In the War on Homeless(ness), "(un)Occupy" Takes on New Meaning

On Wednesday, October 12, my group and I visited the now defunct (un)Occupy Albuquerque camp in Yale Park. I was a bit surprised to find on closer look that the camp functioned as a sort of makeshift homeless shelter. Food Not Bombs had set up a kitchen, and the lawn was strewn with the same crowd I see in the Main Branch library downtown while staffing the community writing center. I wondered, “Where are all the radical student leaders!?” I felt a little swindled at first. If the Tea Party set up a soup kitchen in Yale Park, they’d gather a similar crowd of indigents to inflate their numbers. Is there really an (un)Occupy Albuquerque movement?

Part of my problem was I had stereotyped the agent of this rhetorical act. I was looking for a twenty year old with an army jacket, beret and megaphone. I wasn’t willing to grant agency to the man with tremors and no shoes standing at the curb with a drooly sort of faraway stare. One the way back to my office, I began to realize that I had marginalized the homeless population as voiceless, inhuman, and incapable of representing the fear and anger of the larger citizenry. In fact, these people have been occupying our public spaces for decades in unintentional silent protest. All we needed to do was support them. Give them food and a sign and say, “We’re standing right here with you.”

If all of the homeless in Albuquerque were to have gathered together at Yale Park and marched through campus under their own banner without the larger context of the Occupy movement, I wouldn’t doubt that APD under the order of Schmidly would have had them forcibly removed. We see in this past week’s developments how the university deals with the problem of homelessness in our community: out of sight, out of mind.

In a way, the (un)Occupy Albuquerque movement has made a pact with Albuquerque’s indigent population. It’s important to recognize this local movement as part of a global and historical tide of indignation against postcolonial capitalism, but to me, to “(un)occupy” now has a different meaning. I’d like to (un)Occupy Albuquerque of all its indigent citizens, not through forcible removal, but through services that provide for my fellow citizens a better life than the one we’ve been happy to ignore them living for all too long. I think we need to look to this pressing exigence that through the unraveling of recent events has binded the (un)Occupy Albuquerque movement to a very timely, very pressing, very human, very local cause.