May 24, 2017 Last week, events in Puerto Rico continued to reach new levels of tension and emotion as the island’s bankruptcy proceedings began, the university’s month-long strike was threatened by court maneuverings, and the long-held political prisoner Oscar López Rivera emerged from house arrest to assertively spread an anti-colonial message to a people long […]
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The campaign to free Puerto Rican nationalist Oscar López Rivera, a political prisoner confined in a US federal penitentiary since 1981, has dominated various sectors of Puerto Rican activism for the last decade. The demonstrators behind 34 Mujeres Por Oscar has been a fixture at Union Squre Park and other locations around New York for […]
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On December 4th I interviewed José López, whose brother Oscar López Rivera is a Puerto Rican political prisoner in the U.S, for Living in Spanglish Radio. He has been held over 35 years and over 100,000 have signed a petition asking President Obama to pardon him before the end of his term in office. José […]
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The new Living in Spanglish radio episode is a special Puerto Rican Pride edition, in time for the Puerto Rican National Day Parade in New York. There’s plenty of salsa, bugalú and boleros, and special guests iLe, Calle 13 vocalist with a new solo album called Ilevitable, and David Galarza, Nuyorican activist, talk about life, love, […]
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Okay let’s get this straight. Last week Obama free-styled on the White House lawn, apparently said he had the Oscar López Rivera matter “on his desk,” then took off for Havana, where he watched a baseball game and then on to Argentina to throw down with some tango dancers. Prominent members of the Puerto Rican/diaspora […]
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It’s a bittersweet moment in San Juan this summer as the pressure mounts on the island to pay a debt that was near impossible to avoid, on the backs of the poor and working class, since the middle-class mirage of the ’60s and ’70s has all but ended. There is a depopulation and disinvestment syndrome […]
Read moreToday, Oscar López Rivera, a Puerto Rican nationalist who has been in prison for 33 years after being convicted of seditious conspiracy, released a moving statement about his homeland’s continuing colonial status, the ways he finds to celebrate his life, and the continual struggle for independence. Last night, Edward Snowden, a former NSA employee who […]
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About three years ago, Malcolm Gladwell wrote something in the New Yorker about how the social media’s role in political activism was overrated, and some people got upset. Let’s not even mention where Egypt is at lately. It might be that Gladwell is one weird-looking dude, and there was a recent study that backed him […]
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Last Thursday, Professor Cornel West visited the University of Puerto Rico to give a talk with his Union Theological Seminary colleague, the Reverend Samuel Cruz. It was under the auspices of a group called Mesa Diálogo Martin Luther King, extraordinary in itself, and aimed, according to its spokesperson Juan Ángel Gutiérrez, to encourage dialog between […]
Read moreThe last couple of weeks, legendary Puerto Rican activist Tito Kayak has been re-creating the centuries-old migratory voyage made by indigenous people from Venezuela to the Greater Antilles to draw attention to the imprisonment of Puerto Rican Independence activist Oscar López Rivera. Imprisoned for “seditious conspiracy” López Rivera has been behind bars for over 30 […]
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ED MORALES 