Saul Solorzano touched thousands of lives in D.C.’s Central American community

There was a terrible, quiet irony to Saul Solorzano’s death.

He had grown up in the maelstrom of a vicious civil conflict in El Salvador that decimated his generation and killed many of his childhood friends. He had survived an illegal desert crossing into the United States as a teenager, then spent years as a semi-clandestine organizer in national movements that opposed U.S. policy in El Salvador and provided a haven for undocumented war refugees.

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 The head of the nonprofit Central American Resource Center in the District, who died after a fall in his home, for years had fought to obtain legal amnesty for refugees and helped thousands in the Washington area secure a perch in American society.

For the past two decades, as head of the nonprofit Central American Resource Center in the District, known as Carecen, he had fought to obtain legal amnesty for Central American refugees and helped thousands in the Washington area secure a perch in American society.

Meanwhile, he earned two college degrees and became a legal resident and U.S. citizen. Only in the past several years had he found time to marry and start a family. Even more recently, he had begun exploring a career in politics. At 49, he was finally beginning to enjoy life.

Then, late on the night of Aug. 16, while his family was asleep, Solorzano went down to the basement. He often stayed up e-mailing associates or working on grant proposals, and he may have been rummaging for a soda in the storage area. He either passed out or stumbled and fell, striking his head on something sharp. Early the next morning, his wife, Wendy, found him lying motionless. He never regained consciousness, dying later that day at Washington Hospital Center.

“Sometimes he seemed like a child himself, rolling in the yard and swinging on the swings with his daughter,” Wendy said last week, sitting in their remodeled brick townhouse in upper Northwest while 4-year-old Camila watched cartoons. “I don’t think he had much time to be a child in El Salvador.”

It was the most mundane of passings, an abrupt and unsatisfying end to a life lived in the thick of political battles and community turmoil, first in the shadows and increasingly in the limelight. Solorzano, who left a laptop bursting with ideas, contacts and plans for the future, died in mid-sentence.

Luckily, he had already achieved his major goal: the transformation of Carecen from a tiny, shoestring agency to a pillar of the community. It was a journey that mirrored the evolving priorities, needs and conflicts of the region’s Central American immigrants, and it had consumed him for 20 years.

“A lot of us would go out to bars or to the beach, just to relax a little, but Saul never wanted to go. He was always serious, like a catechist,” said Mauricio Alarcon, a Salvadoran-born education specialist in Arlington County who served on the board of Carecen for many years. Over time, many such activists moved to the suburbs and drifted away from social causes. “Not Saul,” Alarcon said. “Carecen was his whole life.”

Salvadoran solidarity

Among certain Salvadoran Americans in their 50s and 60s, the mention of Solorzano evinces pangs of nostalgia for an old and faded cause. Like him, they were once young leftists who fled illegally to the United States in the early 1980s and joined campaigns to promote “solidarity” with El Salvador’s poor and sanctuary for its refugees. Their nerve center was Los Angeles, where Solorzano landed at 18 and plunged immediately into the movement.