Join YCA next Thursday, July 2nd, as we wrap up our discussions of “Let This Radicalize You” by Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes.

If you weren’t able to join us before, now is a great time as we will be covering the book in full. All are welcome! Book available at the library, online, and locally at Sunny’s.

About the book:

Dora: A Daughter of Unforgiving Terrain is a gripping memoir by Dora Rodriguez, one of only thirteen survivors of a harrowing 1980 crossing through the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Arizona during El Salvador’s civil war. At just nineteen, Dora risked everything to flee political violence, only to be met with new dangers along the migrant trail. Her story unfolds in vivid, heart-wrenching detail, from a childhood of hardship and resilience in Santa Ana, El Salvador, to the moment she collapses in the desert, left for dead, and through to her eventual rise as a humanitarian leader in the U.S. borderlands. Her story became one of the catalysts for the Sanctuary City movement in Tucson.

Now the Founder and Director of Salvavision, Dora shares her journey with unflinching honesty, illuminating the realities of forced migration and the resilience it demands. This is a story of survival, service, and the enduring hope that drives people to risk everything for a better life.

For readers of Solito and The Line Becomes a River, this book offers a firsthand account of forced migration and the strength it takes to rebuild. An essential title for readers drawn to immigration stories, human rights, and voices of lived experience.

Join YCA next Thursday, June 4th, as we wrap up our discussions of “Let This Radicalize You” by Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes.

If you weren’t able to join us before, now is a great time as we will be covering the book in full. All are welcome! Book available at the library, online, and locally at Sunny’s.

About the book:

Southwest Reconstruction is a disquieting journey through the uncharted dreamspace of memory and loss, expulsion and shelter, family and recognition. Through an eclectic range of forms and echoes drawn from the relational complexities of occupying the difficult terrains of unceded land, these poems are critical improvisations of creation, closures of an imperceptible sense of displacement, and interconnecting routes mapping the vastness of a desire to belong.

Divided into three sections, the text’s vocal registers act as noisy divining rods for kinship and ancestral communication; a sonic brown butch vernacular strumming notes out of sorrow and mettle. Written over the course of almost ten years in the Southern Arizona landscape, these poems function as a psychic Thomas Guide diving into the wreck of settler logics looming large in the rearview mirror of mestizaje and the mythological ruptures left in their wake.