Lifetime Achievement Acceptance Speech -- Elena Poniatowska

Lifetime Achievement Acceptance Speech -- Elena Poniatowska

Since I became a journalist, I have always listened to voices. Where does a writer get her voices? I got them first in jail, in 1959, during the incarceration of railroad workers who had gone on strike, then in 1968 during the student massacre, then at the moment of the 1985 earthquake. Why under these circumstances? Because it is in extreme situations that men and women feel the urge to be with others. They suddenly have time for themselves and for others and they speak out, they try to open up communication with their fellow men and women; they improvise their behavior because barriers and prejudices have been torn down. In doing so, they acquire a torrent of new knowledge.

Let me give you an example. On September 19 1985, after the earthquake that nearly devastated Mexico City, I stayed in the streets for four months and witnessed how the city underwent one of the noblest transfers of power in its history, a power that greatly transcended the limits of mere solidarity; the transformation of the people into a government, and of official disorder into civilian order. Democracy can suddenly highlight the importance of an individual who was previously invisible.

The highest death toll was found among the seamstresses. More than 500 women were killed. Why? Because no one remembered them. After all they were women, they worked in run down buildings, had no social security and no presence in society. They loved their boss because when he went on vacation to Rome he brought them back a rosary and an image of the Pope. Usually the sweat shops were on the top floor of the building and the women who saved their lives threw themselves out of the window hanging from a roll of cloth like Tarzan but the ones who ran to the staircases found their death. Four months after, the rescuers were still digging out the bodies that could only be recognized by a ring or a bracelet. Led by Evangelina Corona who faced the Mexican President and told him he was lying when he said that the city had gone back to normality, the seamstresses founded one of the first clean Unions in our country and gained a self respect they had no idea they possessed.

Although the population of Mexico is 52 percent female, women have always been the forgotten ones. Without camp followers there would have been no Mexican Revolution. Jesusa Palancares, the heroine of Here´s to you Jesusa was one of them. Her wisdom was as essential as corn and rain. She was as brave as all the award winners here today and she taught what no one else can teach. Through her I discovered that those who do not have a voice are those who possess the most powerful voice because it is unpredictable, unlikely, terrifying; a voice that has not been carved by formalisms, a voice whose only modulation is the earth. No woman has ever said to me what I have heard from Jesusa, not one of them has given me what she gives, nor have I met anyone with this dignity that the Spaniards call breeding. While conditions of oppression, misery and social exclusion exist in Latin America, listening to voices will be the only way in which we can become aware of unsuspected and different ways of living, although we might be very often reluctant to learn the truth of this reality that women like May Chidiac, Jill Carroll and Gao Yu have faced.

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