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I crossed the pond for the first time nine months ago. For the first time without a glimpse of the horizon, without the wind at my back. I’d crossed it before for work, for a scholarship, for pure pleasure. Always with a date and time in mind to return and resume my life, my occupations.
In the last year, at least 53 journalists fled El Salvador, under threat by the government of Nayib Bukele. Now I’m a photographer in exile, another migrant among the many migrants from my country. Among the many colleagues who’ve also become migrants.
One winter morning, I saw a pair of chairs on top of a shipping container. I remembered Bad Bunny’s latest album. I remembered that Saturday afternoon when my mother gave my grandmother a stack just like them. There were four, in the front yard, surrounded by lush plants.
I’d migrated since I was a child. At the age of four, my parents moved to a new town. Those were the last years of the civil war in El Salvador, although it had no connection to that conflict, which was felt less in our area.
At 16, I returned to the same town I thought I had left behind. The earthquake of January 13, 2001, destroyed our house and brought us back. Three years passed, then I traveled to the capital, San Salvador, to study.
Shards of a New Salvadoran Exile
Now it’s different. “If I go back to my house, that place that expelled me no longer exists,” a friend, colleague, and neighbor told me, “because the girl who used to bother me at my door every morning doesn’t live there either.” He means my daughter.
That winter morning, I got off my bike, descended a small hill, and crossed a field of frozen crops. The wind whipped my face. But I felt an overwhelming urge to take the picture — that overwhelming urge of a photographer.
“That could be a scene from my country, but it’s not,” said another colleague who also went into exile in May 2025. He’s right; it’s not our country. Nor could it be. There’s no warm landscape in sight, nor my grandmother’s smile.