Recognizing Excellence Benefit Dinner

The Puerto Rican Parade Committee of Chicago will host its 2012 Benefit Dinner on Saturday March 24, 5:30 p.m. at the Casa Puertorriqueña (1237 N. California Ave). The event is being hosted by Angel "Tito" Medina, President of the Puerto Rican Parade Committee of Chicago along with State Representative Luis Arroyo. The event will be keynoted by Congressman Luis Gutiérrez.  

Individual tickets can be purchased for $100.  To have your questions answered or to purchase tickets call (773) 292-1414.   

$200 left to raise. Donate now!   

As of Wednesday, March 21, the Kickstarter Project to fund the publication of the English translation of Oscar López Rivera: Between Torture and Resistance has raised $3281.00 out of $3500.00 needed to publish. 11 days are left to raise the remaining $200.00. Please go to the Kickstarter site (link at the end of the story) and donate what you can today. We must raise all of the money or we receive none of it. Between Torture and Resistance is the story of one of Latin America's longest-held political prisoners, a Puerto Rican pro-independence activist who was convicted of the political "crime" of seditious conspiracy, not of harming anyone. Lavishly illustrated with photos of his life and artwork (he has become a painter during his now over thirty years behind bars), the book is an easily accessible introduction to U.S.-Puerto Rico relations and contemporary prison issues.  

The IPRO team at IIT is continuing to work on a way to manage all the documents and items that are currently stored in boxes in the PRCC. The team has decided to organize the data by means of a system of tags. At this point, the team has come up with four main categories: Date, Organization, People and Events. In addition to that, a "+" has been incorporated to include words that may serve to define the title, medium, or any other aspects that are not included in the four main categories.

Recently, the team split into four subteams: the scanning team, digitizing team, tagging team and documenting team. The scanning and digitizing team will be responsible for scanning all the materials into the computer and also taking photographs of objects that cannot be digitized via a scanner. The tagging team will be responsible for tagging all the scanned material. The team has already started working on a test bed of material. Currently, they are working on defining and establishing a controlled vocabulary that could help create uniformity between tags across all documents. The documenting team will also be responsible for physically storing and organizing all the documentation that has already been digitized. The team plans on creating a prototype box that staff at the PRCC will be able to look at and assess for the remaining documents/items and future documents/items.

On March 18, 2012, VirtualBoricua had the honor of sitting in on a discussion with former political prisoner Carlos Alberto Torres during his historic return to New York City after a 40-year absence. In this first series of brief clips, Carlos talks about his early political development and becoming self-aware of his identity as a Puerto Rican nationalist. Carlos Alberto Torres eventually became a member of the Puerto Rican  independence movement and one of the longest-serving Puerto Rican political prisoners, left federal prison on July 25, 2010  a free man after serving 30 years for seditious conspiracy and lesser charges .  

Carlos Alberto Torres On His Political Development