Este libro narra la conmovedora historia de Patrocinia Polanco Rivas, una campesina salvadoreña que personifica la lucha por la dignidad en medio de la adversidad. A través de su testimonio y el análisis del autor Andrés McKinley, la obra recorre su vida, desde una infancia marcada por la pobreza extrema y la opresión de la oligarquía cafetalera, hasta su participación en la guerra civil como operadora de radio del FMLN tras el asesinato de su mentor, el padre Rutilio Grande. La guerra le arrebata a su padre, pero forja en ella una resistencia inquebrantable.
Tras los Acuerdos de Paz de 1992, la esperanza de una vida digna se desvanece ante la persistente pobreza y las políticas neoliberales que mantienen a las familias campesinas en la miseria. Para sobrevivir, Patrocinia trabaja incansablemente cortando caña de azúcar, mientras la falta de oportunidades lleva a su esposo y, posteriormente, a sus seis hijos a emprender el peligroso viaje migratorio hacia Estados Unidos. El libro documenta los horrores de este periplo: el abandono, la extorsión, el secuestro y la constante amenaza de la muerte.
Una vez en el norte, los hijos de Patrocinia se enfrentan a la dura realidad de la vida indocumentada y a la maquinaria represiva del ICE, especialmente bajo la administración de Donald Trump. La autora establece un poderoso paralelismo entre la violencia de los escuadrones de la muerte en El Salvador y la persecución sistemática de los migrantes.
El Precio de la Dignidad es un testimonio de la resiliencia humana, mostrando que la dignidad no reside en el éxito de la lucha, sino en la propia lucha, un legado que Patrocinia heredó de su padre. El libro se erige como un recordatorio urgente de las consecuencias humanas de la guerra, de la injusticia económica y de las políticas migratorias despiadadas.
Andrés (Drew) McKinley was born in the United States but has worked for over 50 years in programs for sustainable development, environment and human rights in Africa, Latin America and the United States. He has worked for the past 48 years…
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[Spanish edition of Jackson Rising]
Mississipi; el estado más pobre de los EEUU, el que tiene el porcen- taje más alto de población Negra y con una historia dramática de terror racial y de resistencia Negra. Este es el contexto de la resistencia presentada en este recopilatorio de escritos.
Sin desanimarse por la incertidumbre, el miedo y la an- siedad causadas por el constante deterioro del orden ne- oliberal, la respuesta de las activistas Negras de Jackson ha sido organizarse. Inspiradas por la rica historia de lucha y resistencia en Mississipi y comprometidas con la Estra- tegia Jackson-Kush, construyen instituciones arreladas en el poder comunitario, que combinan política y desarrollo económico y que satisfacen necesidades reales de la gente para crear un model social alternativo.
Las experiencias y análisis recogidas reflejan el poder creativo que se genera cuando la lucha política se basa en una visión del mundo liberada de las contradicciones y li- mitaciones inherentes al liberalismo. Esta es, en definitiva, una historia sobre un porceso decolonial y socialista, orga- nizado y dirigido por personas Negras.
The current absence of any emancipatory vision for Africa lies at the heart of our political problems of racial capitalist and colonial oppression. Any attempt to rethink political emancipation on the African continent must be able to locate a universal conception of freedom within singular cultural experiences where people live. Irrespective of the specific manner in which such struggles for freedom were thought within different historical contexts, emancipatory politics always exhibited such a dialectic when it was based within popular traditions. Yet only some militant intellectual leaders understood the importance of this dialectic in thought.
The present volume outlines and discusses two particularly important views concerning the role and importance of popular culture in emancipatory politics in Africa. Each is the product of distinct forms of colonial capitalist exploitation: the former saw the light of day within a colonial context while the latter is directly confronted by the neocolonial state. All emancipatory politics are developed in confrontation with state power, and all begin with a process of discussion and debate whereby a collective subject begins to be formed. The formation of such a collective political subject has been fundamentally informed by popular cultures on the African continent.
The two authors whose essays are included here understood this and posit popular culture at the centre of their politics. The first, Amílcar Cabral, addresses the central role of popular culture in the independence struggle of Guinea Bissau in the 1970s; the second, Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba, addresses the centrality of African popular culture in an emancipatory politics for the current Democratic Republic of Congo. Despite the distance in time that separates them, both Cabral and Wamba-dia-Wamba develop a dialectics at the core of their politics which activates the universals of culture in the present. It is this that makes their views of central importance to emancipatory thought today.
![Aufbruch in Jackson [German edition of Jackson Rising: Black self-management and solidarity economy]](https://darajapress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/174_Akuno_Jackson_web-150x225.jpg)
How black activists are building liberation practically from below: Departure in Jackson documents the history of one of the most exciting revolutionary experiments in the USA Present.
Since the 1970s, black liberation movements in majority-black Mississippi have taken change into their own hands. The Deep South should become the center of their independence – “Free the Land!” In the 2010s, the election of Chokwe Lumumba as mayor in the capital Jackson took an important step towards implementing the vision of assembly democracy, solidarity economy and an end to racial inequality. Lumumba dies unexpectedly in 2014, but his son Antar and the Cooperation Jackson continue to move forward.
We learn about the pitfalls of radical local politics and struggles for housing and land, democratic economic models and ecology, internationalist solidarity and the parallels to the Rojava Revolution and the Zapatistas, about encouraging experiences in which different concerns go hand in hand.
One brother goes missing in action in Afghanistan, the other falls in love with an Afghan girl in England.
Bitter divisions engulf an English town where young Muslims oppose the British army’s presence in Afghanistan, whilst white youth condemn the Muslims as traitors.
To the disgust of his white friends, 17-year-old Jake Marlesden, whose brother is missing in action in Afghanistan, is in love with Leila Khan, an Afghan. When Jake tries to find out what happened to his brother, neighbour turns against neighbour and lover against lover.
Leila joins young Muslims protesting against the returning bodies of dead British soldiers, and Jake stands with the families of the soldiers. The lovers fall apart.
But far off events, and sinister forces at home, bring the lovers together again in a journey in which they will not only discover themselves, but also heal the wounds of their families and friends.
This is the sequel to You’re Not Proper.
Settler Colonialism examines the genesis in the USA of the first full-fledged settler state in the world, which went beyond its predecessors in 1492 Iberia and British-colonized Ireland with an economy based on land sales and enslaved African labor, an implementation of the fiscal-military state. Both the liberal and the rightwing versions of the national narrative misrepresent the process of European colonization of North America. Both narratives serve the critical function of preserving the “official story” of a mostly benign and benevolent USA as an anticolonial movement that overthrew British colonialism. The pre-US independence settlers were colonial settlers just as they were in Africa and India or like the Spanish in Central and South America. The nation of immigrants myth erases the fact that the United States was founded as a settler state from its inception and spent the next hundred years at war against the Native Nations in conquering the continent. Buried beneath the tons of propaganda—from the landing of the English “pilgrims” (Protestant Christian evangelicals) to James Fenimore Cooper’s phenomenally popular The Last of the Mohicans claiming settlers’ “natural rights” not only to the Indigenous peoples’ territories but also to the territories claimed by other European powers—is the fact that the founding of the United States created a division of the Anglo empire, with the US becoming a parallel empire to Great Britain, ultimately overcoming it. From day one, as was specified in the Northwest Ordinance, which preceded the US Constitution, the new “republic for empire,” as Thomas Jefferson called the new United States, envisioned the future shape of what is now the forty-eight states of the continental US. The founders drew up rough maps, specifying the first territory to conquer as the “Northwest Territory.” That territory was the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes region, which was already populated with Indigenous villages and farming communities thousands of years old. Even before independence, mostly Scots Irish settlers had seized Indigenous farmlands and hunting grounds in the Appalachians and are revered historically as first settlers and rebels, who in the mid-twentieth century began claiming indigeneity. Self-indigenizing by various groups of settlers is a recurrent theme in story of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and the history of erasure and exclusion about which I have written elsewhere.
Editors and Authors: Daniel Bendix, Chandra-Milena Danielzik, Franziska Müller, Lata Narayanaswamy, Juan Telleria, Miriam friz Trzeciak, Aram Ziai
Artists: Hangula Werner, Roshni Vyam, Michel Esselbrügge, Qi Zhou, RotmInas – Rotmi Enciso & Ina Riaskov, Maite Mentxaka Tena, Lena Ziyal
Postcolonial critique reveals the traces of the colonial past in every corner of our present lives and exposes the colonial violence inherent in global inequality. This collective comic project illuminates the coloniality of everyday life as well as the decolonising potential of everyday struggles in the spaces, discourses and practices of so-called global development.
What an absolute impertinence! My lawyers are already involved. It’s just as well that I was able to use tax money for the purchase.
—Queen Elizabeth II
I love true crime books, but this one got a bit boring after a while. It could do with more bloodshed.
—Lothar von Trotha
I added this book to my list to burn. Just saying.
—Diego de Landa
A waste of time. So glad I didn’t buy it, but stole my copy.
—Christopher Columbus
I didn’t get it. Are they suggesting colonialism is not quite over?
—Harry S. Truman
We hear for the first time from the internationalist secretly working for the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), in the struggle to liberate South Africa from apartheid rule. They acted as couriers, provided safe houses in neighbouring states and within South Africa, helped infiltrate combatants across borders, and smuggled tons of weapons into the country in the most creative ways. Driven by a spirit of international solidarity, they were prepared to take huge risks and face great danger. The internationalists reveal what motivated them as volunteers, not mercenaries: they gained nothing for their endeavours save for the self-esteem in serving a just cause. Against such clandestine involvement, the book includes contributions from key people in the international Anti-Apartheid Movement and its public mobilisation to isolate the apartheid regime. These include worldwide campaigns like Stop the Sports Tours, boycotting of South African products and black American solidarity. The Cuban, East German and Russian contributions outlined those countries’ support for the ANC and MK. The public, global Anti-Apartheid Movement campaigns provide the dimensions from which internationalists who secretly served MK emerged. Edited by Ronnie Kasrils. First published by Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd in 2021, ISBN: 978-1-4314-3202-8, this Daraja Press edition is available in North America and East Africa.
Ghostlines is a graphic novel that describes the journey of the author and three Kenyan artists along the LAPSSET development corridor, a braid of roads, pipelines, and resort cities that promises to bring development to Kenya’s marginalized north. It mixes conceptual and empirical insights into the human geography of infrastructure with the narrative flexibility and depth afforded by the medium graphic novel – a geo-graphic novel.
They meet Peter, a retired pilot who had previously worked for a conservancy and can tell stories about the LAPSSET from high above and from the ground. He understands how everyone involved is seeking to benefit from the corridor in their own way, even if that means building uninhabited “ghost huts” that manifest the presence of pastoral communities and thus qualify them for compensation. Jane is an activist for a women’s and Indigenous rights organization. She’s been fighting invisible monsters her entire life: stalking hyenas (metaphorical and real), corrupt politicians, and the patriarchy itself. The spectre of the LAPSSET is only the last one of these hidden monsters. They meet Joseph, a herder, who hopes that the LAPSSET might connect him to far places but worries that it will instead cut him off of the grazing grounds that are essential for the survival of his family. What is the LAPSSET – a road or a fence? In Oldonyoro they meet Rashid, a poet, who writes about the long history of the corridor. In his mind, it reaches far back to colonial times. “My grandfather suffered greatly,” he writes, “Is it my turn to face the worst? I wonder, a tricky treasure”. In the last village on their journey, they meet a group of women who have come together to support each other. Their position on the LAPSSET is more optimistic. The real connections of solidarity they forged contrast with the imaginary ghostlines of the LAPSSET. The narrative structure of the geo-graphic novel draws connections between the narrators, that is, the team of researchers and artists and the interviewees. They seek to unravel the idea of the omniscient or unbiased narrator and to reveal how storytellers bring their own ghosts into stories. By connecting all of these narratives along their journey, they challenge the single, universalist story that planners tell about large-scale infrastructure projects. Instead, they invite the reader to embrace the often-contradictory multiplicity of infrastructural relations, to see the ostensibly solid lines on maps for what they are: a messy, ever-changing braiding of multitudes.
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Daraja Press
Este es un libro sobre la dignidad humana.
A través de las conmovedoras palabras de una mujer extraordinaria,Andrés McKinley teje una historia de los últimos cincuenta años enhonor a las personas del mundo que luchan cada día por sobrevivircon dignidad. Patrocinia Polanco Rivas es una mujer con una historiaque merece ser contada. Nacida en la pobreza y sufriendo bajo eldominio de las oligarquías cafetaleras y azucareras que gobernabanEl Salvador, Patrocinia sobrevive a la violencia de los abusos paramili-tares, a los horrores de una guerra civil alimentada por Estados Unidosque cobró la vida de 75,000 personas (ella fue operadora de radio delejército guerrillero), a la pobreza de una economía desigual, al dolor dever a sus hijos soportar el terror de migrar a Estados Unidos y al temorcotidiano de que sus hijos vivan bajo la maquinaria migratoria del ICEdurante la era Trump.
Al mismo tiempo, Patrocinia comparte las alegrías de una familiaamorosa, el despertar de las Comunidades Eclesiales de Base de ladécada de 1970, las esperanzas de los Acuerdos de Paz de 1992, eldolor y peligro de 20 años de cortando caña para poner comido sobrela mesa de sus 6 hijos, y la extraordinaria fortaleza y valentía que senecesitan para sobrevivir una vida de pobreza; una pobreza nacida depolíticas impuestas por los sectores más ricos de nuestra tierra.
Gran parte de este extraordinario libro está compuesta por las propiaspalabras de Patrocinia, pero Andrés McKinley entrelaza su historia conla historia de las comunidades cristianas de base, el papel de EstadosUnidos en el respaldo al terror de la guerra civil, el milagro y las decep-ciones de los Acuerdos de Paz, la violencia estructural de las políticasde Reagan y de sus aliados salvadoreños que empobrecieron a lamayoría de campesinos de El Salvador, el surgimiento de las pandi-llas y, posteriormente, los años de gobernación autóctona de NayibBukele, así como la dura realidad que enfrentan los salvadoreños enEstados Unidos bajo Trump.
Cada página arde con las palabras que Patrocinia recuerda de supadre en los días más oscuros de la guerra civil: “Nuestra dignidadno siempre se encuentra en el resultado de nuestras luchas; nuestradignidad reside en la lucha misma.”
– John Cavanagh, Instituto de Estudios Políticos (Institute for PolicyStudies), y coautor (junto con Robin Broad) de Los Defensores delAgua: Cómo la gente común salvó a un país de la codicia corporative
Este es un libro extraordinario que conmoverá a sus lectores tantoemocional como intelectualmente. Vincula la crisis actual de crueldadcontra los migrantes salvadoreños en Estados Unidos con la crisis decrueldad ejercida contra los pobres salvadoreños durante la guerrade la década de 1980. Combina la historia personal de Patrocinia,una campesina salvadoreña con una asombrosa trayectoria de sufri-miento, resistencia y resiliencia, con la forma en que Andrés McKinleysitúa su historia dentro de las acciones de los gobiernos de EstadosUnidos y de los poderosos y acaudalados salvadoreños, desde aquellaguerra hasta la actualidad. Esta es una lectura imprescindible paraquienes desean comprender lo que significa ser pobre y carecer depoder, y cómo los salvadoreños, a pesar de todo, han continuadobuscando todas las formas posibles de sobrevivir y vivir con dignidad.– Jenny Pearce, Profesora Visitante, Instituto de DesigualdadesInternacionales, London School of Economics
El Precio de la Dignidad es una lectura indispensable, especialmentepara quienes desean comprender el flujo migratorio hacia el norteprovocado por los conflictos en Centroamérica que fueron finan-ciados en gran medida por Estados Unidos. Está escrito con pasióny con frecuencia da la palabra a las voces elocuentes de campesinosy campesinas, cuyas vidas han sido moldeadas por el sufrimiento yla lucha. Ofrece una mirada actualizada sobre la vida en El Salvador ysobre las vidas valientes, aunque a menudo peligrosas, de las personasindocumentadas.
– Charlie Clements, MD, MPH, autor de Witness to War (Testigo de laGuerra) (Bantam, 1984; Daraja Press, 2025).