2010

English follows...

Por el trabajo que hacemos, yo creo que ya es  tiempo de que  nos tomen en cuenta  y que hagan una ley  que nos ayude  a todos. Pues hay muchas personas que trabajan más  de la cuenta. Los empleadores prometen cierta cantidad  luego no les cumplen. Yo digo esto porque apenas unos días  atrás me entere de la ley que paso en Nueva York. Por fin se dieron cuenta que todos tenemos derechos.

Esta  es mi propia experiencia. Una vez alguien me contrato para limpiar su casa. Prometió pagarme  más de 100 dólares. Yo me sentí  feliz porque necesitaba  dinero para el gasto de mis hijos pero sentí  como si me hubiera  caído una lluvia de  hielo cuando me pago la siguiente vez Me dio la mitad de lo que  me prometió. Esta gente abusa porque somos personas sencillas. Ellos creen que porque somos amables no nos damos cuenta de sus abusos. Hay gente que tiene miedo de decir lo que los empleadores les hacen. Yo solo estoy esperando. ¿Qué piensa hacer esta persona conmigo? Pues  estoy trabajando para él. ¡Pero si no me paga lo que me prometió, yo tomare otras medidas. El no sabe que yo me  gradué  de defensora legal en LA RASA centro legal! ¡Se mis derechos!

Pero cuesta mucho. Se te hace muy difícil, no pagan tiempo extra, te dicen vas a cuidar niños y terminas hasta bañando al perro. Te quedas callado(a) porque muchas veces has tenido  una amistad,  con él o ella. Eso hace que se aprovechen de ti. Ya por favor  tenemos que perder el miedo y denunciemos a estos  patrones abusadores. ¡No nos demos por  vencidos! Luchemos para que aquí también haiga  una ley que nos proteja como a los trabajadores  domésticos de Nueva York que por 75 años lucharon para  lograr esta ley que es perfecta. Así ya no habría maltratos y abusos que lamentablemente mucha  gente sufre.

Hasta hoy  día  nadie lo sabe. Por miedo nunca le decimos a nadie. Preferimos callar y sufrir lo que nos pasa pues  a veces nuestra misma Rasa se burla de nosotros o nos conformamos con lo que nos dan siempre decimos algo es algo peor es nada. No es justo que esto siga pasando en nuestra ciudad. En ves que nos ayuden nos  discriminan, esto duele y no nos ayuda en nada. Por eso yo quiero que nos unamos para lograr una ley que nos proteja y nos beneficie a todos. Sigamos en la lucha, no nos demos por vencidos hasta lograr que  nuestro trabajo sea reconocido como cualquier otro trabajo. ¡Así que compañeros  a luchar!

Ingles sigue...

For the work that we do I think that it is time that we are acknowledged and a law be created that would help us all.  There are many people that are overworked. Employers are promising a certain pay but are not following through.  Just a few days ago I became aware of a law that was passed in New York.  Finally there was an acknowledgment that we all have rights. 

This is a story of one of my own experiences.  One day someone contracted me to clean their home.  They promised to pay me more than $100 dollars. I was filled with happiness because I needed the money to pay for expenses for my children.  When they ended up only paying me half of what they promised I felt as though a ice storm was falling on my head. These people abuse us because we are a simple people. They think that because we are nice people that we don't notice their abuse.  There are people who are afraid to talk about what their employers do to them. I am only waiting, and thinking 'What does this person think they will do with me?'. Well I am working for him, but if he doesn't pay me what was promised I will take other means to get the full amount.  He doesn't know that I graduated from a legal defense program at La Rasa Legal Center. I know my rights!

The work is very hard. There is no overtime pay, and when they tell you that you will be taking care of the kids, you end up washing the dogs.  A lot of times you stay quite, because a lot of times you are friends with her or him.  That is a way that they take advantage of you. It is time that we stop being scared and denounce these abusive bosses. Lets not give up! We must fight that here too they create a law that will protect us like the domestic workers in New York. For 75 years they fought for this law that in my opinion is perfect. With such a law there will be less mistreatment and abuses that unfortunately many people suffer from.  

To this day many people don't know of these abuses. And because of fear we don't tell anyone. We prefer to stay silenced and suffer through what happens to us. In some cases it is our own race that clowns on us. It is unjust that this continues to happen in our city. Instead of helping us they discriminate against us, this hurts and doesn't help us at all.  That is why I want us to unite to achieve a law that would protect us and benefit everyone.  We continue in the fight, we should not give up until we win the acknowledgment of our work like any other job. That is why friends we must fight!

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A ReVieWfoRtHErEVoLution  on POOR Magazine's new mural in San Francisco.

I took the bus down to the once down-parts, the they-used-to-be low-down parts; the dog town, formerly dirty down, formerly affordable rent parts of Mission. I climbed over the SROs, which have been almost pulverized beneath the tide of condo-lofts, lofty-condos, condo-TICs, ricky-ticky lofty boxes. I squeezed past the mocha-latte sucking poetry mafia in their faux-thriftstore chairs, in the wasteland of the Valencia cafes. I passed all the places that I used to know and was beginning to not know anymore, searched until I found POOR's powerful new mural filled with images and text of resistance, struggle and revolution on Clarion Alley. The first thing that returned to memory as I beheld it was my experience at the California State Summer School for the Arts (CSSSA). I was part of the writer's program; it was the only formal art training I had ever received. I can still vividly remember the way the writers were treated amid the other "real artists" of the school.

Dance was big, with the whip thin, tight-bodied ballerinas and big-bootied, dreadlocked afro-cuban students strutting around like they owned the place. And if any class of artist ruled there it was the visual artists, by sheer numbers, but also because when people thought "artist" what came to mind was always a pencil mustachioed painter with a flat frenchy hat, or a beatnik with a sketchbook, or some other flavor of visual art maker.

The writers were like poor relations; when people asked me why I was there and I said, "I'm a writer," blankness invariably settled over faces like steely curtains. The kinder ones furrowed their brows and exclaimed, "Oh! Is there a writing workshop here?" The less kind replied, "Huh. Writing isn't art, though, so why are you at an art school?"

CSSSA was also the place where I found counterculture. Talent and style were represented abundantly and at the time I was utterly taken with the newness of the scene in which I found myself, the ART scene. There were hippie kids, rastas, punks, gothics, metalheads, skaters, skins, surfers, emos, and even some hip-hoppers. At the time I thought it was the height of diversity, regardless of the fact that whatever the sub cultural flavor, the majority of the kids were white.

When I came home, it wasn't long before I threw away my Swatch watch and started constructing what I thought of as my personal statement out of found, bought and cast-off clothes and made jewelry. I still think of CSSSA with great nostalgia because it was the place where I first began to question the mainstream values instilled in me as a child. Needless to say, that questioning began the way it does for so many disaffected white suburban kids (although I was neither white nor suburban)...it began with aesthetics.

Luckily I never internalized the idea that writers aren't artists. I grew up writing, and now that I write with POOR I get to combine my art, my writing and my tremendous dissatisfaction with the way things are in this society in which we live. I have interviewed the D.A; I have done articles slamming the SF Department of Human Services, hellthcare, and SROs. I am comfortable with my writing life, and I am accustomed to, if not accepting of, being enraged by the way social injustice plays out in the mainstream and in the media.

I have shed my black eyeliner and goth velvet for jump drives and a laptop. But this is not to say that I do not occasionally miss the satisfaction of crafting a "look" and being completely certain that it stands as my manifesto. I could never go back to that brand of shallowness, but I couldn't help remembering the relative simplicity of it as I thought about the POOR Magazine mural project in Clarion Alley.

Clarion Alley is famous in the semi-obscure way local art projects can become when they get tied to activism in just the right way. The Clarion Alley Mural Project seems to have begun as a way for native, indigenous, and default-gentrifier artists who lived in the Mission in the late 20th century to simultaneously mourn, mark and resist the homogenizing effects of the full-scale gentrification that kicked into play in the Mission at that time.

Until the subject of the mural came up at POOR, I had no idea that the alley was famous for anything but the cool parties that "organizers" have been throwing since 2002. I have always assumed that an anti-gentrification stance is by definition pro-neighborhood if you're talking about neighborhoods being gentrified, but the first Clarion Alley party I ever attended looked nothing like the neighborhood that hosted it.

I remember walking alone into a bunch of mostly white hipster kids. I remember hanging at the party for two hours, drinking exactly 4 beers, and never being spoken to or approached, barely even looked at by anyone. Hardly the Mission I knew outside of the alley. Everyone seemed so...cliquish.

It was neo-hipster artsy default gentrifiers at their finest; everyone dressed in such very similar ways that it had me wondering if we were violating any gang-injunction regulations by gathering...Old sneakers, boots, tattoos and thrift store finery; it was art-school lite all over again.

I felt at that party just as Tiny, our executive director and poverty scholar in residence at POOR, and her mama Dee felt for years living as poor artists in the Bay Area.

"As poor artists who attempted to gain access to 'the art scene' in San Francisco but who could not afford to pay tuition at SF State, let alone at one of the private art schools here in the Bay Area, my mom and I always felt like outsiders on Clarion Alley," said Tiny. However, she sees the POOR Magazine mural as penetrating the privilege divide that was only made possible by the access of local artist, Caitlin Seana.

"It was interesting to have Caitlin, the artist who got us into the alley and who in many ways represents the often-exclusive art world, show so much empathy and understanding about why it was not only important, but crucial, to have POOR in the alley, a space that, though hyped mostly by children of middle class privilege, still positions itself as at the heart of resistance to the gentrification of a traditionally working class/poor neighborhood...and because she, as a member of that privileged art school world, is the conduit, the mural would not have happened without her," said Tiny.

Mural space on Clarion is extremely hard to come by, due to the popularity of the venue; Caitlin was given space because she helps organize the mural-painting part of the Clarion Alley event.

"I wanted to make [my mural space] something bigger than just a personal statement," said Caitlin, who describes her murals as message boards and not just beautification. "I wanted to bring POOR Magazine to the wall to show people that there are roots in this city of dope people doing amazing things to affect change in original ways…offering a mural was my way of supporting POOR and honoring the work that you all do," said Caitlin.

A slender, beautiful twenty-five year old who majored in conceptual art at SF State and graduated in 2001, Caitlin is privileged in that she has had an encouraging, loving family and access to a better than average education and a reasonable amount of material stability. She is aware of how POOR has been heavily influenced by both "high" and "popular" art theory and practice through co-founders Tiny and Dee, who began their revolutionary art careers staging performance pieces after auditing art classes at State because they could not afford tuition.

"I'd been hearing dee and tiny speak on the radio throughout the past few years and I always appreciated their style of journalism and their relevance to issues San Francisco citizens face. I like the way that they would be serious and upbeat, expressing complex ideas in a straightforward manner, and maintaining a certain sense of artistry throughout it all. I admire the theatre and outreach work that they do," said Caitlin.

The entirety of Clarion is located between Mission and Valencia, with 17th and 18th streets running parallel on either side. If one looks to the west while standing on the alley, one can see the Mission precinct cop shop squatting like a smooth, watchful concrete and tile gargoyle on the other side of Valencia. Our mural site rests in the body of the Community Thrift building, one of the district's most venerable old nonprofit thrift stores.

Oddly enough, directly facing the mural is a wonderful example of the kind of pseudo-"loft" condominium development that has spread like a bauhaus cancer throughout the Mission since the late 1990's, displacing thousands of working class and poor individuals and families from their homes, and even lower middle class default – colonizer artsy white kids, as they are built.

This placement is addressed in the mural, of course; in the middle left side there are dirty yellow bulldozers demolishing houses with magically real, frightened looking faces. One of these houses is occupied by a family; rather than having a face, two small figures, obviously children, stand in the arms of a longhaired silhouette on the upper floor, and another figure stands at the window on the ground floor. The word "eviction" is drawn in block letters across the front door. The grim action of the bulldozers takes place in the shadow of ticky-tacky high-rise boxes that have the exact same degenerate-Santa Fe color-scheme of the life-size condo-box "loft" development that glowers at the mural from across the alley. On the bottom-left is a developer in a dirt-colored suit holding a deed that says "condos for money."

The figures that dominate the mural are two of POOR's key mythic heroic characters, Superbabymama and El Mosquito. Superbabymama is our saint of the spoken truth; with her mic in hand she guards the way to the right. El Mosquito is our vengeful angel, wings thrown back in a ready posture; his left hand crushes a Lennar truck as it wreaks havoc on the wrecking ball and the bulldozers that are poised to take out the cluster of frightened houses, and his right hand holds a skull as it beckons to the observer. In keeping with POOR's practice of honoring the everyday poverty hero/heroine, these two ferocious sentinels are gatekeepers to the road that takes la gente out of the hells of oppressive anti- poverty laws, cruel urban profiteering and murderous gentrification.

The road is depicted in a vibrant orange, lined with people because POOR believes that it is the people, our community, that will ultimately give us the strength and support to free ourselves. The orange road cuts straight through the center of the mural, sewn with words and leading the eye out of the chaos of words and struggle imagery into cool green hills and sky-blue sky that seems to bleed off the high side of the building and into the actual air of the day.

On the top left side of the road is "the house that POOR built," a rainbow-hued compound of strong, warehouse-type buildings that represent all the programs and projects that POOR offers. On the top right is a San Francisco cityscape. On either side of the orange road, where it tapers off into the dream hills, there are crowds of people welcoming travelers coming to them off of the way. And above it all, the twin banners of POOR Magazine and Homefulness seem to ripple and shelter the magical scenes under blood-red wings.

Our mural is not neat or pretty or polished. Our images are not idealized; they are obviously a reflection of our ongoing struggles with The Way Things Are as far as human rights like housing being sacrificed to a wider margin of profit, in San Francisco and everywhere. Other murals on Clarion use text, but our text is crawling, swarming, kinetic, like a barrage of ideas that may not be comfortable but are ignored at the peril of the thinking person.

Addressing poverty, racism, disability and gentrification through art and writing is something we've always done at POOR as a form of education and resistance. Our mural continues this tradition as it was created by the community members that are themselves dealing with gentrification, eviction and displacement, which in and of itself is an act of resistance.

Caitlin herself feels art and activism can change the course of action, as she says, "Gentrification can be resisted with radical art and organized movements, whether we do punk parades, outdoor teach-ins or benefits to pay for eviction trials."

In my opinion, radical art is only as radical as the message that gets through, and for me, attending that summer art program and willfully taking control of my personal aesthetic was my first step toward a rebellion, a dissatisfaction, which would eventually help shape my entire outlook, including my political stance.

But effective activism cannot be rooted in, say, colored hair and ripped clothes alone; a picture is seldom worth a thousand words, and a benefit to pay for an eviction trial must not stop at just one show, one reading, or one art sale to stop the only the warehouse-gallery where all the artkids go to look at each others' latest from being converted into a TIC.

In a 2002 SF Bay Guardian article, Glen Hefland generated a new term to describe the mostly art school trained, mostly privileged white-dominated art scene of the Mission: he called it, "the Mission school." To me this "school" represents colonization and thievery of land and housing.

The POOR Magazine mural is at once, a piece of multi-layered public art that resides in the eye of the needle of the undeclared war of gentrification on poor people and peoples of color in the mission and as well, lives in a place that we kicked out poor folks can't. And, by its residence there, it is not a cutesy, palatable, snack of culture and real-ness, like a tour to the Natural History Museum or the zoo, but rather, a powerful form of resistance and an offensive attack on the rampant gentrification and displacement of that neighborhood through a very public form of art.

District 6 Mission PEOPLE's Debate part 2

“Unemployed workers are lazy welfare queens,” said Sharon Angle, running for Senate in Nevada under the Tea Party, in one of her many speeches laced with vitriol and hate for families living in poverty in the US.

From New York to California, from Sharon Angle to Meg Whitman, the running theme of hundreds of political campaigns supported by the so-called, Tea Party and their Republican counterparts is Hate. Hate for us poor mamas, poor people of color, poor families and im/migrants.

“I will end the welfare system as we know it and I will crack down on sanctuary cities for immigrants,” said Meg Whitman, a billionaire Republican who is running for Governor of California. She and others have built their campaign on a perceived base-line of racist and classist hate that exists in the US for poor folks and immigrants and people of color, which, even if this perceived hate isn’t actually there, is fueled by a constant stream of disinformation and lies that rolls, unchecked, through US corporate-owned media and out of the mouths of corporate politricians.

“Instead of handing out welfare checks, we’ll teach people how to earn their check, we’ll teach them personal hygiene. In New York, the Tea Party has a candidate running on a platform riddled with myths and lies about poor families and the measly subsidies we get. Paladino has proposed to transform New York prisons into dormitories for welfare recipients, to teach us “hygiene” so we can get “work” for our checks. Again, either because of his own ignorance and arrogance and/or to cede the base-line fascism of the US, he fails to mention that us poor parents who receive the tiny amount of cash aid from the State always have to “work” for that subsidy through the welfare to work program, work we have done for years, there is in fact no “free money” in the US scarcity models of welfare.

From calling migrants “terrorists” like Angle has done many times to claiming that we need to incarcerate illegals for just that being “illegal”, like Whitman has said many times, all of the Tea Party and Republican candidates have consistently used immigrants of color to cede hate and a perceived racism that apparently lurks everywhere in the US. But does it? Is this overt racism and hate for the poor really here? Or is crafted like a well-oiled hitlerian machine meant to birth a national hate towards someone, anyone, as long as its not the corporations who keep stealing our resources, killing families and poisoning land across pachamama (mother earth)

"You are the reason, Arnold Schwarzenegger is in office," my welfare case worker spitted out to me through clenched teeth in one of my food stamps evaluation meetings.My already sad heart dropped to the floor as the words tumbled angrily from her lips. I'm not sure why she said this to me, maybe for no reason except to make me feel like less than the gum on the bottom of my shoe and/or to make her feel a moment of hegemony-fueled power. But as i watch the current batch of politicians top each other with hate speech for the poor, I continue to wonder how hate became political currency in the US.

"There but the grace of god go I," goes the old saying my mama used to say to me about folks sleeping on the street below our run-down East LA apartment window. Then, after my mama became disabled, unemployed and without resources, there we were, on the street, in our car, sleeping on top of all of our clothes, being viewed as trash, bums, lazy, and all the other ways peoples are stereotyped and silenced with words and names and casual hate.

What i do know is one of the reasons Whitman, Paul, Paladino, Angle and O’Donnell and all of the Tea party/Republican members continue to use poor mothers and children and immigrants is because they can. Because we don’t own Clear Channel or You-Tube, NBC, ABC, FOX. or the New York Times. We don’t own the channels of information and access and so we can be easily lied about, talked about, disrespected with hateful impunity.

“We want to make all of California a sanctuary state,” said Carlos Alvarez, the un-heard gubernatorial candidate of the Peace and Freedom party in response to a question by me in a recent interview on PoorNewsNetwork, on their proposed policies on im/migration.

Not only are the “other” candidates, i.e, candidates not running on hate or millions of dollar campaigns, shut out and silenced, sometimes they are even arrested like Laura Wells of the green party when she attempted to attend the billionaires club debate of Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman. Which is why the inclusion of Jimmy McMillan of the Rent is too damn high party, in a recent debate in New York was so revolutionary.

“Landlords we are coming to get you,” since his recent involvement in the debate, Jimmy McMillan has raised money and gained massive popularity across the country, which leaves me thinking that the deep racism, classism and hate that fuels the Tea Party, is based on the ongoing exclusion and silencing of truth, and true voices in the US.

Which is why I, a poor mama, who has been called a welfare queen, lazy, trash, and all kinds of other classist and racist slurs, and have spent my life making sure that my voice and that of my fellow poor folks, are not only heard, but listened to, recognized and included, have a proposal. I think that we should re-name the euphemistically titled Tea party and all their Republicrat friends and supporters, The Hater party. And if goddess forbid, they win a majority rule in the Senate and Congress, the US should be known for the next four years as Haternation.

Tiny is a teacher, multi–media producer, and author of Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America, published by City Lights and the co-editor and co-madre of POOR Magazine/PNN

Community of poor mothers and children in San Francisco’s Mission district is gone due to $700 dollar rent increase fueled by gentrification

(Co-edited by Tony Robles)

“What is the moon saying tonight, Mama?” My son looks into my face as I gaze into the face of the moon.  The moon’s voice travels like a whisper into my heart.

It was bedtime and my son and I were going through our nightly ritual of gazing at the moon, talking-story, reading, and naming our blessings and spirits from the rectangle window in our tiny bedroom . As someone who grew up houseless, rarely sheltered by a roof, much less a window, these moments were filled with gratitude, love and humility, always certain that our impending houselessness lurked silently around the next shaky rental agreement.

I no longer live within the soft wood frame of that house I was served with a rent increase of $700 dollars two months ago. But of course, the house never belonged to me. I only rented it. Lingered with trepidation within its bright long walls.

And so me, my son and the other poor mamas and countless children that co-habitated together  in that house we dubbed Mamahouse, sharing food, stories, resources, art, support, liberation and social justice consciousness in the Mission district of San Francisco, no longer dream, think, rest or live there.

The Herstory of Mamahouse

Mamahouse, the rented, smaller vision of the sweat-equity co-housing, dream that is Homefulness. Mamahouse, the revolutionary concept and project launched by my mama dee and me so many years ago, as a collective for mothers and children in poverty. A place to live and resist the deep isolation that kills the spirits of so many people in a capitalist society, combat the discrimination that impacts poor single parents of color, and provide peer support and scholarship for the struggle of raising a child in this society that never supports poor parents, much-less any parents, and has effectively separated our elders and ancestors from our  young folks.

Mamahouse has always worked, even as capitalism hasn’t. In its first incarnation Mamahouse existed within a tiny one bedroom apartment in the Tenderloin district, launched by a revolutionary slice of philanthro-pimped dollars, meant solely for a series of writing workshops with youth, adults and elders in poverty and the publication of Volume 1 of POOR Magazine, which was called HOMEFULNESS. The workshops and publication were done with great success, at which point my revolutionary, community driven, always tortured by capitalism, indigenous Taino, single mama of color in poverty, Dee, announced in an act of change-By-Any-Means-Necessary!, “let’s realize the dream of Homefulness beyond the pages, otherwise we may never see it happen.”

My beautiful and sad mama, tortured as an unwanted child of color in Amerikkka foster homes and orphanages, stripped, separated and devoid of her indigenous family, culture, language and community, never took anything for granted. She  always knew, like all us po’ folks know, that if you ever have any access, or money, that there is absolutely no guarantee that it will continue to be there, or continue to flow, no matter how hard you pull up your bootstraps, or dream the only-in-sleep-Amerikkkan Dream.  

As a Taino- Boricua-African-Irish, Roma and half-kkkolonizer human, I have lived my life in the ways of our elders, the indigenous way. When I was 11 my mama became disabled from her life of deep struggle with violence, racism and poverty. I had to drop out of school in the 6th grade to take care of her and start working in different underground economies. We struggled in and out of homelessness for the duration of my child-hood and into my young adult-hood. And as soon as we had a few resources to realize any dreams of counter-capitalism-separate-ness we did.

It was never easy, we were never supported in our efforts, but we knew if we were to infiltrate the destruction of capitalist separatism in real time, in our own lives, as a poor single mama of color and daughter, with no extended family or community, it was necessary that we act fast and act revolutionarily.

I lived as a “good daughter” with my ghetto-fabulous mama creating art, revolution and as much community as our resource poor, POOR Magazine family could cobble together, until she passed on her spirit journey in March of 2006.

I work so hard in my mind and heart everyday to not take my son through the sorrow of loneliness, desperation and poverty that me and my mama felt for so many  years. Isolation kills. Capitalism promotes isolation and the cult of independence and separation. Our barometer for sanity is based on how “happy” we can be while being alone, separate from others and at peace with our solitude.

Western psycho-therapists prescribe deadly drugs to help us be ok and happy and “sane” with our “alone-ness”. Hyper-consumer culture sells us constantly on the products that help us find independence, safety and security in our alone-ness. We are sold on the ghettoization of senior housing which “safely” houses our beautiful elders and securely archives, buries alive and forever silences their robust and deep and complex human souls. Away.

The tenderloin Mamahouse circa 1998 successfully housed two landless indigenous families, ran beautiful community dinners and art events, and silly moments of love and indigenous justice in real time.

We had to end it one year later, due to no more funding. Sadly, capital campaigns (property acquisitions) are usually only launched and realized by already wealthy organizations and individuals who have access to long ago stolen-from indigenous peoples U.S. resources.

In 2005, after a series of very serious organizational and personal losses at POOR Magazine, (organizational and personal lives are naturally enmeshed as a natural part of revolutionary poor people-led/indigenous people-led organizations like ours), I founded the next series of Mamahouses, this one in a substandard house in the Mission District, shared with many non-paying tenants with tails and feathers and wings and antennae’s, these un-seen tenants facilitated the only truly affordable market rate housing in the brutally gentrified mission district of San Francisco.

In 2007, the slumlord from hell of this Mamahouse actually set fire to her own property to rid her building of “problem tenants” like us mamas and children, in other words, tenants that tried to get her to fix the plumbing and rid the house of the serious rat, roach and pigeon infestation, proving one of my other theories, that poor folks who want/need to stay have to take sub-standard dangerous conditions like mold, insect infestation and asbestos, even if it kills us, just to remain housed.

Which brought us to Mama-house – the Gentrification Palace – an unbelievably beautiful place with shining floors and spacious rooms and a back-yard out of the pages of a glossy magazine, only affordable to us poor mamaz, because one of the mamaz had a housing subsidy..

“Mama can we stay here forever?,” My son would say while we lived within its serene structure with multiple other mamaz in and out of crisis, several children, a houseless family member or two and birds, cats and even a little dog, sharing stories, dreams, ideas and equity, crafting complex future plans for Homefulness’s truly shared equity and food localization and a micro-business economic self-sustainability model .

And then one day it was over. The slice of paper hung flimsily from the grand blue oak door. 60 Day NOTICE. Its words, slashing across the page, dripped with ancient blood of conquistadors, missionaries, real estate speculators, mortgage brokers, developers, and benevolent land-lords. My relationship with its beauty. Its never-really mine- stability. Its community with other mamaz and families, life-breathing support and love, was gone.

On our last day at Mama-house, all of us indigenous mamaz, brothers, sons, daughters, uncles, aunties, grandmothers and grandfathers huddled together, our abuelita pictures, icons and spirits from our mama altars, our clothing, stuffies, beds, desks, chairs, wastebaskets, feathers, icons, beads, shoes and toys strewn across the sidewalk, scattered from the wind-less hurricane of deadly gentrification and displacement, while default gentrifyers raced by to get $4.00 free-trade, organic, coffee and raw, vegan donuts at the plethora of blond wood filled cafes and $100 artist/designer dresses at the new, “underground” clothing stores beginning to fill up all the store-fronts in our inner-mission neighborhood.

My eyes cry tears of untold evictions and displacement of communities—of children and elders--faces that are left in faded murals to be covered in sheets of cold white paint or brushed over by the whimsical brush strokes of hipster/artists that have no respect for the neighborhoods they gentrify.

As the rays of warm mission sun began to slip away through our beloved, no longer-ours, front yard tree, all us mamas and children were still pulling thing after tragic thing out of unseen crevasses in the house.

All of sudden, my son, perched on a box full of his complete collection of legos, looked up at me, tilting his head to the side and holding back tears, “Mama, its ok, I just figured it out, we are going to move to Homefulness after this, and then we will all be ok.”

To this day my son and I are still houseless, we have bounced in and out of different temporary living situations all over the Bay and although I no longer live in the neighborhood, I still inhabit it on the margins, driving past my street, glancing at the just painted front steps, the newly planted flowers in the front yard, dreaming of the sounds, the love, the times spent in community there, lingering within its inside-ness.  Remembering, always recollecting the words of the Po’ Poet Laureate of POOR Magazine, A. Faye Hicks, “When us po folk are evicted we don’t always leave the neighborhood, we just move into the sidewalk hotels, the card-board hotels, the street..

HOUSING FIRST: IF YOU BUILD IT THEY WILL COME ISN'T JUST A SLOGAN

PNNscholar1 - Posted on 08 August 2010

By Bruce Allison and Thornton Kimes
San Francisco has a “Housing First” policy. The (very extended) Patel
family, which owns the vast majority of SRO hotel (Single Room
Occupancy: a.k.a. Poor People Housing) properties in the city, is
spitting in our faces by leaving SRO’s vacant for years. There is one
in the Mission (22nd and Mission, above the Ritmo music store, with 40
units), and one in SOMA—the already earthquake code-improved 100-200
unit four-story Chronicle Hotel (across the street from the
newspaper!) and the retail space under it.
Housing in the city translates into money spent in the city, including
jobs for people staffing SRO hotels; of course, getting the empty
Patel spaces clean and useable as living spaces would also generate
those oh-so-wonderful short-term (a.k.a. temporary) jobs the “job
creators” love to talk about (contractor stuff, construction…) too.
The SRO in the Mission only needs $500,000 (current costs) to be
returned to service. The electrical wiring is up to code. Sinks and
bathrooms would need to be installed. The SOMA space, abandoned for 20
years, used to have a blood plasma donation center on the ground
floor. Bruce and Thornton remember it well. A lot more money would
need to be sunk into it to make it liveable.
City services, funded by local, state, and federal taxes, would not be
strained by an effort made to maximize housing for poor people, the
tax base would be improved by it. This modest proposal would take
approximately 200 people off the streets. More would be better.

*Note from POOR Magazine Co-Editor Tony Robles

This fantastic poem was written by my cousin Kyra Bowes, a youth scholar living in New Jersey.  Kyra is a poet, songwriter, and dancer. She and her mother Leslie Yngojo-Bowes visited POOR Magazine recently.  Kyra  graciously demonstrated her dancing to our children in POOR Magazine's Family project.  The children followed her moves, step building upon step--flowing beautifully to the music coming from not only the radio, but from our ancestors who live in our sacred space at POOR Magazine--including the spirit of our Uncle Al, whose presence is strong.   I am very proud of Kyra. Her poem demonstrates the values of POOR Magazine:  honoring family, eldership and remembering--values that come from poetry, the life's blood of POOR Magazine.

I am From

By Kyra Bowes

Camping trips

And shopping sprees.

Soccer games

And tennis tourneys.

Dancing

Singing

Writing,

That’s me.

Drawing every little thing I see.

I am from a great line of activists.

Half are peacemakers.

And others use iron fists.

Travelers from around the world.

Coming here to speak their voice.

Having to make their own right choice.

I come from Veterans.

Accountants.

And activists.

Dancers.

Singers.

And artists.

In blood their talents sit.

In my heart, their light is lit.

They’ve lead.

Sang.

Danced.

And inspired the world.

From Germany to England.

From China to Japan.

Spain to The Philippines.

Around the world, it seems I’ve seen.

Traditions from all over.

Joining my cousins playing red rover.

Houses painted white.

With little picket fences.

Barns on a field.

With animals trotting the grounds.

I am from sayings like

“Stand up for what’s right.”

To

“No texting past midnight.”

From my brother yelling

“No dating till eighty-five.”

To my daddy saying

“Take a risk, learn how to dive.”

My great Uncle, may he rest in peace.

“Don’t cry for me.

Don’t think I am gone.

I am here, for whatever is right and wrong.

I am not dead.

For I am still living,

In your hearts,

And mind,

And soul.”

I come from a symbolized family.

Gay rights and the lord.

Farmers driving tractors.

Others in a ford.

I come from hard wooden-floors.

With a red little rug.

In the cabinets,

You’d see a “#1 Daddy” mug.

This is who I am.

This is how my family is and forever will be.

If you don’t like them.

Then you don’t like me(:

Happy Birthday Ray Charles

Happy Birthday Ray Charles.  I miss u!

Human Spirit

Today we are a witness to the spirit of human kind
we watch it rise and burst forth at least thirty three times
From a pit, into the Fenix, began a journey a half mile long
To the surface, to their family, to the beginning of their new song.

We all are

Chilean for the day

The men to our amazement are fit and full of vigor
As if something mysterious has shot them out
with a life-sustaining trigger
Some shout, some chant, some kneel to pray
In their own unique sort of way
And we find that we just can’t help but be

Chilean for the day

Their eyes are shielded from their first
exposure to the sun
Their lives on hold, but now rebirthed, are far from being done
Their paths are changed, but so are ours
We watch, we hope, we pray
And we find that we just can't help but be

Chilean for the day

Editor's note:  Florence Mayberry is a mountain scholar currently living in Hendersonville, North Carolina.  She is the mother of POOR Magazine co-editor Tony Robles.  Afro Celtic dreamer whose poems flow from the mountains, quenching the roots and travelling across the maps lashed onto the backs of the poor who came across the Atlantic.  Her stories honor those who came before us.

The Redefining of Hip Hop: Gay & Disabled Artists Speak Up And Out!

Get Rich

By Revolutionary Worker Scholar

It was the last day of my security guard job. I had a stain in the collar of my blue shirt that refused to come out and the scent that a skunk shared with me during my nightly bike ride home 5 months ago still lingered on my fur (fake) lined security officer’s jacket.

The property I’d been paid to protect was the "Land O’ Lakes Apartment Complex". I’d been at the Lakes for a year and a half. I remembered the bike rides home at 1am. It was good exercise but it wore me down over time (The bus service in the area was cut leaving me no other choice but the bike). I recalled the near misses I’d had with animals on the way home. I nearly ran over a raccoon as I headed from Skyline towards Sloat. He froze and I swerved, almost hitting a pole.  One evening a coyote ran alongside me as i pumped my bike.  "Are they hiring at your company?" he asked.  I looked at him and told him that the best thing he could do was be a coyote and keep howling at the moon.  He said i was chickenshit but not before I tossed him half a sandwich.  Another time, I almost hit an opossum. He, like the raccoon, froze. It was almost as if the opossum was daring me to run him over. Again, I swerved.  

I’d been trying to get out of security since I got hired nearly 2 years ago. I sent out many resumes and got only a few responses. In the bad economy, people are selling themselves out in record numbers. I applied at non-profit organizations mostly and got a couple of responses but no job. In fact, I interviewed at one place with a white haired saintly man and a woman who looked like she’d dropped out of a convent. It was my second interview with this pair in 2 years, this time for an on-call employment counselor position for an organization serving folks with developmental disabilities. The interview was a repeat of the first. I thought I was a shoe-in. I had them laughing and pouring me cups of coffee. I left thinking it was in the bag. Before I walked out the door I went to the restroom, inadvertently walking over the janitor’s freshly mopped floor. He gave me a scowl and I thought to myself: you can kiss that job goodbye. I never got a call from the saintly white haired man or the convent drop out.

I met a lot of good guys at "Land O Lakes". The common thread among them is that they are mostly men in their mid 50’s and have been security guards 15 years or more—lifers. I said: I ain’t gonna end up like them, I’m not gonna guard the hen house for the man for an extended period of time. Hell, the man’s lucky I’m even doing this. Then I thought about the fact that I’d been working as a security guard off and on for almost 20 years. Maybe I am a lifer too.

The job had its good points. It was a multi-layered quilt of multicultural private security goodness. There was Norman, the Samoan guard who was one of the best human beings I’d ever met. He was a big muscular guy with a big muscular smile who used to tell me stories about fishing at night back home in Samoa. His favorite thing to eat was king crab, which, when he said it, sounded like king crap. He directed the choir at his church and was taking classes to become a minister. He would bring leftovers from Sunday Service—ham, taro, chicken, noodles—never reciting scripture but sharing his food and his laughter and his smile—which told me more about him than anything else. Once he brought a tin of fancy cookies. I said, those are some white people cookies. He laughed and with a mouthful of cookies said, brown people can eat these cookies too. He went on to tell me about his uncle who was a minister: He is a bastard. (It sounded like he said bastard, but what he actually said was pastor). There was another guard who we called Shark, who used to guard nothing but the swimming pool, smiling at the girls. There was Billy, who everyone called ‘backwards’ because he got things backwards…such as pronouncing the word harmonica as marhonica…and so on. We’d all sit in the security guard shack talking about the job, about who was trying to sneak into the pool, which tenants played their music too loud or who was stealing recyclables from the garbage dumpsters etc. Those conversations were boring. It made me crave white people cookies and king crap (crab).

I decided to quit the security job. I’ve thrown off my security rope—which I never got a chance to hang myself with—and have traded it in for a new rope—with another security guard company paying 2 dollars an hour more.

My orientation with the new company was yesterday. I watched some training films on workplace safety and various forms of harassment. The films are so bad that they themselves qualify as harassment. The orientation manager informed me that my supervisor would be either Ted or Rich. I was a little tired and thought he’d said I was going to get rich. I sat in the training room in anticipation of getting rich. "I want to get rich" I repeated to myself over and over, taking sips of lukewarm coffee. The door finally opened, I was going to get rich I thought. The orientation manager smiled as a man followed him through the door. This is Ted, he said…smiling.

© Revolutionary Worker Scholar 2010

Dee:  What is your current position at San Francisco State?

Wade Nobles: Full-tenured professor in Black Studies Department.

D: And you are a Ph. D.?

WN:  I have a Ph. D. in [experimental] social psychology.

D:  First, can you speak on the psychological notion of individuation and how it affects people, especially African-American people, and can you define individuation, as it is commonly defined in psychology?

WN:  As I recall, this notion of individuation had to do with people’s need or capacity to find something unique about themselves that separates them from other people.

D:  To separate from their people?

WN:  Other people, that’s the difference, its all people.  So it’s a kinship to this notion of individuality, but it’s seen more as a process wherein people strive to heighten – and the belief is that they benefit from  - having this sense of individuation.

D:  …and it’s similar to individualism, but it’s not exactly the same.

WN:  I don’t recall any of the theorists, who talked about it, but I believe that it’s grounded in the philosophy that comes out of the Euro-Western tradition and to that extent it may not be applicable to all people who are not Western or who are not European people.

D:  At one point you made a comment, something to the effect that black folks do not believe in individuation.

WN:  Look at the way African people live, the way they conceive of themselves, it’s all rooted in their own cultural deep structure.  And African people, particularly African-American people have been an oppressed people and as an oppressed people have never been given full license to embrace or to adopt Western Standards.  Consequently, we’ve simply retained our old African, even though it’s unconscious, we’ve retained our old African belief systems and philosophical orientations.  And those as I understand them are antithetical to this notion that what is most valuable about you is what makes you unique and distinct from everybody else.

D:  So you’re saying that individuation would apply to white families in the US or any family that incorporates these traditional white society values?

WN:  My total response would be that that’s something for a white psychologist to determine, but being separate and distinct is not a driving force for African people.  Even when we distinguish ourselves from other people, like when you do something great or special, like a great ball player like Tiger Woods or Michael Jordon or a great scientist, if you look at those people, they are driven by the desire to represent the best of their people, not driven by the desire to show how they are different from everybody else.

D: Why do you think, though, that white psychologists and teachers of psychology promote this idea of individuation?

WN:  I believe that it’s more political than scientific or psychological.  That in societies that thrive on the basis of exploiting people, then you have to have people believe that they are separate from each other so that when they see the exploitation of someone else or some other group, they are satisfied that it is not happening to them so they don’t have to do anything about it.  If you keep a society full of individual, you can exploit the whole population individually, and each individual believes that it’s happening to the other guy and not happening to me.

D:  Would you say this concept promotes capitalism?

WN:  I think that capitalism and much of the constructs in Western psychology emerge out go the same philosophical grounding, and that philosophical grounding is based upon the idea of separateness, distinctness, domination, fear, and exploitation.  So, capitalism is just the economic system that parallels individuation as a psychological system.  So it’s not that it promotes it, it certainly does reinforce it and allows for it to exist, because individuation would never challenge some of the precepts of capitalism.  Capitalism says I’ve maximized my profits, minimized my loss; in order to do that others and I have to exploit others.  I won’t exploit others if I believe that others are the same.  So if I believe in individuation, then I certainly have a free license to exploit others.

D:  So individuation reinforces capitalism?

WN: Yes.

D: Okay.  Does psychology that promotes individuation cause a problem for African-Americans or other people when they’re caught in the mental health system?

WN:  Absolutely, a great deal of the psychological problems that African people and people of color experience are associated with their oppression and their exploitation- so if their psychological trauma is associated with exploitation and oppression and you have them believing in individuation then they never challenge the oppression or the exploitation then they think their problems are intrinsic they think something that happened in their individual family systems are the cause of their psychological problems, as opposed to being systematic, which is; problems are caused by the nature of the society not the nature of your mother.

D:  The nature of mama! Yes I like that.

Tiny enters…

Tiny:  Can you speak to the fact that Western or Euro-centric psychology critiques the multigenerational family house where you have adult children living with the mother or the father, i.e., critiques this family structure by pathologizing it.

WN:  Well, you see, it becomes problematic in the therapist’s eyes because to them the problem with the client is they’re not being independent of that web of influences that are the multigenerational family, so they cast it as a negative environment, because you’re not independent, you don’t have volition, your own self-volition as opposed to viewing it with the notion of collectivism in the African family that is complementary and not oppositional.

D: …. But the psychologists who believe in individuation would say…

WN:  You’ve got to break free from our family, you’ve got to break free from the influence of your grandmamma, from the influence of your uncle, that you have no independent agency because in their minds you are submitting to the thinking of or the feelings of or the ideas of these other individuals, which you are just as independent as them so why do you let them influence you?  So they have you fighting with your kinfolk for the independence as opposed to fighting with a system that is dominating and exploiting human beings and human life.

Tiny: - Does that approach of pathologizing that family structure also occur for instance, in Africa or in other countries?

WN:  The thing is African mental health professionals have been trained by Western theory, they’ve embraced it and they bring it into the African continent, just as black psychologists in America, who have not challenged the thoughts and idea of Western psychology, will use what they have been trained to do to try to medicate or to help black families, and what they do is they introduce factors to the family that are alien and cause in my opinion as much destruction as it does healing.

T:  And how does that play out? Does the culture answer back?

WN:  Well, the culture answers back but what the Western world does is compartmentalize everything. And so what happens is that people believe in the cultural realm or in the spiritual realm or in the religious realm or in the family realm that we can do these things, but in their professional life or their educational life or in their economic life they have to do other things.  And so if they don’t see there’s a holistic notion or a holism, if you will, with human beings, i.e., I can’t be interdependent in my family and then be independent and domineering and exploitative in other arenas.  But that’s what this society tries to have – black people especially, but people of color in general – do to decompartamentalize their lives and their live-spaces.

WN:  It is bad for human wellness, I believe, but for people of color you almost have to do that in order to survive in this society.  From generation to generation, and across generations you’ll see that one of those are going to become the dominating theme of one’s lifestyle.
 
D:  So what you’re saying is that compartmentalization is necessary in order to remain interdependent in the family as well as economically independent?

WN:  You have to do that, but then everything is valuated.  Then people start putting value on what’s most important.  What’s most important in life is not playing libation to my ancestors or giving deference to my grandmother.  What’s more important is that I’ve got to get a job and live in the white world.  So people start putting down or making less important those indigenous cultural values and start consciously trying to fit in and be like whatever the dominant society says is a successful human being.

D:  And I’ve noticed when you go to Third World cultures that there is interdependence in the family and the rule of the mama, or in African-American families such as Joe’s (Joseph Bolden) grandma, he didn’t call her grandma, he called her mama and his own mother he called mother.  And neither his mother or him could cross grandma, or else.

T:  Can I just ask… we were taught by Pamela George at one point about the notion of transubstantiation and she gave the illustration of [Daniel Moynihan] in the sixties, and interestingly enough one of our staff writer’s mother wrote to Daniel Moynihan expressing to him how wrong his deduction was. Could you describe what the notion of transubstantiation is?

WN:  The idea of transubstantiation is that in looking at the surface behaviors of a people, you can draw conclusions about the meaning and values of behaviors, but the meaning and the value comes from the deep structure of a people’s culture and values.  And so you have African people behaving in a certain way, based upon the African deep structure, but you have a person like Daniel Moynihan looking at that behavior and trying to interpret it from his own European culture deep structure.  He draws the wrong conclusions.  And so in the black family at eh time that Daniel Moynihan was examining it, there was this whole notion of families with women without husbands raising children, which he deemed, a broken home and that the broken home would cause negative things to occur in the development of children.  The mistake he was making was the installations of values in the development of children is not tied to the mother-father linkage, it is tied to a system of eldership.  And you have older brothers, older cousins, older uncles, older aunts, older mama, grandmamma, big mama, great mama, almost in this hierarchy of eldership, and all of those layers are what improve the development of children. So if you take one piece our, i.e., the father, it is not a devastating as it would be in the European family.
T: You mean the nuclear family?

WN:  Yes the nuclear family.  Moynihan made a transubstantive error because he was judging the black family based upon the value system of the European culture.

D:  What do you mean by eldership, can you be a little more specific?

WN:  Eldership really says that everyone older than you is responsible for your well-being and welfare.  So it makes no difference whether it’s your sixteen-year-old cousin and you’re nine years old, that person is responsible for looking out for you.  And then there’s somebody above her and someone above that person, so there’s a hierarchy of age grades, and everyone that is younger than me I’m responsible for looking out for, and they have to be obedient to me, and everyone that’s older then me looks out for me and I have to be obedient to them.  So I’m a 60 year old man, if see a 70 year old in my family, I give deference to that 70 year old, because they are my elder.

T:  So that would be the actual construction of the village that is always talked about.

WN:  That’s how the village operates.

D:  And why do you have to be obedient?

WN:  Why do you have to be obedient?  Obedience is… be careful with the transubstantive mirror, because obedience is not the individual being somebody who is ruling you, obedience is listening to somebody who is guiding you.  So the reason why you’re obedient is because you’re getting guidance from this person to become a better person.

D:  Okay, and that’s just sort of built in, that’s the assumption, that’s been the tradition forever.

WN:  Everyone in the village is responsible for guiding, for directing, and for making sure that the next generation advances to the next higher level, the person of good character.  The goal here is not obedience that you will obey someone, the goal here is for your good character to evolve.  Well, how do I as an elder help other people evolve their good character?  I give them challenges, I give them assignments, I evaluate them, I give them feed back to them on what is good and bad about their decisions they’re making, the choices they make, ect.

D:  So for example, if you are one of the people of the “village”, and you caught a young person doing something they weren’t supposed to do like smoking for instance, and you take them behind the school and you “whoop” them and then you tell them that you’re going tell their parents if you see them doing it again and then they’ll whip them.  How does corporal punishment fit into all that?

WN:  It’s a technique.  Corporal punishment is just a technique of child rearing; just as loving and hugging is a technique of child rearing.  You have a whole arsenal of techniques, and it becomes problematic if all you do is whip and spank children.  A lot of people look at corporal punishment in African families as this bad thing because we are beating children or something, but the fact of the matter is that they don’t look at the fact that children are incorporated in celebrations and parties and they’re given responsibilities and they’re identified to the larger group as having done something of excellence and they’re praised and they’re honored for their achievements.  And when they stray into something wrong, they are chastised.  Sometimes it’s a verbal chastisement.  A lot of times if you commit an offense and every time your mother or father comes around other adults they will say, “Well, tell Aunt what you did last week,” and you will have to repeat this same old thing you did to every adult as a way of internalizing that… and they’ll be astonished and shocked and oh, you shouldn’t have done that, you’ve got every adult saying you did something wrong.  And then when you do good, the same thing happens. Tell Aunt Mary what you did, how you got an A or whatever, and you tell that and everybody will stop that they’re doing to praise you. So it’s a balancing of different strategies of child rearing that were not looked at when non-African scholars tried to examine black family life or black psychological processes.

D:  That’s true.  You hear about it a lot.  And that’s where, for example, my question about poor people, poor families, single parent families, and people of color get caught in the mental health system.  I’m thinking Child Protective Services (CPS) in particular, because Mom was caught yelling at the kid a whole lot and maybe spanking the kid or something like that and oh, that’s a terrible things they’ve done and they’re judged by these people in CPS who have absolutely no knowledge of any of the things that you’re saying.  And I think that fits in to what you’re saying right now about the “village”.

WN:  A village around them, other sisters or kinfolk or play kin.  There are all kinds of people that go into the mix of raising a child. So what Mrs. Clinton stole from the African culture belief system about it takes a whole village to raise a child, that’s absolutely true, because all adults, it’s not just adults, it’s age grade.  It’s anyone older than you is responsible for making sure that no harm comes to you and that you benefit and develop in life.

T:  How do you fell about the relationship between Child Protective Services and Black Families who may believe in corporal punishment as one of their parenting strategies?

WN:  It’s very important that people who work in Child Protective Services take courses in black studies, so that they understand black reality grounded in a black perspective, in fact, when I was in graduate school I worked in the summers in Child Protective Services, and one of the things I had to do was to write up all these little case studies to demonstrate that some family was either neglecting or abusing their child.  But because I has already started my career training and understood that there’s a difference between African reality and European reality or white reality and black reality, I was able to point out things like I’m pointing out to you now about the family system that did not qualify or justify the removal of the child or for the charging of the family for abusive behavior or neglectful behavior.  People have to know about the culture and the belief system and the values of the community if they’re going to work in that community.  And unfortunately, a great deal of people in social welfare, social work and Child Protective Services have been educated but not educated to the degree that they understand the real culture of the community that they’re working in.

Dr. Wade Nobles is the author of many books on African psychology.  He is a tenured professor in Black Studies at the San Francisco Stare University and the Executive Director of the Institute for the Advanced Study of Black Family and Culture in Oakland, California.  For more information on how to purchase his books please contact Yolanda at (510) 836-3245.  

The pretty and the grizzled, the kind and the embittered, all have lives and stories they have worked hard for that with God’s bidding may help other’s. In this process I survived to learn that fear comes in many forms, flavors and textures.

This story took place between 1988 and 1995. I was a lead Communication’s Specialist with the engineering department for Swedish Hospital Medical Center. The latter five years were a nightmarish experience I will never forget nor how it affected my future after that job. It followed me to my next job where I also worked very hard only to help cause me to be equally smeared and to fall further into depression, PTSD and a finally a schizophrenic break. PTSD grows out of this interminable pressure over periods of time.

For moments I only hear the click click click of the circular clock. Industrial cool white tube lights painfully overpower my vision leaving few shadows but for edges of computers and alarm systems on the console around me.

Absently for hours I now realize I am clenching my diaghram forgetting to breathe. I look into the reflection of monitors to see who is behind me at the plexiglass window. No one is there in this moment of tense respite. Soon an engineer or team of two walking by the window mouthing unheard explicatives through sarcastic smiles or making sleazy hand motions aimed at me will appear. Who knows what new round of cruel lies and engineered derision or death threats they have spread creating an entangling web around my weary life throughout this campus juggernaut.

I worked hard to protect and prevent blowing a whistle on the dangerous fryable asbestos “life and death” issue presented to myself and another I was aware of by one of our contractors; their was great concern expressed by him on a weekly basis. He could have lost his job had he talked to anyone else other than us Communications Specialists; I thought I would surely lose mine once my steely nerves gave way and which did happen leading an eventual future of mental illness. “Asbestos is estimated to account for 3,400 to 8,500 new lung cancer cases in the United States each year. The disease type Mesothelioma is a cancer of the lining of the lung, heart or abdomen.” (Goldberg, Persky & White P.C., The Mesothelioma Center, 2010, pg. 1)

I gave my department managers and supervisors many chances to correct this issue internally. They chose instead to fake studies with negative results and lie like well-heeled politicians. There were weeks of lies to save the hospital money and perhaps a bonus. A co worker who wanted revenge against the department called in OSHA. OSHA declared the situation all over the hospital very serious and so a long period of asbestos removal began. My manager called me into his office and asked me why I had to do this? He said, “We are all going to die some day.”

It all could have been avoided if the asbestos issue had been dealt with internally. But instead management tried to save money at the health risk of its mostly oblivious staff and contractors and patients who were all unaware. We were all exposed.

Click click click goes the circular moon-shaped clock. That continuous sound pounding coffin nails by the inch into a coffin three quarters in the ground already. The sweet smell of metal combined with the dull, creamy scent of oil based paint was all that permeated the air. It felt like there was nothing organic within miles but the orange peels left in the garbage can from dinner. And possibly what was left of myself.

For the first two years I was their welcomed, bright golden boy being greased for a lead position and an eventual recommendation for management. When I later was offered the supervisor position, I refused it do to the management philosophy of “divide and conquer” of the workforce and how they tried to make them feel “alone and on edge” so to avoid their uniting as a team and to close the union shop.

I feel as though I am waiting for Godot in a bank vault mausoleum. Ironically, the dispatch office used to be an old bank vault before Swedish gobbled it up. With the continual character assassination caused by lies fed to the hospital and human resources to get rid of me; also human resources lead me on that I could transfer to another department without any real intention of ever helping me at all; I felt my days of work to pay my bills, survive, and pay my college loans back were numbered and that I would end up pretty soon joining the growing numbers on the streets. A whistleblower basically has the “perspective of one who has been pushed not just out of the organization but halfway out of society, ending up with no career, no savings, no house, and no family.” (C. Fred Alford, Whistleblowers, Broken Lives and Organizational Power, pgs. 97-98)

Everywhere I see the maze of gray and white sprayed walls support this life-sucking fortress known as Swedish Medical Center . I feign a joke and a practical laugh to someone needing help at the window to my aft. Their ghostly eyes a disappearing reflection on the battery of monitors. For the next jump of time, I furiously dispatch needed work on the phone, respond to orchestras of unrelated and related alarms and finish writing work orders and organize calls for an undeserving skeleton crew of engineers.

Did I tell you I also did call cord repairs to help out Biomed, repaired canister vacuum cleaners and made extension cords for environmental services, and helped the engineers with an array of patient room needs, repairs in mechanical rooms and jump starts for desperate customers and staff wanting to depart. I did this to help get a break out of the dispatch office but to also help work get done expeditiously to help workers get their equipment back so they could get their work done in a timely manner. My goal was to aid other department’s desperate needs and keep work from being left waiting or forgotten in the daytime jumble. Yes, in addition I wrote all the training manuals and trained and oversaw the staff as a lead Communications Specialist.

Does that make me valuable? Since no one else bothered to do work to my knowledge beyond their job descriptions you might think so. Did my honed sense of humor gain points? Enough that they would pick me off slowly with an array of lies used as slow torture like how it was spread that I had AIDS disease, that I was gay, dumb, mean, evil—any lie they could use to make me a leper in the Swedish community. I forced snickers and cruel stares everywhere I went and most people stopped being friendly, or even talking to me. I was alone in that prison to face whatever cruelty they chose to dish out. Human Resources even asked me if I was going to ever get married? Even though I am straight, this was an illegal question they asked to see if I was gay which is what they perceived me as do to the lies and smear campaigns spread about me. SMC was known to be anti-homosexual. I stood up for gay worker's rights and anyone being targeted the best I could. I tried to put an end to the targeting of others (those before me as well until my number was called; I tried to put an end to this) so it would not happen in the future to other’s. This was an additional issue to the asbestos issue. When the lead engineer (who was a married, closet homosexual) took out his anger and frustrations on me, I tried to defend myself and could not get help. I was foolish to believe Human Resources would help. Instead when the lead swingshift engineer and other engineers next turned on me and targeted me, Human Resources turned on me as well because they went with the majority as it became too difficult to band-aid this disasterous situation. The other engineers were afraid of angering the lead, so they were forced to turn on me as well. I hoped to pay off my college loans and survive financially as I had no one to turn to, before I was destroyed by the smear campaign and falsely fomented rage aimed at me. A lot of this cruel targeting was caused by a really ignorant day dispatcher as well who had connections to the HR department and the Director's secretary. I just had to continue working under fire and kept it light with as much humor as I could conjure. It was only a matter of time as I was psychologically slipping away and would be permanently politically ruined and forced into banishment. “As a psychopathic creature, the corporation can neither recognize nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others. Nothing in its legal makeup limits what it can do to others in pursuit of its selfish ends, and it is compelled to cause harm when the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs.” (Joel Bakan, The Corporation, the Corporation, the Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, pg. 60)

Click click click went the mechanized cricket, a reminder that 5 hours in a frenzy of crazed, but mindful zen action engaged in the flow went by in what seemed like a few minutes. It is the end of a long shift (sometimes double shift) where I now gather my belongings robotically and flee this elongated coffin into the shadowy night’s bustle.

Shifting about at the bus stop, I restlessly gazed about at what the lamplit night might bring hoping to not be a victim of violence (I had been mugged and witnessed Crip gang attacks on my bus and in a bar where I lived) before the warm, lonely oasis of Metro arrived. I no longer hear the tick tocking of the dispatch clock and yet woke to the fact I am tense still and reluctant to breathe. With a large, forced exhultation of breath, I jumpstarted myself allowing color to return to my translucent face.

Over the years I would face repeated sexual harassment from the lead engineer and a seriously hostile work environment*; a collective attack on my person. Once collapsing from this job my despoiled reputation would be spread to my next job down Broadway at Safeway where I was then again targeted and driven to a schizophrenic break. My depression was pounded into PTSD which was pounded into a psychotic break over this course of years. Imagine this after knowing and being repeatedly told by your workers and management that you are the best communications specialist they had in the position. I oversaw all the dispatching employees with genuine care and concern. This series of events and attacks left me nearly homeless and in a state of isolation and complete desolation.

My parents and friends were freightened by my experiences and could not believe anyone would treat me that way. They knew what a kind soul I was. They were deep in denial. They repeatedly dismissed me and my serious troubles as if nothing were really wrong each time we met and that to mention it was a burden for them that they did not want to hear. They did not want to be bothered with the details either and so years of terror were dismissed with the proverbial wave of their hand. All the time I had become just a paycheck away from homelessness. I fell into a space where I was mostly alone and for almost a year I hardly could get out of bed. I had been diagnosed with Schizoaffective disorder, while my psychiatrist overlooked the crucial clinical depression and PTSD which was hardly recognized at the time thinking that only happened to war veterans. I spiraled further into darkness and there was little remorse.

Tick tick tick, How will I sleep tonight? How can I face a succession of tomorrow’s with no hope? I didn't realize this yet, but this was to be only the beginning of a series of nightmares that would last the next twenty years...

*Any action that materially affects the value of your job is an adverse employment action. A discharge is clearly adverse. A demotion, cut in pay, denial of promotion (if someone else gets that promotion), or denial of benefits would also be considered adverse. The Department of Labor will also recognize a claim against a "hostile work environment," although courts still disagree about what employer actions would make the workplace sufficiently "hostile." Other employer actions that have been held to be adverse and therefore against the law, include a refusal to hire or rehire, blacklisting, reduction in work hours, reassigning work, transfer, denial of overtime, assignment to undesirable shifts, reprimands, threats to discharge or blacklist, providing unfavorable reference, damaging financial credit, close supervision, unpleasant assignments, evicting from company housing, and a sudden drop in evaluation scores after the protected activity.

latest poem in reflection of 1995
I propose we listen
and not lie, hearing
feathery logic simply undone, lingering
between each morbid sigh.
I know what it is to caste the lowest die, ignored
for ignoble lattitudes, impertinent
energy from eltist idioms.
Impressed I am
into confined crystaline stature;
burned to ashes my pitiful sum.
and then blood sprays bright red
turbidly with new found
turgid fingers, full of life
and handfuls of joy,
bursting, releasing
from my old scuttled hulls,
screaming through shackled stature of
personally impaled statues;
ignored for a clutching century of
personally held breath, gasping
for new gathered life, ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh .

Check out these articles and more on our sister sites at Real Change and the International Network of Street Newspapers: INSP Vendor Blog: http://www.insp-blog.org/ INSP Main Website: http://www.street-papers.org/ Real Change Blog: http://www.insp-blog.org/realchange/ Real Change Main Website: http://www.realchangenews.org/ 

The San Francisco Building and Planning Commissions are attempting to fast-track a new condominium construction project, slated to replace a long-dead gas station and active Green Cab parking lot on the north-east quarter of the intersection of 16th Street and South Van Ness Avenue.  This involves the Mission Plan of the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan, and is a violation of it.  Housing for the poor (30% of AMI—Area Median Income—rent paid) is a priority.  In small print, but it’s there!

Two blocks away, at 14th and Mission Streets, is Senior-only housing; the Mission Hotel, a Single Room Occupancy (SRO) building, is half a block away--with another 100 or so resident seniors.  Most of them walk with canes.  The proposed structure will have 88 condos and a 44 space garage in the basement, an increase in traffic generating more respiratory illness in a population already suffering more than its fair share—along with more traffic period, more cars to worry about crossing the street, etc.

16th Street, from So. Van Ness to Mission, frequently hosts film festivals.  The block is less gentrified than others, but that is changing too, as POOR magazine poverty scholars can see from a third story window of the Redstone Building.  New nightclubs, more noise at night, fewer of the original businesses and residents of the area around. 

Small businesses on the 2nd and 3rd floors of the Redstone Building will lose fresh air (ventilation) from their windows, which will increase the odds of catching respiratory diseases (colds, etc) for the people working in those offices.  Residents of the neighborhood on Capp, between 16th and 15th Streets, will endure 2 years of construction noise and pollution.  There is an elementary school, with a (concrete) playground behind the 16th and Mission Walgreens store, on this block of Capp Street as well, half a block from Ground Zero.  Active construction sites, with lots of large moving parts (trucks, etc) are not good for children, who do not respond to stimuli around them the same way adults do.

The Green Cab Company will likely be forced to close.  There aren’t many alternative spaces in the city available, considering all the other Eastern Neighborhoods (and other areas) construction activity going on, the fact that the (local) taxi industry is highly competitive and the awarding of Taxi Medallions is a whole other story (perhaps a novel-length work) all by itself!

Readers of these poverty scholars’ words here have an opportunity to make a difference in how the Mission Plan of the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan is dealt with.  You can contact Jeanie Poling, an Environmental Planner in San Francisco’s Planning Department.  The address is 1650 Mission Street, Suite 400, SF, CA  94103.  Contact by phone is:  415-575-9072 (fax # 415-558-6409).  Poling’s email address is:  jeanie.poling@sfgov.org The address of the condo project is 490 So. Van Ness Avenue, the case number of it is #2010.0043E.