John Ross--El Monstruo Dread and Redemption in Mexico City

mostruoEl Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City
A Book Reading/Signing with John Ross

John Ross—poet, journalist, and globetrotting troublemaker—has lived in Mexico City since the 1985 earthquake crushed out as many as 30,000 lives. Over the years, he has watched the city—El Monstruo—pick itself up, bury its dead, and come battling back. But he is filled with a gnawing unease that Mexico City's days as the most gargantuan, chaotic, crime-ridden, toxically contaminated urban stain in the Western world is doomed, that the monster he has grown to know and love through a quarter of a century of reporting on its foibles and tragedies and festering blight will be globalized into one more McCity.

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 phantasmagoric retelling of the story of Mexico City, with which Ross's own history has become hopelessly entwined.

johnJohn Ross is an author and journalist based in Mexico City for the last two decades. His reporting has appeared in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Nation, Texas Observer, and Counterpunch. 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, Zapatistas, Murdered by Capitalism and the novel Tonatiuh's People .