MELISSA ROXAS & TWO OTHER COMPANIONS ABDUCTED BY ARROYO REGIME

Surface Filipino-American Activist Melissa Roxas Now!Share


Kuusela Hilo
BAYAN-USA Vice Chair
vicechair@bayanusa.org

Rhonda Ramiro
BAYAN-USA Secretary General
secgen@bayanusa.org

BAYAN-USA, an alliance of 14 Filipino American organizations and chapter of Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan Philippines), is calling on President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, the Department of National Defense, and the Armed Forces of the Philippines to immediately surface Melissa Roxas, an American citizen of Filipino descent who was abducted in the Philippines on May 19. BAYAN-USA also urgently calls on our representatives in the U.S. Congress to act quickly to ensure the safe return of Roxas.

Roxas is a well-known Filipino American activist, who served as the first Regional Coordinator of BAYAN-USA in Los Angeles and co-founded the cultural organization Habi Arts. Roxas is an active human rights advocate and was instrumental in organizing a BAYAN-USA contingent that participated in the International Solidarity Mission in 2005, an international fact finding mission that called attention to the escalating human rights violations in the Philippines. Roxas went to the Philippines in 2007 to pursue human rights work, where she became a full time volunteer health worker. She was abducted on May 19, 2009 at approximately 1:30 PM in Sitio Bagong Sikat, Barangay kapanikian, La Paz, Tarlac. She was with two other volunteers, Juanito Carabeo and John Edward Handoc.

Based on reports filed by the human rights group KARAPATAN and the La Paz police, Roxas and her companions were taken by at least 8 armed, hooded men riding two motorcycles and a Besta van without any license plate numbers. There has been no word on the whereabouts and condition of Roxas and her companions since the abduction. The circumstances of Roxas’ abduction typify the abductions and enforced disappearances of over 200 innocent civilians, allegedly last seen in the hands of suspected state security forces.

“We are deeply concerned about the abduction of Melissa Roxas, Juanito Carabeo and John Edward Handoc. We call for Melissa and her companions to be immediately surfaced unharmed,” said BAYAN-USA Secretary General Rhonda Ramiro. “We condemn the ongoing abductions and human rights violations that have been rampant under the Arroyo administration and victimized thousands of innocent people.”

The search for Roxas and her companions will be spearheaded by the human rights organization KARAPATAN, while BAYAN-USA, its member organizations, and allies will undertake an international campaign to exert pressure on the Arroyo government to surface Roxas. “We appeal to our elected officials, members of the Filipino American community, and all people in the U.S. who believe in human rights to take action to surface Melissa and her companions. Since we were founded in 2005, BAYAN-USA has campaigned ceaselessly for an end to the human rights violations in the Philippines, and we will not stop until we obtain justice for Melissa and all victims of human rights violations under Arroyo.”

IPAGPATULOY ANG PAKIKIBAKA NI KA BEL--HOMAGE TO CRISPIN BELTRAN, HERO OF THE PHILIPPINE REVOLUTION

PAMANA NI KASAMANG CRISPIN BELTRAN, BAYANI NG ANAK-PAWIS


ni E. San Juan, Jr.

Kinabukasang ligtas sa barbarismo ng Kapital –

Maari, Oo, pagkat ninanais, ninanasa, minimithi, pinapanaginip....

Sang-ayon kami, Ka Bel, kinakailangan ang binabagong daigdig

Na sumasalubong sa iyong pagtawid sa kabilang ibayo: Mabuhay ka!

2 NEW WORKS: In the Wake of Terror & U.S. Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines

NEWS RELEASE

TIMELY INTERVENTION IN THE CRISIS OF CAPITALIST GLOBALIZATION


Noted Filipino scholar E. SAN JUAN, JR. intervenes again in the urgent debates in racial conflicts and international relations with two scholarly works.

In the midst of the flag-waving lunacy afflicting the U.S. after 9/11 and the current racist war on national liberation struggles, San Juan seems to be a solitary "voice in the wilderness." His new collection of essays on cultural theory and comparative politics, IN THE WAKE OF TERROR: Class, Race, Nation, Ethnicity in the Postmodern World (Lexington Books), offers critiques of U.S. interventions and the destructive effects of globalized neoliberalism in culture and humanistic studies. It focuses on the dialectic of class, race and ethnicity in the context of global capitalism.

The other important work to be released by Palgrave Macmillan (local imprint by Anvil Publishing) this September is U.S. IMPERIALISM AND REVOLUTION IN THE PHILIPPINES. Here San Juan reviews the record of U.S. colonialism and neocolonial domination of the Philippines, centering on a critique of the ideological mechanisms of cultural and political control in imperial discourse and practices. The book contains documents on the human-rights violations of the Arroyo regime, including the verdict of the Permanent People’s Tribunal Session 2 at The Hague, Netherlands, last March 2007.

A Filipino resident in the U.S., San Juan is an internationally recognized cultural critic whose works have been translated into French, German, Russian, Chinese, Spanish, and other languages. San Juan's two previous books, Racial Formations/Critical Transformations (Humanity Books), now a classic in ethnic studies, and After Postcolonialism: Remapping Philippines-U.S. Confrontations (Rowman and Littlefield), won the Myers Human Rights Awards. He has also received a MELUS award and the Asian American Association Prize for distinguished contributions to the discipline of cultural studies.

San Juan was previously a Fulbright lecturer at the University of the Philippines, Ateneo de Manila University, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, and visiting lecturer at National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. San Juan’s previous works include The Philippine Temptation (Temple UP); Beyond Postcolonial Theory (Palgrave Macmillan), Racism and Cultural Studies (Duke UP); Working Through the Contradictions (Bucknell UP); and Himagsik (De La Salle UP). Available in the Philippines are:Allegories of Resistance; a re-issue of Toward a People’s Literature, and a new collection of poems, Sapagkat Iniibig Kita, all published by the University of the Philippines Press. Forthcoming are Balikbayang Sinta: An E. San Juan Reader (Ateneo U Press) and From Globalization Toward National Liberation (U.P. Press). San Juan taught at several universities, including the University of California, Brooklyn College of CUNY, University of Connecticut, and Washington State University. He was recently a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center at Bellagio, Italy; and a fellow of the W.E. B. Dubois Institute, Harvard University.


[ Released by PHILIPPINES CULTURAL STUDIES CENTER, 117 Davis Road, Storrs, CT 06268, USA ]

Review of E. SAN JUAN's book RACISM AND CULTURAL STUDIES (Duke U Press) by Prof. Azfar Hussain

On E. SAN JUAN's Racism and Cultural Studies (Duke University Press)

by Dr. Azfar Hussain



This is a superb, outstanding intervention not only in the domain of cultural studies as such, but also in the fields of ethnic studies, American studies, and even political economy. This book exemplarily demonstrates what an engaged, rather a fiercely mobilized, historical-materialist critique can do. Indeed, enacting a productive and even admirably militant dialectic among the political, the historical, and the theoretical, E. San Juan, Jr. doesn't merely challenge the dangerous culturalism of metropolitian cultural studies on the one hand and the economic determinism of traditional political economy on the other, San Juan also powerfully theorizes and accentuates a "permanent cultural revolution" against capitalism, imperialism, racism, and patriarchy--variously interconnected as they are today.

While I commend the richness and rigor and range of E. San Juan's undertaking, I also see a politically significant "tricontinentalist" (Che Guevara's term) dimension and direction in his book. For San Juan foregrounds a staggeringly wide constellation of emancipatory theories and practices from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, simultaneously engaging and ranging beyond their Anglo-American and European counterparts. He knows, of course, all the ins-and-outs of contemporary "post-al"--postmodernist-poststructuralist-postmarxist-postcolonial--theories and dogmas; but, more significantly, San Juan exemplarily mobilizes theorists-activists from the "third world"--say, for instance, from the Cuban Jose Marti to the Peruvian Jose Carlos Mariategui to the Filipino Jose Maria Sison, including others such as W.E. B Du Bois, Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, C. L. R. James, Maria Lorena Barros, Rigoberta Menchu, and Leslie Marmon Silko, to mention but a few. Indeed, the book challenges and unsettles the "West" as the dominant, privileged site of the production of theory and practice. I recommend the book to anyone interested in radical theory and practice today."

AFTER MAY DAY 2009--Video by E. San Juan, Jr.