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Dr. Juarez and students  in Guatemala

NSF grant to help students present their research
on education among Guatemala's Maya people

February 2008—Students who spent summer 2007 studying education among the Maya in Guatemala will be able to present and publish their findings, thanks to a $13,816 grant from the National Science Foundation.

The grant, obtained by Texas State University-San Marcos Anthropology Professor Dr. Ana Juarez, will enable the students to travel to Memphis, TN, March 25-29 to present scientific papers about their work, at the annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology. The students will also co-author a book of essays about their research with Juarez and Dr. Octavio Pimentel, an educational ethnographer and member of the Texas State Anthropology faculty.

The students were participants in a summer program led by Juarez in Guatemala’s highlands to gather information about educational practices in two Maya communities. The students include Martha Bitar and Lizet Diaz from Texas State; Fabiola Torralba and Jennifer Vasquez from The University of Texas-San Antonio; and Amy Dawson and Tanya Romo from Brigham Young University. Silvia Solis, a graduate student from The University of Texas-Pan American, had previously done research in Guatemala and worked part-time as the student facilitator.

The summer program, called the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Site on Culture and Globalization in Highland Guatemala, aimed to train students in ethnographic research and analysis, and in public presentation and publication of results. After taking courses in anthropological field methods and Latin American studies on their respective campuses, the students spent 10 weeks in Guatemala with Juarez and other faculty doing fieldwork.

In Guatemala, the students gathered data on the status of education in two highland Maya communities—Nahuala and Nueva Santa Catarina Ixtahuacán—in an effort to contribute to the understanding and improvement of Guatemalan education in a globalized world. Their research papers address issues such as:

• The effects on indigenous teachers of Guatemala’s national economic restructuring and educational reform movement
• The socio-cultural reasons that highland Maya women give for abandoning their education at an early age, e.g. harsh economics, patriarchal systems, and limited alternatives
• The sexual education of Maya women in Guatemala
• How Guatemala’s economy and changing cultural roles have increased women’s educational attainment
• How Guatemala’s 1996 Peace Accords and educational reform have promoted the presence of both Spanish and the indigenous K’iche’ language, and the factors that determine their use
• Schools’ practice of putting a much higher expectation on parents to attend meetings than to help their children with their homework
• The proliferation of internet cafés in the Guatemala highlands and their effect on young Guatemaltecos
• The educational system’s resistance to community laws that derive from oral tradition

Juarez and Pimentel will write an introduction to the book, explaining the theoretical framework used for analyzing education in the highland communities and analyzing the literature on education in Greater Latin America. The book will be submitted for publication in May 2008.

In the summers of 2008 and 2009, Dr. Juarez will train students to do ethnographic research in Tulum, Quintana Roo, Mexico. Juarez has conducted ethnographic research in Tulum since 1990. She and Pimentel are currently preparing 11 students from four institutions for research in Tulum in summer 2008.

For more information on the REU Site on Culture and Globalization in Quintana Roo, Mexico, see http://www.txstate.edu/anthropology/field-schools/reu.html.