Dr. Marcia Esparza is a professor of sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She is known for her research on state violence, genocide, and collective memory-silence that are the product of mass killings. She is the founder of Historical Memory Project, HMP[1] and the author of Silenced Communities: Legacies Resistance to Militarization and Militarism in a Guatemalan Rural Town, 2017 (Berghahn Books).[2]
Esparza formed part of the United Nations’ Historical Clarification Commission in war-ridden Guatemala (1997-1999), interviewing war and genocide survivors.[1] In 2002 she founded the HMP[1] to preserve the collective memory of war, genocide and state violence and to promote critical awareness of their long-term consequences in Latin America within the Latinx diaspora in New York City.[1] She collects local archives recording human rights atrocities in the region in an attempt to preserve historical memory of state violence.[2] Esparza has also appeared on talk shows such as Democracy Now![3] and Aljazeera[4] to talk about her scholarly works and HMP mission in documenting the extinction and genocide of the indigenous population of Latin America. At CUNY and throughout NYC she has held public and cultural events commemorating and raising awareness of human rights crimes as seen in Rebel Memory #1[5] which touches upon the missing 43 Mexican students of the Ayotzinapa school.
Esparza takes an interdisciplinary approach that includes Museum Studies, Studies of Indigenous Peoples, Poverty Studies, War Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Central and Latin American Studies, and Human Rights Studies. Her current book project focuses on collective military memory through the lens of military museums, particularly in Mallorca, Spain.
