Chiapas, officially the Free and Sovereign State of Chiapas, is one of the states that make up the 32 federal entities of Mexico. It comprises 124 municipalities as of September 2017 and its capital and largest city is Tuxtla Gutiérrez. Other important population centers in Chiapas include Ocosingo, Tapachula, San Cristóbal de las Casas, Comitán, and Arriaga. Chiapas is the southernmost state in Mexico, and it borders the states of Oaxaca to the west, Veracruz to the northwest, and Tabasco to the north, and the Petén, Quiché, Huehuetenango, and San Marcos departments of Guatemala to the east and southeast. Chiapas has a significant coastline on the Pacific Ocean to the southwest.
The Maya are an ethnolinguistic group of indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica. The ancient Maya civilization was formed by members of this group, and today's Maya are generally descended from people who lived within that historical region. Today they inhabit southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and westernmost El Salvador and Honduras.
Lesley Gill is an author and a professor of anthropology at Vanderbilt University. Her research focusses on political violence, gender, free market reforms and human rights in Latin America, especially Bolivia. She also writes about the military training that takes place at the School of the Americas and has campaigned for its closure. She has campaigned with Witness for Peace.
Arthur Andrew Demarest is an American anthropologist and archaeologist, known for his studies of the Maya civilization.
James Quesada is a Nicaraguan American Anthropologist and professor at San Francisco State University's Department of Anthropology.. His work focuses on cultural and medical anthropology, the ethnography of structural and political violence, social Suffering, critical medical anthropology, urban anthropology, culture change, transnational migration and refugee migration, North America, Central America, and the inner city.
Cancuén is an archaeological site of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization, located in the Pasión subregion of the central Maya lowlands in the present-day Guatemalan Department of Petén. The city is notable for having one of the largest palaces in the Maya world.
A sanctuary city is a municipality that limits or denies its cooperation with the national government in enforcing immigration law.
Guatemalan Americans are Americans of full or partial Guatemalan descent. The Guatemalan American population at the 2010 Census was 1,044,209. Guatemalans are the sixth largest Hispanic group in the United States and the second largest Central American population after Salvadorans. Half of the Guatemalan population is situated in two parts of the country, the Northeast and Southern California.
Simon Martin is a British epigrapher, historian, writer and Mayanist scholar. He is best known for his contributions to the study and decipherment of the Maya script, the writing system used by the pre-Columbian Maya civilisation of Mesoamerica. As one of the leading epigraphers active in contemporary Mayanist research, Martin has specialised in the study of the political interactions and dynastic histories of Classic-era Maya polities. Since 2003 Martin has held positions at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology where he is currently an Associate Curator and Keeper in the American Section, while teaching select courses as an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Jeffrey H. Cohen is an American anthropologist.
Alex Rivera is a Sundance award-winning American film maker and MacArthur Fellow, best known for his films about labor, immigration, and politics.
Lourdes Gutiérrez Nájera is an American cultural anthropologist. She is a tenured Associate Professor at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies teaching in the American Cultural Studies curriculum. Her prior experience includes her work as assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at both Dartmouth College and Drake University. She is a member of the Latin American Studies Association, American Anthropological Association, and Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social. Her research is published in journals and books such as Beyond El Barrio: Everyday Life in Latina/o America. Other publications include reviews of scholarly work. Her academic accomplishments and research pertain to the field of Latinx national migration, indigenous communities in the United States and Mexico, and the U.S.-Mexican borderlands.
Pusilhá is an archaeological site in Belize. The location of this Late Classic Maya urban complex, along the east and west flow of trade, made the city a major transfer point for economic activities in the whole region. In addition, the city gave archaeologists a historical view of a secondary Maya site. Large and extended excavation efforts have changed the overall picture of Maya social and political relationships between larger and smaller cities and challenged the prevailing view of conquest and absorption of smaller cities into the larger cities in the region. The research conducted at Pusilhá began in 1927 and continues to this day.
Migration studies is the academic study of human migration. Migration studies is an interdisciplinary field which draws on anthropology, prehistory, history, economics, law, sociology and postcolonial studies.
Sarah J. Mahler is an American author and cultural anthropologist. She was part of a group of anthropologists attempting to change migration studies to a more comprehensive way to understand how migrants crossing international borders remain tied to their homelands and how cultural practices and identities reflect influences from past and present contexts, called "transnational migration."
The history of Maya civilization is divided into three principal periods: the Preclassic, Classic and Postclassic periods; these were preceded by the Archaic Period, which saw the first settled villages and early developments in agriculture. Modern scholars regard these periods as arbitrary divisions of chronology of the Maya civilization, rather than indicative of cultural evolution or decadence. Definitions of the start and end dates of period spans can vary by as much as a century, depending on the author. The Preclassic lasted from approximately 3000 BC to approximately 250 AD; this was followed by the Classic, from 250 AD to roughly 950 AD, then by the Postclassic, from 950 AD to the middle of the 16th century. Each period is further subdivided:
Barbara L. Voss is an American historical archaeologist. Her work focuses on cross-cultural encounters, particularly the Spanish colonization of the Americas and Overseas Chinese communities in the 19th century, as well as queer theory in archaeology and gender archaeology. She is an associate professor of anthropology at Stanford University.
Steven Vertovec is an anthropologist and Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, based in Göttingen, Germany. He is also currently Honorary Joint Professor of Sociology and Ethnology at the Georg August University of Göttingen and Supernumerary Fellow at Linacre College, Oxford.
2017 California Senate Bill 54, commonly referred to as "SB 54" and also known as the "California Values Act" is a 2017 California state law that prevents state and local law enforcement agencies from using their resources on behalf of federal immigration enforcement agencies. The law allows for cooperation between local, state and federal law enforcement in cases of violent illegal immigrants, and is often referred to as a "sanctuary law" due to its resemblance of sanctuary jurisdiction policies.
Dennis Eugene Breedlove was an American botanist, herbarium curator, and plant collector. He is "best known for his collections and floristic studies in the Mexican state of Chiapas, and his ethnobotanical work in that state with various collaborators."
