Story Archives 2010

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Brown Pride: A Letter to Cain Velasquez

Dear Brother Cain,

Congratulations on becoming the new UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) Heavyweight Champion of the World. I didn’t get to watch you, to see you perform your artistry, to see you live the spirit warrior dance flowing from your heart and mind. I didn’t see the moment when it all came together, the moment that came and went like a flash—blows raining down from the heart of a drum, the pulse of our ancestral rituals—inspired by love and struggle and the spirits of our indigenous ancestors. No, I didn’t see it and I surely didn’t see the years, the countless hours of work you put into training and preparation, embracing your craft, sweating and sacrificing and letting go of fear, standing up and being who you are.  I can only dream of the discipline, skill and determination it takes to compete in such a grueling sport.   What a great day it is. It means something. "Cain Velasquez…heavyweight champion". Those words keep echoing in my mind.

While you were in the octagon facing Brock Lesnar (who pronounced your name VELAS-QWEZZ), I was at the home of POOR Magazine reportero Muteado Silencio. Muteado is an indigenous scholar, artist and poet with Prensa Pobre, POOR Magazine—an indigenous newsmaking circle that makes revolutionary media, that is poor people and indigenous people led. Muteado is a powerful voice resisting racism, border fascism and linguistic domination—always there when help is needed, always ready to speak up for migrant Raza and communities of color. It was Muteado’s birthday and friends and family gathered in his small home in Oakland. Cain, you would have loved the gathering. The music was alive with Cumbia, hip hop, salsa, rap—the rhythms of resistance alive, tearing down the walls of confinement with the movement of our bodies and minds. Muteado’s mother was so warm and gracious and giving, her journey of motherhood and struggle swimming across her brown skin. Bowls of chicken, pork and vegetables warmed us. I think one of our reporters, Bruce Allison, ate 6 bowls. Muteado’s mother is a tough lady, mother of 13 beautiful children—even tougher than you, Cain—no joke.

The house was hers and the ancestors are alive, their voices alive in her movement, in her hands, her eyes, her voice—in everything she prepares. I saw an interview you gave where you spoke about your parents and how their struggle inspired you to become a fighter. You spoke of your father crossing the desert 5 times and being sent back before making it across to this country for a better life. You went to school and wrestled for Arizona State, earning honors in that sport while achieving a degree in education.  Tell me Cain, is Muteado’s mother like your mother?

Anyway, I wish I could have seen the fight but we didn’t have pay per view at Muteado’s house so we watched the Giants game instead. The Giants won! The room was alive—the Giants on TV, salsa in the speakers, pollo in our bellies and poetry on our lips. What more could we have wanted?

As the evening went on, I got a text message from my brother that read, "Cain beat Lesnar". I began telling people about your victory. "What?" they asked, the music blaring from the speakers. "Cain Velasquez…he beat Lesnar…he won" I repeated. They didn’t hear it but those words were music and it blended with the salsa coming from the speakers. The whole neighborhood heard it.

Since the night of Muteado’s birthday, I’ve read about the fight and have watched interviews you have given—including one interview where the host asked you about your brown pride tattoo—saying that some people think the tattoo indicates affiliation with a gang. We at POOR Magazine think the tattoo is beautiful. Also beautiful is the way you’ve spoken of and given respect to your father’s struggle as a migrant Raza man—his strength is your strength.

Brother Cain, just want to let you know that when you beat Lesnar, it was us beating the landlord, slumlord, boss. It was the kid that I was, afraid of confrontation, being able to confront fear and put it on its ass. It was our elders long ago and in the present who fought and are fighting for decent housing. It was for the dreamers who dreamed of doing what you did, to be able to stand up and look fear in the eye.

I read once that when Joe Louis was heavyweight champion, after each of his victories, the people in Harlem used to go wild in the streets in celebration. When I think of your victory, I feel those spirits moving from Harlem across the country to Arizona and to Muteado’s house in Oakand. And from there it goes through the desert where your father walked, planting the seeds that would become Brown Pride.

© 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Homefulness Means to Me

When I think of the word “Homefulness” an idea model created in 1997 by my mentor, co-founder of POOR Magazine/PNN, “Tiny” Lisa Gray-Garcia, only two words come to my mind: Equal Equity. Living in “affordable housing” via a Single Room Occupancy Hotel for the past five years, I've come to the revelation that in order for one to actually have peace of mind, one needs an affordable, stabilized home...........as opposed to a room with a roof.

To have “peace of mind from those who would threaten my safety in the sanctity of the little room I call my home. Not to have twelve po-lice officers illegally come into the little room I call “home” ready to kill me; and/or have my “landlord” fail to protect my safety as its tenant. This was what I went through on October 7^th, 2005.

“Peace of mind” is not just a reality for me, but for all poor families that struggle to even get a bed in homeless shelters. The freedom to be collective as a community, and to share everything denied from us courtesy of non-profits financed by governments, and governments who’re financed by greedy land developers.

A lifetime of struggle for me, and my family in Cleveland, Ohio is a testament to that effect. No matter how much I worked, we lived on fixed incomes for our entire lives. Though my mom managed to get an actual house for me, my two brothers, and my sister, she never truly owned it. Capitalism was killing it everyday, and eight years later, it died leading to their displacement.

I came here to San Francisco to get from one capitalism system only to face another. My mom had to rent an apartment, was in a shelter for a while until she was able to get back to that apartment space with the very limited amount of income sadly she receives each month to house my little brother and sister.

For me, and for all poor communities around me, “Homefulness” is the freedom from being undivided and categorized from all forms of institutionalized race and class control. To be apart of and not being in an apartment.

What Homefulness Means to Me

I was born in Berkeley and raised in Oakland. My mother, a black woman and a single mother, worked for a decade for the City of Berkeley. She eventually bought a house in Oakland, but she lost it. She bought property back when a working-class person could still buy land in the Bay Area, before gentrification fueled theft and speculation. The house she bought was a “fixer-upper” on 59th street between Telegraph and Shattuck, what used to be a working-class Black neighborhood; she always had dreams of fixing it up, but she was hardly a handyman, and she didn’t know anyone who was. The house was what was called “income property” because there were units to rent in back, but my mom was a bad landlord; if people could not pay rent she would always cut them a break, and when she began to get sick there was no money to pay the mortgage. When she lost the place I grew up in, there was no public outcry, no bailout. This was in the early 80’s. I was 9 years old.

When I say bought, I don’t mean bought. The property my mom had that I grew up in never really belonged to us; it was always the bank’s. My mother engaged in a gamble when she assumed the mortgage on our house, a gamble that she would be able to generate enough money eventually to get to the point where the house was not owned by the bank anymore. What I understand now is that this game was rigged from the start; a woman of color is likely to have less job security and more likely to have crippling health problems like high blood pressure or mental health issues that will exacerbate income instability, in addition to making less money when she is working. So the inherent racism and sexism of this country’s capitalist system played a large part in me losing my childhood home… but more than all that, I think isolation was to blame.

When my mom bought her house her plan was to do it all herself; she had moved away from her family, who all lived in San Francisco, she and my dad divorced, and as I got older she stopped working outside the house, relying on rents generated from the property in order to stay home with me, so she was quite alone in the world in many ways. She had tenants who liked and respected her, but the landlord/ tenant relationship is set up to be exploitative and hierarchical, not fertile ground for friendships or even reciprocity. When she started to get sick there was no one around to help either of us.

My mother passed away last year, after having been homeless for more than a decade. I am and will always be proud of her as a strong and independent woman, but the drive to be alone and safe, for the sister to do it all for herself and take no handouts, the way her ties to community attenuated to the point where she had no one to turn to in her deepest extremity of crisis, wrecked the latter part of her life and the early part of mine.

My mom, like many of us in the African American community, distrusted not only government
intervention and assistance in her life, but assistance from other people as well. She chose to “do it herself” because she thought it was safer not to rely on anybody, not even her family. I have found this to be a typical attitude in our carnivorous American culture. I believe that capitalism authors so many of this society’s great and small betrayals, and undermines the trust we have in each other; it comes between sisters, between lovers, between parents and children, between new neighbors, between a mother alone and her extended family that could have helped her survive. In modern American capitalism human relationships come in a poor second to the prioritizing of individual economic gain and the parasitic enrichment of wealthy elites whatever the cost.

If my mom had had a home community with which to share the responsibilities and burdens of home ownership, of child-rearing, of life, she might have lived longer. I don’t know why she chose to separate from her birth family, but as an adult I realize that family can mean the family you are born to, the family of circumstance you find yourself locked up/in school/workin/playing or on the street with, or the family you create. This is the beginning of beloved community .

HOMEFULNESS stands in direct opposition to the cancerous American profit ethic, the paradigm that sends individuals fleeing from each other in the public and private spheres, fearful that if one assumes the geas of caring for another, one’s security/retirement fund/college experience/life plan/ ”me time” might be lost or greatly reduced or altered in some frightening way beyond individual control. The donations of participants and allies buy the land for the project: owning the land HOMEFULNESS stands upon free and clear will insulate the community from the vicissitudes of rent and land speculation, but the heart of HOMEFULNESS is the idea of people banding together to create stability through shared sweat, assets, and commitment to being not only our brother’s keeper, but our brother’s daughter’s keeper, and our sister’s boyfriend’s mother’s keeper, and the keeper of the Paki grocery store owner down the block.

HOMEFULNESS is a vision of intention, rooted in the idea that taking responsibility for each other in love and mutual accountability is a radical act.

In many ways the heart of homefulness is the struggle and fight for the International
Hotel. The “I-Hotel” was the epicenter for the fight for affordable housing in San
Francisco in the late 60's and 70's amidst a climate of business expansion and gentrification of neighborhoods—full-scale removal of neighborhoods, such as Manilatown, adjacent to San Francisco’s Chinatown, to make way for the expansion and voracious hunger for land on the part of the city’s financial district.
 

I grew up eating across the street from the I-Hotel, across the table from my father who
would order food from the waitress everybody affectionately called mama. “Mama, give
me rice, pig nose, Chinese sausage and oxtail”. I’d watch mama give the order to Jim,
the cook; a Filipino old timer whose eyes said everything his mouth couldn’t.

Mama would bring out the food and I’d watch my father pick it up with his hands—rice
mixed with pig, mixed with fish—against the backdrop of the I-hotel—the abandoned
brick building across the street from the Silverwing Café and Smokey Wong’s garage. It
was the heart of Manilatown, the place where Filipino and Chinese elders lived. It was a
place where artists and poets created their art for the community in place like the Kearny
Street Worshop. It was where young revolutionaries like Bill Sorro answered the call
when it was slated to be demolished--displacing its elder residents to make way for a
parking lot. I can never forget the image of Bill Sorro captured in the film, The Fall of
the I-Hotel, walking to the offices of Walter Shorenstein—billionaire landlord of the I-
Hotel, saying, “I’m here to speak to Mr. Shorenstein”. I thought, that’s the kind of man I
want to be, a real man.

I’d watch my father eat in the indigenous way, with his hands, while I used knife and
fork. What I saw as a kid was merely my father eating breakfast, but what I see as a man
is our ancestors from the I-Hotel, and the ancestors who preceded them, speaking through my father. The act of going back to Manilatown after it had literally been destroyed was an act of resistance—the act of being close to the I-Hotel, empty, but not abandoned
following the eviction of its tenants, was an act of resistance to the forced uprooting of
the Manilatown community. The act of eating with his hands was my father’s resistance
to the forced capitalist notions of what is decent and proper and acceptable.

What was not acceptable or decent was the eviction of our elders from the I-Hotel, elders
who had worked their entire lives to achieve the American Dream but were confronted
by the myths and lies that make up the layers of that dream. It was the community’s
dream—the community of poets, artists, activists, students, and ordinary people—to
have a place where our elders could gather with the youth and celebrate their lives. To
celebrate their struggle—which is the best part of our poetry—gathering together, eating
with their hands, and, as the poet Al Robles once wrote, “Taste the thick adobo tales of
their lives”.

Someone once wrote, it’s not what you look at, but rather, what you see. Capitalism
sees only more, wants only more. It has no memory beyond the latest sale or row of
figures. Capitalism cannot quantify the heart because capitalism has no heart. It will
not—cannot-- recognize work that has no paycheck and boss attached to the end of it.
Capitalism doesn’t concern itself with what you did yesterday, much less 10-20 years
ago. That’s why it was of no consequence—in capitalism’s eyes--that the elders of the
I-Hotel were discarded after a lifetime of work, their small rooms containing lifetimes
of memories of struggle demolished after a long and hard fought battle on the part of the
elders to keep their homes. In the eyes of capitalism, parking lots hold more importance
than people.

Homefulness is a dream that will become a reality. Homefulness is housing that is
not concerned with how much money you earn but rather is concerned with equity
and justice. Homefulness is about honoring our elders and youth and recognizing the
things one brings to the community that does not destroy the community: activism,
interdependence, eldership, art, poetry and the act of surviving an inhuman system
backed by corporate misinformation, ideals, the police and the non-profit industrial
complex. It is a dream that was planted long ago by the elders of the International Hotel
who knew that housing is a human right.

It was a dream that was honestly articulated by the poet Al Robles who said of the
Manongs (The Filipino elders of the I-Hotel) “They need a place because there is no
place for them”. Homefulness is that place, a place that is our own and not tied down to
one’s income. It is a place conceived by the poverty, disabled and migrant scholars of
POOR Magazine who see possibilities beyond the struggle to be housed and the unequal
dynamics that exist between the landlords and the landless. It is a place where we can eat
with just our hands, like our ancestors did. A place where we can say, “Mama, can I have
more rice”. And there’s enough rice for everybody.

© 2010 Tony Robles

Prensa Pobre/POOR Magazine

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For me, ‘Homefullness’ is what life is meant to be…

To be free…raise my family…alongside my community…while thriving nutritionally…

To be thankful for all that we have while ‘having’ collectively…giving back to pachamama, to
plant that fruit tree…feeding nature…my baby…us…we.

No landlord…who can hoard…my money…jus’ wanna’ live by what our ancestors taught…don’t
need to be bought…sold out, pimped and played…so an oppressor, speculator, investor,
regulator, invader, infiltrator, hater, manipulator can get paid…

Jus’ need a safe-warm bed for my family…community…

All that are simply what represents humanity…

Not an individualistic existence of loneliness…

We must find interdependence within one another to become what is truly ‘HOMEFULNESS’.