The Ezequiel Martínez Estrada Essay Prize

Héctor Díaz-Polanco: a critical update of the discourse about diversity Casa de las Américas gave to outstanding Mexican essayist the Ezequiel Martínez Estrada Prize in Havana
Uriel Medina
Mexican essayist Héctor Díaz-Polanco has just received in Havana the Ezequiel Martínez Estrada Essay Prize. This is one the Honorary Prizes Casa de las Américas gives to the best books published in the continent in Spanish. It’s been awarded since year 2000. For the essay category has been used the name of one of the most important Latin American intellectuals. It was thanks to essay Elogio de la diversidad. Globalización, multiculturalismo y etnofagia that the author was awarded with this Prize and the Premio Internacional de Ensayo (International Essay Award), 2006, of Siglo XXI Editores, National Autonomus University of Mexico, UNAM, and the University of Sinaloa. The prize-giving ceremony was held at the Che Guevara hall of Casa de las Américas during the 49th closing ceremony of the Literary Prize sponsored by this institution. Chilean poet Gonzalo Rojas, Cervantes Prize in Literature, presided over all activities since the moment they started. This resident-in-Mexico social scientist is notable for his prolific work in the academic world of that nation in which he is a professor and researcher at the Centro de Estudios e Investigaciones Superiores en Antropología Social. He’s also the editor in chief of specialized magazine Memoria. His work as a professor is what has given this Latin American pedagogue the opportunity of having a powerful dialogue with the youngest generations with whom he’s also linked because of his exegetical work. This is the kind of reslationship he also has with the public interested in the most urgent problems of the contemporary social and cultural thought, as shown in his texts Autonomía regional. La autodeterminación de los pueblos indios, El laberinto de la identidad and Etnia, nación y política. This essay, as cleary said in the prologue, “is a critical update of the discourse about diversity” in today’s wold context in which we see that “globalizaton is a new phase and not a force of nature: equality and difference are biunivocal programs in a socialist horizon: the ideology of multiculturalism is the weapon of the capital’s globalization; the proposal of the egalitarian liberalism. Hence, the importante of the gnoseological and ethical values of these ideas of master Díaz-Polanco who, in his study, condemns how with neolibralism and the globalization it tries to impose upon nations all over the world is “reinforced the liberal conception devoted to the absolute priority of freedom upon equality”. *The author is a journalist and writer.