It's Teach Central America Week! This week hundreds of teachers from 34 U.S. states, D.C., and four other countries (Bermuda, Honduras, Colombia, and Canada) have committed to #TeachCentralAmerica.

For the past few weeks, we’ve been focusing our attention on resources for teaching about different countries in Central America. So far, we’ve touched on Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua.

Today, we’re turning our attention to El Salvador, a country known as the “Land of Volcanoes” because of the more than twenty volcanoes in the region.

This series of high school lessons by Justin Sybenga uses the country of El Salvador as a case study to provide important historical context for contemporary immigration issues. The lessons were developed for use in conjunction with the website When We Were Young There Was a War. Students explore the push and pull factors that have impacted immigration from El Salvador since the 1980s, research the various policies that have regulated immigration from El Salvador since 1965, fact-check common myths about immigration from El Salvador to the United States, and develop their own recommendations on a current immigration policy question.

In workshops on Central America, we often begin with the question, “How many Central Americans of note can you name?" Below, read about two Salvadorans. You can find these bios in Central America: An Introductory Lesson.

Maria Serrano was a young mother when she began organizing her fellow campesinos (farmers) to ask for land and rights from the corrupt Salvadoran government during the U.S.-backed civil war. Serrano joined the guerrilla forces of the FMLN in their fight against the government. After the peace accords, she became a legislator in the National Assembly and served her country as Minister of the Interior, where she continued her quest to bring dignity and rights to the poor of El Salvador. Learn more from the award-winning documentary about her life called Maria’s Story.

Archbishop Oscar Romero was a religious leader and activist in El Salvador during the 1960s and 1970s. Romero fought fervently for the rights of the oppressed and was a key figure in the religious movement to practice “liberation theology.” In February 1980, he wrote a letter to President Carter asking him to halt U.S. military assistance to the Salvadoran government. On March 24, 1980, Romero was assassinated while he was giving mass. Over 250,000 people attended his funeral, which became a protest against the government. He became an icon to El Salvador’s revolution, and he was canonized as a saint in 2018.

On May 5th, 1991, people took to the streets of Washington D.C.’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood to protest the police shooting of Daniel Gomez, a young man from El Salvador. The uprising called attention to the deep and widespread discrimination experienced by the Latinx community. Through testimony, song, poetry, and street theatre, the new documentary La Manplesa weaves together the collective memory of one of D.C.’s first barrios and dives into the roots of the ‘91 rebellion.

In 2017, El Salvador became the first country in the world to ban metal mining. Robin Broad and John Cavanagh present the story of the social struggles and legal battles behind that ban in The Water Defenders (Beacon Press, 2021). 

Help us give teachers and parents the tools to teach Central American history and multicultural education. Give today.

See our project advisors.