Please check back for more information on Awardees for the 2020 Quechua Alliance Annual Meeting!

 

2023 Quechua Lifetime Achievement Award

Quechua Alliance Annual Meeting

 

Luis Morató Peña

Luis Morató Peña is a native Quechua speaker from Cochabamba, Bolivia. He studied Law, Linguistics, and Journalism at the University of San Simón, and was the first Bolivian to broadcast Quechua programs at radio stations in Cochabamba. He founded the Colegio Mariscal Santa Cruz and the “Instituto de Idiomas Tawantinsuyu”, which taught Bolivian and Peruvian Quechua, Aymara and Spanish. For five decades, Morató Peña dedicated his time to the research and teaching of Quechua and Spanish. He was a professor of Quechua and Andean Culture at the Universidad Mayor de San Simón, Maryknoll Language Program, French Alliance, Centro Pedagógico Portales, the South Andean Pastoral Institute (Cuzco, Peru), Consulate of the United States, and others. The Radialists of Oruro, as a tribute to his research and teaching of Quechua, awarded him the “Medal of Merit” for outstanding work as a Bolivian speaker of Quechua. In 1982, the municipality of Cochabamba declared him a “Meritorious Citizen” for these efforts as well. He has also taught in this country at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Chicago, the University of Texas at Austin, and Cornell University. He retired from teaching Spanish and Quechua at The Ohio State University in Columbus in 2016.

Previous Awardees

• Elvia Ambía (2018): founder and director of the Quechua Collective of New York and a native of Chincheros (Apurímac, Perú)
• Kichwa Katari (2017):  is a weekly radio program, the first in the indigenous Kichwa language in the U.S, aimed at reaching the Quechua/Kichwa population in the United States, particularly the Ecuadorian community in New York.
• Julia García (2016): Bolivian teacher and community leader in Virginia.
• Clodoaldo Soto (2015): Peruvian professor of Quechua at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He is the author a worldwide renowned Quechua language learning manual.