Just like the pupusera learned to flip her pupusas by feel and sight, Mateo and his family had learned to listen to gunfire without needing to look. They rushed, as always, without speaking. Lights off. Bodies low. Mateo’s cheek pressed into the tile floor, as close to the ground as possible, where safety lies. It was no longer fear, but choreography—a dance of survival taught by repetition, instinct, and chaos. The crack of gunfire was severe; it was just past ten when the night broke open. Seconds of gunshots turned into one minute of dread. The shots rang unusually long and didn’t let up, as if the rifles were possessed by a fury all of their own.

When the gunfire dissolved into the humid air, Mateo rose from the floor like a ghost. He crept out, moving toward the fence bordering the slope where their house clung precariously to the hillside. Mateo crouched behind the wild brush, letting the overgrown leaves cloak him in shadow. Perched on the hill, he wasn’t afraid to look under the cover of night, nearly invisible, the hillside and the fence gave him just enough shelter. From his hiding place, he peered across the road at Chevron Guardado, the gasoline station recently abandoned after too many robberies during the war had made it too dangerous to keep open. Men appeared, stepping out from the dark. Their rifles hung heavy across their backs—G-3s or M-16s maybe—long black shadows. Bandoliers cut across their chests. Some wore broad sombreros, and others wore jean jackets.

There was no mistaking them. These were not soldiers. Not guerrillas, either. These were the men who didn’t wear uniforms because the death they brought upon people didn’t need any recognition. These men moved in stealth. Mateo had seen them before, about one week ago, when they marched into his high school searching for classmates who were taken and then disappeared for supporting the revolution.

He watched the band of men climb into the beds of pickup trucks with no plates, no markings. One truck flashed its headlights at the other, signaling their departure. They disappeared into the night, engines humming.

The dead silence of a warm night in the outskirts of San Salvador, where all you hear is the cicadas and crickets. No screams. No sirens. There are no searchlights for what just happened. This was the first year of the civil war. Everyone remained in their homes, minding their safety. Inside the house, Mateo lay back down. No one spoke, and no one needed to. They fell asleep, not knowing what had happened.

✦

The next morning, Mateo woke as he always did, early and quiet. It was customary for him to fetch pan francés for breakfast at the store located in front of Chevron Guardado. He went with his friend, Chamba, the next-door neighbor who was one or two years older. The two teenage boys walked across the street. They passed by Chevron Guardado, where usually the scent of diesel always hung in the air like something rotting sweet.

In the tiendita, Mateo asked for pan francés. Chamba bought a pack of cigarettes. Just as the sound of the monedas de colón was hitting the countertop, the woman behind the register spoke:

“¿Y ya fueron a ver los muertos?”

The question hovered.

Chamba asked: “¿Cuáles muertos?”

She nodded toward the gasoline station. “Hubo una balacera anoche. En la fosa.”

The sound of gunfire from the night before came rushing back to Mateo. Still, from afar, he couldn’t piece together exactly what had taken place.

They thanked the woman for the bread, and then, driven by teenage curiosity, they crossed the road. The sun had just begun to rise, casting a sharp, golden light across the worn down concrete road.

They reached the mechanic’s pit in Chevron Guardado. A large concrete trench beneath the repair canopy where mechanics slid under cars to screw bolts, inspect leaks, and fix whatever was broken. But today, it held something sinister.

They inched closer to the pit.

Twelve or so bodies lying dead. Heads completely shaven, with no hair. Teenage boys about 14 years old or so, faces gone, unrecognizable. Limbs twisted, bent in directions the body was never meant to move. Blood pooled and soaked into sections of the concrete like ink into paper along scattered bullets and discarded shells. The bodies were deformed by heavy caliber. They could trace how some of the bodies were near the steps, as if caught mid-flight, desperately running for a way out.

At the pit’s edge, beneath the shade of the canopy, their eyes widened in horror. They looked up and saw flesh clinging to the top of the canopy, bits of bone with dried blood embedded on the metal ceiling.

No one else was there. Just the two of them, the dead, and the soundless morning.

Only then did the night before begin to make sense.
The blast of gunshots.
Men draped in bandoliers.
Figures vanishing into unmarked trucks.
It had been the Death Squads. They executed teenagers and young adults in the mechanic’s pit under the cover of darkness.

They left, now knowing what rifle bullets do to human bodies. They walked back home carrying the golden-crusted pan francés, its oval form still warm, along with a pack of cigarettes. Upon entering Mateo’s home, Chamba paced back and forth and lit a cigarette. Mateo sat on the couch. Neither of them could speak. What could they say? How can you talk about the horror of seeing teenagers your age or younger dead inside a pit?

Mateo brought the bag of pan francés to the kitchen. His mother, Mercedes, looked up from the stove, concern etched across her face. “¿Están bien?” she asked gently, her eyes drifting toward Chamba, who had slumped into the couch, wordless, a cigarette trembling between his fingers.

He sat pale and hollow-eyed, lighting one cigarette after another.

Mateo broke the silence. “Fuimos a la gasolinera,” he said quietly. “Había varios cuerpos muertos en la fosa. Eran los disparos de anoche… ¿te recordás?”

Mercedes was ready to serve breakfast, but neither could bring themselves to eat.

✦

Within 30 minutes, word spread quickly around town and Mateo observed a mob of people gathered around the gasoline station. It became a spectacle. Within the hour, family members, mothers, and grandparents came to the pit, all hoping to identify their recently lost ones, those eternally disappeared during the war.

Soon after the press arrived, followed by the forensics team.

Three of the bodies were reportedly those of young union organizers. The others—mostly boys—were students still in high school or some just starting university. No one knew if they had taken up arms or spoken out in a classroom. In the eyes of the state, it didn’t matter; they were the opposition, they were the dissenters, to be eradicated by means necessary.

The death squads left the dead bodies in public for all to see. A purposeful tactic with a message: silence yourselves, or you too will be silenced.

✦

Weeks later, Mateo knew he had to flee El Salvador. The sight of those nearly headless bodies in a pit haunted him. He could be next. What if the death squads stormed his high school again? What if they mistook him for a revolutionary? Or worse, what if they tried to recruit him—something he had narrowly escaped once before. His younger brother had been lucky. One morning, arriving late to his school, the receptionist at the gate warned him not to enter: the military was inside, forcibly recruiting students to join the military. Without a second thought, his younger brother turned away and sprinted back home.

His older cousin, about ten years his senior, had vanished a month earlier. No one knew how or why. What Mateo did recall was how his cousin would occasionally leave behind revolutionary pamphlets and books for him to read. A few years back, his cousin boldly led his fellow workers in a protest against unfair wages, and for that, he was brutally beaten. Now, people whispered that he had either joined the revolution or had been killed by the military. Deep down, Mateo just wanted to live the life of an ordinary boy, not as a revolutionary or military soldier.

There was a way out. Mateo knew people were fleeing the country, many heading north to the United States. His aunt Sofía, who had migrated to San Francisco in the 1960s, was their only family contact abroad. In San Salvador, Sofía emerged from poverty, her striking beauty, light complexion, and sharp wit setting her apart, eventually leading her to become a pageant queen. Her mix of looks and savvy opened doors to elite social circles, where she met a boyfriend with family in San Francisco. Their relationship led her to travel frequently between the two cities. They married but later divorced. Sofía eventually remarried a wealthy Mexican entrepreneur, and together, they opened a successful Mexican restaurant. When the famous Mexican actor known as Cantinflas visited their restaurant during a trip to San Francisco, the restaurant made headlines. With the publicity, they expanded into a small but thriving chain across the Bay Area.

The family pleaded with Sofía to take Mateo in. El Salvador was no place for a teenager on the brink of adulthood to be caught in the crossfire of civil war. Understanding the danger Mateo faced, she agreed to help. She offered to bring him to San Francisco and promised him a starting job as a dishwasher at one of her Mexican restaurants to help him get on his feet.

✦

For the first three days, he stayed in Sofía’s lush home in the suburbs of Hillsborough. However, Sofía had recently found him a place to stay in the Mission District, in a rented room off Valencia Street, not far from an alley and a bar that stayed noisy most nights. The bed was soft. The air was still. No machine guns barked at night, no death squads dumped bodies across the street. She warned him to watch out for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, known as the INS; they were recognizable because they often dressed in navy windbreakers. Yet, Latinos didn’t call them the INS. They called them “la migra.” This was the era of “Operation Jobs,” a campaign launched under President Ronald Reagan and carried out by INS. La migra was always lurking, always unpredictable. They could appear without warning, whether in factories at dawn, in the middle of crowded restaurant kitchens, or out in the fields under the afternoon sun. Even family-run diners weren’t safe; dishwashers and prep cooks would vanish mid-shift, and entire crews would be gone before lunchtime.

For Mateo, who grew up in El Salvador, the idea of people vanishing wasn’t exactly new or shocking. But talk about raids and deportation added a twist on an old nightmare. The accents were different, the uniforms less intimidating, and the orders barked in English, a language he barely knew. Yet, instead of death squads, it was INS agents in crisp navy windbreakers. And instead of a guerilla warfare, it was workplace raids and detention centers. At least here, the disappearances didn’t end in death. Or did they? After all, many were deported straight back into the wars they had narrowly escaped. What was the point of running? To flee death in El Salvador, only to be sent back by paperwork and a plane ticket? The U.S. supported the Salvadoran government during its civil war, and granting asylum to Salvadorans would have been seen as acknowledging human rights abuses by a U.S.-backed regime. They were not accepting unofficial refugees. It turns out the U.S. American version of disappearance doesn’t need a firing squad—just a desk, a badge, and a one-way flight back to civil war.

✦

On his first night in the Valencia Street apartment, he was finally settling in. On the verge of proper rest for the first time in what felt like years. As his thoughts began to blur into dreamlike fragments, teetering on the edge of sleep, a sudden BANG! A single gunshot cut through the fog-heavy air, yanking him back into the moment.

Without thinking, he dropped to the ground. It was automatic. His body knew what to do before his mind could catch up. Flat to the floor, arms splayed wide, cheek pressed to the ground.

But this ground was soft. Not tile. Not concrete.

A thick, soft carpet muffled his impact to the floor. Below it, old wooden floorboards creaked faintly under the weight of his body. The room was dark and quiet again. No one screamed. No one fled. No one came for him. He breathed. Once. Twice.

Then, in a whisper to no one but himself, he said, “Chi… ¿Y esto qué es?”—half in disbelief, half in awe touching the soft carpet with his fingertips.

It was then that he understood:
This was not war.

This was not home, not the terror-riddled nights in San Salvador, where bombs would go off at any moment of the day.

This was San Francisco.

The gunshot outside was not a military ambush or the death squads. Probably just a warning shot. Maybe a fight between cholos or drunk men spilling out of the bar. But it wasn’t war.

Still lying on the plush rug, his heart beginning to slow, he felt the strange softness beneath him. He did not move. He paused. He let it hold him. The warmth. The stillness. The quiet. He let the rug soak up the sudden stream of tears that slipped from his eyes and ran down his cheeks. He didn’t have the words to articulate this feeling of survivor’s guilt. He thought of his mother, Mercedes, and the younger siblings he left behind. Everything he had ever known was still in San Salvador. He feared his family would continue facing danger, the brushes with death that had become all too common in his homeland.

And there, face down on the carpet of an old Victorian apartment building that had survived the 1906 earthquake, he realized something:

He had entered a new world.