This accession has been roughly arranged into six series as described below. Within each series, files have been alphabetized, although there are a few folders at the end of the Reference series which are not in order. It should be noted that this collection is not fully processed, so materials may be somewhat scattered.
The ADMINISTRATIVE FILES series is the best at documenting the activities of CDA itself. It includes meeting minutes, grant applications and reports, public relations material, by-laws, Board of Directors information, etc. Unfortunately, the meeting minutes and reports are scattered throughout the collection, and the set is incomplete. Also, many of these mainly discuss administrative details, such as where to locate the office, rather than substantive policy issues that CDA and related organizations were dealing with. The reports are better for the later years, and document the reasoning behind the organization's shift of focus. However, no documentation on how and why the organization decided to close was found. This was disappointing given the fact that in 1994 they seemed to have a well-thought out plan on how they were going to expand their role, and then suddenly the organization ceased to exist. The grant files give detailed information about the organization's goals, actual accomplishments, and budget. However, much of the grant material is redundant.
The “EL SALVADOR ON LINE” series basically consists of copies of the CDA newsletter “EL SOL.” This newsletter was one of the prime activities of CDA, and it consists of weekly news synopses gathered from a wide variety of sources. “EL SOL” was mainly circulated to activists and journalists, so it is now very difficult to find. Much of the information in the newsletter could be obtained from other sources, but the newsletter compacts the information in a nice format, and many journalists used “EL SOL” as one of their major sources of information. Also in this series are “EL SOL's” writing guidelines and other administrative materials which provide some background on why and how the publication was produced.
NATIONAL AGENDA FOR PEACE IN EL SALVADOR. CDA's work with NAPES is the most well-documented aspect of CDA's activities. The most valuable part of this series is the material on the election observer delegations, part of the Free and Fair Elections Project. There are very detailed reports, both written before delegations went to El Salvador and while they were there. The reports include such things as the goals of the delegations, who should be invited, and how to evaluate election procedures. The reports written while in El Salvador are especially rich in providing behind-the-scenes details that are not often recorded in the summary reports the public sees. These details can sometimes be tedious, but they include interesting information such as how the American volunteers are received by poll workers, arguments that developed between volunteers, how volunteers went about finding food and housing, and how many deceased people were on the voting rolls.
Besides the election material, this series contains a lot of fairly routine lobbying documentation, such as letters to members of Congress, testimony, lists of “swing vote” legislators, updates to members, etc. Mixed in with this material is some more substantive NAPES interpretations and critiques of upcoming legislation and meeting minutes which give a very good picture of the larger agenda of NAPES and the activist groups it worked with. There are also a few documents, such as minutes of a meeting NAPES had with State Department officials, which show how lobbying groups and government officials interact to affect policy. The series also contains a smattering of issues of NAPES' “Washington Updates,” which give an overview of the organization's stances on legislation.
MARGARITA STUDEMEISTER FILES. Ms. Studemeister was the first employee/director of WCCAS/CDA and was one of the California-based originators of the idea of creating this organization. This series mainly contains material that is not directly related to her work with CDA, but to other work she did on behalf of Central American issues. However, it is sometimes difficult to separate the two, so the series should remain part of the collection. There are speeches and material she collected for freelance articles, including notes and transcripts of interviews she did with activists.
Ms. Studemeister was on the Board of Directors of the Berkeley-based New El Salvador Today, later known simply as the NEST Foundation. This is one of the first organizations to begin promoting sister-city relationships between U.S. and Salvadoran cities, and this series contains files which document how and why these relationships were set up. There is even a little bit of information on the Madison-Arcatao relationship, since it was one of the first NEST set up. NEST sent delegations to El Salvador to find out what the people's needs were, and there are some excellent reports which describe living conditions, the military, family life, etc. The Nest project proposals document which of these issues the delegations thought most pressing and the easiest to “sell” to U.S. contributors. There are some media workplans and propaganda plans which document the details of this “selling” quite well.
These files also contain a small amount of material on a Center for Central American Studies in San Francisco, which, if studied in depth, may shed some light on the connection between this and other California organizations and the Washington-based CDA.
The REFERENCE FILES series consists of material produced by other organizations. It includes articles and clippings from Salvadoran sources and also press packets, brochures, reports, etc. that provide information on now defunct activist organizations and on how these groups worked together to form coalitions. There are many “semi-archival” things in this series which are potentially quite valuable to researchers, such as a report on a 1988 women's delegation to Mexico to discuss El Salvador, and U.S. embassy press kits.
PHOTOGRAPHS. Most of the photographs are fully captioned and relate entirely to the war in El Salvador. Included are images of residents of San Antonio Los Ranchos; photos documenting the arrest of Manuel Alfredo Toledo and Vinicio Bazzaglia by National Guardsmen in 1980; and images of war atrocities. Please note that the photos pertaining to war atrocities are extremely graphic.
