Author John Ross to Speak at NMSU Library
Date: 2001
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Jeanette Smith, NMSU Library, (575) 646-7492, jcsmith@lib.nmsu.edu
A presentation by John Ross, Mexican author/poet/correspondent/activist, will be held at NMSU’s Branson
Library at 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, January 30, 2001. The program, sponsored by the Library’s Southwest
and Border Research Center, will take place on Branson Library’s second floor west. Ross will speak
about his book, The War Against Oblivion – Zapatista Chronicles 1994-2000, the season-by-season sixand-
a-half year saga of the rebellion in Chiapas. Copies of the book will be available for purchase at
the program. The program is made possible by an American Library Association Reference and User
Services Association Facts on File Grant for current affairs programming.
The War Against Oblivion is the sequel to Ross’s Rebellion From the Roots, which won an American
Book Award. It seeks to fix the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in contemporary Mexican history.
Ross’s latest work speaks to the readers in many tongues: that of Subcomandante Marcos, the charismatic
rebel leader, the voices of the Zapatista villagers of the jungle and the highlands of Chiapas, the reporters
who have so doggedly covered this protracted conflict and the author’s own irrepressible gift of gab.
Mexico City-based John Ross is the author of The Annexation of Mexico —From the Aztecs to the IMF,
a political guidebook, In Focus Mexico and Tonatiuh’s People (Cinco Puntos Press 1999), a novel of the
Mexican cataclysm, in addition to the Chiapas-rooted works listed above. He is a working correspondent
whose dispatches appear regularly in the LA Weekly, Noticias Aliadas (Lima), and the Texas Observer.
A much-published poet with seven chapbooks in and out of print, Ross also issues a weekly electronic
insiders’ bulletin, Mexico Barbaro.
This program is a Special Collections Event of the NMSU Library. For more information, please call Molly
Molloy at 646-6931 or email mmolloy@lib.nmsu.edu.
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