It began as a search for her past and became a quest for justice.

Monday, as Denese Becker speaks in the Sun Room of the Memorial Union, she will tell of a journey that brought her across the world in search of her family and into the darkness of an evil from which she is one of the few survivors.

Her lecture, part of Iowa State’s Hispanic Heritage Month, will begin at 7 p.m. and will be followed by a discussion led by Jerry Garcia and Patrick Barr-Melej, ISU professors of history and Latino studies, at 8 p.m.

Becker said speaking about what happened to her and her family provides comfort for her and gives her a sense her fight against the perpetrators of the Rio Negro genocide will someday come to fruition.

“It makes me feel good,” she said. “I want the world to know what happened to me. It’s important to keep fighting.”

Becker’s story begins on March 13, 1982, when she was a 9-year-old girl with a different name. She was called Dominga Sic Ruiz and lived in a tiny village in Guatemala called Rio Negro.

It was that day the soldiers came. When it ended, Becker’s mother was dead, and she was running.

As hundreds of villagers were slaughtered and dumped into ravines, buried in mass graves that were uncovered until recently, “Dominga,” with her 9-week-old baby sister tied to her back, hid in the nearby wilderness.

Seventy women and 107 children lay in the graves near Rio Negro.

They included Becker’s family and friends and part of a genocide brought upon the inhabitants of the area that claimed an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 people.

The villagers were killed to make way for a World Bank-funded Chixoy hydroelectric dam, Becker said.

The child Becker carried with her in the weeks that followed died in the wilderness.

Becker survived, and was eventually adopted by an Iowa couple. She lived her life not unlike any Iowan, only vaguely remembering the horrors she’d escaped in childhood.

At 27, married with two children, Becker still wondered exactly where she’d come from.

With the help of a cousin, she learned she still had family living in Guatemala. She learned of where she’d been born, and the names of her father and mother.

And she learned and understood for the first time exactly what had happened that day.

With the help of director Patricia Flynn and producer Mary Jo McConahay, Becker recorded her search for her family and her trip to Guatemala. The documentary that resulted, “Discovering Dominga,” tells the story not just of Becker’s pursuit of her past, but of a terrible act of genocide that was brought upon her people.

Now, Becker has two lives. In Algona, she is a mother and a manicurist, trying her best to make a living and raise her children.

But other days, she goes on the road with her message, acting as a voice for the dead of Rio Negro, spreading awareness of the hideous acts that claimed her family and her past.

“I’m pretty determined to get my film out there,” Becker said. “There are atrocities that happen everywhere, not just in Guatemala. But it feels like it’s gone unnoticed there.”

She tells anyone who will listen of what it was like to see the mass graves of Guatemala, and how it felt to know the people who’d watched over these atrocities are still free.

“It’s a tough topic,” she said, “But I think the film has had a very good turnout. People are reacting to it properly.”

She speaks in hopes that, with awareness, her cry for justice will be echoed by the world.