Rigoberta Menchu: Human Rights and Indigenous Peoples

Rigoberta Menchu, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for 1992 and human rights activist from Guatemala, will speak on Friday, October 21 at the Mondavi Center on "Human Rights and Indigenous Peoples." The event is co-sponsored by the Law School, the Hemispheric Institute on the Americas and other UC Davis units. Tickets.

Best known in the U.S. for her 1984 autobiography I, Rigoberta Mench, an Indian Woman in Guatemala, she was born in 1959 and spent her early years in a remote village in the Guatemalan highlands. She got her start as a social activist at age 11, in a Catholic organization called the Daughters of Mary. Through the 1970s and 80s she continued her social and political activities on behalf of indigenous peoples, even as most of her family died in the political violence that plagued Guatemala in that era. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992, the year of the 500th anniversary of Columbus's first voyage to the New World. In addition to her work as head of her namesake Foundation, since January 2004 she has held the position of Good Will Ambassador for the Peace Accords in Guatemala, in the administration of President Oscar Berger.

As a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, indigenous woman and survivor of genocide in Guatemala, Rigoberta Menchu seeks the observance of a code of ethics for an era of peace. There is no peace without justice; no justice without equality; no equality without development; no development without democracy; no democracy without respect to the identity and dignity of cultures and peoples.