Join us at 3:30pm on Sunday, January 28th at Iffy Books for the premier release of freshly published, The Blue Agave Revolution: Poetry of the Blind Rebel. Collaboratively written by indigenous anarchist political prisoner Oso Blanco and Michael Novick, The Blue Agave Revolution is a joint work of speculative/magical realist fiction containing tales of the Mexican Revolution, analyses of contemporary Indigenous struggle, engagement with the work of other political prisoners including Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Jessica Reznicek, art, poetry, and meditations about what struggles for freedom may look like in the future.
After introducing the book and hearing a piece from Oso Blanco himself, we’ll jump into a multimedia program on contemporary aspects of the Zapatista movement and other topics related to Oso Blanco’s wholehearted connections to indigenous autonomy in Turtle Island. We will be joined by author and journalist Scott Campbell to shed light on the role of Magonismo in the early Mexican revolution.
$20 suggested donation (includes a copy of the book). No one turned away for lack of funds, and cash donations are welcome too.
Remote participation is welcome! If you can’t make it in person, we’ll ship it to you so you can follow along while watching the livestream.
Don’t need a personal copy of the book, but want to support Oso Blanco’s work? donate and have your copy shipped ot a prisoner of your choosing or just write ‘donate to prisoner’ in the address field and we’ll select a recipient for you.
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Oso Blanco (Byron Shane Chubbuck) is a Cherokee/Choctaw poet, warrior, artist, activist, anarchist, and political prisoner. Originally charged with thirteen bank robberies between 1998 and 1999, Oso Blanco became known to the FBI as “Robin the Hood” after explaining to bank tellers that he was expropriating funds to assist the Zapatistas. He was arrested after an armed standoff with the FBI in 1999, but escaped in 2000 and expropriated about eight more banks, again sending the funds to poor and Indigenous people fighting for autonomy in Chiapas. He was captured again in 2001 after sustaining a gunshot wound to the chest, and sentenced to 80 years in prison. It estimated that in total he expropriated at least $165,000 from 20-22 banks. In 2016, he won an appeal - Johnson v. US - striking 25 years from his sentence. He now produces art and poetry from beyond bars, again to benefit children in the autonomous Zapatista zone of Chiapas and on reservations across Turtle Island. A curated selection of press and podcasts on Oso Blanco can be found here.
Scott Campbell is an author and journalist composing news and analysis on social movements and struggles, with an eye towards so-called Mexico. Scott writes and translates for It’s Going Down and El Enemigo Común.
Michael Novick is a Brooklyn-born veteran of SDS/Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, and 37 years of anti-fascist and anti-imperialist organizing with ARA-LA/PART. He is the publisher of Turning The Tide journal, author of White Lies White Power: The Fight Against White Supremacy & Reactionary Violence, and a contributing writer for many other publications including ¡No Pasarán!: Antifascist Dispatches from a World in Crisis.