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Juan González at Rutgers University

New Brunswick, NJ

October 26, 2018 | Friday | 7:00 pm

Rutgers University

100 George Street
New Brunswick, NJ 08901 ( see map )
Juan González will moderate a conversation between Oscar López Rivera, the long-time Puerto Rican independence activist who was imprisoned for 36 years, and Puerto Rican scholars Ivonne Acosta-Lespier and Johanna Fernández.

The talk, which is part of the Puerto Rican Studies Association (PRSA) 13th Biennial Conference, is titled “The Myth of the Freely Chosen Status: Government Persecution of Puerto Rico’s Independence Movement.”

Oscar López Rivera
An advocate of Puerto Rican independence and former lead of the FALN (Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional), López Rivera spent 36 years in U.S. federal prison for “seditious conspiracy.” He was released in 2017, after international pressure convinced President Obama to commute his sentence.

Ivonne Acosta-Lespier
A Puerto Rican historian, Acosta-Lespier authored La Mordaza: Puerto Rico 1948-1957, the classic study of government repression in Puerto Rico during the 1950s. Now in its 5th edition in Spanish, the book has just been released in English.

Johanna Fernández
An assistant professor of history at Baruch College, Fernández filed a ground-breaking law suit that forced the New York Police Department’s release of more than 150 boxes of secret surveillance records it compiled on radical groups during the 1960s and 1970s.

Tickets
This event is free and open to the public. Register for the entire conference by clicking the link below. Get tickets
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Juan González

Juan gonzalez democracy now
Juan González has been a professional journalist for more than 40 years and was a staff columnist at the New York Daily News from 1987 to 2016. He is a two-time recipient of the George Polk Award for commentary (1998 and 2010) and was inducted into the Deadline Club’s New York Journalism Hall of Fame in 2015. A professor of Journalism and Media...