I Moved Back to El Salvador

Home base has changed. And I'm building a business with no borders. Here's the whole story.

Dear Friends,

I just took care of the hardest move of my life. And I’ve done so many.

I am home. I’ve arrived. It took me 35 years to choose El Salvador as my home base.

Yes, EL SALVADOR.

Playa El Zonte

Coming back didn't make my world smaller. It cracked it wide open. El Salvador is my base now. It's not my only ground.

That's why I've been silent, on pretty much every platform for over a month.

Rooting has never been my calling. Let’s call it a wound that’s become a comfort zone I’m very talented at.

My ability to uproot and start over began just weeks after I was born in Houston, Texas, the city where my young Salvadoran parents were living when they had me. My maternal grandparents decided it was in my best interest to take me back to El Salvador with them, and have my mom meet me there months later. After my mother’s womb, the waters that held me were the warm Pacific waves of El Salvador.

With my mom in El Tunco beach circa 1973

When I was six my parents divorced, and my mom moved back home with my sister and me. It was the late ‘70s, and El Salvador was entering a long civil war. A war I grew up inside of. I was protected in the bubble of the capital city, the American school, a whole classist society around me, and I’m grateful for that protection and clear-eyed about the privilege that shaped me.

I left in 1990, at 18, ready to return to my birth state of Texas for college. The war ended a year later. I spent the next 35 years living in Texas, Florida, Mexico, Spain, and California, chasing dreams and callings of the heart. I became a successful producer, a trailblazing entrepreneur, a community architect and leader, a published author, a creator, and most of all, a mother.

I built all of it with no family physically close to me, living in places I loved, that made me who I am, though something in me stayed a little unrooted no matter how deep I planted.

And El Salvador became my family’s country, the place we’d visit once a year or so. A few weeks, a summer, maybe New Year’s on the beach. I never thought I’d move back. I never considered that here was where I could thrive.

I didn’t realize that this whole process of becoming, the one I’ve been walking consciously for the last four years, would eventually lead me home.

Years of undoing and letting go.

Of betrayals that still hurt every single day.

Of letting my heart lead.

Of solitude and reckonings and grief, of releasing outworn identities, of scary leaps and learning to embrace that change is the only constant.

Years of ripples after I declared I was done with the hustle, letting those ripples transform me, letting go of control.

I was led here. Right back to the warm land of my ancestors.

I have been called back home.

The view from my new home. I grew up playing in the skirts of this volcano and now it’s welcomed me back.

Some of you were here in February, when I wrote about a clarity I couldn’t betray. The guidance came so directly it scared me, and I told you I couldn’t reveal it yet, only that I’d share more once I committed. This is me sharing. The move was the clarity. I held it in silence for months because it felt too tender to hand over to anyone else’s opinion, and I couldn’t let a single outside voice pull me off a path I had prayed so hard to receive. No matter how much it terrified me.

And truthfully, my home has expanded. El Salvador is my new home base. Home, in the fuller sense, is also the US. I'll be splitting my time between here and there. My clients are still in the US, and now I'm building here too, in the land and the language of my roots. My book, Done With the Hustle, comes out next summer in English and Spanish at once, and being home means I get to grow this message in both languages, on both sides.

Porque soy de aquí y soy de allá.

Now that I’m finally settled into our new place, you can expect my weekly shares every Sunday again. I feel clear and strong, rooted and renewed. A new version of me has emerged through the liminal space.

Estoy del otro lado.

Enjoying every minute we get before she’s off to London!

I said this out loud before I wrote a single word of it. Cristy Marrero and I were recording our podcast Her Wisdom Era with Dr. Mariel Buqué, and she was talking about bringing her parents close, about showing up for her mother in a way no one had ever shown up for her, about proximity as the thing that heals. A big part of my decision was exactly that, being present with my mom. Something took over me when I heard her share and it spilled out of me unplanned. Not part of the script. All intuition. Here’s the moment I told our audience I was going home.

You can listen to the whole episode here or on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be sharing more about the move, how I’m settling in, life in El Salvador as a single, soon-to-be empty-nester woman, book updates (I’m on a deadline for copyedits and HarperCollins has contracted the Spanish-language translator!) and how I’m building a creative practice, a business and a life with no borders.

Friends, I’m so happy to be back, in every sense of the word.

Now I’d love to hear what’s been happening in your world. What big heart-led decision have you taken action on lately and what has it revealed?

Con amor,

Ana Flores 🌹

P.S. If you feel my story would inspire a friend, follow that intuitive hit and send it to them :)