"What is horizontal and democratic about language going to the county without us being able to read it?" asked Matt Ward, another key member of the group. "This is so fast. ... Why are we meeting with some reformist fucks who have no interest in earnestly helping us?"
Marroquin noted that Occupy Fights Foreclosures had pressured state lawmakers to pass the Homeowners' Bill of Rights earlier in the summer. The group had threatened to stage an action outside the home of a key state senator, who ended up supporting the bill. That showed that engagement with the system could work.
"We're not agreeing with their agenda," Marroquin argued. "This is our agenda."
That same debate, between revolution and reform, was at the heart of the intense battle in October over whether to accept Villaraigosa's offer in exchange for peaceful decampment from City Hall.
"What drew a lot of people to the Occupy movement," says Jared Iorio, who facilitated many of the meetings, "was that we didn't ask permission to protest from the people we were protesting. We weren't going to profit from leverage we had with people we disagreed so strongly with."
The Occupy general assemblies sought consensus on a proposal to halt the negotiations, but Brito and his fellow liaisons refused to stop.
"The liaisons blocked it, knowing that 99 percent of the people there did not want that to happen," Iorio says. "That kind of destroyed Mario's credibility."
Over a recent lunch at a Mexican restaurant in Pacoima, Brito says he was in a difficult spot. "In this movement, you're not going to make everyone happy. I almost get how it is to be a politician."
The Occupiers who opposed the negotiations insisted on attending the talks with City Hall. When they made the proposed terms public so they could be debated by the full encampment, Villaraigosa's office withdrew the offer.
After a series of lengthy general assemblies and working-group meetings, Occupy L.A. issued a 1,000-word rejection of the offer.
"We will continue to occupy this space, in solidarity with our global movement, until the forces of the few are forced to capitulate to the power of the people," they wrote. They also listed 10 grievances, ranging from foreclosures and the absence of a world-class transit system to pension and wage cuts for city workers and inadequate care for the homeless.
A week later, LAPD swarmed the encampment in a nighttime raid and arrested 300 people. During the raid, Brito says he was trying to move undocumented immigrants out of the camp so they would not be deported. But after he got outside the police perimeter, he could not get back inside.
Several Occupiers saw him chatting with police, which they took to be a sign of collusion.
"That was the end of Mario," Iorio says.
It also was the end of Occupy L.A. as a unified enterprise. Some campers went to a nearby church. Others went to parks. Most went home, returning only for general assemblies on the City Hall steps.
Brito, who had been camping on the north lawn of City Hall, went home and took some time to get his life back together. For a while, he had Occupiers sleeping on his couch. Then, like many others, he went back to work on his vision for a second phase of Occupy. He organized a demonstration at an immigration office under the banner of Occupy ICE. He took a staff job with Good Jobs L.A. — an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union, which had coordinated demonstrations with Occupy.
Others worked on foreclosures, homelessness or on fighting their charges in court. But tensions within the group continued. At one court appearance, Brito got into a shouting match with another Occupy member. On another occasion, there was a physical altercation. Brito's critics say that he attacked another Occupier and put him in a headlock, while Brito and his supporters say that he grabbed the man's arms to defend himself.
Scott Shuster says Brito was targeted early on by a group he calls the "Riverside Anarchists," whose objective was to "vilify anyone with a skill set."
"He showed up the first day and made peace with the cops. The second day he made peace with City Hall. He was the darling of the media, even if he didn't want to be," Shuster says. "So they asked him to step back, and he did. But that didn't end the scapegoating and objectification. He became the example of the patriarchy, or the police, or the labor unions. He became the scapegoat for everything."
Occupy L.A. came out of hibernation on May 1 with a series of demonstrations across the city, culminating in a rally at Pershing Square. Some considered it a success, while others were disappointed that only a few thousand people showed up.
Brito was working with immigrants-rights groups that day, trying to coordinate with other protests led by Occupy L.A. But he was not welcomed by his former comrades. Instead, several YouTube videos show him being chased out of Pershing Square by an angry mob.
"Get out of here! You're a liar!" they yelled.
@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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