La Onda de Los Torogoces de Morazán / Sebastian Torogoz / 2024
For those unfamiliar with the history, Los Torogoces de Morazán blossomed alongside Radio Venceremos during the Salvadoran Civil War. One could call it the musical arm of the FMLN, the leftist guerrilla group vying to overthrow the US-and-Israeli-backed capitalist dictatorship in El Salvador. During the war, they not only uplifted the people’s spirits with cathartic and edifying mariachi music. They also used their songs to report from the front lines the outcomes of battles, atrocities committed by the capitalist forces, and so forth. This book provides an intimate portrait of how the group came to be and the inspirations for some of their most popular songs. All of it is written in Sebastian Torogoz’s gorgeously folk and studied tongue. It’s truly magical to read masterfully crafted Spanish sentences, famous for its run-on clauses, all in Torogoz’s campesino dialect. The musicality is embedded into the language. The book is a harrowing testiminio and an inspiring perspective on campesino organizing during the war.
My only criticism of the book is that Torogoz distances himself and the movement from communism, claiming that he and his campesino peers were never very versed in Marxism and were fighting for justice, equality, liberation, etc. In the same book and elsewhere in their catalog, however, they have odes and elegies to great Marxist commanders and theoreticians during the war. Even if this unfamiliarity with Marxist ideas was true during the war, at thirty-plus years of distance one would have expected Torogoz to do more research into who his bedfellows were. In recent events held in Chicago, Torogoz also claimed we should move beyond the dichotomies of left and right to something that delivers true change for the people. While I understand his likely disillusionment with the FMLN and the left at large—it has alternatively been crushed or sold out in most of Latin America—I think this muddies things rather than clarifies them for people both trying to enact change and understand history. I give it a 4.5 out of 5.