Yolqui, a Warrior Summoned from the Spirit World

Yolqui is at once a book of mourning and an ultimatum written against the great silencing, against misleading statistics, and against outright lies designed to keep centuries of genocide in place. This book was written for the white supremacist witching hour: an unholy ritual guided by racist doctrine, blood-drenched law, and police executions. This book is written against corruption and coverups, conquest and canon, the past five hundred years recurring every next day.’—Matt Sedillo, Public Intellectuals

‘With this memoir/testimonio, Rodriguez provides us with an overarching indictment and condemnation of the long histories of police violence through the eyes of someone who has experienced it and lived to tell about ‘the barbarity and savagery that is permitted under the color of law’. From the eyewitness accounts of Bartolome de las Casas to Standing Rock, this book makes evident the logics of racialized dehumanization that links colonial violence against Black and Brown bodies to police violence in our communities today. Grounded in the stories of the lives of other victims and survivors of police violence, Yolqui illuminates the physical, spiritual, and epistemic depths and consequences of dehumanization. A must read!’—Roberto D. Hernández, author of Coloniality of the U-S///Mexico: Power, Violence, and the Decolonial Imperative

‘This book is important in its power, heartbreak, and call for continued revolution and resistance!’—Natalia Deeb-Sossa, editor of Community-Based Participatory Research: Testimonios from Chicana/o Studies

‘Through transformative personal narratives, stories, and poems the authors—all victims of systemic extralegal violence at the hands of law enforcement—remind us of how our communities of color have been affected since the inception of the U.S. by a culture of political violence, torture and trauma. This book is important in its power, heartbreak, and call for continued revolution and resistance!’—Natalia Deeb Sossa, editor of Community-Based Participatory Research: Testimonios from Chicana/o Studies
 
‘Rodriquez illuminates the dehumanizing effects of law enforcement violence for communities of color in the U.S. by effectively drawing from his memoir of a near fatal and brutal encounter with Los Angeles Sheriff Deputies during the height of the Chicana/Chicano Movement. The memoir illuminates the pandemic of violence in the US as a continuing tactic in the colonization of people of color by dismantling the mind, body and spirit of Black, Brown and American Indian peoples.’—Elisa Facio, coeditor of Fleshing the Spirit: Spirituality and Activisim in Chicana, Latina, and Indigenous Women’s Lives