09/14/2022
Every semester, the Center supports a series of Applied Research Projects that tackle some of the region's most pressing challenges, including State violence within and across borders, corruption, forced migration and its consequences, and its criminalization.
The image shows Efrain López Rancho and postdoctoral scholar Czarina Aggabao-Thelen leading the history and social analysis workshops for Maya Guatemalan youth at Catholic Charities Community Services of NY.
This past Spring, Thelen and Lopez Rancho, a Maya Poqomam lawyer and ajq’ij (a traditional knowledge holder), ran a series of educational workshops about Guatemalan Indigenous history and social analysis for Indigenous Guatemalan youth asylum-seekers, most of whom come from poor rural backgrounds and have had minimal access to formal education.
This semester, Aggabao-Thelen is teaching her course “Maya Guatemala: Neoliberalism, Colonialism, and Resistance” for the third time. The course aims to help students with the development of their theses and research projects, while simultaneously connecting them to real world scenarios, such as empowering Maya Guatemalan asylum seekers to make sense of their own experiences of violence and discrimination.
In this course, students learn about how neoliberalism consolidated in Guatemala with the 1996 Peace Accords and how certain Maya regions have been targeted for mining and other resource extraction projects. These lessons also informed the workshops, which helped youth participants understand how their lives have been shaped by the deepening social inequalities and violences that are characteristic of neoliberalism. “There were striking moments when the impact of the historical processes on their lives became very clear to the youth. One such powerful moment was discussing intergenerational gendered traumas resulting from the 1980s genocide,” said Thelen.
For more information on the youth workshops and class visit: https://ilas.columbia.edu/content/applied-academic-projects
SSOL: CSER 3964 UN sec:001 Maya Guatemala-Neoliberalism & Resistance
📸: Josephine Herman.
