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| Healing the
wounds of a civil war |
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Maria Luz Garcia '01 earned her undergraduate degree in Latin American Studies
at Pomona College and then she set off for Guatemala, where she wound up working
with survivors of that nation’s long civil war. Today, even while pursuing her
doctoral degree, Garcia carries on her efforts in a small Guatemalan village,
and her dedication has led the Pomona College Alumni Association to name her as
the recipient of the 2007 Inspirational Young Alumni Award.
 The student selection committee determined that Garcia’s work since graduation
best exemplifies the quote on the College’s Blaisdell Gates: "They only
are loyal to this college who departing, bear their added riches in trust for
mankind."
At Pomona, Garcia wrote her senior thesis about the Recovery of the Historical
Memory Project (REHMI), the Catholic Church’s detailed account of military
persecution of civilians during the 36-year-long Guatemalan Civil War, which
ended in 1996. The report implicated the military in 90 percent of the Mayan
civilian deaths.
Upon graduating, Maria set off for Guatemala and eventually ended up in the
highlands village of Nebaj, where the vast majority of the population is Ixil
Mayan. They are mostly refugees who escaped to the mountains during the civil
war. Many, if not most, lost parents, husbands, siblings and/or children to the
military persecution of the Mayans. In order to survive the post-war chaos, the
women of Nebaj founded a small cooperative, Grupo de Mujeres por la Paz (Women's
Group for Peace), to sell their weavings. But they were still struggling to feed
their families and survive.
When Garcia arrived, the women had just received a $2,000 grant to develop and
agricultural project. With Garcia's help, the women rented a plot of land, built
a greenhouse and grew vegetables to sell at the local market. Garcia worked side
by side with the women, who would share their life stories as they tilled the
land together. Eventually she began to learn their language, understand their
stories, and started recording their history.
"What they really want is for people to hear their histories, to know what
happened to them in the past ... and to know that the legacy of violence and
poverty is something they're still dealing with today," says Garcia.
Garcia started a literacy project which has expanded to include other family and
community members, received grants and assistance from other American
linguistics professors (including her mother, Jule Gomez de Garcia ’72) to
document and preserve the language of this culture, and made numerous
professional presentations which have earned her the respect of peers many years
her senior.
In 2003, Garcia was awarded a Ford Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellowship for
Minorities and she is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in linguistic anthropology at
the University of Texas at Austin, where one of her professors writes that
Garcia “is one of the best students we have ever had.”
Throughout her graduate studies Garcia has returned to Nebaj repeatedly
and continues to work tirelessly to record the stories of the survivors and
document their struggles and achievements. One of her goals is “to make the
researcher obsolete as the women learn to do the work of documenting their
language and their lives themselves.”
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