USC Shoah Foundation expands its collection of Guatemalan Genocide testimonies

By: Rob Kuznia

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.

Rob Kuznia

Lecture: Women victims of sexual violence during ethnic genocides often thought of as ‘vessels for nationalism’

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.”

"Finding Oscar" Opens Guatemalan Genocide Conference

Fresh off its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival last week, the documentary Finding Oscar was screened at the opening night of USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research’s conference “A ‘Conflict?’ Genocide and Resistance in Guatemala.”

New Guatemala Content Coming to IWitness This Fall

Updates to IWitness in time for the new school year will include a suite of Spanish-language full-length testimonies, testimony clips and activities from USC Shoah Foundation’s new Guatemalan Genocide collection.
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