Dawn0% in

Lupe

The farming hamlet

Dawn

The day begins before light in a cluster of dirt-floored houses among the cornfields, where an elderly peasant woman starts her chores and waits on news of the men. The hamlet is Argueta's invention, but its poverty, its maize plots and its footpaths belong to the real subsistence country of northern Chalatenango.

Opening, morning

inferredThe novel's hamlet is a composite of the poor farming settlements of Chalatenango and is not a named, findable place; this marks a representative point in the rural hills north of Chalatenango town.

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Morning25% in

Lupe

The village store and chapel

Morning

The small general store and the modest chapel are the hamlet's shared ground, where neighbours gather, gossip carries and a lay catechist has been teaching people to read the Bible and question their conditions. Argueta ties this church work to the base communities that spread through the Salvadoran countryside in the 1970s and drew the suspicion of the security forces.

Morning

inferredThe little store and the chapel are fictional fixtures of the invented hamlet; sited beside the hamlet point, they stand for the kind of general store and rural chapel found across the department.

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Midday50% in

Lupe

Chalatenango, the departmental town

Midday

The road out of the hills leads to Chalatenango, the departmental capital and the seat of its authority, with its market, its offices and its National Guard post. For the family it is where officialdom lives and where a summons or an errand can turn dangerous, the town against which the hamlet measures its distance and its fear.

Midday

explicitChalatenango town is a real place and the seat of the department the novel names; this marks the town centre.

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Afternoon75% in

Lupe

Highland country toward the Honduran border

Afternoon

Northward the land rises into cool pine highlands near the Honduran frontier, the broken country where army patrols hunted suspected guerrillas and, within a couple of years of the novel, would drive whole villages toward the border. La Palma anchors this upland zone; the wider region became one of the hardest-fought fronts of the war that followed.

Afternoon

explicitLa Palma is a real mountain town in northern Chalatenango, near the frontier zone the novel evokes; this marks the town, standing in for the surrounding highland border country.

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Dusk100% in

Lupe

Aguilares on the road south

Dusk

Below the Chalatenango hills, on the northern highway, Aguilares was a real focus of the repression the novel dramatises: a district of church-led peasant organising where the army occupied the town and where the priest Rutilio Grande was assassinated in 1977. It marks how the terror in the fictional hamlet mirrors documented events in the surrounding country.

Dusk

explicitAguilares is a real town just south of the department on the northern highway; a documented centre of church organising and army repression in the 1970s, it grounds the political violence the novel treats.

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