Amigos805 staff reports
René Corado, who has published his first book in Spanish — “El Lustrador / Dreams of a Shoeshine Boy,” has been invited to participate in La Feria Chapina / the Guatemalan Fair starting at 6 p.m. Thursday, July 9 at Exposition Park next to the Los Angeles Coliseum at Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Figueroa Street, Los Angeles.
René Corado. Courtesy image.
“I will be there with my book El Lustrador and t-shirts for sale. Also, I will be showing birds like, quetzals, toucans, hummingbirds, macaws etc.,” Corado stated on his website at http://ellustrador.org
Corado will be exhibiting at the fair starting at 2 p.m. Friday and Saturday, July 10 and 11 and from noon Sunday, July 12.
El Lustrador is his autobiographical story of growing up as a youth who shines shoes in the streets of Guatemala and his eventual journey to the United States.
Corado, who was born in Guatemala and has lived in the United States since 1981, is a biologist and 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 20,000 nests, he stated on his website.
Since late 1980’s he conducted research projects in the Amazon jungle of Ecuador, as well as in Costa Rica and California, in 2001, started a project of reproduction and distribution of birds in Guatemala, on the present visit this country twice a year to conduct his research.
He has previously published Egg & Nest with Rosamond Purcell, Linnea Hall (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008); Dreams of a Shoeshine Boy (Vanity Press, 2011) Edited Birds’ Nests of the World (Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology, 2012) previously published in Japanese.
“I was born in a village of 13 houses El Chica?, Morazán, Dept. El Progreso. When I was 8 years old my family moved me to the capital (Guatemala City) in order to help bring food to the house I went to school in the morning and worked as shoeshine boy in the afternoon. I asked for food scraps to take my siblings and the times that I did not get enough, I had to look for food for myself in trash where I had to compete with the dogs. I came to California in 1981 with only sixth grade of schooling, undocumented and with no one here, just with a heart full of dreams. I worked in different jobs as, gardener, painter, dishwasher, cook, house cleaner, welder, put wallpaper in hotels, opened trenches for drains etc,” he said.
“I started to work as a gardener in a museum and I really liked the work conducted by biologists and at night I started to go to school. Now, I am a biologist and the collections manager of the museum where I was the gardener, I’m ornithologist (branch of biology that studies birds) and Oologist (branch of biology that studies birds eggs),” he said. “I volunteer in my community in hospitals, recovery houses and jails for people with alcohol and drug problems because I also have a degree of addictions disorders.
“This is my book, my life’s dreams that I could achieve, dreams that all we can achieve if we want to and we put actio,” he said. “I hope that this book will inspire someone to achieve their dreams like I did and if you believe that your life is too hard, read my book and see hard I worked, started on zero, never gave up and at the end I achieve my dream. It is a story of hope.”