Description
Book SynopsisIn this revised and expanded edition of Medicine Stories, Aurora Levins Morales weaves together the insights and lessons learned over a lifetime of activism to offer a new theory of social justice, bringing clarity and hope to tangled, emotionally charged social issues in beautiful and accessible language.
Trade Review"Morales’s book is an excellent tool for understanding some of the dynamics of social justice movements and should be part of activists’ survival kits against despair." -- Nylca J. Muñoz Sosa * Monthly Review *
“Perhaps the most directly significant contribution of
Medicine Stories...is Levins Morales’s framing of oppression as the most widespread and systematically reproduced source of trauma....
Medicine Stories maps the intimate and collective pathways of survival that communities and individuals find in the face of violence and injustice....” -- Corinne Lajoie * Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies *
Table of ContentsLibation v
The Ground on Which I Stand
Ecology Is Everything 3
Bigger
Is Better 10
My Feminism 18
Identity and Solidarity 34
The Power of Story 42
The Truths Our Bodies Tell 47
The Historian as Curandera
False Memories: Trauma and Liberation 55
The Historian as Curandera 69
Night Flying: Power, Memory, and Magic 89
What Race Isn't: Teaching about Racism 95
Raícism: Rootedness as Spiritual and Political Practice 99
The Politics of Childhood 104
Speaking in Tongues
On Not Writing English 111
Forked Tongues: On Not Speaking Spanish 115
Certified Organic Intellectual 121
Ban Me! 127
Tribes
The Tribe of Guarayamín 133
Taíno Citizenship 140
Speaking of Antisemitism 145
BDS and Me 154
Puerto Ricans and Jews 157
Privilege and Loss
Class, Privilege, and Loss 175
Nadie la Tiene: Land, Ecology, and Nationalism 179
Torturers 192
Histerimonia: Declarations of a Trafficked Girl, or Why I Couldn't Write This Essay 197
The Long Haul
Building Radical Soil 207
Circle Unbroken: The Politics of Inclusion 211
Tai: A Yom Kippur Sermon, 5778/2017 217
A Note From the Author 223
Index 225
