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 […]
#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 […]
This post is a documentation of installation work with Yolanda Lopez related to forced eviction. 1. Meeting A Mission Legend 2. The Context of Ellis Act Evictions in La Mission 3. Home/Studio: Eviction Scene Investigation (Lopez & Camarena, 18th Annual Sólo Mujeres, MCCLA, March 12-April 18, 2014) 4. Eviction Garage Sale (Yolanda Lopez & Rio […]
A Watershed of Tears: Arroyo de los Dolores (extract 1/5) Ocean fog protected the Bay from European discovery, until 1769, when explorer Gaspar de Portolá viewed the body of water from a mountaintop. Six years later, on August 5, 1775, the ship San Carlos sailed through the golden gate under a moonlit sky. The Huimen […]
Refugio Nieto and Elvira Rodriguez (now Elvira Nieto) were born a year apart in the little town of Tarimoro, Guanajuato, known for its agricultural and handmade brick businesses. Refugio was the eldest child in a family of eight, and Elvira the fourth in a family of nine children. He was born into a family of […]