GUATEMALAN ACTIVIST AND NOBEL LAUREATE
RIGOBERTA MENCHU GIVES LECTURE AT UH
| WHAT: |
Rigoberta Menchu lecture, “Latin
America’s Indigenous People and the State in the 21st
Century and the Current Crisis” |
| WHEN: |
2:30 p.m., March 26, 2003 |
| WHERE: |
Auditorium 2, Agnes Arnold Hall
www.uh.edu/campus_map/buildings/AH.html |
Guatemalan activist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient
Rigoberta Menchu will relate her indigenous struggles to Sept.
11 and the war with Iraq during a lecture at the University
of Houston on March 26.
Her lecture, “Latin America’s Indigenous
People and the State in the 21st Century and the Current Crisis,”
will be delivered in Spanish with an English translation.
Menchu spent her childhood in Chimal, a mountainous
village in El Quiche where many savage battles between guerillas
and U.S.-backed government soldiers took place. Her family worked
in privately owned cotton and tobacco plantations, like many other
peasant families. Her experiences with the government, she has
said, inspired her to advocate social change.
She became the youngest Nobel Peace Prize recipient
in 1992, when the Nobel committee recognized her advocacy of indigenous
Americans and victims of violence in Guatemala’s civil war.
In 2002, the National Civil Rights Museum gave Menchu the Freedom
Award. She is the author of the book “I, Rigoberta Menchu.”
Since 1994, Menchu has been the official spokesperson
for the United Nations International Decade of Indigenous Peoples.
Menchu’s speech is sponsored by UH’s
Comparative, Critical and Cultural Studies Initiative of the Modern
and Classical Languages department, the American Cultures Program
Tinoco Fund, the history department and the Center for the Americas.
Following the lecture, a reception sponsored by UH’s Women’s
Studies Program will take place in the lobby of Agnes Arnold Hall.
The lecture and reception are free and open to the public.