…after… is a collection of short stories whose title derives from the final story in the book. The primary setting of the book unfolds in El Salvador of the 1970s, and culminates in the 1980s. The stories chronicle a girl’s coming of age in turbulent times: how one keeps compassion alive while suffering the loss of love and close friendship; how a witness to atrocious human rights violations searches for meaning in an unstable world; how one experiences sexual awakening during the catharsis of family separation and in a time of war. For the primary narrator, Dalia, life unfolds within the context of family and community before and during the civil war in El Salvador.

Reviews

La Bloga
The Boy Who Cried Books

Blurbs for …after…

“This poetic writer (Carolina Rivera Escamilla) also knows all these Salvadoran dramas. She transforms them into an offering for readers, sublimates destructive social details, and transforms them into love letters for her own people and for all readers who accompany her on this journey of life which is writing.”

—Manlio Argueta, author A Day of Life, Un día en la vida

”In …after…. Rivera composts memory. Her book lays it on, breaks it down, stirs it up, and mixes it with bravado and brilliance. Rivera’s language is plastic, visual and malleable. It inspires and shapes images. It adapts itself well to the subtleties of the Salvadoran world of the eighties. She carries them into a world of intimacy, the better to draw us into the emotions contained beneath her words. It is beautiful to discover her and to get to know her through her work.”

—Arturo Arias, author, Arias De Don Giovanni

“With the skills of a poet and a filmmaker, Carolina Rivera Escamilla recreates within these short stories a genuine voice in …after…-

—Alicia Partnoy, author, The Little School

“In vivid and evocative prose, Carolina Rivera Escamilla captures what it's like to grow up in a country in the midst of civil war, where at any moment a best friend or a family member can disappear.  These are moving stories about coming of age in a time of turmoil.”

—Mark Jonathan Harris, Writer/director of the Oscar-winning Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport

Testimonials

“Rivera Escamilla's ... after ... provides powerful stories firmly anchored in Central American reality, a perfect collection for a course about Latin American literature. My students have often found the collection with its focus on ordinary lives in extraordinary war times more relatable than stories from more southern regions. They respond to the dilemmas of Escamilla's protagonists and find connections with their own experiences and resilience as they struggle to thrive and find validation in an often hostile land.

—Genevieve Patthey, Professor/writer, Los Angeles City College, University of Southern California

“Carolina’s creative output explores trauma, violence, memory, memorialization, and liminal subjectivities. Her stories about struggle and strife in El Salvador and the United States, political unrest, and assimilation, read like prose poems—concise, her writing cuts to the heart of things; it is nuanced, complex, insightful, and beautifully written. The shock of war, and the banal details of the everyday and displacement are powerful commentaries on global politics, labor, and gender.

Carolina’s writing is poignant and thoughtful; her explorations of loss, liminality, agency, family relationships, and social structures seeks to expand and challenge the parameters of the diasporic experience, shifting simple discourses on immigrant narratives and identity politics.”

—Viét Lê, artist/writer/curator, Associate Professor in Visual Studies, California College of the Arts