María de los Ángeles Aguilar
María de los Ángeles Aguilar is a Guatemalan Maya-K´iche´ historian whose research centers on state-sponsored violence, policing, and processes of criminalization in Guatemala during the second half of the 20th century. She received her degree in History from Tulane University in 2021. From 2021 to 2024 she was a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at the Council on Latin American and Iberian Studies (CLAIS) at Yale University, where she taught courses on Latin America Studies and Political Violence in Latin America.
She has worked on collaborative research projects centered on historical memory, collecting testimony from Indigenous communities and genocide survivors. For over nine years, Dr. Aguilar was a columnist in Guatemala’s newspaper elPeriodico, where she wrote about the country’s social and political issues and denounced repressive policies that affected the Maya population. Her work has also appeared in Jacobin magazine, Agencia Ocote, and Revista Gazeta, among other popular publications.
She is currently working on her book manuscript titled “Una institución como la nuestra”: Police and Policing in Guatemala City, which explores the interconnections of race, policing, criminalization, and political control during the country’s genocidal armed conflict (1960-1996). The work is based on Spanish-language records from the now-closed Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive (AHPN), a one-of-a-kind collection with over 70 million documents related to police activity in the country.
