Overcoming Geographic and Linguistic Barriers to Foment Cross-Cultural Learning: Mayan History in a Southern Maine Classroom
David Carey Jr., College of Arts & Sciences
One of the greatest challenges to teaching Latin American history at the University of Southern Maine (USM) is the geographical distance and linguistic barrier that separates my students from the subject matter. In an effort to bridge this gap, the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation funded a proposal to collect primary sources from Guatemala that present a sample of Mayan historical perspectives and lived experiences to facilitate USM students’ direct access to how Maya think about and reconstruct the past. In addition to learning first hand about different epistemologies, USM undergraduates may also recognize commonalities between themselves and the Maya of Guatemala. Since so many of my students claim they have never left New England, let alone traveled abroad, encouraging an awareness of, appreciation for, and connection to the people of Guatemala will do much more than pique their interest in Latin America; it will encourage them to engage in the world as global citizens.
To reflect the diverse mediums through which Maya portray and have been portrayed in (or excluded from) history, I will collect visual, oral, and written historical evidence in the summer of 2005. This approach not only introduces students to the distinct ways through which the past becomes history, it also recognizes that students bring different skills to the classroom and should be provided multiple ways to learn. Visual, oral, and written learners will all have the opportunity to excel in the mediums in which they are most comfortable and improve in the ones with which they struggle. I will photograph a mural depicting Mayan history, transcribe and translate four oral history interviews, and photograph and translate archival documents. These primary sources can then be used in the classroom both to give students a sense of how Maya recreate their past so it has meaning in the present and to allow students to reconstruct Guatemalan and Mayan history based on their own interpretation of these paintings, transcripts, and documents.
After traversing the twenty-kilometer road that leads from the Pan American highway up into the central highland town of San Juan Comalapa in Guatemala, one of the first breaks from the verdant scenery is a mural painted on the cemetery walls. In 2002, teachers, artists, students and other community members sketched and painted the history of their town and people; the result stands as a testament to Mayan resistance. The sixty-one panel mural begins with images of the Maya before the Spanish Invasion in 1524 and then depicts the colonial period, independence movements at the turn of the nineteenth century, and the modern era. For the recent past, it illustrates Guatemala’s civil war (1960-1996), the poverty and racism that were among its causes, and Maya-Kaqchikel responses to violence and economic injustice. But the mural does more than simply display significant historical events, it also intimates Mayan understandings of ethnic and gender relations and how they have changed over time. I plan to take digital photographs of each panel to use in a PowerPoint presentation so students can experience the mural as if they were walking on the dirt road that runs in front of it. And since they will have access to the photographs, students can focus their attention on the paintings they find most pertinent.
The second part of the project will be to record, transcribe, and translate four oral history interviews. Since the first language of Mayan residents of the central highlands is Kaqchikel and many elders are monolingual speakers, oral history interviews must be conducted in that language. I will hire two Kaqchikel research assistants who I have worked with in the past—Ixkawoq and Ixkat—to each interview and record two elders whom they have identified as particularly knowledgeable about their community’s past. Allowing Ixkawoq and Ixkat to select their informants and conduct the interviews (in my absence) will result in a more autochthonous historical representation than would be possible with my influence or in my presence. In this way, community members will determine what they want USM students to know about their past and reality. And so students can put a face to the words, Ixkawoq and Ixkat will also photograph their informants. Ixkawoq and Ixkat will transcribe the Kaqchikel oral history interviews and then translate them into Spanish. Undergraduates who know Spanish can read these transcripts. But since most of my students are monolingual English speakers, when I return to Portland, Janice Jaffe, formerly an associate professor of Spanish at Bowdoin College with extensive experience and publications in Spanish to English translation, will translate the interviews into English. Though the translations create additional filters through which the students must sift (an issue which we will address in the classroom), these accounts will provide students a lens into Mayan historical perspectives.
The final aspect of the project will be to digitally photograph and translate documents from the Archivo General de Centro América (General Archives of Central America) in Guatemala City. I have used these archives in the past to consult court records as well as internal correspondence and reports from the Ministry of Labor, Ministry of Agriculture, the National Police, and governors’ offices. Even though Mayan voices seldom appear in these documents and when they do they are usually translated, transcribed, and interpreted for a Ladino (non-indigenous) audience, students will gain an understanding for both how Maya represented themselves in these state institutions and how Ladinos depicted Maya. Indeed, their very obscurity and lack of agency in these documents will elucidate aspects about how history is produced and who controls its presentation. Again, Dr. Jaffe will translate these documents into English for students who do not speak Spanish.
As a historian, I am excited about the prospect of using primary sources in my classroom to allow students to revise Latin America’s past. Since the end products of historians’ research and scholarship—published books and articles—are (ideally) generally well-organized, cogently argued, and neatly presented, students often do not develop an appreciation of the complexities, complications, struggles, and frustrations inherent to the historian’s craft. And often these publications are read as definitive texts as opposed to potential versions of the past. Students who wrestle with sources that have many possible explanations, defy simple analysis, and often contradict each other will begin to understand that historians too reconstruct the past based on their own readings of primary material. In teaching with these sources, I hope to help students move beyond obvious descriptions to inferred meanings. To do so, we will ask questions about the point of view of the artists, narrators, and authors. How do their gender, class, ethnicity, education, interest in the events described and so forth affect what they portray, say, and write? Most important, students will come to appreciate that written, visual, and oral presentations are products of interpretation and perspective and therefore need to be consumed with a healthy dose of critical analysis.