National heroes or dangerous failures

Abstract

This article centres the Global South in studies of language and mobility by focusing on migration discourse in El Salvador, a Central American country with four decades of widespread emigration. The analysis examines state-endorsed discourses, tracing how entextualised figures of migrant personhood shift over time in response to changing political-economic conditions. Gender is central to these dominant depictions, which rely on a consistent contrast between successful and failed migrants that mobilises neoliberal models of personhood. This dichotomy emerges through indexical associations with heteropatriachal forms of care: successful migrants fulfil their responsibilities by providing for their family and their nation, whereas failed migrants do not. By placing the onus on individual actions, these dominant discourses elide the state abandonment and global political economic inequalities that continue to compel Salvadorans to migrate.