In Memory of Roberto Resto (1950-2010)

Last Monday (9/20) a car accident tragically took the life of our friend and comrade, Roberto Resto. On his way to an early morning doctor appointment, Roberto lost control of his car and crashed into a tree. It was his sixtieth birthday.

Everyone who knew Roberto (and now I comprehend, that’s a vaster population than I had ever imagined) on hearing the news, faced not only the sharp sense of devastating loss, but also a feeling of total surprise, even paradox. For Roberto suffered from--and carried on every day in spite of—manifold and overlapping afflictions: diabetes, heart surgery, Agent Orange exposure. He met them all with a stubborn cheerfulness and determination, which also characterized his political work, through the course of an eventful lifetime that touched an amazing number of people.

Roberto did all this, while at the same time raising and doting on his family. Surviving him are his wife,Iris Rivera, along with 5 children 9 grandchildren and one great grand-daughter.
We were lucky to have shared with them a portion of Roberto’s energy and enthusiasm.

Born in Puerto Rico, Roberto had lived in Rochester for about five years when we met in the course of actions around the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. He quickly joined the ISO, and became notable as a featured speaker in the early rallies and teach-ins against the war. He was a disabled veteran, wounded by a mine as a marine in Vietnam. On the podium he employed this moral authority to great effect, driving home his message of ardent anti-imperialism, delivered in such a direct and unassuming way no one ever dared challenge him.

Roberto already had considerable experience in mass struggles prior to meeting us in the Rochester ISO. After leaving the military in 1970, he studied first in New Jersey then obtained a degree in sociology from the Interamerican University of Puerto Rico. He became a participant in the protracted struggles of more than three hundred families who made up “Villa sin miedo” (village without fear), a land-rescue community (comunidad de rescadadores de terreno.” They established camp on unused land outside of San Juan and tried to set up permanent residences. But the government treated the families as illegal squatters, and in 1980 sent in 500 police to storm the makeshift village and demolish the homes. With the movement’s initial leadership in jail, Roberto stepped forward to help organize a campaign of resistance that eventually forced the Puerto Rican government’s hand, compelling them to grant the families another parcel of land where they could settle; there the Villa Sin Miedo, re-built, stands to this day.

One of Roberto’s most engaging qualities was the way he communicated a keen sense of the dignity and worth of ordinary working people, in everything he did. As he recounted years later in an interview at Villa Sin Miedo, “Poor people and colonized people need to free themselves from chains of subordination and develop an awareness of their own powers. The people here are beginning to speak up, make their own rule and regulations, govern themselves.”

In fact, wherever he was, Roberto appeared in the thick of struggles for social justice. If he happened to be visiting Puerto Rico, he would turn up at a blockade over the Navy’s bombardment of Vieques Island; or, as he did last May, at the student occupation of the University of Puerto Rico campuses. During the wonderful Immigrant Spring of 2006 with its huge and unprecedented marches, Roberto was key to organizing two separate Rochester demonstrations a month apart, each one drawing 800 marchers. Moreover, out of these mobilizations, he founded the Rochester Alliance for Immigrant Rights, a group which carried on organizing against the daily repression by Border Patrol and ICE agents.

Of course not all of Roberto’s demos were large. To him, the size was of little concern when a matter of principle was at stake, like our principled support for the struggle against US colonialism in Puerto Rico. Thus he organized Rochester’s protest at the Federal Building following the FBI’s assassination of Puerto Rican nationalist (Macheteros) leader Filoberto Ojeda Rios in September of 2005. And even though there were but a handful who responded to the call, and even though the rally program was no more than Roberto’s monologue into the bullhorn, we all counted it as a success, and exulted a bit in having faced down the ridiculous number of cops assigned to protect the building from us. Roberto brought the same intense commitment to making his political statement, regardless of the crowd’s size.

It was Roberto’s real talent to being able to reach out and work politically with practically anybody else, (though that’s not to say he would always be willing to try—he asserted his limits, and was quick to spot a phoney). He could be blunt to the point of discomfort, but he commanded people’s respect, by being completely friendly and open and unassuming.
He was a political omnivore whose feeding habits placed him at the intersection of numerous causes and actions. Beyond his longstanding work in antiwar efforts, immigrant rights and Puerto Rican liberation, he was a presence Palestine solidarity, LGBT rights, responding to police repression of the Latino community, solidarity with the Motts strike.

I guess what I treasure most in thinking of Roberto is how much he obviously enjoyed being a socialist: enmeshed in a set politics and struggles whose result is the self liberation of the people. He took seriously the need to train himself politically, and he was constantly trying out the lessons from whatever Marxist classic he happened to be reading, injecting them into whatever topic was under discussion whenever he thought appropriate. Sometimes these trials succeeded surprisingly well.
But whatever their success, Roberto saw himself entirely at home in the ISO, among this much younger, largely student crowd. He occasionally reminded me: “In this group I feel the same as everybody. It keeps me young.”

He had plans for staying healthy, in order to be ready for the struggles that he could see shaping up on the horizon. He described for me a minor triumph at managing to catch up on his ISR reading while walking on his treadmill.

Right now we are all feeling the abrupt, even terrifying sense of loss, that such a solid rock as Roberto is gone. It’s his example as a comrade, a friend, a grandfather… that will live on with us, and prove in time to be just as solid.

A Community Memorial is being planned for November
6th, 2010