Tag: Emiliano Zapata

“You were right, Tiny. Interdependence does work for us poor mamas.” My revolutionary poet, fellow welfareQUEEN at POOR Magazine and co-founder of Homefulness and KEXU radio Laure McElroy and I spoke quietly on the phone in the kind of intimacy befitting deep sister comrades like we were and had been for many years of deep struggle and deep resistance. Writing this today is so hard for me between tears and pain. I’m so unsure of how to go on without her love. On Sunday, Sept. 23, we held a multi-nationed tree-planting ceremony in Laure’s honor at Homefulness.

Zapata’s legacy of integrity, dignity, self-determination and emancipation rang loud and clear to many, not as simply a worthy cost of freedom but a call to duty, to fight and challenge for a deserved justice. Zapata and the EZLN generalized their plight. Exposure itself can be a force when successfully framed: “Circumstances create man as much as man creates his circumstances.” As the vanguard, we must create ours.

The Los Angeles Richard Aoki Commemoration Committee will acknowledge the life and legacy of San Francisco Bay Area activist and organizer Richard Aoki, member of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF), on Sunday, Sept. 16, at 4 p.m., at Centenary United Methodist Church in Little Tokyo at 300 S. Central Ave., Los Angeles.