Note: This story, written by Tim Penning of University Communications, appeared first in the Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education
David Alvarez, an assistant professor of English found himself struggling to help his students thoroughly understand the Central American subjects of the books he teaches in his courses on Central American literature. So he decided to bring a few of them to class.
Alvarez went to Guatemala last summer to interview Guatemalan writers and common citizens. Alvarez traveled with independent video producer Jeff Smith, who is also the director of the Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy and works in the city's Community Media Center. Together they videotaped the interviews so that Alvarez can show them in his literature classes to give his mostly white, North American students a reality-based image of the Central American people, places, events and ideas they discuss in class based on various works of fiction.All literature I teach I do contextually, explaining to students the history, economic and political situations that are described in a story or book, says Alvarez, a native of Gibraltar who is fluent in both English and Spanish. Latin American literature cries out to be contextualized because of the students' lack of knowledge about that region of the world. Plus, all Latin American countries are going through some form of crisis right now, and writers, sensitive souls that they are, are preoccupied with those conflicts and write about them. We all need to understand that.
Ever the teacher, Alvarez is quick to give an example. He describes the civil war in Guatemala from 1954 to 1996 that left deep scars in that country's society. It's a situation that is frequently mentioned in works of literature he teaches in his classes. For that reason, among the interviews he taped when he went to Guatemala this past June was one with a representative of the Archdiocese of the Catholic Church. The church official spoke about how Bishop Juan Gerardi had been killed two days after releasing a four-volume report about human rights abuses during the 40-year war. It was a story that grabbed headlines in Central America, but went largely unnoticed in North America. Alvarez wanted to have a real person who experienced that trauma articulate their emotions on camera. That way, his students who feel so remote from the fictitious characters, sitting in their classroom thousands of miles from the scene that is described in their reading assignment, can grasp the story better.
Another interview subject was a Mayan woman, a typical citizen who is not connected with the church, the military or the government. The woman speaks of her efforts to locate family members who had been missing since the way, and the death threats she received for simply trying to learn the truth about her loved ones. Alvarez says it's a story somewhat typical of the harsh reality for people living in Guatemala, but something the North American media rarely mention. In fact, says Alvarez, literature is the best way for the typical North American college student to read about this situation in Guatemala, and others in Central America.
There's a palpable climate of fear in Guatemala, even though the war there is over, says Alvarez, who says his recent trip was a learning experience for himself even though he has taught on the subject for several years. In the states, we just don't understand this. It will be good for students to hear about all of this directly from the people who live there.
Alvarez adds that the videotape will help students see as well as hear these real people. He mentions that the Mayan woman he interviewed is a vivid and visible example of a typical character in many books by Central American authors, including the acclaimed and controversial autobiography of Rigobertu Menchu, a Mayan woman who describes in detail the Mayan clothing and customs. Menchu has been criticized for fabricating parts of her own history, but Alvarez says her description of Mayan life is accurate. He has included this book in the syllabus for his class this semester, and will show that segment of the video when they are into Menchu's book.
Funding for the trip came in part from a grant by the Faculty Teaching and Learning Center at GVSU, a three-year-old office on Grand Valley's campus that provides training and encouragement, often in the form of grants, to help faculty members improve their teaching. GVSU's primary mission is teaching, as opposed to research, and thus the proposal by Alvarez was deemed appropriate.
I hope to find out whether writers are still preoccupied by the events of the 1970s and '80s and their aftermath or whether they have turned their attention to new themes, he wrote in his grant proposal. I believe my trip to Guatemala will enhance my teaching by lending my account of life in that vibrant yet troubled nation something of the authority of lived experience. I see my teaching and my presentations as contributing directly to the university's mission of internationalizing the curriculum.
Alvarez, who also teaches in GVSU's Latin American Studies program, has focused his classes on the 1970s and '80s in Guatemala because the United States was deeply involved in Guatemala during those years, and because those decades generated a groundswell of literary writing in that country.
Studying this chapter of Guatemalan history from the perspective of its literary commentators allows North American students to acquire a better sense of how the U.S. has been perceived abroad, he says.
Alvarez is most pleased with a one-hour interview he conducted with Adolfo Mendez Vides, a 44-year-old considered to be the best Central American writer in his generation. While not well known in the United States, Vides has just had a novel published by a large Mexican-Spanish publisher. Alvarez says Vides is hoping his novel will be translated into English, which would make it available to the vast North American market. If that happens, Alvarez will have a treasure on his hands with the videotaped interview with Vides before he gains large-scale popularity the level of way Pulitzer Prize winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, of Columbia. For now, Alvarez will show the videotaped interview in class when they study one of Vides' works.
Alvarez had hoped to interview other prominent writers while in Guatemala as well, including Humberto Ak'abal, a bilingual Mayan poet; Marco Antonio Flores, journalist and novelist; and Ana Maria Rodas, a prize-winning feminist poet and journalist. But he was only able to catch up to Vides in the two weeks he was in the country. So for the remainder of his time he pursued his second objective, which was to interview the more common members of society. In addition to the Mayan woman, he interviewed land rights activists, human rights workers, relatives of the disappeared, students, artists, workers, feminists, ecologists and many other representatives of current Guatemalan society.
Our overriding purpose in undertaking this trip was to discover whether social, economic and political conditions have changed in Guatemala since leftist guerillas and the state signed peace accords three years ago, thereby putting an end to four decades of armed conflict, Alvarez explains. In addition, given the United State's role in stifling Guatemala's fledgling democracy in 1954, and also given President Clinton's recent apology to the Guatemalan people for the nature of U.S. involvement in their country, we asked the Guatemalans to tell us what positive actions they thought the U.S. could now take to help consolidate peace there.
Alvarez and Smith have both had professional interests in Guatemala for a long time and have worked with Guatemalan refugees in the United States, helping them gain legal status and social services. While living in Austin, Texas, in the early 1990s, Alvarez worked as a bilingual translator for the Central American Resource Center, a non-profit clearinghouse for information related to the region. He developed a series of programs intending to help refugees orient themselves to life in the United States. Smith has served as an election observer, testified as an expert witness for political asylum cases, and made documentaries on the status of women in Guatemala and human rights violations by the military.
With about 3,000 Guatemalan refugees in west Michigan alone, Alvarez and Smith are taking the videos outside of Alvarez' classroom and sharing them with the broader west Michigan community. They plan to make presentations in the Community Media Center, on public access television, and at area churches and other colleges. They began this outreach into the community in October, with a presentation to a group of area Hispanic residents at Heartside Ministries, an inner city organization in Grand Rapids.
The local Central American population, Guatemalan and otherwise, will really appreciate these interviews, Alvarez says. In Central America, writers play a social role that they don't here. They are looked at for advice and considered to be politicians.
As they begin sharing the information with classes and other community groups, Alvarez and Smith point out three common themes that emerged from their various interviews. For instance, Guatemalans they interviewed pointed out that the government still represses dissent with violence, even though political conditions are more open. Also, those responsible for past repression have not been punished. A second common theme in the interviews is that the conditions that gave rise to the 40 years of war have not changed, especially the extreme concentration of wealth to just a few members of the population and the corresponding poverty of the majority of Guatemalans. Finally, Alvarez says the interviews suggest that the U.S. government can play a positive role in Guatemala's reconstruction by making classified documents dealing with the repression available to human rights organizations. Alvarez adds that the U.S. should offer economic aid to counter effects of years of warfare, such as underdevelopment.
It pains Alvarez that the situations described by the people he interviewed persist, and that they still go mostly unreported and unnoticed by the North American media. Alvarez keeps up on the news by reading Guatemalan papers on the Internet. In mid-October, he noticed that the front-page news on the daily newspapers of Guatemala carried a story about a judge fleeing the country because of death threats against himself and his family. The judge had been in charge of the investigation into the murder of Catholic Bishop Juan Gerardi. Alvarez had interviewed another member of the church about the bishop's murder during his recent trip.
Today's news confirms what all the organizations we spoke with emphasized, that repression of dissent has not ceased but has simply become more selective, Alvarez says. But he adds that the spirit of the people remains resilient and hopeful.Despite Guatemala's grim history of violence and exploitation, the mood among the Guatemalans we spoke with was resilient and optimistic, he points out. They look to internationals for continued solidarity with their many-sided efforts to create a Guatemala liberated from the sordid injustices of the past 500 years.
In the end, that may be the best lesson for Alvarez' literature students, and anyone else who sees his videos.
