discovering the movement: the older generation

I mentioned that we visited a second library well the first one we visited was called popular library. This old man called jose was there, we found out later that he lives there. he had no english and we had no spanish so we communicated through the limmited writen french we both had. He understood that we were comrades and we interested in the Red and Black mag that we showed him. In the frustration of language jose called someone from the library collective who was orginally from the states. This Peter invited us to dinner later that night.

Jose showed us arround the archieves and we were in awe, books of material from around the world through out the 20th century. We saw our excitement and gave us bookmarks (apparently we were the first to get them!) and 2006 agenda´s from a book series the collective has put out. He also gave us more anarchist newspapers.

We left jose and headed over to peters for dinner. Peter is from the states, met his ex-wife in italy where he had a few children then they moved to argentina. Hes 18 year old daughter although is not confident with her english speaks very well, she talks to us about argentinian history and her plans to travel. Peter tells us more about both the popular movement and the anarchist community.

He is part of a local assembaly, he says at the hieght there were 160, but now there are only 40. He says yes his assembably has taken food from the government but they are still autonomous. He talks about how some anarchists are involved in specific anarchist groups, and others have "left" the community as such and are involved more in the local community groups.

The collective that runs the library have taken on a great project where they have put out a book series on biographies of anarchists. It is 4 groups together that have done this, a radical book store the library and 2 more. They have managed to get this books in street kiosks and in some bookstores around the city.

He is criticial of groups like OCL it seems for there over theorising and lack of action, yet he is friendly with them. He gave us a very different and friendly view of the anarchist movement. But more then that he spoke english!!!