by Bryan Gibel
Daily Lobo
Poet, author and political activist John Ross is in Albuquerque to make people think about Mexico.
"One thing I've always tried to do with my writing is to create a model so that here on the other side of the border, we understand that we have neighbors that are always in the street; that are always on the march; that are always on the move; that challenge the system," Ross said. "I'm hoping some of that will rub off here."
Ross arrived Wednesday for a three-day tour to present his new book, Zapatistas! Making Another World Possible: Chronicles of Resistance.
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Ross said he was the first draft resister to be jailed for refusing to serve in Vietnam.
He was the first journalist to break the story of the Zapatistas' 1994 insurrection in the Mexican state of Chiapas, he said, which eventually led to Chiapas' self-declaration as an autonomous region of Mexico.
During the years in between, he said he's covered some of the most important stories of the last several decades in Latin America.
"In the early 1980s, I was working in Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and Colombia, interviewing leaders of guerrilla organizations. I did some of the first stories on the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) in Peru," Ross said. "Probably the hardest story I ever had was on the Frente Patri¢tica, who tried to assassinate (Augusto) Pinochet in Chile. It took me months to track those guys down to get them on record talking about it."
Ross read some of his prose and poetry Wednesday at Librer°a La Semilla, a bookstore at 929 Fourth Street S.W. On Thursday, he taught a class in the UNM Community and Regional Planning Department and gave a lecture at the UNM law school, where he discussed insurrection in Mexico, the country's economy and the 2006 presidential election.
He will speak on civil society in Mexico at the Latin American and Iberian Institute today at noon, followed by an open discussion at the Albuquerque Center for Peace and Justice at 202 Harvard S.E. at 4:30 p.m.
Ivis Garcia Zambrana, president of the Student Organization of Latin American Studies, said she was excited to meet Ross.
"Having John here is a great opportunity for us to get information about Mexico and the Zapatistas that is new and current and that comes from a scholar, a researcher and an activist," she said.
Ross, who has published nine books of poetry, was first exposed to Mexico through the famous poets of the beat generation, he said.
"I was one of the younger beat poets. (Jack) Kerouac and the rest were about 15 years older than me," he said. "I got on the road when I was 19 and went to Mexico where a lot of the history of the beat generation had been written. They were always on the road going back and forth, and I stayed."
He said his work as a reporter grew out of his life as an activist.
"When I went to prison in '64, I wrote my first article in English about activism in jail. My first concerted movement in journalism was on environmentalism in California," he said. "We managed to decommission a nuclear power plant and create Redwood National Park. I reported on the sinsemilla dope wars in northern California, then I took off for Europe and North Africa and did a lot of reporting from there."
He said he later returned to Mexico as a reporter for Pacifica News Service, where he reported on the development of Mexican civil society.
Ross said he's also reported from the Middle East and was reporting in Baghdad, Iraq, when the United States began bombing there in 2003.
His coverage of the Middle East and Latin America has been published via Pacifica Radio, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Texas Observer, the Nation and several Latin American newspapers.
"I was privileged to have covered the movements in the 1980s that became the genesis of Mexican civil society," he said. "I've been right there on the front lines for basically every development of that process for the last 21 years."
