[Fire on the Mountain
is most pleased to present this photo essay on the ongoing struggle to
build a library and community garden in spaces that the city of Oakland has
abandoned. It is also scheduled for posting at the website of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization/Organización Socialista del Camino para la Libertad.]
by Tom Attaway
Signs of the history of people’s struggles in East Oakland are all around for those who have eyes to see them...
Middle class white residents who once lived in these lowland neighborhoods have fled up to the Oakland hills, leaving this part of town to its multinational working class residents...
In the Chican@/Mexican@ neighborhood around International Blvd and 23rd Avenue, those signs of history can be seen in the building at 1449 Miller Ave.
Originally a Carnegie-funded library built in this working-class neighborhood in 1910s, the building represented the city’s commitment to provide amenities for all of its residents. After the library closed in the 1970s, the building housed the Emiliano Zapata Street Academy. This institution, which grew out of the revolutionary national movements which erupted in Oakland in the 1960s and 70s, was an alternative high school for Chicano students in the neighborhood. The Academy closed its doors in the late 1980s and after brief use as a church and a social services center, the building was left vacant. A space gifted to the people of Oakland for their benefit became an urban blight, slowly filling with refuse from sporadic squatters.
That was until earlier this month, when Oakland activists, coming together from Occupy Oakland and other radical projects in the East Bay, opened the space ...
. And cleaned it up...
And filled the shelves with books again...
They named the space the Victor Martinez People’s Library (Biblioteca Popular Victor Martinez), in honor of the Bay-area Chicano writer and poet who died last year.
A casual observer might think that the city of Oakland was paying no attention to this neighborhood given the violence, drug use, prostitution and other social ills which flourish in plain sight nearby. But there are certain things that simply
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