Culture of El Salvador
Additional appendages are in golden Amber (color) Salvadorans inhabit the lush Central American nation of El Salvador.
The surface of El Salvador features tropical forest, jungles, mountains, volcanoes, plains (savanna), rivers, lagoons, lakes, calderas and the Pacific Ocean.
In terms of nonliving resources, El Salvador contains rich volcanic soil, fertile earth that gives life to lush vegetation.
Centroamericano/a in Spanish and in English Central American is an alternative standard and widespread cultural identity term that Salvadorans use to identify themselves, along with their regional isthmian neighbours.
The term Salvi is preserved in a very positive light when compared to its other older counterparts and predecessors such as Guanaco and Salvatrucha which have fallen into disuse among Salvadoran Americans, regarded as derogatory and negative.
[3] Another big tradition that El salvador celebrates is “Las Bolas De Fuego”[4] translated to “The Balls of Fire”.
Today the country has monuments, plazas, stadiums, high rise buildings, large malls and cathedrals built in Neo-Gothic, Modernist, Populuxe, Googie, Art Deco and Futurist style architecture.
Religious Contemporary Catholic liturgical music instrument such as Tubular bells, Pipe organ, and Glass harmonica are also present.
Popular music in El Salvador uses Xylophone, tehpe'ch, flutes, drums, scrapers and gourds, as well as more recently imported guitars and other instruments.
The traditional style of art in El Salvador comes from the northern town of La Palma, and that is where artists are trained and live today.
Originating from an artist named Fernando Llort, the art is simple and colorful, typically making use of animals such as birds, rabbits, and turtles, as well as common objects such as flowers, trees, and houses.
Later, the colonizing Spaniards used the term as an allusion of earthquakes constantly rocking the valley where San Salvador City is, like a hammock.
Native Americans appeared in the Pleistocene era and became the dominant people in the Lithic stage, developing in the Archaic period in North America to the Formative stage, occupying this position for thousands of years until their demise at the end of the 15th and 16th century, spanning the time of the original arrival in the Upper Paleolithic to European colonization of the Americas during the early modern period.
Historically El Salvador has had diverse Native American cultures, coming from the north and south of the continent along with local populations mixed together.
El Salvador belongs to both to the Mesoamerican region in the western part of the country, and to the Isthmo-Colombian Area in the eastern part of the country, where a myriad of indigenous societies have lived side by side for centuries with their unique cultures and speaking different indigenous languages of the Americas in the beginning of the Classic stage.
The 'Olmec Boulder, ' is a sculpture of a giant head found near Casa Blanca, El Salvador site in Las Victorias near Chalchuapa.
Some scholars have suggested that the Lenca migrated to the Central American region from South America around 3,000 years ago, making it the oldest civilization in El Salvador.
Guancasco is the annual ceremony by which Lenca communities, usually two, gather to establish reciprocal obligations in order to confirm peace and friendship.
Its pottery shows strong similarities to ceramics found in central western El Salvador and the Maya highlands.
The Lenca sites of Yarumela, Los Naranjos in Honduras, and Quelepa in El Salvador, all contain evidence of the Usulután-style ceramics.
The culture lasted until the Spanish conquest, at which time they still maintained their Nawat language, despite being surrounded by the Maya in western El Salvador.
The Pipil are known as the last indigenous civilization to arrive in El Salvador, being the least oldest and were a determined people who stoutly resisted Spanish efforts to extend their dominion southward.
The 1932 Salvadoran peasant massacre occurred on January 22 of that year, in the western departments of El Salvador when a brief peasant-led rebellion was suppressed by the government, then led by Maximiliano Hernández Martínez.
The history of the Arabs in El Salvador dates back to the end of the 19th century, because of religious clashes, which induced many Palestinians, Lebanese, Egyptians and Syrians to leave the land where they were born, in search of countries where they at least lived in an atmosphere of relative peace.
[12] Arab immigration in El Salvador began at the end of the 19th century in the wake of the repressive policies applied by the Ottoman Empire against Maronite Catholics.
Although the imperial administration, whose official religion was Islam, guaranteed freedom of worship for non-Muslim communities, and Lebanon in particular had a semi-autonomous status, the situation for practitioners of the Maronite Catholic Church was complicated, since they had to cancel exaggerated taxes and suffered limitations for their culture.
The hostile climate caused many Lebanese to sell their property and take ships in the ports of Sidon, Beirut and Tripoli heading for the Americas.
In 1939, the Arab community based in San Salvador organized and founded the "Arab Youth Union Society"[16] A Cabalgador (Spanish: Cavalry, Horseman, Horserider) is a Salvadoran horse-mounted livestock herder (cowboy) of a tradition that originated on the Iberian Peninsula and was brought to Central America by Spanish settlers.
Among common horse riders, there were also military and police Cavalry troopers called (Guardias) National Guard (El Salvador) who were infamously feared due to their abuse and unlimited use of power over the population, patrolling the rural areas keeping order.
The Cabalgadores would prove to be vital up until the mid 20th century, especially for the military and the campesinos who would be influenced by the revolution, most of the guerrillas in El Salvador's civil war, were poor citizens who rode horses in the rural mountains.
