ReCurrent: Central American Art and Resistance in 1980’s LA

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Announcer: This is a Getty Podcast.

Jaime Roque: It’s Los Angeles in the mid-1980s. In a small church in Echo Park, people are quietly moving in and out, trying not to draw attention. Down in the basement, it’s different. There are posters drying on the floor, someone rehearsing lines in the corner, and a guitar case open on a folding chair. These weren’t just creative moments. For the people gathering here, art was survival.

[Indigenous flute music plays]

Rubén Martínez: Everybody arrived with some level of trauma, but some people really, really had it hard, losing family members. And so these were a kind of, you know, putting some ointment on the wound. It was art, like a weapon, yes!

Roque: In 1980s Los Angeles, rooms and basements inside some local churches became places where people facing unimaginable loss turned to art—poems, songs, performances—as a way to survive and process what they had experienced. Most of that work was never recorded, yet it shaped the city in ways we’re only now beginning to understand. I wanted to know what that meant, what it felt like to live it, and what it means now as people work to preserve this history before it fades.

Hello, my name is Jaime, and welcome to ReCurrent.

Martínez: I’m Rubén Martínez. I’m a professor at Loyola Marymount University. I’m the son of a Salvadorian immigrant who came to this country before the civil wars.

[Percussion music plays]

Roque: Ruben was born in Los Angeles to immigrants—a Salvadorian mother and Mexican father. And in the 1980s, he was a young artist interested in migration stories. He soon became involved in supporting the new arrivals, moving through those churches and parks, and making art as a movement unfolded.

When we met, though, I asked him to start at the beginning. I wanted him to tell me what was happening in Central America that pushed so many people to leave home.

Martínez: So during the 1980s there were civil wars, major conflicts in El Salvador and Guatemala. There had also been a revolution in Nicaragua. There was political instability in Honduras throughout what we call the Northern Triangle region of Central America.

And the United States was heavily involved in those conflicts and I think at this point most people would agree with that; we were on the wrong side. We were supporting governments that were murderous, that supported death squads, that supported torture, that supported anti-democratic institutions in the region. By the 1980s, the pressure on people had just gotten to the point where civil war broke out in both Guatemala and El Salvador, and that sent hundreds of thousands of people, by some estimates over a million people, within a decade, northward.

Roque: But once in the US, these migrants faced a new challenge—obtaining legal status to stay there.

Martínez: The refugees fleeing terrible violence in those countries found doors closed to them in the official sense.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan was president the first part of the decade, George Bush after that. Those were Republican governments that supported the murderous regimes in Central America, and because of that, admitting people as refugees would’ve been a complete contradiction in terms.

And so basically they said, no, these are not refugees. They’re communists, they’re this, they’re that, they’re economic—they just want to get more money for their families in the United States.

[Slow Mexican folk guitar music plays]

Roque: So families fleeing wars arrived in cities across the US and were told they didn’t qualify for refugee status. With few avenues for obtaining legal status, migrants soon faced the reality that they would not be able to legally work, rent apartments, or qualify for support services.

Then, churches stepped in.

Martínez: So it was at that point that there was a moral reckoning among communities of faith throughout the country, and specifically in Tucson and in Berkeley, California. Two Presbyterian parishes opened their doors to the refugees, at first quietly, and then very publicly. And this is what came to be known as the Sanctuary Movement.

[Guitar music continues]

Roque: The word “sanctuary” means a sacred place but also a place of refuge and protection. The Sanctuary Movement is so named in part because churches, synagogues, and other religious buildings—places that are sanctuaries in the religious sense of the word—have had a long history of serving as places of refuge for those in need.

Churches were sanctuaries for Christians fleeing Roman persecution; law during the Medieval period in Europe codified these buildings as protected spaces. Judeo-Christian faith communities also had strong social and moral teachings that compelled them to look after others, particularly those in need.

If you fast forward to the language we use now—“sanctuary cities”—you can feel the same instinct at work. Today, that term is about mayors and city councils limiting how much local police cooperate with federal immigration authorities. But back in the 80’s, sanctuary meant something more immediate: spare mattresses in church classrooms, volunteer lawyers, food pantries in basements. But in both cases, the idea is the same: local communities creating protection when federal policy refuses to. This is why these communities stepped in when Central American migrants to the US faced great need and few options.

Martínez: Tens of thousands of people received some sort of sanctuary, whether direct housing or aid, getting connected with food banks. The needs were so great at that point—people were arriving with nothing but the clothes on their backs—that the churches had to provide a lot of basic needs. So “sanctuary” was the umbrella term for all those needs that were being fulfilled.

Roque: Some churches went public with their support for migrant communities; others stayed quiet. But all were defying federal law, which claimed these new migrants were in the country illegally. Nonetheless, the Movement spread from Tucson and Berkeley to the rest of the nation, including Los Angeles.

[Psychedelic Cumbia music plays]

One reason the Sanctuary Movement became so impactful in LA is because hundreds of thousands of the Central American newcomers moved through Los Angeles, many eventually settling here. The city sits less than 150 miles from the US–Mexico border and has a long history of Spanish settlement—a history that predates its history as a US city.

By the mid-80s, the neighborhoods around a big park near downtown LA were becoming a hub for Central American refugees. People called it Little Central America. And these migrants brought with them diverse experiences and backgrounds.

Martínez: So among the refugees there is every social stratum you can imagine—from campesinos, peasants, to urban workers, educators, PhDs, university professors, students, labor activists, everyone, because the violence touched everybody. Among the hundreds of thousands of people who arrived in Los Angeles, there were many poets and painters and musicians.

Roque: The artists Ruben is talking about weren’t visiting Central America from afar or workshopping abstract ideas. They were people who had just fled war—teachers, organizers, poets, musicians—arriving in Los Angeles often with almost nothing but the clothes on their backs. They brought their own traditions, stories, and ways of making art with them, and those would soon spill out onto stages and park lawns across the city.

These artists, they served a critically important role in the Movement—building community. To understand how, you need to know that MacArthur Park is a neighborhood, but it’s also literally a park, a big one, with a bandshell. This space became a hub of political and social activity for the migrant community.

Martínez: And on that stage, there was countless performances, you know, with political speeches and music and poetry, during the whole time of the war, which lasted 13 years and even afterwards. It was kind of like creating a cultural home for the refugees. And it was also consciousness-raising. It was saying, this is what’s going on back home, this is the political situation, this is what’s going on in the civil war, this is what the United States is doing to support the dictatorships. And so they were solidarity events. It was art like a weapon, yes. Everybody arrived with some level of trauma, but some people really, really had it hard, losing family members and stuff like that. And so these events were a kind of putting some ointment on the wound, in addition to carrying a political message.

[Slow guitar music plays]

Roque: So the art at MacArthur Park was doing two things at once. It was a weapon—calling out US policy and the violence back home—and it was a kind of collective therapy session. People who had lost family, who had crossed borders with nothing, could see themselves reflected, mourn together, and imagine a future.

Most of that work wasn’t coming from professors or long-time Angelenos; it was coming from the refugees themselves.

Which brings us to Elia Arce and her work with Echo Park United Methodist Church.

Elia Arce: My name is Elia Arce. My complete name is Elia Maria de La Trinidad Arce Rodriguez. I grew up in a small town called Santo Domingo de Heredia in Costa Rica, but I actually was born in Los Angeles. I left Los Angeles when I was two, something like that, and I came back when I was 21.

Roque: Elia grows up in Costa Rica, and like Rubén, her political awakening is tied directly to Central America in the late 1970s. Costa Rica was relatively stable politically and economically during the 70s and 80s, but she felt an affinity for her nation’s neighbors.

Arce: A friend of mine from Costa Rica was in New York at that time—he was a filmmaker. He said, “What are you doing there?” He said, “ You should come to New York.” He took me to this place called the Latin American Workshop, which was a factory that had been taken over by these activists, political activists, that were all involved in the Solidarity Movement with Central America.

Roque: And that leads to a film project in Nicaragua during the civil war. She spends a year there helping to make a movie about the conflict—and that experience pulls her deeper into the Solidarity Movement. When the film is done, the path eventually brings her to Los Angeles, right as the Sanctuary Movement is in full swing.

[Psychedelic Cumbia music plays]

Roque: She arrives in 1985 and moves to Echo Park, a neighborhood just north of MacArthur Park with a historically large Latino population. The Sanctuary Movement and Central American community organizing are in full swing.

And as a Central American herself who worked on a film publicizing the ongoing Nicaraguan civil war, she jumps right in. She soon connects with Ruben, and they begin collaborating on new performance and multimedia artworks inspired by the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton, whose work was banned in El Salvador under the dictatorship.

But Rubén and Elia need a place to perform.

Arce: Somebody mentioned the Echo Park Methodist Church.

Roque: Echo Park United Methodist Church—alongside La Placita near Olvera Street and Dolores Mission in Boyle Heights—is one of the early churches in LA to publicly offer sanctuary to Central American refugees.

Arce: I went and I met this really, really cool pastor. And so when I went to ask him, he said, “Sure, of course, no problem”.

Roque: That pastor was Reverend David Farley.

We met online for our conversation.

David Farley: My name is David Farley. I am currently the pastor emeritus of Echo Park United Methodist Church.

Roque: Reverend Farley came to Echo Park United Methodist in 1982, right before the big influx of Central American refugees. As more families arrived and the neighborhood began to change, the church started to get involved: first just by connecting with people as neighbors, then more intentionally supporting those new arrivals. Over time, those relationships would pull the church directly into the Sanctuary Movement.

Farley: We were not just getting involved with a Sanctuary Movement, we were very much involved with the Solidarity Movement related to the struggle in Central America. And so…those kind of went together.

Roque: By then, Echo Park United Methodist wasn’t just a Sunday church anymore.

Farley: Our ministry developed in a sort of creative combination that was sort of artists, activists and refugees.

Roque: On any given night, the building was full, meetings in one room, rehearsals in another, kids running through the hallways, and upstairs former classrooms became organizing hubs. The Los Angeles Poverty Department had an office there. Muralist Ernesto Delosa used one of the old rooms as a studio. Downstairs, something else was taking shape.

Farley: We had what was called the basement coffee house. That was your classic 60s coffee house there in the 80s. We had poetry readings there. We had a lot of songwriters, a lot of, you know, cultural events, little fundraisers for different community organizations.

Arce: He had created the basement of the church into a cultural gathering spot.

Martinez: When Ellie and I started collaborating, that became like our—the first place where we staged performances with our new Central American artist friends.

Roque: Once the doors were open, the rooms kept filling: musicians, poets, theater groups, kids from the neighborhood. Thinking back, Reverend Farley is struck by some of the musicians who found refuge there.

Farley: There were a number of Central American musicians and singers as well. The group Sabia, it was Mari Riddle, Erica Verba, Carolina Rivera Escamia, Rosa Perez, and, and they were specifically message pieces. The Nueva canción, a lot of that messaging.

Roque: Sabia was a part of a wave of Latin American musicians bringing Nueva canción. A folk rooted protest music with traditional instruments and powerful lyrics against political oppression, social injustice, and inequality. Songs that had been censored or criminalized back home now echoing through a Methodist church basement.

Farley: You know, there’s support groups, there were healing circles. And that was often done through music and art. For example, the the La Llorona presentation was, was definitely that kind of spiritual empowerment, feminist element to it too, but very much dealing with grief and community healing. I remember the puppets and the music and the the sharing of the poetry, Roque Dalton.

Roque: And it wasn't just performances on stage. Art was being made there too.

Farley: That whole silk screen project was an example. We worked a lot with young people in the neighborhood and they would be involved in creating, expressing themselves on t-shirts or posters or, you know, doing folk, doing graffiti style kinds of art and things like that. The art definitely was therapeutic and designed to be therapeutic for those involved.

Roque: Sometimes what started downstairs spilled into the sanctuary in the form of full community theater.

Farley: We actually created a couple of musicals, one called Midwife Joe. That was a Christmas story, but it was a story within a story, where some young girl who didn't get in the Christmas play and she was pissed off of it, and her grandma, grandma said, no, don’t, don't worry about that. And she falls asleep and she dreams the Christmas story, but it’s about María and José on their way to get that green card.

Roque: Nuevo canción, Dalton's words, silkscreen posters, art made by and for people who had just arrived, circulating through the same building where so many were still unsure of what came next or where they were even allowed to belong. I asked Rubén who he remembered from those nights.

Martinez: And I was very lucky to be part of a social circle of artists that had just arrived. Rosa Perez, a poet and healer. Luis Lopez, a beloved musician. Milton Aviles, a great painter. Edgar Aparicio, a sculptor who became quite famous.

Roque: These were artists whose lives and works were shaped by exile and by the community forming around Sanctuary—at Echo Park and across the city. But there was one sculptor whose story I came back to because it captured just how deep the wounds were. And why the art being made in these spaces was absolutely necessary.

[Electric guitar music plays]

The Salvadoran artist Juan Edgar Aparicio had been a student leader back in El Salvador; his wife, brother, and daughter were killed in retaliation for his political work before he fled to Los Angeles as a refugee. In the mid-1980s and after, he carved and painted that trauma into reliefs and installations that confront the brutality of war and displacement.

His 1985 mixed-media piece Los Milicianos Bajo Fuego—The Militiamen Under Fire—shows carved figures caught in gouges and burns, evoking the violence he lived through. Another work, an installation titled Detention Center, recreates conditions inside a detention facility in El Centro, California, where Central American refugees were held before deportation: an upright carved figure gripping a rusted chain-link fence, his hands twisted and damaged, a reminder of torture survivors described, objects made out of necessity, grief, and the determination to keep a community alive.

I’m talking about Juan Edgar’s story, not to linger on his pain, but because his work shows how essential this art was. It was one of the few tools people had to express and process the unthinkable and to make sure it couldn’t be ignored.

Ruben and Elia were part of that circle too, but in a different kind of way. As US citizens with Central American roots, they carried a kind of stability that many of their friends didn’t have. Their solidarity showed up in the roles they could safely take on: organizing performances, talking to Reverend Farley, bringing people together, and helping keep the doors open. They leaned on that security to help create a stage where others—friends whose status was more precarious—could gather, share their stories, and be seen.

Arce: That became a place where I started to be friendly with him in a way that made me feel like it was a place for people to be safe. So at some point I just said to him, “So I heard that you, you know, [laughs] sometimes receive people here, and I was wondering if maybe you could, you know, receive my friends that are coming.” So for a few months I had friends with children that stayed there, that lived in the church, and he took care of them.

Farley: That’s what a church is supposed to be, a sanctuary. A sanctuary is more than just where you sit in the pews. It’s a sanctuary for people. It’s a safe haven and a place of welcome that’s there for people and, particularly, the marginalized.

[Guitar music plays]

Most of what happened in spaces like Echo Park United Methodist or MacArthur Park wasn’t carefully saved. The banners, the posters, the hand-drawn signs—those were tools for the moment. People taped them to sanctuary walls, stapled them to telephone poles, passed them out at rallies, and then moved on.

If you zoom out across Los Angeles, you start to see fragments of that visual record. And in each fragment, you can still feel what Rubén told me from the start: that in this movement, art was a weapon—but it was also an ointment.

This is why, decades later, a lot of what happened in those basements and parks only survives in memory and scattered traces. At the Getty Research Institute, Jasmine Magaña is part of a team trying to change that.

[Psychedelic Cumbia music plays]

Roque: This is why, decades later, a lot of what happened in those basements and parks only survives in memory and scattered traces. At the Getty Research Institute, Jasmine Magaña is part of a small team trying to change that.

Jasmine Magaña: So I joined the Latin American and Latinx Art Initiative in August 2023. And what drew me to the position was that there was an express desire to develop the initiative around Central American art, using that as a main focal point. And that’s practically unheard of in art history and in art spaces, even in Los Angeles, where the population of Central Americans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans specifically, are the largest outside of their countries.

Roque: The Latin American and Latinx Art Initiative, also referred to as LALAI, aims to increase access to research materials about Latin American art. Their current focus is on Central America and its connection to Los Angeles. Their job is simple to say yet huge in practice: record the stories of Central American artists, some who fled the wars and landed in places like MacArthur Park and Echo Park, and others who grew up in the communities that formed around Sanctuary. Today, that mostly means oral histories: longer recorded interviews with artists in Los Angeles and in Central America that become a public, permanent record of the people behind the posters, performances, and neighborhood art that shaped a generation.

Magaña: That’s what I love about oral histories. Artists are capable of telling their own story. You just need to give them a microphone.

Roque: For Jasmine, this work isn’t abstract. She grew up in Los Angeles, the daughter of Salvadoran immigrants, but rarely saw her history reflected in school or in museums. Because so much of the physical art from the Sanctuary years was never meant to last, these recorded voices become one of the only ways to keep the story alive. And that matters, because many of these artists are now elders. Their stories connect the MacArthur Park rallies and Echo Park basements of the 1980s to the work happening today: the children of refugees growing into the artists, organizers, and archivists reshaping institutions.

Rubén sees this throughline already—from Central American refugees on church floors becoming the artists and organizers shaping institutions now.

Martínez: To use a very obvious Central American metaphor: El Salvador’s a land of volcanoes. There was an eruption in 1980s, there was a volcanic eruption, that was the civil war and spewed out, you know, pain and people, and it propelled people to come here. The lava kind of settled, right, and then stuff started growing up. [laughs] You know? Organic matter started growing out of that very fertile soil that is volcanic soil. That’s why Central America is as fertile as it is. So to extend the metaphor, the fruits that we have today began with that explosion, that pain and death and sorrow and grief.

We’ve risen from the ashes of the volcano.

[Dreamy piano music plays]

Roque:  And just like that, we’ve reached the end of season two. And I just wanna say thank you so much for listening and for going on this journey with me. Please make sure to go back and listen to all the episodes for season two and season one, wherever you get your podcasts.

ReCurrent was written and produced by me, Jaime, with creative support from Zoe Goldman. Our executive producer is Christopher Sprinkle. And for transcripts, images, and additional resources for this episode, visit Getty dot edu slash podcast slash recurrent.

[Piano music fades out]