2012

(SCROLL DOWN FOR ENGLISH)

Mi Nombre es Teresa Villa
Soy madre soltera de 2 hijos pero me siento
muy frustrada cuando
mi hijo fue agarrado por la policia.

Empezaron
los problemas con mis 2 hijos.
La policia empezo a
molestarlos, el abuso
con la policia fue tanto
que ellos
decian que no
se iban a graduar pero
yo como mama siempre
estuve al pendiente.
Los enfrente  porque
ellos eran acosados
siempre, pero ellos
se gruaduaron.
pero la policia
del sur de los
angeles.Siempre los acosaban.

My name is Teresa Villa
I am a single mother
with 2 children but I feel
very frustrated when
my son was
caught. Started
problems with my 2 children
The Police
disturbed and abused
them
not wanting
them to get caught
like a mama I was always
on the lookout
because
they were harassed
but they were always looked for
but the police
in the south
abuses and causes
problems with the youth

This story was written by Teresa Villa, a poverty skolar from Community Asset Development Re-Defining Education (CADRE), for the Voices of Poverty Resist series. This series was launched out of a fellowship that Lisa received from the Marguerite Casey Foundation for journalism focused on poverty. Because Lisa leads with her indigenous values of inter-dependence she has created this collective journalism process where all of our voices in poverty are speaking for ourselves.

 

November 20th, 2012

The following stories are written by poverty skolars from the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN) for the Voices of Poverty Resist series. This series was launched out of a
fellowship that Lisa received from the Marguerite Casey Foundation for journalism focused on poverty. Because Lisa leads with her indigenous values of inter-dependence she has created this collective journalism process where all of our voices in poverty are speaking for ourselves.

Moving to Skid Row
by Karl Scott

Moving to California caused me to really face the reality of the “social” aspect of life. After losing my job, home, furniture, and car, I came to the LA area knowing I could get unemployment until I found a job. Well unemployment made me fight to get in, and jobs were
hard to find.

With no money and no place to go, I was forced to deal with a system that I knew nothing about. But the people assigned to help me had attitudes like everyone “stinks.” I refused to give in and let my spirit be wiped away by mere humans. This caused me to reevaluate my
thoughts by asking and being honest with myself. Was I like that? Did I think like that? Do I react like that?

With determination, I found housing in “America’s most homeless capital” area. This helped me to deal with and understand what people go through in life by being stereotyped in the “Skid Row” group.

I was introduced to LA CAN and became impressed by an organization in Skid Row that was friendly, honest and willing to help people without funding. So now my life is full of new meaning and much deeper respect for every human.

Quicksands
by Carina

Struggles are categorized by suffering, ignoring the self, an
ignoring, a drowning.
Shifting soil beneath life’s constructs
deconstruct and I was left floating
feet beneath me couldn’t sustain me.
Quicksands when all you know is obliterated.
But you hold on. Reach out for the elusive vines that remain of a
structure you emerged from
triumphant? Or at least with honors.
But something changed.
May have been the greed factor
outside of self in a social structure or
a delusional paradigm I no longer knew.

The day I entered a shelter I had little clue how I got there. It was a series of mishaps and false hopes as I look at it now. I worked freelance, and people stopped paying on time after my jobs were completed, until this little circus took a toll. Coupled with bad relationships, I can’t say what event caused me to become homeless, other than a series of shady employers who took advantage of the delusions of a person who believed in principles. I still give freely
and receive little in the way of financial recompense. I have a head full of ideals that have little to do with this economic monster set up to consume everything and everyone. Ultimately whom or what can I blame but my own poor choices? What was it that I really wanted? And
when did I stop believing?

Yes we live in a white world and I’m brown. My mixed heritage café con leche would color me, but I couldn’t begin to state the many moments when my goals and dreams were hindered by external forces. I felt stopped my breath when I tried to reach higher. So where do I begin?

Hope for Young Black Men
by Jose VanDerburg

When a child loses hope, I feel a whole lot of things are wrong. Young Black men start off in this America with a disadvantage. Dreams are not only deferred, they are often stolen, or seem unobtainable. I often struggle to find hope. But I usually do through my fellow brothers and sisters in the struggle.

I just lost my job, because of some injustice. I was struggling yesterday to find hope, to believe in my dream of becoming an executive director, when Kevin Winn, a three striker, told me his
story that inspired me to dream again.

Kevin Winn started his own company off the bottom called Nini’s House of Fragrance. It’s a line with body and house products. Kevin told me about all he went through to start his business, where he came from, and how I too could win. His first job growing up in the ghetto of St. Louis was on an ice cream truck. He, like me, had grown up in a struggling home. At 20, with an AA in Economics he found himself working as a swimming coach, leading a Hispanic kid out of Watts to win a Junior Olympic gold medal at the expo park where I used to work.
At 26 he had his first child. I explained to him my desire for a child. He encouraged me to stay focused because once he had his daughter he got into drugs and alcohol and was in prison 3½ years.

Kevin and I tried to figure out why Blacks with degrees end up in jail. It’s because we can’t figure out how to, or have no way to, apply our education skills to the streets we go back to. I expressed my frustration in finding a job and how I have to hustle too. He told me he thought that way too. He was sober his second time out of jail, so he sold but didn’t use no more. But then after voluntary manslaughter he got 15 years in state prison.

At this point I could see my life just like Kevin’s. How easily I could be cycled onto the conveyer belt to becoming another prison statistic.

Kevin and I both agree that young Blacks go into jail with no love or support. Even out of jail, we get little support. But we do run into change. The transformation of our minds comes from meeting a good role model. Mine is Pete White at LA CAN and Kevin's is Magic
Johnson. Kevin said in prison he read about a brother who got out of jail and took acting classes and got a show on Fox. Young Black dreams can revive themselves with the story of another brother’s struggles. In jail he wrote a business plan and got out and started a business
with the last $175 of GR. He named the business after his daughter Shanika and called it Nini House.

After hearing Kevin's story I had hope. I got hope through my brothers’ struggles and victories. Who's got a story to tell?

A Journey of Healing
Walter Fears

In 2003, I suffered a work injury that left me immobilized for two years. During my hospitalization I was evicted. Upon release from the hospital I recuperated with family. But because I required 24-hour care, my family could no longer help me in my physical/mental state. I became homeless. Then I started getting arrested for being homeless. One night the police arrested me, bagged my head, and drove me to Skid Row.

I lived on the streets until I got really tired of the abuse, suffering, and my body's need to recover. I went out to the VA to get help and was told that because I didn’t have a drug problem I couldn’t qualify for services. I came back to Skid Row and commenced doing
every drug I could get my hands on (out of anger, not because I wanted to go back. It was like I said, “fuck it”).

Then one day I heard this brother playing the congas. On Skid Row! It was amazing to me! How this one drum seemed to hold sway amongst all the surrounding chaos. I knew then that was what I would be doing: healing. Not only myself, but more importantly others, through art. It was through painting, guitar, drums, sculpting, and music that brought
me out of the state of mind I was in.

After my last jail stint I was ready. I wanted my life back so I checked into the VA and didn’t leave until almost two years later. This was almost unheard of but I needed the PTSD classes, I the one-on-one psychiatric meeting, the physical therapy, the tai chi, fishing, and surfing trips. All these things combined to give me that sense of purpose in my life. And that was to fight for the voiceless, sing for elders, and live for children.

Today I consider myself a positive member of a community trying to define itself in its own terms. This is a place of recovery, a place of healing. It is the phoenix rising from the ashes. It was in this place that I found my connection to people who were suffering like me,
and that in itself provided a healing connection. Though others are in different situations and stages, we are all in it together.

And that sense is what holds us together, good or bad, bad or worse; nobody, NOBODY gets left out or behind. After learning the VA system, I came back down to Skid Row, to live and fight for the peoples who call this place home. I don’t make a lot of money but I’m rich in
quality of life. My life’s work is to continue to speak out, to play my drums, to educate myself and others to the realities of the issues that are directly impacting us, our community.

Journaling 101, Jinny
by Soni Abdel

The first worst time is when
They said it was cancer.

The second worst time is
When they called and said
She expired.

The third worst time is
When they said we won’t help.
You bury her because
You didn’t pay the bills on time.
And you should have a job eventually
Your mother needed 24 hrs care
And we pretended that YOU
Didn’t need any help

The fourth worst time is when
They refused to pay me my
Deposit back because they
Claim I didn’t notify them
On time. Then their bitch ass
SPaul said “do what you gotta do.”

The fifth worst time
Is when you said I could
Stay with you for a while
But your face said “I don’t want you here.”

The sixth worst time is
When I had to sleep next to
A broad who
Reeked like a sewer

What comes to me is
Treachery….from even I
Reminisce on my so-called
Fa-mil ly who fucked me
And told me fuck you

They said you used to be
Smart…you used to be
Pretty…used to be…
We thought you were gonna
Be sumthin
Say what?
See here Jigga boos
Living in ghetto zoos

Waitin on the 1st & 15th
The only time you brush your
Teeth Persecuting wit yo
Ignoramus brain insane off
Crack & weed cuz you won’t
Kill your demons…So you
Laugh at the ones who
Got me surrounded You can
You and YOU….claim to
Have sumthin legit but you
Can’t quit smoking that shit
Hippocrit

Laugh cuz u IS dumb founded
Cuz dumb found you and
Bound you.

PO’Lice brutality
Wesley Walker, Jr.,

Because of the drugs that the U.S. brings in to all of our communities and cities, I was a victim of drug use. Drug use began my financial downfall and loss of housing, self, and health. It brought more problems with the police because I was hurt by the police one day, I didn’t know my rights, and so I let it go. One day I got sick and couldn’t walk and I didn’t know why. So I had to have an operation on my neck. After that, I began to do more and more drugs, and going to jail more and more. When they told me that I would go to jail for 2 years I stopped doing drugs. I began to work with LA CAN to help myself. The VA helped too.

Young Adult in the Streets

by James Porter

My personal experience with houselessness started when I was 18 years
old. I left home to live in the street, and I made up my mind I was
going to survive no matter what. I would do what ever I have to do to
make it. I used and abused whoever I had in order to make it. This was
a lonely life because I did not trust no one but myself. I dealt with
racism in my own race, with white people, and with the police.

I was in jail for a j-walking ticket. Police gave me a card—threw it
on the ground and called me a nigger—and I wanted to whip their ass
but I didn't.

I remember what my parent taught me and realize now this was not the
way to success that I was hoping for. I am learning that there are
good people in the world. I just have to surround myself with them and
I realize that life is what you make of it. No more, no less.

The Malcolm X Transformation
by Steve Richardson aka General Dojon

My name is General Dojon, and I was born and raised on Skid Row, got into my addiction on Skid Row, was arrested for bank robbery (feeding my serious addiction), and sentenced to 18 years in state prison. I entered state prison as a brain-dead Christian and leader of Denver Lanes Blood gang in South Central. I was sent to Corcoran SHU Program where I did five years in the hole. There I met George Jackson's comrade who had been in the hole since 1972. He re-educated me about who I am as a Black Hue-man, about God, and the principles of revolution. Basically I did the Malcolm X Transformation: came into prison a mis-educated gang member, and paroled as a member of the Black Guerilla Family in 2004.

After eleven years I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew I wanted to fight for social justice. I came to LA because I had a complaint about the police and private security guards. I was told by Bilal Ali (a Black Panther), "We don't talk about it, we be about it." He gave me a camera and clipboard and said go get some evidence and come back. I went, got evidence of police and private security guards racial profiling and targeting low-income Blacks during
gentrification. I came back to LA CAN. Bilal, Pete White (the director of LA CAN) and I talked. We decided to create a community watch program to monitor LAPD and private security to ensure no biased policing was going on.

In 2006, LA Mayor Villaraigosa and Police Chief Bratton released a Safer Cities Initiative on Skid Row which brought 110 extra pigs to Skid Row, making it the most policed community in America. Their goal was to gentrify Skid Row. They had a six-month plan to wipe out poor
folks so that the yuppies can walk their $5000 french poodles down Main St. without seeing Ed the wino and Ted the pan-handler. For the last six years since then we've been at war fighting for the land, and LA CAN has led the charge.

I'm the point man on our community watch team. I was sitting in meetings with Mayor Villaraigosa, meeting with Chiefs Blatter and Beck. I've been to the LAPD Training Camps giving them information on how not to participate in racial profiling. I've been to LAPD 4K
trainings on policing people with mental disabilities. I've helped ACLU bring lawsuits against the city for violating rights of homeless people. I've worked with UCLA to document police brutality. I've been in may newspapers, books, and movies. I've been arrested for felony
and facing 25 years to life twice for doing this work. The United Nations has requested information about me because of a report they got saying the government is targeting me.

And the story goes on because I'm still fighting daily. As a three-striker my biggest fear is being struck out with 25 to life, before I can finish my mission. Can't stop, won't stop. All power to the people.

Hard News at the Clinic
by Deborah Burton

I was working at K-Mart Company, as a part-time employee with no health coverage, working four hours a day. My work schedule changed weekly. When I became ill, I could not take time off to go see a doctor even if I could afford the appointment. My weekly wage was minimum: $7/hour. Just enough to pay rent, buy food, and pay for transportation.

Then I lost my job. I went to downtown LA. I began to visit a free clinic doctor, because I would get headaches so bad that I could not get out my my bed. and every time I sit or stand up I would get sick and have to throw up. I told my neighbor my issues. He said I might have high blood pressure. I visited my doctor again to check it out. As always, I went through the process we all go through on doctors' visits: take temperature, check weight, and check blood pressure. The nurse records it. Then you see the doctor, they read your results. The
doctors, they ask me what brought me in today.

I said I think I have high blood pressure, the response is: yes.

Mis Hijos
By Teresa Villa
(SCROLL DOWN FOR ENGLISH)

Mi Nombre es Teresa Villa
Soy madre soltera de
2 hijos pero me siento
muy frustrada cuando
mi hijo estaba
garado. Empezaron
los problemas con mis 2 hijos
La policia epezo a
molestarlos el abuso
con la poliscia fue tanto
que ellos
desean que no
se ivan agarrar pero
yo como mama siempre
estuve al pendiente
los enfrenta  porque
ellos eran acosados
siempre pero ellos
segaduaron al en
pero la policia
del sur de los
andales si
enpro abusa
denvesteos
jovenes y

My name is Teresa Villa
I am a single mother
with 2 children but I feel
very frustrated when
my son was
caught. Started
problems with my 2 children
The Police
disturbed and abused
them
not wanting
them to get caught
like a mama I was always
on the lookout
because
they were harassed
but they were always looked for
but the police
in the south
abuses and causes
problems with the youth

My Story
By Sarbelia
(SCROLL DOWN FOR ENGLISH)

Yo soy de Guatemala 37 anos y mi historia es muy triste por contar. Porque es difícil porque fue abusada, abusada sexualmente por mi hermano. Yo y mis 3 hermanas chicas. Esto es difícil serlo, porque fueron amenazadas por que mataria a mi papa si decíamos algo. Esto marco mi vida.

Solo con Dios a cambiado mi vida a poder cambiar y a seguir adelante. Recientemente me di cuenta el abuso de mis hermanos.

Yo me ayi al norte de Guatemala, a México y emigre a los Estados Unidos. Para ya no ser abusada. No mas abusada.  

Yo aprendí del abuso sexual de mis hermanas cuando mi hermana que vive, me llamó; y me exijo parque dejé a mis papas. Yo le dije porque lo que me había pasado. Y es cuando ella me confesó llorando que ella también. Emigró para aca, para que ya no fuera abusada.  

A mi me abuso 3 veces, solamente me abusaba cuando el llegaba. Porque el vivía en el ejército de Guatemala. Esta historia quiere decir la por primera vez en papel para que muchos la lean. Porque un sufre más cuando uno calla uno, o se queda en silencio.

Yo tenia 6 anos cuando esto comenzó mi hermana mayor así que yo era abusada. Por eso ella me empujo me fuera al norte.

Esta historia la cuente porque es mejor hablar. En hablando puedo agendar mi matrimonio.

Lo más difícil es de que mi mamá nunca nos creó. Todavia no nos cre. Ella siempre crió a los hombres. Siempre quisomáss los barones. Siempre hizo al lado a las mujeres nos llama mentirosas.

Yo me siento liberada en hablando sobre esta historia. Porque a veces los uní a unos. Pregunta porque tomará esa decisión de dejar su familia para escapar.

I'm from Guatemala 37 years and my story is very sad to tell. It's hard to tell because I was abused, abused sexually by my brother. Me and my 3 sisters. They were threatened that my brother would kill my dad if we said anything. This marked my life.

Only with God has my life changed to be able to change and move forward.

I left Guatemala to go north, to Mexico and emigrate to the United States. To no longer be abused. No more abuse.

I learned of the sexual abuse of my sister when my sister, called me once demand demanding why i left my parents. I told her what had happened. And she broke down crying telling me she was also abused. She immigrated here also, to no longer be abused.

I was abused 3 times. Because my brother lived in Guatemala's army he wasn’t home much.  want other to read this. Because one suffers more when one shuts down, or remains silent. I was 6 when this began.

The hardest part is that my mom never believed ​​us, still hasn’t. She always preferred the boys over the girls. We as women were called liars by her.

I feel liberated in talking about this story. Because sometimes it brings us together.
 

La Mama Que Lucha Por Su Familia
(SCROLL DOWN FOR ENGLISH)

Mi vida fue triste, porque no tube Mama. A los 9 meses, al paso de tiempo me dejaron con mis tíos y unos de ellos me violo. Y tome deciciones no fue buenas. Y l mas facil para mi juntarme con un muchaho.

Fue Tipo polítio 12 años empecé a salir con el 16 tuve mi nina. Empeza a trabajar y lo deje a mi pareja por ser drogadicto. Ya tenia 3 hijas.

Empeze a salir con otro muchacho que tuvimos otro hijo pero desgraciadamento el fallecio en un accidente.  

Duve como 6 meses, y me vine a los Estados Unidos. Batallamos para cruzar y pero al fin lo logramos, de ahí empezó mi nueva vida tristeza, soledad, pobreza. Porque yo venía embarazada de dos meses de una niña y no tenía trabajo. Yo me hice la promesa 1 ano me iba a traer a mis hijos, tuve la suerte de que gente me ayudara a traer a mis hijos.

Primero me dieron el apoyo y me pidieron que me moviera, y no duramos mucho ahi porque yo andaba recogiendo botes, y una ocasión el quería abusar de mi y yo le dije a su esposa y ella despues me dio dos dias para salirme. Yo me sali a rentar a un apartamento con ratas un espacio no habitable. Cual yo no me senti vivir con mis hijos. Al paso de tiempo conoci al que fue mi pareja, 17 años al cual me saco de ahi, y me llevo un hogar donde vivia en la sala y mis hijas el cuarto en el transcurso de esos anos pasaron tantas cosas. Mi hija la mas grande conoció un muchacho de los 12 anos, lo cual no me parece porque era mayor que ella. A los 20 tantos anos que estuvo con mi hija, yo estubo molestando a mis hijos, y pasamos por mucho trauma. Y que todavía seguimos padeciendo, apenas estamos uniendo entre todas. Dialogando y seguimos aquisufriendoo en la pobreza; mis hijos sufriendo por que todavia pocree 3 mas.

Por su padre que esta enfermo, solo hay comunicacion de teléfono. Por alcoholismo, la lucha con mis hijos que la escuela me los estaban echando de escuela. Y no saber como poder ayudarle y me sentía desolada. Gracias a Dios unos de mis hijos esta en Sheriff y juega futbol. Y Ahorita estoy luchando 17 por graffiti. Y estoy en luchando con el de 22 anos las drogas. Espere Dios me te la fuerza a seguir luchando.

My life has been a sad one, because my Mother passed when I was  9 months. I was left with my uncles and one of them raped me. And from than on i took decisions that weren’t the best.

When I was 12 years I started dating a boy who was 16. I eventually left him due to being a drug addict. We had three daughters.

I started dating another boy who had another child but sadly  he died in an accident.

After six months, I came to the United States. And struggled to cross the border but finally I made it, my new life began but filled with sadness, loneliness,  and poverty. Because I was pregnant two months of a child and had no job, I made a promise that after 1 year I was going to bring my children. I was lucky that people helped me bring my children.

First they gave me support and asked me to move, but I ended up coming here and picking up cans. A man and his wife took me in. But the man wanted to abuse me and I told his wife and she then gave me two days to get out. I went out to rent an apartment that was in no way habitable since it was infested with rats. I felt that I did not live with my children. At time passed i met a man who became my partner. At 17 years old he  took me out of there, and I got a home where I slept on the floor and my daughters slept on the room. My daughter grew up and met an older boy when she 12. The boy was 20 and he was with my daughter for many years. They are still together. My children went through a lot of trauma. And we are still suffering, we are just trying to come together.

Their  father is sick, and there's only telephone communication. Their father suffers from alcoholism. The struggle with my children's school is the risk of being kicked out of school. And not knowing how to help I am devastated. Thank God one of my sons plays soccer to take up his time. And right now I'm fighting  my 17 for being a graffiti vandal. And I'm struggling with my 22 year old with drugs. God is giving me the strenght to keep on fighting.

Attack of the Pigs at a Pasadena Park
by JoJo Smith

Last Wednesday on November 14, 2012, we were peacefully protesting Mexican Ex-President Vicente Fox, who was speaking at an event in Pasadena, California. Why were we protesting? We do not support a mass murderer who was Vice President of Coca Cola Company in Mexico that killed many indigenous people there. He is also a capitalist pig and the root cause of why the Mexican drug cartels are so much stronger today. We were showing resistance against this.

However, he is protected here by the Los Angeles Police Department, who planted many riot cops around the area of the courthouse and park near where he was speaking that night. Those cops were being commanded by LAPD Sargeant Bobby Crees of the Special Enforcement Services Division, who incited the riot so that they could outright violently ambush us.

As a houseless revolutionary with Occupy the Hood in L.A., I strongly feel that this assault on us was uncalled-for and provoked by outright hate and disdain from the LAPD, as they gave us evacuation orders. However, they did not specifically tell us that we had to back away from the Courthouse area of the public park where we were protesting.

After three hours of stand-off intimidation, with the LAPD standing in unison wearing full riot gear, all of a sudden out of nowhere they rushed us, knocking everyone and everything down, smashing our tents and personal belongings, stomping on top of everything that was lying on the ground with their heavy boots. Within a few seconds, I was barely able to save my friend, who was sleeping inside one of the tents, from being killed by having his head violently stomped on by a crazed cop in riot gear.

In the melee I was violently struck in the ribs by a baton. They just came at us….stomped on us….violently hit us….all of our civil rights violated. In L.A., we are allowed to sleep on the streets, unlike a lot of other cities….We, with the support of L.A. CAN, had fought for and won this right to sleep in public….it’s our right to be there, yet the LAPD broke the law.

The LAPD kept on attacking us. They punched my friend’s 12-year old daughter in the face! They also hit my friend in the face, knocking out his tooth! They continued assaulting us and knocked down a pregnant protester with a night stick to the ground. Many people were severely hurt, however the LAPD took absolutely no accountability for their assault upon us and the physical abuse they inflicted upon my friend’s daughter.

Because we are poor, we are being criminalized without due process. Because I have been homeless for the past five years on Skid Row and homeless for an additional ten years of my life, it doesn’t mean that the police have the right to harass us, assault and violate our civil rights. This is truly capitalism at its best while we are being treated at its worst, being illegally assaulted, charged and locked up. The mainstream media did everything they could to keep what happened out of the media. People need to know that LAPD physically assaults poor children.

November 26th, 2012

Last Wednesday on November 14, 2012, we were peacefully protesting Mexican Ex-President Vicente Fox, who was speaking at an event in Pasadena, California. Why were we protesting? We do not support a mass murderer who was Vice President of Coca Cola Company in Mexico that killed many indigenous people there. He is also a capitalist pig and the root cause of why the Mexican drug cartels are so much stronger today. We were showing resistance against this.

However, he is protected here by the Los Angeles Police Department, who planted many riot cops around the area of the courthouse and park near where he was speaking that night. Those cops were being commanded by LAPD Sargeant Bobby Crees of the Special Enforcement Services Division, who incited the riot so that they could outright violently ambush us.

As a houseless revolutionary with Occupy the Hood in L.A., I strongly feel that this assault on us was uncalled-for and provoked by outright hate and disdain from the LAPD, as they gave us evacuation orders. However, they did not specifically tell us that we had to back away from the Courthouse area of the public park where we were protesting.

After three hours of stand-off intimidation, with the LAPD standing in unison wearing full riot gear, all of a sudden out of nowhere they rushed us, knocking everyone and everything down, smashing our tents and personal belongings, stomping on top of everything that was lying on the ground with their heavy boots. Within a few seconds, I was barely able to save my friend, who was sleeping inside one of the tents, from being killed by having his head violently stomped on by a crazed cop in riot gear.

In the melee I was violently struck in the ribs by a baton. They just came at us….stomped on us….violently hit us….all of our civil rights violated. In L.A., we are allowed to sleep on the streets, unlike a lot of other cities….We, with the support of L.A. CAN, had fought for and won this right to sleep in public….it’s our right to be there, yet the LAPD broke the law.

The LAPD kept on attacking us. They punched my friend’s 12-year old daughter in the face! They also hit my friend in the face, knocking out his tooth! They continued assaulting us and knocked down a pregnant protester with a night stick to the ground. Many people were severely hurt, however the LAPD took absolutely no accountability for their assault upon us and the physical abuse they inflicted upon my friend’s daughter.

Because we are poor, we are being criminalized without due process. Because I have been homeless for the past five years on Skid Row and homeless for an additional ten years of my life, it doesn’t mean that the police have the right to harass us, assault and violate our civil rights. This is truly capitalism at its best while we are being treated at its worst, being illegally assaulted, charged and locked up. The mainstream media did everything they could to keep what happened out of the media. People need to know that LAPD physically assaults poor children.

This story was written by JoJo, a poverty skolar from the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN), for the Voices of Poverty Resist series. This series was launched out of a fellowship that Lisa received from the Marguerite Casey Foundation for journalism focused on poverty. Because Lisa leads with her indigenous values of inter-dependence she has created this collective journalism process where all of our voices in poverty are speaking for ourselves.

10/24/12

As a formerly houseless single mama, raising three children in a capitalist society that tends to see being houselessness in AmeriKKKa as a crime, I can’t even begin to imagine what it would have been like for me twelve years ago when I was living in several different homeless shelters that kicked us out all day, getting ‘cited’ for being out in a ‘public space’ with nowhere to go, and on the second so-called violation citation, risking the chance of being arrested and put in jail!  This is why in the City Berkeley, Measure S, a law that prohibits sitting and/or laying on the sidewalk in certain public areas of Berkeley, which is a direct violation of civil rights, which is being currently proposed on the voting ballot should not pass.  

November 20th, 2012

In 2002 my wife and I both lost our jobs. We were homeless with three children under ten years old. We were forced to share a house with another family.

We lived in one room, all five of us. We slept and watched TV and everything in this room. We had to share the bathroom and the other parts of the house with 10-13 other people.

We were not allowed to use the backyard. It stayed locked like we would steal something. It made us feel like criminals. But through this experience we have come closer to God and each other. It made us trust and believe in God, trust and believe in each other as a family.

This story was written by Eddie, a poverty skolar from Community Asset Development Re-Defining Education (CADRE), for the Voices of Poverty Resist series. This series was launched out of a fellowship that Lisa received from the Marguerite Casey Foundation for journalism focused on poverty. Because Lisa leads with her indigenous values of inter-dependence she has created this collective journalism process where all of our voices in poverty are speaking for ourselves.
 

Julio Cesar Perez Reyes

El rojo, por lo que comenzo, amor pienso.
Red, to what I begin with, love I think.

Dulce, como su sabor de cuerpo.
Sweet, like the taste of their skin.

tu ecencia junto a mi cuerpo.
your scent next to me skin.

De pasion cuando contigo me encuentro.
Of passion when I find you.

Tu voz diciendo, te quiero.
Your voice saying, I love you.

Soy de Morelia, Michoacan Mexico
I am from Michoaca Mexico

No me gusta verme caido y menos a un amigo. Por eso demuestro carino y afeccion de luchar a cada tiempo.

I do not like to see me down especially a friend. That’s why I show love and affection to fight always.

Amor
Orgullo
Tristeza
Lucha
Meta

Love
Joy
Sadness
Fight
Goal

Amor, me inspiran en pose de tiempo
Orgullo, es el que me imponen por lucha de vida
Tristeza, por su susencia que a dejeda un hueco
Lucha, en la que por ustedes me encuentro
Meta, lograr por ellas mas por los que en lucha continuamos.

Love, what inspires me as time goes by
Joy, what gets in my way ro fight in life
Sadness, for the emptiness its left
Fight, what I do for you
Goal, achieve them in order to fight for them in life.

Juan Alberto

Verde en el decierto crucando fronteras
Green in the deserts of the border

Flores del campo
Flowers of the field

Olor a noche
Smell of the night

De locura aso destino donce quiera llegar
The crazy place i wanted to rach

De los grillos el sonido de los uventos
From the crickets sound.

Soy de Mexico, Michiocan
I am from Michoacan Mexico

Que areglen alos immigrantes de cada paiz y por ser Mexicano.
The legalize immigrants from very country and being Mexican.

1.La virgen maria ese la vase de todos los peregrinos Mexicanos.
1.The virgin Mary is the base for all the Mexican pilgrims.

2.Que pides, por nosotros y por todos los muertos que pedimos por ellos.
2.To ask for us and all the dead that we ask for them.

3. Las candelas que es una visilla para los vivos y los muertos y la luz.
3. The lanterns that is a way for the live and the dead and the light.

4.Que nos ilumina para el perdon de los pecados amen y todas esos chicos.
4.That light up for forgiveness and the sins amen and all the young people.

5.Y chicas que ya no estan con nosotros y que nunca compleron sus suenos pero en otra vida conocieron su sueno realidad de conoser a dios y para que ellas y ellos pidan por nosotros amen.
5. And the young people that are no longer with us and never were able to achieve their dreams but in another life they achieved thier dream in reality to meet god and for them to pray for us amen.
 

Susan Porve

En panada y trasporente de vende coral
Pastry and transparent coral

Amiel y allerva amarga.
Honey and bitterness

A pan recien horniado y masa podrida de los anos
Bread recently baked and more rotting dough.

Un toque de mama y papa
A touch from Mom and Dad

Un llanto de amis vesos
A sound from my kisses

Soy de Michoacan Mexico
I am from Michoacan Mexico

La union de jeneros y que no mas fronteras.
The union genres of and no more borders.

Emily Nino

Rosa
Pink

Salado
Salty

Suave
Soft

Ponta
Point
Soy de Hundaras
I am from Hunduras

Suenos

Por nacer con sexo opuesto
Being born of the opposite sex

Hemos derramado tanto llanto
We have cried very much

Por hacer nuestra transicion
From doing our transition

Nos hemos ganado demasiado odio
We have gained much hate

Y por tanto
And for a lot

Muchas hermanas se las
Many sisters have

a llevado la muerte al mas alla
been taken by death to the great beyound
 

Chessyca

S

Rasivle

Exensal

De amor
Of love

Tintiva

Soy de Mexico
I am from Mexico

Por todos corazon erido.
For all the injured hearts.

Maria dela luz es es la esencia que nos alimenta
Maria of the light is that feeds us

Con su pureza alas hermanos y hermanos
With her pureness for sisters and brothers

Des encarnados que se adelantaron
The ones that went ahead
 

Andren Manza

Negro
Black

Agrio/Acido
Sour/Acid

Canela
Cinimon

Suave
Soft

Agua/brisa del mar
Water/Ocean breeze

Soy de Michoacan Mexico
I am from Michoacan Mexico

Justicia Social
Social Justice

Altar tradiciones de nuestros antepasados
Altar traditions of our ancestors

Virgen Guadalupe madre que los proteje
Virgin Mary, mother who protects us

Nuestros Hermanos
Our brothers

Fotos que esenian del sufrimiento
Photos that show suffering

De este mundo
Off this world

Flores, aqua y luz
Flowers, water , and light

Para cruzar atras dimensiones
To cross dimensions

Adrian Escobain

Gris de la noche
Grey of the night

Amargo como mi soledad
Bitter like my solitude

Mi azudor pegajoso
My sweat

Las espinas del desierto y mi unica solucion de mi soledad era
The thorns of the desert and my only solution of my solitude

Del viento y los coyotes
Of the wind and coyotes

Soy de Mexico Chiapas
I am From Chiapas Mexico

Poder
Able to

Reencarnaciones de mi padre Guadalupe
Reincarnations of my  father Guadalupe

Tu cara mi tranquiliza tus colore
Your face calms your colors

Me llenan de alegría tu sombra
I am filled with joy from your shadow

Me proteje tu esencia me conecta
I’m protected by your essence connecting

con los muertos
With the death

Jovana Luna

Azul del cielo porla tarde
Blue from the  sky at the evening

Dulce de la miel
Sweet from the honey

A rosas del campo
Roses from the fields

Femenino y delicado rostro
Feminine and delicate face

De castañuelas sonando en el aire
The castañuelas playing in the air

Soy de Mexico el del estado Guanajuato
I am from Mexico in the state of Guanajuato

La libertad de mi pueblo
The liberty of my pueblo

1.En el color amarillo y morado del fondo del altar que da mucha pas y tranquilidad
1.In the color yellow and violet the bottom of the altar of much calm and tranquilidi

2.En el sentro la reina de Mexico jolla ermosa radiante luz y paz
2.In the center the queen of Mexico beatiful jewel radiant light and peace

3.A su alrededor Chicas que significan víctimas y seres de luz guardianes
3.Around  there are girls that signify victims and individuals of light protectors

4.Las velas luz para su camino a la eternidad
4.The candles to a light path to eternity

5.Y yo aqui admiradora y luchadora para que siga de pie su luz
5. And i am here admiring and fighting for the light
 

Divina Kin

Por mi color canela
My cinnamon color

Por mi sabor latino
My latino flavor

Por mi olor a tierra mojada
My scent of wet dirt

Por mi toque femenino
My feminine touch

Por los murmullos en mi corazon
For the murmers in my heart

Soy de Acapulco
I am From Acapulco

Soy mujer
I’m a woman

Luces que iluminan el camino
Lights that light the path

Luces, veladoras y flores
Light, candles and flowers

adornan tan bello y poderoso altar
decorate the pretty and powerful altar

Fotografias, agua bendita
Photographs and holy water

y ángeles en lo que veo
and angels in what I see

en este alar que dice
In this altar that says

te amo, te amo y te amare por siempre
I love you, I love you and will love you always

Divina Kin
Divine Kin
 

I ran into a brother the other day at the bus stop.  I’d just gotten off work and was heading home.  I heard a voice call out, Hey Tony!  I flinched, thinking I’d been recognized by someone I didn’t want to talk to.  It is part of what my dad calls the duck and dodge, a strategy whose main purpose is to avoid getting into other people’s shit.  I didn’t want to get into a useless conversation that would strain not only my nerves but my ears.  I looked to see who called out my name.  It was a brother in a baseball cap and dark shades.  I looked for a moment and recognized the brother as a cat named Terry.  Terry used to be part of a work training program at a non-profit organization that I had worked at a couple years ago.  Hey, what’s happening brother, I said, shaking his hand.  The cool air seemed to warm as we talked—catching up:  how you doin’ man…how’s your mother?  We were glad to see the story in other’s faces.

Seeing his face was refreshing given the faces I have to endure on the busses, coffee shops and worse—on TV.  All those stale, sterile faces walking along Market, Valencia and Divisadero Streets—minds stuffed with self-satisfaction from years of being told how wonderful they are—their thoughts, their poses—as hipsters, parading around as if they were real San Franciscans.  Can smell ‘em a mile away.  Terry was born and raised in San Francisco, the real deal straight outta Fillmore.  Real nice guy and there’s something royal about that velvet jogging suit he wears.  It’s for lounging, not jogging.  I am in the presence of real class, a guy just being himself without the need to cover insecurities with tattoos or gimmicks—physical, verbal or otherwise.

In short, Terry is a beautiful brother. I always thought he was too good for that job program.  His job was piecing and assembling mosaic tile kits for an organization that serves people with developmental disabilities.  The tiles were made into kits that were later sold at retail outlets.  I’d sit and watch Terry count and weigh those little tiles that looked like crackers.  You were paid according to how much you assembled, bagged and sealed.  All that fun for so little pay; all those folks in the program, some dropping off only to return to that stack of heat sensitive, see-thru bags.  The welcome mat was always nice and tidy.

One thing I remember vividly about Terry was his love for music.  He'd devote his spare time to producing mixtapes at home—on cassettes.  He’d sell ‘em for 5 dollars a pop.  I bought one although I didn’t own a cassette player anymore.  I asked him what kind of music he had on it and his face lit up as he ran off names of musical groups I’d grown up with, had love, whose lyrics held meaning for me.

Sideshow by Blue Magic

Mind Blowing Decisions by Heatwave

People Make the World Go round by The Stylistics

Fire and Desire by Rick James and Teena Marie

I remember Terry performing during the job program's Christmas party.  He came decked out in a powder blue suit with wide lapels.  He got on the mic and sang an old song by the Manhattans. 

There's no me...without you

He was smooth, gliding across the floor, his bad leg no longer bad but providing him a leg up on whatever barriers he had to face, now or in the future.  It was poetry, beautiful to watch—a brother doing what he was intended to do without shame, without apology…just free to do it.

I bought one of his mix tapes but couldn’t listen to it. I then found an old tape player at a garage sale and no sooner did I put the tape in the deck than the player chewed and mangled the tape.  The tape spilled to the floor like an out of control tapeworm.  But I thought about those songs.  They were in my mind and couldn’t be erased.

The bus headed towards Fillmore while we talked.  Terry spoke slowly. He told me that a long time ago he had gotten into a car accident that had affected his mobility and speech--that he had to attend a special school.  Then he stops and there is a pause.  What fills the pause is life, the sound of birds, wind, laughter, gunshots, cries, birth and…

Terry told me he was now making music CD’s, that he was selling them for 5 bucks a piece.  He said his girlfriend was helping him produce the tapes since she has a computer.  Girlfriend? I said, you didn't say nothing about no girlfriend.  "Shit man...i can't tell you everything, now" he replied, laughing.  He told me he didn’t have one of his CD's on hand but that, if I wanted one, to meet him tomorrow night at 10 at the doughnut shop on 7^th and Market.  Ok, I’ll meet you there” I said. We shook hands and he got off the bus.

The next day came, busy at work.  I went home.  945 pm rolled around.  Then I remembered…the doughnut shop!  It was too late…I fell asleep.  The next night I went to the doughnut shop.  I looked around.  Every kind of doughnut you can imagine was looking back at me.  Terry wasn’t there.  I looked outside thinking he might be out front.  My eyes met the night and its eyes melted into mine.  I saw Terry everywhere.  His music was in the street and it pulled me closer to the city that we were both raised in, the city that knocked us down and raised us up over and over again.

Terry, if you’re reading this, I'm sorry we didn’t connect. It was good seeing you, talking to you, my beautiful brother.  The music of your voice is in my ears.

November 20th, 2012

My name is Jacqueline Mendez. I'm the first one from six. In my family we are 7 in total. I'm 28 years old. I had a really rough childhood, never got to be a child. Since I was the first I had to help my mom with my brothers and sisters, while she was at work and our dad wasn't around to help. We saw how she struggled.

I went through a lot of violence and I was sexually abused by my father, which has messed up my life. For me my way out of all that was getting involved with my kids' dad. This ended up not working out after ten years. After we split up, once again I made the mistake of getting involved with a guy and got pregnant by him. Now I'm almost 7 months pregnant and I stay with my mom.

I have no job and need to care for my ten-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son. I'm really depressed cause as an immigrant I really can't get a good job but I wish for my dream to become a massage therapist and provide for my kids. But for now I have to deal with my own demons which I call my problems. Because I don't have a job I'm thinking of giving my unborn son up for adoption. If I can't provide for my two oldest I don't know how I will provide for this one. And the people that know about it, they all tell me there are options. Some are like, "This is the best decision you can make. You are growing up and you are not only thinking about you, you're thinking about that baby's well-being." Others end up telling me, "In the end it's your decision." So now I'm a single mother.

But I thank God for giving me the mother he gave me. Now I'm trying to be as strong as she is, not for me but for my kids. I know that in order for that to happen I need to find myself. In the meanwhile, I talk to my daughter about staying in school and I do as much as I can to keep her and my son in school, for them to have a good education and be someone in life.

This story was written by Jacqueline, a poverty skolar from Community Asset Development Re-Defining Education (CADRE), for the Voices of Poverty Resist series. This series was launched out of a fellowship that Lisa received from the Marguerite Casey Foundation for journalism focused on poverty. Because Lisa leads with her indigenous values of inter-dependence she has created this collective journalism process where all of our voices in poverty are speaking for ourselves.
 

(Editor's note: This article is reprinted from the November issue of the San Francisco Street Sheet, courtesy Bob Offer Westort.  Photo taken by Golden Gate X Press)

After more than a week of counting, the final vote was tallied a little before 7:30 p.m. on November 15: Measure S—a proposed law that would have made it a crime to sit on the sidewalk—had failed. The sitting prohibition lost by 4.6%—a greater margin than Barack Obama’s reelection.

The No on S victory is a notable upset both for the national trend of homeless criminalization laws and for development and commercial real estate interests in Berkeley. Since 1993, “sit/lie” laws—laws that make it a crime for people to sit or lie down on public sidewalks—have been spreading around the country, particularly intensely on the West Coast and in Florida. While the laws nominally apply universally, universal enforcement is never the actual intention: Sit/lie laws are a law plus a wink and a nudge. Everyone knows that the intent is that they be enforced exclusively to “shoo homeless people” out of public places, as the Downtown Berkeley Association’s John Caner put it.

San Francisco passed such a law in 2010 through Proposition L. Aside a short period of such laws in the 1960s (the most notable cases being San Francisco and Los Angeles—the former of which was repealed after several successful constitutional challenges, the latter of which remains on the books but which has had enforcement curtailed as a result of the settlement of a constitutional challenge), the Patient X for these laws is Seattle, which passed the first of the current batch of sit/lie laws in 1993. Since then, nearly three dozen cities have passed such laws. What makes Berkeley different?

The lazy answer—and Bay Area print journalism has already shown characteristic interest in the lazy answer—is that Berkeley is simply perversely weird. But that explanation doesn’t cut the mustard: Berkeley and San Francisco are unique in the two-decade history of these laws in that they are the only two cities to have considered sit/lie laws at the ballot, and that both have done so twice. Berkeley, in fact, passed a sit/lie laws in 1994, only to have it repealed through a constitutional challenge. San Francisco rejected a nearly identical law the same year. One would be hard-pressed to argue that Berkeley has become less conservative than it was in 1994, or that San Francisco has become more conservative in the past two decades than Berkeley has.

The victory is even more surprising given the shape of the campaign to pass Measure S: Proponents spent roughly $120,000 on the campaign—more than was spent on any other campaign this year (including that for mayor), and likely more than has ever been spent on any other campaign in Berkeley history. (I have not checked all campaign records since Berkeley’s 1878 founding, but have yet to find any campaigns that spent much more than half as much money in the past decade.) 86% of this money came from corporations or limited liability companies.

For understanding why corporations would spend so much money on a law like this, San Francisco provides an instructive example—perhaps the only instructive example. In 2010, real estate and finance corporations provided roughly $412,000 in funding to pass this city’s Proposition L. The largest backer, Ron Conway, told business leaders that this was part of an effort to “take San Francisco back” from progressives. In conservative states, undocumented migrant workers and queer people are a convenient scapegoat for economic or social ills, and conservatives very effectively use popular prejudices against these people as a wedge issue to elect candidates whose values are otherwise more conservative than their constituencies’. In the Bay Area, we are fortunate that it is far more difficult to electorally target queers and undocumented people. (Queer people and migrant workers are definitely oppressed in San Francisco and Berkeley, and people in these communities can certainly think of examples of scapegoating, but I think it’s true that we have for the most part been spared the worst excesses of the rest of the country, and that these scapegoating efforts have rarely made it to the ballot.)

In the past fifteen years, conservatives have struck on an alternative scapegoat for San Francisco: Homeless people. In election after election, San Francisco voters have been asked to pass punitive measures against homeless people (often as part of a combined package that included some benefits, so as to ease consciences, sometimes with the argument that these punitive measures would actually help homeless people). In many cases—including 2010’s Proposition L—the law passed has been one that did not actually need voter approval: it could have been passed by the legislature. But other things do need voter approval. A wedge issue on the ballot which has helped to distinguish conservative candidates has had a noticeable effect on the composition of the Board of Supervisors, and arguably has been a determining factor in recent years for the mayoralty.

In Berkeley, similarly, conservatives have no chance if they are not supportive of the most basic rights for queer people or people without documentation. In the past two months, Berkeley has passed the nation’s first Bisexual Pride Day and has instructed the Berkeley Police Department to end its association with Secure Communities. So conservatives attempted to adopt the San Francisco model, using frustration with homelessness in the city as a wedge issue to affect rent control and development.

Berkeley’s City Council could have chosen to pass a sitting prohibition (over the objections of progressive City Councilmembers Max Anderson, Jesse Arreguín, and Kriss Worthington), but chose instead to place the matter on the ballot. The same funders who backed Measure S were also heavily involved in two other races as primary funders: A conservative Rent Stabilization Board slate that was involved with organizations such as the Berkeley Property Owners Association that have advocated for the end of rent control, and Measure T, a development giveaway for West Berkeley that was opposed by most residents of that neighborhood. Measure S provided a convenient wedge issue for the one, and obscured the other. As Berkeley formerly homeless activist Dan McMullan put it, “They bet that the people of Berkeley, in the privacy of the voting booth, would be mean enough to kick our poorest community members while they were down.” And they thought that the malice accompanying that kick would carry far enough to make more selfish, less reasonable decisions prevail on other electoral matters.

But outspending wasn’t the only tack that the corporate backers of Measure S took: The campaign to pass Measure S included a mailer that failed to mention what the law would actually do (make it a crime to sit on sidewalks), and claimed instead that the law would keep people out of jails, help them into services, and “provide hope for those on our streets who are hopeless. It comes down to saving lives.” In a desperate last-ditch move, proponents of Measure S hired homeless people (largely from Oakland, who were unfamiliar with the issue) to hold Obama signs and hand out misleading fake Democratic Party Voter Guides that endorsed the measure. The Democratic Party took no stance on Measure S. In fact, five out of the six endorsing Democratic clubs opposed the measure. (The sixth had on its board one of the leaders of the Yes on Measure S campaign.)

But big money failed. Measure S has been defeated. Measure T is trailing by less, but it, too, seems unlikely to pass. While the conservatives were able to get one member elected to the Rent Stabilization Board, the other three seats up for election have all gone to defenders of rent control and vocal opponents of both Measure S and T.

Why didn’t the San Francisco model work in Berkeley? I have been heavily involved in homeless community organizing in San Francisco for seven years, and worked against Measure S in Berkeley. I suspect that the answer is twofold.

The first is that the campaign against Measure S learned from San Francisco. We held numerous fun and engaging actions, much as happened in this city. But we didn’t depend exclusively on that kind of “earned media”: The media infrastructure of Berkeley is likely too weak for such tactics to have an adequate impact. We also engaged in traditional, grassroots campaigning, knocking on doors and talking with Berkeleyans about homelessness, about Measure S, and about real solutions for the city. Over the course of two months, we estimate that we were able to talk with about 10% of the Berkeley electorate. Money can buy print space, Web banners, and airtime. But it can’t buy personal convictions or face-to-face conversations. When those of us who believe in civil liberties, compassion, and pragmatic solutions to social problems talk with our neighbors, we win. The numerous volunteers—both homeless and housed—who created these brilliant events and who knocked on doors every single weekend and many week nights were able to defeat the tens of thousands of dollars sunk into this campaign by the East Bay’s largest developers. Many of these volunteers were from groups that have been involved in homeless people’s struggles in the long term—most notably the East Bay Community Law Center, the Homeless Action Center, Building Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency, and the POOR News Network. But dozens more were simply concerned community members who saw a social wrong, and knew that they could do something to right it.

The second is the shape of Berkeley progressivism. In San Francisco, the community was tremendously supportive. The Coalition on Homelessness, the Day Labor Program (then of La Raza Centro Legal, now part of Dolores Street Community Services), and HAVOQ/Pride at Work played a central role in the organizing against Prop L, but we also benefited from tremendous support from organized labor and housing advocates. However, there were also progressives who were shy of the issue: I recall a conversation with one candidate who told me that they opposed Proposition L, but couldn’t do so openly: “I have my constituency to think about. They’d eat me alive.” Another endorsing organization printed two versions of its endorsement guide: one that opposed Prop L for areas where they thought the proposal would be unpopular, and another that didn’t mention the issue. Progressive community support against Prop L was phenomenal, but not complete. Berkeley saw a more nearly total level of committed support from the progressive community. The candidates against whom Measure S was intended to be used as a wedge issue didn’t shy away from it: Rent Stabilization Board Commissioner Igor Tregub spoke vocally and passionately against Measure S; Commissioner Asa Dodsworth organized a rollicking Black-Tie Sit/Lie Chess Championship; Commissioner-Elect Alejandro Soto-Vigil knocked on doors and spoke about Measure S when he spoke about his own candidacy; Danfeng Koon, who organized both the progressive Rent Stabilization Board slate and the Kriss Worthington for Mayor campaigns instructed her volunteers to walk No on Measure S lit at the same time that they walked the literature for those two campaigns: Without that effort, No on S literature would have reached tens of thousands of fewer Berkeleyans than it did. City Councilmember Max Anderson, whose challenger was a supporter of Measure S, also didn’t shy away from the issue, and was perhaps the measure’s most eloquent opponent. Even candidates and campaigns who were not targets of the wedge issue campaigned hard against S: Every challenging mayoral candidate—most notably City Councilmember Kriss Worthington—spoke openly against Measure S. Mayoral candidate Jacquelyn McCormick, who differed from other progressives on several issues, also took a principled stand against S, and started a Community Campaign Center on University Avenue that allowed for an unprecedented level of coordination, beneficial to numerous grassroots campaigns.

There’s a lesson in this for San Francisco: Here, we have too often followed the lead of the nervous national Democratic Party leadership, and have backed away from controversial wedge issues. The grassroots core of San Francisco progressivism has been heartfelt and devoted to real, compassionate solutions to homelessness and the defense of poor people’s civil liberties, but too much of our political leadership has let electoral concerns outweigh our consciences. Ironically, as Berkeley has shown us, it is precisely that shyness of conviction that has kept us pinned to this recurring wedge issue. It is our fear that has allowed the San Francisco model to be effective. In San Francisco, the San Francisco model of homelessness as a wedge issue will end when there is a progressive consensus that it can no longer be allowed to work.

Not long ago I saw an interview with a Filipino writer who spoke of cliché’s that Filipino writers—mostly beginning Filipino writers—use.  He cited such things as mango colored suns, white sand beaches and, of course, the obligatory carabao as hindrances to the literary landscape one is trying to create.  This writer’s comments made me think of my own writing and the role the carabao has played in it.  Firstly, I have never seen a carabao in person.  The carabao is a beautiful animal—hard working and loyal—I’ve been told.  The people who have told me this of the carabao also happen to be hard working and loyal (and I have been told that I have displayed just the opposite qualities, namely by my father).  I have seen the carabao in pictures—National Geographic and in numerous books showing the landscape of my indigenous ancestral home, the Philippines.  I felt somewhat guilty in regards to the writer’s comments because I had used carabaos and mango colored skies as metaphors in my writing.  “You’re a sham” a friend once told me.  “You’ve never seen a carabao in your life, nor have you been to the Philippines”.  This was true.  But I began to think about the writer, who is quite well known since the release of his book, which has been well-received.  I looked at his face, his clothes, his hair—all were immaculate, all impurities swept away in the Arkipelago winds.  I was curious if this writer had ever stepped into a steaming mound of carabao dung in his oxfords or boat shoes and subsequently fallen?  Or did he ever wake to find carabao crust in his eyes, or walk with carabao mud between his toes or carabao snots running down his nose?  These and other questions remain—the mystery persists. 

My Uncle, the poet Al Robles, wrote of carabaos.  His book of poems, “Rappin’ With Ten Thousand Carabaos In the Dark” are carabao tracks on the page, tracing their journey in the Philippines and in the US.  Each poem is stained with the mud, saliva, tears, tae—the life of the carabao, the memory of the carabao, the music of the carabao—the heart of the carabao which is the heart of the manongs.  The sound of the carabao brings us closer to home, closer to the earth, closer to ourselves.  Carlos Bulosan wrote of the carabao in “America is in the Heart”.  In the story his brother Amado beats a weary carabao with a stick, to which his father responds by slapping him sharply across the face. What are you doing to the carabao?  I think of one of my uncles poems and the reverence he had for the carabao:

                                    He’s nice one, you know

                                    Carabao is nice to you

                                    When you come in the afternoon from the ricefield

                                    He go home too, by himself

                                    After the sun go down he lay down

                                    Goddam!  Like a human being.

                                    International Hotel Night Watch

                                    Manong –carabao

                                    I ride you thru the I-Hotel ricefields

                                    One by one the carabao plows deep

I recently took a walk to the grocery store in my neighborhood.  I picked up a few things and headed back home.  A couple blocks away from my house I came upon a garage sale.   I approached and saw the usual—books, plates, clothes, knickknacks—all kinds of stuff.  It all belonged to a young white guy wearing a Giants T-shirt.  His face had a pinkish tint due to the unusually hot weather.  He sipped on a Pabst Blue Ribbon as people browsed through the items making up his life.  I looked at a few things but didn’t see anything I wanted to buy.  I was ready to leave when something caught my eye.  It was on a table, a wooden figure that looked worn but beautiful, crafted by someone I’d never met but whose feelings I’d feel as my own.  I reached for and touched the figure.  Its eyes whispered.  I tried to make out what it was saying but was interrupted by the guy with the beer.  “You like my yak?” he asked before taking a swig of beer.  He took a very long swig before proceeding to crush the empty can with one squeeze of his freckled hand.  He stood examining my face.  I looked at the wooden figure and realized it was a carabao.  It was beautiful.  It had eyes that were alive.  But before I could tell the garage sale guy that what he had was a carabao, not a yak, he went to the cooler and pulled out another beer.  He walked back over and told me that his yak had belonged to his ex-wife, who had gotten the lion’s share in the divorce.  He made fun of the Yak, saying it needed another yak to fuck (a yak to yuk, to use his exact words), etc.  I looked at the carabao, it looked at me.  We knew.  Then the man started rambling about this and that—a rant of belligerence mixed with a twinge of sentimentality; his words spilling forth in a spirited froth of beverage-inspired verbiage.  As I recall, it went like this:

Yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak

Yak yak….yak yak yak…yak yak yak yak…yak yak yak yak yak yak

Yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak

Yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak

Yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak

Yakitty yak

Kayak

He yakked my head off for almost half an hour.  Finally he stopped.  Then I uttered two words:  How much?

Five bucks

I dug into my pocket and the carabao seemed to say: if you don’t get me out of here and away from this fool, I’m gonna back up and run as fast as I can, dead at you, and ram one of my horns up your ass. 

I found five dollars, gave it to the guy and picked up the carabao that had to endure being called a yak for who knows how long.

I brought it home where it belonged.

November 20th, 2012

Moving to California caused me to really face the reality of the “social” aspect of life. After losing my job, home, furniture, and car, I came to the LA area knowing I could get unemployment until I found a job. Well unemployment made me fight to get in, and jobs were
hard to find.

With no money and no place to go, I was forced to deal with a system that I knew nothing about. But the people assigned to help me had attitudes like everyone “stinks.” I refused to give in and let my spirit be wiped away by mere humans. This caused me to reevaluate my
thoughts by asking and being honest with myself. Was I like that? Did I think like that? Do I react like that?

With determination, I found housing in “America’s most homeless capital” area. This helped me to deal with and understand what people go through in life by being stereotyped in the “Skid Row” group.

I was introduced to LA CAN and became impressed by an organization in Skid Row that was friendly, honest and willing to help people without funding. So now my life is full of new meaning and much deeper respect for every human.

This story was written by Karl, a poverty skolar from the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN), for the Voices of Poverty Resist series. This series was launched out of a fellowship that Lisa received from the Marguerite Casey Foundation for journalism focused on poverty. Because Lisa leads with her indigenous values of inter-dependence she has created this collective journalism process where all of our voices in poverty are speaking for ourselves.

November 20th, 2012

Struggles are categorized by suffering, ignoring the self, an
ignoring, a drowning.
Shifting soil beneath life’s constructs
deconstruct and I was left floating
feet beneath me couldn’t sustain me.
Quicksands when all you know is obliterated.
But you hold on. Reach out for the elusive vines that remain of a structure you emerged from
triumphant? Or at least with honors.
But something changed.
May have been the greed factor
outside of self in a social structure or
a delusional paradigm I no longer knew.

The day I entered a shelter I had little clue how I got there. It was a series of mishaps and false hopes as I look at it now. I worked freelance, and people stopped paying on time after my jobs were completed, until this little circus took a toll. Coupled with bad relationships, I can’t say what event caused me to become homeless, other than a series of shady employers who took advantage of the delusions of a person who believed in principles. I still give freely and receive little in the way of financial recompense. I have a head full of ideals that have little to do with this economic monster set up to consume everything and everyone. Ultimately whom or what can I blame but my own poor choices? What was it that I really wanted? And when did I stop believing?

Yes we live in a white world and I’m brown. My mixed heritage café con leche would color me, but I couldn’t begin to state the many moments when my goals and dreams were hindered by external forces. I felt stopped my breath when I tried to reach higher. So where do I begin?

This story was written by Carina, a poverty skolar from the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN), for the Voices of Poverty Resist series. This series was launched out of a fellowship that Lisa received from the Marguerite Casey Foundation for journalism focused on poverty. Because Lisa leads with her indigenous values of inter-dependence she has created this collective journalism process where all of our voices in poverty are speaking for ourselves.

Hello Krip-Hop Folks,

These last three days have been off the wall.  My email accounts has been hacked, Yahoo.  Fuck! I just realized that when my email account was Hacked that they took all of my email addresses yes they wiped out my yahoo address book! So please send me your email address at kriphopnation@gmail.com. Yes I'm finally slowly leaving Yahoo. This happened to me before time to move on.

If you got this email, don't reply to it because it is spam.

SPAM EMAIL COMING FROM MY ACCOUNT PLEASE DON'T REPLAY IT IS SPAM BUT IF YOU DID REPLAY THEN CHANGE YOUR PASSWORD ASAP

I really hope you get this fast. I could not inform anyone about our trip, because it was impromptu. we had to be in Manila Philippines for a program. The program was successful, but our journey has turned sour. we misplaced our wallet and cell phone on our way back to the hotel we lodge in after we went for sight seeing. The wallet contained all the valuables we had. Now, our passport is in custody of the hotel management pending when we make payment.

I am sorry if i am inconveniencing you, but i have only very few people to run to now. i will be indeed very grateful if i can get a loan of $2,000 from you. this will enable me sort our hotel bills and get my sorry self back home. I will really appreciate whatever you can afford in assisting me with. I promise to refund it in full as soon as I return. let me know if you can be of any assistance. Please, let me know soonest. Thanks so much.

Leroy F. Moore Jr
Founder of Krip-Hop Nation

If you’re a native San Franciscan you know the sound. It’s as sweet as the smell of BBQ ribs and cornbread and sweet potato pie when the city had soul food restaurants all over with black folks cooking in black kitchens on black grills with black pots and pans bubbling music in the background, in the foreground—all over. Imagine that, black folks cooking soul food in a soul food restaurant—not like what you see when you walk in the city today. The black and brown laughter I grew up with was nourishment, it told me where my mother and father had been, where my ancestors had been, it told me who I was. Black and brown laughter, like the smell of adobo, tortillas and rice, chow mein—nourishing us and keeping us fighting for things that mattered—our elders and children and community; black and brown laughter, the sound of struggle, the sound of strength—the sound of legacy; the laughter of our skin, with the scars and sweat filling the air with the fragrance of our lives. San Francisco, where is the black and brown laughter? All I hear is empty chatter, tinny voiced cell phone code, no laughter, no music, no nothing.

But sometimes you hear it. It comes like a friend who knows you, who’s glad to see you. And the beautiful sound came to me a couple days ago. I was on Muni heading home. I was anticipating a surly driver followed by a bus full of empty faces. The driver was a Filipino guy who grew up in the city—a Filipino who’d grown up in the barrio, the ghetto, the neighborhood. How’d I know? It was his voice and the way he tilted his head to the side. He said 4 words: How you doin’ brother? It was the voice of ungentrified Frisco, the voice of my father, my uncles—the voice of my life. I felt relaxed and alive, like I’d walked into my grandma’s old living room. He drove several blocks before coming to a stop. He rose from his seat to make way for the relief driver. The relief guy got on and the switch took place. It was an African-American brother, from the city too—I could tell by his voice, his laughter. The two drivers talked to each other, laughter of black and brown intertwined and beautiful. It was voices saying, “You ain’t right man” and “All right now” and “Man…you late again…what you doin’, starin’ at all the girls?” And the men looked at me and I said, “No, the brother was on top of it…he wasn’t lollygaggin’…fo’ real”.

And they laughed, their laughter drawing me in. I felt at home in a city that’s feeling less like home.

Macho Macho Clam….I want to be a macho clam…
Hearing the water splash in my bathtub as Bruce sang this song at the top of his lungs at 6 in the morning is and forever will be one of the happiest moments of my life. Bruce was safe. He was warm. He was happy. And his absolute genius woke me up with a song….

That’s why they want him. That’s why they want to take him away. He knows too much. He means too much. But there’s no one there to protect him. He’s an elder. No one will try to stop us. NO ONE WILL TRY TO STOP US.

I don’t know where I’d be without Bruce Allison. I’d don’t know where any of you would be without Bruce Allison either cuz without him cuz if he wasn’t he the vibration of the earth would be changed so dramatically….the glow would diim so darkly…that I doubt trees would even make oxygen enough for humans to breathe. The world would spin around the moon And water would float uphill. On Spaghetti, the lemonade lakes would watch their rivers flow upstream and the gumball trees would surely turn to peppermint. The Troll that Lives in Golden Gate Park would not sit on the hilltops and gnomes would never have tried to build a Dyson Sphere. Maybe that last one is ok, but that’s another story.

But THEY don’t care about that. The people that want to pretend they’re organizers…pretend their fighting for the homeless….pretend that they are REAL warriors in the struggle….THEY didn’t care about him when they asked him to join their little group. WE’LL GIVE YOU HOMES, NOT JAILS….that’s what they used to do. Not anymore. WE’LL OCCUPY SAN FRANCISCO….but first we must occupy our heads with our own assholes. WE’LL EVEN PLAY ORCHESTRA MUSIC…while the po’lice carry your broke and\or colored ass to jail while we run back to mommy and daddy’s house in the hills. Yes…I’m talking to you!!

I don’t know where San Francisco, the Bay Area, or the country in general would be without Bruce Allison. There are few elders, mentors or youth that have or ever will dedicate themselves so fully and so completely to the revolution, the struggle, social justice, system reform…whatever the hell you wanna call it…than Bruce Allison. Its hard to find one person that has spent more hours in city hall, in shelters, in meetings, in nonprofits, in the streets, than Bruce Allison. He spent 7 years sleeping in a plastic chair in a shelter. He spent years in Vietnam serving his country while they disserved him in the deepest ways. He spent decades as an activist and for the past 6 years he has been my best friend, my Rock. He calls me every day. Multiple times a day. He sings me songs. He tells me jokes when I cry. He has medical conditions that need constant attention. He has physical needs that can’t be attended to on a whim…He cries with me sometimes….

I know I am sobbing as I type these letters and thinking of all the letters I haven’t typed yet for him. I wonder if any of the hAcktivists that got Bruce AKA Uncle Gumball are shedding tears over him. I wonder if they are crying for my revolutionary and epileptic Brother Jeremy Miller. Jeremy, I hope you read this and know I love you. I wonder if they are crying for the other 8 locked up right now.

Macho Macho Clam….I Want To Be a Macho Clam
And for what??? Locked up for what??? Was it to REEEALLY save someone?? Was it REEEALLY necessary???? Was it media attention??? WAS IT YOUR OWN MUTHAFUKKKIN EGOS????

Are you even payin attention?

Folks in the Community like POOR Magazine know that times change. And it don’t change everywhere at the same time in the same way. But these hAcktivists don’t know this shit cuz they haven’t even cut their little soft baby gums with their tiny little apple sauce gnawin teeth yet. They think just because they put on a black hoodie and use the same words as folks in the struggle that means they know something. Yep, you know something alright. YOU KNOW HOW TO PIMP!!!

And I warned him. Bruce they’re just trying to pimp you. I know you’re not AFRAID to get arrested if its important. But you gotta be strategic. This shit aint strategic. It’s a mess. It’s just telling you what you want to hear. I warned him. As his best friend and one of the people privileged enough to get to talk to him every day…I warned him al the time about hangin with those BOUGIE hAcktivists. And I failed him.

I failed Bruce.

The REAL folks know protest laws in New York aint the same as Seattle which aint the Same s San Francisco. The only thing they do have in common is THEY ARE CHANGING FOR THE WORST AND IF THEY HAVEN’T YET, THEY SURE ASS HELL WILL SOON!!! So if you’re planning to get arrested…..for no good fucking reason other than for some media attention and to make your own self feel like a “REAL” soulja, you might wanna check up on your policy. And if you GOTTA PLAN to get arrested, then you aint in the real struggle…so you probably won’t having any problem reading that shit. So take a fucking look before sending poor folks and folks of struggle into the battle as your human shields.
Last week a law passed in San Francisco that made it policy to THROW OUR ACTIVIST ASSES IN JAIL UNDER RICO AND HOLD US THERE ON FELONY CHARGES. And according to federal funding and planning…its just going to get worse.

I mean OCCUPY THE JAILS if that’s your fucking plan, but I’m pretty sure enough of us poor folk and folks of color is doing that already. You might wanna shed youre little Stranger\SF Weekly\NPR\ Huffington Post light on that shit first before sending any more of us in.

Actually, you might wanna put yourselves on notice: YOU HAVE PIMPED US FOR THE LAST TIME. There is eldership in this community. You have rejected it and stepped all over it. You have stolen the words and the movements of people in REAL struggle for your own purposes. You can’t even fill out the hipster pants your fronting in. You don’t know what your doing. You don’t know what you’re getting into. You are falling right into THEIR traps. YOU ARE A THREAT TO OUR COMMUNITIES AND YOU WILL NO LONGER BE TOLERATED. STOP using OUR people for YOUR wack ass movements. You WILL be called out as the PIMPS you ARE and TREATED AS SUCH. I made the mistake of not directly confronting you before. For that I apoogize to Bruce, Jeremy, and my entire community. It won't happen again.

MENTORS AND ELDERS: WE HAVE FAILED. We let these wack ass muthufuckers take over our movements for far too long now. IT’S TIME TO TAKE THEM BACK. No more of our people can go down for pimps and hipsters.

On my birthday, Bruce faced his fear of flying to come visit me in Seattle. We went bowling. He sang me Age of Asparagus and Macho Macho Clam. He listened to me cry. He cried with me. I’m crying for him now. I wish I knew how he was.

Action: Please Call the district atty and demand they be released and that this was not a conspiracy- Ph # 415-553-1751-

Russell Means, who gained international notoriety as one of the leaders of the 71-day armed occupation of Wounded Knee in South Dakota in 1973 and continued to be an outspoken champion of American Indian rights after launching a career as an actor in films and television in the 1990s, has died. He was 72.

Means died Monday at his home in Porcupine, S.D., his family announced on his website, russellmeansfreedom.com.

The nation's most visible American Indian activist, Means was a passionate militant leader who helped thrust the historic and ongoing plight of Native Americans into the national spotlight.

In joining the fledgling American Indian Movement in 1969, Means later wrote, he had found a new purpose in life and vowed to "get in the white man's face until he gave me and my people our just due."

Diagnosed with throat cancer in July 2011 and told that it had spread too far for surgery, Means refused to undergo heavy doses of radiation and chemotherapy. Instead, he reportedly battled the disease with traditional native remedies and received treatments at an alternative cancer center in Scottsdale, Ariz.

"I'm not going to argue with the Great Mystery," he told the Rapid City Journal in August 2011. "Lakota belief is that death is a change of worlds. And I believe like my dad believed. When it's my time to go, it's my time to go."

An Oglala Sioux born on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, Means in his activist prime was called strident, defiant, volatile, arrogant and aggressive. He was frequently arrested and claimed to have been the target of numerous assassination attempts.

A onetime con artist, dance-school instructor and computer programmer, Means was executive director of the government-funded Cleveland American Indian Center when he met Dennis Banks and other AIM founders in 1969.

In joining the American Indian Movement at age 30, Means later wrote in his autobiography, he had found "a way to be a real Indian."

In Cleveland, he founded the first AIM chapter outside Minneapolis, and he became the organization's first national coordinator in 1971.

In 1970, he was among a group of American Indian activists who occupied Mount Rushmore, where he infamously urinated on the top of the stone head of George Washington — an act he later said symbolized "how most Indians feel about the faces chiseled out of our holy land."

That November, he joined fellow AIM members and other Native Americans in taking over a replica of the Mayflower in Plymouth, Mass. And in 1972 he participated in the seven-day occupation and trashing of the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters in Washington, D.C.

But the controversial and flamboyant activist with the trademark long braids gained his greatest notoriety at the trading post hamlet of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

The occupation of Wounded Knee by more than 200 AIM-led activists began in late February 1973 in the wake of a failed attempt to impeach tribal president Richard Wilson, whose Oglala critics accused him of corruption and abuse of power and said his private militia suppressed political opponents.

After the takeover of Wounded Knee, the historic site of the 7^th Calvary's large-scale massacre of Sioux men, women and children in 1890, the area was cordoned off by about 300 U.S. marshals and FBI agents, who were armed with automatic weapons and aided by nine armored personnel carriers.

Among the occupiers' demands were that congressional hearings be held to protect historical benefits held in trust by the U.S. government.

Before the occupation ended peacefully in May, two occupiers were dead and a U.S. marshal, who was paralyzed from the waist down, was among the wounded.

A federal grand jury reportedly indicted 89 people, including several AIM leaders, for federal crimes in connection with the seizure and occupation of Wounded Knee.

That included Means and Banks, who emerged, as a 1986 story in The Times put it, as "the two most famous Indians since Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse wiped out Custer nearly a century earlier."

Their widely publicized trial in 1974 on a variety of felony charges ended after eight months when a federal judge threw out the case on grounds of prosecutorial misconduct.

On the 20^th anniversary of the occupation in 1993, former South Dakota Gov. Bill Janklow told the Associated Press that the fighting intensified racism, bitterness and fear in the state.

Means saw it differently, saying it was the Indians' "finest hour."

"Wounded Knee restored our dignity and pride as a people," he told the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2002. "It sparked a cultural renaissance, a spiritual revolution that grounded us."

Tim Giago, the retired editor and publisher of the Native Sun News in Rapid City, S.D., takes a critical view of Means' militant methods as an activist.

"I think he could have accomplished 10 times what he did eventually accomplish, which was to bring focus on Native American issues, if he had followed the path of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi instead of turning to violence and guns," Giago, who was born and raised on the Pine Ridge Reservation, told The Times last year.

"If he had followed a peaceful demonstration like those two great leaders did, I think he would have had much more support from the American people that I think he lost when he turned to violence," Giago said. "As a matter of fact, he lost the support of a lot of Native Americans when he resorted to violence."

Historian Herbert T. Hoover, a professor emeritus at the University of South Dakota whose specialties include the history of American Indian-white relations in Sioux Country, described Means as "a force for good during the civil rights movement on behalf of American Indians."

"I don't think Russell should be remembered as a radical," Hoover told The Times in 2011. "Russell was somebody who simply wanted Indians to get their due in the civil rights period."

Means' 1974 trial wasn't the end of his legal troubles.

In 1976, he was acquitted of a charge of murder in the 1975 shooting death of a 28-year-old man at a bar in Scenic, S.D. He had been accused of aiding and abetting in the shooting for which another man was convicted of murder.

And in 1978, Means began a one-year prison term after being convicted of an obstruction of justice charge related to a 1974 riot between American Indian Movement supporters and police at the courthouse in Sioux Falls, S.D.

Through it all, he continued his high-profile activism.

In Geneva in 1977, he was a delegate to the "Conference on Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations of the Americas." As one of the main speakers, he urged the conference to recommend Indian participation in the United Nations and attacked the U.S. government.

"We live in the belly of the monster," he said, "and the monster is the United States of America."

In the mid-1980s, Means spent several weeks in the jungles of Nicaragua with the Miskito Indians in an attempt save them from what he said was "an extermination order" issued by Daniel Ortega's Sandinista government.

Means also tried his hand at national politics in the '80s.

In an attempt to bring the "world view of the Indian" to the American people, he agreed in 1983 to be Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt's running mate in Flynt's unsuccessful campaign for the presidency of the United States.

And in 1987, Means sought the presidential nomination of the Libertarian Party but lost to former Texas Congressman Ron Paul.

Means' acting career began after he was approached by a casting director to play Chingachgook in the 1992 movie "The Last of the Mohicans."

A string of more than 30 other roles in films and television followed, including playing a shaman in "Natural Born Killers" and providing the voice of the title character's father in "Pocahontas."

Means' transition from activist to actor was deemed a natural one.

"Russell has always been very mediagenic," Hanay Geiogamah, who joined AIM in 1971 and co-produced a series of Native American TV movies on TNT, told The Times in 1995. "He was eloquent, capable of synthesizing complex political ideas for the press and, with his long black braids and statuesque physique, the image the media wanted to see.

"Russell was smart enough to realize that when you've got it, you've got it. He used the system … and used it well."

Oliver Stone, who directed Means in "Natural Born Killers," described him as "a renegade with one foot in both corrals, someone who has walked a crooked and strange life."

"He's a very authoritative presence with his own brand of magic," Stone told The Times in 1995. "Whether he's acting or not is hard to say."

Of his career as an actor, Means told The Times in 1995: "I haven't abandoned the movement for Hollywood. … I've just added Hollywood to the movement."

As he told the Washington Post a year later, "My life has been a life of passion, and I'm still a voice for traditional Indian people, for freedom-seeking Indian people."

Means was born Nov. 10, 1939, on the Pine Ridge Reservation. After his father landed a job in a Navy shipyard during World War II, the family moved to Vallejo, Calif., in 1942. Summers, Means would return to South Dakota to visit relatives on the reservations.

Means, who chronicled his life in the 1995 book "Where White Men Fear to Tread" (written with Marvin J. Wolf), continued his activism in old age.

In 2007, he was among some 80 protesters who were arrested after blocking Denver's Columbus Day parade honoring Christopher Columbus, an event they condemned for being a "celebration of genocide."

Asked if he was still active in the American Indian Movement in an interview in the Progressive in 2001, Means said, "As far as I'm concerned, as long as I'm alive, I'm AIM.

"We were a revolutionary, militant organization whose purpose was spirituality first, and that's how I want to be remembered. I don't want to be remembered as an activist; I want to be remembered as an American Indian patriot."

“DETOURED My Journey from Darkness to Light “

A memoir by Jesse De La Cruz - a ReView4theRevolution Book Review

“Los Hombres No Lloran” “Man Don’t Cry”

These words echoed in my mind as I read Jesse De La Cruz’s memoir “DETOURED My Journey from Darkness to Light”. Jesse shares in his memoir how these words are still are used in our communities by men to cope with pain, anger and sadness.

Jesse was raised and made in the barrios of califaz.  At twelve he began a journey that led him to become a convict, heroin drug addict and gang member who served approximately thirty years at California prisons like Folsom and San Quentin.

Jesse shares in his memoir his experiences in a real and intimate way of what the Vida Loca gave him, but also has taken away from him---friends, family and community. Jesse speaks about the demons one faces in the Vida Loca in real raw uncut truth. He speaks of our broken communities, the false notion of what is to be a man in our machista culture.

Jesse was born with two strikes against him--brown boy in the America and the child of migrant parents who moved with the seasons to work on the fields of Califaz to raise their family; living in broken communities and having to work in the fields as kid and go to school at the same time.  He speaks of his experiences with racist teachers and a broken, disconnected educational system. He speaks about the beauty of family but also about growing up without knowing who his biological father was until later in life.

At the age of three Jesse was diagnosed with polio. Jesse writes about the difficulties growing up with this disease, spending much of his childhood in hospitals and therapy, and kids making fun of him. Jesse was tested many times to prove himself to others that he was no different than anyone and demanded respect even if it was obtained with violence. Jesse grew up defending himself with violence in a world and system that attacks black and brown youth constantly and fighting the lack of understanding in this society of disabled folks.

Jesse at a very young age show his courage and fierceness by never given up on his well being, in a passage in the memoir Jesse shares

“Los hombres no lloran.You have to be a man, son”

I wanted to please mama badly, so I held back my tears and stuffed my agony inside, but the truth was the pain was so unbearable I thought I was going to die. I frequently asked my mother when I would be going home, but she always gave me the same response.

“You’re too sick right now, son”

Been raised by single mother myself, I understand Jesse’s mother in preparing young Jesse to a world that kills, incarcerating black and brown people everyday.

In a chapter Jesse shares how he struggled with alcohol and drugs addictions, describing in detail how he self-medicated to fill the emptiness that many of us carry in our gut and the difficult and long path to sobriety.

As I was reading this memoir, at times, I was forced to stop reading, to fight back my own tears, thinking about my own childhood growing up in a broken family and in communities flooded with liquors stores, violence and medicating one self to numb the pain or the emptiness in our gut as Jesse describes it.

This book is not only a memoir, but a self-help tool for our brothers and sisters who are trying to sober up and trying to avoid the path the Jesse once walked. This memoir helped me fight my own demons and gave me the strength to keep struggling knowing that this homie Jesse De La Cruz, who had been through worst shit than I had, made it out alive.

Jesse also breaks down how the justice system intentionally does not provide the help for ex-offenders transitioning from prison to the outside.  Jesse took his knowledge and wisdom and founded The Jonah Foundation, which provides sober living housing for ex-offenders to resist the unjust system we live in and to give ex-offenders an opportunity to turn their lives around.

After his final release from prison Jesse De La Cruz enrolled in college, graduating with a baccalaureate degree in sociology in 2001 and a Masters in social work degree from California State University, Stanislaus in 2003.  He is currently working in his Ed.D.

“Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore. We have seen the future, and the future is ours.” 

Cesar Chavez