OXNARD — In honor of his philanthropy and support for education, René Corado will receive a special tribute in the VI Feria Internacional de la Lectura Infantil y Juvenil de Centroamérica.
“This show us that dreams came come true if you work for them,” said Corado, a biologist and writer who was born in Guatemala and has lived in the United States since 1981 and in Oxnard since 2001.
Corado is the Collections Manager of the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology in Camarillo, the museum with the largest collection of eggs and nests of birds of the world, with more than one million eggs and more than twenty thousand nests.
Courtesy photo.
He was born in a village of 13 houses in Guatemala. When he was 8 years old his family moved to the capital (Guatemala City) in order to help bring food to the house he attended school in the morning and worked as a shoeshine boy in the afternoon.
Corado said many times he had to look for food in the landfill where he had to fight with dogs for food scraps. He came to California in 1981 with only sixth grade of schooling, undocumented and with no one here, he worked in different jobs and start as a gardener in the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology in Camarillo, the museum with the largest bird egg collection in the world. He decided to go to school to continue his education and now he is a Biologist and the Collections Manager of the museum.
He came to fame in his homeland after he published his autobiography “El Lustrador” in Spanish. He started the nonprofit El Lustrador Foundation to provide scholarships to impoverished Guatemalan students.
In 2019 he was awarded with 2 honors in his home country, the title of Ambassador of Peace and The Knighthood of the Quetzal (La Orden del Quetzal), Guatemala’s highest honor bestowed by the Government of Guatemala to a civilian.
For more information:
- El Lustrado Foundation — Website
- El Lustrado Foundation — Facebook
- El Lustrador — Facebook
- El Lustrador — YouTube
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