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 w...