In March 2009, the FMLN won the Salvadoran presidential election for the first time in the party’s history. Mauricio Funes became El Salvador’s first left-wing president after nearly two decades of ARENA government following the end of the civil war. For the Salvadoran diaspora community in Maryland — one of the largest Salvadoran communities in the United States — this was not a distant political event. It was personal.
I’m Lawrence Justin Mills, a filmmaker based in Silver Spring, Maryland. I was there at the Casa Farabundo Martí in Maryland when the community came together to celebrate the victory, and I filmed the concert that followed. These two videos — Part 1 and Part 2 — are the record of that night.
Why the 2009 FMLN Victory Mattered
The FMLN — Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional — was formed in 1980 as a coalition of leftist guerrilla groups during the Salvadoran Civil War. The war ended in 1992 with the Peace Accords, and the FMLN transitioned from an armed movement into a political party. For seventeen years after the war ended, they contested elections without winning the presidency.
The 2009 election changed that. Mauricio Funes, a journalist and FMLN candidate, defeated ARENA’s Rodrigo Ávila by a margin of about 51 to 49 percent. For people who had lived through the civil war, who had lost family members to government violence, who had come to the United States as refugees — this election result carried an emotional weight that is difficult to overstate.
The Maryland Salvadoran Community
Maryland, and the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area more broadly, has one of the largest concentrations of Salvadoran immigrants and Salvadoran-Americans in the United States. Many of these families came during or after the civil war. They built communities, organizations, and cultural institutions in Maryland that have maintained deep connections to El Salvador over decades.
The Casa Farabundo Martí is one of those institutions — a community space named after Agustín Farabundo Martí, the Salvadoran revolutionary leader whose name the FMLN also carries. When the election results came in, this was where the community gathered.
Filming the Celebration
What I witnessed and documented that night was not just a political party celebrating a win. It was a community processing decades of history. People who had survived the war, people whose parents had survived it, young people who had grown up hearing stories about it — all in the same room, celebrating what felt like a turning point.
The concert featured Salvadoran music and cultural performances that reflected this specific historical moment. Music has always been central to Central American political movements — from the Nueva Canción tradition to the songs that accompanied the civil war itself. A victory concert in this context is not background entertainment. It is a political and cultural statement.
I split the recording into two parts because of the length of the event. Both are available on my YouTube channel, and together they document the full arc of that evening from celebration to concert to community reflection.
The Connection to My Documentary Work
Filming the 2009 FMLN victory celebration was part of the same ongoing engagement with Salvadoran history and diaspora community that eventually led me to produce The Path of the Shadows. That documentary tells the story of Carlos Mauricio, a professor who survived torture at the hands of the Salvadoran military during the civil war — the same conflict that gave birth to the FMLN.
These connections are not coincidental. My work in the Salvadoran community, attending events like this one, building relationships with community organizations, understanding the political and cultural stakes of this history — all of it informed the documentary work that followed. You do not make a film like The Path of the Shadows without years of presence in the community whose story you are telling.
Documenting Diaspora Political Life
One of the things that gets lost in mainstream coverage of immigrant communities is their political life — particularly their engagement with politics in their countries of origin. Salvadoran-Americans in Maryland are American citizens and residents who also maintain deep ties to El Salvador. An election in El Salvador is not a foreign event for them. It is an event that affects family members still living there, that shapes remittance flows and economic relationships, and that carries the weight of personal and community history.
Filming events like the 2009 victory celebration is a way of documenting that political life — of saying that this community exists, that their engagement with their history matters, and that their celebration deserves to be part of the record.
Between the two parts of this recording, these videos have been watched over 3,300 times. That audience includes Salvadorans in Maryland, members of the diaspora community across the country, and people studying Central American political history. Each view is someone engaging with a piece of history that might otherwise exist only in the memories of the people who were in that room.
About The Author
