Self-Portrait. Acrylic on wood. 36” x 36” (2014).
This essay was first published in Spanish in the magazine Diálogo, Vol. 23.2, Fall 2020, University of Texas Press, editors Rocio Ferreira and Isabel Quintana.
From fragmentation to integration: the evolution of Martivón Galindo’s inner world and artistic expression
by Isidra Mencos
The Fragmentation of Violence
One of the first things that hits you when you look at Salvadoran artist Martivón Galindo’s works is her complex representation of female figures. Women fill the frame with their spine cracked open from top to bottom; with a fractured head and another female escaping from the wound like a dream; floating gracefully like mythical birds; hounded by voracious hands that attack their groin; dissociated between themselves and their reflection; with their edges disintegrating in the wind and uniting their present with eternity. Women in reds, greens, blues and yellows. Women alone and in powerful groups that march fearlessly forward.
Galindo has spent thirty-six years pouring into her art a meditation that contrasts the reality she has endured—especially, gender violence and social injustice in El Salvador—with wild spaces nourished by her subconscious and what she calls, “the perennial vibrations of life.”
Born in San Salvador in a middle-class family, her first influences were two strong but antithetic women: her serious, refined, and structured mother, Antonia, and her irreverent grandmother, Juana.
Her mother, even though she became the first woman Minister of Culture and Education in El Salvador, brought up Martivón to be a conventional young lady. “My mother’s dream was for me to marry a wealthy doctor, live in a nice house, raise children… the middle-class dream in our country,” says the artist. On the other hand, her grandmother hated rules and didn’t respect societal laws. “I thought all grandmothers were free-spirited like mine, that they all dressed up and wore perfume,
laughed all the time and swore up a storm, but once I started high school, I saw that my friends’ grandmothers were completely different,” she says, laughing.
Both women, with all their contrasts, are present in everything the artist does. They feed her free spirit, that pushes her to publish her own books and share her art in Facebook, and her passion for learning and education.
As a child, Martivón lived with a second fracture that made her dissociate from her own gender. “I envied my brother, because he was allowed to do whatever he wanted. I was jealous because he had toys that I didn’t, he wore his hair short and I had these enormous curls, he rode a bike and they gave me dolls, he was allowed to be out in the street, and I couldn’t.” She dreamed of being a man, because she equated maleness with power. “I felt divided, because I wondered, what’s the point of being a woman, if you only get limitations and prohibitions?” she says.
The systemic violence women suffered under a brutal military dictatorship opened an even deeper fracture. “Both men and women were harassed and tortured,” says the artist, “but a woman’s gender made her more susceptible to humiliation in the soldiers’ sick minds. They occupied her
vulnerability. This type of violence opens cracks that go beyond the physical. It affects you mentally and morally, because you become disillusioned with the human race. The emotional fissures showed up in my art as girls flying out of the head of a grown woman, as female figures that weren’t whole anymore, as women cracked open from their throat to their sex. And they still come out, because there are remnants in my memory, and I allow them to surface.”
There’s Always a Small Window.
Monotype with dry point. 22” x 30” (2001).
The 70s were a turbulent time in El Salvador. The enormous gap between the oligarchs who controlled the land and the destitute majority that lived almost in servitude, had become unbearable. In the cities, you found the same inequalities in pay, the same abuses toward the working class. Movements for social justice and popular revolts grew, culminating with the formation of armed guerrillas violently repressed by the military. The universities, and the Jesuits that ran them, sided with the popular movements. They were not involved with the guerrillas, but the government branded them as communists.
In 1979 the violence and unrest escalated into a civil war that lasted twelve years and left a bloody legacy: over 100,000 dead, over 10,000 disappeared, thousands of orphaned children, and thousands jailed, raped, and tortured. In addition, the country’s infrastructure was destroyed, and the loss of foreign capital and the closure of businesses left the economy in tatters.
Martivón Galindo had been preoccupied with social justice since childhood. Her grandmother Juana raised an orphaned girl, who became pregnant at age 17. She abandoned the baby and Juana raised her as well in her home. Martivón was 7 years old at the time and the baby became her little doll. “I didn’t understand why they treated us differently,” she says. “I went to a better school than she did. I fought with my grandmother and mother because they wouldn’t let her attend the same school. I demanded that they adopt her, and I always introduced her as my sister, which made my mother angry.”
Her desire for justice developed further when her school took the students to low-income neighborhoods to dole out religious instruction and candy. Upon seeing the immense poverty, she confronted the nuns because they didn’t do enough to help. But this sensitivity got watered down when she got back home to her fancy dresses and parties.
Martivón studied architecture, married young, had a son, and started practicing her profession. She was finally able to exercise the power she had always longed for as a child. “I could give orders, walk in the streets, and do as I pleased,” she says. “But later came another fracture because I realized this power was meaningless.”
By then, she had divorced, was taking on her own architectural projects, and studying Humanities at the Universidad Católica. Her earlier yearning for justice came back in force, influenced by her Jesuit professors. “My beloved priests, Father Ellecuría, Father Martín Baró, Father Segundo Montes, and all those who would be assassinated by the military in the 1989 massacre, had an amazing social conscience. They made me see the real country I lived in,” she says. As she participated in Monseñor Romero’s social justice projects, she questioned her career. “Although I loved designing beautiful spaces, I started noticing my clients’ capriciousness and selfishness. They would demand that I pay my workers less so I could lower the price of the project. How could I create beauty in the middle of all this crap?”
In 1980 a far-right paramilitary group assassinated Monseñor Romero. Things went from bad to worse. “To the institutionalized violence that had already entered my system—the violence that makes children’s neurons not thrive due to malnutrition, that makes people have no hope for the future—another violence was added. Those were very hard years, because you never knew if you might be killed during a shooting when you left your house in the morning, or maybe a friend was captured, or people you loved disappeared—until it ended up being you who disappeared.”
During her last year in University, she taught design at the Universidad Nacional because at that point there were barely any architecture jobs. The only thing middle- and upper-class people built were tall walls to protect their houses from the guerillas. Martivón’s association with the two universities was suspicious. Her mother asked her to leave, but she paid her no attention. As a precaution, her mother wrote to her ex-husband in the United States, asking that he request residency to bring the family there. “I never intended to leave my country,” says Martivón. “And, of course, I didn’t even want to think about coming to the United States because I hated them for their interventionist role in El Salvador. The United States had trained the military and paramilitary groups, provided them weapons, gave them a million dollars daily.”
She will never know with certainty who reported her to the authorities, but one night she was detained in her own house and thrown in jail. She doesn’t like talking about this period, not only to avoid remembering the humiliations she suffered but also because she doesn’t want to pose as a victim. She considers herself one of the lucky ones because she eventually got out of prison and emigrated to California. It was 1981. “I spent many years battling survivor’s guilt, because many people died or disappeared, and I was alive and well in San Francisco. In talking to other survivors, I realized many shared the same sentiment.”
This forced exile added a last painful fracture to her life—the split between her beloved country and the new one, which she resented. It would take her years to heal this fracture.
The Years of Rage
In California, Martivón Galindo began producing art consistently, adding a pictorial side to the poetry she had always written. She earned her living working an array of different jobs and took care of her son. At the same time, she began experimenting with various artistic mediums, starting with oil paintings.
She refers to the period between 1984 and 1990 as “The Years of Rage,” years in which anger for what was happening in her country, and the role the United States was playing in the war poured out. “Chaos,” an oil painting in which clowns and strange people merge with an eagle’s eye, parts of the American flag, and Ronald Reagan’s chin, is a defining work from this period.
At the end of 1985, Martivón Galindo, together with fourteen other Salvadoran artists and writers, founded CÓDICES in San Francisco (Center of Documentation and Investigation of the Culture of El Salvador). They organized numerous events, including art exhibitions, plays, concerts, conferences and workshops. They would go on to exhibit in the United States, El Salvador and Japan.
It was an era of friendship and warmth which helped Martivón overcome the rage that had seized her. “Our words and our art showed our pain, and our music expressed our hope,” she says. Little by little, thanks to the solidarity of her Salvadoran friends and the Americans who supported them, she accepted that the actions of a hostile government and the actions of its citizens were two distinct things and she made peace with her adoptive country.
In 1987, Martivón and the Salvadoran painter Ricardo Portillo presented their work in an exhibition in which she explored pastel painting techniques. Portillo’s themes centered on indigenous women and Martivón’s on indigenous children. She recalled the children who flew the violence, the children of the war. “From the moment my grandmother’s foster daughter came into my life, children have deeply moved me. They were a major factor in my pursuit of social justice in El Salvador,” she says. It’s a sad series, featuring children with wide fear-filled eyes, painted with an expressive realism in predominantly earth tones.
Being a Child Shouldn’t Hurt.
Pastel. 20” x 24”. (1987).
Memories Revived
In 1991 the Argentinian artist Claudia Bernardi contacted CÓDICES and offered to teach printing techniques to Salvadoran refugees. With the support of the KALA Institute and the California Art Council, Claudia and four other Salvadoran artists, including Martivón Galindo, opened a print workshop named Tamoanchán.
The five artists involved in Tamoanchán formed a strong bond of friendship. They filled the workshop with laughter, shared meals, parties, and personal and creative growth. At the same time, Martivón felt accepted by her classmates at UC Berkeley, where she had begun doctorate studies in Latin American Literature. Perhaps this emotional strength and inner happiness was what allowed her most difficult memories of the violence in El Salvador to surface in her artwork. They came through symbolic images filled with color and surprising compositions.
This is where Martivón Galindo’s love story with monotype begins—monotype is a printing technique that allows only one print of each work. “This technique has touched me the most deeply because monotype speaks to you,” she explains. “I would put one color in, and it would come out completely differently. At first it made me angry, but one day I said to myself: ‘Why am I fighting this? I’m going to let it speak to me, control me, and answer me.’ From that moment on, if something unexpected came out, I took that path … It was like a game, but also a lesson in humility. When I started treating the medium this way, my relationship with it grew because I accepted that I wasn’t in control … just as I have never had complete control over my life. I saw it as a reflection of my life. Monotype has brought me twenty-nine years of play, meditation, and even dance.”
Her pictorial work and her poetry filled in this period with heartrending screams, and with dismembered, broken, harassed bodies.
In “Sumpul,” a symphony of reds and yellows burns in a space where disembodied heads seem planted in the soil, and the amorphous background shields the perpetrators of this horror in anonymity.
Sumpul.
Colography. Printed on paper. 15” x 12” (1995).
In “Mayan Woman Throwing Herself to the Dogs,” the almost schematic strokes, the grotesquely dislocated leg of a woman raped, thrown about in an absurd position, and the primary red color of the blood, jump from the surface of the painting. This work, and others like the procession of “Mothers of the Disappeared,” portrayed in sad blue tones with the mothers’ features blurred—because the pain they experience is universal—, evoke Goya’s Black Paintings. Goya also expressed the presence of evil in the human experience with anonymous, blurry, terrifying figures.
Mayan Woman Throwing Herself to the Dogs.
Monotype. 22” x 30” (1995).
MOTHERLAND
By Martivón Galindo
Motherland! If I embody you,
if my eyes are traveling records of your twists and turns,
if my mouth murmurs your sounds,
if my scent is a mixture of your mountains and hills,
And I go on showing your volcanoes abroad,
I stop in the street corners blossoming,
and they admire my Rosy Trumpet Tree, fire flower,
they become frightened by my thunder, my burning belches of lava.
And I go on yelling your grievances,
showing your festering sores, the gums of children with no teeth,
forgive me, my old lady, for not being prudent,
as when I undress myself, I may undress your disgraces,
your living dead.
Motherland! You there and me here, present within you.
Martivón mentions artists who inspire her, but she asserts that she never remains fixated on any of them, because she craves the freedom to develop her own voice. She loves how Picasso’s disfigured spaces, Frida Kahlo’s passion, Ana Mendieta’s videos of figures burning in space or disintegrating into sand, as if to indicate that everything is futile even though we might believe we are so important. She calls upon Guayasamín for his exaggeration in communicating anguish, as well as Siqueiros, for the hyperbolic figures in his murals, the enormous hands, the emphatic gestures.
In 1995, Tamoanchán lost the financial support of the California Art Council and the space that KALA Institute had provided and became an independent group. Ricardo Portillo, Carlos Cartagena, Víctor Cartagena, Martivón Galindo and Carmen Alegría, the last artist a new addition to the group in this second phase, kept exhibiting in the United States and El Salvador.
Painful memories of Martivón’ s past still surfaced in works like “Circle of Tears” and “Tattooed in My Memory.” Nevertheless, themes rooted in the beauty of art and her Latin heritage began to appear, including homages to various painters and writers, or the piece “Cuba and Puerto Rico.”
Trip to Inner and Outer Worlds
Since 2000, the visceral screams in red and yellow that dominated the previous era and the faces blurred from pain give way to more reflective images. We see brilliant greens and blues in the homage to Alfonsina Storni, and complex compositions, which at times layer photos, writings, and paintings or that show a marked abstract influence, like “I Call You, Liberty”, or “Mana.” Beautiful female figures take over the canvas, with their eyes closed in meditation as the “Tattooed Goddess.” The artist also undertakes a profound journey within and gathers parts of herself that had remained hidden, like her indigenous heritage.
Tattooed Goddess.
Acrylic on canvas. 20” x 40” (2014).
“In Latin America everyone wants to be a descendent of Europeans,” explains Martivón. “Nobody wants to say they have any indigenous blood, in a horrifying denial of our origin. When my mother died, I found some necklaces from my great-grandmother in a little box, and I discovered that she was an indigenous Mayan K’iche’ from Guatemala. They had never told me. As my first act of defiance, I put them on and went to teach a class. I told my students that those necklaces spoke of an indigenous past that had been hidden from me. And well, maybe I am mostly a descendant from Spaniards, but if I look at my profile, this nose is not European at all, it’s purely Pre-Colombian!” she exclaims amid laughter. It was then that she painted the image “Window to My Ancestors.” “I didn’t want to include figures, just some Pre-Colombian hieroglyphics on one side and a window that opens to let those forgotten ancestors delicately into my life.”
With a stable professional life—she is now a professor in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies at Holy Names College (Oakland, California), where she would go on to teach for more than two decades—she begins a playful and investigative stage in her art. She uncovers the many layers of her identity and recovers the beauty and color of her beloved native country. In works like “Lost Paradise,” “My Country,” or “Green Power,” El Salvador’s lush multicolor vegetation and the powerful red of its volcanic earth erupt in a happy concert in compositions with defined strokes and abstract representations.
Lost Paradise.
Acrylic on wood. 30” x 34” (2012).
At the same time, the female figures now appear whole, absorbed in their inner world as in “I Was Born with a Woman’s Star” or strong and supportive, as in “Daughters of the Mountain.” “The life I live and what I do is not mine,” says Martivón. “It is a product of other women who came before me, who have lived, and whom I have read, who are in my DNA, who spin, who float, to whom I aspire, and who inspire me, and so they form me, that little grain of sand that contains infinity. Humbly, we harbor the traces of many people, of much history.”
For Martivón Galindo art has been a form of therapy, a way back from the violence and fragmentation of her childhood and youth into the woman she has become. “I always tried to find a way to heal the brokenness in order to become a whole person. This desire to integrate myself has fueled the constant search for my truth,” she says.
In the last few years, while she experiments with small collage-based pieces, which she calls “Bed Pieces,” Martivón has embarked on a reflection about death and her identity, but it is a joyful reflection. She has discovered that as she leaves behind material things, she integrates herself in the ONE that is all, the universe. The beautiful monotype “Disintegrating” evokes this experience to perfection. The anguish from her beginnings has disappeared. The female figure, in bright red, with hair floating in a blaze of energy, with eyes closed in a calm meditation, seems to dissolve into the nourishing background of softly blurred greens and yellows. Both, woman and space, melt into one another, like boundless universal energy.
Disintegrating.
Monotype. 22” x 30” (2017).
Martivón Galindo still belongs to two worlds, but she has found peace through the transformative power of art.
TRANSFORMATION
I was born with the star
of a woman
I grew up with a vine
without knowing
I pulled, I built, I drank
and I consented
From my chest I made
a big drum
I played, I beat, yelling
I am song
I became an off-season
scent
Silk, lace, veil
I was love
But they opened me in half
from the forehead to the flower
My drum broken into pieces
erased my colorful star
Lace they detached
yesterday the myth escaped
Pulverized proton
I exploded
But I return made of energy
and I always am
About the author:
Isidra Mencos has a Doctorate in Spanish and Latin American Contemporary Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught Spanish language, literature, culture and creative writing for twelve years. Her essays have appeared in The Penmen Review, Front Porch Journal, and Chicago Quarterly Review, and in online journals like The Huffington Post and Wisdom Well. Her essay “My Books and I” was listed as a Notable Essay in the Best American Essays anthology, 2019. Her memoir “The Conquest of Pleasure” will come out Fall 2022 at She Writes Press.
About the artist:
Salvadoran artist and longtime resident of San Francisco Martivon Galindo has exhibited in the United States, El Salvador and Japan. She has dedicated her artistic career to representing the effects of gender violence and social injustice, while also dipping into her subconscious for integration with a higher reality. Having been a victim of violence herself in El Salvador, Galindo’s work is a necessary reminder of the crimes perpetrated by those in power against those who are powerless.