Frank Lara, a Mission District Latino activist and a bilingual teacher, is running for Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi’s congressional seat. Lara was born in Calexico, MexiCali and has lived in the Mission for five years. Lara shared his political views with El Tecolote:
How would you describe yourself on a personal level?
Its hard not to relate the personal to the political, that’s why we’re involved in this. Being a public school teacher who is also involved in union work, you get to see at the basic service level of society—how little we prioritize education. Being a teacher, you feel the repercussions of students who don’t have access to the basic resources that they should, you know— housing, healthcare, jobs. So as a teacher, you end up having to do patchwork to make up for something that should be a social service, that should be a foundation for them to really participate in education the way they should. As an activist, it is frustrating to see.
How do we handle the crisis of gentrification?
It’s interesting, because so much work has been done and it’s really important work. It also shows how important the connection is between the social movements out in the street and political representatives that can pull that energy from the street and into politics of the legal work in City Hall. Both are really required to make any change.
When we deal with the issue of gentrification, we try and deal with it from the standpoint that when the banks were bailed out in 2008, that really what that was, was a handing over of wealth from working people (…) to the rich.
With that, we found that they couldn’t find ways to invest it. So they let the economy fail—while wages went down, foreclosure rates went up. This led to the capital increasing in the coffers of these banks.
You need to be fighting this out in the street. The way yesterday’s Google Bus protests highlighted the issue of how MUNI and Google will give money to make public transportation free for youth. Well, if we taxed you [Google] you’d actually not only give free MUNI for youth, but also upgrade our systems. That type of approach is needed so that we deal with it on a local level. And as the activist’s have said… they find a lot of impediments to implement any action against (the) Ellis act because suddenly there’s no support (at the) state level.
You need to push the social movements and build a political movement that demands the money that was given to the banks be given to the people and their social services.
It’s really disgusting that we have 11 million abandoned homes in the country, and 8 million people are homeless. It’s irrational to have that situation.
Google’s moving in at 16th and Mission streets. We have a major banking institute here—Wells Fargo. We have downtown districts which have money but it’s always untouchable.
They talk about the health of the economy but what about the health of the people? We’ve had thousands of San Franciscans kicked out, long-term residents who can never come back. It’s impossible for them to come back because their rents have tripled. What about the health of that community? What about the teachers that can’t come back?
It’s been in a hole of debt for years now, and every time they talk about its funding, always has to do with these piecemeal projects of charging riders or raising parking meters or raising costs. But they never talk about these districts that benefit so much from all the workers in the Bay Area, that these businesses and corporations depend on. They depend on public transit to maintain their labor force and yet are not asked to maintain that system.
Many Americans would be uncomfortable with some of your standpoints, like ‘free healthcare for all,” a $20 minimum wage, amnesty and citizenship for immigrants. Why do you think that is?
I think the political program we’re offering in the congress campaign is a unified program taken all together. We live in a society that’s extremely divided because of the messages presented by politicians. The strategies that allow us pretty much to be conquered are that this group is taking from your group; that the immigrants here are taking from you, taking from your jobs, It’s insecurity.
(In the United States) the vast majority of people who come from Latin America and who come from in particular Mexico, a country that has suffered so much through NAFTA, an economic agreement that allowed business interests to cross borders and exploit and rob an entire country. We didn’t see that mass migration until then. And yet when you talk about immigrant rights, you are supposed to talk about people who just come here because there’s some “American Dream.” Well that American Dream was built upon the suffering of a lot people. All that money that came from capital crossing borders didn’t go into our schools, it didn’t go into our social services, it didn’t go into providing health care…it went into these big corporations that used it and profited to become other industries of war, industries of finance.
When we talk about these things it may seem like people are not in agreement, but if you explain to people, ‘look, who tells us that we shouldn’t have health care, who tells us that we shouldn’t have a job with a dignified pay, who tells us that the immigrants are the enemy, who tells us that you and I are the enemy?’ It always points to the same group of people.