It was in this context that, in 2017, Salvadoran-American poet Yesika Salgado released her collection, “Corazón.” Salgado is a Los Angeles based poet whose collection is primarily about romance and heartbreak, but often makes references to her experiences as a Salvadoran-American diasporic author. Though her ethnicity is not the main concern of her debut collection, references to her Sal- vadoran-American identity are mentioned throughout her poems. These references are significant because they are antithetical to the kind of criminalization of the Salvadoran diaspora that politicians like Trump and Obama engage in. Scholar Lorgia García-Peña argues that, “literature works, at times, to sustain hegemony, while at others, it serves to contest it” (Garcia-Peña, 2016) leading her to coin the term “contra-diction.” In contra-dictions, “dictions” are the “performance of language and meaning” that run counter to hegemonic narratives to offer a subaltern perspective of historical “truth.”

Salgado’s poetry is written in contra-diction precisely because it challenges the dominant political discourses that conflated MS-13 with the broader Salvadoran diaspora. As Lindsey Cienfuegos does in her work on cultural representations produced by MS-13, an analysis of Salgado’s poems will use “fiction to discuss the con- troversial topic of gangs because I concur that the socio-historical process of gang formation and our knowledge of that process cannot be separated from fiction because historical narrative is already ‘one fiction among others’” (Cienfuegos, 2016). Specifically, a literary analysis reveals that Salgado challenges the way la Mara Salvatru- cha was used to criminalize the broader Salvadoran diaspora by reframing the image of the machete and presenting it as a positive, and central, piece of Salvadoran-American life and identity.

The machete appears in multiple poems from Yesika Salgado’s collection, “Corazón,” which is notable because of the machete’s historical significance. Machetes are commonly used in the rural, agricultural departments of El Salvador for various types of farm work, but they have come to attention in the United States for more sinister reasons. Through the 2000s, “Salvadoran gangs have since been the subject of media sensationalization and politiciza- tion” (Dingeman et al., 2009), a trend marked by a heavy focus on instances of la Mara Salvatrucha using machetes to commit murder.

In 2003, a pregnant, seventeen-year-old Honduran immigrant named Brenda Paz was stabbed multiple times with a machete by members of MS-13, leading the Washington Post to call it a “‘sav- age’ and ‘brutal’ affair.” Paz’s story “put the Mara Salvatrucha at the forefront of American television and radio” (Cienfuegos, 2016). In addition, a 2005 editorial published in Human Events, a conservative political newspaper, claimed that MS-13 “the El Salvador based syndicate has a love affair with machetes” (Malkin, 2005).

The focus on the machete as a murder weapon lasted, prompting even President Trump to focus on the brutality of MS-13’s machete killings. In his speech to Long Island law enforcement officials, Trump argued that la Mara Salvatrucha, “shouldn’t be here. They stomp on their victims. They beat them with clubs. They slash them with machetes, and they stab them with knives” (Trump, 2017). This latest narration of MS-13’s violent crimes followed a trend of “savage violence” dominating discourses surrounding la Mara Salvatrucha, with an emphasis on the primitive nature of the machete (Cienfuegos, 2016). These dominant political discourses fed into the general fear that MS-13 gang members would infiltrate middle-class life with violence (Cienfuegos 2016), an economic-based anxiety that applied to the Salvadoran diaspora more broadly.

In response, Salgado’s poem “Los Corvos” centers the machete in a positive light, completely separated from la Mara Salvatrucha. The poem starts by narrating the way the narrator’s mother and grandmother garden with a machete and ends by comparing the narrator’s lover to a weed that can be similarly cut out. Instead of viewing the machete as a threat to commonplace, domestic life the way President Trump’s speech constructed it, Salgado includes the machete as a centerpiece of her home life. The poem opens with the lines, “we keep a machete in our home/Mami uses it to cut the weeds/on Saturday afternoons” (Salgado, 2017).

Here, the machete is stripped of the brutality and primitiveness that dominated political discourses by describing the blade’s use in the context of the homey pastime of gardening. Additionally, the machete is centered as part of the household. The use of “home,” instead of “house” or another synonym, is important because “home” carries a much more positive connotation, one closely associated with comfort and intimacy. Diction further conveys a sense of comfort found within the machete when Salgado writes, later in the poem, that “the blade is our friend.” The word friend similarly conveys a sense of comfort and intimacy.

The second stanza of the poem focuses on the way the narrator’s grandmother used a machete in El Salvador, subverting the danger of the machete by reframing it as a non-threatening tool instead of a savage weapon. The narrator’s grandmother uses the machete to clear “tree branches” and “overgrown bamboo” and Salgado writes that, “Mamita, mami’s mami,/used to grab her own machete/ back in El Salvador.../her tiny frame in the distance/her right arm extended/the blade catching the sunlight” (Salgado, 2017).

First, referring to her grandmother as “Mamita” is critical to portraying the machete as non-threatening because it softens the depiction of the machete’s wielder. In the Spanish language, the suffixes “-ita” or “-ito” are commonly added to names as a term of endearment. The suffixes are diminutive, implying that Mamita is small in stature, further conveyed by the descriptor of her “tiny frame.” Salgado rids the machete of its perceived danger by fram- ing her grandmother, through both description and diction, as non-threatening.

Lastly, Salgado presents the machete as an integral part of the Salvadoran immigrant identity, finding a sense of pride and strength in its image rather than a source of criminality. Salgado frames the machete as part of the tradition of Salvadoran immigrant families, saying that “I come from women/who fend for themselves.” The narrator then uses the image a source of power in her own life, saying that “you are a weed/I know to slice you out of me.” The metaphor of a toxic man in her life as a weed continues to reframe the machete for use in the domestic sphere, not for murder, while simultaneously presenting the machete as a staple of the Salvadoran immigrant identity.

Salgado’s poem “A Salvadoran Heart,” is divided into four different sections that talk about her relationship with her Salva- doran-American ethnicity. The very first section offers the narrator’s genesis story. She writes, “I come from women of corn and cotton fields/of machete/and fire” (Salgado, 2017). The machete is presented as a foundational part of her identity, alongside “corn” and “cotton fields.” Corn is important as both the staple of Mesoamerican diets and religious belief system held by the indigenous people of what is now El Salvador (Rodriguez, 2006). For many years, cotton was a main Central American export (Rodriguez, 2009). Both cotton and corn are foundational to the history of the Salvadoran nation as the source of economic and cultural sustenance. Including them in this paragraph implies that cotton and corn are, metaphorically, a central part of the narrator’s Salvadoran-American identity.

Later in the poem, Salgado metaphorically uses two fruits, jocotes and mangos, in the same way. Jocotes and mangos are both popu- lar fruits cultivated in El Salvador. When the narrator says that “my tongue came to me through a jocote seed” and that “I am the daughter of a river and mango tree” (Salgado, 2017), she frames these objects positively, as the sources of her voice and life respectively. By including machete alongside the images of corn, cotton, jocotes, and mangos, she implies, positively, that the machete is a critical aspect of her Salvadoran-American identity.

By making the machete personal, she decriminalizes the tool and presents in a positive light. Salgado’s use of the machete in both these poems serves as a harsh contra-diction to the images of male, machete-waving, barbaric MS-13 gang members perpetrated by politicians seeking to justify broad immigration policies. She highlights the law-abiding, domestic lives that the majority of Salvadoran immigrants live, throwing into question the dominant political discourses that paint Salvadoran immigrants as criminals. Salgado’s use of the machete is not necessarily reactionary or consciously sparked by the specific speeches given by Trump and Obama. It is likely that she writes about the machete because her childhood home prominently featured one with a practical pur- pose—gardening. But given that the machete is so loaded for the Salvadoran diaspora given its sensationalized relation to MS-13, the reframing of the machete in her poetry is important to illustrate the way the Salvadoran diaspora understands itself outside of dominant discourses of criminality.