The University of Arizona Press
April 28, 2022
CALÓ News, a groundbreaking news initiative of the Latino Media Collaborative (LMC), featured University of Arizona Press author Roberto Cintli Rodríguez on his work with the Raza Killings Database Project to find a more accurate number on how many Latinos are being killed by law enforcement nationwide.
Rodriguez’s book, Yolqui, a Warrior Summoned from the Spirit World: Testimonios on Violence, describes his own experience one night in March 1979 after a brutal beating at the hands of L.A. County sheriffs. It also includes testimonies from other victims and survivors of police brutality and state-sponsored violence.
From CALÓ News:
When I researched, I went to the 1950s, 1940s and 1930s. You’re talking about mass lynchings, you’re talking about mass deportations of Latinos. All that history most people don’t know. All that land belonged to Mexican peoples or Native peoples. How did they lose it? A lot of it was literally by force. It’s an ugly history for African Americans, Native peoples and Mexicanos. That’s our history.
So it’s not a recent thing. We’ve all been fighting it and the media in a way is clueless because they think it’s a competition or something new.
Our struggles are not only related, but we’re related to other struggles, too. The connections were already there, the American Indian Movement, the Black Power Movement, the Chicano Movement, and you go back, also in Mexico with the Mexican student movement, the Mexican liberation movements at the time.
In this country, there’s three groups that have always been under attack. For the longest time, it was indigenous, Black, and Brown people. Now, it’s Asian again. So for me, that is like a natural alliance.
Read the entire interview here.
