Irina Carlota (Lotti) Silber
Lotti Silber’s overarching work explores postwar processes in one of El Salvador’s former warzones and a region known for its peasant revolutionary participation. She documents what she terms the entangled aftermaths of war and displacement, aftermaths that have produced postwar deception and disillusionment and an “obligated” migration. Among her publications, Lotti’s book, Everyday Revolutionaries: Gender, Violence, and Disillusionment in Postwar El Salvador (2011) received the 2013 International Latino Book Award in the Best First Book, Nonfiction category. Lotti remains committed to pursuing various ethnographic genres. For example, she has been recognized for her poetry as evidenced in a first prize poetry award for her poem “Nanita,” from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association. Currently she is pursuing two projects. The first builds from her longitudinal research and explores the Salvadoran diaspora in the United States and Europe with an attention to the tensions between militant logics and humanitarianism. The second project, The Texture of Illness, is a new ethnographic study of childhood genetic difference.
Collected Work
After Stories: Transnational Intimacies of Postwar El Salvador
This book follows the trajectories—geographic, temporal, storied—of several extended Salvadoran families. Traveling back and forth in time and across borders, Silber narrates the everyday unfolding of diasporic lives rich with acts of labor, love, and renewed calls for memory, truth, and accountability in El Salvador's long postwar. Through a retrospective and intimate ethnographic method that examines archives of memories and troubles the categories that have come to stand for "El Salvador" such as alarming violent numbers, Silber considers the lives of young Salvadorans who were brought up in an everyday radical politics and then migrated to the United States after more than a decade of peace and democracy. She reflects on this generation of migrants—the 1.5 insurgent generation born to forgotten former rank-and-file militants—as well as their intergenerational, transnational families to unpack the assumptions and typical ways of knowing in postwar ethnography. As the 1.5 generation sustains their radical political project across borders, circulates the products of their migrant labor through remittances, and engages in collective social care for the debilitated bodies of their loved ones, they transform and depart from expectations of the wounded postwar that offer us hope for the making of more just global futures.