<html><div style='background-color:'><P class=MsoNormal><FONT size=3>Native American Human Rights Activist and Vanguard Chicano Poet Raul Salinas to deliver poetry reading and share his life story connecting the political, social, and cultural struggle of Chicanos and Native Americans. </FONT></P>
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<P class=MsoNormal><FONT color=#ff0000 size=3>Sunday April 9th 8pm Fayerweather Hall room 115 (Pruyne Lecture Hall) Amherst College</FONT></P>
<P class=MsoNormal><BR><FONT size=3>Raul Salinas is a premier cultural pioneer of the Chicano literary, political, and intellectual movement. His involvement and activities with the American Indian Movement, The Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, Zapatista solidarity organizations, the prison rebellion movement in the 1960s, The Red Salmon barrio arts program in East Austin, Texas, and serving as the spokesperson for the International Indian Treaty Council where he represented indigenous people in Geneva, Nicaragua, Libya, Cuba, and Puerto Rico proves that he is one of the most active human rights activists around the issue of native peoples. Raul currently lives in Austin, TX and runs the Resistencia bookstore <SPAN style="COLOR: #333333">a neighborhood center for aspiring writers and a gathering place for activists<I>; </I>he is also</SPAN> a professor at St. Edwards University in
Austin, Texas. This year he released a Jazz CD with revolutionary saxophonist Fred Ho, one book of Poetry titled <I>Indio Trails: A Xicano Odyssey through Indian Country</I>, and one collection of his writings titled <I>raulsalinas and the jail machine: My weapon is my Pen. </I></FONT></P>
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<P class=MsoNormal><I><STRONG><FONT size=3>come out to show our respect for mr. raul salinas and to learn more about indigenous solidarity and Native American/Chicano struggles for self determination. </FONT></STRONG></I></P>
<P class=MsoNormal><FONT size=3>sponsored by the Chicano Caucus of Amherst College</FONT></P>
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<P class=MsoNormal>Biography: </P>
<P class=mainbody><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT color=#990000>Raul Salinas</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P class=mainbody><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT color=#000000>Living legend “el maestro” and “poet laureate of the East Side” Raul Salinas, at over 70 years of age (born March 17, 1934), is one of the preeminent poets of Chicano-Native American literature and a veteran revolutionary activist including the American Indian Movement, the Chicano Liberation Movement, the Prison Rebellion Movement, the U.S. Marxist-Leninist New Communist Movement as well as “jazz” criticism and political commentary. In 1957 he was sentenced to prison in Soledad State Prison in California. Over the span of the next 15 years, he spent 11 years behind the walls of state and federal penitentiaries. It was during his incarceration in some of the nation’s most brutal prison systems that Salinas’ social and political consciousness was intensified. </FONT></SPAN></P>
<P class=mainbody><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT color=#990000><FONT color=#000000>Since his release in 1972, Salinas has become a leading activist in the American Indian Movement and struggles of native Americans and Chicanos on an international level, all the while continuing to write innovative bilingual poetry infused with a unique hipster “jazz” sensibility as part of the great influence of the Beat writers and “jazz” musicians have had upon him. While many of the white Euro-American Beat writers have received recognition, Salinas along with several other important “writers of color” continue to be overlooked in historical accounts and anthologies of this merger of poetry, spoken word performance and “jazz” musical forms and cultural stances. Salinas continues to be a vanguard force in independent cultural production, running his own Red Salmon
Press and Resistencia Bookstore in Austin, TX, as well as a radical and revolutionary intellectual-artist-activist and Tenochtitlan Man (aka as “Renaissance Man” aka “Timbuktu Man” aka “Tang Man”, i.e., great world forces of intellectual and artistic dynamism).</FONT> </FONT></SPAN></P>
<P class=MsoNormal>“Born in San Antonio and raised on the streets of East Austin, Salinas has blazed through dungeons while captive, carried banners as a cultural worker alongside students and demonstrators, toured the world as an emissary of the native community and—all the while—heaved stunningly poetic words to the wind. Schooled among the highest echelons of streetspeak and the ultra-hip lexicons of jazz and blues, his earliest mentors were Bird & Diz, Monk and the Prez. Ultimately, Salinas became one of the several acknowledged pioneers, the vanguard, a granduncle, so to speak, of Chicano literature.”—</P><BR><BR><BR>
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<DIV><FONT face="Garamond, Times, Serif" size=5><STRONG>Eduardo Suárez</STRONG></FONT></DIV>
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<DIV><FONT face="Garamond, Times, Serif" color=#003399 size=3>223 Pelham Road</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Garamond, Times, Serif" color=#003399 size=3>Amherst, MA 01002</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Garamond, Times, Serif" color=#003399 size=3>413-253-0297</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Garamond, Times, Serif" color=#003399 size=3>cell-335-6224</FONT></DIV></FONT></DIV></FONT></FONT></DIV></FONT></div></html>