Norberto Amaya, Songwriter

 

In 1981, at the beginning of the Civil War in El Salvador, Norberto Amaya, a peasant farmer, or campesino, was forced to leave the country. Like many thousands of other Salvadorans, Mr. Amaya accompanied his community to UN refugee camps in Honduras. In this new context, this former community organizer became a singer-songwriter, documenting his and others’ experiences as victims of war and displacement in powerful, popular folk songs.

 

Research:

Amanda Grzyb (Faculty of Information and Media Studies, Western University)

Emily Abrams Ansari (Don Wright Faculty of Music, Western University)

 

This film is an outcome of a collaborative pilot research project, “Refugees and Surviving Memory in Post-Civil War El Salvador.” This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Western University.

 

Dr. Abrams Ansari presented a paper titled: Music, Memory and Trauma in El Salvador’s Civil War Refugee Camps (1979-1992) at the Durham University Trauma Studies in the Medical Humanities Conference, 2018.