Cultivating Transnational Student Activism: Guatemala and the Hudson Valley

• In Event: Sociology of Sex and Gender Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 17. Youth, Education, and Socialization

Abstract

Transnational community engagement courses help students develop the skills, knowledge, and attitudes to engage with local and global communities in a meaningful and effective way. Through experiential learning students explore the importance of building relationships, fostering dialogue, and collaborating with community members, organizations, and stakeholders. After an influx of Central American immigrants in the Hudson Valley, we co-taught the course Inequality, Gendered Violence, and Migration in Guatemala. This course examined U.S. intervention in Guatemala, the subsequent thirty year long civil war, and the impact of that war on contemporary Guatemala and current migration to the United States. We also created a summer study abroad class on Human Rights in Guatemala where students took classes with human rights activists, journalists, artists, scholars, Mayan spiritual leaders, and local Kaq’chikel women. Students engaged in a variety of community-based educational and cultural activities including raising money and building an adobe oven for the Kaq’chikel (Mayan) community so they could cook and sell food year-round, becoming more self-sustaining. Another summer we took another group of students and painted, cleaned, and helped renovate the Konojel Community Center, the center of the San Marcos Kaq’chikel community. As a result of the financial success of the original caseta (food stand), members of the Kaq’chikel community and our students built a permanent, two-story restaurant that has made Konojel almost entirely self-sustaining. Our relationship with the Kaq’chikel community continues with a variety of ongoing projects including anti-domestic violence work, expanding sewing collectives, and online language classes taught by students. We frequently bring Guatemalan scholars, artists, filmmakers and activists to campus for a variety of programming and have incorporated civic engagement/activist projects into other classes including winter coat drives, adult English language programs, lobbying for the Green Light Campaign, Farm Workers Rights Bill, and Good Cause Eviction at the state capital.

Author

• Anne R. Roschelle, SUNY-New Paltz