Help RnB publish book by Pol. Pris. Oscar López Rivera

by Liz Roberts, Resistance in Brooklyn

Dear friends and comrades,

Amazingly, Resistance in Brooklyn is sailing into its twentieth year in 2012. And while we’re committed to carry on our signature projects—the Roses and Bread women’s performance event and fundraiser in the spring, the Anti-Fourth of July barbecue fundraiser in the summer, and the Political Prisoner card-writing party in the winter—we also look forward to taking advantage of some very exciting opportunities in the coming months.

 When we produced the pamphlet Enemies of the State in 1999, we had little idea that it would so excite a new generation of activists, bringing the words of Marilyn Buck, David Gilbert, and Laura Whitehorn to many who had never before heard of them. After republications by half a dozen small presses and over five thousand copies in print, distribution was eventually taken over by our wonderful Montreal-based colleagues at Kersplebedeb (radical book

publisher/distributor).

Less than ten years later, we came together to put close to 1,000 pages of important documents from the movements to free U.S. political prisoners into the PM Press and Kersplebedeb book Let Freedom Ring, which Argentine Nobel Peace Prize recipient Adolfo Pérez Esquivel called “a welcome and important addition to the growing literature on U.S. human rights abuses.”

We now have the chance to help launch a new book by Puerto Rican political prisoner Oscar López Rivera. Entre la Tortura y la Resistencia, edited by Dr. Luis Nieves Falcón, a longtime leader of the movement to free the political prisoners, is an extremely accessible short book that contains the words, artwork, biography, and photographs of the longest-held prisoner in U.S.-Puerto Rican history. The book was published at the end of 2011, to grand fanfare throughout Puerto Rican literary and social circles. And now Dr. Nieves Falcón has asked us—and we are asking you—for help in bringing forward an English-language edition. We will not only contribute to publishing the book, but also help distribute it among North American progressives. In addition, to continue to broaden the campaign for Oscar’s immediate and unconditional release throughout 2012 and beyond if necessary, we are working with our comrades in Philadelphia’s Wild Poppies Collective to produce a popular education comic book, based both on excerpts from the Oscar López Rivera book and on related vignettes about colonialism in Puerto Rico.

To actually accomplish these very ambitious plans, Resistance in Brooklyn—for the first time in twenty years—is coming to our friends, supporters, and communities to ask for financial help. While we have raised thousands of dollars for countless groups over the past twenty years, we have always done so through our own tithing or through the events where the recipients of those efforts are spotlighted. But this is a special time, and these new publications (and the urgent timelines attached to them) require special emphasis. We can’t do it without you.

At a time when the Occupy movement has shown us that creative new modes of resistance can open up all kinds of possibilities, we want to stretch ourselves. We are inspired to reach for the kind of concrete contribution we’re in a unique position to help make. We want and need you to join us in that effort. We will undoubtedly be contacting you over the next twelve months about our occasional evening updates welcoming traveling visitors, our strategy sessions reviewing the movements we work in, and our discussions reflecting upon these last twenty years. But now we look forward to hearing from you—with financial support for this special initiative on Puerto Rico and the campaign to free Oscar López Rivera.

Forward Ever!

Your Comrades in Resistance in Brooklyn

P.S.—Please reply directly to MMMSRNB@IGC.ORG with your pledge. There are various ways to contribute, depending on whether you’d need for your gift to be tax deductible.