Associate Professor Cecilia Rivas’s 2014 publication, Salvadoran Imaginaries: Mediated Identities and Cultures of Consumption, for Rutgers University Press, examines how the country ravaged by civil war throughout the 1980s and 1990s has emerged as a study in contradictions, and where urban call centers and shopping malls exist alongside rural poverty. It is a land now at peace but still grappling with a legacy of violence and marked by deep social divides, yet offers a surprising abundance of inclusive spaces. Above all, it is a nation without borders, as widespread emigration during the war has led Salvadorans to develop a truly transnational sense of identity.