In the late 1990s, Oaxacan artist Alejandro Santiago set to repopulate his town with 2,500 individual human sculptures, each representing a person who had left San Pedro Teococuilco to migrate elsewhere. Right now these sculptures are alive in the streets of Oaxaca city, documenting a strong sense of pain that rarely makes it into comprehensive immigration debates in the United States.

Since April 15th, members of the P’urhépecha indigenous community of Cherán, Michoacán have self-organized community defense committees to protect themselves from violence amidst Mexico’s drug war. On June 26th a small caravan set off from Cuernavaca, Morelos to bring food supplies to Cherán, to show support for the community, which is both suffering from and resisting the drug war model imposed by Mexican president Felipe Calderón soon after he took office in 2006.

From May 30 to June 5, I participated in the Migrant Trail Walk, a 75 mile walk from the U.S.-Mexico border to Tucson, Arizona, traversing the Altar Valley, one of the hottest stretches in the Sonoran desert during the summer months. This eighth annual walk was done in solidarity with the thousands of migrants who cross into the United States clandestinely, and in remembrance of the thousands whose bodies have been recovered, many in the same vast desert where we walked.

Voters in El Salvador took the first step on March 15 toward turning the tide against 130 years of conservative rule over the country by electing Mauricio Funes of the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) party as president. The FMLN's resilience and persistence has finally paid off. But after nearly three decades of struggle – on the battlefield, in the streets, and at the ballot box – the political forces that make up the FMLN now face perhaps their greatest challenge: governing.