I was in Norristown, Pennsylvania a couple days after the election. I went to celebrate the five year anniversary of the Reuniting Family Bail Fund and participatory defense hub there. It was an awkward time to be at any sort of celebration with the election results so fresh - and to be in Pennsylvania especially since the state was so prominently featured as a swing state that went Trump. Norristown itself is a sort of a cultural island in its county and state. It’s diverse, working-class, and that week, there was a somber collective air of loss, a sense that the dangers of the election fall out were gathering like storm clouds.
But the celebration itself was immune to any of that heaviness. Inside a warehouse turned community creative space - it was family, of all generations, that had in some way or another been connected to the bail fund or participatory defense hub to free themselves or a loved one over the past half decade. The food, shirts, swag being handed out were made by these same families telling stories of how this community saved them years of separation from their own. The walls were lined with paintings from formerly incarcerated artists. People shared testimonies of what these last five years of building meant to them, and who was home as a result of that struggle, what they were doing with their lives now.
Being there that night, with the political backdrop of what was happening in the country, it didn’t feel like being at an event, it felt like being inside a fortress. A community that turned to one another, fortified by all it naturally marshals together when that happens, to celebrate one another, recommit bonds, and protect one another from the forces outside.
So yeah, just days after that election, in that state - I saw something clear, doable, and meaningful to do in a period when threats are aimed at us and those we love - build our fortresses.
The political energy for many of us for the last year or so has been focused on electoral campaigns, politicians, voting results. That gravity of attention may have been deserved at that time. But now, it is a question as to what we as communities who will bear the brunt of those electoral decisions are building ourselves outside the frame of conventional appeals to governmental structures and institutions.
Ballot Box Time Machine
After Norristown, I came back to a California that used the ballot box like a time machine. It voted to go back in time to the War on Drugs era and the Three Strikes era through the passage of Proposition 36. It had the opportunity to end forced labor in prisons, and voted instead to maintain slavery for the incarcerated through Proposition 6.
And the current moment has all the signs we are about to be in one of those “eras.” The kind that is given a name later by historians as they reflect on and try to explain the magnitude of damage of the policies and laws that period caused. Those wounds are noticeable already, even if it doesn’t appear directly attributable to the propositions or electeds that haven’t taken office yet. It feels more a result of the politics underneath the election results - the one that publicly validated racism, mass incarceration, mass deportation; the one that calls for elimination not of poverty and suffering, but of the poor and those who suffer.
Last week, an elderly Black man came in to De-Bug to show us a video from his phone. He was shopping at his local grocery store where he lives across the street and has been going to years. The video shows a young white manager following him around and telling the man to leave the store. The manager suspects he is going take something, or make a mess, or disrupt in some way. His presence was not welcome, and in this moment those racist sentiments can be said out loud, even encouraged, applauded. The local police and sheriffs, even the mayor of San Jose, have started posting images of people arrested for being accused of taking things at stores. They are social media perp walks, mainly of young people, handcuffed in front of some big box store with some accompanying text like “caught red handed!” The last post I saw by the sheriffs listed “over counter medicine, beauty products…even Oatmeal Cream Pies” as among the allegedly stolen items, accompanying a curated photo of products. It got likes and retweets, comments calling on the sheriffs to “show their faces.”
An immigrant member of our community was called by his attorney who said he may want to consider ending his efforts for status - because being anywhere on the radar of ICE right now may make him vulnerable. He said he worries what protections he would have if raids come and he has terminated his process to seek status. Turns out vulnerability for many in this era is a choice of gradience - to decide not what is safe, just what may be less dangerous than the alternative.
And this same week in Santa Clara, a 14 year old boy committed suicide after being tormented by peers and adults at his school, his dad says, for being homeless. Some would say a causal link to a child taking his own life after being picked on, humiliated because of his poverty to the politics of the day is impossible to make - but I can’t not see it. The connected city to where this child lived, San Jose, already declared that encampments and RV’s can’t be anywhere near schools. They created protective zones to shield students from the potential of interactions with the houseless. To be without a home in Silicon Valley is to be an inherent danger and threat to the innocent. So a homeless kid on campus, on the football team, having his first exploratory months as a high school student, becomes a target to condemn, vilify. He is a child who has not survived this new era, perhaps was sacrificed to it.
Fortresses Beyond Walls
This is why I see necessary and live-saving hope in the form of fortresses like what I saw that night in Norristown. A fortress is shelter, is protection, is built by the same people who find solace and each other inside. And it takes different shapes, can come in forms that have different time spans - can be a temporary gathering, an ongoing practice, something that can exist within and beyond the limitations of structures like buildings and organizations.
Through this lens, when I see families in San Jose who lost loved ones to police who are now organizing to create non-police responses to calls of crisis and building barricades from coercive police interrogation, it feels now like they are fortress constructing, building community barriers from the oncoming assaults of hyper-policing that will be a feature in this era. The South Bay Land Trust, in the costliest places to live in the country, is taking homes off the ever-inflating market, and allowing people in San Jose to still be able to afford to live here. The homes they own, that the community owns, are citadels too, declarations that our people will survive here despite the plans and policies of city hall.
Cultural fortresses are more important than ever. A month before the election, Souleros Ball - an ongoing celebration of Chicano culture which hosts gatherings with DJ’s spinning oldies, vinyl record exchanges and live bands, drew over 1,000 people to be together at the flea market. A speaker addressed the crowd about how Prop 36 was an initiative designed to lock up Black and Brown communities, and needed to be stopped. But even if the politics weren’t explicitly on the agenda that day - the affirmation of cultural identity, history, resilience in a time when the prevailing politics of the moment is trying to vanish those same communities is everything.
And every week at De-Bug, families who are being threatened by incarceration or deportation, set up their fortress through participatory defense meetings. Moms, dads, children, spouses - turn their chairs into a circle, and talk through their strategies to defend against their loved ones from being taken from them. And now, those forces that cause family separation are more equipped and emboldened than ever. The gatherings are support groups in many ways of how to endure being in the crosshairs of the state, but it’s also a war room. Those inside the fortresses are not quivering; they are planning, strategizing, recruiting.
I don’t know when hyper-carcerl and racist eras like the Three Strikes era, the War on Drugs era, the Super Predator era, get their names. I suspect it is in the aftermath - the historical autopsies after the disasters reach such seismic levels of devastation that they are impossible to ignore. Whatever it will be called, we, right now, have an opportunity to define this era from what we construct, rather than be defined by it.
(Photo of a participatory defense meeting at De-Bug. By Charisse Domingo)
