When: Friday April 30 at 7:00 PM
Where: First Church in Jamaica Plain, UU 6 Eliot Street, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130


Speaker: John Ross

Author and activist John Ross has spent many years traveling and chronicling struggles for human rights in Mexico. He has written ten books of fiction and non-fiction. His latest volume “El Monstruo – Dread & Redemption in Mexico City”, a street-level peoples’ history of the most polluted, overcrowded, corrupt and crime-ridden megalopolis in the western world.

Covering 4,000,000,000 years of history from the primal broth that first spewed out the monster to the Aztec-Mexica oblivion through centuries of rapine and revolution all the way to the Great Swine Flu Panic of 2009, El Monstruo is a retelling of the story of Mexico City, with which Ross’s own history has become hopelessly entwined. Come join us for a presentation about the political times past and present in Mexico.

Reviews:
“Vividly impressionistic survey of a fascinating urban panorama,
El Monstruo makes for addictive reading.”
—Fort Worth Star-Telegram

“El Monstruo is a valentine to place and useful chronicle of an epoch that has seen Mexico’s people find their voice…
Ross’ quarter-century as witness does us the invaluable service of putting events to come in a context to understand them.”
—Denver Post

About the Speaker: John Ross is the author of the acclaimed memoir Murdered by Capitalism, which was praised by Thomas Pynchon and chosen as a San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year. Based in Mexico City for the last two decades, Ross’s reporting has appeared in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Nation, Texas Observer, and Counterpunch, to name a few. He is the winner of an Upton Sinclair Award and an American Book Award. His books include Rebellion from the Roots, The Annexation of Mexico and the novel Tonatiuh’s People.