Conversations Across Our America: Talking About Immigration and the Latinoization of the United States

Antonio Díaz, Oscar Grande, and Teresa Almaguer

Antonio Díaz and I were fellow students in the late 1980s at the University of Texas at Austin. He was a cofounder of PODER (People Organized in Defense of Earth and Her Resources) in Austin, an environmental justice organization . In the mid-1990s he moved to the Bay Area where he began working with another organization called PODER (People Organizing to Demand Environmental & Economic Rights), a grassroots organization based in the Mission District that despite sharing the same acronym is not related to the Austin group. Members work with Mission residents to find local solutions to issues facing low-income communities and communities of color. Antonio was my host when I was in Oakland. We met at the PODER offices with the other full-time staff members, Teresa Almaguer and Oscar Grande, who also participated in the interview. antonio: I met staff from PODER [San Francisco] back in 1991 at this national conference in Washington, D.C., the first people’s environmental leadership seminar, and by that point we had started PODER in Austin. I was happy to realize that we were working with an organization that had the same acronym. We kept in touch over the years, primarily through the Southwest Network that they are a part of, and so when we moved out here in 1995 we looked up the folks. I was first asked to be on the board. Then I became a staff person in 1998 and made a connection through the environmental justice work, having done similar work in Texas. oscar: I am the organizer, coming up on my ninth year at the organization . I was born and raised in San Francisco, in the Excelsior District, and I feel like the Mission District is my second home. My family comes from El Salvador, immigrated over here in the late ’60s. My brothers and sisters, antonio díaz, oscar grande, and teresa almaguer 144 conversations across our america except for one brother, are all over here, and most of my family is in El Salvador. I got my first taste of activism doing gang prevention work, case management work, tutoring local high schools, and all that. It felt very, very stifling, like you were spinning your wheels and you were not getting anywhere. For every one success story, there were thirty, forty, fifty young people out there with no opportunities or resources to get out of the different situations that our community finds ourselves in. Some of the work that I do here at PODER has really been focused around project issues, displacement issues. We have been engaged actively in anti-displacement work since ’98. I would say all the work we do could be lumped and categorized into anti-displacement from our first battle around trying to get a ground field site cleaned up and turned into a park, which was started in the mid-’90s and culminated in 2001 with the building of this beautiful park, the park that we actually use to organize out of. We had our Fiesta Navideña (Christmas party) this past Friday. There are just so few places we can get together and celebrate our culture, or get together for a meeting and figure out what we are going to do in the community. How are we going to improve it? How are we going to demand our rights? A lot of our work around anti-displacement is long-term, looking toward not just today, tomorrow, next week, but looking ten years, twenty years down the line, The staff of PODER in their office in the Mission District, San Francisco. Left to right: Antonio Díaz, Oscar Grande, Teresa Almaguer. Photo from PODER files. 145 confronting threats to community looking at city maps, city spaces that we can claim for affordable housing, locally owned mom-and-pop businesses, spaces for community services. In the short term what I think has gotten us a lot of visibility and a lot of trust in the neighborhood has really been our more short-term, kind of reactive work. But we have been vigilant around fighting for people’s homes and businesses. Out here we have had a huge turnover in terms of evictions of residents, small businesses, primarily Latino immigrant homes. A lot of these business owners have invested all of their life savings into it or are living on month-to-month leases. A...