A Place to Call Home
A Place to Call Home
Tenant organizers demand that housing be more than just a bare roof over your head, and in doing so they make space for a full life.
I met Edain Altamirano in the office that Inquilinxs Unidxs Por Justicia (IX) shares with Centro de Trabajadores Unidos En La Lucha (CTUL) on George Floyd Square in Minneapolis. I had been walking among symbolic graves, and she had been on Zoom court with tenants testifying against their landlords. We were both tired but her smile was infectious, and I could see why even her silent presence on a call could soothe.
Altamirano had called Minneapolis home since she was seventeen, and she spent her days helping people to find and stay in homes of their own. “I think I was an organizer since I was little, but I didn’t recognize that until recently,” she told me with a laugh. She had been a fiercely independent child in a Jehovah’s Witness family in Mexico City, taking on caring responsibilities for younger siblings after her father died young and learning to organize them to win arguments with their mother. She got a job to pay for high school, fell in love, and got pregnant. At that age, she said, “I felt that I could conquer the world.” Her partner—now her husband—had family in Minneapolis, and so she agreed to move with him. When they could finally afford a home of their own, after years with her husband’s family, Altamirano was thrilled, but then her son started to get sick, wheezing and coughing from the mold and the cold in the building. Unscrupulous landlords, she realized, targeted recent immigrants and assumed, often correctly, that they would not cause trouble. The landlords would blame the tenants for bugs and mice, implying that immigrants were dirty, and living in those conditions bred shame and compounded the fear of speaking up. When a tenant organizer knocked on her door, she was ready to get involved.
IX was founded by two organizers, Jen Arnold and Roberto de la Riva, who met through Occupy Homes, an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street, where a lot of the work had been preventing evictions and fire fighting, but through working alongside CTUL and other labor organizations, they became interested in a union-style model where they would deliberately organize tenants of particular large landlords in order to change the power dynamic. One of their targets, a partnership known publicly as the Apartment Shop, was then Altamirano’s landlord.
The founders of IX encouraged Altamirano to apply for an open position, doing what she already did, bringing neighbors together to improve their conditions. She had always been a big dreamer, had always believed in transformation, had always believed that her community deserved more than low-wage jobs and to bow and scrape for inclusion in America. She believed too that the kinds of conservative beliefs she had been raised with could be challenged, that immigrants’ best chance of gaining real power within the system was by working alongside other people marginalized by landlords and bosses and police. She joked about the “immigrant filter,” the lens through which people learned to mistrust and fear and close themselves off from the city and their neighbors even as they struggled to assimilate to America.
“People look at me like a bridge,” she explained. She had a foot in both worlds, as a migrant from Mexico and also someone who had learned English and beyond that learned about how “the system” worked: the courts and the landlords, local and national politics, but also “capitalism, racism, gender.” This particular niche she occupied could help her make people feel welcome while also pushing them to learn more. “I started to work on trainings about popular education, about race, power, our own experiences,” she said. She created a women’s group within the cooperative, where women could talk about violence and create new kinds of safety together. “That’s one of the biggest things that I feel that I’ve achieved.”
The day-to-day struggles for survival can get in the way of experiencing life, in the way of feeling the good and the bad. Work two jobs, get the kids to school and fed and to bed, and then collapse yourself, and all you can touch of your emotions is the edges around your exhaustion. Organizers often talk about dignity—union organizers speak of dignity on the job, and tenant organizers the dignity of one’s home—and when I think of dignity I think of the ability to feel your feelings without having to apologize or stifle them. To claim a space for yourself. Tenant organizers do that physically, demanding that housing be more than just a bare roof over your head, and in doing so they make space for a full life.
Altamirano’s experience of immigration was one of synthesis; she left her home and her family and their particular beliefs behind but still carried with her the history of her country and a fierce love for her people, and she blended that with a new political edge she developed while organizing against her landlord. Rather than the eternal presentness, the kind of enforced melancholy of not really being at home anywhere, she built community by learning and teaching history and by sharing her dreams of a future. A long lineage of migrations, as Cristina Rivera Garza wrote, can bring strength as well as grief. “Could it be true that those who move frequently remember more?”
Even after Altamirano and her husband finally purchased a home and left the Apartment Shop behind, the fight continued, and she worked alongside her former neighbors through a combination of lawsuits and protests and rent strikes to put pressure on elected officials and on the landlords themselves. As a result of their organizing, the tenant organization was able to buy five buildings that had been owned by the Apartment Shop, buildings that are now the Sky Without Limits housing cooperative. The Sky Without Limits buildings are decorated with colorful murals detailing the values of IX and the cooperative: unity, empathy, lucha, justice, community. A banner to the neighborhood: we can dream bigger.
Precarity after all is not just the condition of recent immigrants; it is the condition of all of us in some way, vulnerable to the other people around us, the condition of the vast global majority in an economic system designed to exploit and extract. The kind of organizing that Altamirano and IX do is based in this idea that we do not get to choose the people we live next to, but we can build with them across difference a world where, rather than subsumed, that linkage is celebrated. Where it becomes the root of co-governance, of community autonomy, of democracy. The murals on the buildings are a declaration of interdependence and an invitation: join us.
For Altamirano the experience has been one of liberation, a kind of liberation that means she can do things even when she has limitations, that means she feels supported and can in turn show her children that support and allow them in turn to choose the path that suits them. Immigrant parents, organizer and clinician MaryGrace DiMaria noted, often carry a complicated grief watching their children leave them behind with language fluency and a new culture that feels alien. Altamirano has been on both sides of this grief: her mother, she explained, was hurt and worried when she left, saw it as a rejection of her values, and she does not want to place those expectations on her children. But it was good for her heart to finally take her children to Mexico, to see them meet the rest of her family.
The work has been grueling even as it has freed her; it is constant crisis, and it is easy to lose herself and disconnect from her body and her own needs. But the community she has built as an organizer is one that can hold her too when she needs it, a place where she has friends and care beyond her immediate family. A home.
Sarah Jaffe is the author, most recently, of From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire, and an editorial board member at Dissent.
This article is an excerpt from From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire, reprinted with permission from Bold Type Books.
