Charras: a true story of the assasination that roiled the yucatan

​Part of The Global Reading Series.

​Nuestra Palabra presents Christopher Louis Romaguera, translator of Charras: a true novel of the assassination that roiled the Yucatán written by Hernán Lara Zavala.

​ Charras is the true story of Efraín “El Charras” Calderón Lara, a twenty-six-year-old union leader and student activist, and the Yucatecan government’s successful plot to kidnap and murder him. Acclaimed Mexican novelist Hernán Lara Zavala combines real-life newspaper articles and interviews with renderings of key events, laying the state-sanctioned narrative of Charras’s death beside the actual experiences of those involved. To kaleidoscopic effect, Zavala enters not only the mind of the hero but also those in his orbit: the governor of the Yucatán, Charras’s bureaucrat brother-in-law, even the mercenary hired to carry out the kidnapping—the chilling “you” whose point-of- view the reader must inhabit to unravel what took place during that fateful spring of 1974.

​Master of Ceremonies: Professor Tony Diaz, El Librotraficante, founder of Nuestra Palabra. Author of THE TIP OF THE PYRAMID: Cultivating Community Cultural Capital.

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​​Sponsors: 

​​American Leadership Forum

​​​The BIPOC Arts Network and Fund - BANF

​​​The Brown Foundation

​​​The Law Office of Carolina Ortuzar-Diaz, PLLC

​​​Que Onda Magazine