We Shall Not Be Moved: Posters and the Fight Against Displacement in L.A.’s Figueroa Corridor

Tomas Benitez, Gilda Haas and Carol Wells (Ed.)
PM Press (2009)
Reviewed by Ernesto Aguilar

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.