What No One Took the Time to Translate for Her

<p>THEY DID NOT TRANSLATE THE TRUTH. THEY TRANSLATED HER SENTENCE. When Mariela Gálvez a Salvadoran migrant woman who did not speak English went into unexpected labor in a portable toilet and lost her baby the US judicial system charged her with homicide in less than twenty-four hours. Without adequate interpreters without real defense and without understanding the charges Mariela becomes the perfect scapegoat for a crime she never committed. What follows is a brutal fifteen-year journey in a prison where dignity is a luxury food is a business communication is a debt and survival is a new language. Amid abuse pseudo-families power relations extortion abandonment and a system designed to profit from every incarcerated body Mariela loses everything... except her ability to resist. But freedom is not the end: it is another labyrinth. Deported to the country she left behind Mariela must learn to live in a world that has moved on without her where technology overwhelms her the people judge her and her own name is tainted by a story that was never hers. Based on structures and abuses documented in real prisons in the United States this novel is an urgent denunciation a story that hurts that makes you uncomfortable and that exposes what happens behind the most hermetic walls of the modern prison system. A book you will not be able to forget. </p>