Presentation and Reading of The Beast by 2014 WOLA-Duke Book Award Winner Óscar Martínez

Óscar Martínez, the winner of the 2014 WOLA-Duke Book Award, will give a talk and read an excerpt from The Beast: Riding The Rails And Dodging Narcos On The Migrant Trail. This book is Martínez’s account of the thousands of migrant disappearances that occur between the remote desert towns of Altar, Mexico, and Sasabe, Arizona, and the stories that he garnered during his two years traveling along the migrant trail to the U.S.

Martínez is the seventh author to win the annual WOLA-Duke Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America, which honors the best current, non-fiction book published in English on human rights, democracy, and social justice in contemporary Latin America. According to Holly Ackerman, Librarian for Latin American, Iberian and Latino/a Studies at Duke University and one of this year’s book prize judges, “Martínez has written a definitional book with raw authenticity and graceful prose. The Beast does for Central America’s migrants what Michael Harrington’s The Other America did for the poor in mid-20th Century America; what Randy Shilts’ The Band Played On did for those affected by the AIDS epidemic and what Lincoln Steffens’ The Shame of the Cities did to confront corruption in turn of the century urban America. It uses frank encounters to promote outrage at social injustice.”

Óscar Martínez writes for ElFaro.net, the first online newspaper in Latin America, and is currently investigating gang violence in Latin America. In 2008, Martínez won the Fernando Benítez National Journalism Prize in Mexico, and in 2009, he was awarded the Human Rights Prize at the José Simeón Cañas Central American University in El Salvador.

There will be a book signing and reception immediately following the reading.

Sponsored by the DHRC@FHI, the Duke Human Rights Archive, the Washington Office on Latin America and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

Date: Thursday February 12, 2015
Time: 5:00pm-6:30pm
Location: Smith Warehouse, Bay 4, Franklin Garage

For more information contact Patrick Stawski, Human Rights Archivist, Duke University at patrick.stawski@duke.edu or 919-660-5823.