In the summer of 1980, Dora Rodriguez almost died in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. Along with a group of 30 people, most of them having fled violence and the beginnings of a gruesome civil war in El Salvador, she had just crossed the border. Rodriguez was 19 years old.
As the group set out into the desert, Rodriguez writes in her recently published memoir, “Dora: A Daughter of Unforgiving Terrain,” “We were utterly dependent on the two Mexican smugglers to take care of us, and we were beginning to understand that this would not be a simple walk to freedom.”
The group soon lost their way, and Rodriguez and the others spent a few harrowing days baking under the sun, desperately searching for shade, clawing at desert plants for moisture —reduced to drinking urine and cologne. She watched 13 of her friends and companions die…