Santa Ana, El Salvador. Photo courtesy of Luis Desiro

“Consider a country where poets have led revolutionary movements, where writers have been disappeared, exiled, and even assassinated for their work—a country where the literary has rarely ever come without risk. This is El Salvador.”

Poet, scholar, and NER 46.2 contributor Janel Pineda presents a brief essay and interview with Salvadoran educator, writer, and editor Ricardo Hernández Pereira. They discuss living and writing under the state of exception, Hernández Pereira’s work co-editing the anthology Daños Colaterales [Collateral Damage], and much more. As Hernández Pereira reminds us, “Literature can be a starting point to question what we do not want to see or what others do not want us to see.”

Reading Others, Reading Ourselves: An Interview with Ricardo Hernández Pereira

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This is the twelfth installment in our “Literature & Democracy” series, which presents writers’ responses to the threats to democracy around the world.