We Live in Public: Encampments as Resistance and Revolutionary Care in Los Angeles

Carla Belinda Orendorff, Anthony Orendorff, Lupita Limón Corrales, Paisley Mares, Gelly Harrell

As rent rises, evictions increase, and houselessness grows, the homeless encampment becomes both a symptom of organized abandonment and a site of insurgent knowledge and practice. We Live in Public was written by residents and organizers of one such encampment, Aetna Street. Their experiences offer strategies for solidarity and survival in the face of escalating state violence. Many people’s worst fear is to be homeless, equating it with social death.Throughout this book, Aetna residents and organizers share insights and analysis and offer maps and wisdom that is grounded in reality but also rooted in vision for poor peoples movements here in the United States. Our histories and experiments with living and organizing in public provide critical lessons in modes of collective living and must be at the center of public history and knowledge. In a time of monsters, we refuse the criminalization of homelessness and the longer arc of the unrelenting settlement of the US. Our words are an invitation to revolutionary care in the time of class war.