I, am Maria Suarez Toro, am a 77-year-old feminist scuba diver in Costa Rica's Caribbean. I have directed a community of underwater archeology programs since 2016 that has taught very young local Afro and Bribri boys and girls from Talamanca to scuba dive with the purpose of documenting shipwrecks. During this process they have also learned how to care for the ocean and to conserve the coastal communities. These young people call themselves “Ambassadors of the Sea” and have developed what we call "citizenry science", a process that combines the use of the scientific method with ancestral knowledge.  

 

After decades of dedicated work with our community, I am urgently needing a brilliant and dedicated young person to take over my socio-cultural activism and research responsibilities. I am very pleased that a young feminist Afro and indigenous woman, Maraya Jiménez Taysigue, who is currently president of “Ambassadors of the Sea” has eagerly embraced this challenge. 

 

Therefore, we need to raise funds so that Maraya can finish professionalization studies in Cadiz, Spain, in order to return to the Caribbean and take over my responsibility so that I can continue to contribute from a different vantage - not diving and full-time activism - but writing and training and conferencing.

 

Maraya has been granted an opportunity to study for a master’s degree in underwater archeology at the University of Cadiz, but her scholarship did not include the funding needed to undertake such studies.  

 

We immediately organized the communally to for her to successfully undertake the beginning of such studies this October 2025.  We mkkmkhave already covered Maraya's tuition, passport, visas, computer, travel, winter clothes and food and lodging for the first months of October to December 2025.  

 

This GoFundMe will need to raise $10,000 to make it possible for Maraya to continue her studies at the University of Cadiz until October, 2026.  

Maraya would be the first Costa Rican woman to earn her Master’s Degree as an Underwater Archaeologist. Moreover she is local, Afro, indigenous and is 24 years old.

 

Upon her return to Costa Rica next October, her community and I will happily collaborate with her to protect and manage the sites, but mostly to deepen the cultural rooting of this new history in the community, nationally and globally through storytelling, all the arts, diving, and conservation of the maritime culture.  

 

In this way I will continue contributing together with Maraya as an intergenerational feminist relay of roles, very welcome by all because the new generation is being called to be active in the present, not only in the horizon of a future. 

 

An on the other hand, we as the elder feminists, will have a place in that horizon if we help the new generation trace and shape the present.

 

Thanks for reading so far, and please take action if you can!

 

                                      In gratitude, María Suarez Toro

 

* Background

 

The “Ambassadors of the Sea” have developed what we call "citizenry science", a process that combines the use of the scientific method enriched by ancestral knowledge. The Afro and indigenous youth of the “Ambassadors of the Sea” have inherited a wealth of generational knowledge about the sea from their grandparents who were fisher people. We believe that their process of creating knowledge is a form of community archaeomythology, that uses and expands the discipline of archaeomythology as coined by Marija Gimbutas (1921-1994).

 

In 2025 we have finally scientifically proven that two of those wrecks are slave ships that arrived to Cahuita by mistake on March 2, 1710 bringing 650 enslaved Africans. Upon arrival the sailors and Africanas mutinied for lack of food and and being lost.  The Africanas left the ships to reach freedom in the shores while one ship was burned and the other left to crash against the reef. The narrative comprises an unknown chapter of the history of the arrival of Africans in Costa Rica's Caribbean that up to now was believed to have arrived 150 years later, post slavery. This finding is changing the history of Costa Rica and is contributing an unknown chapter to the global history of the slave trade. As of today, only 5 such ships have been identifies out of over 1,200 such slave ships known to have wrecked! The two ships in Costa Rica - the Fredericus IV and Christianus V are 6th and 7th in that unearthed underwater story of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

The relevancy of this finding is not only about unearthing a burried historical record, nut the fact that the youth divers have found the roots of their heritge that is not fully taught in schools.

No sweepstakes, giveaways, or returns on investment are offered in exchange for any made to this GoFundMe.