Urban/Global Politics

Although it’s not known for sure what motivated the Arizona shooter today, the morbid syncretism between Colombine-style mass murder and fringe violence directed at politics and government is maturing in frightening fashion. Although Gabrielle Giffords was a foe of Arizona’s anti-immigrant legislation, she was a target of death threats last March because of her position […]

The naming of Mark Zuckerberg as Time magazine’s Person of the Year over Julian Assange is emblematic of the utter corruption of our economic and political system. Zuckerberg represents the ultimate capitalization of life, language, and the pursuit of loneliness, where individuals are used as bases for advertising campaigns in a way that may eventually […]

Just a note here to let you know about a special blog put together by students at the University of Puerto Rico chronicling the quotidian reasons why many will have great difficulty affording the $800 per semester increase imposed by the administration and its partner, the PNP government of Puerto Rico. These stories help demystify […]

There was a police riot late this afternoon at the UPR Rio Piedras campus. After peacefully demonstrating in the Natural Sciences building, the police began to isolate certain students and arrest them violently. Preliminary estimates are that 17 were arrested, some injuries, one known in Auxilio Mutuo Hospital. Radio Huelga reports a text from a […]

This freshly posted video shows Puerto Rico governor Luis Fortuño addressing a group of conservatives who had come to the Governor’s Mansion in San Juan just last week on a Caribbean cruise sponsored by the infamous CPAC, or Conservative Political Action Group. If you dare click on that link, you’ll see that CPAC’s website is […]

The Wikileaks phenomenon is remarkable because it seems to overtake whatever passes for “the discourse” (el discurso) and explodes from within any notion of a temporal news cycle, illuminating a hidden speech that we have always known exists, but could only rely on paranoia to imagine. The sheer volume of the documents cause revelations to […]

The University of Puerto Rico central campus in Rio Piedras is currently under siege by operatives of a private security firm called Capitol Security, which has been contracted by the University for what has been estimated to be hundreds of thousands of dollars (one report by WAPA TV’s Rafael Lenín López puts the figure at […]

I know you’re all reading the Wikileaks documents right now (how about the way the Times buried the lead in their story? all the way down the list is this little tidbit: “Saudi donors remain the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al Qaeda…”), but there are some stories coming in from West of […]

These are harsh times, that perhaps need to be described by using harsh words. Such is the case of the working title of a series of videos uploaded by El Barrio/Spanish Harlem’s poet laureate Papoleto Melendez, whose new youtube channel documents last week’s viewing of a cherished “community space,” heretofore managed by Taller Boricua, for […]

Querido readers, I invite you to check out a brilliant new site that I’ve been asked to contribute to. It’s called 80 grados, and it’s written entirely in Spanish, except for my post, which is in Spanglish! All the way live from Boriken, you know, La Isla. home page: http://www.80grados.net my column: http://www.80grados.net/2010/10/jennifer/ Esto si es […]