Barto
Part 1
At that time, this was my fortress. I had to militarize myself because I was on survival mode so I created a fortress with my food supply, my water and line of communication with the outside world and doing research so to find a place, an affordable place (which was through my phone).
This also depicts my organizational style, which helped me in keeping stable because if everything is just running wild around in my head and everything gets too chaotic, I can get really overwhelmed… and when I get overwhelmed, I start thinking about giving up for the moment. So that notebook is very, very important to me, it puts all the thoughts in one place. This is my story of being a minimalist that is just surviving with the bare necessities that I need; it was a pretty raw time. I was using my sleeping bag because it was getting to be 30 to 40 degrees outside and I couldn’t always leave my car running for heat, so my sleeping bag was very useful.
A lot of times I would not do all the readings I was supposed to do for my classes; I read them after the semester but at that time I read what was needed in order to complete the assignments and get the grades and reach my goals. Being organize was so important. To make mistakes can be fatal to my goals, and I knew I couldn’t afford mistakes because there wasn’t anyone to fix or clean up after them - thus I became a cat...
Reflecting on my childhood and my parents as well, I kept thinking the whole time when I was sleeping in my car, “wow.” The stories I heard from my mom when she lived in poverty in Mexico, going to the beach to dig up turtle eggs to eat, carrying buckets of water on her shoulders from the river for the rich to shower for some pesos, and her great journey that was pretty dangerous to get here for a better life. It made me think of her struggle, and it made me think about how I incorporated that resilience that she had into myself, and the sacrifices she made to come here so I can have an education and have a better life than the one she had.
The story is very important to me. It’s the stories of people that struggle where I really learned survival tactics and that stuck to me as a child, they were beacons that I evoked when I needed them. Not just the struggle of the stories, but the process and resilience of succeeding in the stories. The stories can transform people and tell them that it has been done before and could be done again. Sometimes a lot of these things people don’t know about because they are brushed beneath the mat. I hope my story can help people and say to them - “you can go to graduate school and survive homelessness. You can learn how to adapt to your situation until another solution comes along. It can give hope.”
Part 2
This is a picture of a restroom inside of McDonald’s, the one in McKinleyville because the one on Broadway in Eureka can be extremely dirty and messy and sometimes you’ll find syringes there...and sometimes the same thing in the one in Arcata. So I would use the McKinleyville McDonald’s and I would go in there and buy a $1 coffee and I would use this restroom to brush my teeth, comb my hair put the gel on, and get ready for the day. I would use this one when I would stay in parking lots or when I did primitive camping. And when you do primitive camping, there's no restrooms, there's only just a plot of land, no campsite. I would also use their tables to get organized for the day and also see what places I’m going to look at for housing, what assignments I have coming up.
You get your large coffee for a dollar, but I guess the best part is, it's a resurrection. When you splash the water on your face and you're cleaning yourself, I don't know if it's a spiritual thing or a religious thing, but you're being reborn. You're reinventing yourself for that day, and it's so important that you feel fresh and that you feel clean, and you're ready to tackle the world. It really helps with your self-esteem, that you're able to brush your teeth.
Thinking of the next steps… If the school (HSU) knows that a student is homeless maybe the university could offer some vouchers to park around here, because it is kind of expensive to park here. They have lockers here for $5 a semester, that’s a pretty good deal, but when you’re talking about $5 dollars for a locker for a semester that includes a place to shower, but then your parking is $3.50 a day, that’s kinda weird. Also, I did not know about the lockers and showers until the end of my first semester. Finally, when I was looking at HSU’s website in deciding on where to attend grad school, never once did I ever detect that they have students that are homeless, and as you know there is quite a handful of them. I think this university can be a leader in creating change, being a frontier and a vanguard and trying to put more advocacy and services for homeless students, after all they are the ones paying for tuition and salaries. Every university has a problem, but here it’s a little different. When I arrived and began looking for housing with a friend, we kept on going to places to find housing, and we just couldn't find a place. I don't know if it was because… Well it might be because he's black and I'm brown, but every place we went to, we kept getting beaten by other students whose parents had checkbooks and more money and could co-sign. The choices are very, very limited, and sometimes just non-existent when you're competing with a lot of other students as well. We need to make incoming students more aware of the situation here, to be really aware about how they can prepare to coming to this place a lot better. Students need to be informed that this place is going to be hard to find housing and we may need to look as soon as we receive our acceptance letters.
This is the Widow White Creek RV park where I stayed for quite some time and basically that was home. I was being charged $20 per night to camp out (in my car) and while they weren’t the best, they did have showers. I found this campsite through a book I have about camping sites in California, and I have carried this book throughout a great part of my life in California because you just never know when you might need a place to crash...and luckily it came in handy during this moment of my life last semester when I first began HSU.
It was cold out there, like 30 to 40 degrees outside. Sometimes I worried about pneumonia and it was a pretty lonely campground. I also heard stories of KKK presence in McKinleyville so I would sleep with pepper spray right next to me with the doors locked with the keys in hand. There was a level of anxiety and hypervigilance I experienced while staying at that campground.
The Martin Luther King Quote (captioning this photo) kind of coincides with a lot of the Indigenous teachings from where my family is originally from. My Grandma is Nahuatl and there’s a big emphasis on where you always have to keep on moving...everything is always moving and changing and transforming. Once you stop moving, then you stop existing. So those kind of things built up a lot of resilience and they really came in hand when I was staying at this place and other places around town as well.
In these moments, you are really forced to be creative. So you try to be creative with the resources you have. And you try to extend those resources as far as you can and try to stay positive even though everything around you is chaotic and the air is full of disparity. I think keeping this sense of hope alive is essential. When I stayed at the Hostel in Arcata, it was mostly students, and to be honest, most of them were people of color. I was beginning to realize there is a history I am carrying on the back of my shoulders. It can be traced back to colonization where a lot of my ancestors had it pretty bad. There are sacrifices my family made, really profound sacrifices they made to come here, who labored with a lot of suffering just to get food on the table and for us to be educated. So I didn’t want to take those sacrifices for granted by giving up or having that sense of failure stamped on my forehead.
Thinking to the future, our university and others need to do whatever they can to provide resources, even if it is a campground. We need safe places where students can stay. Maybe the school could offer tents for these students. Or perhaps we have vouchers for tents, vouchers for hostels or maybe have a contract with the hostel here. Instead of $50 per day, maybe $30 if you have a school ID...whatever the case, we need to work together as a community.