This was one of my favorite projects at Animas so far, the amount of research, blood, and tears I put into this project is more than any before. I feel especially proud of all the research my partner and I put into this project. We did about a month of research, not including the portion learning about Rwanda. My partner and I did so much research beforehand and I felt like we almost had an excess amount. There are some sources that we put into our google doc that were in Spanish so we could not understand them, but those were the only we did not use. When doing are Genocide Research Paper I mainly used declassified CIA documents about the Guatemalan cold war and the genocide. I  found this letter from the Guatemalan ambassador to the Secretary of State stating, “We must come to some resolution in policy terms. Either we can overlook the record and emphasize the strategic concept or we can pursue a higher moral path”(Bureau of Intelligence and Research). This truly struck me because I had not known previously that the U.S.A. was communicating with the Guatemalan Government. Even with all this tinder to fuel our genocide project, it did not turn out all I wanted it to be.

 

One thing I would do to refine our project is making the human-shaped boards more professional. As you can see in the picture above the boards had a bit of a rough outline that was most definitely not symmetrical, and the mod podge job left the text unevenly glossy. If I had another week to work on the project, I would work on doing the whole boards in mod podge to make it evenly glossy. Also laying them back to back so I could make them even and try to cut them into being passably symmetrical. I would clean up the edges a bit to make them more even and rounded. Once I did this I would finally feel ready to present my work to the public. Even with these refinements, there were some problems that we would have still faced.

One of the areas in this project that was quite challenging was the materials. When Riley and I were planning this project we thought that cardboard would be the perfect material, it is bendable, easily cuttable, and handy to use. We were right, but what we failed to realize it frayed really badly and did not look very professional even when covered in black paint. In the end, it was too late and we tried to make the cardboard the best it could look before the exhibition. If I were to do this again, I would have used a different material like plywood which looks better but would be harder to cut. Even though the cutouts were a flop, I feel I got a lot out of this project.

 

The most important thing I learned out of this project is how easy it is to overlook the wrong in the world and to continue on with our daily lives, and how easy it is for governments to hide their wrongdoings, ours and others. I tried to show this at our project by telling people that there are caches of corpses around Guatemala to this day, this shows that wrongdoings are still happening without our notice or our care.