Patricia Rumer

Lifetime activist and educator Patricia Rumer fell in love with Guatemala in 1969 as a community development volunteer with the American Friends Service Committee working in a rural highland, K’iche’-speaking community. She has returned frequently to unite with the part of her heart that will always live there.

Throughout a prolific forty-five years of activism, educational and international leadership, Rumer has traveled extensively in Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East and Africa. Patricia was strongly influenced by her early Guatemalan experiences working with Paolo Friere’s popular education literacy program as well as with Roman Catholic nuns and priests who preached and lived a liberating Gospel. She saw the impact of Liberation Theology in organizing poor communities to become involved in social justice struggles and saw them become leaders in their own communities. She believes in a radical, inclusive spiritual practice and has worked to incorporate those early experiences into her life work.

As a Witness for Peace observer she accompanied Guatemalan refugees displaced by the 1980’s internal armed conflict in their return from Mexico to Guatemala (1993,1995) and their resettlement in the Ixcan. In 2013 after the Ríos Montt genocide trial she was a member of the Guatemalan Human Rights Commission/USA delegation to investigate the impact of the genocide decision on Guatemalan human rights defenders. In 2016 she witnessed the Sepur Zarco trial in which a Guatemalan judge convicted two former military officers of crimes against humanity on counts of rape, murder and slavery from 1982-88.

Patricia has a PhD in Urban and Public Affairs from Portland State University. From 2008-15 she taught senior international Capstone courses that focused on the roles of women and indigenous communities in community development. She also organized two student-immersion courses to Chiapas, Mexico.

Since her retirement from teaching, she has been working on a book that describes her own transformational life journey along with those Central American human rights workers with whom she has shared their struggles for justice. Recently she worked with Central American immigrants in Tucson, Arizona. Her writings on Central America and immigration-related stories have appeared in Streetroots, Common Lot, at Los Porteños events and in her blog, www.justiceactivist.com.