María Luz García works with Ixil Maya communities in both Guatemala and the United States as a linguistic anthropologist. Her research focuses on how Ixil speakers make use of the resources of their language to construct and reflect social and political realities. Her research specifically focuses on how shared discourses operate in community formation and in cross-cultural institutional interactions.
In Guatemala, she analyzes Ixil discourses of historical memory of genocide and communication of that memory in institutional spaces, particularly in the context of the trial of former de facto head of state José Efraín Ríos Montt for genocide. In the United States, the immigrant context is crucial to Ixil discursive practices of community formation and negotiation in institutional spaces. In both spaces, cultural practices of language use often go unnoticed but are crucial to building solidarity within and across groups as well as being an underlying cause of difficulties in communications with significant consequences for Ixil speakers.
María Luz García is an Associate Professor of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminology at Eastern Michigan University
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