This event has been held since 2010, in collaboration with the La Mennais School in Montevideo and the Dionisio Diaz Center for Non-Formal Education in Maldonado. A moment of Joy and Solidarity that makes us an increasingly Mennaisian Family.
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Thank you to all the Families, Educators, Students, and Alumni who are working together to make this project a reality. This meeting has certainly transformed us!
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From Divina Providencia District
Who is Dionisio Díaz ?
Around 1920, the small town of El Oro, now known as the village of Mendizábal, was then a hamlet located near the El Oro stream and the mountains that were later named Cuchilla de Dionisio, in honor of the boy this story is about.
Dionisio Diaz was born on May 8th in Arroyo de Oro, department of Trienta y Tres. He lived in a mud and straw house in the countryside, with his widowed mother, his fourteen-month-old half-sister, his grandfather Juan Díaz and his uncle Eduardo Fasciolo, who had a wooden leg.
Dionisio’s younger sister, Marina Ramos Díaz, was the daughter of Luis Ramos, with whom Juan, the grandfather, was at odds. Even after Luis Ramos’s death, the grandfather still harbored resentment and took his displeasure out on the barely one-year-old baby.
On the night of May 7, 1929, when Dionisio was about to turn nine, his grandfather got into an argument with his mother and stabbed her to death with his knife. His uncle intervened but only managed to be seriously injured, and Dionisio himself received a knife wound.
The boy covered his wound with a sheet and hid with his sister to protect her from his grandfather. He waited until dawn to walk nine kilometers to the village. He reached the police station, where he handed over his sister and received medical attention. Only two days later, they managed to transfer him to the hospital, but Dionisio died before they arrived.