LOS ANGELES, CA — On August 9th Martha Escudero addressed a crowd of city residents preparing to enter the Los Angeles City Council to protest a law, LAMC 41.18, that would expand areas in the city to 20% of city land where sitting, sleeping, or lying is a crime.
Martha Escudero spent more than a year and a half couch-surfing before occupying a vacant house in El Sereno, California, with her two daughters. The home they moved into was one of just a handful of 460 properties that Caltrans bought in El Sereno and Pasadena throughout the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s to make way for a now-abandoned plan to extend the 710 freeway.
“We need to act faster to occupy all of these vacant homes, not only owned by Caltrans, but by LAUSD, the city, and throughout the whole state.” said Martha.
“I’m really excited about having a little more stability, knowing that it’s not illegal and I’m not a reclaimer anymore.” Here is Martha, in her own words:
Good morning, everyone, I am a resident of occupied Tongva land [the original inhabitants of the Los Angeles Basin] and as a mother I feel the expansion of 41.18 does not keep our children safe, it causes more unsafety because it is actually causing deaths among the most vulnerable children we have, the children of unhoused residents. There are 67,000 un-housed children in LAUSD and that’s shameful for our city because there are three empty homes for one unhoused person. I was unhoused. I did not live on the streets because I was couch-surfing with my daughters, but that in itself caused trauma. I was able to reclaim a home in March 2020 during the pandemic lockdown to keep my children safe. This is because the city is not doing enough for us. It had to take people power to keep my children safe, because the city could not do this for me, although they have a surplus of housing.
So what will keep all our children safe? Not the expansion of 41.18, but to house them, house all people who are on the streets, because there is enough housing for everyone. Another thing that they argue is about drug use. And I want to say that I’ve always taught my children that drugs are not bad for us. We’ve been using them for hundreds and thousands of years, we all use them, we all use drugs whether it is caffeine, sugar or prescription drugs or illegal drugs, we all use drugs because they are amazing. They relieve our pain, they bring us joy, they bring us energy, so I don’t know why people are criminalizing drug use and not addressing the trauma that causes the misuse. What these people need is more compassion. Unhoused folk need compassion, they’re not different from us, they’re human beings, and once we teach our children to treat every human being with compassion that is the key to solving this issue of safety.
I’m really ashamed of adults who don’t understand that. A lot of these housed people are out of touch with the community. They are concerned more about the money and the power than they are about the people. And I’m trying to give them the benefit of the doubt. That’s why I’m here today at city council to let them know who the unhoused people are and to stop the stereotypes, that they look this way or do this. Yes, a lot of people are not only traumatized with capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, most of the people on the street are black folks and a lot of black femmes, and because of this we further criminalize them and traumatize them. This is just disgusting to me, there are no words.
I feel we should keep them safe instead of punishing them. Unhoused people are actually more vulnerable to violence than housed folk, from people who’re housed and from police violence, and we don’t see this. There are five people that die every day. And they’re unseen. People are not disposable; these are human beings. Nobody’s disposable, especially children. We don’t see them, unhoused children are not seen in public, but there are a lot of unhoused children I’ve seen, because I work for these moms and these families, and I was not going to be in that same situation.
I know that in these shelters they divide people, they separate families. They have weird restrictions like children cannot make noise, like …? Children play, they’re noisy, they’re wild and that’s just part of what a child is, and they restrict you for that, they punish you for that, so shelters are not a children’s space, neither are the streets, we should house them. I don’t understand not housing them when we have the resources. We have the houses, LAUSD has the houses, the county has houses, the city has houses that are empty and available. Caltrans has a lot of houses, especially where I live in El Sereno, Alhambra and Pasadena. So, there is housing for everybody. And these people deserve housing, they get up early to work for it, after all this drama.
We need reparations and land back, that’s what we need, for our indigenous folks, for our black folks. Provide people with trauma care and harm reduction, and really address these systems we need to abolish. I tell my daughters if the system is not working for you then you change it. We can absolutely change it. We’re not going to sit there and adapt to a system that is unsustainable and is not only killing human beings but every living being and mother earth. We have the power, the people power to change it and change it to something that is way more sustainable, and it’s based on love and compassion for every living being. And as an immigrant to this land I also look up to Tongva elders and Tongva leaders to guide me to this. This is not our land. We just need to abolish patriarchy, capitalism and white supremacy and get our power back.
