Yolqui, a Warrior Summoned from the Spirit World

Testimonios on Violence

Roberto Cintli Rodríguez

• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780816538591
• eBook ISBN: 9780816540518
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies

In Nahuatl yolqui is the idea of a warrior brought back from the dead. For author and activist Roberto Cintli Rodríquez, it describes his own experience one night in March 1979 after a brutal beating at the hands of L.A. sheriffs.

Framed by Rodríguez's personal testimony of police violence, this book offers a historia profunda of the culture of extralegal violence against Red-Black-Brown communities in the United States. In addition to Rodríguez's story, this book includes several short essays from victims and survivors that bring together personal accounts of police brutality and state-sponsored violence. This wide-ranging work touches on historical and current events, including the Watts rebellion, the Zoot Suit Riots, Operation Streamline, Standing Rock, and much more.

From the eyewitness accounts of Bartolomé de las Casas to the protestors and allies at Standing Rock, this book makes evident the links between colonial violence against Red-Black-Brown bodies to police violence in our communities today. Grounded in the stories of the lives of victims and survivors of police violence, Yolqui, a Warrior Summoned from the Spirit World illuminates the physical, spiritual, and epistemic depths and consequences of racialized dehumanization.

Rodríguez offers us an urgent, poignant, and personal call to end violence and the philosophies that permit such violence to flourish. Like the Nahuatl yolqui, this book is intended as a means of healing, offering a footprint going back to the origins of violence, and, more important, a way forward.

With contributions by Raúl Alcaraz-Ochoa, Citalli Álvarez, Tanya Alvarez, Rebekah Barber, Juvenal Caporale, David Cid, Arianna Martinez Reyna, Carlos Montes, Travis Morales, Simon Moya Smith, Cesar Noriega, Kimberly Phillips, Christian Ramirez, Michelle Rascon Canales, Carolyn Torres, Jerry Tello, Tara Trudell, and Laurie Valdez.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword: Love Note in the Key of Trauma
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• A Ceremony of Memory, a Ceremony of Bloodletting
• On Forgiveness and Justice
• Disposables, Throwaways, and Undesirables
• From the Watts Rebellion to the Police Riots in East L.A.
• The Sleepy Lagoon Case, Zoot Suits, and Fingertips
• First Encounters of the Blue and Green Kind
• Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery
• The Lynchings of Mexicans and Indians
• The United States of War
• Running for Our Lives, Running for My Life
• The Legalization of Racial Profiling, the Border, and Operation Streamline
• Black Veterans, Southern Racism, and the Long History of Police Abuse
• In Support of Black Resistance
• Neither Black nor White
• Merchants of Fear and Hate
• Guatemala: The Quetzal Cannot Live in Captivity
• Sister Dianna’s Tortured Eyes
• María Guardado: She Didn’t Know How Not to Suffer
• Torturers and Their Enablers
• Violence Against the Mind-Body-Spirit
• Spiritual Violence/Spiritual Genocide
• The End of Soul-Searching
• A Wall of Martyrs: Activists Killed by Law Enforcement
• Santa Dolores, heroína de muchos dolores
• Arizona’s Violence Against the Mind-Body-Spirit
• Voices and Testimonios
• The Pandemic Violence Against Red-Black-Brown Peoples
• Synopsis
• Brown Peoples: Miscounted, Undercounted, and Disappeared
• Standing Rock, the Dogs of War, and Remembering Wounded Knee
• The Killing of Indigenous Women
• Fatal Force: Washington Post Report for 2018
• Conclusion: Orange, the New Face of Hate, Brutality, and Violence
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Contributors
• Index