Walter Estever Gonzalez, at The Blogs

Walter Estever Gonzalez

Exploring Memory, War, and Survival

Oct 1, 2026, 6:10 AM

W. E. Gonzalez with his nieces Luna and Estrella at the Philadelphia Marathon in November 2012, during the years when distance running was a regular part of his life.

The shooting lasted about ten minutes. It took me seven to finish breakfast. My wife, my mother-in-law, and my father-in-law were sheltering in the safest part of the house while gunfire echoed outside. I had found the spot for them...

Sep 17, 2026, 6:51 AM

Seven Passports for a Journey That Never Happened

Walter Estever Gonzalez at approximately four or five years old in El Salvador. This surviving copy comes from a photograph taken for a passport intended for a family journey to Mexico that never took place. (Courtesy of the author)

There is a photograph of me from when I was four or five years old. I am wearing a Mickey Mouse shirt and looking directly at the camera with the seriousness children sometimes have when adults tell them not...

Sep 3, 2026, 6:52 AM

The Tracks Left in the Earth

By the time I met him, I already knew what a landmine could do. I had heard the explosion that killed another boy not long before, and for weeks afterward, his mother's scream followed me everywhere. I thought I...

Aug 20, 2026, 6:50 AM

The Mountain That Refused the War

AI-generated illustration inspired by the slopes of Chaparrastique volcano in El Salvador.

People often ask me what I remember most about growing up during El Salvador's civil war. They expect stories about soldiers, explosions, fear, or death. Those memories exist, but they are not the first ones that come to me....

Aug 6, 2026, 5:43 AM

The Bridge That Held Us Together

Puente Litoral (later widely known as Puente de Oro), over the Lempa River in El Salvador, photographed on January 20, 1953. Courtesy of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, via Wikimedia Commons.

In 1988, a dog with rabies bit me in San Jorge. I do not remember the bite as clearly as I remember what came after it: the buses, the hospitals, the bridges, and my older brother sitting beside me...

Jul 23, 2026, 5:51 AM

The Boy Everyone Called Calavera

A Salvadoran mother offers a meal to a young soldier during the country's civil war. AI-generated illustration based on the author's recollection.

I no longer remember his real name. Everyone called him Calavera—the Spanish word for "Skull." His real name disappeared long ago, but the nickname remained. That’s how memory sometimes survives war: it forgets names but refuses to let go...

Jul 9, 2026, 7:00 AM

The Scream That Followed Me Home

Illustration created with AI based on the author's memories.

There are sounds that never completely leave the body. They fade for years, hide beneath work, distance, language, and adulthood. Then one afternoon, without warning, they return exactly as they first arrived—raw, immediate, and alive. For me, it was...

Jun 25, 2026, 5:38 AM

The Roof Where I Watched the War

An illustration inspired by childhood memories of watching the Salvadoran Civil War from the rooftop of a family home in San Jorge, El Salvador.

There are memories that return first as light. Not faces. Not names. Not even fear. Only flashes against the darkness. When I was a child during the Salvadoran civil war, I used to climb onto the roof of our house...

Jun 11, 2026, 4:32 AM

Before We Understood What a Grenade Was

A childhood memory from San Jorge, El Salvador, during the Salvadoran Civil War.

There are memories that remain suspended between childhood and catastrophe. At the time they happen, they do not feel historical. They do not announce themselves as trauma. They arrive disguised as confusion, as heat, as adults behaving strangely while...

May 28, 2026, 2:01 PM

Where Was God When He Asked for Water

A mother hides her children during the Salvadoran civil war.

There are nights that never end. They do not remain in the past. They return quietly, without warning, and sit beside you as if they had never left. One of those nights still lives in me. During the Salvadoran civil war, when...

About Me

W. E. Ticas is a Salvadoran-American writer, poet, and independent music artist based in New York. His literary work explores memory, war, displacement, faith, Jewish memory, and survival through nonfiction and poetry. His writing has appeared in The Times of Israel, New English Review, Jewish Literary Journal, and Voices Israel, and he is a member of the Voices Israel Group of Poets in English. As a music artist, he creates instrumental works rooted in memory, place, and storytelling, including the concept album La Novia de Las Piletas. Across his work, he explores the emotional afterlife of violence, migration, loss, and remembrance.

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