Mexican Journalist on Latin America to Speak on Truth and Beauty in Mexico April 24 at UCSD

April 3, 2007

By Jan Jennings

Alma Guillermoprieto

Alma Guillermoprieto, author and Mexican journalist who has written extensively about Latin America for the U.S. press, will speak on Truth and Beauty in Mexico and Latin America at 7 p.m. April 24 in the Price Center Ballroom at the University of California, San Diego.

Sponsored by the UCSD Helen Edison Lecture Series and the César E. Chávez Celebration Planning Committee, Guillermoprieto’s lecture is part of UCSD’s monthlong celebration of the life and accomplishments of César E. Chávez, labor leader, champion of human rights and a principal figure in the Chicano Civil Rights Movement. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Born in Mexico City and raised in Mexico and New York City, Guillermoprieto began her career as a journalist in the mid-1970s for The Guardian of Great Britain, later moving to the Washington Post. In 1982 she was one of two journalists who broke the story of the El Mozote massacre in which 900 villagers at El Mozote, El Salvador, were slaughtered by the Salvadoran army in December, 1981. She also has served as a South America bureau chief for Newsweek and for almost two decades has been The New Yorker’s Latin American correspondent.

Guillermoprieto has written about Mexico, Colombia, Nicaragua, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, El Salvador, and Panama. She covered the Colombian civil war, the internal conflict in Peru, the aftermath of what was termed the “Dirty War” in Argentina, and post-Sandinista Nicaragua.

“I’m an efficient, good, professional reporter,” Guillermoprieto says. “But I also write. And so what I try to do is write about places that I know, that I care about intensely, and write about them in a way that conveys the fact that I care.”

Guillermoprieto is the author of The Heart That Bleeds (Knopf, 1994) and Looking for History (Pantheon, 2001) which are compilations of her writings on Latin America for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.

Considered one of the premier authorities on Mexico, Guillermoprieto comments: “Of course, millions of us cross the border to work in U.S. homes and gardens and factories and carpentry shops and restaurants, and if you go to a restaurant pretty much anywhere in the United States, the chances are that the dishes will be washed by a Mexican.”

And she muses: “What I wonder is what would happen in California, say, if all the Mexicans left from one day to the next?”

In addition to her work as a journalist, Guillermoprieto studied modern dance in New York City and was a professional dancer from 1962 to 1973. Her first book, Samba, (Knopf, 1990) is an account of a season studying at a samba school in Rio de Janeiro. In 2004, she published Dancing with Cuba (Pantheon) which tells of when the author, an admirer of choreographers Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, taught dance in Cuba in her early twenties and during the early days of the revolution there.

As a journalist, Guillermoprieto is as comfortable discussing modern dance and traditional Latin dance as she is discussing socio-political trends in Latin America.
Guillermoprieto has received a number of awards, including the Alicia Patterson Fellowship, the Latin American Studies Association Media Award, the George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting, a MacArthur Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University, and the Samuel Chavkin Prize for Integrity in Latin American Journalism.

In 2001, Guillermoprieto was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Since 1995, she has conducted the first workshop of the year at the Fundacion Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano in Colombia, which she cofounded. The workshop is for young journalists throughout the continent.

For further information on the Guillermoprieto lecture visit the website, helenedison.ucsd.edu or call (858) 822-0510.

Media Contacts: Pat JaCoby, 858-534-7404 or Jan Jennings, 858-822-1684