Sarah Menefee: Tiny, tell me about Poor Magazine that you are a founding member of?
Tiny: POOR is led by very poor youth, adults and elders. We practice eldership and ancestor worship and rebuke the pseudo-corporate model of the non-profit industrial complex. We keep our leadership among the folks who are oppressed: teach, facilitate and produce revolutionary media, and cultural work on issues of poverty, racism, disability and border fascism and indigenous resistance, as well as collaborations with other grassroots folks.
The only reason we were able to progress back in 1998--cuz none of us had any money, and we do live in a Capitalist society--was to get a grant from a welfare-to-work program (albeit a VERY radical one that eventually kicked us out for telling the truth in our media about the welfare system itself), and it provided us the seed money (very little, I might add) which allowed us to rent an office and start our radical educational and media programs, like the Race, Poverty and Media Justice Institute, Po Poets Project, Community Newsroom, and Youth in Media PoorNewsNetwork on-line, and our monthly radio broadcast.
SM: Speak about how your powerful memoir, "Criminal of Poverty" embodies the principle of poor people speaking and fighting for themselves, creating their own organizations and media forums.
Tiny: After surviving the experience of being a child in a homeless family and later being incarcerated solely for being homeless -- a citable offense in Amerikkka -- I had what I call three interventions (or tres milagros) where my life of severe poverty and incarceration, mi loca vida, gained a context. In the first, my mama found a civil rights attorney who commuted my fines and jail time to community service where it was my job to write a story about one of my experiences with poverty and then encouraged me to publish it. This was so life-changing. As a poor person, I was never heard, and perhaps most importantly, as a person struggling every day with the challenge of staying alive, I didn't have the privilege of writing at all. The second intervention was that me and my mama began to sit in on some classes at SF State University (we didn't have the money for tuition) and we began to get a political context for the suffering that me and my po mixed race mama were experiencing in Amerikkka and how our experience was similar to that of poor people all over the world. These interventions and many more were the basis of POOR's model of poverty scholarship: speaking the truth--from the first-person experience of our lives and struggles and how that also is the basis of our organizing model and education models.
SM: Tell us about your membership, and how they use culture--journalism, poetry, art, performance and other forms--to educate and inspire the wider community?
Tiny: Our poverty, disability, race, youth, and elder scholars come from everywhere: from the gentrified neighborhoods, from the locked-down group homes, the criminal injustice system, shelters, the fronteras and the streets. We are currently being criminalized and harassed, locked down and locked up, profiled and evicted. Now more than ever -- locally and globally -- it is urgent that we resist with our words, our scholarship and our actions these systems that oppress us, and one of the ways is through media production.
SM: What are some of the campaigns you and Poor have been involved in?
Tiny: We are currently in a serious national campaign to shed light on the criminalization of poverty. We are about to launch a national press conference with other folks locally and nationally, connecting migrant raza, folks impacted by border fascism, youth of color impacted by Gang Injunction and the criminal industrial complex, recyclers, panhandlers and other micro-business people, poor families and children, struggling in racist classist school districts and more.
Over the last ten years POOR has launched and/or collaborated on over 200 actions and corporate media infiltration campaigns. For example, the "I can't go to school" campaign which focused on the lack of child care for poor families in school. All of these campaigns use the media as an organizing tool to address issues of eviction, lack of child care, housing access and services for poor folks.
Visit POOR on the web at http://www.poormagazine.org.
CRIMINAL OF POVERTY
GROWING UP HOMELESS
IN AMERICA
"A daughter's struggle to keep her family alive, through homelessness, poverty and incarceration"
by Tiny, aka Lisa Gray-Garcia.
To order the book, contact
http://www.citylights.com.
