They had been massacred, assassinated. [The death squad] had pulled off their nails. They had been burned with acid ... shot in the head." In a provoking account of the horrors of war and political persecution, Salvadoran refugee and community leader Carlos Vaquerano remembers the day that his brother Marcial and seven others were brutally murdered by the death squads supported by his country's violent right-wing government. Like the more than one million Central American refugees fleeing the atrocities of war, Carlos made the difficult journey through Mexico and into the United States. He would go on to establish the Salvadoran-American Leadership and Educational Fund, one of the nation's leading Central American organizations. Each of the eight people whose interviews form the basis for this landmark collection--Carmen Alegria, Isabel Beltran, Juan Ramon Cardona, Eduardo Gonzalez, Javier Huete, Alicia Mendoza, Rossana Perez, and Carlos Vaquerano--is a leader in the Salvadoran / Central American refugee movement. Consequently, this book offers insight into the early philosophy and framework of the movement as revealed by some of its pioneers. Published as part of the Hispanic Civil Rights Series, this compelling and historically significant volume collects the narratives of Central American refugees who fled the violence in their homelands and became leading community advocates at the forefront of social justice.