Yale senior Christian Baca has received a grant from Projects for Peace, a program that supports college students who are developing innovative, community-centered responses to pressing challenges.
Baca, a senior majoring in political science and humanities with a certificate in education studies, will use the Davis Projects for Peace grant to help create a youth-based audiovisual memory initiative in El Salvador that he is developing in partnership with the Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen (MUPI), a San Salvador museum dedicated to collecting and preserving memories of the Salvadoran civil war.
Baca's initiative, called Sembrando Memoria, will train young people in ethical and technical audiovisual documentation. Through workshop-based training and community fieldwork, Baca says, participants will document histories of state repression in their hometowns and produce community-based archives, culminating in a public exhibition at MUPI.
"By equipping youth to document and preserve their communities' histories, the project aims to strengthen locally grounded memory practices and expand civic participation in contexts of political and informational constraint," Baca said.
The project builds on his previous experience in El Salvador, where he took a leave of absence during his junior year to work with Cristosal, a human rights organization now in political exile. There, he supported "know your rights" and anti-corruption workshops for community members navigating arbitrary detention and restricted access to legal protections.
Beyond his work in El Salvador, Baca has been involved in Latin American foreign policy through work at the Organization of American States and the Washington Office on Latin America.
At Yale, he serves as a lead student mentor for the Pedagogical Partners Program, a residential teaching assistant for the Citizens Thinkers Writers program, and a First-Generation, Low-Income Peer Mentor.
Based at Middlebury College, the Projects for Peace program partners with educational institutions to identify and support young peacebuilders. Each year the program grants $1.25 million to 125 or more student leaders. Projects can take place anywhere in the world.
