Reunion

This captivating ethnography reveals the immediate and persisting impact of forced family separations and the eventual reunifications in communities affected by El Salvador's civil war.
 
In 2005, medical student Elizabeth Barnert traveled to El Salvador to build a DNA bank for reuniting families forcibly separated during the Salvadoran Civil War. Based on fifteen years of interviews and field notes, Reunion chronicles families' experiences with military attacks, child disappearances, family separations, joyful reunions, and arduous processes of reintegration.
 
Barnert worked alongside Jesuit priest and Pro-Búsqueda founder Father Jon Cortina, former guerrilla fighters, and reformed gang members. Told through the voices of activists and survivors, the book accompanies young adult children seeking biological kin, including a young woman returning to El Salvador twenty years after her adoption abroad to meet her mother and brother. This groundbreaking ethnography illuminates the cycles of poverty and violence driving immigration and ongoing separations around the world. Reunion includes a foreword by renowned anthropologist Philippe Bourgois and his firsthand account of fleeing a Salvadoran military "scorched-earth" operation, with never-before-published photos and children's drawings from the war.

All book royalties of Reunion will be donated by the author to Pro-Búsqueda and related causes.

Elizabeth Barnert is a pediatrician and Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research, grounded in human rights and social action, examines children affected by violence, family separation, and incarceration.

Contents

Author’s Note

Foreword: Historical Accountability for Crimes Against
Humanity in El Salvador, by Philippe Bourgois

Introduction

Part 1 Pro-Búsqueda and the DNA Bank
(Summer 2005)

1. Arriving
2. Guarjila with Father Jon
3. At the Nunnery
4. Guerrilleras
5. Morazán
6. Gunshots
7. Sonsonate with Ceci and Lucio
8. Fathers
9. Sonia’s Reunion
10. Carmen’s Reunion
11. Suchitoto with María Inés
12. Isabel and Gloria’s Reunion 
13. Meeting Angela 
14. Meeting Pedro 
15. Sandrita and New Separations 
16. La Esperanza
17. Coming Home 

Part 2 Fifty Interviews (Winter 2005–2006)

18. Father Jon’s Legacy
19. Back at Pro-Búsqueda 
20. Pedro’s Testimony 
21. El Norte 

Part 3 Angela’s Story (2006–2020)

22. Angela’s Phone Reunion 
23. Return to El Salvador
24. Angela’s Reunion 
25. Blanca and Ricardo
26. Remittance
27. Home to California with Angela
28. Berkeley Days Between
29. Angela’s El Salvador
30. Onward 

Afterword 

Acknowledgments

Appendix A: Photo-Ethnographic Testimony of a
Salvadoran Military Scorched-Earth Operation
(November 1981) by Philippe Bourgois 

Appendix B: Refugee Children’s Drawings of the
Salvadoran Civil War by Elizabeth Barnert and
Philippe Bourgois

Notes
Index 
Contact Information