A School for Others covers my time in Belize, Central America as a Peace Corps Volunteer. It is about my personal growth, some adventure, unintentional altruism, and finding true love, despite my best efforts not to. I live in a Mayan village and one day I discover an abandon school in the jungle. It is the beginning of a vision to develop a school for students who are unable to continue their education in a system that is designed to weed out the “academically challenged.” They are the “other” kids who don’t have the privilege of attending secondary school.

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Through an innovative approach that combines years of ethnographic research with British imperial archival sources, this book reveals how cultural heritage has been negotiated by colonial, independent state, and community actors in Belize from the late nineteenth century to the present. Alicia McGill explores the heritage of two African-descendant Kriol communities as seen in the contexts of archaeology and formal education. McGill demonstrates that in both spheres, Belizean institutions have constructed and used heritage places and ideologies to manage difference, govern subjects and citizens, and reinforce development agendas. In the communities studied here, ancient Maya cities and legacies have been prized while Kriol histories have been marginalized, and racial and ethnic inequalities have endured. Yet McGill shows that at the same time, Belizean teachers and children resist, maintaining their Kriol identity through storytelling, subsistence practices, and other engagements with ecological resources. They also creatively identify connections between themselves and the ancient cultures that once lived in their regions. Exploring heritage as a social construct, McGill provides examples of the many ways people construct values, meanings, and customs related to it. Negotiating Heritage through Education and Archaeology is a richly informed study that emphasizes the importance of community-based engagement in public history and heritage studies. A volume in the series Cultural Heritage Studies, edited by Paul A. Shackel