Ever since, the Catholic Church has played a central role in the political life ofLatin America-sometimes for good, sometimes not. Although his aim is to learn rather than proselytize, he isan inheritor of a checkered past, where priests marched alongside conquistadors, converting the natives to Christianity, often forcibly, in the effort to win the New World. He considers himself an Indian in head and heart and, for this, is well known in his adopted country. Xavier Albo is a Jesuitpriest from Barcelona who emigrated to Bolivia, where he works among the indigenous people.

His story echoes the violencethat has coursed through the Americas since before Columbus to the crushing savagery of the Spanish Conquest, and from 19th- and 20th-century wars and revolutions to the military crackdowns that convulse Latin America to this day. He was among hundreds of criminals Cuba expelled to the US in 1980. Carlos Buergos is a Cuban who fought in the civil war in Angola and now lives in a quiet community outside New Orleans.

And now, just as then, a miner's survival depends on a vast global market whose fluctuations are controlled in faraway places. Illiteracy, malnutrition, and disease reign as they did five hundred years ago. Like her late husband, she works the gold mines much as the Indians were forced to do at the time of the Spanish Conquest. Leonor Gonzales lives in a tiny community perched 18,000 feet above sea level in the Andean cordillera of Peru, the highest human habitation on earth. 'Against the background of a thousand years of vivid history, acclaimed writer Marie Arana tells the timely and timeless stories of three contemporary Latin Americans whose lives represent three driving forces that have shaped the character of the region:exploitation (silver), violence (sword), and religion (stone).

Braiding sweetgrass author