RICANSTRUCTING VIEQUES

RICANSTRUCTING VIEQUES design by Sam Lahoz

Vieques is a small island off the eastern coast of Puerto Rico that was used for decades by the US military as training ground. For 200 days out of the year war games were played in Vieques with live ammunition much to the consternation of the over 10,000 Puerto Ricans who call Vieques home. In 1998 the NYC based Puerto Rican Hardcore Punk Band RICANSTRUCTION was invited to play a Kick The US Navy Festival Out in Vieques, Puerto Rico. i decided to bring a camera along to document the trip but had no inclination to make a documentary.

When we got back from Vieques we found that many people really didn’t know what was happening in regard to the destruction of the environment, the pollution, the depleted uranium shells, the unexploded ordnance, the high cancer rates, or any of the other long list of abuses by the US military in Vieques. So we decided to look at some of the footage i’d shot to see if a documentary could be put together. At the end of March 1999 we finished a short 25 minute punkumentary and decided to call it RICANSTRUCTING VIEQUES. A few days later on April 19th David Sanes Rodriguez, a civilian Puerto Rican guard was killed in an accidental bombing. A F18 fighter jet dropped a  500 lb. bomb too close to his guard post. His death sparked a global movement to end war games on the island of Vieques.

The people of Vieques led a protest in which they occupied the bombing ranges of the US military effectively becoming human shields. International media began to pay attention to the plight of Vieques and semi-permanent encampments began to spring up in the bombing zones. Celebrities and politicians began to take notice of the struggle and began to lend not only their voices but their bodies to the movement.  Famous Puerto Rican singers Danny Rivera, Robi Draco Rosa and Ricky Martin, lent their support, Puerto Rican boxer Félix “Tito” Trinidad, writers Ana Lydia Vega and Giannina Braschi, actor Edward James Olmos and Guatemala’s Nobel Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú supported the cause, as did Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Al Sharpton, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Even Pope John Paul II mentioned that he wanted peace for Vieques.

After many years of protests, occupations of the bombing zones and violent skirmishes with law enforcement, the US military relented and pulled out of Vieques on May 1st of 2003. Today marks ten years since the US military pulled out of Vieques but the struggle is far from over. The unexploded ordnance and depleted uranium and other environmental damage has yet to be cleaned up and the land that was once used by the US military is still off-limits to the people of Vieques.

This May Day is the ten-year anniversary of the US military leaving Vieques. In honor and remembrance of that struggle i’m re-releasing RICANSTRUCTING VIEQUES on the internet so people can begin to have an understanding of how destructive the US military was in Vieques and how it continues to be with the lack of clean up. As i write this i’m back in Puerto Rico and heading out to Vieques this May Day once again to try to document the ongoing struggle to get the US government and the US military to clean up the mess it left behind, so stay tuned for the follow up and in the meantime check out the punkumentary RICANSTRUCTING VIEQUES…

Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1eniL-12O

John Penley Anarcho Yippie Pt. 1

JOHN PENLEY ANARCHO YIPPIE by vagabond ©

John Penley is an Anarcho Yippie is a new web series that i’m launching today with a new episode coming each week for the next few weeks. The story of how John became an Anarcho Yippie and what an Anarcho Yippie is, has everything to do with NYC in the 1980′s… John first moved to the Lower East Side of New York City in 1985 and became a freelance photojournalist. His photos were featured in all the daily newspapers like the The Daily News, The NY Post, The New York Times and many other publications. His archive of some 30,000 images was recently acquired by the Tamimnet Library at NYU.

At the end of the summer of 2011 John became homeless. Since then he’s been a part of various Occupy movements in New York, Washington DC, and Asheville NC. In March of 2013 John returned to New York to work on his archive in the library. In true Anarcho Yippie fashion John is also holding a protest against NYU by sleeping on the sidewalk in front of the library that houses his archive to bring attention to NYU’s contribution to the rapid gentrification to the Lower East Side and it’s planned expansion into Greenwich Village. In this episode John talks about his days as a photojournalist and how he came to NYC after serving a federal prison term for jumping bail to join the Yippies on Bleecker Street.

Tune in next week for Part 2 of John Penley Anarcho Yippie…

Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1eniL-12o

The Liberation Day Tapes – Dream In Porto Rican

MACHETERO RICANSTRUCTION LIBERATION DAY

MACHETERO features several songs from the album Liberation Day by RICANSTRUCTION. The Liberation Day album was a concept album centered on the liberation struggle of Puerto Rico. While writing the script I listened to Liberation Day and found the songs influencing the narrative and the way in which the film could be structured.

Arturo and Joseph Rodriguez are the song writers (along with singer Not4Prophet), drummer and bass player for RICANSTRUCTION. When we were doing the final mix for MACHETERO Arturo and Joseph came by to talk about the how the songs for Liberation Day came together. In this segment they talk about the song DREAM IN PORTO RICAN…

Dream In Porto Rican is the prelude to MACHETERO. It opens the film. Dream in Porto Rican, is a list of demands and desires for a better future. It’s a declaration for freedom from the ills of a colonial mentality and immediately set the tone for the film. The images of the films prelude opens with the Young Rebel cutting his own hair to Dream In Porto Rican. The cutting of hair is symbolic of re-birth while the song is a declaration of independence.

Liberation Day is available on iTunes

Liberation Day by RICANSTRUCTION

MACHETERO opens in New York City for a one week limited theatrical run.

WED. JUNE 12TH – TUES JUNE 19TH
CLEMENTE SOTO VELEZ
KABAYITO’S THEATER (2ND FLOOR)
107 SUFFOLK STREET
NY NY 10002
(BTWN RIVINGTON & DELANCEY)

TICKETS $10
SCREENING TIMES • 1PM • 3PM • 5PM • 7PM • 9PM
F Train to Delancey Street or J , M , or Z Trains to Essex Street.
Walk to Suffolk Street, make a left.

Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1eniL-11F

Waging Cultural War

Rooftop shot from the film MACHETERO with Not4Prophet & Jeff “AK” Akers by vagabond ©

“The guerilla wins by not losing.” – Che

I’ve never been in the military but based on observation and on what people who have been in the military have told me, film production has to be the closest thing to a military operation than anything else in terms of logistics, operations and planning. A military that goes out to war is essentially a self-contained unit. It has to bring food, shelter, medical supplies and equipment to the battlefield in order to get the job done. Filmmaking isn’t very different. A crew moves out in the early morning hours onto location eats breakfast, unloads equipment, sets up, shoots, eats lunch, sets up more equipment, shoots some more, wraps up, loads the equipment back in the trucks and moves out only do it all over again the next day. On a shoot that has several locations the unload, set up, shoot, load and move process can happen two or even three times in a single day.

Major film productions are run like a military operation with several departments acting as platoons fueled with vast budgets and deep resources. When filmmakers talk about making a film they invariably use military metaphors and go into production war stories.

No-budget independent guerrilla film production is the complete opposite of major studio productions. MACHETERO’s production was the equivalent of a small rebel guerrilla army going up against the odds of almost certain failure fueled with of a vast belief in the impossible and a deep resourcefulness that kept us going. The struggles that were waged and the risks that were taken to get MACHETERO done, in a way, were indicative of the struggles that were being portrayed within the film itself. After all, an independent guerrilla film production like MACHETERO ran on the ether of faith that we would make it through with a clever and passionate resourcefulness. And guess what? It worked.

As artists we were prepared to sacrifice for our art. We were ready for the long grueling hours, the pangs of hunger, the cold New York nights, the hot Puerto Rican days, the exhaustion that settles into the body and the frustration that seeps into the mind. And when our art required more from us we took the risks… too many to count, and like characters in the film we wanted to be free . We wanted to be free to make some art, to make a film. We wanted to bring some beauty into the world by telling a story that few people have heard or seen and bring some understanding to what is misunderstood. The world is in such a place now that in order to do that we had to lie, cheat, and steal, most of the time we got away with it and the few times that we didn’t we had to deal with the arrests, the warrants, the court dates, and the summonses.

We live in a world that talks about freedom but in order for us to be free to make our art, to make our film we had to the run and hide, we had to be clever and clandestine. MACHETERO the film and the making of MACHETERO… like a small guerrilla army waging cultural war in the streets… block by block… corner by corner… second by second… frame by frame…

We may not have won anything by making MACHETERO but we certainly didn’t lose anything…

MACHETERO opens in New York City for a one week limited theatrical run.

WED. JUNE 12TH – TUES JUNE 19TH
CLEMENTE SOTO VELEZ
KABAYITO’S THEATER (2ND FLOOR)
107 SUFFOLK STREET
NY NY 10002
(BTWN RIVINGTON & DELANCEY)

TICKETS $10
SCREENING TIMES • 1PM • 3PM • 5PM • 7PM • 9PM
F Train to Delancey Street or J , M , or Z Trains to Essex Street.
Walk to Suffolk Street, make a left.

If you’re on Facebook Check out our MACHETERO Facebook Page and check out the Facebook Event page… 

Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1eniL-111

MACHETERO As Avant Garde Musical

vagabond/RICANSTRUCTION photos by Sam Lahoz

“Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.“
- Erich Fromm 

When i was writing the script for MACHETERO i used the music of a band called RICANSTRUCTION as inspiration. RICANSTRUCTION was a band that i had been working with for a long time. They were a band that made music with a Hardcore Punk mentality and infused it with Afro-Rican beats and rhythms, they mixed their brand of Hardcore Punk with Salsa, Merengue, Reggae, Be-Bop and Free jazz. They grew up in the mean streets of Harlem in the 1980’s so they threw in a heavy dose of hard-hitting Hip-Hop just for good measure. The easiest way to describe the way that RICANSTRUCTION made music was to imagine the minds of Bad Brains, Ray Barreto, John Coltrane, Pubic Enemy and Bob Marley melding into one.

The thing that attracted me to RICANSTRUCTION was that they were the sum of everything that had ever inspired them. They took that old Hip-Hop adage of “It ain’t where your from it’s where you’re at” and made it a core principle of their creative process. They took everything from where it was and took it somewhere new. This was something that i had always been struggling to do myself as a graffiti artist, as a painter, as a graphic designer, as a writer and as a filmmaker. When i begin to conceptualize a project the first thing i do is turn to music. i need a soundtrack for whatever i’m doing. It helps to form an emotional center that i can project from. Whenever i get into the creative process whatever i’m listening to invariably becomes a part of the genetic structure of what i’m creating.

RICANSTRUCTION’s first album LIBERATION DAY was a concept album centered around people struggling for their freedom, so it only made sense to fuel the imagination for  MACHETERO with LIBERATION DAY. As i wrote the script the songs began to seep into the cracks and crevices and fill spaces within the film that could only be filled with these songs. The music was going beyond inspiration for the film and beginning to shape it. Certain songs from the album insinuated themselves right into the storyline.

For the most part i can’t stand musicals. To me they are so completely artificial and overwhelming that they seem to over take anything else in a play or a film. Not all musicals but most. It’s not a genre i really like and as i was listening to LIBERATION DAY the script for MACHETERO was beginning to lean in that direction. i fought it thinking that it was just over excitement at having found a way to take something from where it was, as songs on a concept album and take it to somewhere new, as songs driving a narrative in a film. It felt like a good fit but there is always an inherent conflict in the creative process where all creators have to be careful and that conflict lies between the ideas and the ego.

That struggle is in removing the ego from the creative process. To think that you as a creator own your ideas is trap that needs to be avoided. Nothing is original and the creative energy that exists in the ether is simply channeling or filtering itself through you and your experiences. The ego would like to claim ownership over these ideas but the moment that that happens the creation becomes a reflection of the ego and whatever is being created suffers because ego is only looking to serve itself and art needs to serve something greater than ego. Art needs to serve as a connection. This is the struggle for every creator, how to filter the ideas in the ether that have chosen to move through you in an effort to connect with others without letting the ego corrupt those ideas. It’s difficult because throughout the creative process the question is always hanging over the creators head as to what is a natural filtering process of these ideas shaped by your experience and what is ego trying to claim ownership. What makes this even more complicated is that the ego is necessary in feeding your confidence, saitiating your belief that you can accomplish the task at hand. Keeping the ego in check in the creative process while using it to support you as you struggle to create is a dialectic nightmare.

The songs from LIBERATION DAY wouldn’t give up though. Incorporating them into the script kept on making more and more sense. It started to feel right and i started to give in but i needed to find a way to have the songs not just be breaks from the narrative in the film but be a continuation of the narrative. i continued to test them conceptually to see if it wasn’t just my ego coming up with something clever that it could claim. But the idea of these songs belonging to the script in MACHETERO seemed to absorb everything i threw at it.

Then the conception of MACHETERO as an avant-garde musical began to take shape. Throughout the film there are songs from the Liberation Day album that are cut into the film and the songs actually bring information into the film in the same way a musical would. The difference being that the characters aren’t stopping whatever it is that they’re doing to sing to the camera. The characters and the story continue in a way that is conventional with a straight forward narrative. i wanted to make sure with MACHETERO each and every one of the songs  being placed in the film move the narrative forward. On another level the songs juxtaposed against the images of the film shared more characteristics with the music video form than they do with the musical, even though the two are very closely related. It’s this strange hybrid of the music video and the musical that made up the idea of an avant-garde musical.

The concept needed to put to the test. Were the existence of the songs in the film just some smug little way of being clever for the sake of being clever or were they actually bringing something to the table? The songs began to inform the structure of the film and impose themselves into the narrative of the film. They essentially became a Punk Rock Greek chorus adding another layer of narration to the film. The songs allowed me to bring a historical and psychological significance to the characters and their actions that would have been much harder to do without them. These were the questions i was asking of this avant-garde musical concept.

The avant-garde musical was looking better and better and proving to be more resilient than i ever could have imagined. The Hardcore Punk Rock foundation of the songs mixed with Salsa (Breakfast In Amerika), Merengue (Liberation Day), Reggae (Abu-Jamal), and Be-Bop Jazz (Shithouse Serenades and Jihad Seeds) meant that it would be difficult  to absorb all this information which comes at you pretty fast. So i slowed down the flow of that information by placing the lyrics across the screen as they are sung to allow the audience to read the lyrics to better absorb the ideas behind the placement of the songs. The lyrics on the screen also allowed the audience to better understand the structure and the shape that the film had taken. It really was adding another level to the film that made the ability to communicate these complex ideas and emotions easier to understand. It really was driving the story and connecting and imparting information that would be difficult to impart otherwise.

Great songwriting has a way of condensing a story in a way that no other artistic form of expression can. The songs from LIBERATION DAY were perfect examples of well crafted  songwriting. Not4Prophet who wrote the lyrics (and played one of the lead characters in the film) really knows how to hack away at the superfluous and get into the heart of the matter. Joseph and Arturo Rodriguez who wrote the music in collaboration with Not4Prophet really know how to craft song structure so it that moves these stories forward. The songs acting as a Greek chorus narrated elements into the film that – had those songs not been there, would have to be incorporated into the film in some other way. Finding an alternative way to get that information into the film would have required an investment in time and energy as well as the extremely limited financial resources we available.

Working on a non-existent budget with very few resources  the avant-garde musical concept became not only a reflection of creative resourcefulness but also a reflection of production resourcefulness. This condensation the songs from LIBERATION DAY brought to MACHETERO allowed the few resources we had access to in terms of finances, time and energy to be applied to other areas of the film. Working within the confines is where creativity blossoms best. Without restraint creativity is like a spoiled brat running amok for it’s own sake. Struggling within the limitations is where resolve and resourcefulness can be tested and the uncommon solutions are found in the creativity that is harnessed against the odds. It’s in this friction of ideas and concepts and resources and finances that MACHETERO became an avant-garde musical.

This clip from the film is a an example of how i used the song Liberation Day in the film and is indicative of how all of the songs were used in the film.

Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1eniL-10H

Dylcia Pagan & Puerto Rican Independence

Dlycia Pagan – Puerto Rican Heroine by vagabond ©

Today is Dylcia Pagan’s birthday. If you don’t know who Dylcia Pagan is then that’s probably by design. To know Dlycia is to know is to know that Puerto Rico has been a colony of the United States since 1898 and this isn’t a fact that the US likes to highlight as it supposedly beats the drum for democracy and freedom around the world from North Korea to Afghanistan. So not knowing who Dylcia is, is by design, because to not know Dylcia is to not know that the US has been a colonizing power in Puerto Rico for over a hundred years. Why are Dylcia and Puerto Rico’s colonialism so inextricably linked? Because Dylcia is a former US held political prisoner of war who spent 20 years in US prisons for fighting to free Puerto Rico from US colonialism.

Dylcia was a member of the FALN (Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional  or the Armed Forces of National Liberation), a clandestine Puerto Rican group that used any and all means, including military means, to achieve the liberation of Puerto Rico from US colonialism. They were labeled a terrorist group by US law enforcement and they were hunted down as such. On April 4th of 1980, the FBI arrested a number of FALN member in Illinois and Dylcia was among those arrested. She was charged with seditious conspiracy to overthrow the US government. During her trial, she and her co-defendants chose to take a prisoner of war status as was their right under the Geneva Convention. The US legal system refused to recognize their status as Prisoners of War and Dylcia and her co-defendants refused to recognize the jurisdiction of the US government. In the end the US government found them guilty and sentenced them to incredibly long prison terms. Dylcia was sentenced to 63 years.

In September of 1999, President Clinton pardoned Dylcia and nine other Puerto Rican political prisoners of war. She’s been living in Loiza, Puerto Rico since she was release. Although Dylcia is best known as being a freedom fighter, it’s only a part of who she is, her story and the sacrifices she made for her ideals make her a heroine, not just for Puerto Ricans, not just for women, but for all of us… Check out the short film below i did of Dylcia where she’s tells her own story…

For more info on Dylcia Pagan visit her website…
www.dylciapagan.com

Connect with Dylcia on Facebook
Connect with Dylcia on Google+

Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1eniL-QL

Clandestinity By Comandante Filiberto

The Ghost Of Filiberto Haunts A Coloinized Puerto Rico by vagabond ©

I am the third and youngest of three brothers ands sisters born to Inocencio Ojeda and Gloria Rios, all natives of Naguabo, Puerto Rico.  My father was a teacher in the public instruction system.  My mother administered what was then the rural Post Office which consisted of a room in the house where I was born in Rio Blanco, a small community about five miles from the town of Naguabo.

During the early years of my life, Puerto Rico experienced one of its worst social and economic crises.  Unemployment, malnutrition, abandonment of children, and the propagation of highly contagious illnesses were destroying a large portion of our population. My grandparents, on both my mother’s and father’s sides, were farmers.  Their land and agricultural properties were lost and businesses ruined when the established system of production changed hands and the North American sugar monopolies took over the Puerto Rican economic structure. These were years in which many thousands of Macheteros (sugar cane cutters) were enslaved by North American absentee companies. These companies controlled all productive agricultural land in Puerto Rico. The wages paid to the Puerto Rican people guaranteed nothing but abject poverty and misery.

These were also years of great struggles for freedom. The names of Don Pedro Albizu Campos, Elias Beauchamp, Hiram Rosado, and such criminal act as the Ponce Massacre, could not possibly escape the attention of Puerto Rican children of the era.  During my early years, my father was a Cadet of the Republic, an organization which at that time had as its primary purpose recruiting volunteers for a Puerto Rican Army, sometimes called the Liberation Army.

My early education was influenced by this socio-political context.  The English language was forced upon all the Puerto Rican students as the main vehicle of learning. Many teachers in those days expressed resentment of this fact, and their resentment carried an independentista message directly to their students. The preservation of our national language became an important tool against colonialism in the absence of sufficient strength to oppose the fierce repression through other means.

When I was 11, in 1944, my mother emigrated to New York.  It was then that I was confronted, for the first time in my life, with all the elements of racism, social discrimination and social oppression that characterized the life of Puerto Rican émigrés and which prevail to this day.  I went through my junior high school years in different schools in Manhattan and Brooklyn, returning to Puerto Rico in 1947.  This was due mainly to my inadaptability and non-acceptance of a degrading and humiliating system with its highly institutionalized discrimination mechanisms.

During the early fifties, I worked in factories in New York City while I continued musical studies. It was this contact with brother Puerto Ricans in the factories which finally helped me understand the true nature of exploitation, racism and colonialism. I understood what life in the ghettoes meant; the reasons for being denied decent education, health, and housing services and equal work opportunities. In sum, I was able to establish the connection between workers’ exploitation and the predominating economic system, including colonialism. This understanding led me to oppose the forced military recruiting of Puerto Ricans to be utilized by the United States as cannon fodder in their wars of aggression.  (I had the misfortune of losing loved family members and receiving others spiritually and emotionally wounded in a war they never understood or condoned.) I refused to be drafted during the Korean War.

In 1957 I joined the Puerto Rican independence movement through active participation in diverse political activities. I formalized, in 1959, my membership in the Movimiento Libertador de Puerto Rico (Puerto Rican Liberation Movement) to which I dedicated my efforts. Through it, I engaged in Puerto Rican historical and political studies.

In 1961, I went to Cuba, taking my family with me. Once there, I joined the Movimiento Pro-Independencia (MPI) [Pro-independence Movement].  In 1964, I entered the University of Havana, and studied political science until 1965. In 1965, I became Sub-Chief of the Permanent Mission of the Movimiento Pro-Independencia in Cuba.  In early 1966, I became the Alternate Delegate to the Organization of Solidarity for the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin American (OSPAAL). From 1966 to 1969, I was also a member of the Directorate of the Association of Puerto Rican Residents in Cuba.  I was the editor of the Puerto Rican publications that were directed at our community and to other Latin American communities in Cuba.

In 1969, I returned to my country, Puerto Rico, engaging in diverse political activities as part of the Puerto Rican revolutionary movement in our struggle for independence. I physically witnessed the police attack against the central officers of the Movimiento Pro Independencia (MPI). In 1970 I was arrested in Puerto Rico and accused of being an organizer of the Movimiento Independentista Revolucionario en Armas (MIRA) which was involved in armed struggle during those years.  I was never convicted of such charges. In 1980, the charges were dismissed for lack of evidence.  From 1970 until my arrest, I lived clandestinely in my country.  The persecution of independentistas by the federal colonialist forces, the numerous attacks and assassinations executed by the right-wing forces (including police ‘death squads’, and other vigilante groups which were organized or encouraged by the CIA and the FBI) and the repeated threats against my life made by these same elements have not permitted me to assume an open role in the struggle for the independence of my country. This personal experience confirmed the significance of the concept of ‘clandestinity’ which is an unfortunately necessary response to the consistent repression of the nationalist movements in particular and the independentista movements in general.

by Comandante Filiberto Ojeda Rios April 26, 1933 – September 23, 2005

For more info on the Puerto Rican independence movement…
www.september23.org

Sidebar: You can get a T-shirt of Filiberto from RICANSTRUCTED… RICANSTRUCTED is a design company i founded that is dedicated to the independence of Puerto Rico.

FILIBERTO RICANSTRUCTED by vagabond ©

Shortlink: - http://wp.me/p1eniL-I4

A Mural For Oscar

OSCAR LUCHAR by vagabond ©

Oscar Lopez Rivera is a Puerto Rican political prisoner and prisoner of war. He’s been held in prison by the US government since 1980 for trying to free his country Puerto Rico from US colonialism. The crime he’s been charged with is seditious conspiracy to overthrow the US government. The ironic quandary of such a charge for Oscar and other Puerto Rican political prisoners and prisoners of war like Avelino Claudio Gonzalez and his brother Norberto Claudio Gonzalez is that they don’t recognize the US government as being a legitimate governing body in Puerto Rico. This inability to recognize the US government as a legitimate governing body in Puerto Rico makes Oscar and others like him political prisoners.

Under resolution 1514 of the UN charter Oscar was within his rights to extricate Puerto Rico from that colonial condition using any means possible, which is what Oscar did as a member of the FALN (Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacíon Nacionalista – the Armed FOrces of National Liberation. The US rewarded those actions with arrest, trial and imprisonment. Oscar’s mindset was that the US government in Puerto Rico was illegal and immoral and so he refused to recognize the US government and its legal apparatus as having any power over him and wanted to be treated as a prisoner of war according to the Geneva Convention. As a prisoner of war Oscar is supposed to be dealt with humanely but that has not happened. He has been denied timely medical treatment, tortured and is confined to solitary confinement which are all violations of the Geneva Conventions treatment of prisoners of war. Throughout all of that Oscar’s will remains unbroken and his dedication unwavering in the cause for Puerto Rican independence.

There is a campaign to try to free Oscar Lopez Rivera… The Revolutionary Artist Vanguard, an artists collective in Puerto Rico got together to paint a mural in honor of Oscar. This is a short video of the mural that was painted…

Join the Campaign To Help Free Oscar Lopez Rivera
Coordinating Committee
National Boricua Human Rights Network
2739 W. Division Street
Chicago IL 60622
www.boricuahumanrights.org
Follow us on Twitter: olrcat
Comité Pro-Derechos Humanos
www.presospoliticospuertorriquenos.org

A Mural For Oscar #nothingtobegainedhere
nothingtobegainedhere.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/a-m…—
vagabond (@vgbnd) January 03, 2012

Struggle Is A Weapon

Dylcia Pagan by vagabond ©

“I’m not made to settle for injustice.”
- Betances

There are people who come into this world who are not designed for oppression. People who cannot stand by and just allow injustice to stand. Since 1493 when Columbus came ashore the island nation of Borinquen (now known as Puerto Rico) with designs to plunder the wealth and resources through the mechanism of colonization, there have always been those who have always resisted against it and that resistance has always come at a price.

The price that has been exacted from Dylcia Pagan has been high, higher than any of us can imagine. Dylcia is a former US held Puerto Rican Political Prisoner and Prisoner Of War. She was a member of the FALN, the Fuerzas Armadas Liberaciòn Naciònalistas – the Armed Forces of National Liberation. The FALN were a clandestine armed organization that believed that they were at war with the US government, who have been a colonial power in Puerto Rico since 1898. Shortly before Dylcia went underground she gave her newborn child to strangers who were sympathetic to the Puerto Rican independence movement to raise. Shortly after that she was arrested in Evanston Illinois and charged with seditious conspiracy and sentenced to 65 years. She would not see her son for ten years and she would not get out of prison for another 10 years after that.

The sacrifice that Dylcia made is not finite. The bond that was broken with her only son can be patched but never made whole, the 20 years she served in prison cannot be repaid. It’s a price she continues to pay because like Betances (the father of the Puerto Rican nation), she isn’t made to settle for injustice.

Struggle is a Weapon is a simple short film about Dylcia Pagan that i made a few years ago. Dylcia tells her own story in her own words… i’m in the process of trying to make another film that Dylcia has been a complete inspiration to… PAWNSHOP DREAM. We are trying to raise $5000 to make the film any help financially or spreading of the word is very much appreciated… For more info click here…

Struggle Is A Weapon A Short Film About Dylcia Pagan #nothingtobegainedhere #PAWNSHOPDREAM #DylciaPagan
nothingtobegainedhere.wordpress.com/2011/12/09/str…—
vagabond (@vgbnd) December 09, 2011

Pedro’s Got A Pipebomb Set For The 4th Of July

New MACHETERO Award poster by vagabond ©

“Pedro’s got a pipebomb set for the 4th of July.”
- from the song Pedro’s Grave by RICANSTRUCTION

My film MACHETERO was inspired by RICANSTRUCTION’s 1st album Liberation Day. It was that album that gave the film it’s structure. During the final mix of MACHETERO Arturo & Joseph Rodriguez the rhythm section of RICANSTRUCTION talked about the how their creative process in writing the songs on the album. In this interview they speak about Pedro’s Grave which opened Liberation Day and was incorporated into the film. After the interview is the scene in which Pedro’s Grave was used in MACHETERO.

Check out the trailer for MACHETERO below…

Pedro's Got A Pipebomb Set For The 4th Of July #MACHETERO #RICANSTRUCTION #nothingtobegainedhere http://fb.me/xm7rCStd—
vagabond (@vgbnd) July 04, 2011

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