This paper investigates this dialectical interplay of tension and solidarity between Salvadoran and Mexican communities in Los Angeles through qualitative interviews with 20 young adults who are children of mixed Salvadoran-Mexican migrant families. Within the everyday struggles of the working class in Los Angeles, an internal antagonism between these two Latina/Latino communities has developed that has divided them yet, dialectically, a sense of solidarity between them vis-à-vis the dominant racialized regime of the U.S. from their countries due to changes in the world capitalist system, and its specific effects on their homelands, has made Los Angeles the most Mexican and Salvadoran-populated city in the United States. In the last 30 years, the mass transnational migration of Salvadorans and Mexicans to the U.S. These cultural trends constitute an important part of what Yajaira Padilla calls the “Central American transnational imaginary” and could shed light on cultural relations between the Central American diaspora and isthmus. Juan Flores’s concept of “créolité in the hood” helps highlight how this new Guatemalan American diasporic awareness and cultural expressions are forming, influencing, and influenced by other Latinxs in urban California. Three Guatemalan American writers expressing this trend in their work are Héctor Tobar, Maya Chinchilla, and Gustavo Guerra Vásquez, who were all raised in the United States and engage their identities as Guatemalan and American in their different literary works. The past 30 years have seen a rise in Guatemalan American literary production expressing a type of diasporic consciousness that seeks to redefine the traditional Guatemalanness the diaspora has inherited while also highlighting its relations to other Latinxs in their shared neighborhoods in urban environments.
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