María Luz García
(she/her/hers)
Education
- Ph.D., The University of Texas—Austin, 2012
Interests and Expertise
- Linguistic anthropology
- Cultural anthropology
- Historical memory
- Ethnography
- Immigration
- Transnational Indigenous communities
Professional
Dr. María Luz García works as a linguistic and cultural anthropologist with Ixil Maya communities in Guatemala and in diaspora in the United States. Her research is concerned with how Ixil speakers make use of the resources of their language to construct and reflect social realities. She is particularly interested in how Ixil Indigenous communities constitute themselves in the aftermath of a genocidal war and across borders and how they navigate external institutional contexts like courtrooms, hospitals, and schools. Her work on documentation of the Ixil Mayan language and its use in community contexts has been supported by the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme, the Sociological Initiatives Foundation, and the Andrew Mellon Foundation-supported Humanities Without Walls initiative. She worked collaboratively with Ixil community organizations to produce a series of five trilingual Ixil Mayan-Spanish-English short books and a bilingual Spanish-Ixil documentation of Ixil refugee experiences for use in Maya communities. Her research has appeared in the American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, and Political and Legal Anthropology Review.