Young people, the dances and the Salvadoran gangs of the eighties

Abstract

Academic research on Central American gangs began three decades ago in 1988 here in Guatemala, El Salvador the following year. Honduras in 1993. These studies provide us with the first descriptions and conclusions about these gangs. Unfortunately, later literature has paid little attention to these pioneering studies, resulting in an imperfect and incomplete understanding of these gangs and their time.Taking the case of El Salvador, new information is provided on the critical role played by “dances” and dance in the formation and development of gangs in this country. For these first gangs, the dances were important spaces of youthful socialization that with time became the place where the rivalry between different maras was expressed in the form of dance. However, rivalries were generated over time. The American dance fashion of “break dancing” and its adoption by young Salvadorans of the eighties was important in this process and will be discussed. This paper is based on sixty-five oral history interviews with former members of several of these non-existent gangs and Salvadoran newspapers of the 1980s.