Monday April 19, 2021
Environmental justice award winner: We have the right to live in a territory that for us is sacred
By Barbara Fraser, National Catholic Reporter
Aura Lolita Chávez Ixcaquic, a K iche Maya teacher and community leader in Guatemala, was returning home on a bus with other women when armed men boarded the vehicle and demanded to know Who is Lolita? Thinking she was about to die, she was about to answer when another woman stood up and said, I am Lolita. The men began to beat her, when another woman, and then another, said, No, I am Lolita.
The Indigenous Literature of the Americas
In late August, Mexico City and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico signed an agreement to teach Náhuatl language and culture to Nahua (Aztec) students in Santa Ana Tlacotenco in the high southern reaches of the city. The signatories were a deputy mayor of the city, the coordinator of humanities at the university, and an honored witness,
Miguel León-Portilla, the leading scholar in the world of Náhuatl history and culture. It had been many years, perhaps centuries, since a great Mexican university had educated Nahua students in their own culture and offered a diploma to those who completed the course satisfactorily. According to some observers, it had not happened since the calmecac (school for nobles) was destroyed with the fall of Tenochtitlan in 1521. Náhuatl culture and language had been studied in Mexican universities, but not taught as a living culture. It was yet another instance of a resurgence of indigenous culture in the