Guatemala

This year dates the time the spanish adventurer Pedro de Alvarado defeats the indigenous Maya and turns Guatemala into a Spanish colony. Because of several earthquakes, the capital was moved several times until it became permanently established at Guatemala City in 1776. From 1524 until 1821, Guatemala (City and Province) was the center of government for the captaincy-general of Guatemala, whose jurisdiction extended from Yucatán to Panama. Economically, this was mainly an agricultural and…

figure with short red hair and the same beautiful tan skin. Also the three-month old is now twenty-one with a husband and children of her own. She is my older sister that made the crazy journey of coming to the United States with my mom. Back in Guatemala she and her family struggled a lot. My mom had to help her mother out a lot with chores, cooking, and running errands. She was in the third grade when things started getting difficult for her family. Her parents couldn’t afford to have her…

(U) Historically, Latin American has been faced with constant turmoil and instability, with very few exceptions. There are many reasons for this. Many of the colonial conquers, and subsequent rulers had ruled with an iron fist, and in doing so had almost decimated the indigenous populations of native Americans throughout Latin America. Social order was laid out by the military conquers and what emerged over the years was a mestizo class of people and the campesino, the peasant farmer or people…

Through Rigoberta Menchu’s testimony in I, Rigoberta Menchu, Menchu was able to shed light on many injustices, cultural traditions, and the overall daily life of a Mayan Indian in Guatemala. For the most part, Menchu gives readers an idea of what it was like to live in the Altiplano, a mountainous region in Guatemala, as well as the traditions many had to follow for their rite of passage. In doing so, Menchu gives readers context behind her decisions, therefore, allowing readers to see why her…

Allison Hellman Viatori ANTHRO 201 24 October 2017 Buried Secrets Book Review Victoria Sanford provides an appreciated examination with her book Buried Secrets on the violence that overwhelmed Guatemala from the late 1970s through the 80s and in the early 90s. As a forensic anthropologist doing her work in Guatemala after the stir of the civil war, she unearthed many of the fatalities that the government would have preferred to have kept hidden from the world. Violence is something everyone…

Fareed Zakaria GPS Response The December 6th episode of Fareed Zakaria GPS touched on the strategies the U.S. is taking to contain terrorism, the stereotypes Americans have of certain minority groups (specifically Muslims), and how one group’s music is countering the horrifying attacks by ISIS that took place in Paris. Mr. Zakaria first sat down to interview President Obama’s national security advisor, Susan Rice, on what the path U.S. is planning to take to prevent any further ISIS acts of…

Rigoberta Menchú Tum is a Mayan Quiche’ activist born in 1959 in Chimel, a small Mayan community of the highlands of Guatemala. When Rigoberta was growing up she “traveled alongside her father, Vincente Menchú, from a community to community teaching rural compassions their rights and encouraging them to organize.” In 1992 Roberta Menchú received the Novel Peace Prize for her work within the indigenous community and shortly after she opens a foundation that is called Rigoberta Menchú Tum…

source from Guatemala. The account describes how the kidnappings in the country were mostly carried out by Guatemala’s government in order to interrogate the victims, mostly male Indians, about their actions and kill them later. However, the U.S. State Department had admitted in the statement that they did not have very accurate data on Guatemala’s human rights conditions. The information gathered may not be credible; nevertheless, an outside viewpoint of the situations in Guatemala is still…

In contemporary Guatemala, many of those who identify as Mayan or have Mayan ancestry remain touched by the chaotic and bloody rule of General José Efraín Ríos Montt in the early 1980’s. His regime is noted to be the most violent in Guatemala’s already tumultuous history. The recent history of Guatemala included a relatively short democratic break, followed by multiple coups, dictatorships, and military-run governments. The cumulating rising tensions of the Mayan people equally endured the…

ESL teacher. That was never the plan. But Guatemala changed me in ways that are indescribable. It was there that I found that teaching English as a Second Language is my passion. I am now starting on the journey of becoming a degree certified ESL teacher. I dream of continuing to teach ESL abroad and in the United States. First I fell in love with Guatemala, then I fell in love with Javier. I had decided before I met Javier that I wanted to stay in Guatemala. I loved everything about it. The…