| Summary/Abstract |
On July 19, 1983, Berkeley, California’s City Council voted to create a sister city relationship with the village of San Antonio Los Ranchos, located in El Salvador’s rural department of Chalatenango. San Antonio Los Ranchos was not Berkeley’s first sister city. In the mid-1960s, the college town had established ties with Sakai, Japan, a rotary club-funded initiative that facilitated an exchange of high school students between the two cities.1 Yet, the relationship created between Berkeley and the Salvadoran hamlet remained of a fundamentally different character, perhaps unlike any other U.S. sister city in existence. The initiative was an explicit statement of political solidarity. According to a 1983 pamphlet distributed by the Berkeley-based non-profit New El Salvador Today (NEST), the group partially responsible for the creation of the sister city, “[i]n 1981 Salvadoran government troops were displaced from San Antonio Los Ranchos. In its wake the people have created a democratic self-government, a Local Popular Government.
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