In broad daylight between 12 and 1pm, almost exactly one month prior to the date and time that I finally start writing this, the Cal State LA encampment was surrounded by between 100-150 riot cops. Only 7 exhausted comrades were on site that day. In nearly two months of prolonged protest on campus, students and community members provided for each other through food, educational programming, sound baths and guided meditations and yoga classes, film screenings, punk shows, zine distribution, capoeira and self-defense and de-escalation trainings, teach-ins, communal meals, including homemade champurrado, coffee, hot chocolate, and yerba mate shared early in the morning and late at night. That day in mid-june, the gap was patently absurd between the enormous state-sanctioned and heavily-financed threat of violence, and the small presence of unarmed protestors.
The last day I spend at the encampment is several weeks before the raid, whereas throughout the month of may, S and I would meet up at camp in the late afternoon or evening when we’d get off work, JY and EN walking over from the house or having a snack at the tent on their lunch break, O and SB at actions and rallies jointly organized with the students, MT and I staying overnight at the Chicanx and Latinx studies professor and her daughter’s tent when they’d tap out for a night at home — sometimes an eventful night watch, sometimes an uneventful night’s sleep, rain falling audibly on the tent fabric pulled taut in the early hours of the morning.
MT and I paint detailed portraits and evocative maps onto wooden planks that we use to reinforce the walls of the camp, and throughout the intervening weeks we paint poppies across the barricades in acrylic, sometimes joined spontaneously by MJ, RY, or strangers. Most often, I’d pull up alone, trusting that in this reliably established third place there would always be a familiar or unfamiliar comrade to carry good conversation. On this date in early june, I walk up with my cat on a leash perched on my shoulders, passing the rainbow flag that’s gone up in recent days with Queers for a Free Palestine emblazoned in black spray paint.
Harold Welton comes to camp today to speak on SNCC, the student nonviolent coordinating committee chapter that would meet in the late ’60s at 74th and Western, which he was first put on to while messing around with friends one afternoon at a nearby liquor store. Melina Abdullah, co-founder of LA’s Black Lives Matter chapter and on the independent presidential ticket this year with Cornel West, attentive on the outdoor sofa, has come through to participate conversationally. Everyone is gathered for his arrival a full hour before he shows up to speak with us, hands plunged casually into black pants pockets, black hoodie tucked into a thick and prominent belt buckle, standing with his legs splayed wide, as if his body requires more stable structural support to remain upright than a typical human torso.
Harold describes to us that throughout May of 1969, organizers with the SNCC chapter would “go out to different churches, white churches, Jewish synagogues,” and read their ten point manifesto, which included the call for reparations for Black Americans, demands for housing, education, and employment, and an end to incarceration and police brutality of Black people. It’s notable to me —a person raised outside of any organized religion— that so much of this community organizing occurred in the church, in congregational buildings, on congregational land, where people came together around a shared faith, or even merely due to familial ties that keep them temporarily chained to that faith.
The last week of june, I drive down to San Diego for a full week of all day conferences for my day job. Joanne Bland speaks on the SNCC chapter in 1965 Alabama to a cohort of colleagues. “They tried to teach me the principles of non-violence and I FLUNKED,” she proclaims exuberantly. Joanne tells us about the two attempted marches from Selma to Montgomery that preceded the historic 1965 march, all of them organized at the local church, where Dr King came into town requesting a court order permitting the march, and which led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act that same year. Joanne tells anecdotes from the vantage of an 11 year old “in this fight for civil rights led primarily by women and children,” framing out her personal history in relation to voting rights and electoral politics for the sake of our ongoing work advocating for housing legislation and tenants rights across the state of California.
“They had one pack of bologna and a bag of grits and we were all full — you understand??” Joanne impresses upon the room, emphasizing that on that march from Selma to Montgomery, food was abundant, an abundance generated entirely by the generosity of people who showed up to materially support the marchers. I think constantly about the way that capitalist norms have been threaded through with my everyday interactions and experiences, atomizing the way that I see myself, when I parse between mutual aid and charity, thinking about what I have to offer, what material comforts I can afford to give up. Joanne reminds us, “you can’t just join the marches, like —I’ll join the marches because they need me— you have to find what you’re going to do, to change things, every day. If I knew, I’d have told you already! But I do know you need to be doing something.”
Friday night, DY and I are chatting on the living room floor while J makes cold sesame noodles in the kitchen, my cat carefully picking her way thru strands of jewels and freshwater pearls, thick stainless steel chains, beaded bracelets, on J’s studio table, winding her way past artful ceramic sculptures and pothos plant hangings curling around the window ledges and ornate detailing on the sills and alcoves of their bungalow court apartment. DY and I are wondering aloud about the word “community,” and what it’s come to mean in the Los Angeles that we somewhat regretfully and resignedly live in, yet hold ourselves apart from.
“To me, if it isn’t intergenerational; if there aren’t people there who you literally don’t want to be around, who you wouldn’t choose to spend time with; if there aren’t people who are extremely different from you, with life experiences that you almost don’t understand; then it isn’t “community,”” DY states provocatively and definitively, as is his wont. But on this point, we agree.
Lately, I note the use of the word “community” as a glaring tell of its lack, so often referring to a sanitized, hyper-controlled, highly-curated, specifically-focused, pay-to-play grouping of individuals coalescing around some supposed shared interest. “Community” is used immoderately both by individuals and by corporations as a marketing device, which reveals that the relational ties being sold are in fact the product of late capitalist alienation foisted on us by the absence of actual community, where bonds are forged across difference, around a shared cause, or in service of the broader collective whole, rather than as a mechanism for merely furthering each individuated, atomized member’s own self-interest.
Of course, actual community formations exist extensively, in mutual aid networks and food distros and teams providing services for unhoused neighbors meeting regularly; in unions, particularly in tenants unions; in organizing of all kinds, particularly labor organizing and organizing against environmental degradation, environmental racism, pollutants endangering the health and well-being of entire neighborhoods, and toxic superfund sites; in social groups marginalized on the basis of race, gender, or sexuality seeking safe space to gather and connect. But while scarcity is a myth produced by capitalist thinking, it’s also the hellscape in which we currently live, where people feel torn between providing for themselves and for their people, and struggle to allocate the time, energy, and attention to show up for the larger collective, to bridge across difference in fights that extend beyond personal networks.
I’ve designed a life around walkable, bikeable neighbors, who I can drop in on after work unannounced or early in the morning for coffee, share a meal or an erranding venture, bringing over greens from our gardens to each other’s kitchen counters, organizing an impromptu dinner party, or carpool to the direct action, or bikeride to the house show. These are the people with whom I consciously choose to surround myself, but my reliance on this curational and controlled context speaks to the lack of third place in our contemporary cities. Public spaces are policed and require payment for mere participation, preventing more spontaneous choreographies. Imagine civic investment in public, accessible third place, and the trust we could build in common if that were consistently available to us.
In a 2020 essay “Protocols for Commoning,” Neeraj Bhatia and Antje Steinmuller write about several forms of cooperative coliving, a series of case studies.1 Bhatia and Steinmuller invoke Drop City, the 1965-1973 commune, to describe the challenges of lack of governance and lack of spatial organization in non-hierarchical group formations:
The hardest time in a commune, particularly Drop City, is the time after the building gets done. While everyone is working together on actual construction the energy is centered, there is fantastic high spirit, everyone knows what he is doing all the time. But after the building is done comes a time of dissolution. There’s no focus for the group energy.2
In the camps arising since late april, the necessity of clear organization and of participatory decision-making between students, community members, and so-called outside agitators was made clear in all the delicate and complicated conversation that ensued about horizontality and leadership. In these spaces, being “in community” is fundamentally an opportunity to come into contact with those who differ from me, around a shared cause, with whom I share commonalities of which I would likely never otherwise have been made aware. The material support we offer each other in this shared space is a threshold between the service-based structure in which we currently live, and a potential infrastructure for collective commons that we are building towards, where our obligations to those around us extends meaningfully beyond our personal networks. The loss of the camp that I feel at the small scale of my own body is the loss of third place, per Ray Oldenburg’s 1989 definition,
a communal public realm that provides space to be challenged by people different from oneself, through dialogue, conflict, or conversation. Oldenburg’s analysis pointed towards cafes, coffeehouses, main streets, and post offices, the sites “between home and work” where informality and frequent use of a given space “promotes social equity” and provides “a setting for grassroots politics.” Favored sites don’t include the sale of goods and services as the cost of admittance.
I learn so many small things worth archiving at camp, mundane interactions that hold compacted eternities in shared understanding and unexpected camaraderie. I don’t yet have the capacity to think through them — rising rates of folks becoming unhoused across LA county and the increasingly severe criminalization of homelessness have been keeping me busy at my day job, and I just learned last week that I am once again losing my housing after less than one year at another attempted cooperative coliving situation, admittedly precarious from the outset [holler at your boy if you hear of anyplace with affordable rent on the eastside].
The continuing fight takes precedence when throughout these past weeks, violence has only escalated in Gaza, illegal settlements expanding across occupied Palestine. The already severely-limited and heavily-biased media coverage in the US has slowed, Palestinian Youth Movement marches that reliably took the streets every saturday for most of the past year have been unable to keep up that same momentum in downtown LA, or westside by the zionist consulate, climate change heightening humidity and heat on our streets, making it untenable for us to march collectively. US-funded atrocities increase in scale and death tolls are rising.
All day I’ve been thinking about Octavia Butler’s 1993 Parable of the Sower, published the year that I was born and opening on this date, saturday july 20th 2024. Parable, for anyone not familiar after its huge swell in readership brought on by the pandemic lockdown, is a dystopian science fiction that simply follows the social and environmental ills plaguing Los Angeles in the early 90s to their logical conclusions. Per Butler in a spring 2000 interview with Essence magazine, “I didn’t make up the problems. All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting and gave them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.”3
Writer Octavia Butler was well-versed and extensively-practiced in the reclamation of public space, in the significance of third place. Famously carless, she walked and took the bus despite having been born and raised in Los Angeles,4 infamous for car-based infrastructure and a culture based around individuals atomized by their vehicles. Butler’s Parable traces the formation of a new religion, Earthseed. The fictitious religion speculates on the depletion of this planet’s so-called natural resources by human inhabitants, draws from indigenous knowledge and practices, as well as various aspects of western science, with the concept of change as its central tenet:
“All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
is Change.
God
is Change.”5
From the vantage of a person who has been firmly opposed to organized religion of all kinds all my life —since righteous arguments fighting down the proselytizing of 9-year-old Jehovah’s Witness followers in my elementary school orchestra, playing violin alongside me and picking the wrong child with whom to try to talk about God and top-down, evangelizing faith traditions— I find the prominent evangelizing in Parable haunting. Still, I can identify the absence that this fictitious faith seeks to address. As a culture, here at the heart of settler colonial empire in the US, we lack ritual and connection. I recall the friend of friend who describes that as a baby, their child would describe political marches as “churching.” And there’s something consequential to the fact that so much of civil rights organizing has its roots and history in the church. In seeking to archive the absence left by the encampment, I note that our shared belief in a liberated Palestine, in land back to indigenous peoples globally, is the glue that held us together in that third place.
When I come back to LA three years ago after more than a decade away, I first forge connection here through attending death cafes. I was reading about death every day; thinking about service workers —“essential workers”— in the ongoing pandemic; remembering the Black church on the street corner of my West Philly neighborhood, which would meet weekly both for services and for funerals, PF and I wondering sadly about the rates of covid infection affecting elderly and immunocompromised folks in the congregation and resulting in those deaths. The parent of a friend in LA had recently died unexpectedly. I was living with my gonggong, my mom’s dad, whose dementia is continually worsening, and my great grandma, my mom’s mom’s mom, who was dying of a severe skin cancer in the bedroom across the hall from me.
In the first months back, MG and L take me to death dinners hosted by AT and MF. The dinners are focused on the communal and cultural grieving rituals first of AT’s and my Chinese ancestry, and then of MF, MG, and L’s Filipino ancestry. S and I often forget that we actually met on lex, the lesbian dating app, because they had posted there about a death cafe meeting for mixed-race queer and trans folks. We met up in the park to cut up magazines and read LP’s poetry, and have been close ever since.
I can’t stop thinking about death and the role of religion these days, the way that the worship of capital insidiously makes farcical and transparent the transmutability of religious principles. In early october, I write about this phenomenon inspired by a lecture and group conversation with “geographer of Maya-Mam roots raised by Palestinians, Zapatistas, Panthers, and jaguars” Linda Quiquivix at El Sereno’s Eastside Cafe:
The secular embrace of capitalism in the west turns money /the individual into a religion. If we don’t talk about spirituality, “ideology,” “religion,” “philosophy,” whatever you want to call it; if we don’t “understand our ethics, how we understand time and space, how everything dies;” if we don’t contend with that dimension, then capitalism does it for us. It’s another dominant system just like organized religion. This makes it so hard for people to talk about death — because it seems final, when it isn’t, so many of our communities don’t understand death that way.
Ritualized care practices and religion, community formation and collective faith, third place and advocacy work, cooperative infrastructures and organized resistance, are front of mind as I think about SK’s marriage to KZ this past week, truly one of the most psychedelic experiences of my life. SK texts me just last week that Amma,6 the guru who SK has been with throughout their entire life, is visiting cities across the US for the first time since the pandemic. Amma is aging, in a c-collar, and SK worries that this might be a last opportunity for their wedding to be officiated by this elder. The connection is personal as well as historic; SK and KZ are the first openly trans couple ever to be married by Amma. They text me hours before the ceremony, on a tuesday afternoon, from the hotel room in Irvine where they and their partner have been frantically pulling together wedding preparations for several days, RuPaul’s drag race playing on a laptop in the background while their two cats get up to antics in their suitcases and under the bed.
MT and I drive down around 11pm, anticipating that the wedding might take place anytime after 1am, but not quite realizing that it’ll be 6am in Irvine before the ceremony is officiated. Deliriously surrounded by Amma’s longtime followers for many hours, we drink chai; snack on dosa, palak paneer, potatoes, rice, and cabbage; shimmy to wedding bangers performed from the floor at the center of the hall; read along with the phonetic translations of names that flower out in gigantic text on screens throughout the hall, detailing the chants resonating from the rows of plastic seats; learn from KZ a Hindu story about Shikhandi, and nature spirits yaksha granting transexuality. I observe high pricetags on various assorted paraphernalia laid out across tables that line the hall, even as meeting Amma is itself touted as free.
I hold out pins arranged by shape, scale, and relative sharpness, for the aunties tying SK’s wedding sari. “I didn’t know that you would be dressing me!” SK exclaims to one, who laughs back to them, “I didn’t know either!” This auntie pins SK’s sari back, critical and impatient while creasing perfect pleats, fondly recalling SK as a child running amok, “they and their friends, their hands would be colored pink and blue from jamba juice!” These are people who have known SK since they were born. I consider SK’s work as an emergency medicine doctor, currently in residency, advocating with healthcare workers for a free Palestine mere days after finally getting top surgery, still recovering. I read about humanitarian efforts across India and around the world carried out under Amma’s name, and consider the ways that knowing this work since they were very young has fueled and inspired SK’s lifelong work as a caretaker and organizer, with a focus on providing safe and accessible care to racial, gender, and sexual minorities, disabled people, and larger-bodied individuals.
At the wedding of O and CH earlier this same month, LP recites a poem she wrote “about the end of the world,” everybody’s cowboy boots kicking up dirt and dust under the lamplight and flickering white papel picado strung up in the hot San Fernando Valley air.
…At the end of the world
I think I’d want to fall in love and live in it together
Big enough for everyone’s truck in the driveway,
and everyone’s bike in the garage.I’d plant roses in the yard
Beside our collection of jokes and trinkets,
and leave the front door unlocked,
Always open for a visit, always free to come and go.In this love we believe in the future by believing in the past,
With an alter for the loved ones who went further ahead,
Our brother, our grandmother, our dog,
With their picked fights, their patient prayers, and their snores.At the end of the world
You’d think we’d stop being afraid to love
To make a promise and dare ourselves to keep it
And to have fun keeping it, too.At the end of the world
You’d think we’d be braver, more devoted,
Float down the river, dance beside the chicken coops,
Stay up all night, march through the streets and start fires
Be afraid and plant the native seeds anyway
For the new world yet to come…
Beyond commonalities or shared interests, it’s our shared convictions and commitments that build out a space between us, a threshold between the way that I currently live —well-trained by capitalism’s strictures of scarcity and highly-atomized individualism, wary of the hierarchical structuring and predatory proselytizing of organized religion— and the ways that I want to live in common, in interdependence, believing in the bigger things between us.
Neeraj Bhatia, Antje Steinmuller. “Protocols for Commoning.” Disc Journal #1 Protocols, 2020.
Bill Voyd. “Funk Architecture.” London. Shelter and Society, ed. Paul Oliver. Barrie & Jenkins Publishers, 1976.
Octavia E Butler. “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future.” Essence Magazine. May 2000.
Lynell George. A Handful of Earth a Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E Butler. Angel City Press. October 20, 2020, and The Huntington’s “A Guide to Octavia Butler’s Pasadena.” 2017.
Octavia E Butler. Parable of the Sower. New York. Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993.
“Amma’s Multifaceted Empire, Built on Hugs.” The New York Times. May 26, 2013. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/business/ammas-multifaceted-empire-built-on-hugs.html