ohn's bio
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Born in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, John Ross grew up in a
lively cultural ambiance informed by jazz, abstract expressionist painting, radical
politics, and Beat poetry. At 18, Ross was a younger member of the Beat Generation,
reading his poetry in Greenwich Village bars with the great bass player Charles
Mingus.
In 1957, Ross hit the road following the Beat trail that Burroughs and Kerouac and
Ginsberg et al had blazed to Mexico City. Soon he had taken up residence in an
indigenous community in the Meseta Purepecha of the state of Michoacan, where he grew
a garden, built himself a home, and sat down to write the Great American Novel.
Six years later when Ross returned to the United States, he was nabbed by the FBI and
incarcerated at Terminal Island federal penitentiary in San Pedro California for
refusal to report for induction in the U.S. Army, the first resister to be jailed for
refusing service in Vietnam.
In 2005, Ross returned to San Pedro to receive the American Civil Liberties Union's
annual "Uppie" (for Upton Sinclair) award for his penultimate cult classic "Murdered
by Capitalism – A Memoir of 150 Years of Life & Death on the U.S. Left."
During the 1960s, John Ross was active on many class war fronts - tenant organizing,
building anti-racist coalitions, and civil disobedience against the war - for which
he was regularly beaten and jailed by the San Francisco police.
In the early 1970s, the author stepped back from the barricades and took up freelance
journalism, reporting on environmental politics and social movements in California,
Spain, and North Africa. In 1984, he won a grant to investigate guerrilla formations
in the Andes, filing some of the first reports on Peru's Shining Path for Pacific
News Service.
Following the terrible September 1985 8.2 earthquake in Mexico City, Ross returned to
the city he first knew as a young Beat and took up residence in the old quarter or
"Centro Historico", the ancient Aztec island of Tenochtitlan, where he lives still.
Now the dean of foreign correspondents in Mexico, Ross continues to report for
Noticias Aliadas (Peru), the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and the Texas Observer, and
is a regular contributor to U.S. publications like the Progressive, the Nation, and
Counterpunch (on line), in addition to the Mexican Left daily La Jornada. Since 1996,
Ross has published a weekly newsletter now called Blindman's Buff (formerly Mexico
Barbaro.) His investigations into electoral fraud and human rights abuses in Mexico,
environmental carnage, and the struggles of Indians and farmers for justice have won
an assortment of awards down the years.
Since its earliest hour nearly 15 years ago now, Ross has accompanied the Zapatista
rebellion in Chiapas, breaking the story of the impending uprising in a small
northern California weekly weeks before it occurred, and writing four volumes
chronicling this unique indigenous movement - "Rebellion From the Roots" (American
Book Award winner 1995), "The Annexation of Mexico" (1998), "The War Against
Oblivion" (2001), and "Zapatistas! Making Another World Possible – Chronicles of
Resistance 2000-2006" published by Nation Books.
John Ross has written eight books of fiction and non-fiction. "Murdered By
Capitalism" (Nation Books 2004) is partially a personal history of 40 years on the
barricades of the Americas north and south, and partially the strange story of the U.
S. Left during the past century and a half. "(Murdered by Capitalism) is a rip-
snorting and honorable account of an outlaw tradition in American politics which too
seldom gets past the bouncers at the gates of our national narrative" wrote reclusive
novelist Thomas Pynchon of the work.
Ross has continued to pursue both his political and poetic concerns over the
decades. With ten chapbooks of poetry in and out of print, the latest of which
"Bomba!" is hot off the press from Calaca de Pelon, Ross continues to be an active
performer and spoken word artist, appearing recently with the Godfather of the Beats
Lawrence Ferlinghetti at both Bellas Artes in Mexico City and Lawrence's famed City
Lights Bookstore in San Francisco.
John Ross's continuing participation in the on-going resistance to Washington's
imperialist crusades has been congruent with his stance against the bloodletting in
Vietnam. On the eve of the U.S.invasion of Iraq in 2003, Ross was part of the Human
Shield brigade in Baghdad and later journeyed to Palestine where he was beaten
savagely by Israeli settlers while picking olives in the Nablus valley.
Now an elder in his seventh decade spinning around the planet, Ross does not consider
retiring as an active combatant in the worldwide struggle for peace and social
justice any time soon. "Movement is what keeps me alive" he tells friends and
comrades, "like the pensioners in Mexico say 'parar es morir' ('to stop is to die.')
I'm going to keep marching until I drop. I believe another world is possible."
From: The Annexation of Mexico
