Story Archives 2009

by SAD BOY

“Another brown motherfucker that I gotta’ get rid of,” is the first thing I heard from the judge as soon as I walked in the courtroom. As soon as I heard this I knew that it wasn’t going to be easy. I knew then that I had to deal with racism and somehow put myself together in the short time to deal with this situation and present my case. My brain was storming with all these emotions from blatant racism in the court. I told my lawyer to ask the judge if we could have a five minute recess so I could pull myself together and judge’s answer was no. When my lawyer asked why, the judge’s answer was “I have a lot of criminals like himself to get rid of and they are the reason why this nation is the way it is.”

It took me 11-12 years of emotional abuse from the court systems to actually get my point across. Even though I’m in the country I know I will always be treated as if I was a ghost. As a person of color I have to be strong because they opened my eyes to the reality that all people of color deal with on a daily basis with the judicial system. It took me back to what my mother and father had to go through across the border for two and a half months for my sisters and I to have a better future.

I knew after that trial that my life had changed. One of the changes I had to make was to take advantage of this new opportunity that God had gave me. Instead of getting angry at the judge or the system, one of the ways I would change was to go to school get educated. I can’t imagine the struggles of my ancestors who came before me had to go through. The majority of them speak only spanish and in some cases only speak in dialects which makes them easy targets for abuse.

This has been going on since the 1930’s, where the government would send any person who looked mexican or latino to the farthest parts of mexico making sure that they could not find a way to come back. Blaming the migrant workers or braceros, for their own dirty business practices was common in these days.

Despite the fact that two million peasants lost their lives in the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the government failed to provide them the resources needed to improve their lives. By the late thirties, when the crop fields began yielding insufficient harvest and employment became scarce, the peasant was forced to look for other means of survival. The Bracero Program was created in which more than 4 million Mexican farm laborers came to work the fields of this nation.

Even though things have changed we can still see how migrant people are targeted. For example, back in the 90s they tried to pass proposition 187 to take away migrants people’s human rights. Even though I was a little kid back then I still remember how difficult it was for my people to take their children to the hospital.

Because I’ve had this experience I believe that if we fight we can get what is entitled to us. I have also learned that we can empower ourselves and take what is negative and turn it positive. We should all be equal and people should not be marginalized because of the color of our skin.

by Mission Resistors

An Oakland mourning, grayish clouds like the courthouse building.

Looked like a skyscaper to me… As the people walked down the street, they looked scary to me like the building. As I went into the building with my parents to see the judge for his judgment, he sent me to another foster home.

I must have stayed there about 3 weeks before I ran away again. They found me on the streets in the Fillmore with the prostitutes, the pimps and the players of the street life. Everybody used to hang out at Chicken A-Go-Go on Fillmore Street. It was a restaurant for the prostitutes. The prostitutes would give me a dollar to go to school—-for lunch money. They would say, “You make sure you go to school, cuz if you don’t, I’m gonna whip your ass just like your mama. I’m not givin’ away my money for nothing."

They were wearing short mini skirts with high heels. They swayed from side-to-side. I used to sneak into the Fillmore theater all the time, like when James Brown came to town. I’d seen him for free—-and Otis Redding and Sam Cooke. I liked the song, “Please Please Please.” I liked the way he sang it and the way he danced. Sam Cooke would make the women jump up, holler and scream. Back in those days, it was a big dance floor—-everybody would be dancing.

Then I got arrested by a truant officer. I went to Juvenile Hall, then back to court. I then went to a boarding school named Frego Ranch School in San Andreas, California. I tried to run away from there, but instead, got lost and scared. I stayed 6 months at the ranch and later, went back home. I was about 13 years old. I was going to a Jr. High School named Benjamin Franklin for a minute. I would never go to my class and ended up running away from home again. This time, they sent me to Los Angeles to a foster family’s house. I didn’t know anything about LA.

The first day, I arrived at their house, they took us to Disneyland and I was gone again. I ran away... I met a white man going back to S.F. He gave me a ride and dropped me off at the old Greyhound bus station on 7th and Market Street, but the police found me sleeping in the doorway there.

I ended up going back to Juvenile Hall and back to court, when the judge asked me, “What should I do with you?” I answered, “Why don’t you let me live with my real parents?”

He granted it.

by Tony Robles

Jimmy, Jimmy, oh Jimmy Mack

When are you coming back?

--Martha Reeves and the Vandellas

It was 1980 and the thick smell of sugar cane from the factory was heavy in the air. My family had just moved to Waipahu, Hawaii from San Francisco. I would walk the roads with the red clay earth under my feet. I was a newcomer. I didn't know the history of where I was. All I really knew were the messages I got from tourist propaganda. I didn't know about the Hawaiian monarchy and how it was overthrown by the US. I didn't know about the workers who had labored under severe conditions on the sugar and pineapple plantations in the early days. I had no idea that Pilipino workers had shut down the factories to protest inhuman working conditions. All I knew was the dirt under my feet. I tried hard to get rid of it.

My father, Jimmy Robles, had taken a chance moving to Hawaii. He labored more than 20 years as a janitor for the city and county of San Francisco. One day he said goodbye. He, his wife, my brother and sister and I packed up and moved to Hawaii. My grandmother had warned my father against the move. To her, the smart thing was to remain in his job, retire and collect a pension. Life in Hawaii was hard. The economy was bad and nobody seemed to have any money. My father had started his own janitorial business in San Francisco and brought his equipment to Waipahu. His vacuum cleaner, mops, brooms and floor waxing machine sat idly near a mango tree in the backyard of his father in law's house.

My father walked the same road that I did. He said he was looking for work he wasn't but he was looking for something else, something deeper. Somehow I knew he was looking. And while I was at school listening to a girl say to me, "You talk like one haole" the same red earth clung to the bottom of my father's feet in Waipahu when he came upon a house. Unlike me, he didn't try to get the dirt off his feet.

"I was in Waipahu," my father says as he recalls that day over 20 years ago, "I saw these guys in a garage. It was a beautiful dance. A guy in a ponytail came out. His name was Snooky Sanchez. He knew my father and my brother. I watched these guys sparring and I was inspired. I sought out this art.

What my father had encountered on that day was the Pilipino fighting art of Escrima. Escrima is a Philippine fighting style which utilizes sticks, knives and open hand techniques as well as fluid body movements and footwork. The movements are explosive. The origins of the art predate the Spanish invasion and subsequent colonization of the Philippines. My father explains the warrior's mentality that goes with being a successful practitioner of the art. "To do well, you have to have a war mentality. You have to be strong and in condition. You have to be in total relaxation and from that come a burst of energy. You go down into your spirit; you go beyond your limit."

My father worked at the art and became an instructor, an indigenous warrior scholar who has resisted the American occupation and colonization of his mind, heart and spirit. He befriended another martial artist, Joe Behic, AKA Joe the volcano, and the two experimented with the art, synthesizing different styles, developing their own style that they've named Sayaw Ng Mandirigma, which means "Dancing with the warriors" in Tagalog. "Our style is like a cobra. As we retreat, we're ready to attack at any time. It's a reality-based combat. We developed this system over a period of 5 years."

My father says that in the old days, you learned the art through your family only. Hawaii is an integral center for martial arts people have come from all over for generations, bringing their different styles. "A lot of masters came and planted roots here in Hawaii," dad says. I remember my father trying to pass the art to me. He'd take his sticks and he'd show me the basic strikes, which I still remember. For some reason I didn't take to it. Perhaps it was the bad memories I had of him showing me boxing, with me on the receiving end of more punches than I landed. I ended up gravitating towards writing.

My father was in Hawaii with some of his Escrima students when he was invited to attend an Escrima world championship tournament on the Island of Cebu in the Philippines. My father's parents arrived in the US in the early 1920s. This will be his first visit to the birthplace of his parents. "I'm happy to go to the motherland, the roots. My people came from there. It's gonna be emotional for me. The students he will accompany will be visiting for the first time as well.

It is befitting that this world championship will be held on the Island of Cebu, the place that Ferdinand Magellan was killed by the Philippine warrior Lapu Lapu in an act of resistance to the colonizing of the Spaniards.

He leaves for Cebu on July 16th. When he gets off the plane I'm sure he will have the same red earth on the bottoms of his feet, having arrived just in time to dance that beautiful dance which is his life.

by Mission Resistors

When the judge granted the department of human services their request that I take a psych evaluation, my heart dropped. I felt betrayed by people in authority. I felt like my world was ending. I felt numb all day. I felt there was a conspiracy to take my children from me and my life was in their hands. I had to obey every thing that they said. As a mother I felt the need to protect my children like an animal that protects their children, but I was human trying to protect my children from the very system that tried to take them away from me. Should I take the psych eval? And let them take my children? Or should I go and get my own psych eval and compete with them? I didn’t want to jeopardize anything. I was afraid like prey that’s been caught in a trap, and knowing nothing but to protect my children. When I looked at the judge, Judge Gargano, I knew in my heart that he was going to grant the request. I looked at him looking at me with his piercing eyes like he was cutting me in two, section by section, saying “You little black nigger, you better shut up or else I will ruin your whole life. You have no rights and you cannot fight us.” I felt nervous I felt like I was by myself even though there were people around me. There was no one I could turn to.

I looked a the judge with his old, pale white face and he reminded me of Scrooge. He was wearing a black cape like the grim reaper. They had no reason, no explanation. Just because I was a mother I went to the right people to ask for help, yet they turned on me. I started talking to some people I thought that I could trust. The very people I thought that would help me: the dept of human services, the judges, the city attorney turned against me. I had to go get help from the Center for Exploited Children. I brought every piece of paeprwork, every doctor’s note, every school papoer from my children, I went to my church talked to my pastor. I went to go see my faimly doctor to ask her to write a note about my character. I asked anyone that knew me or loved me or cared about me to write a note about my character as a parent, as an advocate and I also took my foster child’s paperwork from when I got her even before she was born—-I had them all. I took it to the National Center of Exploited Children, finally someone to listen to me I thought. He put all of that together, read every paper, every doctor’s note, every teacher’s letter, my doctor’s letters, he put it all together in a document. I had another court date to go to finalize the psych eval and I took that paper to my next court hearing. I was told that if I didn’t take a psych eval and went against court orders, I would be placed in jail. I thought that was another tactic to take my children.

They say the squeaky wheel gets oil--I needed to keep talking. So I took that document frm the National Center of Exploited Children to my court hearing and filed it for the judge to see. And to my surprise, it was pandamonium. They said, “Where did you get this from?” I said there is a name there and I said, “I am not taking a psych eval.” There my story started getting worse. I was not afraid as I was before. I didn’t go to jail. They didn’t take my children. They were bluffing me all along to take a psych eval to use their own people, not allowing me to use my own.

But with that, I went through all kinds of horrible things with the system. During that time I hired an attorney named Craig Martin.

He was the only person that I could talk to that I knew could rattle the judge’s mind and authority more than I could. So all I could think was put myself in survival mode for my children because my children are my life and no one could love them like I could. With that, I decided to let him touch me in places I didn’t want to be touched. But as time went on, it got worse. He did what he was supposed to do and do the paperwork and go to court but he used it against me for the simple fact that I was a poor mother with no money. But I thought I was paying him enough with my rent money, grocery money, anything to keep his hand off of me. But that didn’t help. But then I would think about my children and I let him do these things to me. During that time he grew angrier and angrier at me. I tried to tell anoher judge that my own attorney was raping me because I was scared that if I let him go I would lose my children.

by Mission Resistors

It didn't occur to me that the young, black, self-proclaimed thug whose girlfriend I owe three dollars was about to cowardly strike me from behind with a wooden baseball bat. The back of my head and throughout my body was almost without life.

Over three dollars.

I lay there, trying to protect my face. The Barry Bonds of Mission St. continued to reach the all-time record. As the blood and beating continued, the fans accumulated and just stood in awe.

That's all they did.

He finally walked off with a silent standing ovation. He had the nerve to return moments later to say I was making the block hot.

I couldn't move. Warm blood poured over the back of my head, neck, back. I thought my arms and legs were broken. A prostitute helped by putting pressure on my wounds to stop the bleeding from my head. Paramedics soon arrived and asked me to get up on the gurney. They spoke to each other as if around an office cooler.

They released me that night.

I returned and gingerly, but purposely, walked the same block where the incident occurred. As the fans accumulated, I signed no autographs except for one, the prostitute who possibly saved my life.

by Jennalynn Jazzmyn Stevens/PNN Gender, Poverty and Disability Scholar

I am a Gender, Poverty and Disability Scholar who has dealt with houselessness, discrimination, family rejection, and system abuse. I am a MtF Transgender Lesbian that has never been sexually active, but knows that I am attracted to women. In this column I will be talking about other misconceptions and discrimination that the Gender Variant Community faces. The issues I will be talking about are magnified even more by the fact that many of our community are low-income and in other situations of discrimination. I want to address well-thought out questions and concerns that you might have. You can e-mail them to removing.the.glasses@gmail.com.

What defines a man as a man and a woman as a woman? Is it that women like men and men like women? It is like saying that it is mandatory that cats eat mice. This is one of many misconceptions that a transgender has to deal with.

I come to you out of a desire to inform and educate you on this widely misunderstood concept. It is said, The truth will set you free. I think we need to examine this phrase a little better. When we look at the truth we are often guilty of looking at it through tinted glasses. Most of the time we don't realize it. When we want the truth to set us free, we first need to take off the glasses. This Column is about removing the glasses about transgenders. Now I will talk about misperceptions about the trans community.

First, I will talk to you about the confusion between sex and gender. Gender has nothing to do with sex or sexual orientation. Many people define gender as male and female. They make this determination by physical attributes. There are many problems with this; the biggest one is that there are individuals born with anatomy that is not one or the other. Another complication is that our social structure puts expectations on females and males. Many people have thought processes that do not fit within these limits. These people are Transgender or Gender Variant. Gender Variant people fit into many different groups. The important thing to know right now is that they identify as something other than what they were assigned at birth by society. It is also important to know that there are various different types of Gender. There are Genetic Male, Genetic Female, Cross Dressers, Drag Queens/Kings, FtM's (Female to Male) and MtF's (Male to Female) Transgender {Transsexual} (someone who wishes to completely become a gender other than what they were born), Inter-Gendered {Inter-Sexed} (someone who has natural physical attributes of both), Gender Queer (someone who identifies as no specific gender), and even others I do not know about.

I realize that one definition of sex is synonymous with gender. For the sake of this column sex is about what we do in bed besides sleeping. Sexual orientation describes whom we can see ourselves having sex with. Many people think that because we were born one gender and identify as the other we therefore are attracted to our birth gender. This is not true. The Gender Variant Community has sexual orientations as variant as they are, just like the Gender Normative Community. In both communities there are a whole bunch of options when it comes to sexual orientation. Some of these orientations are heterosexual, homosexual (gay male and lesbian), bi-sexual and asexual (a person that is simply not into sex). There is another sexual orientation that needs some explaining, that would be pansexual. A pansexual is someone that realizes that there are many genders and is open to a sexual relationship with any of them. A person does not need to be sexually active to know what kind of person they are attracted to, in other words their sexual orientation. If you accept that anyone has the right to be attracted to whom they are attracted to, then should that not include everyone? And remember everyone knows what is right and wrong from childhood, and you cannot help what mental gender you are or who you are attracted to.

I hope that this column has helped remove the glasses and clear your perception on the definition of Gender and Sexual Orientation.

by Al Giordano/Special to The Narco News Bulletin

US and Mexico authorities claim that neither knew about the "swine flu" outbreak until April 24. But after hundreds of residents of a town in Veracruz, Mexico, came down with its symptoms, the story had already hit the Mexican national press by April 5. The daily La Jornada reported:

"Clouds of flies emanate from the rusty lagoons where the Carroll Ranches business tosses the fecal wastes of its pig farms, and the open-air contamination is already generating an epidemic of
respiratory infections in the town of La Gloria, in the Perote Valley, according to Town Administrator Bertha Crisostomo Lopez."

The town has 3,000 inhabitants, hundreds of whom reported severe flu symptoms in March. CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta, reporting from Mexico, has identified a La Gloria child who contracted the first case of identified "swine flu" in February as "patient zero," five-year-old Edgar Hernandez, now a survivor of the disease.

By April 15 - nine days before Mexican federal authorities of the regime of President Felipe Calderon acknowledged any problem at all -the local daily newspaper, Marcha, reported that a company called Carroll Ranches was "the cause of the epidemic."

La Jornada columnist Julio Hernandez Lopez connects the corporate dots to explain how the Virginia-based Smithfield Farms came to Mexico: In 1985, Smithfield Farms received what was, at the time, the most expensive fine in history - $12.6 million - for violating the US Clean Water Act at its pig facilities near the Pagan River in Smithfield, Virginia, a tributary that flows into the Chesapeake Bay. The company, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) dumped hog waste into the river.

It was a case in which US environmental law succeeded in forcing a polluter, Smithfield Farms, to construct a sewage treatment plant at that facility after decades of using the river as a mega-toilet. But "free trade" opened a path for Smithfield Farms to simply move its harmful practices next door into Mexico so that it could evade the tougher US regulators.

by Mission Resistors

It came without warning!

I was going to be homeless with nowhere to sleep but the unpreditible streets of San Francisco, filled with drug addicts, mentally ill patients turned away from treatment centers, and roving bands of gangsters vying for turf space.

There had been a full-blown shoot out in front of Ella Hill the previous Fall, and a murder inside the shelter itself a couple months earlier, a man shot during an afterschool basketball game in front of his young daughter.

Ella Hill Hutch, the shelter I had stayed at for the last 1,000 days
was being shut down, the staff member at the front door informed me
as I entered that cool night last Spring.

“Can you believe that?” he exclaimed in disbelief.

I could hear the fear in his voice and realized that it not only meant that we would be losing our place to sleep, but he would be losing his job as well.

“We have a petition over there on the table you can sign if you want to try to keep the place open,” he said.

by Bruce Allison/PNN

May 16th at 5:25pm, members of SCIU 1021 were taking names as people from SCIU, Senior Action Network, Planning for Elders, Gray Panthers, Tenderloin Housing Clinic, and a community of others, including Access of Love Youth Program, were about to march against the mayor's 70% budget cuts that will cripple public health for the future. The banner was set out, "The Bad A$$! March." As I stood by, I watched the banner go up, and the token politicians stand in the front of the line when they should have been in the back for causing the problem. The politicians were Supervisors Ross Mckeriny (?), and Chris Daly, carrying his young child on his shoulders, as well as others.

The March started, the line kept going and going. There seemed to be about 1,000 people, taking up one lane of traffic, stretching for three blocks, blocking the rush hour traffic as commuters were trying to get home. The March was trying to point out the average amount of chaos that will happen when the poor are affected by the drastic cuts in public health. As I counted to see how many were there, it went on for three blocks. Then, as the only reporter who reports the truth, I ran towards the front to keep track of what was happening: I saw families pushing babies in carriages, and medical personnel in uniforms, just fired two months ago for no apparent reason. I saw SRO residents, and the entire poor community of San Francisco, immigrants, day laborers, and homecare workers. As they marched, I ran past them, up about four blocks. As they marched, I saw the beginning again. They marched into UN plaza, all the way up to the steps at City Hall. The steps looked like the Bastille, surrounded by riot gates, so we held the demonstration at the park across the street. Suddenly, one member of the march jumped on stage and exclaimed, “no justice, no peace!” We shouted that for fifteen minutes, until the last marcher stepped on the green facing city halls. The grass was replaced with people. When you turned around, all you could see was an ocean of people.

Fred, one of the organizers, got up to the stage, and said, "We have been keeping you this long because we wanted to show how many people are involved to the members of the march," she followed by asking, "How many people here are homeless?" Over 300 people raised their hands. "How many people live in the Tenderloin?," she asked again. Another 1/3 raised their hands. Then suddenly, a woman got on stage and said she worked for Tenderloin Health Clinic, she said, "We are now only allowed to be open 2 hours a day, and we take care of over 500 people a day." Another person from Curry Senior Center got on stage and said that their ability to feed seniors will be restricted to the weekdays, that seniors will not get nutrition on the weekends.

As a senior, hot meals are very handy when it comes to living in this expensive city on an income of $900 a month with a rent of $600 a month. Average readers do not realize that this poverty scholar needs to use food pantries. With those resources cut, I need to find another way to get food. There are other things that could have been cut, like overtime for policeman and the cost of drivers for fire captains. I know, as a worker, that social security is expensive, but please, pay the amount you owe, the city will pay the other amount. That will give the city 100 million this year that could go to public health.