Historical Memory Project: Ni Olivido, Ni Perdón
This online showcase is part of a series designed to capture the work of the HumanitiesX fellows and students at DePaul University. Over the 2023–24 academic year, three teams of HumanitiesX fellows created unique community-engaged, project-based courses in the humanities. These new courses were taught in spring 2024. See the other course showcase posts on the HumanitiesX website, including those from spring 2022 and 2023.
The Course
The genesis for this course was in the winter of 2022, when the Chicago Religious Leadership Network, or CRLN, hosted a dinner for two Guatemalan activists living in exile. It was during this dinner that Susana and Lydia, both faculty at DePaul, and CRLN’s Latin America Program Coordinator, Jhonathan Gomez, first discussed their shared interests in Central America, human rights, activism, and historical memory. The conversation continued, and a year later, the three submitted a HumanitiesX proposal to develop a new course around these shared interests.
The 300-level, team-taught course, which was cross-listed in Peace, Justice and Conflict Studies and Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse, centered around three themes: historical memory, human rights, and artivism. Students were asked to consider the connection between post-1960 historical events and current injustices impacting Central America — specifically, in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. Using cultural, historical, and rhetorical frameworks, students interrogated the Western idea of democracy and learned how organized communities in Central America have actively worked with human rights groups in the US.
Students also worked with CRLN throughout the course to engage with and create public, political art and writing that preserves historical memory. Alongside CRLN staff, students interacted with a collection of CRLN’s human rights posters and materials held in DePaul’s Special Collections and Archives. They also met with U.S. based Latinx political artists and human rights defenders several times during the course. These engagement activities gave students a hands-on understanding of the importance of preserving historical memory through art and archival practice.
The Course Project
CRLN tasked the students with devising ways to disseminate research on human rights abuses to the public. The major course project asked students to work in five teams to research and create social media posts and a public art project to preserve historic memory and activate the public’s interest in Central American human rights movements and injustices.
During the first half of the course, students conducted research on their topics, which ranged from the erasure of trans life in El Salvador, to the United Fruit Company’s role in land theft in Guatemala, to the work of climate activists from Honduras. During the second half of the course, students translated the research into public-facing writing and collaborative art projects. They first created two social media posts on their topics, which were hosted on Peace, Justice, and Conflict’s and CRLN’s Instagram accounts. They then organized a free pop-up participatory art event — on campus and open to the public — during finals week.
The pop-up event had five stations, one for each team’s research topic. Each station featured an interactive art activity, which allowed visitors to screen print or weave and take a piece of art with them. To accompany their artistic component, students distributed fact sheets with bibliographies on their topics. The goals of the pop-art art event were to disseminate information to the larger community, engage the community, and consider the role of art in human rights and grassroots movements.
The Team
Like all HumanitiesX courses, Historical Memory Project was designed and deployed by a team of two faculty members and a community partner, with assistance from two Student Fellows.
Community Fellow Jhonathan Gomez is the Latin America Program Coordinator for CRLN. He is a human rights defender and documentary photographer-artist, from Guatemala City. Jhonathan has worked with community and human rights organizations in Guatemala and the United States for over 15 years.
Dr. Susana Martínez, is the director of DePaul’s Peace, Justice, and Conflict Studies program and an Associate Professor of Spanish. She is writing a book on the representation of the Central American migration journey in Latinx Young Adult literature.
Dr. Lydia Saravia is a faculty member in DePaul’s Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse department. Lydia has conducted research in and about Guatemala. Specifically, her research has included an analysis on Guatemala’s violent history, and a look into the peace accords as a historical and cultural document.
The HumanitiesX Student Fellows that assisted the course were Angelina Alvarez, a senior majoring in Peace, Justice, and Conflict Studies, and Safiyah Simkins, a senior majoring in Political Science, with a minor in Philosophy. As Student Fellows, Angelina and Safiyah introduced the students to the public humanities with a presentation early in the course; worked with DePaul’s Special Collections and Archives to prepare archival materials for students; worked with all groups to coordinate visits to DePaul’s “maker space,” the Idea Realization Lab (IRL); compiled lists of art supplies; and provided instructions for fact sheets and social media posts.
Another important collaborator was Derek Potts, Instruction and Outreach Archivist in Special Collections and Archives at the DePaul’s Richardson Library. Derek led two class sessions, first introducing the class to the recently donated CRLN archives and another to walk us through political art holdings in the archives. Derek carefully curated materials from the Philip Berrigan and Elizabeth McAlister papers, Lincoln Park Conservation Association, selected Young Lords posters from the Collection on the Young Lords, and Voces de Los Artistas Box Set. Students had much to say about how art functions as a tool for activism.
Lessons Learned
1. The power of solidarity.
Lydia, Susana, and Jhonathan are all committed to solidarity with those in Central America and around the world who are subjected to authoritarianism, corruption, and political violence. In their collaborative planning and teaching, this shared commitment to solidarity both focused and motivated their work. Students in the course, likewise in the spirit of solidarity, were powerfully motivated to share what they had learned and engage the public in the ongoing struggle for justice.
2. Themes of advocacy, activism, and accompaniment can unite work inside and outside the classroom.
As we drafted our syllabus and assignments in line with CRLN’s mission of advocacy and accompaniment, we asked, how can movements for rights be preserved and communicated to public audiences and future generations? How can we document and understand past injustices to prevent future injustices? Throughout class discussions during the spring quarter, students reflected on these questions with a critical awareness of unfolding events in Central America and around the world. Together, we reflected on what advocating for human rights looks and feels like within and beyond a class setting.
3. Art-making, especially that which is collaborative and participatory, can be a powerful way to think about politics and popular education.
Researching historical memory in Central America can be painful. Translating the research into art, especially collaborative and participatory art, allowed students an entry into their topics with the public. Using campus resources like the archives and the Idea Realization Lab sparked students’ creativity to approach social justice issues through the lens of collective action and joy.
4. Questioning democracy and rights.
Reflecting on the goals of the publicly engaged humanities, we grappled with how the fields of peace studies and writing and rhetoric prepare us to inform contemporary debates, amplify community voices and under-represented histories, help to navigate difficult experiences, and preserve culture in times of crisis and change. We discussed how individual stories and collective archives contribute to historical memory while confronting past injustices and present impunity. In their social media posts and final art projects, students raised awareness about how democracies use authoritative practices to silence those who dare to speak out. This teaching and learning experience underscores the need to constantly question the extent to which we are actively working to democratize the needs and rights of all community members equitably.
Next Steps
Team CRLN plans to stay connected and has several projects in motion to continue working together.
- The work students created will continue to inform the larger project. The art pieces as well as fact sheets are being displayed at CRLN events, most recently a fundraiser for members who are currently in Guatemala to accompany Maya Ixil in the historic Maya Ixil Genocide case (July of 2024).
- Lydia and Susana shared their course with a broader audience of faculty interested in teaching the publicly engaged humanities, in a HumanitiesX workshop titled “Creative Arts with and for Community Partners in Public Humanities Courses.”
- Lydia is working with CRLN to design a new DePaul Study Abroad course to Guatemala, informed by the subject-area focus of the Historical Memory Project course.
- Lydia, Jhonathan and Susana have submitted a conference proposal for a “Peace, Literature, and Pedagogy Panel” at the Midwest Modern Language Association Convention, scheduled for fall 2024.
- Lydia and Susana have submitted an abstract for a book chapter on “Critical Geographies of Education.” The aim of the collection is to respond to a broader call for a disciplinary movement that explores discursive and geographical processes of privatization, territorial inequalities and injustices in education, which are engaged in political struggle over schooling, and is practiced by transnational scholars and activists.
