March 31, 1998
Elizabeth Burgos, Latin American Woman of Letters,
to Speak at Middlebury College
Elizabeth Burgos, one of the most widely
recognized women in Latin American letters, will speak on Thursday,
April 9 at 8 p.m. in Middlebury College’s Dana Auditorium on College
Street (Route 125). Burgos will address the validity of testimonio,
the Latin American genre that has brought the life stories of
impoverished people into literature and scholarship in their own
eloquent words. The talk is free and open to the public.
Venezuelan by birth and French by citizenship,
Burgos is best known for eliciting and publishing the story of
a young Mayan Indian woman and the political violence that destroyed
the woman’s family and village in Guatemala. The book, “I,
Rigoberta Menchú,” commanded so much respect that
its narrator went on to win the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize as a representative
of the native peoples of the Americas, and of hopes for peace
in Guatemala.
Recently Burgos edited a second life-story,
“Memories of a Cuban Soldier,” by one of the three survivors
of Che Guevara’s last guerrilla column in Bolivia. Currently she
is working on a new book about her lifetime of experience with
Latin American revolutionary
movements.
For more information, please contact
Mary Duffy, women’s studies administrator, at 802-443-5937.