Resumen

GRIMALDI, Grazzia  y  MOODIE, Ellen. From not knowing to knowing and back again: insecurity and intimacy in El Salvador’s postwar. Alteridades [online]. 2022, vol.32, n.63, pp.13-25.  Epub 19-Sep-2022. ISSN 2448-850X.  https://doi.org/10.24275/uam/izt/dcsh/alteridades/2022v32n63/grimaldi.

Shortly after the end of El Salvador’s civil war (1980-1992), Salvadorans began to experience a new kind of insecurity-an affective state of not knowing when to feel anxiety. Their war-era survival repertoire could not account for the new postwar context. Slowly, and then suddenly, gangs converted into the new principal danger in the Central American country. Today they have become figures of intimacy in El Salvador’s political and community life. As the thirtieth anniversary of the Peace Accords nears, in this article, based on a combined 30 years of ethnographic fieldwork, we consider transformations in senses of insecurity, from not knowing to knowing and back again, as well as continuing forms of unknowing, that perpetuate unequal distributions of power in urban San Salvador.

Palabras llave : transition from war; affect; anxiety; gang members; criminalization.