Melville, Thomas and Margarita

Thomas and Margarita (Marjorie) Melville are U.S. Catholic missionaries in Guatemala who became revolutionaries. Margarita Bradford (b. 19 August 1929) was born in Irapuato, Mexico, and studied at Loretto Academy in El Paso, Texas. She became Maryknoll Sister Marion Peter and was assigned in 1954 to teach at an upper-class school in Guatemala City. Influenced by the cursillo de capacitación social (short course of social empowerment) movement, she began to spend time teaching the urban poor and organizing vacation projects for affluent students in poverty-stricken rural areas. Thomas Melville (b. 5 December 1930), from Newton, Massachusetts, joined the Maryknoll order and, after ordination in 1957, was sent to work with Indians in the Guatemalan highlands. He helped them form cooperatives. Later he organized an Indian resettlement program in the Petén.

Both missioners became involved with radical university students, some of whom had contact with guerrillas. Frustrated by what they felt was a lack of commitment to the poor by church leaders, they decided to join the guerrilla movement, in order to give it a "Christian presence." Their plan was discovered, and they were expelled from Guatemala in 1967. Soon both left Maryknoll, and they were married in 1968. They then joined a group of Vietnam war protestors burning draft cards in Catonsville, Maryland. They both served time in federal prison for these activities. They later earned doctoral degrees in anthropology and wrote Guatemala: The Politics of Land Ownership (1971). In 2005, Thomas published Through a Glass Darkly: The U.S. Holocaust in Central America.

See alsoGuatemala; Maryknoll Order.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Melvilles defend their actions in Guatemala in Whose Heaven, Whose Earth? (1971), an autobiography.

Additional Bibliography

Berhens, Susan Fitzpatrick. Confronting Colonialism: Maryknoll Catholic Missionaries in Peru and Guatemala, 1943–1968. Notre Dame, IN: The Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, 2007.

Pullapilly, Cyriac K. Christianity and Native Cultures: Perspectives from Different Regions of the World. Notre Dame, IN: Cross Cultural Publications, 2004.

                                          Edward T. Brett