My father never intended to be a man on the run. But as a teenager, when the soldiers arrived at his bus stop, he had no choice. That first flight—sudden, unplanned—became the prelude to a life defined by refuge as his homeland slipped into civil war and the familiar streets of his youth turned into a battlefield of revolutionary resistance.

 

      He told the story casually, almost as if it belonged to someone else, between forkfuls of red beans and rice, the scent of my mother’s carne guisada thick in the air. The way he spoke, you would think it was just another family memory. But I recognized it for what it was: a past he has never fully released, one that continues to shape the admiration for my parents and what they endured growing up in wartime El Salvador.

 

      After the 6 pm Univision 14 newscast over cable television and the last bites of dinner, time slows, and the past pours out. Around this time, conversations usually break out, and sometimes, my dad will remember the past, living in El Salvador. We are finished eating around the dinner table, in our familiar arrangement, each in our usual spot, forks scraping against plates.

 

      Outside, the crack of fireworks pierces the stillness of a San Francisco evening in the Excelsior District—early celebrations for the Fourth of July. A neighborhood ritual unfolds: A week before the holiday, car alarms shriek in protest as M80s and cherry bombs detonate, wailing for a minute or two before falling silent. The fireworks crack like distant gunfire, and for a moment, I imagine what it might have been like to live in wartime El Salvador, where a random bomb explodes. Pandemonium erupts, or a shootout begins between the army and guerillas. But here, it’s just the neighborhood kids, mostly teenagers, lighting up the day with illegal fireworks and sprinting away before anyone catches them. Still, there’s unpredictability to it, and you can never quite calculate it. You pause, listen, and depending on how near or far you hear the blast, it tells you how close it was. Then, you go back to whatever it is you were doing, because here, you know it’s not war—it’s just another summer evening in the city.

 

      My father launched into one of his stories unprompted, as he often does. His voice dropped to a hushed tone—reserved for memories deep in the soul. He tells this story with the awe of a man still astonished by his fortune.

 

      On a warm, humid night in San Salvador, around 9 pm, he was heading home from night school—a common reality in El Salvador, where teenagers and young adults work during the day and attend school after dark. At 16 or 17, as a high school student, he rode the bus that would take him close to home. But the night was not as still as it seemed. Openly by the bus stop, soldiers lay in wait. He didn’t know it yet, but they weren’t there to check documents.

 

      As the bus came to a halt, soldiers emerged from the shadows. This was his stop. One by one, passengers were pulled from the bus and lined up against the bare wall of a corner house. He stood among them, silent and anxious like the rest. If eyes met, it was only briefly—their faces tense, expressionless, and filled with the quiet fear of what the night might bring. He knew people often disappear at night; he had seen it before but never experienced it firsthand.

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      The soldiers demanded proof of vialidad. In El Salvador, the vialidad, was on its surface, a mundane government-issued document—a receipt of sorts, proof that you had paid your dues to the state. But it became something far heavier leading up to and during the Civil War. It was meant to signal obedience—a kind of protective badge showing you weren’t a troublemaker or a danger. At least, that was the idea—and only men and boys carried them. To not have it was to invite suspicion. And suspicion, in wartime El Salvador, could be lethal. My father had the document in his pocket, proof that he was not a criminal and had paid his taxes.

 

      My father quickly realized these soldiers were potentially hunting for recruits—young men like him. In wartime, no one was safe; children as young as 12 years old were forcibly recruited to become military members. In the years leading up to the full eruption of El Salvador’s Civil War in 1980, violence was already part of daily life. Political disappearances, targeted killings, and nightly curfews were not uncommon. Young men—especially those perceived as poor—were often the first targets for forced recruitment, particularly in schools. The military didn’t need much reason; being in the wrong place at the wrong time was reason enough. My uncle, my father’s brother, narrowly escaped recruitment not once but twice. On both occasions, he was running late for class. As he approached the school gates, a woman at the front reception warned him not to enter—the soldiers were inside, rounding up students. Without hesitation, he turned around and walked back home. In those days, fear hung heavy in the air, clinging to every street corner like the acrid scent of burning trash.

 

      The soldiers began moving down the line, scrutinizing the passengers. My father’s heart pounded as he stood there, trapped. He noticed they weren’t carrying the rope they usually used to tie people of interest. Out of nowhere, a rare stroke of luck. Another bus's deep bass and rumble shattered the tense silence, pulling the soldiers’ attention away from the line of passengers they had just forced off. Three soldiers turned toward it as the bus approached, leaving only one behind. That one soldier, distracted and tired, leaned on his rifle like a walking stick, his back turned to my father and the other bus passengers lined up against the wall. My father was the second to last person in the line, the shadows of the street corner just behind him. He noticed a young man near his age, standing just beside him in line, his body rigid with decision. He was at the edge, poised, the moment stretching like a held breath. Then he moved—silent, swift, a motion blur down the rocky street. No hesitation, no second thoughts. He vanished into the shadows as if he had never been there at all.

 

      The soldier didn’t notice. No one noticed. No one saw but my father.

 

      My father didn’t wait to see if he should run; his instincts kicked in. He quickly ran, too, turning the corner and running downhill. The sharp rocks bit into his shoes, but adrenaline drove him forward. He knew this hill, its twists and turns carved into his memory from years of growing up there. The dark night wrapped around him. Reaching the bottom of the hill, he turned into a side street that led him back, up and around, to his house.

 

      He finally reached his home, full of adrenaline. He burst through the door, where his mother, Mercedes, was waiting.

 

      Her voice, sharp with worry, called out, “¿Estás bien, mijito?”

 

      “Sí, mamá, estoy bien,” he whispered, though his chest still heaved.

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      Mercedes exhaled sharply, gripping the edge of the wooden table as if steadying herself. She stepped forward, her hands tracing his arms, shoulders, and face—reassuring herself that he was real, whole, and safe. Pulling him into a tight embrace, she wept, her sobs heavy with emotion.

 

      It was the kind of cry that tore through the air, the kind that made it feel like she believed she would never see him again. I heard that cry before. She wept the same way each time we left El Salvador after one of our summer visits every four years growing up. And again, over long-distance phone calls in the ‘90s and early 2000s, when goodbyes came through a crackling landline. I can still hear those cries—deep, guttural, filled with grief that made each farewell feel final. As if each goodbye might be the last.

 

      Then, a loud cherry bomb exploded right on our corner, sharp and sudden, jolting us back into the present. We all flinched and exchanged glances, half-smiling at the careless youths playing with fireworks outside. And just like that, his story dissolved into the quiet hum of everyday life—the clinking of plates in the sink, the faint pop of fireworks echoing through the hills as the neighborhood kids carried on their explosive rampage across the Excelsior District. But I knew better. I knew that, in another version of history, another split-second decision, my father’s name might have been etched onto a tombstone plaque, whispered in mourning, lost to the silence that swallowed thousands during the Civil War.

 

      As a child, I never fully understood the weight my father carried. To me, he was simply a man who learned to become a mechanic, a dishwasher, a truck driver. A man who laughed loudly at old Cantinflas films and cracked jokes about the absurdity of life. But as I grew older, his stories began to feel like portals—passages into something far more profound. They were not just family anecdotes but survival testaments of a past building up to the 1980 Civil War in El Salvador.

 

      Only then did I begin to understand that I had been raised in the aftershock of war—a civil war that many in the U.S. recognized and protested. For some, Central America’s conflicts were another Vietnam in the making. They saw how U.S. tax dollars fueled brutal military campaigns across El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua.

 

      The caution with which my parents moved through life—the instinct to scan a room, to avoid drawing attention—can all be traced back to those years in El Salvador. My identity as a Salvadoran-American exists between two worlds: one rooted in the asphalt streets of San Francisco’s Mission District, lined with taquerías and pupuserías, the other shadowed by volcanoes and hills where guerrillas once schemed for revolution. The more I learn, the more I recognize that what I have inherited is a history scarred by suppressed revolutions, state violence, and fascism. Violence lingers in many of the memories he has recounted, and I still find myself asking: Has El Salvador always been marked by violence? I return often to 1932 and La Matanza, the massacre that marked a psychic rupture in the soul of El Salvador. I follow that scar across time, through the silences woven into so many Salvadoran families, and the stories my father began sharing with me in high school. Similar to other migrant communities that have been folded into the national story of the United States, Salvadorans are unofficial refugees. We are here not by choice, but by consequence. We are here because the U.S. went there—because Cold War policy turned our homeland into a proxy battlefield. 

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      And still, my father’s voice doesn’t tremble when he speaks of those nights. In his even tone, I hear a quiet endurance. In his decisions—both spoken and withheld—I see a resilience within him. He lived. A stroke of fortune, a flicker of instinct—now he sits at the table, telling me this story. A reminder that life is built on near misses, on choices that could have ended differently. That night in San Salvador, he was not the only teenager forced into a decision that would shape his life. He was one of thousands across El Salvador who learned, far too early, what it means to run for your life. And because he ran, I am here—to remember, write, and carry forward stories that might help others not forget what happened in our little pulgarcito.​