Prisca Awiti is one of the 25 Mexican women who have won an Olympic medal so far this century. They are the ones who have stood up for Mexico. On July 30, she became the first Mexican judoka to win a medal of such high caliber for the country. He did it at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games following the philosophy of Jigoro Kano, father of judo, Jita Kyoei, a concept that can be translated as mutual support and solidarity. Prisca Guadalupe Awiti Alcaraz, silver in the less than 63 kilos category, found and built this with her family.
Dolores Alcaraz, mother of the athlete, is a native of León, Guanajuato. She was born in her own home thanks to a midwife who in those years cared for city women who came from rural communities. She was one of the last babies to come into the world like this because by then the children were already born in a Social Security clinic. Her birth marked her, because over the years she dedicated herself to social work. Just like the midwife who helped her to be born, she, from her trench, also wanted to help the families.
Don Pedro and Doña Guadalupe, Prisca’s maternal grandparents, were natives of Rancho El Tejocote, a rural community located in the municipality of Yuriria, south of Guanajuato, a region adjacent to the north of Michoacán. The peasant couple left their land in search of giving a better life to their first two children. They arrived at the Portes Gil ejido that belonged to Reynosa, Tamaulipas, with the supposed promise of a government that at that time offered free land to farmers as long as they went to populate northern Mexico. In that place four other of his children saw the first light. Life was not easy. Their dreams and hopes faded day by day when they saw that their hands were no longer enough to clear the land where they were supposedly going to plant.
Reality pushed them back to León, where they had four more descendants, where they put down roots. Dolores is one of the 12 children of that couple, she is the eighth of the ten who survived because two died when they were little.
Doña Guadalupe dedicated herself to taking care of her home and her children. She was a very intelligent woman, with a very agile head and a photographic memory; with an emotional intelligence that left everyone speechless, but he was never able to learn to read due to his aggravated condition of dyslexia. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t. That never limited her from educating her children.
Don Pedro said goodbye to the field forever. Life took him as an adult to a school where he learned the turner’s trade. He worked in a German company that was very generous in salaries with its workers where submersible pumps were built. This is how he made his living until he retired at the age of 60.
“We had a very simple life materially, but emotionally very rich. My parents were very loving and kind to each other and to us. In my house we never heard anyone call us weak or stupid, nor did they call anyone nicknames. My father was proud of his children and always showed off our qualities to everyone, he was a super dad. My mother was a little stricter and, at the same time, very loving, she was the one who held the reins of discipline,” says Lola Alcaraz.
Doña Guadalupe and Don Pedro never made a difference between the obligations of their sons and daughters, who equally did domestic work and were also free to leave their house to play. For example, Lola learned dressmaking and cutting hair, she went swimming, playing volleyball and dancing. Their parents told them to “go out and learn, to realize that they could do anything they set their minds to.” If they did not want to help with household chores at home, they had the obligation to occupy themselves with learning something useful.
Those words strengthened Lola’s confidence, both intellectually and emotionally. As chance would have it, one of his brothers ended up living in London, where, in addition to marrying an Irish woman, he became the father of two children. Lola, 26 years old, was already working in a company in León as a social worker when that brother invited her to live with him so that she could teach Spanish to his children and at the same time learn English.
The plan was to go only for six months. However, everything changed when Lola fell in love with Xavier Awiti, a Kenyan the same age who was also in London studying English. She met him at the house of some of her brother’s friends just a few days after arriving in that city. He saw it and his eyes lit up. “He was very handsome, a very pretty man,” Lola confesses between laughs.
Their coexistence occurred mainly at school where they both studied the same language, and also on the volleyball and basketball courts of the community where they had friends in common. Xavier was an extraordinary dancer of Latin and African rhythms and so, between music and the warmth of friendship, they fell in love.
That broke the plans Awiti had. His idea was to return to his Luo tribe, which is based in a place in western Kenya known for training theologians and fishermen in Kisumu, the main port of Lake Victoria. Xavier was a seminarian educated in theology who only needed to be ordained as a priest. He dreamed of becoming a missionary until Lola streaked his landscape like rain.
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Fragment of the report published in edition 0016 of the magazine Processcorresponding to October 2024, whose digital copy can be purchased here link.
