By tiny Gray-Garcia - daughter of Dee, mama of Tiburcio
Homefulness #2 @7600 BlackArthur - Deep East Huchuin
“Here are the keys”, On a beautiful day in May - right as the pandemic and the poltricksters who wouldn’t listen to the CDC and continued to conduct “sweeps” on houseless bodies all across the Bay Area, was making it impossible for so many houseless peoples to survive, muchless shelter in place (like I always say, how you gonna shelter in place , when you have no place) a wite-man in a brand-new BMW pulled up in front of the Sliding Scale cafe at Homefulness #1 where we share healthy food, groceries, masks, diapers, produce and organic pastry to over 800 folks a week, and handed us the “keys” to Homefulness #2 at 7600 BlackArthur.
That was a moment in herstory for so many reasons. Us poor people who have struggled with rent, eviction, homelessness, displacement, removal, false borders, hunger, mold, cold, scamlords, illegal evictions, gentriFUKation as i call it, had taught people who had Never had to struggle with any of those things, about the concepts of Poverty Scholarship and ComeUnity Reparations. We were able to It meant SO much and yet it oddly quiet moment , it meant so much but was barely a blip in the terror of poor peoples pandemic survival. In addition we poor, disabled, indigenous peoples have been “given” the keys to apartments, rental houses, garages, storage bins and cars before, and as soon as we can’t pay the rent, we are given more things, like 3 day notices to pay rent
“This lot is zoned for 14 luxury condos…” said the real ESNake agent....
Before that day with the “keys” which were to an empty lot in the intentionally blighted poor people of color neighborhood known as Deep East Oakland, which was currently ground zero of a huge push to gentriFUK that had been the home of a gas station and a body shop for decades and then just left and decimated as so many other locations in poor peoples of color, we had had a series of frightening conversations with the devil-opers of Oakland and realEsnakes who were “selling” a lot on BlackArthur intentionally planned to remove the people who already lived on BlackArthur.
Lots of people talk, protest and even organize against gentrification and removal, but how do you actually stop it in its tracks?
After our youth poverty skolaz from the liberation school called Deecolonize Academy and us Mama and Uncle poverty Skola teachers - all of us coming from homelessness and eviction trauma, living and schooling on Homefulness, released the Hoarded Mama Earth WeSearch Report last year…
"Vacant lots and empty buildings are being “hoarded” i.e. not housing people who are in desperate need of housing , sometimes for years, and us homeless and formerly homeless youth and families at Homefulness by doing extensive research can help take them back for the good of the people"… excerpt from the Hoarded Mama Earth Report by POOR Magazine Youth and Mama Poverty SKolaz-
What we “learned” from this WeSearch ( what i call Poor people-led research) is what we already knew, what all of us poor peoples and long-time residents of these gentriFUKed neighborhoods all know, the gentriFUKers are coming, they have always been there. They are waiting like cultures at the intersections of every working class and poor people neighborhood across Turtle Island (United Snakes). And they always move violently and swiftly, whether its against 100 year old Black elders, like Iris Canada, or families with nowhere else to go, Sabrina Carter and Moms4Housing and so many more. But people need numbers and proof of things we already know so POOR Magazine researched and “proved” eviction is elder abuse and its why we launched the Bank of ComeUnity Reparations to get folks with race and class privilege to radically redistribute to poor and houseless/indigenous peoples like us so we could “UnSellMamaEarth” one small piece at a time. Its why we wrote Poverty Scholarship Textbook, its why we do Theatre of the POOR, its why we do PeopleSkool - a poor people-led school to help privileged, housed, hoarding and unhoused folks degentriFUK and decolonize their lives and minds.
Thanks to all of this work and sweat and prayer and education and cultural work, 7600 BlackArthur was successfully the 2nd small piece of Mama Earth that us poor folks have UnSold, and removed out of the hands of the gentriFUKers so they couldn’t “build” devil-op, destroy, more of Mama Earth about us without the residents in the very place they think they have rights to.
“You need to re-name yourself Rich Magazine now, how you poor people got two places?,” Have heard this more than once, since the launching of Homefulness #2 - and the hard part is explaining POOR Magazine is still in fact Po - we don’t “own” nothing, this wasn’t about us controlling or owning , or running or colonizing, or perpetrating more of the same ole same ole krapitalist lies of Ownership. This wasn’t a “Capital Campaign, or other non-profiteer, philanthro-pimp lie.
This was about lifting stolen land off the commodities market in real time and giving it back to the comeUnity, forEVER. This was about 21st century actual manifestation of dreams of poor people -led self-determination. This was the manifestation of DeGentriFUKation. In real time what does that looks like? It looks like just what we have slowly but surely crawled though. The CONfusion, terror, poverty, mud, and struggle of Homefulness #1 into building 6 units of rent-free housing, for houseless and formerly houseless very poor, disabled families and individuals, and by BlackAugust, assuming the City of Oakland doesn’t throw us more over-priced permits or obstacles, 11 units. That families and elders and their descendants can live in forever, with no fear of gentriFUKing. No-one, no entity or agency profits off of this land, or "owns" it, but we grow food, heal and take care, of each other, educate and support the community with massive redistribution of everything we have, all the time.
We are stewards of the land- we, the landless, indigenous, poor peoples who launched Homefulness & the children & childrens children of original founders of homefulness and generations beyond- DO NOT OWN MAMA EARTH. None of us who live here own the land, but because this land and all of us exist within a capitalist system who will easily take a certain amount of blood-stained dollars to evict us, displace us or remove us- we understand that their needs to be some entity on paper that "owns" the land or it will get stolen by more government gangsters or devil-opers. For that reason we are creating a series of documents and entities to protect the land and its stewards from current or future removal, devil-opment or removal -excerpt from the living document known as the MamaFesto created by all the poverty, disability youth and elder skolaz of POOR Magazine since 2009 revolutionary Change Session at POOR Magazine
In the case of Homefulness #2 - its looks like 6 all nations prayer ceremonies, comeUnity visioning days, where the whole community has weighed in on what their Homefulness is going to look like (there have been 6- we will be having another one June 20th (For Juneteenth and Revolutionary Fathers Day weekend) , its looks like ComeUnity led clean-ups and asphalt lifting and land cleaning and loving and designing together with conscious architects and comeUnity Architects, who take back this paper-dominated space of land planning. It looks like leaders from the comeUnity stepping up to lead this liberation and create their own MamaFesto #2 . These arent just dreams and strategy and talk, these are happening.
Its a funny thing, but people have been lied to so long about “ownership” and mamaEarth, that the idea of UnSelling seems really hard for us colonized people to truly believe.
BlackArthur Homefulness #2 was taken back from the Devil-opers and given to the people and hardly anyone noticed…
We at POOR Magazine are going through a process with some conscious lawyers from Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC) who thankfully took us on as “clients” and conscious legislators like Carol Fife and Rebecca Kaplan to create a new legislation, a new designation not informed by the settler- colonial terror of land theft and the CONstitution, but prayed for and informed byPoverty Scholarship and 1st Nations warriors like one of POOR Magazine’s spiritual leaders, Corrina Gould, from Sogorea Te Land Trust and West Berkeley Shellmound and our ancestors of gentriFUKation like my Mama Dee and Uncle Al Robles and us poor and gentriFUKEd and removed/houseless/bordered/disabled poverty skolaz, who are here and fight and protest and build and struggle everyday , with very little notice, no media except what we create ourselves and no accolades or bling.Just doing the work, cause it has to be done.
Our Poor Mama/Family/Youth and elder-led movement stands in solidarity and align ourselves with warriors from the EZLN, Landless Peoples Movement, AbaseMonjodole (Shackdwellers Union in South Africa) and MOVE Africa- Long Live John Africa, who a lot of people glamorize now , but weren’t standing with, when people were Shit-Talking about their refusal to get down with Krapitalism when the poltrickster mayor decided to bomb their powerFULL movement.
The Violent Herstory that led us houseless mamas to this day….
“Get the F&*k out you bums,” Mr. H, the motel owner, screamed at us. It was one of the few times we had moved our houseless bodies into a motel room to escape the cold of the park bench we were sleeping on. Me and mama were houseless and really at the end of our spiritual, physical rope. Our last hooptie (broke-down car) was towed for too many tickets for sleeping in it) and we had nowhere to go. When we stayed in the motel, I silk screened t-shirts all night in the tiny closet and then sold them on the street to pay for the next days motel rent, but this time sales weren’t so good and I only sold one shirt for $15.00. the days rent was $50.00.
Mr H called us bums because he had decided that because we had no money, no credit card and no cash we were “Bums”. He failed to notice how hard we worked to try to pay him but really that doesn’t matter anyway, as the old adage goes, “Money talks, bullshit walks”
This is just one slice of herstory that makes up the deep change work of my life-work to upturn what I call the Lie of Rent, Heal and UnSell Mama Earth and help fellow houseless, disabled /indigenous peoples launch as many Homefulness projects as possible across stolen and colonized Turtle Island and beyond. We will be doing one of our StolenLand/Hoarded Resources Tours though Akkkademia to manifest land liberation for the Stolen ancestors and land of Ohlone /Lisjan relatives and poor and houseless peoples of Peoples Park and 1921 Walnut st - a building about to be gentriFUKEd for the Dorm Industrial Complex. We welcome all folks to walk, march, stand and speak with us in this- pls connect if you interested. In addition, this Summer and Fall this povertyskola and others from POOR Magazine will be doing a road trip in the months of June and July and October-February to share this medicine as we always have from Day 1, with as many povertyskolaz and wealth-hoarders trying to un-hoard as want to learn, change and transform - please hit us up to visit your town and launch a stolen land tour, a workshop and/or a reading of the powerFULL medicine that informs this work Poverty Scholarship- Poor People-led Theory, Art , Words and Tears Across Mama Earth. Please hit this povertyskola up if you are interested to know more.