In June 1985, Diana Block, her two-week-old son, and five companions fled Los Angeles after finding a surveillance device in their car. Facing the possibility of arrest because of her militant activities in the struggle for Puerto Rican independence, Diana spent the next decade living underground: on the run from the FBI, raising two children, and juggling security, solidarity, and motherhood.
In a perfect demonstration that the personal is political, Diana’s memoir offers insights into efforts to build homegrown clandestine resistance to US imperialism. With emotional depth and a poetic style, the book brings a woman’s perspective to a subject typically dominated by heroic, male discourse. It also traces Diana’s political development on either side of her period underground, offering a history of the culture and politics of the 1960s and 1970s – especially the decisions that led many to take up arms against the US government – and an analysis of the political terrain of the 1990s, when she resurfaced and tried to reintegrate into a very different world.
Diana Block has been an activist for forty years. She has written for political journals and women’s magazines, and currently edits The Fire Inside, the newsletter of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners.
