A Decade of Displacement-SF in the Nineties

This essay was written for City Lights Publishing’s anthology “The Political Edge,” a good collection of work about our fair city.

“The housing crisis doesn’t exist because the system isn’t working. It exists because that’s the way the system works.”- Marcuse

Whether fleeing from a death squad in Latin America or a homophobic family in the Midwest, many have sought refuge in San Francisco. Those who consider San Francisco an “island,” offer ample evidence: the sizable protest culture, gay marriages, and the municipal minimum wage. Certainly we live in a beautiful city, worth fighting for. However, cold, hard reality demands that we acknowledge the ways that San Francisco is nearly identical to every other city in the nation.
Segregation? Here? Maybe not apartheid or “separate but equal” but let’s just say that here two people can walk down the same street and experience it in completely different ways. One person can look at Valencia Street and wonder where the best crêpes are, the other can wonder if the can make it to the bus stop without being stopped by the police.

Hegemony Circus: Breaking Down Fox’s 24

This month, Fox’s greatest piece of propaganda, “24″ returns, and by all accounts is going to be a hurricane of yellow menace stereotypes. For this review I managed to sit through an entire season of nationalistic, racist and unintentionally hillarious episides. Where else can you watch a story unfold that actually blames a terrorist attack on Arabs, Chinese and Queers all at the same time? Guess without Russia to blame it on anymore, Hollywood has to go the extra mile in the scapegoating game. Anybody remember Red Dawn?

The television show “24,” is a fast paced roller coaster of a spy series scripted so that every screen minute is corresponds to an actual minute-and each episode represents an hour in a day. The show made its debut shortly after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. As a melodrama, the show has held a mirror up to the mood of a nation at once deeply paranoid but also confident that it has the bad guys in the crosshairs.

From Music to Movement: An Interview with “From Monument to Masses”

 

This is an interview with From Monument to Masses I recently did for for Left Turn magazine.

From Monument to Masses (FMTM) proves that creating politically engaged music doesn’t mean sacrificing artistic form. Their complicated, textured music in virtually lyric-less opting to sample political speeches and soundbites from the global intifada. Left Turn sat down with Sergio Robledo Moderazo and Matthew Solberg just after a US Summer tour to talk about the rock and roll and revolutions past and future.

LT: FMTM rips apart the basic formula of a protest song-lyrical, anthemic, and direct and replaces it with long, textured songs with samples of political speeches and rallies. How does this break with tradition help you get your message across?

SERGIO: Well, on an artistic level, it helps because it sort of sets us apart stylistically from much of what’s out there in terms of popular music, whether we’re talking about protest music or otherwise. This is always a good thing when you’re trying to get people’s attention.

From a political perspective, there’s something to be said about presenting the words and people’s movements, organizations, and activists using samples…actually letting people hear them in their original voices. There’s something immediate and “real” about that. Much of the perspectives and voices that we feature in our samples have been left out of mainstream politics in general and definitely out of popular culture. I like the idea of re-inserting them…featuring these unheard voices and perspectives when no one’s looking. It’s like we’re sharing the stage and the airwaves with people’s struggles all over the world.

Rooks-Poetry Review

Review originally published in Beyond Chron.

Now that Journalists are finally asking some hard (but basic) questions about what really led the nation into the latest phase in the war in Iraq; questions of how individuals are prepared to fight wars may be better left to the poets. No poet is better qualified to ask these questions than Gil Fagiani. In “Rooks,” his second collection of poetry, Fagiani, take the reader on a bare-knuckled tour of Pennsylvania Military College, against the backdrop of the Vietnam war.

Fagiani’s work, like the PMC itself, is tightly controlled.. The freshman (rook) year is best thought of as a factory where young civilians are forged into elite officers, eventually to command and pass the abuse onto the next generation of cadets. In Spit Shines, Fagiani recalls the discipline and punish that makes mountains out of molehills:

At the morning muster, Sergeant Kotowski
Swaggers up to me
Points to a speck of dust on one shoe
“Hey, douche bag,
what did you polish your shoes with,
Brillo pads?”

President (S) Amnesia

With the recent passings of Ford, Hussein and Pinochet, (none of which could hold a candle to James Brown!) I was reminded of this (not overly respectful) obituary for Ronald Reagan I wrote for Z Magazine. While the mainstream press fawns over the passing of Ford, remember that he can only be considered a “moderate” judged by the standard’s of King George II. Ford’s moderation came more from the fact that his party was put on the defensive from the defeat in Vietnam and Watergate. Otherwise, he was part and parcel of building the foreign policy that built the murderous Hussein and genocidal Pinochet.

1983 Picture of Rumsfield and Hussein. U.S. tax dollars built Hussein up when he was still shooting who he was told to shoot and sending the oil revenues to the right address.

Amnesia

Ronald Wilson Reagan, RIP

 

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Those of us who came of age during the Reagan years did so in an era that had optimism surgically removed. Perhaps our parents, as young people in the 1950s and 1960s, had thought that by 1984 the nation would truly be a sweet land of liberty. Instead, 1984 looked a lot more like 1984, in the Orwellian sense of the year. For all of the false sense of me-first optimism, a cynical era produced a cynical generation. It is a wonder any of us, now in our early 30s, managed to pick up a picket sign.

Amnesia has always been the fuel of empires. Reagan perfected the art and science of perverting language in order to justify tyranny and inaction. Reagan’s understanding of science could be summed up by his statement that “Trees cause more pollution than cars,” his concern for child hunger pinpointed in the moment that he declared ketchup a vegetable.

So, when conservative commentators attack my generation’s use of language to justify “moral relativity,” I have to ask, “Where did we learn that trick from?”

In Reagan’s America, an army of “welfare queens” secretly ruled the nation, strong by ill-gotten gains pilfered from the paychecks of ordinary people. In the America that the rest of us lived in, junk-bond traders and savings and loan scandals robbed many senior citizens of their retirement.

Interview with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

 

from Left Turn Magazine #19

 

 

Roxanne-Dunbar-Ortiz has defined the term engaged intellectual through a life spent on the frontlines of the past four decades of social struggles. Born to a rural working-class white family in Oklahoma, she has never abandoned her roots through the process of becoming one of the most respected Left academics in the United States. At different times in her life, she has been involved with the armed revolutionary underground (detailed in her book Outlaw Woman), an early radical feminist, and active in civil society through the United Nations. Throughout these changes, she has actually remained quite consistent as a working-class voice that has connected the class struggle to anti-white supremacy, feminist, and indigenous work.Her latest book Blood On The Border: A Memoir of the Contra Years (South End Press), details her involvement with the efforts to defend the Nicaraguan Sandinista revolution from the US-funded “Contra” War. Many of the same neo-conservatives who planned this war from the comfort of the United States are central in the planning of the invasion and occupation of Iraq; making her book essential for today’s activists. Dr. Ortiz is a professor of Ethnic Studies at California State, Hayward. (James Tracy)

LT: I remember you saying at a speaking engagement that you fell in love with the Sandinista revolution? What made it so special in your eyes? What set it apart from other revolutionary projects?

RDO: What I liked about it, was that they were people just like us. I knew so many of them here in San Francisco. At the time it had the second largest Nicaraguan population outside of Managua. After Augusto Cesar Sandino was assassinated in 1934 and the Somoza dictatorship was put in, they really wanted to export Sandinistas, get them out of the country. That was a really large part of the population, since it was quite a popular movement. The United States set up a very different system for Nicaraguan workers to immigrate here. Remember, there were only two million people there, even if 100,000 or 500,000 people came, the U.S. figured it wouldn’t be a stress on immigration. They had so much experience working for U.S. corporations, in mining and fruit; there were no restrictions put on them, unlike workers from most other countries. They could come as they wished. The main place they settled was San Francisco, the Noe Valley neighborhood was almost all Nicaraguan and our Mission is still largely so. I knew a lot of them. I knew the poets Roberto Vargas and Alejandro Murgia, who is Chicano, but married to a Nicaraguan. They went down to fight in the revolution., they also founded the Mission Cultural Center here.

The Sandinistas in Nicaragua were disorganized! Just like any leftists here, it seemed! It was like the youth revolution here had won. They were kind of bumbling in some ways, but they were sincere, they were so sincere. I fell in love with that even before I went there, but more so when I went there. But I fell in love with what they were doing there, they produced a huge literacy campaign, they were so idealistic in what they were doing. They went out into the countryside and taught people how to write poetry, this got everyone wanting to be a poet. It is the only country in the world where being a poet is the highest thing you can be. So the aspiration was to know the language so you could write poetry. All over there were poetry workshops, it was the most amazing thing.

Then there was this damn contra war, eating away at that. Seeing that deteriorate, it was just heartbreaking.

A World of Possibilities at 45 Westpoint

Originally published in Processed World, Winter 2004. Thanks Chris!

Thanksgiving Morning 2003. At the intersection of 30th and Mission an odd assortment of humanity gathered—even by San Franciscan standards. Homeless families, most with strollers in tow, cautiously mingled with trade union activists. College students tried out their Spanish on Latino day laborers. Street punks, checked out the non-profit workers with a sneer that acknowledged “I’ll probably be you one day.” The crowd of about 140 had diversity written all over it—elderly and young, and enough ethnicity to make even the most jaded observer speak about Rainbow Coalitions as if the idea was just invented five minutes ago.

Protest signs handed out casually read “Let Us In!” below a cartoon of a global village angry mob. The mood remained mellow, maybe strangely so for a group of people who, in an hour’s time would be participating in an illegal takeover of vacant housing; one unit among thousands owned by the San Francisco Housing Authority —the often troubled agency that is charged with providing homes for the city’s most impoverished.

Photo by Joseph Smooke

Announcements are made: the bus chartered to bring the protesters to the secret takeover site is late, but will arrive shortly. The driver of the bus had been reached by cell phone and reported a hangover from which he’d just woken up. He would be stopping for a strong cup of coffee. Even on Thanksgiving Day, there was more than one protest going on in San Francisco. A couple of hundred feet away, United Food and Commercial Workers members picketed Safeway in the ongoing battle over the company’s attempts to do away with healthcare benefits. A delegation went over to wish the unionists well as one nervous housing protester tried to conceal the Safeway logo on her fresh cup of coffee.

Divorcing Columbus:The Italian-American Dilemma

This op-ed originally appeared in the San Francisco Bay Guardian as part of the Italian-American Political Solidarity Club’s annual attempt to inspire our folks to divorce the lost explorer. Slight changes have been made to the published version. I highly recommend anyone interested in radical Italian-American history to check out “The Lost World of Italian-American Radicalism,” edited by Gerald Meyer.

By Tommi Avicolli Mecca and James Tracy

OPINION This year may go down in history as the one new immigrants reignited a civil rights mobilization in the United States. Their efforts, like those of the black liberation movement of the ’60s, will certainly become a catalyst for progressive action from many communities. As southern Italian Americans, this Columbus Day we have to ask our community the age-old question — which side are we on?

Unfortunately, many of us have chosen exactly which side we are on: supporting racist immigrant bashers, whether they are legislators in the halls of Congress or vigilante Minutemen.

As progressive Italian Americans, we support new immigrants because of the simple fact that our folks were once in the same situation that newcomers find themselves in: overworked, exploited, and demonized for quick political gain. It’s time for the Italian American community to finally reclaim our social justice tradition, divorcing the dazed and confused explorer who discovered a country that was already inhabited.

Instead of Columbus, we honor the Italians, Cubans, and Spaniards of Ybor City, Fla., who worked in the cigar industry and were able to create a Latin culture based on values such as working-class solidarity and internationalism (see “Lost and Found: The Italian American Radical Experience,” Monthly Review, vol. 57, no. 8 and The Lost World of Italian-American Radicalism by Philip Cannistraro , Gerald Meyer ). We also remember the Italian American radicals who were a part of labor actions in the early 1900s, including the Lawrence textile, Paterson silk, Mesabi Iron Range, and New York City Harbor strikes.

The Original Rainbow Coalition: An Interview With Bobby Lee

Bobby Lee moved to Chicago in the late 1960s as a VISTA volunteer, and joined the Black Panther Party. He was instrumental in bringing together the first Rainbow Coalition—a teaming of the Puerto Rican Young Lords and the white Young Patriots Organization. This is a short excerpt of a longer interview with Lee, for an upcoming book I’m working on about white working class New Left groups. It was originally published in Area Magazine, one of my favorite new periodicals. http://www.areachicago.net

JT: In Chicago, you formed the first Rainbow Coalition with the Young Lords and the Young Patriots Organization. Was this controversial in the Black Panther Party? I don’t think it could have been easy for Black Radicals to accept working with whites who wore the Confederate Flag on their uniforms.

BL: First of all, the Patriots’ leader William “Preacherman” Fesperman was one of the best human beings I have ever met. He was originally from North Carolina before he moved to Chicago. However, many of the Panthers left the group when we built alliances. Some didn’t like the Patriots, some just didn’t like white people in general. They were heavy into nationalism. To tell the truth, it was a necessary purging, except for these niggers took themselves out of the organization. The Rainbow Coalition was just a code word for class struggle.

Preacherman would have stopped a bullet for me, and nearly tried. Once, I was in a meeting up in Uptown, and I decided to leave by myself. I immediately determined that the police were following me. I made the mistake of leaving alone. The cop called out “You know what to do,” and I put my hands up against the wall. Preacherman came outside and saw what was going on, and in the cold of winter brought the men, women and the children outside. The cops put me in the car and they totally surrounded it, demanding my release. The cop called someone and they must have told him to let me go. I’ll never forget looking at all those brave motherfuckers standing in the light of the police car, but staring in the face of death.

JT: Looking back, was there enough basis for unity?

BL: Hell, yeah! When I went to Uptown Chicago, I saw some of the worst slums imaginable. Horrible slums, and poor white people lived there. However, two organizations prepared the way for the Rainbow Coalition, without them there wouldn’t have been a chance of forming one. Rising Up Angry (rua) and JOIN Community Union. The uptown neighborhood was prime recruiting zone for white supremacists. Most of the cats who were in the Patriots also had at least one family member in the Klan. Cats like Mike James and Jewnbug, and Tappis worked hard to fight that mentality. Mike James and RUA drove a wedge in that bullshit, that white supremacist bullshit, their groundwork was just amazing, out of this world.

JT: When did you first meet the Young Patriots?

BL: It was at the Church of the Three Crosses. There was a meeting, and it was the one recorded in the movie American Revolution II. After the crowd left, the Patriots were still there. We asked the Minister if he could let us have his office. We asked the Patriots if they could work with the Panthers and they said yes. I didn’t even tell Fred for the first three weeks of meeting with these cats. It wasn’t easy to build an alliance. I advised them on how to set up “serve the people” programs—free breakfasts, people’s health clinics, all that. I had to run with those cats, break bread with them, hang out at the pool hall. I had to lay down on their couch, in their neighborhood. Then I had to invite them into mine. That was how the Rainbow Coalition was built, real slow. Then I contacted Cha Cha Jimenez from the Young Lords.