In late August, the Hernandez family got a notice to vacate. Their three-bedroom house had been sold at a foreclosure auction to Bank of America.
They threw an eviction party on the Saturday before they were supposed to leave, but afterward, they decided not to go.
Instead, they would occupy.
It has been almost a year since Occupy L.A. began. Last Oct. 1, a group of protesters seized the lawn at L.A. City Hall. They defended it for two months, focusing attention on the cause of the 99 percent. Now they're defending a single house on a quiet street in Van Nuys.
Occupiers built a plywood barricade around the perimeter and decorated it with slogans such as "Housing is a human right." Some 50 activists started camping in tents on the front lawn. On the roof, they wrote "Evict Banks" in Christmas lights. They set up couches in the street, outside the plywood wall, and stationed a guard at night to watch out for the sheriffs. They call it "Fort Hernandez.
The activists broke up into committees — the Bank Negotiations Committee, the Kitchen Committee, the Outreach Committee. The latter group gathered a list of homes in foreclosure from RealtyTrac and went door to door to proselytize. They made T-shirts with the Twitter hashtag #FortHernandez. They've been holding "general assemblies" twice a day, at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m., plotting strategy based on group consensus.
But if the tactics are much the same as the original Occupy, the battleground — and the stakes — have shifted.
"Our main goal is not to camp at City Hall," says 21-year-old Ulises Hernandez. "Our main goal is to organize out of everywhere."
Occupy L.A. was just one of 1,000 encampments nationwide inspired by Vancouver-based Adbusters magazine, which proposed an occupation of Wall Street. But by the time LAPD swept it off the City Hall lawn in November, that small piece of the movement had itself begun to fragment.
As Occupy L.A. marks its first anniversary, the group has torn itself into more than a dozen entities. Some are more coherent than others, but none has the force of the original encampment. A lot of people have simply dropped out.
In many ways, that is the paradoxical result of the consensus process by which the movement operated. Like left-wing movements since the 1970s, Occupy organized itself "horizontally," around group consent. A proposal would only be adopted after lengthy discussion and with unanimous approval. That gave anyone who showed up to the encampment an equal stake in the group's actions. But it also meant anyone could veto a proposal simply by crossing their arms.
"One of the brilliant things about Occupy was that it was so horizontal," says Elise Whitaker, a young activist who was a key figure in Occupy L.A. "But that was also one of its great weaknesses. There was no unified understanding of 'How do we win? What does it look like to win?' "
Anyone who tried to pull in a particular direction found someone on the other side of the issue, pulling back. Those seen as "leaders" were attacked. Anyone seeking to cooperate with outside forces, such as labor organizations or political campaigns, was accused of co-opting the movement. The result was paralysis.
"The communists and the anarchists never got along," says Scott Shuster, a union organizer who is heavily involved in Occupy. "Anything that anyone in one camp did that was getting traction, the other side would try to dismantle it."
The goals of Occupy — to the extent that they were articulated — remain as far from reality as ever. Given the setbacks Occupy L.A. has suffered, its biggest achievement is that it still exists. Unlike Occupy groups in most other cities, Occupy L.A. continues to hold general assemblies three days a week in Pershing Square — though attendance has dropped from hundreds to about 50 people on a good night.
Though Occupy aspired to break with "old left" tactics, it got bogged down in ways that veteran activists would find familiar. In her 2002 book, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting, sociologist Francesca Polletta describes struggles that afflicted "horizontal" protest movements dating back to the 1960s: "Over and over again, participatory democrats found themselves wracked by battles over decision making, battles that alienated members, halted campaigns and made some activists despair of the possibility of democratic decision making. 'It turned me into a Leninist,' said one. Groups were paralyzed as members charged unrestrained egoism and powermongering in every exercise of initiative, manipulation in every programmatic suggestion and a betrayal of democracy in every effort to get something done."
That pattern asserted itself at Occupy in the early going. No one knows that better than Mario Brito, who tried to lead a leaderless movement, and found it couldn't be done.
When the Weekly first met Brito, back in 2011, he introduced himself as a former union official. He was 38 and unemployed.
"Now I just rabble-rouse for a living," he said.
It was the first week of October, and Brito was standing on the lawn outside L.A. City Hall. Nearly 100 tents had sprouted up in the previous few days, the beginnings of the Occupy L.A. encampment. That they hadn't been immediately driven off by LAPD was largely thanks to Brito. As the unofficial "police liaison," he had worked with the cops to get permission to camp out. He was asked how long they would they stay.
@xicano007 @sjrivera my 2cents. They have a passion to part of a movement, but don't have the passion to be a movement... #notready2die4it
@rtops Totally agree!! That's one of the fundamental differences from their movement and previous ones. @xicano007
Sloppy journalism- far too many generalizations... Fort Hernandez is not the new ground-zero for Occupy LA- it's just one out of numerous ongoing actions. Sloppy journalism to assume that the movement has failed, sloppy journalism to assume we ever "hibernated"... articles are suppose to be objective and a truthful accurate reflection of a series of events, not this pseudo-reporting littered with the writer's shitty opinion. And some of the people interviewed haven't even been much involved with Occupy LA since last Winter- some of their opinions on the movement aren't very valuable.
The King Koopa Initiative has been immortalized in print. What a great name to galvanize opposition to a union/communist co-opt of the movement and express our tone and stance. Seriously not serious or not seriously serious, I'm not sure which one.
The Lex Luthor Initiative was fairly successful but I believe the OccupyLA media director should get the credit for solving the problem before the initiative really took hold at the camp.
Finally, The Duck Hunt Initiative was a mixed bag. Post-raid it was much more difficult to build a coalition of occupiers willing to potentially sacrifice their standing in the group. The fallout exposed me to state surveillance and poisoned my other occupy activities. I learned that it's important to build coalitions through consensus with active participation from all parties, even in cases where autonomous individual action can be justified. In other words, I became what I was fighting against.
Regardless, lessons were learned and no hard feelings were harbored. All this was done to help express the group will and give a constructive outlet to frustrations with "leaders" that were causing people to leave the movement.
I hope the strong and motivated people who these initiatives were directed at can trust that I only had the best intentions. I would be happy to build relationships with all of you in the future.
Horizontalidad!
This article does a lot of things well, but does one specific thing VERY poorly:
You wrote: "While the encampment was a powerful symbol, it was also a logistical nightmare. Just keeping the Port-a-Potties operating was a major drain on resources, not to mention providing food for the local homeless population and keeping the peace within the camp."
"They wore out their welcome," Alarcon says.
This is nested in the middle of a bunch of Richard Alarcon quotes (who, for the record, did not draft the resolution in support of OccupyLA. Eric Garcetti did, give credit where it's due). This quotation gives the impression that the city was providing any of these things, and/or that these points relate at all to the city and their logistics.
Nothing could be further from the truth. As one who personally woke up each morning during final weeks of the encampment to swab and clean those Port-a-Potties by hand, only to have the health inspector show up, compliment our work, then walk around the building and write up a bogus health violation and hand it to a different person altogether (any person would do, they liked going up to the media tent for some reason), I'm somewhat resentful of any notion that the city had anything to do with it. OccupyLA provided the port-a-potties, OccupyLA provided the food, OccupyLA kept the peace within the camp. The city was too busy denying us access to water, even for limited hours of the day, despite their being dozens of available faucets for that express purpose on the outside of the building. Cyclovia gets access every month to the city's water, but citizens of Los Angeles who were residents/participants in OccupyLA were denied. It should be noted that Mario Brito also intentionally prevented members of OccupyLA from attending negotiations to discuss these issues with commissioners within the parks department and DWP, despite repeated requests for access to the same table to which he had access.
@paganangel. Ciclavia does not happen every month. It happends twice a year and we do not use the water at city hall.
*there being dozens of available faucets.Why is this water issue specifically relevant? The #1 health code violation claim made (despite us paying out of pocket hundreds of dollars every month for hand washing stations and supplies for restocking): insufficient access to handwashing. This comes despite the fact that we were serving only pre-packaged foods, and the city had an available remedy only feet away. But to provide the city's resources to the city's inhabitants, even in a controlled and metered fashion, would be too much even to discuss.
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