"In New York City, I enter a hardware store on an errand and I hear the clerk say a few words in Spanish. I recognize that it is Salvadoran Spanish and I say a few words to him. Soon we are talking about his village, Usulután, where I have been. I wonder, "Was he a guerrilla?" At his age, he would have surely been recruited. Or was he sympathetic to the right? What has he seen or experienced of the death squads? He has a past that he carries inside of him wherever he lives - New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle - as a kind of invisible wound.

By leaving his life in El Salvador he exchanged...