El Rescate Collection

November 18, 2025

El Rescate is a non-profit 501(c)(3) founded in 1981 by members of the Santana Chirino Amaya Central American Refugee Committee (SCARC) and the Southern California Ecumenical Council. El Rescate was the first agency in the United States to respond with free legal and social services to the mass influx of refugees fleeing the civil war in El Salvador. The El Rescate Collection documents their work, as well as the Salvadoran Civil War and post-war period. Notably the collection houses their Human Rights Department's Index to Accountability (Indice Sobre La Responsabilidad) which is a precedent setting relational database that facilitates identification of patterns of human rights violations using two sets of data: one on human rights abuses and one on the command structure of the Salvadoran military.

We were able to hire two Student Assistants to support processing of the collection thanks to support from a Mellon Foundation grant subaward from UC Irvine’s Community-Centered Archives Practice: Transforming Education, Archives, and Community History program. At the conclusion of the project, we ask our Student Assistants to share their reflections on the project:

Jenesy Lazo, History major:

For the past nine months of this year, I have had the pleasure of working on processing the El Rescate collection. As a history major, working at an archive was always a goal of mine. And as someone who is part Salvadoran who has felt the effects of the war in my family, I’ve always been adamant about preserving my family’s story. Being able to work on a project that resonated with both aspects of my background has been something that I’m very proud to have been a part of.

A very impactful moment while processing for me was when I came across my last name on an incident report. It had been stated that the two individuals included had been killed in a bombing. In El Salvador, my family’s name is quite rare, so finding it really shocked me. Whether or not I was related to them, it still left a profound impression on me. Some days would move quickly while processing the collection, meaning some of the content in the material I was working with would be glossed over. But it was moments like these that really reminded me of the magnitude of this project. Seeing the hundreds of individuals in the incident reports, along with the pictures in the collection, and listening to the cassettes we digitized was all a very memorable experience. They really helped to humanize and bring back the meaning and weight of the official documents and reports, which, after working with them for a while, would tend to become merely words in my mind. There’s a tendency in the study of history to reduce human lives to statistics for the sake of convenience, and it can be easy to fall into it, but this project would remind me to look into the importance of individual lives. I’m glad that researchers passionate about this subject will also have the opportunity to experience this collection, and I’m excited to see how it will be utilized for the greater good.

Veronica Hernandez, Central American Studies major and Africana Studies minor:

The contemporary Central American struggle is one for remembrance. With the El Rescate archives now at CSUN, researchers, students, and community members alike are able to carry on that struggle in a whole new way. Just as I know El Rescate’s work through history has touched and changed the lives of so many people, witnessing that history through the archives has done the same for me. I step away from the photos and files proud of my history as a Salvadoran American, and knowing that I come from a lineage of organizing and fighting people.

The photos of the 1992 Chapultepec Peace Accords signings hold a special place in my heart. They capture such contagious joy, optimism, and hope. The peace accords brought significant changes to the country’s most flawed institutions: the judicial system, the electoral system, and the Armed Forces and National Guard. Today the country’s three year State of Exception proves that there is still so much work to be done to defend human rights and reform the justice system. For me, the photos of the Peace Accords celebrations serve as a reminder of why the long fight is worth fighting.

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Post tagged as: urban archives, photographs, international