Thursday, November 17, 2011

In Solidarity: Miami Dade College Students pay tribute to Laura Pollán

Miami Dade College students demonstrate their solidarity with the Ladies in White while honoring their founder Laura Pollán, who died on October 14, 2011. When will Florida International University and University of Miami students do the same?


Originally Published by Pedazos de la Isla:

Dressed in white and carrying signs and flowers, dozens of students from Miami Dade College paid a moving tribute to the fallen leader of the Ladies in White, Laura Pollán, this Wednesday November 16th.  The heart-felt notes of a tune by Amaury Guttierez dedicated to Pollan were heard as the participants congregated in a public plaza of  the College’s Kendall campus.  When the song concluded, various College professors and staff of diverse ethnic backgrounds shared words of admiration for all the work which Laura Pollán carried out and for the bravery which the Ladies in White still display as they march every Sunday in the island.



The demonstrators then carried out a silent march around the campus all the way to a monument erected in honor to ‘world peace’, where they deposited flowers in memory of Laura.



The activity was carried out by a student organization, founded at MDC,  by the name of “If Not Now, When?“. According to the counselor of the group, Teresita Pedrazo Moreno, who is also a professor of sociology and political science, the recently created group aspires to “promote human rights all around the world and has taken its name from an essay written by Primo Levi, a holocaust survivor who denounced to the world the horrors he and so many others faced during that time“.



Moreno adds that the group is completely “made up of students, and they were the ones who chose to pay tribute to Laura Pollán for our first ever public event“.

The activist also adds that “this is an honor and something we owe to the brave women, and it is very important that this message spreads to the younger generations“, which successfully occurred that night, seeing as the majority of the students present did not surpass the age of 25.

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