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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The Stories We Carry is a compelling collection of essays that explore identity, trauma, and resilience through deeply personal narratives. Edited by Merlyna Lim and Kathy Dobson, this volume brings together twenty-two contributors—academics, artists, journalists, and storytellers—who refuse to separate personal experience from scholarly inquiry.
The collection unfolds in three interconnected movements: Self, Scar, and Struggle, examining how identity is shaped through history, gender, embodiment, and migration; how trauma and exclusion leave lasting marks; and how survival requires ongoing negotiation with institutions, technology, and community. Each essay is accompanied by hand-drawn illustrations, making the personal visible and visceral.
The contributors challenge academic conventions that dismiss personal writing as less rigorous, arguing instead that the narrated self is a legitimate site of knowledge. Their stories address Islamophobia, poverty, colonialism, queerness, neurodivergence, immigration bureaucracy, and the politics of belonging. This is not a book seeking inclusion in broken institutions, but one that insists the table itself must be rebuilt. It asks readers to sit with complexity, contradiction, and the unfinished work of being human.
This is a collection of observations and meditations by Professor Emeritus (York University, Toronto) and philosopher Ato Sekyi-Otu on events, issues, people and ideas culled from recent history and the world, from the US and Canada to Ghana. If there is a persistent thread in these entries, it is this: Virtually all of them testify to the ironic truth of the saying that there is no place like home, no place, that is to say, which looks like the lodestar called home or comes close to approximating its promise of being a just space of human flourishing. Most of the entries are, therefore, harsh, particularly those on the USA. That is because that nation, in his view, has, in recent history, made a major contribution to rendering the world and every homestead we inhabit unhomely and sabotaging attempts to better it. But no one or place is spared, certainly not the author’s native land, Ghana. Canada appears intermittently in these pages in rather fragmentary and contrastive observations. That paucity of comments may be taken to be the complement the author pays to Canada as a place of relative civility and glimmers of decency in a mad and cruel world. It is a short work of predominantly gloomy pictures. But there are a few countervailing images and invocations of hope here and there. There are 166 entries of unequal lengths arranged around 14 headings. These epigrams are contrapuntal variations on the philosopher’s searing imprecation and visionary invocation: unfinished ode, resounding with intermittent fury, to the dawn of human existence set free from all tyrannizing enclosures.
This deeply personal and introspective work explores survival—not merely physical survival, but emotional and spiritual endurance through love, war, and loss. Written by a Palestinian author against the backdrop of the Gaza conflict, the book weaves together reflections on love, betrayal, war, displacement, and the search for meaning in a world stripped of stability.
The narrative oscillates between intimate romantic relationships and the brutal realities of life under bombardment. The author chronicles a turbulent love affair marked by passion, jealousy, betrayal, and eventual dissolution, examining how relationships fracture under the weight of pride, misunderstanding, and external pressures. Simultaneously, he documents the devastating experience of war in Gaza: displacement, hunger, the loss of loved ones, the daily struggle for survival, and the erosion of human dignity.
Central themes include the nature of survival—questioning whether mere existence constitutes living, and whether those who survive emerge intact or fundamentally altered. The author grapples with grief over the death of his grandmother, the loss of his beloved, and the collective trauma of a people under siege. He explores the tension between hope and despair, the betrayal of humanitarian aid systems, the corruption of values in times of crisis, and the profound loneliness of carrying unspoken pain.
Writing serves as both confession and catharsis—an attempt to staunch internal bleeding and make sense of chaos. The prose is poetic, fragmented, and emotionally raw, reflecting the author’s belief that true survivors do not write; they simply endure. Ultimately, the book is a testament to the impossibility of returning unchanged from love or war, and the quiet dignity of continuing despite everything.
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
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.
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.
The sound is always there. Hmmm. A low, continuous, mechanical hum that never stops. It is the sound of drones—circling above Gaza at all times, surveilling everything below, a permanent reminder that someone is always watching. It has been there since before the students could remember. Since childhood, when it disrupted their favourite cartoons. It is the backdrop against which Gaza’s students refused to stop learning.
Beneath the Hum of Drones tells the story of those students through their own words and paintings—and the story of how their voices reached the world.
Beneath the roar of drones and the shadow of annihilation, we will keep learning until our last breath. Education is our final refuge.– Saad Muhana, Mechanical engineering graduate, Islamic University of Gaza, Palestine and contributor to We Are Still Here.
It begins with a single conversation over coffee in England. A young Gazan scholar asked: What can we do? Not governments. Not international bodies. We, the two of us, here, with what we have. What could be done for the students of Gaza, right now?
What followed was a grassroots movement that nobody had planned. Seventy English teachers volunteered to teach through WhatsApp voice notes, listening to recordings made with the constant sound of surveillance overhead. Academics from across the UK delivered recorded lectures to medical students who walked miles through rubble for a signal. A community in Brighton and Hove raised funds for tuition fees and devices, sold student artwork as tote bags and stickers, and packed rooms for readings that left strangers weeping. A gallery in Hailsham hung the students’ paintings free of charge. A publisher brought out We Are Still Here, an anthology of poetry and prose by fifty-eight Gazan students writing from displacement tents and bombed-out neighbourhoods.
But this book is not only about what was built. It is about who built it—and who they built it for.
Hala painted a man pulling his family’s entire world on a wooden cart, refusing to look back at the ruins behind him. Sara drew an olive tree whose leaves had become shrouds, yet whose roots held firm. Lama sketched a starving child from life, because she would not let that child pass unwitnessed. Medical students climbed rooftops for a signal. Children who had not played in two years were finally given paint and paper. Young writers sent their most private words across a cracked phone screen, trusting that someone on the other side would handle them with care.
We are still here, they wrote. And we refuse to disappear in silence.
This is their story. It is a testament to courage, dignity, and the unbreakable will to learn—even beneath the hum of drones.
Los agentes patógenos surgen una y otra vez de un sistema agroalimentario global arraigado en la desigualdad, la explotación laboral y el extractivismo sin límites por el que se despoja a las comunidades de sus recursos naturales y sociales. Un sistema económico propenso a la crisis que prioriza la producción para obtener beneficios por encima de la satisfacción de las necesidades humanas y la preservación ecológica se organiza en torno a una intensa producción monocultural que, por el camino, permite la aparición de las enfermedades más mortíferas.
La Investigación sobre la Pandemia para el Pueblo (PReP) se centra en cómo la agricultura podría ser reimaginada por el tipo de intervención a nivel de la comunidad que podría detener la aparición del coronavirus y otros patógenos en primer lugar. Abordamos cómo la ciencia convencional apoya los mismos sistemas políticos y económicos que ayudaron a producir la aparición del coronavirus y otros patógenos en primer lugar.
Introducimos la agroecología, un ecologismo de los campesinos, los pobres y los indígenas, que existe desde hace mucho tiempo, y que trata la agricultura como una parte de la ecología de la que la humanidad cultiva sus alimentos. La agroecología -una ciencia, un movimiento y práctica- combina la ciencia ecológica, los conocimientos indígenas y campesinos y los movimientos sociales por la soberanía alimentaria y territorial para lograr sistemas alimentarios ambientalmente justos.
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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).