From Silence to Resilience: Eva Palma-Zúñiga Brings Human Rights to the Classroom
Growing up in a dictatorship in Chile, Eva Palma-Zúñiga observed the silence around political violence in the classroom and in her community. Like many other families, hers stayed silent for fear of retaliation. Today, as a lecturer in the Spanish and Portuguese studies department at the University of Minnesota, Palma-Zúñiga brings discussions of human rights violations to light.
Palma-Zúñiga’s path to the University of Minnesota was driven by a need to “understand and comprehend deeply the meaning of human rights.” After moving to the U.S. and enrolling at the University of Minnesota, she earned an MA in Hispanic Literature and Cultures, followed by a PhD in Hispanic Literatures and Cultures and a graduate minor in human rights. Her time at the U proved to be a life-changing period, as it allowed her to learn beyond her own department, explore “different realities,” and most importantly, to better learn the history of her own country.
Beyond the lectures, Palma-Zúñiga completed an internship with the Salvador Allende Foundation in Chile, where she interacted with and interviewed former government secretaries who had served before the dictatorship. Today, she integrates lessons from this experience into her teaching, where she finds that conversations about Latin America inevitably lead to conversations about dictatorships and human rights.
Beyond the classroom, Palma-Zúñiga’s scholarly work brings new perspectives to the human rights sphere. In her work analyzing the relationship between nature and violence through ecocriticism, she suggests that nature is a “victim and witness of colonial and postcolonial violence.” By framing the land itself as an entity deserving of rights, she challenges people to look beyond traditional human rights perspectives and consider how identity and memory are tied to physical spaces or “territories of disobedience.”
Hope Across Generations
Palma-Zúñiga admits that hope and motivation do not always come easily to her. Talking about human rights often feels like a “wishlist for Christmas” that countries all too often fail to uphold. Still, her students and young people give her hope. Through “disseminating and sharing information,” younger generations explore human rights in ways she was not able to do when she was in school, she explains.
Palma-Zúñiga argues that in order to heal, but also to truly change our realities, we need generations after generations of young leaders. Additionally, she believes that studying human rights fosters a unique kind of empathy that helps individuals move away from narcissistic tendencies and eventually fascist governments. Ultimately, she believes human rights should be a foundational part of education, and hopes that one day human rights education will be a requirement similar to language requirements across various institutions.
Going Beyond the Classroom
Her advice to current students passionate about Human Rights is to “keep being passionate” and to “not give up.” She shares that the classroom is a great place for consistent practice and learning, but argues that the real challenge lies with applying human rights knowledge beyond the classroom. Palma-Zúñiga encourages students to practice human rights not just in classes, but in their everyday interactions after they graduate. She reflects on Operation Metro Surge and how community members being “better humans and better neighbors” was a great example of everyday practice of human rights. For Palma-Zúñiga, human rights practices are not limited to working in specific organizations or doing textbook activism, but rather can be found in small acts of community engagement and solidarity. Ultimately, the goal is not to follow a perfect path, but to remain engaged, to keep learning, and to fight so that our voices and our stories are never silenced.
