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UNM senior to travel to Guatamala

in effort to help indigenous people

Alicia Garcia

by SARAH KRAMER, C&J 271

The Americas include more than just the United States.

Alicia Garcia, 21, is a UNM senior and takes active interest in the country’s southern neighbors.

This spring Garcia hopes to graduate with a double bachelor’s degree in media arts and Latin American culture and language.

“I chose my majors because they’re interesting to me and relevant to my life and the world at large,” Garcia said.

Garcia began to take an interest in media in high school. She attended Las Cruces High School and was a reporter for the school’s student-produced paper, The Bulldawg. She also worked on the school’s weekly television broadcast program.

“I was a reporter in title, but it was mostly myself and a few other students doing the brunt of the work,” Garcia said. “It taught me to be self-reliant.”

These experiences in classroom media exposure carried through until the time Garica had to declare her major.

“Film is not just film to me. It’s a reflection of people in general,” Garcia said. "Studying movies helps me be more aware of media and the way it works, especially in relation to our government’s involvement with Latin American countries, things that nobody knows about.”

Garcia’s social and political concerns are mainly within the homeland of her family and ancestors.

“My largest concern is outside capitalism and its influence on southeastern Mexico,” Garcia said. “In southern Mexico and Guatemala, the governments (of these countries) are taking land from the people and selling it to make money. Native people who’ve been there for generations don’t have paperwork to prove the land is theirs, so they lose livelihood and are displaced from their homes.”

Even if farmers do keep their land, Garcia said, the market is still unfriendly because it is cheaper for produce buyers to purchase from U.S. growers than from farmers within the country, which she said also has a devastating effect on the crop growers of Latin America.

Garcia also expressed concern about the influence of corporations in developing countries.

“A lot of U.S. businesses – McDonald’s, Starbucks, Holiday Inn – justify going into these native communities and destroying the culture by saying that they’re providing jobs,” Garcia said. “A lot of the time, the jobs are sweatshop-like conditions, and in the long run the presence of these businesses hurts more than it helps.”

This winter Garcia will take a trip to Guatemala with her religion class. The class, offered at UNM, is a study of Central American religion and politics.

The U.S. Department of State’s travel Web site warns, “Violent criminal activity continues to be a problem in Guatemala, including murder, rape, and armed assaults against foreigners.”

Garcia is undeterred by the potential dangers and hopes to use the trip as another venue for learning.

“All travel involves risk,” Garcia said. “Southern Mexico and Guatemala are similar, and I liked Southern Mexico when I went, so I’m excited to see this new country.”

The trip to Guatemala also marks a return to a landscape Garcia missed since returning to New Mexico from a semester-long exchange to California last fall.

“I’m excited to be close to the ocean again,” Garcia said of her upcoming Guatemala trip. “I’m excited to see the things I don’t even know will be there yet.”
Garcia hopes the trip will help her see in action things about Latin American society and culture she learned in the classroom, as well as inspire her to use the media part of her degree program.

“In Southern Mexico there’s a program called the Chiapas Media Project. The goal of it is to train indigenous people to use technology to tell their own stories,” Garcia said.

The project, named for the southernmost state of Mexico where it began, encompasses several of Garcia’s collegiate pursuits.

“The project has grown enough that now the people who’ve been trained can train new people and it can keep flourishing within the people,” Garcia said. “Some thing like that, if not that exact program appeals to me.”

Garcia likes the Chiapas Media Project because it brings attention to Central America through media while simultaneously providing a method of agency to the people of the region.

“We talk about South America and Mexico,” Garcia said. “But so often Central American gets forgotten in that discussion.”

--October 26, 2007

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