In her research of testimonies, USC student Virginia Bullington observed that women in the context of both the Armenian and Tutsi Rwanda genocides are often described as “bearers of culture, maternity and nationalism,” while in the Guatemalan context, “indigenous women were not essentialized -- they were erased.”

Their loved ones – including women and children – were slaughtered by the military and tossed into mass graves. For more than 30 years, survivors of the Guatemalan Genocide against the indigenous population assumed nobody cared about their stories. After all, nobody had ever bothered to ask.