SAN FRANCISCO, CA — An extraordinary protest gathering was held recently in North Beach, San Francisco’s Washington Square Park, against the vicious Ellis Act, a law that created a scourge of evictions all over California cities on the part of the class of landlords. It highlighted the threatened eviction of 81-year-old Diego De Leo, an Italian immigrant and North Beach resident for more than 30 years, who, after his wife Josephine passed away four years ago, began to write poetry for the first time in his life, just as he was told he was going to be evicted.
The event for Diego and other Ellis Act victims before a crowd of more than 100 people featured—perhaps for the first time in a generation—the reading of poems in Chinese against the Ellis Act by Chinatown poets, Guang Jian TANG, Zhi Xiong LIU, and Qing Zhi DENG, which were translated for the crowd. Diego De Leo also read his “Eviction!” poem, as did poets Tony Mecca, and Agneta Falk and Jack Hirschman of the Revolutionary Poets Brigade of San Francisco and the Juana Briones Cultural Committee. Eternally young seniors chanted their disdain for the immoral Ellis Act, as did Lotta Garrity and Maria Maranghi, who are venerable fighters against that malicious legislation.
The beauty of the event was the coming together of the communities of North Beach and Chinatown with young and old in a just struggle against the greed-for-profit that underlies the evictions. The Senior and Disability Action group, the Chinatown Tenants Association, Eviction Free San Francisco, the San Franciso Tenants Union, the Manilatown Heritage Foundation and the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco all participated, and Diego’s fighting attorney Steve Collier, also addressed the gathering with fervor, as did brilliant organizers Theresa Flandrich and Tony Robles, and Lee Hepner of Supervisor Aaron Peskin’s office.
It was one of the most momentous events in North Beach in years!
