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For more than half a century, Juan González has been eyewitness to countless major battles led by working people in the Americas. As a radical activist in the 1960s and 1970s with groups like the Young Lords, the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization and the African Liberation Support Committee, he urged working-class unity in the fight against racial oppression and colonialism. As a journalist, he covered major strikes in the U.S. and Latin America — the 1981 PATCO strike, general strikes in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico in the 1990s, the 2005 New York City transit strike, the resurrection of May Day by immigrant workers in 2016 — while also exposing the plight of maquila workers in Mexico and Central America, of U.S. workers thrown out of work by factory flight or sickened on the job by toxic chemicals. Juan recently talked about his decades defending and chronicling workers in a speech at CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! Audio and was authored by Democracy Now!.