One ordinary day in 1969, a child bathed with her father and siblings in the Goascorán River dividing Honduras and El Salvador. Suddenly, Honduran military forces opened fire, killing her father.
“This moment shattered her childhood, leaving her and her siblings orphaned and vulnerable in a world increasingly defined by conflict and insecurity. It was an act of violence born from hatred against one’s own neighbors,” writes Chelsea Flores in her 2025 Conflict Transformation project, Echoes of Resistance: Celebrating Central American Storytelling.
The child depicted in the story is Flores’s grandmother. This moment of violence left her orphaned and altered the course of her life. For Flores, revisiting this family trauma became a way to examine her relationship with her Central American identity and the legacies of conflict that shaped her lineage.
This personal story forms the emotional and historical foundation of Flores’s conflict transformation project. From there, she branches out to explore larger themes of climate justice, immigration, and heritage languages.
“This project gave me a confidence boost,” said Flores, a psychology undergraduate student who shifted to intensive Spanish translation and language study in her graduate program.
“I feel like I finally know how to combine my interests,” she added. “This project was my way of responding to the past and establishing a positive relationship with my history and bilingual identity.”
Flores chose a bilingual zine as her communication tool for this project, a specific deliverable required of the Conflict Transformation Fellowship. The 2025 cohort integrated a creative communication strategy to help transform the dialogue around their conflict; producing everything from podcasts to educational curriculum.
The fellowship is part of the Kathryn Wasserman Davis Collaborative in Conflict Transformation, a multiyear initiative focused on productively harnessing conflict for meaningful change. The Conflict Transformation Fellowship is open to all Middlebury Institute students, whether they attend in-person or online programs, and opens for applications each spring.
[The Conflict Transformation Fellowship] gave me a confidence boost. I feel like I finally know how to combine my interests.
This zine, titled Mommy Issues, weaves together historical research, personal narrative, and multimedia artwork to tell Flores’s story and link her family’s diasporic history to larger narratives like immigration, identity, resistance, and generational trauma. Flores’s zine also challenges history’s remembering of the conflict that killed her great-grandfather.
“The murder of Salvadoran citizens living in Honduras was later minimized in public memory, reduced to a brief episode known as the ‘100-Hour War’ or the ‘Football War’ of 1969,” writes Flores in her zine. “But this short-lived conflict laid the groundwork for deeper instability.”
Flores invites readers to “engage with Central American narratives not only as historical records but as living echoes of resilience.
“By centering storytelling as a tool for both resistance and healing, this project contributes to the field of conflict transformation by amplifying marginalized voices, preserving cultural memory, and offering context to the harsh conditions people from the region continue to flee in search of stability.”
In addition to the zine, Flores produced a curated glossary of colloquial Honduran Spanish, “offering linguistic and cultural insight into regional expressions often overlooked in formal translation.
“Studying language so intimately means I can better place myself in the world,” she said. “I learned I don’t have to be ashamed of my heritage language.”
Flores, a 2025 Spanish translation graduate, is working toward a career in community interpretation—possibly in a medical or educational setting.
“I want to be anywhere with children and families who need to be understood,” she said. “I can be someone who understands the history and context of their culture.”
Flores shared a number of books that inspired her project:
Human Diastrophism, by Gilbert Hernandez
The Best We Could Do, by Thi Bui
A Camera in the Garden of Eden, by Kevin Coleman
For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts, by Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez
Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler
Cipotes and Prisión Verde, by Ramón Amaya Amador
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