Story Archives 2018

Salt, grease and fried meat filled the air. with just hint of burnt sugar thrown in. My mind wandered to breakfasts past sizzling in a greasy diner. The only thing was, i was on my bike, riding past an empty lot in East Oakland at 6:30am. No houses or restaurants were remotely close. And then i saw the smoke,and heard the sizzle. It was coming from one of a long line of late model Subarus, Hondas, BMW’s, Acura sedans, and even a Mercedes, no car older than 2015, parked along this hidden street. This breakfast was courtesy of a tiny grill plugged into a cigarette lighter in a 2017 Honda two-door.

This humble quiet group of cars and their inhabitants were part of a rising group of unhoused peoples, teetering on a fragile middle class, earning just enough to pay a car note but not the scamlord, gentriFUKed rents of 2018 Bay Area rentals.

“I work everyday, sometimes 12 hour shifts, but i still can’t afford the rents in Oakland or SF,” Malcolm, one of the unhoused parkers told me. “I originally got out here due to an Ellis Act eviction from my San Francisco apartment of 20 years, It costs too much to get back inside,” Malcolm concluded.

Malcolm went on to tell me that he had always paid his rent on time and had dreams of buying a cheap home out of the county and then the eviction happened. Now he is unable to raise the $5- 10,000 it costs to get back into an apartment, pretty much anywhere in the Bay Area.

Malcolm is a 62-year -old Black elder and was really scared about his future. He is a contract worker (code for no health insurance, no pension, no security)

On today’s bike ride, which my formerly unhoused, trauma-infused self calls my Bike Rides for Sanity, cause without it i truly could not function with all of the PTSD triggers constantly rolling through my brain. i witnessed over 10 new cars added to the 9 cars already there, all with folks of all colors and cultures and ages in different states of getting ready for work or school. My own past with homelessness and vehicle dwelling made me terrified for them and their safety against the poLice, poltricksters and hater neighbors.

“I come from a working class family, I couldn’t afford rent and school supplies,” Yesica, a UC Berkeley graduate and one of over 15 fellow unhoused folks who live in RV’s in Berkeley that the City of Berkeley recently evicted from a parking lot in the Berkeley Marina, for no reason but the fact that notwithstanding the veneer of political correctness oozing out of Berkeley, the city is full of HypoCrazy and anti-poor people hate.

“They have done nothing to change the laws, there is no way to legally live in a vehicle in Berkeley,” said revolutionary lawyer for the people Osha Neuman who is working with the Berkeley RV dwellers to fight the anti-poor people hate of Berkeley and its poltricksters. “Emeryville repealed the law on the books specifically targeting vehicle dwellers, but Berkeley uses a law that says you can’t park a commercial vehicle between 3-5am targeting non-commercial RV dwellers.”

His words pierced my heart. I had been there for most of my childhood. We weren’t living in RV’s, or late model Honda’s, we were in hoopties, buckets, whatever me and my mama could buy with what we earned from a street based micro-business. We parked wherever we could, working really hard to avoid people, bougie neighborhoods and poLice. Usually this wasn’t very successful and we were ticketed and towed literally all the time. Either it was parking tickets for sleeping in our vehicle or no current registration, taillights and other poor people crimes. When the cars were towed it was either sleep on park benches or doorways out of sight or unsafe shelter beds where we were predated on. When I turned 18 i did three months in Santa Rita County jail for the poverty “crime” of sleeping in our car.

Every Tuesday myself and other PoorNewsNetwork correspondents go out to conduct poor people-led media and research or what we call “WeSearch” for RoofLESS radio (which also includes healthy hot meals served to all who are hungry and hygiene kits as have them). Every week unhoused poverty skolaz hiding in their hoopties, in parks and under tents report multiple stories ranging from “sweeps” of our unhoused bodies like we are trash, being asked to move, having their tents and belongings stolen by Dept of Public Works or just plain being told like the recent reports in SF that they can’t sit down at all. You could argue that the sort of middle class car dwellers are better off because they don’t get this same non-stop hate and have a container for their belongings but the harassment hits them too, it’s just more subtle.

“Parking enforcement was ticketing me literally everyday. I’m parking here because there are hardly any residential homes here so less people to call the police on us.” An elder Latinx woman who works at a hospital spoke to me out of a 2015 Subaru. “I’ve got so many tickets I’m at risk of losing my car and ending up in a tent.” she concluded.

Real Solutions instead of More anti-poor People Predation.

From San Francisco to San Mateo people are harassed ALL the time and the settler colonizer- anti-poor people laws on the stolen land books, lygislators and poltricksters support, promote and underwrite this harassment .

Its why poverty skola elder Bobby Bogan and myself are calling for a Poor Peoples Party. Its why us Po and houseless folks at POOR Magazine are building Homefulness- a homeless peoples, self-determined solution to homelessness.

But more importantly for people reading this, it is urgent to understand and overstand we are in a different time.There is no room for the same old greed-filled, land stealing wealth-hoarding policies. Mama Earth is weakening. Climate destruction is increasing. More and more of us are unable to afford the insane prices being falsely placed on Mama Earth. For our collective survival and thrival as human beings it is an emergency for us to listen and learn and follow the practices indigenous nations have been teaching and living and manifesting since the beginning of human-ness.

“San Diego has a huge lawsuit going right now on the right to sleep in their vehicles,“ said Paul Boden, poverty skola and long-time poor people revolutionary and director of WRAP (Western Regional Advocacy Project).

No-one owns these parking lots like the ones the Berkeley RV dwellers were parking on because no-one owns Mama Earth. No-one owns the public streets that peoples are parked on in San Diego just like no-one owns the (so-called) public streets in San Francisco, San Mateo, Berkeley or East Oakland.

My proposal to conscious folks like Jovanka Beckles and Cheryl Davilla and Cat Brooks  who happen to walk in those politrickster halls is to unearth the property first settler colonial laws and actually create space for us growing members of the Unhoused Nation. Decriminalize parking and sleeping, decriminalize sitting, standing, living and being while unhoused. These practices aren’t logical in a 21st century reality and of course never were logical, but rather undergirded this culture rooted in scarcity models, crabs in a barrel survival models, racism, classism and greed.

Support indigenous women-led projects like Sogorea Te Land Trust and their fight to save, preserve, liberate and honor a 5,000 year old sacred indigenous site, the West Berkeley Shellmound from more devil-oping and land stealing, profiteering and politricking

Transform both private and publicly “owned” empty lots (like the thousands of acres of CalTrans-owned land) and privately speculated empty houses into collective land use not rooted in Property values” and more buying, selling and speculating.

And conscious folks reading this don’t have to wait for the poltricksters or beg them to activate. You as the housed citizen are the ones the poltricksters supposedly implement and enforce all these anti-poor people laws for and so it’s why I’m putting a call out to conscious housed people to stand with us Po and unhoused people and say, no, you don’t want unhoused people incarcerated or criminalized, you don’t want vehicularly housed people to be poLice harassed.

And if you have inherited land or resources, please understand that projects like Homefulness happened with the redistributed dollars of decolonized young people who learned from poverty skolaz at PeopleSkool  and the Stolen Land/Hoarded Resources Tour to redistribute to poor and unhoused folks for their own self-determined solutions. These are the deep and life-changing lessons shared in Poverty Scholarship- Poor People-led Theory, Art, Words and Tears Across Mama Earth- coming out with a radical book and curriculum tour in 2019

Similarly, stop enabling, funding and building more and more high rises and rich people housing and liberate stolen indigenous territory to poor people-led projects like Homefulness. We poverty and indigenous skolaz at Homefulness are going through a long legal and ceremonial process to take our small part of Mama Earth permanently off the real estate snaking market, so it will always remain a space for people to live and learn and grow and heal without the threat of removal , eviction or displacement.  The four families who live here now (i being one of them) are all formerly unhoused folks, don’t pay rent to anyone, aren’t trying to make a “profit off of Mama Earth and only pay toward the taxes, insurance and utilities, and don’t want to own any part of Mama Earth- but like i always say to my Sun, are very certain we would be homeless if it wasn’t for Homefulness

“It’s not the best grill and sometimes the pancakes don’t get cooked all the way through,” Malcolm told me looking out his window, “ but its all I have and it’s better than nothing.”  

To co-lead or walk with us in the next Stolen Land /Hoarded Resources Tour or book us for a reading or workshop on the upcoming  poor peoples Textbook Poverty Scholarship email us at poormag@gmail,com. To register for the upcoming PEopleSkool DegentruFUkation and Decolonization Seminar happening BlackAugust 25 & 26th  go to www.racepovertymediajustice.org  

"Nobody should be put out alone into this cold night," said Benita Turner, mother of Jessica St Louis, who died after being released from Santa Rita County Jail at 1:30am on July 28th. 

i can’t exactly describe the sound of an aluminum walker being crushed by a Dept of Public Works (DPW) truck - but its a special sound of material violence unlike any other- with each crunch-clap - another unhoused disabled life is metaphorically and actually dismantled, while the truck continues to chew like a dog on a bone- our precious momentos, pictures, medicine and lives are now reduced to trash and our own bodies , no longer awarded the respect of being considered humans swept, cleaned up, removed.. As i witnessed and futilly tried to stop another sweep on thursday, in one of our Bay Area RoofLEss Radio Support/reporst i prayed for Shannon Marie Bigley - a 32 year old woman who was killed by a Cal-trans sweep in Fresno, which was sadly a perfect metaphor for the ongoing attacks on poor people who happen to live without a roof - in the “public” aka occupied indigenous land the land-stealers call America- 

I begin this story of Climate change and poverty about Shannon Marie Bigley, because it is the poorest among us, folks like me and my mama, when we spent our lives unhoused, without shelter or protection, our belongings constantly predated, lost, stolen and crushed by scam lords, DPw trucks and Sheriffs, that are and will suffer the most in this time of Mama Earth’s pain

From the indigenous peoples who cross false borders to work in this stolen land to the poor families like me and my mama, we barely have enough to get by  when fires, earthquakes, Tsunamis and floods, happen, the wobbly thread we were holding on to before they happened snaps . Folks like Shannon Marie Bigley’s thread already snapped, she was unprotected, un-connected and unsafe in a society already set up on the lie of kkkrapitalist scarcity where US poverty is born.

“I was homeless in Santa Rosa but i was working, after the fire i lost my job, the protected place i went to sleep and my car, “ said Miguel Flores, a day laborer, who was one of thousands of unseen poor people impacted by the climate change fueled fires that rage across Mama Earth increasing in the last two years exponentially.

“Many of us have gone deeper inland in California where the work is more scarce, the heat is worse and we can’t even support ourselves much-less send money home, which is why we came here in the first place,” Miguel concluded. Miguel had moved near to where Shannon Marie was killed, pushed to the poor people suburbs where we he have no work or protection and was now unable to support himself.

“I used to sleep on the beach, but every week more and more of the beach disappears, they aren’t talking about it much cause they don’t want to scare the rich homeowners down here, but the California Coast is already disappearing and land down here is no longer safe to be on for any of us without a roof,” Michael Kong, a Filipino fisherman who was evicted from his longtime home in San Francisco due to rising rents and now sleeps in his car, houselessly in San Francisco. “Those folks will just pack up and move somewhere else, covered by insurance, supported by their families and their extreme wealth,” Michael said waving towards the billion dollar homes that line Ocean Beach, “ I will lose my livelihood, food and place to park.

As reported on by this poverty skola in a previous story the rising numbers of working poor, working class and almost middle class people who have lost their homes through the insane rent increases across the Bay Area are now sleeping in their car in huge numbers across the country and the world.

“More of our extended family members from Puerto Rico had to come live with us after Hurricane Maria because their humble homes were devastated, now we are all getting evicted because they say we have too many people in this apt and its really because they want to make more money on this apt and double the rent, “ said Trinidad T, whose family in Brooklyn is facing gentrification fueled eviction because the new owner of the building is saying they have too many people living in the apt.

“I never got any of that re-housing help after Katrina cause i was homeless before Katrina, so of course I’m still homeless, Ricky E from New Orleans, who lives in a lean to under the bridge explained how the heat sometimes gets so bad he feels like he is going to die right there on the street and as usual no-one will care-, “Actually people will be happy, one less poor person taking up space on the street.” Ricky E tragically concluded.

“I almost died last week, literally right here because the heat was so bad, i didn’t have money to buy more water and there was no shade and they just look my tent, “ John O, Unhoused and living and hiding in an undisclosed location in San Jose.

John O’s story made me think of when me and mama were hiding in our hooptie (old car) when there was the fires of several years back in Oakland and literally had to close the windows with no air conditioner just so we could sleep safely and work up almost dead from suffocation.

While Mama Earth burns, floods, melts, shakes and implodes, losing more and more of her precious surface, we are are still caught in this flagrant and violent system that supports and condones and her buying and selling, stealing and destroying,

Now there are many climate change activists and 1st Nations Land warriors, land water protectors for thousands of years before climate change was sexy that fought, died and prayed for Mama Earth to resist this corporate destruction that has led us to this dangerous place we are in now. But it is rare that people also include the concept of real estate speculation, development, eviction and gentrification this same conversation.

We as homeless and poor people are being pushed out of our homes and residences by the thousands by this ancient colonizer-created scarcity system, rooted in greed and wealth hoarding, considered the ulitmate model of success and yet, our lives are considered not important, our bodies and belongings constantly swept like we are trash and rarely, if ever are our stories included in the conversation on Climate change, similarly, we are pushed out of places and spaces and we are forced to deal with an increasing criminalization of our poor bodies.

It is why us unhoused and formerly unhoused, criminalized and poor folks at POOR Magazine launched a different model of living and thriving- a model truly rooted in sharing not more wealth-hoarding and increased profiting off of Mama Earth- projects like Homefulness- which we see as a global template for land use and housing and healing- which we are legally and spiritually taking off the real estate snaking market to live in actual harmony with Mama Earth and her earth peoples. A model that doesn’t perpetuate this deranged profit model of rent and eviction and gentrification and removal.

In the end this story is meant to lift up our stories and lives like Shannon Marie Bigley who rarely, if ever, are viewed as experts in the conversations on “climate change” - to realize that in many ways us folks who are surviving on the streets are living in the most “harmony” with mama Earth and to make a clear ask as i always do for folks who have more than they need to survive, inherited/stolen wealth or land to consider inviting us Poverty Skolaz in to teach about the concept of Community Reparations - this way of life is not sustainable for Any of us and we are all connected, even if some of us are more easily forgotten-

For more information on Community Reparations and Poverty Scholarship workshops contact me through my website- www.lisatinygraygarcia.com. For more information about Homefulness go to www.poormagazine.org/homefulness  (This story is dedicated to my poverty skola-Sista warrior Laure McElroy who worked so hard along with me and other poverty skolaz to realize the dream of Homefulness and joined the ancestors last week )

The subject of whether or not Black students and other children of color receive harsher punishments than their counterparts has been a conversation that’s been ignored for too long. The latest disciplinary action was against a 11 year old Black student of Christ The King Elementary in Terrytown, Louisiana. The roman catholic school sent the child home after she had “broken” a “No Braids” protocol that was allegedly implemented over the summer. After 2 years of attending the school without any issues over her hair, she was told that her hairstyle was “unacceptable” and was sent home in tears. The family of the girl did not agree with the school’s decision but nonetheless they (school) had the last say and the student’s mother is looking into placing her daughter in another location.

In Amerikkka’s learning institutions, the miseducation and the destruction of Black people’s culture has always been on the agenda, going back to restrictions such as not being able to speak one’s native tongue, what is worn, and now the hairstyles. Braids have correct names such as Suku (Shuku) and Didi meaning “basket” and are part of African cultures with many different styles defining a woman’s social and marital status. For example, Suku that start at the forehead going all the way to the nape of the neck may suggest that a woman is married. Single women have a different pattern. So let’s be clear that “braids” is just not a trend but but it says something meaningful and it is part of a people!

The emotional toll this “Administrative Discrimination” takes on Black children is swept under the rug while the child is either branded with being “bad” or having a “learning disability.”

Any teacher or staff that tells a child that something that is part of his or her culture is “unacceptable” might add that the student’s VERY existence is “unacceptable.”

The kid is basically punished for being who he/she really is, just like anywhere else when dealing with racism here in this kkkountry.

In doing POOR Magazine WeSearch, The Government Accountability Office can say stat-wise that Black students are far, far more likely to be punished unfairly and more severely, even students who attend schools in the more affluent areas, but there were no talks of action to change the problem.

Here in SF, frustrated Mamas such as myself and Mama Jewnbug have little support and we are ignored and our children persecuted.

“These big public schools are suppose to be practicing restorative justice and they are not. They have no real community building and no conflict resolution in practice. My son has been retaliated against twice and was suspended along with his friends. Other students didn’t get any consequences but I had to place my son in a school outside SF for his safety and to avoid having an expulsion on his record. The public schools are not de-escalating violence they only punish. Our Brown and Black children should be safe and yet they are targeted, labeled and criminalized.”

Mama Jewnbug has been dealing with the runaround and the unjust tactic of Black, Brown and other children of color being but against each other just like myself with the case of my kid being bullied when she attended Everett middle school and was punished more than the girls that bullied her. The young girls are of Latina descent and there was one teacher in particular who sided with the girls no matter what they said. We had several smoke blowing meetings and I along with another Mama had came up with solutions and Queena asked if she could either change classes or do her work in the office to avoid conflict and WE were refused these simple accommodations while the girls who are filming Queena in class, harassing her, labeling her the “angry black girl” and provoking her to fight or react out of anger and the same teacher blamed her. After witnessing the unjust ways this teacher was showing I kept Queena out of school because she did not feel safe and she felt as if the adults did not listen to her. Our children have the right to be treated with dignity and equality,  not like ⅗ of a human being. Also the “hidden” agenda of pitting all us people of color against each other is way overplayed and if the skkkool system refuse to eliminate these biased school protocols then it is about time the community come together to educate our own children ...-fairly.

Queennandi Xsheba PNN KEXU

Standing in Revolution- A Love-Uary for SisSTAR comrade, Laure McElroy who joined the ancestors BlackAugust 31st 2018

I would rather die on my feet, than live on my knees. Emiliano Zapata

Who dies on their feet?

the hardcorest revolutionary warriors you will ever meet...

Emiliano Zapata, Laure McElroy, Papa Bear and so many more who only and always tell the hard truth -

no matter who it scares.....

walking into stolen land spaceships-

tripping up colonizer liars

lifting up poverty skolaz everywhere

Living/ Manifesting -Always with calm hands

Having trouble going on without you sisSTAR laure

almost too hard to hold this loss- too hard to stand…

“You were right Tiny- Inter-dependence does work for us poor mamas.” My revolutionary poet, fellow welfareQUEEN at POOR Magazine and co-founder of Homefulness and KEXU radio- Laure McElroy and i spoke quietly on the phone in the kind of intimacy befitting deep sister comrades like we were and had been for many years of deep struggle and deep resistance.

We were both daughters of very traumatized single parent disabled houseless mamas, we are both single parents of Suns, both struggled with suicidality and depression from our lives and were both houseless and/or marginally housed on and off with our young children which led us to co-create MamaHouse2- a collective home for houseless single parent women and children in the rapidly gentriFUKING Mission District of San Francisco.

This is how we do it at POOR; using the " I ", the first person, we centerpiece our own knowledge. We choose to use who we are and what we’ve personally experienced as both the keystone narrative for any story we write, as well as the lens through which we interpret it. We believe that doing this is the best way to be honest about where one's point of view is coming from, and that the journalistic cult of the third person in this country is not objective at all, but rife with hidden, mostly privileged bias. We also insist that those who experience it must create the news, rather than any non-participant journo, however formally educated; those who live the stories both interpret the stories and claim the byline at POOR…Laure McElroy 2007

The first time Laure walked in my life, was in 1998 with her long-time friend, Ivy, another poverty skola, writer, and daughter who walked into POOR Magazine when we were all located on 9th street in San Francisco, in an old, beautifully musty union hall, doing our poor people-led journalism trainings. Laure began a story that would later become part of the MOTHERS issue of POOR Magazine. My mama Dee, a harsh critic of sloppy writing, believing that as poor folks , poverty skolaz it was our duty to tell our own stories, without translators and fetishizers, but tell them beautifully and see them as art, agency and resistance, proclaimed, “Laure is an amazing writer,” a statement my mama rarely said about people. She was excited to meet someone so eager to write, and live the radical values of voice and literary art that we all walked at POOR Magazine.

Capitalism killed Mamahouse

Fast forward to 2007, after the passing of my mama, my own serious crisis with homelessness and barely keeping POOR Magazine alive and currently houseless myself after facing scam lord -fueled insurance fires and forced displacement from MamaHouse 1. Laure had expressed interest in joining me to launch a 2nd iteration of the beautiful vision of interdependence, poor mama-led self-determination that is and was MamaHouse.

We played all kinds of raced and classed poverty skola games that anyone poor and of color and a single mama has to do just to secure housing in amerikkklan, especially gentrified San Francisco, which sort of went like this; Laure put on her best wite-voice(which Laure truly mastered) and called all kinds of realtors, owners, etc and then like a page out of Black-kkklansman (yes our stories at POOR Magazine are truly filmic, and awaiting the right revolutionary filmmaker) I put on a suit and used my witeface to play Laure going to see the apartments, cause in this situation even though i was working, which i was and she wasn’t Laure had a beautiful credit score and the stipend that would make the insanely inflated rent of $2,300 and redunkulous credit check process possible for all of us poor mamas and children. But i knew this well- this was the game me and mama played for years, I being a melanin challenged daughter of a poor single parent of color- this was the only way we got housing whenever we raised enough money to even rent an apartment throughout my childhood of homelessness.

It was an extremely terrifying time for me and Laure, so even as i write this i shudder with the fear of our impossible situation. My mama was sick with what took her to her spirit journey at a very young age, I had a 2 year old sun and no place to live with all of us. and was just constantly scared that we wouldn’t find a place and would end up on the street with our children and elders.

And then i walked into “Florida street” as we used to call it. The ancestors sang in that kitchen, the sky opened up and became large and sweet, birds seemed to circle around the yard in a love affair with the multiple fruit trees always in bloom- the Sun filled every room. It was beyond beautiful, it was truly magical.  I knew when i walked in that this was where we were meant to be. This hustle must work. By Any Means Necessary we must get this place.

Suffice it to say, we finessed another process with the picture ID required so Laure’s identity wasn’t completely revealed until the end and then, thanks to my special “scam-lord love dance” or “rent-starter” as my mama used to call it when i was 11 years old posing as a 25 year old adult, they were charmed, it was our place if we wanted it.

After we were told we got it- i had another severe anxiety attack cause it required $7,500 just to move in and Laure didn’t have that and i didn’t either so i needed to borrow a big chunk of money which i was truly afraid i wouldn’t be able to pay back. One day at my desk of my non-profit job in downtown financial district of SF, a beautiful large hawk landed on my 13th floor window sill  and began screaming (in a hawk way) at me until i listened. i know it was my mama- slapping me telling me to “Make a damn decision already—this is THE place- make this happen- - it is meant to be.”

“Omigod Tiny, this kitchen alone- its Everything.” Laure and i were equally nervous, but knew we had nowhere else to go. And felt we were being pushed into this luxurious, Home-& Garden magazine place with a kitchen big enough to house us and all of our extended family members.

We moved in. We brought our Suns, aunties, sisters, uncles, brothers and babies from our multi-generational, multi-cultural, multi-lingual POOR Magazine revolutionary family. We brought our love and our complete trauma-filled souls. We invited another single parent mama in struggle to live in the downstairs space, the beautiful prayer-bringer and danzante Sandra Sandoval. We held rehearsal meetings for the welfareQUEEN’s play we were all working on, so we could eventually co-create along with Mama Jewnbug, Vivian, Dharma, Queenandi and Tracey Jones Faulkner the beautiful stage play of the same name. We held workshops and art events and performances and prayers. We launched Theatre of the POOR/Teatro de los Pobres Theatre Learning project. We co-wrote the Declaration of Interdependence and the Manifesto of Change and so much more.

And what Laure and I realized so clearly, so solidly, more than in any other moment of struggle before that one, was that we had to manifest the landless/poor/houseless people’s movement that became Homefulness, a homeless peoples solution to homelessness, which we did end up manifesting and co-creating in Deep East Huchuin, with the prayer and permission of our multi-rationed ancestors and permission from the 1st peoples of this territory. An extremely hard process that Laure has worked on since day one when we literally removed the asphalt from this powerful small slice of Mama Earth. Now working very hard to build the 4 multi-family townhouses on the land along with everything else we named MamaHouses.

“I will SURVIIIIVE……..” Laure’s beautiful melodic voice, always perfect pitched and clear, sang up her Mama’s spirit in a beautiful ceremony where we all sang Gloria Gaynor’s song, held at MamaHouse. Her mama transitioned while we lived there. It was tragic, as it always is for our traumatized mamas who were already poor, of color, and angry. POOR Magazine family was there in any way we could be to hold Laure and her mama and her Sun in what we call Revolutionary Social work, resisting the non-profiteers and the healthcare system. Laure, as usual, was on point calling out the Medi-Hell system that led to her mama’s early death. This becoming an integral part of our welfareQUEEN’s play.

in 2010, the deep gentrification hit that beautiful home and we were served with a $700 rent increase which was completely impossible considering we were struggling just to cover the rent as it was. And so in September of 2010 all of us poor mama were scattered to the wind, barely able to stay alive through this grief, much-less re-house ourselves. Most of us, like Laure and me, never really recovering from that loss of so much. And we were trying our hardest to build Homefulness as soon as we could to save us. the poor, isolated, mamaz.  

Laure - Xtascene, as curator from the Sex Worker Film Fest


Xtascene joined the Festival in 2009 as film curator. Xtascene is an SF Bay Area native; although currently rolling in the city of San Francisco, she misses Oakland and the East Bay desperately and is moving back as soon as she puts her chihuahua through college. Xtascene writes like she is giving birth - painfully, over the course of hours or sometimes days. Xtascene is an afropunk, a cis that doesn't believe in the gender binary, an ally looking for allies. Xtascene constantly burns with equal parts fear and wonder, and her narcissism is exceeded only by her compassion. Laure’s Bio written by her for the Sex Worker Film Fest

“It’s so funny Tiny, as usual, poverty skolaz like us are silenced in so many spaces, we have to bring in our poverty scholarship workshops,” Laure shrieked out over the phone to me with nervous glee, she so often spoke with. In this magical time at MamaHouse, Laure also began to work with the powerful Sex Worker Film Fest project, curating the festival and speaking her own Sex Worker Scholarship, Poverty Scholarship everywhere she could.

“She put her beautiful heart and deeply real perspective into her curation work of every festival,” said founder and Sex Worker/Artist Carol Leigh, also a very good friend of Laure’s.

“She was so brilliant, always thinking, reading critiquing,” said, Vern McElroy, Laure’s brother , who shares the same father but a different mother, and who lives and works in Berkeley.

“Our father was a Black muslim and revolutionary, Laure lived a lot of his revolutionary spirit in her work with POOR Magazine. She was so excited by all the powerful work you all do and she was so dedicated to it,” Vern concluded.

Elephant circle after elephant circle, family council after family council where we hold each other in a circle of accountability because we refuse to engage with the poLice or kkkorts, who are there to test, arrest and incarcerate every poor person they get, Laure’s calm love literally held us together. Facing people and systems always ready to tear us down for being the baaadass ghetto skolaz we are and were. Writing this today is so hard for me between tears and pain, I’m so unsure of how to to just go on without her love.

“We the people, the unhoused, the displaced, gentriFUKed and destroyed, are here with a proposal, with medicine to offer, the medicine of redistribution,” Laure speaking the manifesto of redistribution from the Stolen Land/Hoarded Resources Tours POOR Magazine launched in 2016 to help people with hoarded, inherited wealth and/or stolen indigenous land redistribute to folks who have none to create models like Homefulness.

“She lived for this work and would want us to keep it up, even stronger, even fiercer,” Krip Hop Nation founder, poverty/disability skola and my brother Leroy Moore said.

“I miss her so much,” fellow Po Poet, poverty/indigenous skola and Homefulness co- leader/co-founder Muteado Silencio called out in September’s Community Newsroom our monthly indigenous news-making circle that Laure ran countless times over the years, this one we did in Laure’s honor.   

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….Laure on Homefulness

Join us this Sunday, Sept 23rd at 1pm for a multi-nationed, tree-planting ceremony in Laure’s honor at Homefulness. We will be planting a tree in her honor in the Ancestor Forest at Homefulness- 8032 MacArthur Bl. Oakland, Ca 94605

Dee Allen.

ECSTASCENE

System: Activism

Her poetry

Gave medicine

To the broken

In heart & mind,

Revolutionaries

Found within

Their ranks sometimes.

Her plays

Gave us

Reason to laugh

At the misery

Associated with poverty

In our lives brought to heel

In one act or two.

A different play

For each

PeopleSkool

Kept things interesting

For the privileged

And underprivileged students.

Always where

The excitement is—

Teach-ins,

Movement strategy

Meetings, radio shows,

Street protests,

Film and

Arts festivals,

Confrontations

With politicians—

Yet calm, humble,

Eloquent through it all.

Berkeley born dreadlocked

Daughter of Caroline

On the ground reporter

Digital resistor

Afro-Punk

Not on the forefront

Melted into the scene

With Poor Magazine

Welfare Queen

Gentle heroine

Ecstascene

Disseminated that

Revolutionary love

For other

Single mothers,

Revolutionary love

For sex workers

Surviving off their

Physical art,

Revolutionary love

For the Punk Rock scene,

Her secondary

Bay Area family,

Revolutionary love

For the indigenous,

Whose land this

Settler lie stands upon,

Revolutionary love

Patience, in actuality,

For the author of these words,

A man whom extreme

Few respect and none understand,

Revolutionary love

For the poor In all guises, levels of hardship,

Revolutionary love

For her biological son,

For her Mexican

Lover and his own son,

For little

Xolo and Chihuahua

Dogs, the softest spots in

Her heart were for them,

Revolutionary love

For most she encountered

Order was

Brought to

Disorder when

Her calm

And positivity entered

A room together—

W: 9.13.18

[ For Laure McElroy—1972-2018. ]

Today is the day I deal with my own fate. I’m all talked out .. I’ve been helped out enough. I’m so fuckin tired and I keep it to myself … we all got our problems. I’ve got mine and you have got yours … So who really cares … other than me … and sometimes I don’t.

Life is fucked up and I kind of cant see it coming so I somehow manage to divert my pain...pushing through I can feel the heart of the aftermath overcasting my shadow.  I anticipate on living like but lately I have been having anxiety around death and my transition….I already outlived my son Torian, our hope who will be 20 next month on October 20th 2018. My birthday is September, 20th 2018 and my last baby boy’s birthday is September 13th, 2018. He will be 10 years of age and my middle child is now 15 years old.

This year is the year we all have been waiting on I had plans and dreams. Oh so many plans for my family of three … I love my sons so much my three heart beats, they take my breath away … often I am amazed … three mini replicas of me.. (X) times three … who will be next one down or one up? Tomorrow is not promised to us … and death has no respect of beauty bronze nor brains … it’s inevitable….

I feel like its so close- but i don’t know
Hypokkkrazy ( as i call it ) is real….

Unhoused, poverty skolaz living in vehicles and on the streets in the stolen Ohlone/Lisjan land colonizers call Berkeley face constant harassment (like they do pretty much everywhere) -but in Berkeley,its not so much from one entity, poltrickster or community, but from all of them and mostly from "Nimbyism" (Not in my backyard), fueled by the omnipresent, anti-poor people hate that exists everywhere in colonized Turtle Island.

This deep anti-poor people hate has been in this stolen land since the colonizers stole it and called the theft a “discovery”. With their greed, thieving, genocidal, racist, wite-supremacy, they also brought criminalization of poor, houseless and disabled peoples and a whole litany of laws and language meant to incarcerate every poor person they got.

Sadly, this is nothing new and it is the fight we poverty /disability skolaz are versed in fighting everyday, but the deeply hurtful part is this hate is really no different in a town that claims progressive overstanding of struggles from here to Palestine? And in fact, oddly enough, Berkeley is no different than many of the towns supporting, enabling or legislating anti-poor people laws, and in some ways, Berkeley is more rigid, more closed to change and meaner than even the not so “politicized” or “woke” regions of Turtle Island

The reality is unhoused folks are everyone, we are all colors, cultures, spirits and so much more. We don’t live with Any privilege, but what we lack most of all is the privilege of privacy. Imagine if someone took the roof off of your home or apartment or dorm room. Your life and belongings and momentoes exposed and now no longer seen as belongings- but as a varying pile of trash to be “swept” and “cleaned up” more hygienic metaphors about us Po folks.

So i’m writing this story with love and respect- trying to lead with abundance, hope and open-ness. I am certain, so certain, i can feel it in my bones, that someone, somewhere in Berkeley , Richmond, Oakland, the greater Bay Area (or anywhere in Turtle Island for that matter), who has access to inherited land or resources, Blood-stained or love-stained dollars is open to liberating this land to unhoused, vehicularily housed poverty skolaz so they can manifest their own Homefulness. (Homefulness is a homeless peoples solution to homelessness, created, launched and currently being built completely by homeless and formerly homeless youth, adults and elders in deep East Oakland)

“I lost my home, when i lost my job,” said Kim, one of the power-FULL poverty skolaz who has been taking part in POOR Magazine’s street-writing/poverty journalism workshops which we have been doing for the last two months on a street corner in West Berkeley near their parked RV’s and cars.

The RV dwellers, were humbly, carefully, cleanly dwelling at Berkeley Marina for many weeks, until the City of Berkeley decided they were an eyesore and interfered with Berkeley’s tourist economy. Installing weird, unnecessary barriers and no parking signs to criminalize a small and beautiful community of unhoused folks that had come together at the Marina parking lot.

Unleashing a series of tickets, tow trucks, tickets, poLice cars and threats, the City of Berkeley refused to budge no matter how many times the all ages, all nations and cultures RV dwelling poverty skolaz like the amazing Kim, Amber, Phil and Yesica to name a few in tandem with revolutionary lawyers like Osha Neuman, met with the city.

Finally, for survival they were scattered to a series of street-corners , where they have encountered a recent litany of parking ticket threats.

Which brings me back to this articles goal of leading with abundance and love. To a feeling in my gut that i am three degrees of separation away from someone, anyone who wants to talk/walk/ practice the true principles and values of Berkeley by offering some liberated land ( or resources to “buy/liberate” land) in Berkeley, Richmond or Oakland for these humble poverty skolaz ( and several other Oakland based poverty skolaz we are working with also) to either park their RVs and cars or build/create homes in the vision of what we are calling Homefulness2. 

Homefulness #1 which is far from finished and struggling to be built with no government or “charity industrial dollars” but with permission and spiritual giudance from 1st Nations Ohlone/Lisjan leaders, is funded entirely by redistribution of hoarded, inherited resources taught/shared to folks with resources in a project we call PeopleSkool, by poverty/indigenous skolaz at POOR Magazine- on a different way to live in our tortured Mama Earth, and has nothing to do with the continued buying, selling and profiting off of Mama Earth..

To share this model with fellow poverty skolaz & wealth hoarders/land-stealers  across Mama Earth we launched the Stolen Land/Hoarded Resources Tours and have shared this template with fellow poverty skolaz from CalifAztlan to Connecticut and are releasing a book that has this medicine in it called Poverty Scholarship - which we are releasing, teaching on, sharing and touring in 2019

So all of that said, the offer of abundance and belief that these abundant resources exist in someone’s heart who is reading this and if you are tentatively reading this wondering in your heart if you are ready to truly walk, live and liberate Mama Earth..please call or email this poverty skola…so we can actually work on an actionable solution created by us, the impacted poor and unhoused folks, that is  rooted in love, Mama Earth’s thrival, decolonization and self-determination. 

To contact Tiny or any of the poverty skola leaders at POOR Magazine to redistribute land or resources, book a teaching of PeopleSkool at your organization, school or community, join the next Peopleskool Decolonization/DegentriFUKation seminar or Stolen Land/Hoarded Resources Tour email: poormag@gmail.com To get a copy of the upcoming book Poverty Scholarship- go to www.poorpress.net