urney Most people associate Maya culture with the pre-Columbus Maya civilization and with images of astrology, calendars, mystical pyramids, and brutal human sacrifice. While the Maya have maintained their languages and many of their values and traditions, today’s Maya people are struggling with their place in modern society and how to accommodate without doing away with, and being ashamed of, their Maya heritage.
While working with and learning from the Maya, graduate students gain real world skills: “flexibility, creativity, the ability to be proactive, work in difficult situations and across different cultures” according to LeBaron. LeBaron describes the MHCP as an “opportunity to discover a people that many people do not know exist. This program is meant to connect students academically and methodologically with an engaged university program, which is achieved through a unique human interaction with the Maya. Our goal is not judgment or ideology, but it is a more intense, more profound level of university learning.”
The Maya people have endured Spanish conquests and colonization of the Americas, which has left them to be regarded as secondclass citizens and the subjects of racial prejudice. LeBaron explains “The Maya have been oppressed for the last 500 years.” Mayas first immigrated to the U.S. in the 1980s “primarily because the Civil War in Guatemala targeted and killed several hundred thousand Mayas in a decade. Government forces destroyed about 400 Maya villages, and approximately a million Maya were displaced, with hundreds of thousands fleeing to Mexico and eventually the United States.” Some of those who came to the U.S .in the 1980s and early 1990s were granted refugee status. Now that they are in the U.S., they often ignore their cultural practices for western ideas because they are learning to undervalue their culture in efforts to redefine themselves and better their opportunities, LeBaron explained. “What will happen to them as they rise out of poverty has been a long-time question.”
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