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Andrea Gibbons
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For more from Andrea Andrea Gibbons was born in Taos, New Mexico and grew up in a round adobe house that her parents built in Tucson's Sonoran desert. Her family lost their home after years of fighting banks and lawsuits to keep it, and she won a big fat scholarship to college in the same year. This probably explains everything. K-mart was undoubtedly the most well-known of her many minimum wage employers, and was far better than both picking jojoba beans for $1.25 a pound, and the days and nights slaving at a Salvation Army orphanage for room and board when her money ran out in Guadalajara. She spent three years working with Central American refugees as a paralegal for the Central American Resource Center in Los Angeles. 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. She was proud to be there at the inspiring beginnings of the national Right To the City Alliance, but burn out was unrecoverable. She sold fancy underwear in Glasgow for a while, now she's in London writing fiction and doing some editing for PM, blogging for the popular education website Dr. Pop, writing for Brightwide, and serving as an editor for the progressive City Journal. In her spare time she also attends the London School of Economics in an attempt to put her theory where her practice is. You got questions about democracy, public space, or Voloshinov? She can help you. And she hopes to see you around the organizing efforts against the public spending cuts. Andrea is an editor of PM's Switchblade imprint. Purchasing Links Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail: Stories of Crime, Love and RebellionISBN: 978-1-60486-096-2
Published August 2011
Format: Paperback
Size: 8 by 5.5
Page count: 256 Pages
Subjects: Anthology$19.95Burn, Baby, Burn.
An incendiary mixture of genres and voices, this collection of short stories compiles a unique set of work that revolves around riots, revolts, and revolution. From the turbulent days of unionism in the streets of New York City during the Great Depression to a group of old women who meet at their local café to plan a radical act that will change the world forever, these original and once out-of-print stories capture the various ways people rise up to challenge the status quo and change up the relationships of power. Ideal for any fan of noir, science fiction, and revolution and mayhem, this collection includes works from Sara Paretsky, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Cory Doctorow, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Summer Brenner. Buy book now | Download e-Book now | Read reviews
 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 Buy this book now | Read book reviews What others are saying...
 The Revolution Will Be Fictionalized: A Review
by Stefan Raets
Tor.com
November 14th, 2011
Most SFF fans will probably pick up Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! because of one or more of these three stories by famous SF authors, but if you don’t mind wandering outside of the boundaries of the genre, there are many other goodies to be found here...
Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! is an excellent, eclectic anthology of stories, a perfect book to read now the cold autumn weather is starting to chill the OWS protesters. The struggle continues... so get your grind on!
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Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail!: A Review
Publishers Weekly
November 28th, 2011
The 18 mostly original stories in this thought-provoking crime anthology offer gritty testament to the violence, cunning, and resilience of people pushed to the brink. Phillips and Gibbons showcase some major talent, notably Sara Paretsky (“Poster Child”), but less well-known authors also make solid contributions. In John A Imani’s moving “Nickels and Dimes,” a black observer of a confrontation between police and protestors in 1972 Los Angeles becomes a reluctant participant and de facto leader. Gibbons’s “The El Rey Bar” brilliantly conveys the chaos, the hopelessness, and the despair engendered during an L.A. riot. SF ace Kim Stanley Robinson’s exotic “The Lunatics” explores the issue of forced labor amid an attempted slave revolt on the moon. On the down side, Michael Moorcock’s lengthy “Gold Diggers of 1977,” first published in 1980, will be incomprehensible to those unfamiliar with the story of the Sex Pistols. (Jan.)
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Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail!: A Review
by John Koeing
johnkoeing.squarespaces.com
November 23rd, 2011
Great book title, one that will help this book be placed cover facing out on bookstore shelves for a week or so. Hopefully exposure will pump up sales and garner some publicity, as this collection of short stories has extreme personality and a bunch of worthwhile writing. If there’s a theme holding these authors together, it’s riots, love, crime, revolution and chaos.
Some pretty heavy hitters are included in this collection: Michael Moorcock, Sara Paretsky, Cory Doctorow, and many others. Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail reminds me of an era gone by, writers from a different time, and attitudes not often seen today. This isn’t pulp fiction; these are splendid wordsmiths. Buy this book now | Download e-Book now | Back to reviews | Back to top  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. Buy this book now | Back to reviews | Back to top The latest news - No Justice Yet for Smiley Culture
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Author PortfolioGibbons, Andrea. "Bridging theory and practice." City, 14: 6, 619 — 621. Gibbons, Andrea. "A Right to the City, a Right to a Home: The Struggle Over Land and Housing in LA." Critical Cities: Ideas, Knowledge and Agitation from Emerging Urbanists, Vol 2. London: Myrdle Court Press, 2010. 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. Back to top |
