Victor and Carlos Cartagena

Dos Hermanos Lejanos: El Gran Despecho

Desai | Matta Gallery

Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton—who spent much of his adult life in exile because of his progressive politics—ended “El Gran Despecho,” an elegy to his homeland, by writing, “If I am an expatriate, you are an ex-country.”

El Salvador refers to its diasporic community as hermanos lejanos, residents of Departamento 15, (there are 14 departamentos or districts inside the country), holding its migrants in a loose nationalist embrace that belies the complex inequities of international and national economic patterns and policies that force citizens into migration. Nor does it account for El Salvador’s reliance on the influx of dollars from North America which on the ground in the Bay Area means that many hermanos lejanos are living clustered in small apartments in order to send money home.

Brothers Victor and Carlos Cartagena emigrated from El Salvador during the long civil war, which saw close to a quarter of the small country’s population flee. If immigrants often live in a liminal space between the place of their birth and their adopted home, those who leave because of violence and war face a particularly complicated reality between two homes.

The Cartagenas are hermanos lejanos, taking the risk to speak for their generation, whose possibilities were shaped by loss and the conflicting emotions of desire and disappointment. “If I go back to El Salvador,” Carlos writes, “it will be to a country that doesn’t remember me.” Born in a time of war, growing up in a time of war, and remembering only conflict, their emotions find an echo in Dalton’s poem, that you, El Salvador, never gave me anything, but I love you. I am good here in the U.S.—I have possibilities I didn’t have at home—but I don’t belong here.

Working both collaboratively and in a conversational exchange, Victor and Carlos Cartagena’s works speak to one another and to us all, traversing a frontera of multiple realities, countries that don’t exist, national boundaries that fracture families, the disappeared and the intimately near.

This exhibition is in dialogue with ANDARES, a multidisciplinary performance collaboration of ABD Productions and the musicians of El Salvador’s Mezoamerika, illuminating the history and legacies of war, and the ways they shape and inform the present.

Twenty years after the war’s end, El Salvador is entering a time of political and social transformation, with a progressive government engaging complex layers of truth telling and accountability, seeking social transformation in a deeply divided post-war society.