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Swallowing the Bitterness
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Police Brutality, Corruption, and Systemic Racism
Healing, Progress, and Collective Consciousness
Justice, Perspective, and Ambiguity
Individuals vs. Institutions
Action vs. Symbolic Gesture
Summary
Analysis
Smith interviews Gladis Sibrian, director of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, USA. Siberian is a former nun from El Salvador who “became a revolutionary.” Sibrian recalls being a teenager and being asked by her relatives how to bring about change to El Salvador, which was ruled by a military dictatorship for over half a century. One power that people possess, she suggests, is that of their “faith” and “convictions” that they can change things. Sibrian explains that people often accuse revolutionaries of being too “idealistic, / romantic.”
Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front is one of El Salvador’s two major political parties. The historically far-left party was one of the main participants in the Salvadoran Civil War (their opposition being the U.S.-backed Salvarodan government), which ended in 1992 with UN-mediated peace negotiations. Sibrian’s involvement in a revolutionary movement gives her a unique perspective among Smith’s subjects. Here, Sibrian emphasizes the central roles that having “faith” and “convictions” play in a revolutionary movement’s success. Several of Smith’s other subjects tend to criticize the 1992 riots as being overly beholden to “idealistic” or symbolic ideas, but Sibrian suggests that a core sense of idealism and a faith in the power of the people are needed, too. Essentially, she suggests that people need to believe in what they’re fighting for, otherwise they’ll have no reason to pursue the fight in the long term.
Themes
Sibrian sees the LA riots as a “social explosion,” which is less “organized, planned” than a proper uprising. She sees the not-guilty verdict the court gave the police as the catalyst that jumpstarted this explosion. At the same time, the “anarchical” quality of the ensuing protests saddened Sibrian, who felt that so many people didn’t need to die. Furthermore, since the riots, there’s been a distinct lack of hope for the future in Los Angeles. Sibrian attributes this hopelessness to people’s inability to see the power to enact change within themselves.
Sibrian expands on the connection between idealism and pragmatism in revolutionary movements. She argues that the idealism that inspired participants in the 1992 riots had an “anarchical” quality and wasn’t backed by “organized, planned” forces, which was why the riots ultimately failed and fell short of a proper political uprising. As she sees it, this poor planning shattered people’s hopes that they were capable of inciting change, which hurt their motivation to organize.
Themes
