Story Archives 2013

No Existe el Sueño Americano

Casi suelto el telefono cuando mi madre me dice que me siente porque la noticia que me va a dar no es nada agradable.

 “Tienes que ser fuerte, tu hija esta embarazada” dijo mi madre en el telefono desde Guatemala.

Desgraciadamente en nuestra cultura esten o no esten con sus padres, las jovencitas estan teniendo bebes con tan solo de 15 a 17 años en todo el mundo como si estubieran ciegas que piensan que el ser mama es todo en la vida y no ven acia el futuro sin no que se estancan en un solo lugar. Y asi siguen, y siguen, y siguen las generaciones.

Como en mi caso sali de mi casa con la ilucion de trabajar dos o tres años en los estados unidos y regresar y hacer my casa. Mi corazon se sentia como si le clavaran mil abujas pues estaba separandome de lo que mas amo en la vida, mis hijos. Pero no pense que el tiempo corriera tan recio como el tren que transvia a los migrantes hacia el norte. Hoy, despues de diez anos veo que el tiempo me gano. Aun no he hecho mi casa en Guatemala. Pensaba regresar en Octubre del año que viene, 2014 a la graduacion de mis hijos. Hable con mis otros  hijos  en Guatemala y llegamos en un acuerdo que cuando yo regresara yo construiria la casa.

Aun que tenga mi familia en Guatemala, solamente con mi mama puedo contar. Lamentablemente ella se encuentra enferma y es por eso que no he podido construir my propia casa.  

Hace un mes hable con mis hijos  para saber como  estaban en sus estudios.  Ellos  me dijeron  que  estaban bien  en sus calificaciones .Yo estaba feliz porque estaban sacando el Segundo basico. Pero tres dias despues recibi una llamada de mi Segundo hijo en Guatemala. Me dijo “ Mama pongale mucho dinero a su telefono porque mi abuelita quiere hablar con usted” Ese momento senti que Corazon se me salia por la boca y se me deshacian las piernas. Con las manos temblorosas, le regrese la llamada.

“Te dije que no le dieras estudio a tu hija porque las mujeres no sirben meterlas a la escuela porque lo primero que hacen es buscar marido o salir embarazadas”

dijo mi mama enojada y triste. En ese  momento  llore porque  yo si creo que el estudio vale la pena sea hombre  o mujer. Pero desgraciadamente yo no puedo controlar la vida de mis hijos  y menos estando lejos. Por eso pienso que el sueño Americano  es una mentira pues  en ves de ganar, perdi  lo mas valioso  de mi vida mis hijos.  Hoy en vez de risas, solo tengo llantos pues tengo 10 años sin ver a mis tres hijos en Guatemala.

Ellos estan dolidos  por muchas cosas que les han sucedido y yo no estoy ahi para defenderlos.  Y esto que me esta pasando le pasa a toda mi raza indocumentada.

Yo no sabia que la vida y el tiempo me estaban ganando.

The American Dream does not Exist

I almost dropped the phone when my mother tells me to have a seat because the news she is about to give me is not pleasant at all.

"You need to be strong, your daughter is pregnant" said my mother on the other end of the line calling from Guatemala.

Sadly in our culture, whether daughters are with or without their parents, they are having their own children at the age of 15 & 17 throughout the world as if they were blind and would think that being a mother is all there is to life. They don't plan according to their future but rather they sink themselves in one solid location. From then on, generations continue this cycle.

Such as in my case, i left my home with the illusion that I would be working two of three years in the united states. Then, I would return home and build my home. My hear felt as though one thousand pins had punctured, being that i was separating myself from what i love most in life, my children. But i didnt think that time would pass as fast as the train that transports migrants toward the north. Today, after ten years i see that time has beat me. My home still has not been built in Guatemala. I planned to have returned in October of the coming year, 2014 to the graduation of my children. I had spoken to my other children in Guatemala and we had come to an agreement that when I returned I would build the house.

Although I have family in Guatemala, I am only able to count with my mother. Sadly, she is sick which is why I have not been able to construct my own house.

A month ago I spoke to my children to find out how they were doing in school. They told me they were doing well. I was happy because they were progressing in middle school. But three days later I received a phone call from my second son in Guatemala. He said "mom, put a lot of money on your phone because my grandma is wants to speak to you". At that moment I felt hat my heart was escaping through my mouth. My legs were collapsing. My my trembling hands, I returned the phone call. " I told you! you shouldn't have given your daughter the opportunity to study. Girls are no good for school because the first thing they do is look for a husband or turn out pregnant” said my mom with a voice of disapproval. At that moment I cried because I do believe that going to school is worth the struggle regardless of the gender. Sadly, I do not have the ability to control the life of my children, much less that they are far away. That is why I believe that the American dream is a lie; instead of gaining, I am losing what I value most in life, my children. Today, instead of laughter, I only have cries being that I have ten years without being able to see my three children in Guatemala.

They are very hurt by the infinite amount of things they have been through and I have not been able to be there to defend them. And what my family and I are going through, happens to all of our undocumented communities.

I was not aware that life and time were winning

To listen to the Radio Segment go to http://www.poormagazine.org/radio

No Existe el Sueño Americano

Casi suelto el telefono cuando mi madre me dice que me siente porque la noticia que me va a dar no es nada agradable.

 “Tienes que ser fuerte, tu hija esta embarazada” dijo mi madre en el telefono desde Guatemala.

Desgraciadamente en nuestra cultura esten o no esten con sus padres, las jovencitas estan teniendo bebes con tan solo de 15 a 17 años en todo el mundo como si estubieran ciegas que piensan que el ser mama es todo en la vida y no ven acia el futuro sin no que se estancan en un solo lugar. Y asi siguen, y siguen, y siguen las generaciones.

Como en mi caso sali de mi casa con la ilucion de trabajar dos o tres años en los estados unidos y regresar y hacer my casa. Mi corazon se sentia como si le clavaran mil abujas pues estaba separandome de lo que mas amo en la vida, mis hijos. Pero no pense que el tiempo corriera tan recio como el tren que transvia a los migrantes hacia el norte. Hoy, despues de diez anos veo que el tiempo me gano. Aun no he hecho mi casa en Guatemala. Pensaba regresar en Octubre del año que viene, 2014 a la graduacion de mis hijos. Hable con mis otros  hijos  en Guatemala y llegamos en un acuerdo que cuando yo regresara yo construiria la casa.

Aun que tenga mi familia en Guatemala, solamente con mi mama puedo contar. Lamentablemente ella se encuentra enferma y es por eso que no he podido construir my propia casa.  

Hace un mes hable con mis hijos  para saber como  estaban en sus estudios.  Ellos  me dijeron  que  estaban bien  en sus calificaciones .Yo estaba feliz porque estaban sacando el Segundo basico. Pero tres dias despues recibi una llamada de mi Segundo hijo en Guatemala. Me dijo “ Mama pongale mucho dinero a su telefono porque mi abuelita quiere hablar con usted” Ese momento senti que Corazon se me salia por la boca y se me deshacian las piernas. Con las manos temblorosas, le regrese la llamada.

“Te dije que no le dieras estudio a tu hija porque las mujeres no sirben meterlas a la escuela porque lo primero que hacen es buscar marido o salir embarazadas”

dijo mi mama enojada y triste. En ese  momento  llore porque  yo si creo que el estudio vale la pena sea hombre  o mujer. Pero desgraciadamente yo no puedo controlar la vida de mis hijos  y menos estando lejos. Por eso pienso que el sueño Americano  es una mentira pues  en ves de ganar, perdi  lo mas valioso  de mi vida mis hijos.  Hoy en vez de risas, solo tengo llantos pues tengo 10 años sin ver a mis tres hijos en Guatemala.

Ellos estan dolidos  por muchas cosas que les han sucedido y yo no estoy ahi para defenderlos.  Y esto que me esta pasando le pasa a toda mi raza indocumentada.

Yo no sabia que la vida y el tiempo me estaban ganando.

The American Dream does not Exist

I almost dropped the phone when my mother tells me to have a seat because the news she is about to give me is not pleasant at all.

"You need to be strong, your daughter is pregnant" said my mother on the other end of the line calling from Guatemala.

Sadly in our culture, whether daughters are with or without their parents, they are having their own children at the age of 15 & 17 throughout the world as if they were blind and would think that being a mother is all there is to life. They don't plan according to their future but rather they sink themselves in one solid location. From then on, generations continue this cycle.

Such as in my case, i left my home with the illusion that I would be working two of three years in the united states. Then, I would return home and build my home. My hear felt as though one thousand pins had punctured, being that i was separating myself from what i love most in life, my children. But i didnt think that time would pass as fast as the train that transports migrants toward the north. Today, after ten years i see that time has beat me. My home still has not been built in Guatemala. I planned to have returned in October of the coming year, 2014 to the graduation of my children. I had spoken to my other children in Guatemala and we had come to an agreement that when I returned I would build the house.

Although I have family in Guatemala, I am only able to count with my mother. Sadly, she is sick which is why I have not been able to construct my own house.

A month ago I spoke to my children to find out how they were doing in school. They told me they were doing well. I was happy because they were progressing in middle school. But three days later I received a phone call from my second son in Guatemala. He said "mom, put a lot of money on your phone because my grandma is wants to speak to you". At that moment I felt hat my heart was escaping through my mouth. My legs were collapsing. My my trembling hands, I returned the phone call. " I told you! you shouldn't have given your daughter the opportunity to study. Girls are no good for school because the first thing they do is look for a husband or turn out pregnant” said my mom with a voice of disapproval. At that moment I cried because I do believe that going to school is worth the struggle regardless of the gender. Sadly, I do not have the ability to control the life of my children, much less that they are far away. That is why I believe that the American dream is a lie; instead of gaining, I am losing what I value most in life, my children. Today, instead of laughter, I only have cries being that I have ten years without being able to see my three children in Guatemala.

They are very hurt by the infinite amount of things they have been through and I have not been able to be there to defend them. And what my family and I are going through, happens to all of our undocumented communities.

I was not aware that life and time were winning

To listen to the Radio Segment go to http://www.poormagazine.org/radio

My hands caressed the edges of the Coors can – it was softer than the 211 can, almost like velvet.  And unlike the Coke, Pepsi, or Sprite cans, they were always empty when I found them. Tonight as I sorted my cans and bottles, one of the many ways this po’ displaced mama has survived through harder times, I prayed for all my brothers and sister poverty workers/ recyclers on the racist, classist streets.

“Cans not Condos, Cans NOT Condos!!! Cans Not Condo-Bill Gandy, Community Housing Partnership organizer

The most recent attack on the already broken and trying to mend backs of us po’ folks in what I am now affectionately calling GentriFUKation City is Safeway’s move to close all of its recycling centers that have been housed in their giant parking lots for years, providing a dire service to elder and disability worker-recyclers and mama, youth, and daddy recyclers just trying to bring in a few extra dollars to survive. (more after the jump)

Safeway reasoning: You only need glance across the street on Market near Church to witness the terra cotta encroachment of Whole Paycheck embedded in the ground floor of a new luxury condo being built, so nervous Safeway management deduces they need to look more bourgeois or die. The sad thing is, like my mama always said, trying to be something you are not will only result in your not being at all. The working-class population who relies on Safeway won’t change, but if Safeway joins the hater minions like Tech monsters Greg Gopman and Peter Shih who think we are all trash, and effectively helps to kick us out, they will just be killing their last grasp on a market-share, displacing their potential customers.

These insane and wrong-headed moves by Safeway follow closely on the heels of the closure of beautiful people-led, truly green HANC (Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council) which prompted me to write a piece I called the new color of gentrification is green. 

What people never understand is, no matter how much they have embraced corporate statehood, or been numb to it and just signed up with the local corporate trash company, pseudo-corporate trash companies do not care about Mama Earth, your trash, bottles or your cans. It is a business for them, just like any other business. Whereas us poor peoples who meticulously sort through your corporate recycling can, trash cans, and waste bins, or the just clean up the streets, actually take pride in our work, actually, separate what is can and what is bottle, what is compost and what is landfill and do it very well. Which is why us Po’ workers and poverty scholars have led an ongoing campaign for years to recognize recyclers as independent contractors.

As a houseless child of a houseless poor, colonized Black/Indian mama, I have little or no regional loyalty. I am just humbly here, in the Bay Area, because this is where mama brought me as a child, and like most poor folks, I cannot afford to be anywhere else. I cannot and would not — like so many of these 21^st century tech colonizers and corporate carpet-baggers — move somewhere else even if I could, and with my uninvited presence displace the peoples who are there, creating laws, legislation, and commerce built to displace the peoples of origin.

So I remain, barely, holding on by a thread, post-evicted, post-gentrified, hoping to not get pushed out of the last corner of mold-filled, substandard housing me and my little family live in. I will fight to the end cause that’s how mama raised me and I will, along with my fellow revolutionary poverty scholars at POOR Magazine and the San Francisco BayView, tell the story of poverty, in my own voice, without the filter of middle-class academics, researchers, poltricksters or media-producers. All while trying to find a place that will redeem my CRV.

Please sign the petition to save the recycling centers-

They sat there. Eyes ahead or faced down, digital symbols from phones, I-pads and laptops scrolling across their eyeballs in the tinted light of their luxury transport bus.

It was an “Apple” bus. And it was filled. Every seat occupied by tech employees, the majority of whom were earning anywhere between $80-150,000 per year and up, recent transplants to a town they weren’t born, raised or invested in. and with their very presence, were displacing hundreds or possibly thousands of very poor, working poor, and even middle-class elders, families and children who could never begin to pay the increased rents now being asked, demanded and evicted for by greed-filled, landlords, and real estate spekkkulators.

There are mildly distinct differences for the buses of tech companies like Apple, Google, Yahoo and the Bio Tech giant Genentech. They form a collective of companies providing 21^st century carriages to shuttle the too-delicate for public transportation feet of  what I am now affectionately calling the gentryTechNation

For the last three weeks activists from many walks of life, including elders, disabled folks, communities of color, working poor and many white middle-class activists have begun stopping the buses at their illegal, non-paid for, “bus” stops, conveniently located in front of coffee houses or near BART stations or just in the neighborhoods they already gentriFUKEd.

But this is where it gets downright surreal. The protests and protestors aren’t abrasive or angry. In fact, they say things like Join Us – Get off the Bus! They are filled with the humble stories of elders and folks who will have nowhere to go once they are evicted, and yet, today in front of a booshie San Francisco coffee shop, in a MUNI bus stop, I witnessed not only complete disinterest from the passengers of the filled to capacity bus, but two more people right in the middle of the protest, pushed past the protestors and… Got On the Bus!…

All of which made me realize I need to write a simple guideline for the gentryTechNation who have obviously been built and made from the deepest message of race and class supremacist values, are so completely engaged in the pursuit of the mighty dolla and the subsequent hegemony of disinterest and the prestige of their trendy tech job that they have become completely bereft of even trace aspects of spirit, empathy, culture and consciousness. 

And for this you truly can’t completely blame them. They are told that they have achieved the ultimate in success in the stolen indigenous land called Amerikkka. Most of us are taught at the youngest ages to succeed means to make the most money, by any means necessary, no matter who gets hurt, how it lands on other peoples and who gets left behind. Throw in race and class privilege and unseen, multiple benefits, from this race, class privilege. Fear and hate of everything you don’t know or never knew and lies about security and safety created by the plantation, prisons and po’ lice and you have built a gentrytechnator. Peoples of the US and all of the places we have colonized with our media, wars, land and resource theft are also taught a whole gaggle of lies about the non-profit industrial complex savior complexes (give away some money every year at tax time or volunteer at a soup kitchen over the holidaze, or donate some of your old, broken down laptops or not cool anymore clothes to the Goodwill and you have “given Back”

So for all confused, befuddled, knowing in their gut that this just isn’t right, for all the tech CEO’s who are open to some real decolonization,  for all the peoples on those buses who entertained, if even for a minute, that they needed to in fact, Step off the Bus.. here is a short excerpt of Guru Tech-Decolonizers’ guide to Getting off the Google-Bus for Dummies:

1)    In a protest, and on any day, Get off the tech Bus- pick up a protest sign and begin saying your humble sorries for your oblivious role in the displacement of so many communities of origin of San Francisco, Oakland, Fremont and San Jose

2)    Take public transportation – no matter how “inconvenient” it is

3)    Send a text, email, tweet and pinterist, google+ msg and old skool phone call to the company you work for and ask them to stop running the buses.

4)    In the same digital streets listed above-ask your company to pay the several million dollars in tax breaks they stole from this city back to the city and that you will even take a $1,000 a year pay cut to support this give-back

5)    Spend a large percentage of your hoarded wealth (after you support your own family and parents if they are working class and need your help) to buy back the buildings so many of us poor peoples who have been evicted, so the thousands of elders can slowly be re-housed. Begin with the support and re-housing of Rene Yanez

6)    DO NOT MAKE AN APP to do any of this – just do it and tell your friends and family everything you do and ask them to support and join you in this walk of decolonization and change.

7)    Get involved yourself with financial support and as well ask your company to financially support the efforts to stop the genocidal Ellis Act.

8)    Ask your company to pay the City for the use of the Bus Stop and streets that it colonizes.

9)    Buy a Street Sheet or Street Spirit everyday and Read it

10) Give your bottles and cans to houseless peoples and elders who are recycling and ask Safeway to put their recycling centers back in

11) Ask Whole Foods to put in a public recycling center

12) Support the poor people-led, indigenous people-led grassroots media, art, and organizing movements that support the work and resistance of other poor and displaced people below is a short list

-The San Francisco Bay View Newspaper - & their work to ensure that African-American residents of the Bayview are employed in ALL housing construction

-The Kenny Harding Foundation

-Peoples Community Medics

-Manilatown Heritage Foundation and the I-Hotel

-Healthy Hoods

-Black Riders Liberation Party - Oakland

-WRAP (Western Regional Advocacy Project)

-The Coalition on Homelessness

-the Brown Berets

-POOR Magazine/Prensa POBRE

-Idriss Stelley Foundation

-City College of San Francisco

-PODER

-Save Sacred Sites

-Longest Walk 4

-Reparations Movement for African Peoples in Diaspora

      10) Give Financial Support to landless peoples movements in taking back land locally and globally to house houseless peoples and support poor folks of color

-United Playaz- San Francisco- buy a building for their power-ful youth programs

-Homefulness in Deep East Oakland- build straw bale homes for houseless, poor families in struggle

-ShackDwellers Union in South Africa-

13) Invite the Tech-Decolonizer Guru into your company for some important Tech Decolonization Action Steps

14) GET OFF THE BUS

For a consultation with the Tech Decolonizer guru call 510-435-7500 or email us at deeandtiny@poormagazine.org

Google Bus
By Tony Robles

White blight
Light sweeping
Across sacred skin

Impersonal hum
Of a drone

Scarring the eyes
Searing the skin
With words:
Eviction and displacement

Behind tinted glass,
Digital colonizers
With eyes that are neither
Half full or half empty look
For vacant space

Back and forth,
Up and down

Cutting across
Our skin and into
Marrow and bone

Our Epitaphs written in
Invisible digital ink
On the steps and walls
And floorboards and
Pots and pans in the
Murals of our bones

Songs
Crying out from
The soil

Not to be seen
In the drone of white
Blight light

Or in
An app

© 2013 Tony Robles

(Picture by Harvey Castro Photography)

Im the residue that sticks to the bottom of the melting pot

My culture is 7-11, winchells donuts and whatever lie Hollywood taught

I am born from five generations of stolen, displaced, evicted, despised & colonized  – Taino, African, Roma, & Irish

Hidden under the wite-man’s blue eyes

Hated orphan Mama of color oppressed by kin

derivative eugenics within

gets wit my colonizer dad to birth the racist genocide

out of her skin

I am born. Raised on 7-11, Winchells donuts and corner Sto’s – Hollywood myths of family, wite-culture lies of happy

I don’t got no beans or rice, lumpia, tamales or collards, I don’t got no fireplace memories, or *capitalismas candies, I don’t got nothing except the .99 styrofoam cupped coffee.

I don’t got no loving aunties, tias, abuelas or sweet grandmas. It was just me and a very sad, depressed, disabled single Black/Indian mama.

Every year at this time, a terror would seep into my gut,

knowing what was ahead, how poor we were or how out of luck

A fake smile with our “free” turkey meal after a three hour line at a shelter. Handed out by nice wite people getting rid of their hoarded wealth guilt one day a year

A Capitalismas toy giveaway by an annoyed fireman or po’Lice officer who smiled at me now and put me in jail later

I aint gonna lie, this time makes me wanna die, sometimes makes me so sad I can’t even cry.

But I try

I try to change this all for my sun, teaching him and me bout all our stolen cultures- un-packing all the lies of our stolen traditions – holding my ancestors & creator and spirits close and never for granted.

And as I do-I Never forget the other parts of me, the broken peoples in my her-stories,

the alonenesses, pain, struggle that so many of us Po’ mamaz and daddyz alone feel, in silence in these times of so much fake colonizers lies about the African revolutionary called Jesus.

the comfort of- that 7-11 .99 coffee as it goes down my lonely throat, washing so much cold-ness and loneliness away until I feel nothing but mama’s love nestled in a free warm coat.

Capitalismas Def: Holiday created by capitalists who appropriated multiple pagan and indigenous celebrations and "changed" the birthdate of a revolutionary who cared for gente pobre (Jesus Christ) all in pursuit of consumer-based profits- (Created by tiny for the POOR Magazine colonizer language re-mix glossary 2007)

Climate Change is Mama Earth in pain…Homefulness is Climate Healing...Gratitude and love to you all for helping us get this far  Please help us take the next humble step towards self-determined,landless peoples  liberation with your Revolutionary Donations

Message from Muteado Silencio, Poverty, Migrante/Indigenous Skola; Prensa POBRE/POOR Magazine......
Because of all of your revolutionary donations and community reparations, every Thursday at Homefulness, come rain or shine, us poverty skolaz set up what we call the Street Newsroom and the Sliding Scale Café, which is us providing and sharing free, healthy, non-GMO-filled hot food and organically grown greens from the newly built community gardens at Homefulness called the Pachamama Garden & A Garden for Trayvon with our fellow Poverty Scholars in East Oakland. This is at a time when major cuts have been made to many public assistance programs and resources which we depend on and need such as food stamps, for we know and understand how critical it is to support our community to have healthy hot meals.

We have also launched the Community Building Circle, which led a multi-racial, multi-generational Revolutionary Work Day grading the land for our first straw bale house. We launched the Revolutionary Summer Camp for East Oakland youth, our second Healing the (Neighbor) Hood event and so much more (see the below list of 2013 activities). 

These are only a few examples of the decolonized, self-determined, landless peoples movement known as Homefulness activating deep interdependent, off-plantation change for all of us.  Now we are trying to keep going with the vision and build our first home, which will house houseless families and elders. Can you help us?

Message from Lex Horan, Inter-dependent Community Reparator and Good Son/Solidarity Family at POOR Magazine/Prensa POBRE
Building Homefulness is exquisitely beautiful, but it isn’t idyllic or smooth. To anyone like me who isn’t in daily struggle to get by, let’s hold that close and try to remember it. There’s desperation, like there is in every fight for survival. Homefulnesss is bringing us closer to a world where land, food and housing are for all of us, where they aren’t stolen from the hands of poor people to be sold at a profit. And until that day comes, those of us who have cash, land, race privilege or access have the honor and responsibility of making reparations to poor-people-led movements. 

Homefulness is possible, it is moving, it is urgent, and it’s what we all need. Please do what you can to match the courage of Homefulness with the resources you have.

We are on the verge of creating the first homes at Homefulness. With your help, we can lay the foundation for several houses and begin building straw-bale homes early in 2014. At this exciting and important moment, one of our longtime donors has offered a $10,000 matching grant. With your community reparations, we can make homes at Homefulness a reality, literally any day now. 

From all of us to all of you: Ase-O, Ometeotl, Semign Cacona Guari, Aho… 

2013 Activities 
Throughout the year, poor youth, adults and elders in resistance created radio, video and online media in the midst of all of our core poor-people-led projects, actions and advocacy below is a small sampling of what we did in 2013.

January/February 
• Bed Bug Flash Mob at the Travelodge Motel.
• PeopleSkool Spring 2013: 14 youth and adult poverty skolaz & 5 mentees graduated from Revolutionary Radio, On-line Journalism and Theatre of the POOR with good daughter & Sun certificates from PeopleSkool
• Co-sponsored, supported Krip-Hop festival for Black Herstory Minute (Month)
• Launched a multi-layered media-organizing effort in coalition with student leaders to fight the corporate takeover of the City College of San Francisco, one of the largest people’s colleges in the nation 
March/April 
• Created several ongoing WeSearch investigations on gentriFUKation
• Media-organized against Po’Lice brutality of the Rapada Family
• Homeless Bill of Rights 
May/June 
• Born N Raised in Frisco: Words, Art & Herstory from a Displaced Colonized City (POOR Press): Book release and seed planting
• Launched the Poor Peoples Plate, a poetic organizing project to center food justice and the anti-GMO movement in the voices of us poor folks who are the most impacted by corporate poisoning
• Healing the (Neighbor) Hood @ Homefulness: Art, Movement, Ceremony and Medicine: A power-full two-day event that rooted healing in poor communities of color 
July/August 
• Revolutionary Youth, Arts & Permaculture Summer Camp at Homefulness: 15 students in poverty ages 7-21 learned about permaculture, GMO poisoning and how to grow their own food in their own communities
• Garden for Trayvon launched by the youth skolaz who were participants in the summer camp
• Cooking Our Cultures: Youth skolaz in poverty in San Francisco learned how to decolonize their own diets through their own youth-led Wesearch and hands-on cooking projects.
• Prison Hunger Striker Correspondents: Re-launched our “Notes from the Inside” column by our brothers and sisters incarcerated in plantation prisons 
September 
• PeopleSkool Fall 2013: 15 poverty skolaz, 5 youth skolaz and 4 mentees
• Revolutionary Work Day at Homefulness: A huge and beautiful intergenerational construction day preparing the sacred land at Homefulness  
October/November/December 
-ThrownOutByTwitter- Theatre of the POOR action in collaboration with over 10 CBO's against tech billionaires displacing poor folks one tweet at a time
• First Herstorical Inter-Generational Council at Homefulness: A powerful meeting of community leadership and accountability that will be our template for a no-Po’Lice zone and decision-making at Homefulness
• Mercado de Cambio/tha Po’ Sto
 

We interrupt your regularly

Scheduled program to bring

You this Ellis act alert

Mom and pop are missing,

Pry open your eyes

Let your ears hear

Mom is 79 and pop

Is 82 and have lived

In San Francisco all their lives

Mom and pop–unplugged,

Displaced in a city of wireless wires

Where friends that never were are

Flung into heaps of the unfriended,

Replaced by holograms that begat

Other holograms who slither behind

Tinted glass bus windows

In kitchen pot silence

In floorboard splinters

In the skin of torn rugs

We search for stains like

Maps for clues, traces

This is an Ellis alert

And mom and pop are gone

And with them the smell of

Adobo

Gumbo

Black eyed peas

Malunggay

Bitter melon

We looked for mom and pop

In the book of landlords

And that book, whose edges

Were a knife, whose pages were

Not stained by a single memory,

Read only one name:  Ellis

Ellis cover to cover

Ellis front to back

Ellis open and shut

Case closed

And we searched for

The book of the evicted

Whose pages and spines multiplied

And were strewn on street corners and

Garbage bins and the names of the

Evicted were written in the streets by

The shrill talon of the raven to be

Paved over by the machinery of

No memory

This is an Ellis alert

And mom and pop

Are out there somewhere

Pry open your eyes

Let your ears hear

With the click of the

Tongue, and not the mouse,

Pop made the birds come and bring

Together philosophies from every

Corner of the world

And

Mom is your mom,

Is my mom, is your skin,

Is my skin, is my memory

Is our memory

Pry open your eyes

Let your ears hear

Mom and pop

Are missing

We now return

To your regularly

Scheduled program

© Tony Robles 2013