Andrea Gibbons was born in Taos, New Mexico and grew up in a round adobe house that her parents built in the desert. She loved Tucson, but at the age of 17 believed she really had to get the hell out of there. Her family lost their home that year after years of fighting banks and lawsuits to keep it, and she won a big fat scholarship to college. Those two things are probably the central contradictions in her life.
She did graduate. But she didn't schmooze herself into a job, so she worked nights at K-mart for six months after signing away her rights to unionize, and then lived in Guadalajara, Mexico on her immense savings...the savings didn't last long so she worked at a Salvation Army orphanage for room and board, but being locked in at night didn't agree with her, and she came home.
She then spent three years working with Central American refugees as a paralegal for the Central American Resource Center in Los Angeles. Realizing there was only so much you could do within a framework of unjust laws, she went back to school and got an M.A. in Urban Planning from UCLA.
And then she became an organizer and then the the lead organizer and researcher for SAJE: she organized tenants, reveled in popular education, uncovered slum housing empires, and helped create the Figueroa Corridor Community Land Trust. And burned out a bit. Now she's in London writing fiction and "working" for PM. In her spare time she also attends the London School of Economics in an attempt to put her theory where her practice is.
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We Shall Not Be Moved: Posters and the Fight Against Displacement in L.A.'s Figueroa Corridor
edited by Gilda Haas, Tomas Benitez, and Carol Wells
ISBN: 978-1-60486-038-2
Pub Date: July 2008
Format: Paperback
Page Count: 51 Pages
Size: 8 1/2 by 11
Subjects: Social Justice, Art
$15.00
We Shall Not Be Moved brings together full-color graphic arts and grassroots voices to describe the impact of gentrification and development in central Los Angeles, and how people fight back to protect their communities. This book emerged from a unique collaboration between SAJE, Self-Help Graphics and Art, and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics. It is a visual and written story of how grassroots organizing can both inspire and be inspired by the creation of original art and the recognition of the intermingled traditions of art and struggle on a global level. It combines a gripping narrative of what gentrification looks like in L.A.’s Figueroa Corridor where the city’s wealthiest developers rub shoulders with its poorest residents. It speaks to how artists can work with activists, and gives a full-color view of posters from housing struggles around the country and the world.
The Buzz:
“How can art and community so magnificently united, ever be defeated?”
--Mike Davis
“We Shall Not Be Moved is a virtual primer on how to get artists, community arts people (you know who you are) and grassroots community organizing groups to work together to fight for neighborhood rights (and whatever lefts we have left). In more than 20 years of doing guerrilla street postering--without the example of this book as a guide--my creative team and I have tried many times to collaborate with several of our favorite non-profit community organizations. The results have been decidedly mixed, like a can of mixed nuts deciding who’s the nuttiest nut in the can. Fuggedaboutit! However, we wouldn’t want to offend anybody, so let me lay it on you from the grassroots organizations’ point of view: working with artists is like herding cats. Until now! Reading We Shall Not Be Moved (and--thank you-thank you--there are lots of pictures), historically contextualizes the movement, articulates the symbiosis of collaboration and addresses specific issues of the moment in a way that even an artist can appreciate.”
--Robbie Conal
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What others are saying...
- We Shall Not Be Moved: Political Media Review
We Shall Not Be Moved
By Ernesto Aguilar
Political Media Review
Gentrification is one of those great battles the working class continues fight on a regular basis. Not that it has much of a choice. Urban desirability and the quest for community in cities across the United States have turned many a block into “neighborhoods in transition,” condominium war zones where the enemy combatants are the less well-to-do. The places they once thrived are plundered by developer prates in ways corporate media forgets, and resistance like home reclamation/squatting is only a warning shot as the U.S. economy and American frostiness for the poor worsens.
Originally released in 2003, We Shall Not Be Moved: Posters and the Fight Against Displacement in L.A.’s Figueroa Corridor is a collection of art aimed at popularizing an uprising that is often boxed into financial and political conventions its opponents have the luxury of dodging. With lawmakers and years of public indoctrination about “progress” (contrast with the image of the rich buying Grandma’s home out from under her and kicking her out to build a strip mall for overpriced baby clothes or a high rise) on their side, urban living’s robber barons sit pretty mostly. It is the people losing their homes who face the burden of spurning media bias of residents crying “not in my backyard” or waxing nostalgic for the good old days. Valid though such caricatures may occasionally be, the vast majority of poor people may see the importance of growth, but not at the expense of losing community or having one manufactured by a property manager. Too often, as housing activists have seen in places like San Francisco’s Mission District, whites seeking to cash in on the exotic aura of a community of color end up killing it. The story presented from Los Angeles in this book, as you can expect, thus has much gravity.
Book collaborators Benitez, Haas and Wells get a thumbs up for contextualizing the Figueroa Corridor campaign with other housing flashpoints, such as the effort in Tompkins Square in the Lower East Side of New York City as well as San Francisco’s International Hotel. Presenting the story of Self-Help Graphics, a legendary art and agitation compound, is another wonderful take because readers see the movement flower as an expression of alternate power. The struggle itself bears learning about, as are the varied ways this mainly Latino and working class L.A. community fought back.
A few remarks for art book collectors: We Shall Not Be Moved is not a coffee table book in the purest sense, although putting out the 50-page read wherever you rest your tea is sure to impress friends. The art here is offered in many formats, but never in the massive, page-bleed printing for which poster books are often regaled. Just as important is the organizing explained throughout the book — the house-by-house, door-to-door method of community organizing inspired by Saul Alinsky and inspiring to all today. You may be lured to We Shall Not Be Moved for its political artwork, but as with any fine tome, it is the story that reels you in, and it does.
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Author Portfolio
Gibbons, Andrea. Driven From Below: A Look at Tenant Organizing and the New Gentrification. Perspectives Journal, Institute for Anarchist Studies, 2009.
Gibbons, Andrea and Gilda Hass. Redefining Redevelopment: Participatory Research for Equity in the Los Angeles Figueroa Corridor. SAJE, 2002.
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