Black Coffee at a Seattle Bus Stop I woke up thinking about Ethiopians in Seattle. In the past weekends of shuttling back and forth between San Francisco International Airport and SeaTac, I noticed elder Ethiopian women wrapped in their white netela. They often occupied a strong spatial presence on the Link train and E line […]
Adriana Camarena is proud to collaborate with Accion Latina to create and distribute “Unsettled/Inquietos,” a series of literary non-fiction essays based on portraits of working class and poor residents of the traditionally Latino Mission District of San Francisco. The essays will be published in English and Spanish in the bilingual El Tecolote newspaper of Acción […]
My encounter at 24th Street Southeast BART Plaza, approximately at 1:30pm, Oct. 9th, 2017, Indigenous People’s Day I had just stepped out of the new Mission coffee house on the Southeast BART plaza, where for about an hour I had been writing up some ideas for my next essay. The moment I walked out of […]
An essay by Adriana Camarena about affordable housing, police brutality, homelessness, art and activism. The author was commissioned by the YBCA to write a response to the exhibit “Take This Hammer”, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), March 11th to August 16th, 2016 (Guest Curator: Christian L. Frock) and present work at the event: […]
The Naming of Things* For Chris Carlsson, and in memory of “Processed World” magazine. I have found the place where making romantic sentences full of pathos and bravado has become factory work. On a plain of paved streets in Sunnyvale, past rows of ticky-tack Spanish-tiled roofs, in a cove of office-warehouses, holding herds of cubicles, […]
Mourning a police shooting On April 7, 2016 at 10:04am, two SFPD officers killed Luis Góngora Pat, a Mayan Yucatecan man living unhoused on Shotwell Street. His killing —partially caught on film— was the fourth high profile police officer-involved shooting since 2014. His killing was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Five community members […]
Democracy Now Interview. “Death by Gentrification: Alex Nieto Killed by Hail of Police Bullets in a Changing San Francisco” April 12, 2016 – Amy Goodman interviews Rebecca Solnit and Adriana Camarena on the SFPD killing of Alex Nieto on March 21, 2014 and the other salient cases of police shootings since 2014 (Amilcar Perez Lopez, […]
#OctoberTogether, More than just baseball… Dedicated to Bay Area families victims of police brutality and their supporters I. October Spirit II. Twilight III. Tipping the playing field IV. Unaccountable Murders V. Giants for Justice VI. October Together, the new normal… VII. List of Bay Area homicide victims by police I. October Spirit “October Together” is […]
Work-in-progress/ Extract (updated Sept. 8, 2014) 108 Homes For Mary Brown— My friend —M— gave me a list of 108 homes with listed owners who had not changed in the last 35 years. I went knocking on those address doors wanting to know who lived there. I started with names on my list that did […]
On a sunny summer afternoon in Dolores Park, a bottle scavenger in a red cardigan picked her way through the partying crowd. She was minding her business, which is picking bottles. She wove in and out of techno dancers and picnickers, barely given notice. When acknowledged, she was identified as one of the others. That […]