Enriqueta Medellín

Enriqueta Medellín (10 December 1948 – 6 January 2022) was a Mexican surgeon and environmentalist.

Raised in Mexico City, from a young age she participated in projects to clean up the city and became interested in the links between disease and the environment.

She earned a degree as a medical surgeon from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and specialized in human genetics.

She also studied environmental education and management.

María Enriqueta Medellín Legorreta was born on 10 December 1948 in Mexico City to Enriqueta Legorreta López and Mario Medellín Ocádiz and was baptized two days later in the San Cosme Parish Catholic Church.

Familiarly known as Queta, she had an older brother, Mario, who is a musician, and three younger siblings, Alejandro Claudio, Juan, and Rodrigo, a biologist.

Her father was an accountant and founder of an ice cream factory, while her mother was an opera singer and activist, who led singers to strike against the Palacio de Bellas Artes.

Legorreta also volunteered for the Asociación Ecológica de Coyoacán (Ecological Association of Coyoacán) and involved her children in activities to clean up the Parque Real de San Lucas (Royal Park of San Lucas) in the borough of Coyoacán.

The death of Medellín's brother Juan in 1969 from cancer sparked Medellín's curiosity in the relationship between disease and the environment.

Medellín graduated from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) as a medical surgeon, and earned her PhD in clinical human genetics.

She also studied environmental education and management.

She married Javier López de la Peña, a cardiologist, and they had two children.

Although she professionally worked as a surgeon, Medellín became known for her environmental activism.

After participating in humanitarian aid projects following the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, she and her extended family relocated to Aguascalientes City in 1987, where she worked as a surgeon while becoming known for environmental activism.

The 1985 Mexico City earthquake caused devastation that authorities were unable to adequately address and the family began organizing soup kitchens, gathering medical supplies, and providing shortwave radio services to help their neighbors.

Longing for a better quality of life, the extended family relocated in 1987 to Aguascalientes City.

Arriving in the State of Aguascalientes, the family searched for an environmental association and joined in the successful fight to stop development in the Fraccionamiento Bosques (Forest Subdivision) and instead create a park on the land.

As there was no other group of environmentalists in the state at that time, Enriqueta Legorreta, Medellín's mother, issued an invitation to form an association on the radio station of the Autonomous University of Aguascalientes.

Academics and other concerned citizens joined together to start an ecological group.

They planned a recycling event at a local church, the Templo de los Dolores (Temple of Sorrows), and Legorreta made a further radio broadcast urging citizens to help.

To encourage participation, a recycling company agreed to take the waste and the city donated saplings to exchange for waste and promote an urban reforestation program.

Along with her mother and other activists, she founded the association Conciencia Ecológica (Ecological Consciousness) in 1992.

This group of activists carried out the first recycling project in the state and introduced numerous projects to raise awareness on waste, teach people about preserving the environment, and protest against developmental projects that caused harm to the environment.

She was involved at the local, state, national, and international levels in the creation of policy to protect ecosystems.

Based on the success of that recycling effort, in 1992 the association Conciencia Ecológica (Ecological Consciousness) was co-founded by Legorreta, Medellín, Abraham de Alba, Humberto Tenorio, and others.

The following year, they initiated a clean-up along the San Pedro River.

Those initial efforts soon led to recycling collection centers being established in the area's shopping malls in 1994.

Not all of the programs went smoothly.

In 1995, when protesting construction of a Texas Instruments facility in a residential neighborhood, Medellín became the target of harassment.

She personally received threats and her family members and home were photographed by people in favor of the construction.

In conjunction with public schools and colleges, scouting organizations, and others, in 1999 she launched the campaign Un cuaderno para tu cuaderno (A Notebook for Your Notebook).

The idea behind the program was to collect textbooks and notebooks at the end of the school year and redistribute the books and unused paper, rebound into new notebooks, for use in rural schools.

The campaign ran for fifteen years and was estimated to have benefited 10,000 students.

Medellín served on Semarnat's Advisory Council for Sustainable Development, as the first representative from Aguascalientes.

She was elected president of the Western Central Regional Council, which coordinates the environmental policies of six Mexican states.

Medellín was the first person to be awarded the state prize for Environmental Merit in 2006 and received Mexico's highest honor for environmentalists, the Premio al Mérito Ecológico (Ecological Merit Award) in 2012.

In 2020, she received the Biotopo de Oro (Golden Biotope) from the National College of Ecological Doctors and the following year was granted the Aguascaliente Prize in the Clear Water category.

The state's ecological and tree replenishment facility was renamed as the Queta Medellín Ecological Center in 2021.

At the time of her death in 2022, Medellín was one of the most prominent environmental activists in the central region of Mexico.

Posthumously, the municipality of Aguascalientes created the Enriqueta Medellín Prize in her honor to mark contributions by individuals and organizations who have made exemplary efforts to better the community and environment.