Changing women, changing nation: female agency, nationhood, and identity in trans-Salvadoran narratives

Changing Women, Changing Nation explores the literary representations of women in Salvadoran and US-Salvadoran narratives during the span of the last thirty years. This exploration covers Salvadoran texts produced during El Salvador's civil war (1980–1992) and the current postwar period, as well as US-Salvadoran works of the last two decades that engage the topic of migration and second-generation ethnic incorporation into the United States. Rather than think of these two sets of texts as constituting separate literatures, Yajaira M. Padilla conceives of them as part of the same corpus, what she calls "trans-Salvadoran narratives"—works that dialogue with each other and draw attention to El Salvador's burgeoning transnational reality. Through depictions of women in trans-Salvadoran narratives, Padilla elucidates a "story" of female agency and nationhood that extends beyond El Salvador's national borders and imaginings.