VISUALIZING THE PEOPLE'S HISTORY:
​RICHARD CROSS'S IMAGE OF THE CENTRAL AMERICAN LIBERATION WARS
AUGUST 15, 2019–JANUARY 12, 2020

American photojournalist Richard Cross documented the turbulent period of liberation wars in Central America from 1979 to 1983, until he was killed while on assignment in Honduras. The photographs depict communities and landscapes enduring war and genocide. Cross’s work illuminates the legacies of these wars, which propelled the largest contemporary migration of people from Central America to the United States, and which continue to shape their American experience.

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EXHIBITION VIDEOS 

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RECOMMENDED READING

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PODCASTS 
EMANCIPATED: VOICES AND IMAGES FROM THE ARCHIVES 

The CSUN Tom & Ethel Bradley Center has over one million images produced by photographers that document the social, cultural, and political lives of the diverse communities of Los Angeles and Southern California. The archives contain one of the largest collections of African American photographers west of the Mississippi. We also have collections on the Farm Worker Movement, Central America, Mexico, the U.S.–Mexico border, and Africa.

​Voices and Images from the Archives is produced and hosted by archival researcher Marta Valier. 

Toña’s Crossing the River and Other Stories of Fight and Resistance from El Salvador. 

In this first chapter, we hear from Linda Garrett, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Democracy in the Americas; and Toña Rios, who migrated to Los Angeles from El Salvador in 1981 and is now a pastor at Baldwin Park United Methodist Church in Los Angeles County. Marta Valier produced and hosted this series based on oral histories with people that lived in El Salvador during the liberation war (1980–1992). The 1970s brought to El Salvador increasing government repression, including the creation of government-organized death squads to combat opposition movements and in 1980 a series of failed military juntas took power. By 1981, leftist guerrillas and political groups joined forces, forming the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, the FMLN. Then, throughout the 1980s, a civil war was waged between the FMLN and the U.S.-backed Salvadoran military forces.

The second chapter of Toña’s Crossing the River and Other Stories of Fight and Resistance from El Salvador, a series produced and hosted by our archival researcher Marta Valier, using oral histories with people who lived in El Salvador during the Liberation War (1980–1992). In the second chapter, we keep following Linda Garrett on her trip to San Salvador as a human rights representative for El Rescate and we meet Carlos Henríquez Consalvi, known as Santiago, who also traveled to San Salvador from Nicaragua with the intention to establish Radio Venceremos, a radio station that operated in areas controlled by the insurgency and that he kept clandestine for 11 years (episode hosted & produced by Marta Valier). Both of them traveled to San Salvador after the assassination of Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero in March 1980, a time where thousands of Salvadorans were fleeing the country.

The third chapter of Toña’s Crossing the River and Other Stories of Fight and Resistance from El Salvador, a series produced by our archival researcher Marta Valier and co-hosted by Rosie Rios and Marta Valier, using oral histories with people who lived in El Salvador during the Liberation War (1980–1992). This chapter centers on El Rescate human rights representative Linda Garrett’s encounter with Salvadoran political prisoner Héctor Bernabé Recinos Aguirre, illegally detained for more than four years for organizing the first national strike in 1980. Recinos Aguirre co-founded the Committee of Political Prisoners of San Salvador (COPPES) while Garrett worked on the Index of Accountability, a database used by the United Nations Truth Commission for El Salvador, linking military officers to human rights violations committed during the war. This episode discusses the significance of accountability, reparation, and the weight of impunity on both the old and younger Salvadoran generation.

Richard Cross's anthropological work at Palenque de San Basilio

Marta Valier talks to Guillermo Márquez about the visual anthropology work that photographer Richard Cross did in Colombia, where he was invited in the late 1970s by anthropologist Nina S. de Friedemann to visually document life in the Afro-Colombian community of San Basilio de Palenque. #BradleyCenterCSUN #Palenque #SanBasilio #Colombia