Lynnette Arnold

am a cross-border traveler and traverser of boundaries. This blog is inspired by what I have learned on my journey of acompañamiento con el pueblo Salvadoreño since my path first took me to El Salvador in 2000. I was a naive 18-year-old, hungry for more experiences of the world I felt I had missed out on, growing up cloistered in a Christian commune. I went to El Salvador in part to escape the restrictive gender roles of my community of origin, but I quickly found my heart and mind captivated by the people I was meeting, whose warmth, tenacity, spirit, and courage pulled me into a journey of walking with them. (You can read letters from my first few years in El Salvador here).

Over a decade later, my life has taken deep roots in the Salvadoran soil. My path has been forever changed by the life-shattering and life-restoring experience of The Savior (El Salvador). I have been blessed with close and enduring friendships, and have been adopted by several extended families. It is through these families that I have been introduced to the experience of migration, becoming part of transnational networks as family members, and eventually I myself, traveled to the United States. While I can travel easily, my Salvadoran friends must risk their lives to cross borders in the search for a better future for their families. Because of this arduous and harrowing journey, they remain in the United States for many years at a time, separated from their loved ones who remain in El Salvador. In my academic work as a graduate student studying sociolinguistics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, I explore how these families sustain connection through cross-border communication. (You can read more about this on my academic website).

But the experiences of these families resonate with me in ways that go much deeper than intellectual interest. I have experienced some measure of the pain of family separation in my own life, although the walls that separate me from my loved ones are made up of doctrines and beliefs rather than iron and steel. This blog is a space where I can explore the depth and breadth of my cross-border journey with el pueblo Salvadoreño. This is intended to be a largely a voyage of self-exploration and self-expression, but I hope that the territory I cover will be of interest to others who are concerned with migration in the Americas. My posts, while addressing current issues that are often highly politicized, approaches these