Local immigrant rights activist Dora Rodriguez, on surviving a border crossing — and her new memoir - AZ Luminaria

Local immigrant rights activist Dora Rodriguez, on surviving a border crossing — and her new memoir - AZ Luminaria

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 Me…