San Francisco and Cochabamba

All week I have been back in the gorgeous City where I lived my life for 15 years. San Francisco in the spring in a week blessed by sun is about as good as it gets.

For a week I have been with a flurry of good people working hard against a rough tide to help make the US and California in particular a more humane place. I met with the writers at the San Francisco Mime Troupe who want to make the struggle for economic global justice the theme of their summer production. I spent a day with social justice advocates trying to tackle the mess of California’s budget crisis, the issue I worked on here for years. Another friend launched a ballot measure this week to create a new preschool option for every four year old in the state, funded by a new tax on California’s millionaires.

And everywhere I go there is still interest in the home I adopted after leaving San Francisco seven years ago, Cochabamba. There is a connection between these two points on the earth’s surface that is more than just my having lived a long while in both places. Maybe they are acupuncture points on Mother Earth.

Walking through San Francisco’s Mission district, a neighborhood of Latin American immigrants struggling against waves of gentrification, I was reminded of the incredible energy that comes when Latino culture gets mixed with old-fashioned San Francisco creativity. This week I saw a resplendent example of that, “La Llorona”.

A few years ago I received an email from one of The City’s most amazing muralists, Juana Alicia. For those who know San Francisco she is the one who designed the powerful four-story mural that wraps around the Women’s Building here. She was working on a mural idea about water and was struck by the powerful tale of Cochabamba’s water revolt. We communicated back and forth by email and I sent her some photographs.

Today at 24th and York streets in the Mission you can see the result, which I saw for the first time this week. “La Llorona” is a sea of aqua blue splashed against the side of a two-story building. At its heart is an image from Cochabamba, a young woman whipping her sling in confrontation with the police – a Bolivian David.

Such different places but with struggles so hauntingly similar. Cochabamba made people around the world believe that bold action was possible. People in San Francisco and the US need that kind of hope right now. I took the daughter of an old friend of mine on a mural walk here this week, a teacher in her 20s. She looked at “La Llorona”, thought a minute and said to me. “We really are everywhere, aren’t we?”

In the last two years I have worked with fighters for social justices in Brazil, Bolivia, the Balkans, Hungary, Thailand, Tanzania, and across the US. Yup, we really are everywhere. Don’t forget that. And if you make it to San Francisco take yourself to 24th and York.