Born in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan to proud members of the U.S. Communist Party, John Ross grew up in a lively cultural ambiance informed by jazz, abstract expressionist painting, radical politics, and Beat poetry – Ross was a younger member of the Beat Generation, reading his poetry in Greenwich Village bars with the great bass player Charles Mingus.

At 19, Ross set out on the road, following the Beat trail that Burroughs and Kerouac and Ginsberg had blazed to Mexico City. Soon he had separated from this U.S.-based literary movement taking up residence in an indigenous community in the Meseta Purepcha of the state of Michoacan

Six years later when John Ross returned to the United States, he was incarcerated by the FBI at Terminal Island federal penitentiary in San Pedro California for refusal to report for induction in the U.S. Army and became the first resister to be jailed for refusing service in Vietnam. In 2005, Ross returned to San Pedro to receive the American Civil Liberties Union's annual "Uppie" (for Upton Sinclair) award for his penultimate cult classic "Murdered by Capitalism – A Memoir of 150 Years of Life & Death on the U.S. Left.

Following the terrible September 1985 8.2 earthquake in Mexico City, Ross returned to the city he first knew as a young Beat and took up residence in the old quarter or "Centro Historico", the ancient Aztec island of Tenochtitlan, where he lives still. Now the dean of foreign correspondents in Mexico, Ross continues to report for Noticias Aliadas (Peru), the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and the Texas Observer, and is a regular contributor to U.S. monthlies like the Progressive, the Nation, and Counterpunch (on line), in addition to the Mexican Left daily La Jornada. His investigations into electoral fraud and human rights abuses in Mexico, environmental carnage, and the struggles of Indians and farmers have won various awards down the years.

Since its earliest hour 12 years ago, Ross has accompanied the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, breaking the story of the impending uprising in a small northern California weekly weeks before it occurred, and writing three volumes chronicling this unique indigenous movement - "Rebellion  From the Roots" (American Book Award winner 1995), "The Annexation of Mexico" (1998), and "The War Against Oblivion" (200.) His fourth volume ZAPATISTAS! Making Another World Possible – Chronicles of Resistance 2000-2006" is to be published by Nation Books this October

BOAVENTURA DE SOUSA SANTOS is Professor of Sociology, University of Coimbra (Portugal), Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Global Legal Scholar at the University of Warwick. He is director of the Center for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra and has written and published widely on the issues of globalization, sociology of law and the state, epistemology, social movements and the World Social Forum. He has been awarded several prizes, most recently the Science and Technology Prize of Mexico, 2010  and the Kalven Jr. Prize of the Law and Society Association, 2011. His most recent books in English include The Rise of the Global Left: The World Social Forum and Beyond (Zed Books, 2006); Democratizing Democracy: Beyond the Liberal Democratic Canon (Verso, 2005); Another Production is Possible: Beyond the Capitalist Canon (Verso, 2006); Another Knowledge is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies (Verso 2007); and Voices of the World (Verso 2010).

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