User:Karmety1967/Lucia Ixchíu

Ana Lucia Ixchíu Hernández, better known as Lucia Ixchíu or Lucia Hernández (Totonicapán, 1990) is a Guatemalan quiché indigenous, feminist activist, architect, cultural manager, community journalist, co-founder of Mujeres en Movimiento and Festivales Solidarios.

She is considered one of the most important activists in Central America thanks to her fight for the

defense of feminism, biodiversity, and the fight for the territory of indigenous peoples.

Her path
She prefers to use the name of Lucia Ixchíu, and not Hernández with whom many of her called her,

in order to highlight her quiché indigenous origins.

A los trece años de edad, tomó conciencia de lo que era ser mujer At thirteen she became aware of what it means to be a woman, following in the footsteps of her

grandmother Juana. To her she owes the courage to have divorced, to have said enough to

violence, and to have passed on to her aunts and sisters the idea of ​​fighting for a better future.

Her sister Andrea Ixchíu also followed the same path as Lucia in the defense of human rights.

She learned the importance of feminism in her life thanks to Marcela Lagarde's text "La soledad y la desolación". At that time, she was coming out of a difficult relationship, and she was afraid of being alone and not knowing how to resolve this crisis. In parallel, her country was experiencing a

war for the memory and dignity of peoples..

On October 4, 2012, in Cumbre de Alaska, at the age of twenty-one, before the massacre that the Guatemalan army carried out against the indigenous population of Totonicapán, Ixchíu decided to become a journalist and community activist. La Prensa Comunitaria became her home for nearly five years, and it taught her the values ​​of truth and the written word, thanks to which she was able to make her voice being heard. As she she herself said, "It gave me the right that we indigenous peoples have, to have our own voice.".

In the same year, she began to be part of the student movement, where she had to live closely and accompany a process of criminalization and political imprisonment; she became representative of the University Council of the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala from 2014 to 2016. She supported the democratization process of the Oliverio Castañeda de León University Students Association from 2012 to 2017, part of USAC Es Pueblo.

She is the co-founder of Festivales Solidarios (a group of indigenous and mestizo artists, journalists and researchers who deal with historical memory, territorial defense and political incarceration); she has also been part of the indigenous Maya kat news bulletin of the Guatemalan Federation of Radio Schools, part of the Somos Una Abya Yala network, Lationamérica Romper el cerco, the Internacional Feministra and the different Encuentrofeminista.

This urban and student experience formed her as a modern woman, an activist who believes in art as a means to democratize society and transform it.

< <I fight because my grandparents, with a thousand debris on their bodies and lives, taught us not to give up, to live with dignity. I fight because I firmly believe that we have the right to live in peace and decide what we want to happen in our territories. At home I have been taught since I was a child that in my country there has been a genocide and a war, I had access to information, but I kept aloof and a little indifferent to my surroundings until my 21 years: it was concomitant of the massacre of 4 October 2012 which became aware of what it means to be an indigenous person in my country, which is structurally racist. And I mainly fight as part of different, indigenous women; I fight for us, for whom it certainly is more difficult than for our male companions, in this system that is not only capitalist and extractivist, but also strips the bodies of us women, and this happens in all parts of the world. Another fundamental reason for this fight against life, without doubst, is biodiversity. 5>>

In 2016, after participating in the Encuentro Latinoamericano de Mujeres, Ixchíu recognized

herself as a feminist.

The article "Los rostros de la nueva política en Guatemala", published in 2016 by The New York Times, included Ixchíu among the emerging personalities of the new politics of Guatemala, together with Briseida Milán, Gabriel Wer, Joel Morales, Gabriela Carrera, Ivonne Monterroso, Libertad Garrido, among many. In this article, activists have talked about access to power as the only way to change things and have described the parties in Guatemala as ";lifeless parties". .

The collective text &amp;quot;Centroamérica en medio del despojo y nuestra lucha feminista&amp;quot;, published in February 2019, saw the collaboration of Ixchíu and other women from the Central American region of Honduras. The goal was to contextualize adverse, convulsive, and undemocratic political situations, electoral fraud, technical coups, violent and murderous dictatorships, and the situation of many women who have risked their lives to challenge the system.

Lucia defended the right of indigenous communities to use communication, in particular community radio, essential for the support, revitalization and preservation of indigenous languages, as a channel of easy access to information and for the organization of scattered people on the territory and without telephone or internet services. In this way, in 2015 she denounced the threats, insults and physical violence perpetrated against the community press for having covered indigenous mobilizations against the construction of a hydroelectric press in Santa Cruz, and their concern for the consequent ecological impact and cultural.

Lucia Ixchíu founded Festivales Solidarios by using artistic expression as a tool for action. She organized numerous festivals including "Vivas nos queremos" in 2020, in conjunction with International Women's Day, which saw the participation of many Guatemalan artists and a virtual meeting with 150 indigenous groups, narrated at the time by the newspaper La Hora.

The Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and the Protection Unit for Human Rights Defenders - Guatemala (UDEFEGUA), on 22 September 2020 denounced the threats and attacks suffered by Ixchíu and other defenders of indigenous territory when they were making recordings for a documentary in the community forest of Alta, in Totonicapán, and they came across illegal loggers.

The feeling of impunity and the existence of a hostile climate towards those who defend human rights have worsened after the press release of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), which condemns the killings and attacks on defenders of Guatemala.

View also

 * Feministas de Guatemala
 * Feminismo comunitario
 * Feminismo descolonial
 * Feminismo poscolonial