Are You With Me?
Run time: 10min 59 sec
2011
Louis Reyes Rivera was a poet laureate, writer, educator, artist, activist and people’s historian of the CUNY movement. Rivera passed away on March 3, 2012. Our film is dedicated to him and the fire that he sparked.
We show Rivera in one of his last speeches at an intergenerational exchange between former and current CUNY student activists. The event was organized by Students United for a Free CUNY – on October 27, 2011 at the AME Church in the Bronx, New York. Intercut with students protests at Union Square as part of the Occupy Wall Street Day of Action on November 17, 2011.
"Louis Reyes Rivera, known as “the janitor of history,” is the type of person who we often allow to fall through the cracks of recorded “official” history, but whose memory is passed on through the African oral tradition."
Hank Wiliams