Film: "The Children Left Behind"

from The Silver Spring Voice

During civil war in the 80's many Salvadorian children were without their parents. This article talks about a film that profiles those children. - Kale

At first Leon Seltzer did not understand why the great majority of the Salvadoran women who shopped at his Adams Morgan discount clothing store in the late 1980’s were so unfamiliar with the sizes of their children’s apparel and why the children themselves never tagged along. Even when he asked the mothers to demonstrate the sizes with their hands – “How tall? How big around?”-- he was given vague and uncertain answers.

These were boys and girls, as he came to realize, destined to grow up in their home country while their mothers, in self-exile from dire poverty and a civil war, labored at immigrant jobs in the Washington area. The clothes purchased at Leon’s store, along with toiletries, cash and an occasional toy, were air-mailed home.

Leon, an immigrant himself, who had been born above a clothing store in Brazil and who had once been a Manhattan clothier, became friends with several of the Salvadoran women and learned something else they held close. In a few cases, over time, they had lost track of their children.

In 1991 Leon traveled to El Salvador as an emissary for them. A ceasefire was in the works, but the war was not over. “There were headless torsos on the roads, bombs going off in the hills,” he recalled on a recent afternoon at his current clothing store, Rerun, in Old Takoma. In the villages where the children had been left, often in the care of a grandmother, he inquired after them. The news was not always positive. “Some had run off. They had become delinquents, glue sniffers, thieves, prostitutes.” When he did locate missing children he handed over gifts from their moms, but the kids invariably asked if he was their ticket to the U. S., and he had to say he was there to reconnect them but not to reunite them. “They misinterpreted why I was there. It was heartbreaking.”

Aside from the gifts and an exchange of addresses, the reconnection took another form. Leon had brought along a movie camera, and he recorded his conversations with the children, their hard candor and tearful pleas, to show to their mothers back in Adams Morgan. From these across-the-border communications Leon ultimately produced a subtitled documentary, “The Children Left Behind,” that was seen on a national tour in 1994 and was screened again on November 18 at the community center during this year’s Takoma Park Film Festival.

For the film he conducted more than a thousand interviews, delving into the lives of many of the estimated 300,000 Salvadoran children separated by economic reality from their mother or father, or both. Yolanda Campos, one of the film’s protagonists, left behind her field-worker husband and their seven children. “They were going to take our house,” she says on camera in a voice that is at once deadpan and wrenching. “My husband said, ‘Let the bank take it.’ He said he would build us a shack somewhere. But I said, ‘How can I let them do that?’”

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