El paquete and el varejón: Women's Material Cultures of Care Under El Salvador's Carceral State of Exception

Abstract

This paper explores the materialities of care employed by families of people incarcerated under El Salvador's gang crackdown, the State of Exception (SOE) declared in March 2022. Through ethnographic research, I analyze the significance of items like paquetes (packages) and varejones (wooden sticks) that mothers and grandmothers use in their practices of care. These items transcend their utilitarian purposes, embodying practices of care, power relationships, and innocence claims within a context of political and social repression. Families, particularly women, leverage these items to ensure the survival of their loved ones in prison and make statements about their innocence, while navigating the state's coercive apparatus. This study foregrounds the gendered labor of care under punitive governance, highlighting the intimate and immediate justice practiced through familial relationships. By examining the material processes of care in situations of carceral violence, this paper contributes to an understanding of care as a relational, gendered, and politically charged practice, challenging the unjust policies upheld by the SOE and advocating for non-punitive responses to violence. Through a deep dive into the social lives, agency, and impacts of these objects, the paper offers insights into the broader implications of care work within hostile environments and underscores the connections between material culture and social justice.

Ester ¹ sits on a cement step in her patio, her blue skirt rising just above her knees. We have just finished eating our pupusas con café. Her two green parakeets chatter throughout the meal, but other than that the pueblo is quiet today. She tells me in her soft but unwavering voice, about when the State of Exception (el régimen ² ) started and they arrested her son:

Iban casa por casa. Hasta el bebé, mi nieto, estaba tiernito, hasta el bebé revisaron para ver si era niño. Yo estaba ahí abajo en la iniciativa. Se llevaron a todos los bolos—mi hijo como no me hacía caso, él era uno de ellos. Yo iba a dejar paquetes, hasta levantaron champas con ventas pero después los del penal se enojaron y los quitaron. Un día nos mintieron, nos dijeron que 500 iban a salir de Mariona así que fuimos el montón de gente, fuimos el gran gentío para allá, ancianas, mujeres con recién nacidos, sin comer. Yo me caí (me enseña una cicatriz en la rodilla izquierda). Mi hijo estuvo preso nueve meses. Quizás fue parte del plan de Dios, porque él no me hacía caso, pasaba tomando en la calle, y así lo agarraron. Lo encañonaron, se lo llevaron con mi sobrino también. Yo cómo me rebuscaba para comprar los paquetes, pero cuando él salió me dijo, ′Yo no recibí yinas, no nos dieorn nada.′ Ellos daban una lista y yo le compraba las dos mudadas que pidieron. Para comprar la sábana, entre ellas, mis hijas, comprábamos las cosas, un poco cada una. Pero me dijo, ′Todo el tiempo dormimos con frío,′ que quedó solo en boxer por tres meses.

The police and soldiers went house by house. Even the baby, my grandson, he was a newborn, and they checked to see if he was a boy or girl. I was a block away, at the women's collective. They took all of the drunks—my son, since he never listened to me, so he was one of them. After they took him, I went to drop off paquetes (packages). Vendors even set up stalls to sell items for the paquetes along the street, but the prison got mad and kicked them out. One day, they lied to us, they said that 500 prisoners were going to be released from Mariona Penitentiary. And a ton of us ran down there, old ladies, mothers with newborns, without breakfast. I fell (she shows me the scar on her left knee). My son was in prison for nine months. Maybe it was God's plan, because he wouldn’t listen to me, he was always drinking in the street, and that's how they got him. They put a gun to his head, and they took my nephew too. And I tried so hard to buy the paquetes, but when he got out, he told me, “I didn’t get flip-flops, they didn’t give us anything.” And the prison had given us a list. I bought the two outfits they asked for, my daughters and I put our money together, a little each one. To buy the sheets, I told my sister, “You buy the fabric and I’ll make the sheets for our two sons.” But my son told me when he got out, “The whole time, we slept in the cold.” He only had a boxer for clothing for 3 months.

Paquetes could cost over $100, depending on how much families were able to spare. Even when working at a maquila, Ester and her peers only made $160-$180 a month.

This article is about the materialities of care employed by families of people incarcerated under El Salvador's State of Exception (SOE) ³ . I analyze items like the paquete that Ester describes, that signify more than simply their utility. For families convinced of their loved ones’ innocence, these items embody their practices of care. Families, particularly women, rely upon them to assure the survival of family members who are locked up and to make claims about their innocence. They use these items as vehicles of meaning extending into the prison and into general discourse about the people who are locked up.

El Salvador's State of Exception (SOE), declared in March 2022, suspended rights to due process, freedom of association, and private communication. Anyone could be arrested without stated cause or evidence. Three years into this “regime,” over 84,000 people had been arrested as the government extended and renewed its emergency powers (Alemán, 2024). Those arrested tend to be young men from poor communities (Cristosal, 2023; Pappier, 2022). Incarceration rates reached over two out of every 100 Salvadorans, surpassing the U.S. for highest incarceration rate in the world (Cruz & Speck, 2022 ). Local organizations documented over 6,000 cases of human rights violations, 244 deaths of detainees, and the abandonment of over 100,000 children (Azul Originario et al., 2024).

In the early days of the SOE in 2022, news reports showed crowds of women like Ester outside of police stations, prisons, and courthouses looking for their arrested loved ones. They slept outside during the tropical rainy season on the chance they might be released. The government claimed that human rights were for those that deserved it, not for terrorists, and the people who had been arrested were all terrorists (Discurso Completo de Bukele En La Asamblea de La ONU: Seguridad En El Salvador, Redes Sociales y Más, 2024). Yet, the family members of the innocent formed groups on social media and in public marches where they demanded answers, proper investigations, and their family members’ freedom.

Contrary to what Bukele and his administration claimed, many of those arrested were not terroristas (terrorists); in fact, there had been no trials and no investigations into individuals accused of gang affiliation. Families of those incarcerated filed human rights cases against the government for illegal incarceration, habeas corpus, and tracked down public prosecutors. Those who could, paid private lawyers from their savings or from loans, looking for any avenue to prove their loved ones’ innocence.

Ester's resources, the assembly of objects that went into the paquete and her son's interaction with those objects shaped her experience of her son's incarceration. They reveal important costs to families and consequences of the SOE. Other studies following human rights violations and the activism of families have focused on the process of claims-making (Gallagher, 2023; Skigin, 2024). Feminist theories of care direct us to consider the skills, time, resources, and knowledge required in these processes (Fisher & Tronto, 1990).

This paper is an analysis of the materialities of care, the objects themselves used to do the caring. Objects are an often-ignored part of the social context that social work research seeks to better understand. Social work researcher John Doering-White has written several pieces on how materials operate in human interactions in contexts requiring secrecy and discretion (2018, 2021). Studying how people interact with material objects in these settings “informs social work practice with other criminalized populations who do not fit neatly into dichotomies of victimhood and victimization, or innocence and guilt” (Doering-White, 2018, p. 432). I argue that mothers’ use of a toolkit of objects is reflective of the affect and power between mothers and sons, and between mothers and the state. As a piece of social work research, this paper aims to challenge the unjust policy of the State of Exception through the untangling of these relationships (IFSW, 2018). The gendered study of women's experiences of this policy are crucial to any evaluation of its effectiveness.

The Material Culture of Care

What is Care? Why Study Materiality?

Mothers’ actions towards their incarcerated sons are practices of care. I draw on the feminist definition of care from Fisher and Toronto as including “everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (1990, p. 40). These tasks supersede the possibilities of any one person or group; mothers are charged with a great responsibility of care, but care is not limited to motherhood. That women compensate for deficiencies in the care for others and our world is indicative of patriarchal structures. Raghuram (2019) reminds us that “care-less practices are as productive of subjectivity as careful ones” (p. 625). The action or inaction of the state in providing basic rights creates the conditions of care for its residents—how many hours or days they must work to provide for their family, how long they wait in public clinics, how expensive food staples are, how safe their neighborhoods are from violence. Not only the what or the who of care, but the how and why constitute what that care means; study of care is also a study of its gendered, political context.

The objects themselves that are used to take care of others are a product of this context and the agency of caregivers. Care objects are not just tools to be used, but rather play an active role themselves in their social context. For example, the examining table in a doctor's office grants access to the patient's body, casting them as vulnerable and the doctor as free to examine. Tilley argues that people “make themselves” in the process of “using, exchanging, consuming, interacting and living with things […] without the things – material culture – we could neither be ourselves nor know ourselves. Material culture is thus inseparable from culture and human society” (2006, p. 61) Materialities of care allow for an examination of practices of care in a relational way, where care practices “are constituted through and between the relations between bodies, objects and spaces” (Buse et al., 2018, p. 245). The materiality of care thus understood in the context of relationships has spatial and temporal dimensions, as well as those of their practice. Buse and colleagues further note that “materials are shared between people as part of practices of care, they sometimes ‘stand in’ for caring relations, and may shape, enable or constrain practices of caring (2018, p. 245). They acknowledge that the physical and emotional elements of care—the difference between “caring about” and “caring for”—are often muddled. The materialities of care can generate and carry emotion.

In this paper, I extend De León's work in selecting what he saw as the “migrant's toolkit” (2012). I share his approach in analyzing objects’ social lives, agency, and capacity to impact their users. He maps the dialectical relationship between border crossers and the objects they use to achieve their goal of crossing the border undetected. Similarly, I look to the relationships between women, paquetes and el varejón to achieve their own goal, of securing the survival of their incarcerated family members through sustenance and innocence claims. The “toolkit” of my participants was involved in crossing the barrier of prison walls to secure the wellbeing and release of their loved ones. While De León's work interprets the relationship between human-object, I extend the relationship across human-object-human, with the state as both interrupter and absence.

El varejón and el paquete are part of the social process of taking care of incarcerated loved ones. They are part of how people structure their experiences of the SOE, the routines of each month, daily conversations, and visits to government institutions. Because the social goal of this process is directed towards their family members, the consequences of these “technologies” are marked not just by their impact on women but on their intended recipients. In this process, state intervention is a key actor in shaping those consequences.

Like De León, I also draw on Alfred Gell's work in which he defines technology as “those forms of social relationships which make it socially necessary to produce, distribute and consume goods and services using ‘technical’ processes” (1988, p. 7). Technology includes the knowledge that goes into the invention, creation, and use of tools. Therefore, my analysis goes beyond a description of characteristics or whether the tool is successful in achieving its task. The creation and use of each object is studied in-context. While Gell specifies “social” relationships, I incorporate the arguments of feminists and care scholars above to argue that to understand the use of the “tool kit” of these families, we must also attend to political relationships. The unmet care necessities of food, clothing, hygiene, and freedom were created by the state through the imposition of the SOE. This is not a passive context but rather an active definition of the political conditions of care for these families. The food in a paquete cannot be faulted for failing to sustain a prisoner when prison guards seize its contents.

The material culture of care thus requires the study of multiple elements. I look at both the relationship between person, object, and intended recipient, and the environment or rules imposed on those interactions by outside structures. The study of these objects and their purpose can help us reconstruct the values, ideas, and social distinctions being reproduced, legitimized, or transformed through their use (Tilley, 2006). The ways in which these objects cross time, space, and practice also help to tell the story of how care has evolved specifically in relationship to the carceral crisis of the State of Exception.

On Material Care and Violence

Fisher and Tronto's definition of care nods to “our world.” Both the “our” and “world” deserve unpacking with attention to intersectional social identities and political, social, and spatial conditions. Where a mother stands, both geographically and socially, affects her care practices and the tools at her disposal. The women in this study all come from marginalized communities where violence at the hands of men—police, gang members, romantic partners, other family members—has long been normalized as a part of gender relations (Hume, 2004). Living and raising children in such an environment has high stakes. There is the question, then, of what will be called “care.” Is it “care” if it further creates harm? Auyero and Kilanski observe that many “care practices” in hostile environments may (re)produce violence, calling them “last resort tools of care” (2015). However, they remind us that it was:

the mothers’ belief that violence was the only means remaining to prevent an even less desirable outcome than the marks they sometimes put on their children's bodies or the fear and trauma that they may have inspired in their children through their violent acts. Their violence, as they saw it, was a last ditch effort to interrupt addiction, keep their children away from bad influences who might endanger them in and out of prison, or end the cycle of young death in the community. Violence is thus seen as an expression of care—as a right way of looking after others (Auyero and Kilanski, 2015, p. 406)

“Care” looks differently in different environments as people (mostly women) do their best to take care of their children based on structural and environmental conditions. Auyero and Kilanski use the images of “making toast” and “splitting apples” to speak to these efforts. “Making toast” refers to the everyday routines of care work dedicated to feeding, clothing, and housing loved ones, much as one might “make toast” every morning for their breakfast. “Making toast” looks like the practices most commonly associated with care work: cooking, cleaning, housing, raising children, tending to the sick (Montaño Virreira & Calderón Magaña, 2010). These would be associated with materials like food products, brooms, soap, construction materials, medicines, and clothing.

If I were to limit my definition of care to these actions, this paper would only discuss the paquete, containing items that are an extension of these tasks. However, continuing in Auyero and Kilanski's framework, they also describe “splitting apples” as the ways in which violence is taught or exercised to protect loved ones from harm. This was a reference to one of their participants who was taught as a little girl how to kill someone to defend herself by splitting an apple with her bare hands. Scholars have described the use of violence with the goal of protection in similar contexts, making important clarifications around structural issues and individual agency. Zubillaga and her colleagues (2015) document how women respond to violence in neighborhoods controlled by armed groups in Caracas. The state takes no responsibility and rather leaves mothers to be responsible for raising children without the resources to do so. Many of them employ individualized violence preemptively to keep family members safe from bad influences like armed groups and drug addiction. They used chains, fists, sticks, and kicks to protect their children from being killed (Zubillaga et al., 2015, p. 200). Other scholars have similarly described this dual role of mothers who play the role of protector and of perpetrator of violence when physically reprimanding children. Physical violence is considered education rather than mistreatment because it may instill morals or values in children (Hume, 2008; Wilding, 2010). In these contexts, mothers’ violence towards their children is part of their repertoire of care. What is needed to sustain life, even imperfectly, must vary based on the resources, skills, and knowledge available to mothers, which in turn are shaped by the normalization of certain practices.

Particular to the case of El Salvador, Hume notes that “violence has been awarded a degree of functionality throughout Salvadoran history, particularly in family relations, where it is considered an important element of good parenting” (Hume, 2008, p. 64). Use of violence in parenting is seen as “right” based on social and cultural norms (Hume, 2008, p. 66). The Family Code establishes the duty of parents to take care of their children in Article 216. The Family Code does not explicitly prohibit corporal punishment, but rather establishes the duty of parents to “correct” their children “adequately and moderately” (Código de Familia, 1993; UNICEF: End Corporal Punishment, 2023). Any rights to support to do so are notably absent. Current Latin American literature has elaborated on everyday care practices and discourse around parenting in hostile environments. This paper contributes to this literature by studying the role of different material elements in care practices in harmful environments.

Methods

What objects are part of women's toolkit when taking care of incarcerated relatives under El Salvador's State of Exception? What meanings do these objects carry in relationships of care between individuals and the state? This paper addresses these questions through ethnographic methods detailed below. As an engaged, observational method, ethnography proved appropriate for understanding patterns in the objects used and the meanings ascribed to them (Creswell, 2007). As Mathias and colleagues (2021) describe, ethnography is a powerful method for social work research. It aims at understanding how social events—like how a care relationship is displaced by incarceration—are contextualized and given meaning. It is also dialogical and shows how participants’ concepts can shape everyday outcomes, for instance, how a mother's belief in her son's innocence affects her advocacy. Finally, ethnography describe social processes over time. My accounts of participants include their histories of care, the ongoing period of incarceration, and uncertain future of their children. It is a method suited to understanding people's experiences as well as the material context in which their lives take place, also highlighted in the work of Doering-White (2018).

Research Setting

Leading up to my arrival for 10 months of fieldwork in 2023, the State of Exception was no longer a fresh crisis, but had become normalized. Family members had learned where the relevant government institutions were and what kind of treatment they would receive there, knew the bus route to prison, and what they could put into paquetes. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) had made plans for programs, and documented human rights violations. Magali, a human rights defender, told me, Yo viví la crisis del miedo, creo que lo viví un mes. No me paraba, no me levantaba, no comía. Solo llorando y asustada, pasaba. Pero desde que entré al movimiento ya mi vida se tornó útil para los demás (I lived the crisis of fear, I think I lived it for a month. I couldn’t stand, I couldn’t get up, I didn’t eat. I only cried and was afraid. But since I joined the movement for family victims, my life has become useful for others). Another, Verónica, said that after some psychosocial workshops and prayer, she felt better, she trusted in God that her son would be released. I took these as cues that interviews with a researcher like me would not be inherently retraumatizing if I employed best social work practices. These included basic physical considerations for trauma-informed care in providing a space with minimum considerations for safety, clean water, sanitary facilities, and privacy and confidentiality (Zapata-Alma, 2019). I also followed guidelines outlined in a local organization's manual for working with victims of human rights violations (Proyecto Derechos y Dignidad, 2023). Part of my own “care toolkit” always included water, tissues, and a stuffed animal as a sensory outlet. I provided participants meals, transportation costs, childcare, and a small gift.

Positionality

My work in El Salvador began in 2013 when gang violence was at its height. It had been called the “homicide capital of the world,” reaching more than 20 homicides a day. Initially, I lived and worked in a rural community, and after two years, I applied for a work permit and worked for a NGO in the capital for three years in-country. Our work connected violence prevention to critical thinking and creativity developed through writing and arts programs. As a facilitator, I worked with public schools and both juvenile and adult prisons across the country until I returned to the United States in 2018. This work brought me to my research by revealing the ways in which so-called security and violence reduction policies often target criminalized individuals, rather than structural conditions, as other research has also noted (Baird, 2025). My prior knowledge of the country and long relationships informed my critical eye as I moved and interpreted what I saw in 2023. President Bukele made sweeping superficial changes aimed at rebranding the country and ultimately announced that El Salvador was the safest country in the Western hemisphere thanks to the SOE (“Derechos Humanos” | English Subtitles, 2024). When I began my research, I was not a novice to the context.

Coming from allá (over there, shorthand for the U.S.), a White woman getting an advanced degree from the United States—where over 2 million Salvadorans and many family members of my participants lived—meant that the people I met were curious about me and willing to share their time. I was perceived as someone separate from the mistrust and fear families experienced in their communities. They thanked me for listening to them and giving them a space to desahogarse (to “undrown,” to vent or unburden oneself of problems through talking)(for more on venting as method, see: Zulver et al., 2024). I have not had the lived experiences of a poor Salvadoran mother of an incarcerated child. However, my positionality granted me the privilege to engage in feminist praxis with reflexivity and humility for my social position. Ariana Markowitz quotes María José Méndez's feminist praxis: “Rather than trying to walk in someone else's shoes, we might instead ‘stand side by side in our own shoes’” (Méndez, 2021, as cited in Markowitz, 2022, p. 261). Standing in my own shoes means recognizing that being an empathetic, experienced outsider in this setting provided my participants the potential for the relief of having their story heard, as well as access to the power to disseminate their stories to greater audiences.

Data Collection

Data collection for this study includes 1) participant observation over 10 months; 2) five arts-based group discussion spaces (three for women, two for men) 3) nine in-depth, semi-structured interviews; 4) seven home visits in the same municipality. Study protocols for this ethnographic study obtained IRB approval from my institution's committee. I used NVivo data management system to organize all data documents. All names were changed to protect the identity of research participants.

Over ten months, I was partnered with a human rights organization as a research fellow. It held community dialogues and collective legal clinics specifically for family members of people who had been wrongfully arrested. I did not participate in private conversations between lawyers and participants, but I took notes about participants’ questions and concerns in the first half of the clinics. In the second half of clinics, I volunteered to take care of any small children that had come along, in support of the organization's commitment to protecting the rights of children from listening to difficult narratives of their family member's (most often, a parent) arrest. I took “jottings” during these events that I would type into fieldnotes on the same day (Emerson et al., 2011).

Several months into my fieldwork, I had been unsuccessful in recruiting families of incarcerated individuals for interviews through my partner organization. Drawing on my past experience facilitating workshops, I proposed holding a “workshop.” My partners responded with relief, “Oh, a taller? Of course we can find a group for that!” In reality, I designed the workshop such that I would not be teaching a new skill, but rather offering activities and questions about care in a more creatively-oriented focus group (Stewart et al., 2009). My partner organization put me in touch with two community-based group coordinators—one from a women's group outside of San Salvador and one from a grassroots movement for families who were victims of the SOE—who assisted with recruitment for these groups. The inclusion criteria were gender identity (woman-identifying) and having any family member arrested under the State of Exception. Working with coordinators, or “gatekeepers,” like this has its limitations ⁴ , but it was the ethnographically obvious option, both in terms of using existing relationships of trust and in terms of studying the story that my interlocutors wanted to be told (Lund et al., 2016). Participants in the groups were aged 27–70 years old and a total of 13 women participated.

In each group, we began with questions like: What do I do to take care of myself? Who do I take care of? How do I take care of them with my hands, feet, heart, thoughts? What institutions hurt or hinder how I take care of my loved ones, both in and outside of prison? I integrated movement and arts-based activities, providing opportunities to express experiences and emotions beyond just speech. Participants gave verbal consent at the beginning of each session, and I asked their permission to “listen through writing,” taking vigorous handwritten notes that I typed up later.

I followed up these groups with home visits and interviews. Home visits followed the pueblo practice of showing up to a neighbor's house and chatting over coffee and pan dulce. In this case, the “neighbors” were the women who participated in one of the focus groups, and I was the visitor. Ester, who figures prominently in this article, accompanied me on these visits and often helped guide our conversation. Visting with women in their homes allowed me to see their care practices in context, rather than relying on what they said in structured group activities. Importantly, for this paper, it also allowed me to observe the objects involved in care. I took notes guided by Geertz's “thick description” to absorb the layers of environment, people, practices, and interactions that I perceived (1973). These home visits were all in the same pueblo, allowing me to gather geographically-specific data.

For participants who were more geographically dispersed, I followed focus groups with semi-structured interviews: five single or widowed mothers, three heterosexual couples, and one mother-son duo. In interviews (50–90 min), I began with standard questions about their care practices, the kinds of support they had received around their loved one's incarceration, how their relationship to that person affected their care practices, and their perspectives on the SOE. However, following feminist scholars’ consideration of interviews as conversations in which meaning is co-constructed, I listened actively to what participants wanted to tell me (or not tell me) (Sherman Heyl, 2007). New questions arose in individual interviews, which in turn informed all of my interactions and conversations that followed. I recorded interviews on a separate recorder and transcribed them using a secure website.

My interlocutors all insisted on their family members’ innocence. My intention is not to determine the guilt or innocence of the people involved in this study but rather to note that much of what they shared with me was meant to convince me of their loved ones’ innocence. They expressed repeatedly that they showed their faces, they spoke up, because they knew their family member was innocent; if not, they claimed that they would have allowed for the justice system to punish them. I want to emphasize my position that regardless of a person's innocence or links to criminal groups, they have the right to dignified treatment and human rights while incarcerated. However, due to the implementation of the SOE, it was not possible for me to speak openly with family members who might doubt their loved one's innocence.

Each method was built and overlapped with the others in an iterative process. Participant observations informed group discussions; each individual group discussion, though they were built on the same questions, informed the others. Group discussions laid the groundwork for semi-structured interviews, which took place in the same period as the unstructured home visits.

Data Analysis

Ethnographic data analysis was an iterative process, taking place over the course of data collection and reflection. I followed an approach much like that described by LeCompte and Schensul (1999). They note that analysis is not isolated from ethnographic field work itself and that much implicit coding occurs throughout fieldwork, grounding analysis afterwards. As I took inscriptions, transcriptions, and descriptions in the field, one of those implicit codes became the analysis of this paper, the role of materials in care work. I carried these implicit codes into the next stage of analysis, post-fieldwork. I primarily used in vivo coding and outlining to process the body of qualitative data (Saldaña, 2020). My notes showed repeated references to the objects used in care practices. Based on these patterns, I turned to the approach of De León (2012) in studying the social life of the objects that people used. I identified their goals, materials, origins, and how they acted on their users within their social and political environment.

Paquetes as Sustenance and Value

In the first weeks of the SOE, Bukele threatened that if gangs retaliated against the mass arrests, their “homeboys” in prison would not be fed; in other pronouncements, he said that prisoners would be fed only twice a day, “y sin pollo” (and no chicken)(Casa Presidencial [@PresidenciaSV], 2022; Si pandilleros desatan violencia, no habrá comida en la cárcel, 2022). Withholding food became a weapon against prisoners.

Families were entirely cut off from those on the inside, repeating to me that “solo Dios sabe cómo están, si están vivos” (only God knows how they are, if they’re alive). The only access point for family members is the paquete. Women told me they had to save little by little from income of $10-$15 a day for the paquetes that they were allowed to drop off at the prison once a month. Azúcar, galletas, Incaparina, leche, sopa maruchan, jabón, sábanas, cepillo de dientes, café listo (sugar, cookies, drink supplements, milk, ramen noodles, soap, sheets, toothbrushes, instant coffee): They knew precisely what was allowed in the paquete, estimating it cost $80-$150 each month. In addition to the products that went into it, the paquete required women make monthly, often multi-day trips to the prison where their child(ren) were held, costing transportation money, time away from paid work, food, and their health as they waited in long lines under harsh sun or rain.

The paquete carried more weight than just the worth of the items within it. In a psychosocial workshop, Karla, a 67 year-old woman, explained, “Si no les llevamos paquetes, van a pensar ‘mi mamá no me deja nada, mi mamá está de acuerdo con esto'” (If we don’t bring them packages, they’ll think, ‘My mom doesn’t leave anything for me, my mom agrees with all of this). The paquete is a way to continue care relationships through both providing material security and signifying continued dedication. Other women repeated this sentiment, saying they felt guilty about the months that they weren’t able to “ir a dejar paquete” (go drop off the package) and others that emphasized that “uno tiene que hacer el sacrificio” (you have to make sacrifices) to make sure their sons were fed on the inside. Jessica told me how she and her sister had deposited $30 so their brother could have a “cena navideña” and “para el 31 [de enero]” (Christmas and New Year's meals). They didn’t feel right thinking that they would be celebrating, eating good food with their family for the holidays, knowing that their brother was aguantando hambre (enduring hunger).

Everyone told me about the paquete, and all doubted that it arrived intact, if at all, to their loved one. Magali, a human rights defender in her 30s and partner of an incarcerated man, explained:

Al principio, con mi mamá sacamos un crédito para comprar los grandes paquetones, pero ahora solo compramos lo muy necesario. Porque el Estado tiene que saber que los privados de libertad no tienen recursos para vivir allá a largo plazo.

In the beginning, my mom and I took out a line of credit to buy these huge packages, but now we only buy what's absolutely necessary. Because the state has to know that the prisoners don’t have the resources to live in there long-term.

Here, she called attention to the paquete as a political act; in playing along with the rules of the régimen, she believed she was enabling the government to shirk its responsibilities towards prisoners. Her paquete shrank with her confidence in the government. Estefany, a mother in her 40 s, took another approach:

No le meto la gran cantidad, sino dos libras de cada cosa…Le pongo poquito porque como dicen que le quitan la mitad, digo yo, le dejan la mitad y otra gente dicen que si le meten el gran montón le quitan la mayoría. O sea, y uno no tiene para meterle el gran montón.

I don’t send in the huge amount, just two pounds of each thing…I put in a little bit because they say they take away half, I mean, they leave half and then other people that if you send in a ton of stuff, they take away most of it. I mean, and you don’t have enough to send in a ton of stuff.

Estefany has made a calculus based on how much is enough to get through to her son, leaving extra that will be confiscated, and still making sure it's not so much that it all gets taken away. The quantity of the paquete and the contents vary; she doesn’t limit herself to just milk like Magali, or refuse to feed the state. Alejo, a veteran and retired police officer, posed the situation as “convenient” for his ex-colleagues who took things from the paquetes, either for themselves or to sell back to the prisoners. Their discussion of the paquetes draws attention to the tension between the goals that families had for the paquetes, and the goals or interests of the state in receiving them.

In a singular case, the state came for a mother who did not deliver the paquete as was expected. A group of soldiers came to Ruth's home:

Yo tenía un par de meses de no ir a dejarle el paquete a mi hijo. Pero ellos me dijeron ‘Es necesario que se lo lleve, el paquete. Váyase a dejarlo.’ Yo les dije que había visto publicaciones que no se los daban, y me dijeron, ‘No es cierto.’

It had been a few months since I left a package for my son. But they told me, ‘It's necessary, you have to take the package to him. Go do it.’ I told them that I had seen posts that the prisons weren’t giving them the packages, and they said, ‘It's not true.’

While these visits from soldiers do not seem to be common practice, they do indicate an unmet expectation of the state. Ruth told me that her remaining son in the home, who recently came of age, had been threatened with arrest on multiple occasions. With one son already in prison and the other under surveillance, the coercion was not subtle. Between women and incarcerated family, the paquete was a vehicle of meaning and communication. It was an extension of traditional care practices of feeding, clothing, and bathing. It also shaped the relationship between the state and women. It represented a dismissal of state responsibility towards poor women and their families.

El varejón as Correction

While paquetes represent an act of care through sustenance, in this section I will argue that mothers’ use of el varejón (a stick) to discipline their children represents a form of care through rules enforcement contextualized to highly violent settings. The varejón, or other household objects, is meant to eliminate behaviors that would put their sons’ lives at risk from gangs or the state. I will address the nuances and tensions in using a stick to correct behavior, and implications of violence and power. Ultimately, I apply the same framework to the varejón as the paquete by analyzing how it contributes to survival in a setting of high violence and its significance in relationships between women, incarcerated sons, and the state.

Invoking the varejón represents mothers’ role as authority figures in their children's lives in opposition to and resulting from the abandonment of the state. Outside of one jail, a sign read:

Padres y madres, eduquemos a nuestros hijos para no tener la pena de andar de bartolina en bartolina y de penal en penal en donde otros tratarán de adaptarlos a la vida que ustedes no pudieron hacer. Si justificamos sus malos actos ambos sufrirán y también las personas víctimas de ellos. (Martínez, 2022)

Fathers and mothers, let's educate our children so we don’t have to wander from jail to jail, prison to prison, where others will try to shape them into the life that you didn’t. If we justify your bad actions, both of you will suffer, as well as their victims.

The state reiterates that raising good children is the duty of parents. The state intervenes only after the failure of parents; this pattern is repeated in Article 215, which establishes that a judge will intervene to “correct” children when necessary (Código de Familia, 1993). Legally, raising “correct,” good citizens is the purview of parents, and it is clear that women take on these unpaid responsibilities in a vacuum of other supports. Based on my conversations with them, I argue that the concern with “correctness” is tantamount to women's assertions of their children's innocence.

Asserting innocence was a key task of caring about and taking care of incarcerated loved ones. The state has failed to investigate the cases of their loved ones. Their time in prison was seemingly unending. This prolonged imprisonment is a threat to life, as documented by over 300 deaths since the SOE's inception and many more cases of torture and mistreatment (Azul Originario et al., 2024). Proving their loved one's innocence is therefore a matter of care, in women's eyes, because innocence would mean the release of their family member into safer, healthier living conditions.

Seen together, the burden of correct caregiving and the urgency of proving innocence contributed to children's upbringing being claimed as evidence of their innocence. As I drank coffee on her patio and admired her garden with three other women, Maricarmen, a 64-year-old who had raised her own children, plus three grandchildren and a nephew, told us how she had taken care of them in their rural community where gangs used to come “para matar” (to kill).

She never left them alone, but one day, her grandson went out to a party, something with balloons, she said, “Pues yo lo fui a buscar con el varejón. La gente me dice, ‘Ya termina el evento.’ ‘No me importa,’ les dije yo. Es que si uno no los educa así, por eso tantos andaban en la calle” (Well I went to look for him with the varejón. People told me, ‘The event's over.’ ‘I don’t care,’ I told them. Look, if you don’t educate them like that, that's why so many ended up in the street). The fact of going to a party, without permission, in this context meant possible exposure to gang members who watched the streets, alcohol, and other vices. It meant opening oneself up to coercive gang recruitment or getting caught in the crossfire between gangs. Maricarmen and her daughter explained that during that time, they shut themselves inside their houses and turned off the lights early in the evening to avoid the gangs. Involvement in gangs ultimately led to death or imprisonment. Given her knowledge of the possible futures for her grandson between the gang, the state, and the varejón (a long stick that comes from the morro tree, see annex), Maricarmen chose the varejón, explaining that this was part of the education she gave him. Love and violence are not unconnected, even if care itself is violent. Maricarmen drew on her own upbringing, Me golpearon, me sentía mal, pero fue algo que pasó aquí mismo y ya, no se salía a la calle (they hit me, I felt bad, but it was something that happened here and then it was over, it didn’t spill into the street).

Maricarmen's “education” might be understood as one of the “last resort tools of care” (splitting apples) described by Auyero and Kilanski (2015) as a mother's attempt to ensure her children's survival in settings of extreme violence. While splitting apples was meant to protect a child from interpersonal violence through physical self-defense, the varejón was meant to protect a child by reinforcing norms perceived to be protective against gangs and other bad influences. The object and the use of the varejón represented the practice of educating and raising innocent children that did not end up on the street or in prison.

El varejón indicates an immediate, intimate sense of justice. No one was in favor of going easy on “criminals.” But mothers whose sons were wrongfully incarcerated insisted, “Yo doy la cara porque mi hijo es inocente” (I show my face because my son is innocent). Karla remembered when the soldiers came to arrest her son, ‘Ay madre, que usted no sabe’ me dijo. ‘Ah, pues sí,’ le dije, ‘Usted lo tuvo a mi hijo por eso sabe!’ le dije, ‘Yo lo he criado en mi casa. Yo sé lo que tengo’ le dije yo (‘Oh mother, you don’t know!’ he told me. ‘Oh right,’ I said, ‘You gave birth to my son so you must know!’ I said. ‘I have raised him in my house, I know what he's capable of,’ I said). Estefany said that if her son was a criminal, she might be in prison too or she would at least resign herself to her son's faults. But no. He was a hard worker, obedient, never lazy. He didn’t offend others or have bad friendships and he was well-behaved. There is an intimacy that comes from the history of caring for their children over so many years, the sense of knowing someone up-close and forming them literally from the tree that grows in their garden. Maricarmen's use of the varejón was about correction and keeping her grandson out of the street.

Mothers’ histories of care defy the state's attempts to deprive the private of epistemological authority. When I asked her about how the government was applying el régimen, Iris told me, “El gobierno fuera una madre mejor y no fuera un padre. Porque muchas veces los padres en el hogar castigan a los hijos sin haber visto lo que los hijos estaban haciendo en casa” (the government should be a mother and not a father. Because many time, fathers at home punish their children without having seen what their children were doing). The state had not investigated the cases of their children since their arrest years before. The ways women took care of their children in the past informed their perception of the state's failure in the State of Exception.

Positioning the varejón as an object of care certainly has considerable tensions. It can only be understood as such by situating it in context. Maricarmen's use of the varejón came from her knowledge about raising children through her own experience and her knowledge of the threats in her community. When her grandson attended a party, he broke house rules with stakes that, in the near term, had real consequences for his survival. In this light, Maricarmen used the varejón out of her intentions to take care of him. My intention is not to argue categorically that enacting violence on children is a practice of care, but to analyze the work it does in this context. To that end, I argue that the varejón draws out differences in the determination of innocence between women and the state and the prompt decision with regards to punishment. That does not make the use of the varejón or any other object to hit children less violent. Rather, it highlights a precarious context where a long history of violence has presented citizens with difficult tradeoffs as they make decisions about how best to keep themselves and their loved ones safe.

Mapping Materialities of Care Onto Interactions Between Women, Prisoners of el régimen, and the State

Women's care practices and the materials they use to enact them under the State of Exception broaden our understanding of care obligations and the meaning produced in these interactions. Paquetes are about extending care relationships between families on the outside and loved ones on the inside. El varejón is more troubling, as it is part of patterns of family violence when raising children in precarious circumstances. However, it is indicative of the relationships mothers develop that provide them with privileged knowledge of their sons, against the unbacked accusations of the state.

Between women and their incarcerated family members, paquetes and el varejón signified intentions for their wellbeing and worth and their conviction of their innocence. El paquete required investment of time and resources to some extent contingent on their belief in their child's innocence. El paquete was a message from women that they still cared about and were taking care of their family member. The connection of the varejón with the notion of innocence, immediacy, and intimacy spoke to women's care practices in raising their children. These care practices reflected the urgency of their family member's physical survival, as well as the survival of their good character as innocent citizens.

Finally, el paquete and el varejón also carry meaning in interactions between women and the state. Paquetes communicate quite differently between women and the state compared to women and their incarcerated loved ones. Where sending clothing, food, and soap to their family members maintains an intimate relationship between women and their incarcerated family members disrupted by the régimen, women recognize the extractive nature of a state that siphons from their sacrifices to assemble the paquete. As a symbol of immediate, intimate punishment for rules broken, el varejón throws the state's intentional inaction into relief. Where mothers turned to el varejón and other punishments to maintain their sons’ survival and innocence, the state seeks neither immediacy nor investigation. For the state, intimacy might rather be a closer examination of each arrested person's circumstances and recognition of their rights, but that does not occur either. By considering the materials and uses of items in the “toolkit of care” in interactions between women and the state, we are better able to understand care practices as providing both sustenance and affirming personal morality.

What does study of a “care toolkit” mean for social work research? A study of objects provides greater contextual grounding in the everyday living of people's lives as well as a window into the ways in which the power of the state acts upon people. Though I have not addressed anti-carceral feminism in this article, these objects and the experiences of these Salvadoran women contribute a complex case. Future research might look further into the implications of innocence as a condition for advocacy while acknowledging the limitations of outright resistance under oppressive regimes (see Krystalli, 2024; Skigin, 2024 for examples of existing work on this topic). In this paper I have shown how care work is not just an action, but is inclusive of the tools used and the meaning given to them within a particular social, political, and historical context. Future research should investigate possible explanations for the lack of attention in social work to objects as part of people's environments. While not actors themselves, these objects illuminate the state's oppressive carceral project. As a feminist researcher, I have acknowledged the complexities and limitations of care work in its intersections with histories of family and community violence. However, in naming them I hope to inform future policy and practices based on non-punitive, non-carceral responses to violence.