Urgent: SAVE Self Help Graphics & Art

LOS ANGELES COMMUNITY DEMANDS ANSWERS

Community is Outraged that Catholic Archdiocese Secretly Sells Self Help Graphics & Arts Historic Building

Los Angeles, July 11, 2008 — Over the last 24 hours elected officials, community leaders, artists and residents throughout Los Angeles expressed their outrage that the Los Angeles Catholic Archdiocese secretly sold the mosaic building that is home to Self Help Graphics & Art. After its founding by Catholic nun Sister Karen Boccalero more than 35 years ago, non-profit organization Self Help Graphics & Arts was notified that the Catholic Archdiocese sold the building to a private real estate and investment company. The organization had no knowledge of the sale or pending sale. Community leaders including Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina made it abundantly clear that the Archdiocese must explain its actions.

We need answers, Supervisor Molina said. “The Archdiocese’s blatant disrespect for the community is unacceptable. I commit to working with Self Help Graphics & Art to mobilize my elected official colleagues and other community leaders to demand that the archdiocese tell us why they mishandled this situation and how they plan to correct it.”

As long as the organization continued to fulfill the mission of advancing Chicano and Latino art and developing local and emerging artists, the Sisters of St. Francis, Mount Alverno agreed to allow Self Help Graphics & Art to use the building. With record-breaking print fairs, community festivals such as its iconic Dia de los Muertos celebration which draws thousands of attendees and artists both emerging and veteran flocking to the organization as a place to cultivate their art, Self Help has been undergoing a renaissance. Last Fall Self Help board members were told that the building was not on the list of sites to be sold as part of the Archdiocese’s attempt to raise funds to pay the settlement to individuals who successfully sued the church for sexual abuse.

A spokesperson for the Sisters of St. Francis alleges that Self Help Graphics & Art failed to secure a grant to purchase the building, leading the sisters to transfer title to the archdiocese. They also allege that the organization was struggling financially. 

“It is preposterous to believe that one attempt at a grant a year ago should signal the Sisters and Archdiocese to move forward with a sale with no notice whatsoever,” said Self Help board of directors president Armando Duron. “Common human decency would have been to give us a deadline for purchase.” 

After closing its doors for three months in 2005, Self Help has experienced resurgence with the help of an untold number of volunteers and the support of the community at large. With no federal or state subsidies or major private grants, the organization has thrived in its array of programs and services to the community. Sales for prints from some of the nation’s leading Latino artists and up-and-coming artists have been booming. The organization is considered by scholars and artists as one of the birthplaces of Chicano art.

“For nearly 40 years, Self-Help Graphics has been one of the major community-based arts centers serving Los Angeles. It has earned international recognition for its contributions to the graphic arts and for being a model of community-based art making and art-based community making. In the last three years, Self Help has reinvented itself as a self-sustaining organization, and it has shown the continued vitality and relevance of its mission by reaching new generations of artists and community members through innovative programs and cutting edge artistic production,” said Chon Noriega, professor and director of the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA.

The terms of the sale from the new owner allow Self Help to remain in the building rent free until December 31, 2008.

Stephen Saiz, Self Help board vice president said the organization will be working with the community, elected officials, foundations, fellow arts institutions and other community leaders to determine the future for the organization.

“We have had a relationship with the Church for almost 40 years and expected them to value that relationship and more importantly, the service we provide to the community” Saiz said. “We are not going to allow their needs for funds to pay off their debts stop us from that service.”

Self Help Graphics & Art is a nationally recognized center for Chicano and Latino arts that develops and nurtures artists and printmaking. Self Help Graphics & Art seeks to advance Chicano and Latino art broadly through programming, exhibitions and outreach to diverse audiences in East Los Angeles and beyond. Self Help Graphics & Art seeks to identify young and emerging artists from the community in all aspects of its activities.

Another Casualty

Cynthia Perez of Los Angeles died of a gunshot wound to the head on Tuesday at 1:15 p.m. at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena. Perez was shot while riding in the back seat of her parent’s SUV in Highland Park on Monday. According to the LAPD, the assailant opened fire on another motorist, Fabian Aguirre, 33, of Highland Park, who had stopped his pickup alongside the SUV. Both vehicles were at York Boulevard and North Avenue 64, waiting for the light to change.

Here We Go Again!

The Long Beach Police Department did not deploy its pioneering mental health team Saturday night when an officer fatally shot a mentally ill Samoan American man as he left a neighborhood birthday party, a department spokesmen said Monday.

Some mental health experts say Saturday’s shooting is exactly the type of situation that special programs like the Long Beach Police Mental Evaluation Team are meant to defuse. Developed in the 1990s, the program teams a police officer with a mental health professional. They are on call seven days a week until midnight.

“It is very disappointing, because Long Beach is one of the few that has a mental health evaluation team,” said Richard Van Horn, president of the nonprofit Mental Health America of Los Angeles.

Add the LBPD, to the category of criminal injustice next to the umbrella leader LAPD and its associates: Inglewood PD, NYPD, and others.

“Freeway Therapy”

A Los Angeles Unified School District police officer has filed a claim with the district contending he was retaliated against for reporting allegations that a substitute teacher sexually abused a student.

Luis E. Barraza said his actions embarrassed two South East High School administrators who failed to report the misconduct although required by law to inform authorities.
According to Barraza, he was reassigned to patrol at another part of the school district on the same day that L.A. Unified Supt. David Brewer allowed the two administrators to return to the South Gate campus, despite their pending criminal cases. Prosecutors criticized Brewer’s action.

Barraza’s attorney, Michael McGill, alleged in the claim that his client was given “freeway therapy.” The claim is a precursor to a possible civil lawsuit.

Read More

Whats Up Philly, Why Can’t the Others Keep Up?

Four Philadelphia police officers will be dismissed, three will be disciplined and a supervising police sergeant will be demoted after the violent police beating of three suspects fleeing a shooting, the city’s mayor and police commissioner said today. A TV news helicopter captured footage of the incident.

If only Inglewood’s, Los Angeles’ and New York’s respective police departments can take notes from the swift disciplinary action from Philadelphia. Police brutality is commonplace, but it should never be condoned. Shooting an unarmed man with 50+ bullets is not deserving of a clean police slate and regional celebrity. Instead, these officers in uniform should have justice served to them, quickly an swiftly. Too many individuals from disenfranchised communities are at the bad end of these officer’s game plan, and all too quickly do these incidents remind us of the racial injustice that is ramped throughout the U.S.

Police Departments across the country-Please take notes. All others, be on watch and guard. Inglewood’s incident was just a mear dot in the legacy of ill-will and police misconduct in Southern California.

Oldie But Goodie: Jena 6

The Jena Six and US History
    By Paul Ortiz t r u t h o u t | Perspective Thursday 27 September 2007

    I was in the middle of an extended research trip in the South when news of the march and rally to free the Jena Six began flowing through the blogosphere. What has transpired in Jena in support of six young black men is an important new chapter in the black freedom struggle.

    The Jena Six are six black teens from Jena, Louisiana, who were accused of fighting and beating up a fellow high school student last December. The student who was beaten up was white. While the victim in question suffered no severe injuries, the six black youths were initially charged by the local district attorney with attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder. The murder weapons, according to the DA, were the perpetrators’ tennis shoes. This is how much progress we’ve made in the United States: what used to be seen as a schoolyard brawl punishable by suspension or community service has become a crime punishable by life in prison. After a wave of publicity, the charges were reduced in most of the cases to battery and conspiracy which may still result in over two decades of prison time for these kids. One of the defendants remains in jail after being unable to post $90,000 bail.

    According to the local authorities in Jena, we are supposed to believe that race has nothing to do with the charges levied against the high school students.

    Earlier incidents of violence and intimidation directed against black students at Jena were ignored by local law enforcement officials. In one incident, a white man pulled a shotgun on a black teen, and on another occasion white youths smashed a black youth over the head with a beer bottle. Black residents also reported that whites were spewing racist epithets at them in public. All of these incidents were reported to authorities, and the police did absolutely nothing in the months leading up to the beating.

    Local authorities also claim that three nooses hung on a tree at the high school three months before the fight had nothing to do with race. African-Americans in Jena report that the nooses were hung up after black students sat under a tree that some white students felt was reserved for them. While this version of the story has been disputed by school officials, according to the district attorney, it doesn’t matter anyway. The DA claims that young people are so ignorant about their histories that they wouldn’t know what the nooses were supposed to represent! The US attorney for western Louisiana concluded that there couldn’t be any possible linkage between the nooses and the subsequent school fight. It was reported that one of the witnesses for the youth who was beaten was also one of the students connected to the noose hanging.

    In Jena, as throughout the rest of the US, we are supposed to believe that “race is no longer an issue” and that justice is colorblind. California fits the pattern perfectly. Out here, Martin Luther King Jr. commemorations have become exercises in remembering how bad racism used to be [in the South] but thank God almighty we are free at last! I am really, really glad that tens of thousands of demonstrators who descended on Jena on behalf of the six young black men ignored what has embarrassingly become the “common sense” position on race relations in this nation.

    Many progressives today would like to de-emphasize or even separate the struggle against racism from efforts to end war and bring economic justice to the Americas. Their rationale is that white folks get upset when you talk too much about racial inequality and that the only way to draw the white working class to the movement is to keep quiet about race. This viewpoint is insulting to white people and it ignores the history of social change in this country. The nonracial proletarian revolution has never occurred in this country, and it never will. White people could not make the revolution by themselves in 1776, and they certainly cannot do it now. Furthermore, you cannot erase five hundred years of slavery, segregation, the Mexican-American War, the Sand Creek Massacre, Bracero programs, etc., etc. Tell the parents of the Jena Six or the survivors of Hurricane Katrina that we are all equally oppressed by capitalism. Race and class are forever linked in this nation.

Read Entire Article

ICE Raid in South Central

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents entered the single-family, two-story home in the 10000 block of South Normandie Avenue about 6:30 a.m.. and arrested 61 Central and South American immigrants in the house due to citizenship status.

Be on the look out and be careful. These raids continue to devastate communities and tear up families. South LA has long been a site of INS agents, dating back to the horrid summer raids of 2004.

Soboba Indian Reservation is Being Attacked by Sheriff’s

After reading about the issues plaguing the Soboba Indian Reservation, I had to take a minute and ask myself what year it is: 2008. The conflict between the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department and the Soboba Indian Reservation looks strikingly similar to the Indian Wars of the 18th century. So much so, I am alarmed and saddened that amidst all of the social and economic problems plaguing Indian Reservations today, they still must face police brutality and outright racism.

Essentially, a wild gun battle between Riverside County sheriff’s deputies and a pair of suspects on the Soboba Indian Reservation left two people dead and tribal members frustrated and demanding answers Tuesday.

“There are better ways to solve these problems than by bringing in the 7th Cavalry and wiping them out. I would say we are in a war right now,” said Robert Salgado, Soboba tribal chairman and a cousin of those killed. Chairman Soboba was refused entry into the crime seen by Riverside County Sheriff’s intensifying the disrespect felt by this community, on top of the mourning of two of their peers. In response to the Sheriff’s, Soboba states ”See why I’m angry? You see what I’m talking about?” he asked as he drove off. “If I was the mayor of L.A. and I was visiting a crime scene, they would have said, ‘Hey, how you doing?’ but they treat me with no respect. Do we look like gangsters?”

Moreover, after the land, natural resources, and livelihood was taken away by European settlers and their descendants, Native Americans have had few resources to deal with the isolation that their newfound ‘reservations’ provided them. They face issues of alcoholism, drug abuse, violence, and depression. Common issues plaguing today’s inner cities, but in this case they are socially isolated and all but forgotten, if it wasn’t for the creation of Indain casinos.

Salgado said he believes some of the tension stems from 2006, when he canceled a contract with the Sheriff’s Department that paid for deputies to patrol the reservation.

“We paid $400,000 and we didn’t see the benefits, so we did away with the contract,” he said. This explanation makes total sense: the sheriff’s department is pissed off they lost easy money for no work and have decided to harass the community in response to the loss of their contract. Are there no rules to regulate unprompted retalialtion and civil rights abuses?

The notion that these blatantly racist and discriminatory public officials can harrass, threaten, and even harm members of this community is beyond my own comprehension. Yet, I must remember this is the same country and same people that have colonized native people into laborers under harsh public policies that favor the rich and beat down on the poor. Now, two members of the Soboba Tribe have died, and tension is only escalating. Seems like the traditions of the wild west are still alive and well in the racist Inland Empire.

Rampart Criminal Injustice

Facing a potential life sentence in federal prison, a former Los Angeles police officer who was the admitted mastermind of a home invasion robbery gang apologized for his crimes Monday, telling a federal judge, “I became something that I despised.”

In a somewhat rambling, emotional address made moments before he was sentenced, Ruben Palomares told U.S. District Court Judge Gary A. Feess that he failed to face up to undisclosed “problems” he encountered as a young police officer and “I took a short cut.”

Palomares has been sentenced to 13 years in federal prison. Coupled with time that Palomares is serving on a related drug case, he probably will spend 20 years behind bars before he is released, prosecutors said. The disgraced officer, who also admitted to planting drugs on suspects and committing other crimes while working in the LAPD’s Rampart Division in the 1990s, had earned a reputation as one of the department’s most notoriously corrupt officers in recent memory.

Spatial Location: Never Again Sean Bell