Social Factory Ateneo 11-22-14

Compañerxs,

We will convene the Universidad de la Tierra Califas' Social Factory Ateneo, Saturday, November 22 from 2 - 5 p.m. at Obelisco (3411 E 12th St Ste 110; Oakland, CA 94601; b/t 35th Ave & 34th Ave close to Fruitvale BART) to continue our regularly scheduled reflection and action space and to explore some of the questions and struggles mentioned below. The space is fully accessible and we can share and support childcare.

Two recent Bay Area events reflect the collective desires of communities to create autonomous spaces for their own regeneration—a gathering of families hosted by the Inter Council for Mothers of Murdered Children (ICMMC) in Oakland on November 14; and a community action tianguis in East San Jose on November 15, collaboratively imagined and orchestrated by Uni Tierra Califas, Somos-Mayfair, and 50.50 Crew. Both events functioned as “spaces of encounter” that emerged in response to a specific set of problems and issues faced by communities of struggle.

The ICMMC event brought together families permanently disrupted by violent forces of militarized policing and incarceration. Their efforts made visible forms of low intensity war intended to disrupt and unravel the familial and community bonds of the social factory. Conversations increasingly turn to an intersection of desire and refusal in three critical areas: first, a desire to confront the state collectively “beyond marching” and a refusal to rely solely on the interventions of “Sacramento” or “Washington;” second, a desire to come together and share stories and information while refusing to submit the act of sharing to the enclosure of “healing;” and third, a desire to act outside and beyond the state to care for and nurture our communities. All three areas embody a refusal to accept the state’s attempts to segregate us according to hierarchies articulated through criminalization. The mothers who gathered exposed various mechanisms to create hierarchies among victims in relation to violence—where some victims are cast as the righteous innocent (a father, college-bond, unarmed) and others as victims of state violence “par excellance” and thus worthy of revolutionary exaltation (those killed by police) as compared to those killed or incarcerated under “questionable circumstances” (carrying a gun, found with drugs in their pockets and/or systems and evidenced in the autopsy report) or those killed by “street violence” that raise difficult questions about violence within communities and the search for its origins. These desires and refusals point to the importance of reading the current crisis as an epistemological struggle (See Manuel Callahan, "In Defense of Conviviality and the Collective Subject," 2012). Our forms of militant direct action include taking seriously community-based investigations—how do we expose and take control of the knowledge being produced about us? How can we better share and generate the knowledges necessary for our confrontations, resilience, survival, and advancement? What must we do to read the crisis collectively, politically?

The event marked a convergence of families whose struggles for justice spanned more than a decade of violence targeting Black and Brown families across the Bay Area. Present were six women on a panel on behalf of their families: Cadine Evans, sister of O’Shaine Evans fatally shot by San Francisco Police on October 7, 2014; Dolores Piper, great aunt of Derrick Gaines fatally shot by South San Francisco Police on June 5, 2012; La Mesha Monge-Irizarry, mother of Idriss Stelley fatally shot by San Francisco Police on June 12, 2001; Cyndi Mitchell, sister of Mario Romero, fatally shot by Vallejo Police on September 2, 2012; Dionne Smith-Downs, mother of James Earl Rivera, Jr., fatally shot by Stockton Police and San Joaquin County Sheriff Deputy; and Anita Wills, mother of Kerry Baxter Sr., incarcerated since April of 2001 and serving a 66 year sentence as a result of questionable policing and judicial process in Oakland and grandmother of Kerry Baxter Jr., killed in an unresolved homicide on the streets of Oakland on January 16, 2011. Although not able to physically attend, Kathleen Sullivan, mother of Asa Sullivan killed by San Francisco Police on June 6, 2006 prepared a statement that was read, and among those invited but unable to attend was Laurie Valdez, partner of Antonio Guzman Lopez, killed by San Jose State University Police on February 24, 2014.

The following day in San Jose, community members gathered on the asphalt playground at Lee Mathson School for a community action tianguis. Typically thought of as an open air market where goods, services, resources, and conversation are exchanged, the community action tianguis brought together community members who converged in the sunny playground filled with music. Professional booths offering free haircuts and free dental and glucose exams were stationed next to community booths offering assistance with accessing food stamps and free literacy programs while in the same circle hot dogs cooked through a solar screen alongside folks peddling a stationary bicycle to to blend blueberry ice cream smoothies for children with their faces painted with bright flowers and dragons. The community action tianguis emerged from local struggles to challenge privatization and the enclosure of community commons. As local public schools face the capitalist encroachment of charter schools, communities organize in defense of their own spaces of learning. This is also a struggle against hierarchies that privatization inscribes on the bodies of students, marking out racial regimes and forms of differential inclusion and carving proclivities for state-sanctioned death (See Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "Globalization and US Prison Growth: Military Keynesiansism to Post-Keynesian Militarism," 1999).

Questions and refusals provoke new desires for convergence. In the deliberate construction of spaces of encounter, we are able to build stronger bonds among community members from a range of backgrounds and experience, erode capitalist attempts to impose individualizing, competitive relations between people, and prefigure larger spaces where we engage each other as a community around the commons and cargos, or shared “obligations” that advance our collective strength and health.

North Bay and South Bay Crew

NB: If you are not already signed-up and would like to stay connected with the emerging Universidad de la Tierra Califas community please feel free to subscribe to the Universidad de la Tierra Califas listserve at the following url <https://lists.resist.ca/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/unitierracalifas>. Also, if you would like to review previous ateneo announcements and summaries please see <http://ccra.mitotedigital.org/ateneo.