EL SALVADOR

EL SALVADOR
Indigenous Rights in El Salvador
The Legacy of a Great Lenca Woman BY LEONEL ANTONIO CHEVEZ
Above: The last Lenca queen. Opposite page: Chief Cheves at the United Nations.
THE STORY I WILL TELL YOU HERE IS OF A
remarkable woman, the last in a centuries-long
line of Maya-Lenca matriarchs
and a living conduit of ancient traditions
brought into the modern world. It is the
story of a woman, a leader, a role model
and a tribal person: the story of my grandmother
Francisca Barbara Romero Guevara,
the Comishaual (Jaguar Matriarch
of the Maya Lenca).
My grandmother came from the Lenca
people, a pre-Columbian group of allied
tribes in Central America. They are considered
the first inhabitants of what is
today Honduras, most of the territory of
El Salvador, parts of Nicaragua and small
enclaves in Costa Rica. Some Lenca cave
dwellings date back approximately ten
thousand years, classifying the Lencas as
existing since the Palaeolithic era.
The history of indigenous people in
El Salvador has for centuries been one of
dispossession, marginalization, persecution
and murder. The Spanish invasions
and colonization of the 1500s purposefully
destroyed the structure of indigenous
communities and tribes. What little
autonomy and few lands had been granted
by the Spanish Crown to the Lenca chiefs
were then completely abolished after the
birth of the Republic of El Salvador in
1821, whose leaders invoked the principle
of equality for all and refused to recognize
any ethnic diversity.
Going further, the Republic had explicitly
declared that the indigenous people
who once existed in that land had disappeared
and were officially extinct. This
meant that from then on, no Salvadoran
could be acknowledged as an indigenous
person, and El Salvador could never
be accused of ongoing mistreatment of
indigenous groups within its borders.
This was the world of my great-grandparents,
the world of the 19th century that
my grandmother learned about as part of
the oral tradition, memorized and passed
down to her by her parents and grandparents.
Born in El Salvador in the first decade
of 1900s, my grandmother Francisca was
the youngest of a family of five. Her father
was Gabriel Sosa and her mother was
Margarita Romero. Both parents had an
unusual heritage. Sosa was half-indigenous
Lenca and half-Sephardic Jew from
a small cluster of secret Jews who had
lived in eastern El Salvador since colonial
times.
Romero was also half-indigenous and
half-European. She was from the noble
clan of the Lenca tribe known as the Tau-
28 ReVista SPRING 2016 PHOTO COURTESY OF LEONEL ANTONIO CHEVEZ