Elena Salamanca – författare

The cultivation of the three sisters (corn, beans, and squash) on subsistence farms in El Salvador is a multispecies, world-making, and ongoing process. Milpa describes a small subsistence corn farm. It is derived from the word milli (‘field’, or a piece of land under active cultivation) in Nahuatl. The milpa is a farming practice that uses perennial, intercropping, and swidden (fire and fallow) techniques that predates the Spanish conquest of the Americas.Kneeling Before Corn focuses on the intimate relations that develop between plants and humans in the milpas of the northern rural region of El Salvador. It explores the ways in which more-than-human intimacies travel away from and return to the milpa through human networks.Collective and multivocal, this work reflects independent lines of investigation and multiple conversations between co-authors—all of whom have lived in El Salvador for extended periods of time. Throughout the six chapters, the co-authors invite readers to consider more-than-human intimacies by rethinking, experimenting with, and developing new ways of documenting, analyzing, and knowing the intimacies that form between humans and the plants that they cultivate, conserve, long for, and eat. This book offers an innovative account of rural El Salvador in the twenty-first century.

Landsmoder, by the Salvadoran poet, historian, and performance artist Elena Salamanca, is a searing, and sometimes grotesque, exploration of the intersections between nationalism, dogma, patriarchy, and violence. Originally read aloud from the oldest standing monument in San Salvador’s centro histórico, the performance poems in Landsmoder retool the laudatory pomp of patriotic ceremony to protest the weaponization of national myth as a mask for erasure, cruelty, and neglect at the hands of the state. This unflinching collection, whose title comes from a Norwegian word that Salamanca translates as “madre de la patria” — or “mother of the nation/homeland/fatherland”— is a work of feminist grief, rage, and irony populated with churning wombs, bloodied flags, and ratteboned she-wolves. Appearing now in a bilingual edition nearly a decade after it was first performed, Landsmoder remains an urgent subversion, loud as ever, both on and off the page.