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“I heal in honor of my friends,” Rodriguez writes in her new memoir, “Dora: A Daughter of Unforgiving Terrain,” released Saturday. “I heal because, for some reason, I was chosen to live.”

Rodriguez recounts, in harrowing detail, the brutal days of walking unprepared through the Arizona desert, misled by smugglers about the length and difficulty of the journey. They carried just 18 jugs of water for the 26 Salvadoran asylum seekers and four smugglers, which quickly ran out. Rodriguez was one of the 13 asylum seekers who survived.

Rodriguez scheduled her book release for July 5, the 45-year anniversary of the day she was rescued by border agents and other law enforcement, likely minutes from death, nurses later told her.

Much of Rodriguez’s memoir focuses on her childhood in El Salvador, and the escalating civil war that forced her, as a 19-year-old community organizer, to leave behind her tight-knit family in 1980 and flee to the U.S.

Rodriguez’s story culminates in her present-day devotion to humanitarian-aid work, including in immigration detention centers and the borderlands of Sonora and Arizona, where she’s become a beloved humanitarian leader.

“Dora is one example of how Central Americans have led some of the most important movements for social justice in the U.S. in recent years,” said Liz Oglesby, associate professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Arizona. She is “a beacon of compassion in southern Arizona.”

It wasn’t until 2015, amid rampant dehumanizing rhetoric about immigrants from then-candidate Donald Trump and his supporters, that Rodriguez said she felt safe enough, and outraged enough, to speak publicly about her near-death experience and the terror that prompted her to flee her home, an account that she’d never even shared with her five children.

Four decades later, Rodriguez’s eyes still fill with tears when she describes leaving her mother and three younger siblings, after it became clear Rodriguez was in immediate danger and could bring risk to her family, too.

“It’s like leaving your soul behind,” Rodriguez said Wednesday, at Mercado San Agustín on Tucson’s west side.

In the late 1970s, El Salvador’s military was targeting anyone suspected of supporting the left-wing resistance, especially young people. Masked men with rifles marched through her neighborhood, part of a growing army of “death squads” who disappeared and killed suspected revolutionaries on behalf of the conservative government, which was backed by the United States, she said.

Suddenly, Rodriguez’s involvement in a social-justice youth group, and her high school sweetheart’s membership in a teachers’ union, were dangerous affiliations. Three of her friends were executed for their work as health educators.

In March 1980, Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero was assassinated at the altar, one day after he gave a sermon imploring military members to stop killing civilians. Civilian deaths numbered 75,000 over the course of the 12-year civil war.

Rodriguez wants readers to understand the reality of forced migration, and the pain of leaving everything one has known.

“I didn’t want to leave, but I also didn’t want to die,” she writes in her memoir. “I didn’t see any other path forward.”

‘Don’t die on me’

Rodriguez’s memoir begins in 2024, with one of her annual visits to the site where her friends died, in a wash east of Arizona 85 in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. The site is now marked by 13 crosses, crafted by Tucson artist Alvaro Enciso, in honor of those who didn’t make it.

There, Dora spoke to visiting college students about three young sisters, at ages 12, 14 and 16, who died that day in 1980. The younger girls had become like little sisters to Rodriguez over the course of their journey from El Salvador. But she was powerless to save them at the end, she told the college students.

In her memoir, Rodriguez describes lying under the spindly branches of a palo verde tree before losing consciousness. She awoke to a uniformed man yelling in her face, “Don’t die on me!” amid a flurry of rescue vehicles and law enforcement officers.

Rodriguez said the only reason she and her fellow survivors weren’t deported back to El Salvador — which almost certainly would have meant death for having fled the right-wing government — was because they could testify against the surviving smugglers who had led the group to the desert, before abandoning them.

The survivors were seen as threats to the Salvadoran regime, because they spoke of the reality facing the Salvadoran people under the repressive government, which was supported by the U.S. in the name of fighting “communism,” Rodriguez said.

In reality, “that war was solely for poor people fighting for their rights and for their land,” she said.

The U.S. wouldn’t offer asylum to refugees from Central America because it would have forced the U.S. to acknowledge its direct role in supporting the violent regimes from which people were fleeing, said Rodriguez, who eventually gained citizenship through marriage.

When she was still hospitalized after her rescue, “the Salvadoran Consul General came and treated me like I was an enemy of my country,” Rodriguez writes. “The publicity we were receiving for leaving the country and many of us dying was a national embarrassment to our government.”

Rodriguez hopes her memoir could become part of college curricula, helping educate and inspire a new generation of humanitarians.

The root causes of migration are too-often overlooked, as is the role of the U.S. policies in destabilizing migrants’ countries of origin, said Abbey Carpenter, a migrant advocate and former higher-education administrator, who co-wrote Rodriguez’s memoir.

“Ideally this book can be used by young people in educational setting to study what’s led people to have to make these choices, and what can we to do help in the future to help them not have to make that deadly choice,” she said.

Humanitarian work

Within moments of sitting down in Mercado San Agustín on Wednesday, Rodriguez was approached by a smiling young man and the two joyfully embraced. Isac was an asylum seeker from Mexico and a former detainee at the La Palma detention facility in Eloy, when he was 19. He’s one of the many asylum seekers for whom Rodriguez has helped secure bond money, and she acted as his sponsor so he could be released in 2019.

The serendipitous reunion is nothing unusual for Rodriguez, who stays in touch with countless people whom she’s aided over the years. She’s especially proud of Isac, who is now bilingual and works in migrant aid, Rodriguez told the Star.

“He’s an example of how, if you give someone a chance, you will see the beauty in this human being,” she said. “Before we are migrants or asylum seekers or refugees, we are a person.”

Helping others became a way for Rodriguez to heal from the trauma she experienced herself, she said. After years of hosting asylum-seeking families in her home, Rodriguez threw herself into migrant-aid work. She helped raise bond money for detained asylum seekers and regularly visited detention centers to hear their stories, which she passed on to immigration lawyers.

Rodriguez eventually took over and expanded an existing program of the El Salvador consulate in Tucson, turning it into the nonprofit , which continues to aid asylum seekers and deportees today.

In 2021, in partnership with Tucson Samaritan Gail Kocourek, Rodriguez established the “Casa de la Esperanza” resource center in Sásabe, Sonora, a tiny town that was overwhelmed by migrants who were being immediately expelled from the U.S. under the Title 42 protocols, without an opportunity to request asylum.

Rev. John Fife, now pastor emeritus at Southside Presbyterian Church, told the Star that Rodriguez’s efforts in Sásabe, coordinating with local residents and officials, was “miraculous.”

“It’s the most amazing job of organizing I’ve seen on that border,” Fife said.

Rodriguez’s memoir highlights Fife’s role as one of the leaders of the Sanctuary Movement in Tucson in the 1980s, in its early days at the time of the tragedy in Organ Pipe. Modeled after the Underground Railroad, the Sanctuary Movement helped shelter, and protect from deportation, thousands of Central Americans who were increasingly fleeing to the U.S., which refused to offer them asylum protection.

Fife recalled first meeting Rodriguez when she was freed from jail after her rescue. Fife had helped raise money for her bond and then reconnected with her decades later, as she started volunteering with the Tucson Samaritans, Humane Borders and No More Deaths.

He praised “her commitment to continue to help refugees and migrants in every way she can, and with a passion drawn out from her own experience in Organ Pipe Cactus Monument,” he said.

Rodriguez’s philosophy at the heart of her memoir encourages every-day people to take whatever small actions they can to help others, including those fleeing war and violence. That can mean volunteering, donating or something as simple as offering to pick up groceries for a family too scared to leave home, due to heightened immigration enforcement, she said.

In times of despair, “it’s incredible how that can give you some peace,” Rodriguez said.

The message is a profound one for co-writer Carpenter, a volunteer with Battalion Search and Rescue, which searches for distressed migrants and human remains in the borderlands. Like many, Carpenter said she can struggle with hopelessness, especially in today’s overwhelming poltiical climate.

Rodriguez’s constant forward motion, and focus on solutions, is a guiding force, Carpenter said.

“She doesn’t seem to give up hope,” she said. “I get so frustrated when I look at the big picture of what has to be changed and I think, ‘I can’t.’ But I can do this: I can search in the desert. I can do humanitarian work. ... Find what you can do, and do it. Dora is a role model for that.”

Later in her memoir, Rodriguez returns to her 2024 visit to Organ Pipe, where she speaks to the college students, some of whom were by then in tears.

“It’s hard to give back when you think you have nothing left,” she told them. “But you’ll be amazed by how much you can give once you realize that giving can heal you. That’s been my salvation.”