One Day of Life

The rural north of El Salvador on the eve of the civil war, seen across a single day from a peasant farming family in the hills of Chalatenango. The map runs from the dirt roads and cornfields of a poor hamlet out to the departmental town, and up into the highland country toward the Honduran border where the National Guard, the army and the first guerrillas collide.

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

inferred The 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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