. The school ordinarily did not accept children born out of wed-lock, but, according to family lore, M aria en listed W innall to persu ad e theschool to make an exception for this promising boy. Roque Dalton refersto this uncomfortable fact of his childhood, the ever-widening financialdependence on his reluctant father, in an unpublished poem dating fromthe m id-1960s, which reads:My father, sinceHe was an angry gringo.Mister Dalton [...]I waited for himLicking an ice cream cone


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GRINGO IRACUNDO I 4 I

He gradua ted from Ex ternado San Jos at the end of 1952, now as RoqueDalton, and for at least a few years developed a cordial if not close re-lationship with his father, who offered to send him to university in theUnited States. When Roque Dalton averred that he wanted to study lawin Chile instead, his father paid for that, thin kin g his son would receive aconservative Catholic education. Instead, Dalton returned from Chile inlate 1953 with socialist leanings that w ould ha rde n into a terminal com-mitment to Marxist revolution through the 1950s. Roque introd uced hisnew bride, Ada Caas, to his father wh en they m arried in 1955, and Win-nall sent aroun d presen ts when their children w ere born. The relationshipwas correct and civil, bu t it grew more estranged after Roque Dalton jour-neyed to the Soviet Union in 1957 for a youth festival that was reportedin Salvadoran newspapers.^" When, in 1959, Dalton suffered the first ofhis many a rrests for political activities, the military president of El Salva-dor, Colonel Jos Lemus, told a news conference that he would do noth-in g to win the release of the now-famous writer and journalist, addingpetulantly, "He is a spoiled b rat, so spoiled that he has lost all manners."^'This obvious reference to Dalton's wealthy father suggests not only thatDalton's status as a rich man's son was known to the whole country butalso that, even w hile end urin g jail for political activities, he w as caught inthe strange predicam ent of having to prove himself as a genuine dissidentbecause of his lineage, a lineage that his father had not recognized formost of the writer's life.

Still, Roque Dalton and his father never completely cut their ties. Inhis first major book. La ventana en el rostro, published in Mexico wh ere hewas living in 1961, the poet referred to his absent father with the resignedtone of someone whoexpects little or nothing. In the poem "La ducha,"he w rites: "My father, or rather, a father, without the possessive, / taughtme to tame furious stallions. The campesinas / taught me to love" (Dal-ton 2005a, 241). His father might have left him a disposition to violence,he says, but he derived the fundamental lesson of learning how to lovefrom ordin ary people and, above all, from the women of his upbringing.La ventana en el rostro was one of two major books Dalton published whilehis father was alive; he sent copies to his mother with a request to en-sure that W innall received one.^^ Indeed some poem s in this volume seem

20. Caas interview, 2006.21 . El Diario de Hoy, December 24,1959. "Un universitario tiene suficiente discernimiento


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142 Latin American Research Reviewalmost directed at Winnall, or at least would be easily understood by ill-tempered, iriipulsive men like him. In "La poesa," Dalton writes:The man of angry eyes asked. What is poetry?The man of clean eyesLooked deeply into his, without offering a word.In his look there was poetry. (Dalton 2005a, 244)

Dalton delved dee per into the paradoxes of his upbrin ging in his mo startistically accomplished book. Taberna y otros lugares, of 1969. Tabernin many ways, Dalton's definitive statement as a writer, a book both ex-perimental and grounded, lyrical and implorinjg, a book that demolishestraditional boundaries of genre and form. Written mostly in Prague, Taberna was his first book to have a truly international impact, w inn ing thCasa de las Americas Prize in 1969 and positive reviews in newspapersand journals throughout Latin America. El Nacional in Caracas called "a book that opens Latin American poetry to any stylistic or thematicpossibility."^^ Taberna is, as Alvarenga (2002) points out, a revolutionarbook, both in its subject matter and its radical experimentation with po-etic forms and styles that were new to Dalton's own record and, in somecases, to the whole body of Salvadoran literature.

The book includes six prose poems, including one titled "La maanaque conoc a mi padre," which narrates one of Winnall Dalton's fleetingvisits to the home of Maria Garcia to see his son and leave funds. RoqueDalton tells us he is about thre e years old wh en the action takes place. H ismother is not present, he tells us, because she has been called away to thehospital to assist in emergency brain surgery. So, when Winnall Dalton'sbig car rolls up to the house, he knocks on the door and is greeted by hercompanion Fidelia Martinez, who goes by the nickname "La Pille." Thescene is almost comic in its aw kw ardnes s as La Pille ushers in the visitornervously laugh ing w hile asking him to excuse the mess and offering himcoffee, to which Winnall barely answers at all. She picks up the toddlerRoque and holds him up for Winnall to inspect him "as they would achicken tha t's on sale or a suckling pig." W inna ll kisses the baby, rubbin ghis razor stubble against his cheek. The text, in James Graham's transla-tion, reads in part:I feel a man slap my rear end gently, he runs a hand through my hair, the pretty


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my mama or La Pille.... La Pille puts me on the sofa and I sit there quietly with along face. He smokes and thinks, spilling the ash from his cigarette onto the floor.He comes over to me again, stroking his fingers over my face before he heads backto the street. (Dalton 1996,134)

The encounter ends with the laconic father leaving off a "very whiteenvelope" ("un sobre blanqusimo") full of banknotes, for which La Pillethan ks him profusely and, with repeated God-bless-yous, bids him good-bye. As we hear Winnall's car roar off. La Pille licks her finger and startsto count the money.On its surface, this text could be read as a study of dependency andsubmission, seen in the woman's extreme solicitousness to the visitor andher abject interest in the money that he has to offer. As Gould and Lauria-Santiago (2008) suggest, the association of big automobiles with rich andexploitative landowners ran deep in rural El Salvador, a link expressedalso by the writer and a rtist Salvador Salazar Arru (who w rote und er thenam e Salarru) in his account of La M atanza. The depen dency of El Salva-dor on the United States, the forced subm ission of its poor to the rich, an dthe soul-destroying effects of underdevelopment were subjects that occu-pied Roque Dalton a great deal at the time that he wrote this essay. In Po-brecito poeta que era yo, Dalton's alter-ego narrator attacks other Salvadoranwrite rs bo th living and dead for what he considers their insufficient atten-tion to class, including the popu lar roman tic poet Alfredo Espino, wh omthe nar rato r faults for "forgetting the national prob lems, the real dram a ofthe people, mise ry and injustice" (Dalton 1994, 201). Non etheless, to view. this text as simply or even mostly a denu ncia tion of injustice, and W inna llDalton as simply a stand-in for Yankee imperialism, would do it a disser-vice. There is genuine tenderness from the absent father toward his giftedson and an ineffable feeling of regre t as he caresses his son's face, cigaretteashes dro ppin g to thefloor.Yet there is also an acute awa reness of the gulfbetween father and son, a feeling of alienation that shows the profoundemotional cost of denying parenthood or only conditionally accepting it,to both child and parent.

The attitude of the son tow ard the father is also telling. Even for a three -year-old boy, the son seems oddly detached and indifferent to the pres-ence of this int im ida ting figure. W hen La Pille tells him to kiss his father,the boy "instead act[s] dumb and decide[s] to hang there like a silkwormfrightened by its first look at the world" (Dalton 1996, 135). He sits sul-lenly on a sofa and refuses to kiss the visitor, as if wa iting for an intrud er


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144 Latin American Research ReviewCalifornia. We see the father's confidence in the son in the handing oveof money for his up bring ing, a kind of dow n pa ym ent for Roque D alton'elite secondary education at the Externado San Jos. Dalton expresses undeniable affection toward his father in this essay. But by combining thethemes of revolutionary change and Dalton's personal role in it with thetheme of his father in the same volume, Dalton demonstrates the depthof his rejection of his father's expectations and money. He offers a taste ofthe seething resentment of white patriarchy felt by rural Salvadorans, inparticular toward fathers of illegitimate offspring, that contributed to LaM atanza (Gould an d L auria-Santiago 2008). Dalton, in effect, thro ws tha"very white enve lope" full of cash back into W inhall Dalton's face.

Dalton was well aware by 1969 of how Freudian his commitment tocommunism might look to others, with his distant American father. People said as much to his face, and the Freud ian implications have n ot beenlost on later scholars (Lara Martinez 2005). Ever cand id w ith h imself andhis readers, he referred to this irony later in Taberna in a long poem calle"Los hongos" that he originally intended to be published as a separatebook. In free-form verse, he writes about the emotional displacement ofbeing the poo r son of a rich man , from a working-class neighbo rhood, attend ing a rich boy s' school, rejected b y his father b ut su bsid ized by him :In the neighborhood of hoodlu m s I wasthe son of the North American millionaire and went to the schoolfor the sons of milliona ires [.. .] I wasthe kid who escaped throug h some trapdoor from the neighborhood of hoo dlum[...]My technical skill at footballand the fact that I was an illegitimate sonmade my name in the uppermost social circles. "They sayyou joined the Comm unist Party because of your han gup s,"Miguelito Regalado Dueas told meOne day in Mexico,After trea ting me to dinne r and talking to me about M r. Marx.

He then answers this charge, that he became a communist to spite hisfather, a ddress ing the mem bers of the Casa de las Americas jury to whichhe plann ed to subm it the book, saying:Hangups, members of the Jury, have nothingTo do with a political consciousness: at most they're goodFor adding a tragic note. (Dalton 2008a, 462-463)


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146 Latin American ResearchReviewtelevision event depends on still photographs, a few press articles aboutit, and the recollections of the many people who saw it and who, almostuniversally, raved about it. The play was a huge, if ephemeral, success. Itfeatured bits of film, audio, and music perform ed live by Silvio R odriguezand Noel Nicola, a multimedia theater experience that, in 1968, wouldhave been ahead of its time almo st anyw here a nd was completely revolu-tionary for Cuban television. Pablo Armando Fernndez called later thatevening to tell Serrano the work was "the liberation of Cuban television,"and even Fidel Castro sent word that he had enjoyed it after Dalton hadpersonally asked him to watch.

The play Dalton y Ca., was, most likely, the origin of the en dur ing m ytof Roque Dalton's descent from American cowboys.^' Later writers tookas fact a work intended as an amusing satire of imperialism worthy ofBerthold Brecht, wheth er or not D alton me ant it fhat way. Serrano recallsasking Dalton in their first conversation whether he was descended fromthe Dalton brothe rs of Kansas. Dalton answere d that he was, and, Serranobelieves, the story of Roque Dalton as the son of frontier outlaws wasborn.2


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his innermost personal circle out of his work, and his father was not inthat circle. In the tale of Dalton y Ca. of 1973, he alluded to the vacuu m ofmem ory caused by his father's refusal to recog nize him pub licly as a childand by the hypocritical mores of Salvadoran society that allow, and evenrequire, such cruelty. In a w ou nde d tone, Dalton alludes to the fact that h isfather's bac kgrou nd has been concealed from him :My distant relationship with him, as well as his uncommunicative personality(I'm speaking of the personality he practiced with his innumerable bastard chil-dren and not the one I suppose he displayed to the gracile, deer-faced young la-dies who accompanied him to his deathbed) kept me in the dark about everythingrelated to the parents of my father. (Dalton 2005b, 28)

Later in the essay, he speculates on his ow n m otives in w riting so mu chabout his father and about uncles wh om he never met, and about wh etherpresenting their story sympathetically somehow calls into question hiscom m itment to com m unism . He suggests that a false image of his father,and therefore of himself, has begun to take hold in the public's mind (asindeed it had) and that, someday, historians would be needed to rectifythis distortion. The task of sepa rating m yth from reality, he implies, wouldbe beyond the resources of a poet, although he would ideally orient theteam that would carry out such research. He writes:So why does a communist take such a liberal attitude toward the evident dirtytricks of his progenitors? First of all, a bit more respect because respect is the bet-ter part of life. Second, a bit more seriousness and historical rigor, which can bedemanded today (1973) of even the most simple and reluctant spectators of his-tory. Don't come asking me to portray my father and my uncle as two AmericanRobin Hoods, because they weren't. They were exactly the opposite, as you wouldexpect of the pioneers of capitalism anywhere in the world. (Dalton 2005b, 39)

An d yet, at the core, this d ilem m a is one of his ow n identity, not that ofhis father. At a time when Dalton was literally transforming his identity,about to take a new name, and undergoing light plastic surgery so hecould join a guerrilla group in San Salvador without being recognized,he was w ond ering deeply about how the mysteries of his father's pa st ha dbecome his own mysteries. He was about to become a new person, JulioDelfos Marin, the nom de guerre he adopted during his disastrous spellwith the Ejrcito Revolucionario del Pueblo. Writing almost on the eve ofhis de pa rtu re for arm ed strugg le, he expresses a sense of being u nm oo redfrom his own personhood . By w riting ab out his father and uncles, even in


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148 Latin American Research Reviewway, that helps me explain the mirror image I desperately ask every m orning. ...Am I the person that I seem to be? Do I have a right to be who I am? The roots othis ugly face, of this shameless caricature of a fighter who yesterday afternoonpaid his taxes, where were they born and raised, and where did they go? (Dalton2005b, 39)

Dalton never had an opportunity to answer these questions fully. Hewas dead within tw o years of asking them. By then, his ow n identity hadbecome so "fictionalized," to use Lara M artinez 's (2000, 60) term , that hewas wonde ring w ho the real Roque Dalton was, as the preced ing passagesuggests. He erased his public persona further with his last book, widelyknown as Poemas clandestinos, written in the depths of clandestine life 1974 under five different pseudonyms and published posthumously (Dal-ton 2008b). The reencounter w ith h is father's faihily in Tucson did finallyoccur, but not un til some th irty years after his death, w hen h is son JuanJos, a Salvadoran journalist, went to Tucson an d w as wa rm ly received byWinnall Dalton's descendants, including Fred Ronstadt's granddaughter(and Roque Dalton's first cousin, once removed) the singer Linda Ron-stadt, who gave him an old portrait of Winnall Dalton Sr. Although hedid not live long enough to learn the real story of his parentage, RoqueDalton was asking the right questions. It fell to later generations to beginto answer them.REFERENCESAlas, Javier1999 Roque Dalton: El turno del poeta. San Salvador: Editorial Delgado.Alvarenga, Luis2002 El ciervo perseguido: Vida y obra de Roque Dalton. San Salvador: Consejo NaPara la Cultura y el Arte (CONCULTURA).Arias Gm ez, Jorge1999 En memoria de Roque Dalton. San Salvador: Editorial M emoria.Azor Hernnd ez, Ileana1986 "Dilogo inconcluso sobre el teatro de Roque Dalton." In Recopilacin de textosbre Roque Dalton, edited by Hctor Garca Verzi, 399-413. Havana: Ediciones Cade las Americas.Cornejo, Do uglas Alcides2002 La aviacin nacional: Historia de la Fuerza Area Salvadorea. San SalvadCONCULTURA.Cortzar, Julio1986 "Una mu erte mo struosa." In Recopilacin, ed. Garca Verzi, op. cit., 551-561.Dalton, Roque1994 Pobrecito poeta que era yo . San Salvador: UCA Ediciones.1996 Small Hours of the Night: Selected Poems of Roque Dalton, edited by Hardie St.


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GRINGO IRACUNDO I 4 9Go uld, Jeffrey L., and Aldo A. Lauria-Santiago2008 To Rise in Darkness: Revolution, Repression and Mem ory in El Salvador, 1920-1932.Durh am, NC: Duke U niversity PressHernndez-Aguirre, Mario1961 "La nueva poesa salvado rea: 'La generacin com prom etida.'" Cultura 20 (Ap ril-June): 77-99.Huezo Mixco, Miguel2005 "'Cuan do sal de la H aba na. ..': Una historia prohibida de Roque Dalton." Cultura89 (January-A pril): 93-107Lara Martnez, Rafael2000 La tormenta entre las manos: Ensayos sobre literatura salvadorea. San Salvador:CQNCULTURA.2005 "Nota introductorio: En las m anos un peq ueo pas." In No pronuncies mi nombre:Poesia completa I, by Roque Dalton. San Salvador: CQNCULTURA.Lindo-Fuentes, Hector, Erik Ch ing, and Rafael A. Lara M artnez2007 Remembering a Massacre in El Salvador: The Insurrection of 1932, Roque Dalton, andthe Politics of Historical Memory. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.Ronstadt, Federico Jos Mara2003 Borderman: Memoirs of Federico Jos Maria Ronstadt, edited by Edward F. Ronstadt.Tucson: University of Arizona Press.Sheridan, Thomas E.1986 Los tucsonenses. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.Sherm an, James E., and Edw ard F. Ronstadt1975 "Wagon Making in Southern Arizon a." Smoke Signal 31: 1-20.Solis, Armando

2005 Roque Dalton: Un disparo a a izquierda del corazn. San Salvador: Editorial Univer-sidad Francisco Gavidia.Vsquez Qlivera, Mario2005 "'Pas mo no existes': Ap untes sobre Roque Dalton y la historiografa contem-pornea de El Salvador." Istmo 11 (July-December), http://collaborations.denison.edu/istmo/nll / index.html.Zaid, G abriel1982 "Enemy Colleagues: A Reading of the Salvadoran Tragedy." Dissent 29,13-40.


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