Best American Travel Writing 2015 Notable
In those first months living in El Salvador, had I walked down a village street and seen young men leaning against gaping doorframes, their eyes steady upon me, I would have read the wrong story. Then, I could barely speak, let alone interpret what signs I might have seen: a flash of black ink on skin; aerosol piss scrawled across cinder block walls. I might have misremembered that those men catcalled, that they hissed. I would have seen cliché, not clique; the awkward beat of sex lost in translation, not the tick-tock of a multinational time bomb.
My tenth grade students were no help. They spoke abstractly of comunistas, and, more concretely, of the kidnappers who lay in nebulous wait for them, should they venture beyond their opulent sphere of bodyguards and bulletproof BMWs. They—bilingual and bicultural, if not tri-, or more—understood far better than I how meanings shift according to association.
“Miss, what does your tattoo mean?” they asked about the blue moon at my nape. They never mentioned—and I relied on them for information—that body art is probable cause in El Salvador, that it came with a twelve-year prison sentence. In fact, they never spoke of maras, of mareros, of gangs and gangsters. Maybe they couldn’t see either, although I doubt that. I think they thought the maras unspeakable.