Growing up, as he considered his career possibilities, he entertained the idea of being a lawyer, like his dad; or maybe a small forward in the NBA, like his boyhood hero Adrian Dantley; or perhaps an archaeologist a la Indiana Jones.
Director of a foundation dedicated to preserving Mayan languages? That never made the list.
But that’s the one that’s turned into his dream job.
Funny the twists and turns life takes. Winston Scott’s twists and turns took him to the lush mountains of Guatemala, where he was introduced to the Maya people who have lived there for the last 4,000 years.
The first 3,500, history suggests, were much better than the last 500. The arrival of the conquistadors and subjugation to the Spaniards exacted a heavy toll that continues unabated to this day — a constant eroding of their culture, their standard of living and, slowly but surely, their languages.
It has become Winston’s life’s work to do something about the last one on that list — and in the process, hopefully help improve the first two.
Two humanitarian aid trips to Guatemala when he was in his late teens and early 20s first introduced Winston to the Mayans.
There really wasn’t anything to suggest much of a connection, let alone love at first sight. He’s 6-foot-3, blue-eyed, blond-haired. The average Mayan is brown-skinned, dark-haired and barely 5 feet tall.
Then there’s the language, or make that languages. The Mayans have 22 different languages in Guatemala alone, each one distinctly different. And since the Spanish language — Guatemala’s official language — arrived thousands of years after the Mayans were already there, there is absolutely no connection between speaking Spanish and Mayan. The same goes for English.
Nevertheless, Winston Scott felt like he’d found his second home.
“From the very beginning, I just loved the people,” he says. “I loved everything about them, the culture, the way they talk, their humility, their outlook on life even when they have very little.”
Inspired by what he’d seen and felt, after his second visit to Guatemala in 1999, he came back to the University of Utah and switched his major from archaeology to cultural anthropology.
“I didn’t want to be Indiana Jones anymore,” he says. “Archaeologists dig old things up, and that still excites me, but I wanted to study cultural anthropology; I decided to change the past with the present.”
After earning his bachelor’s at the University of Utah, he sought out professors working in Mayan languages, which took him to the University of Albany in New York. He earned his master’s and Ph.D. there. When he graduated in 2013, after numerous trips to Guatemala for field work, he was proficient in three of the 22 recognized Mayan languages, namely Q’eqchi, K’iche’ and Kaqchikel.
Then he discovered the hard truth that there are a lot more job possibilities these days for, say, a computer programmer than a linguist, particularly one who speaks Mayan.
In between applying for teaching jobs at universities, Winston managed to find steady work contracting with the federal court system, where translators and interpreters are in demand.
That led to a job in 2021 in El Paso translating for young Mayan immigrants seeking to enter the United States.
It was there that he met a woman after his own heart.
Ludmila Golovine is CEO of MasterWord, a Houston company that was overseeing the translating work in El Paso. Like Winston, she feels a strong need to protect endangered languages.
As it happened, UNESCO, the United Nations arm in charge of educational, scientific and cultural causes, had just launched the International Decade of Indigenous Languages, commencing in 2022.
With an estimated 40% of the world’s Indigenous languages at risk, the goal of the International Decade of Indigenous Languages over the next 10 years is to help protect and preserve them.
Ludmila asked Winston if he would be interested in helping MasterWord start a nonprofit foundation dedicated specifically to the Mayan languages.
He jumped at the chance. For the past three years, he’s been hard at work getting The Mayan Languages Preservation and Digitization Project (mayanlanguagespreservation.org) underway. What began as just him working out of his house in Sugar House now has five full-time employees, along with a steady stream of University of Utah interns, volunteers and a board of advisers from five Mayan language groups in Guatemala.
“The big picture is to lift up educational and employment opportunities in these very poor and small villages with Mayan language speakers so they don’t feel they have no other choice but to leave and migrate,” explains Winston.
“It takes a lot of work, a lot of cooperation with the government, to get them to promote Indigenous language inclusivity,” he adds, “but we are seeing progress.”
It also requires spending time on the ground in Guatemala to effect real change.
To Dr. Scott, who reckons he has spent 8½ years living in Guatemala over the last 30 years of his life — often sleeping in remote villages under the roof of a native Maya family — that’s the big perk of the job.
“When I’m down there, people often ask me, ‘Why are you still coming here?’” says Winston. “‘You like the mountains?’ Yes, I love the mountains. They’re green and they’re enormous. ‘You like the food?’ Yes, the tortillas are wonderful. But that’s not why I keep coming back. It’s the people that make the place special. Fortune has really smiled on me, because I get to work with these people I love every day.”