Catch a new film about the brutality of sweeps and attacks on the unhoused

“The only people who see me are people who hope I disappear…”

“He was just trying to sleep.” Shawn O’Malley, one of the houseless leaders from the Vallejo Homeless Union spoke to POOR Magazine’s RoofLessRadio after the tragic death at a sweep of James Edward Oakley. 

James is just one of the ancestors of the violent war on the poor I wrote about in the new movie Crushing Wheelchairs.

“At 65 years old they evicted me from my home, my community, where I provided a home and cooked for hundreds of houseless neighbors, where I, who was houseless myself for many years, finally had a safe place to be…. To face eviction as an elder resulted in me wanting to take my own life.”

“This was Reggies story who I ‘play’ in the movie, this is my story…” said Auntie Frances Moore. “We aren’t Acting, we are living.” 

Crushing Wheelchairs has held a series of benefit screenings of the trailer at outdoor sites of violent sweeps and gentrification like East 12th St in East Oakland, the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, and the Self-Help Hunger Program in North Oakland, locations where many houseless Black elders and families used to be housed before they were houseless.

I wrote Crushing Wheelchairs as a play that was staged in 2023 and presented around the Bay to acclaim and standing-room-only crowds, dedicated  to my houseless mama and me who survived many devastating sweeps of our belongings, and the communities and hundreds of other houseless Black, Brown, indigenous, poor white and disabled ancestors who have lost their lives to the violence of anti-poor-people hate and sweeps.

After the Grants Pass v. Johnson ruling in 2024, which deemed our houseless bodies as no longer deserving of protection under the 8th Amendment of the Constitution, I knew this powerful medicine had to be turned into a movie that could travel as far and wide as possible. So with encouragement from a teacher/mentor, Darrah Cloud, at a residency at Goddard College, I wrote my first screenplay, an adaptation of the play.

As soon as I finished the screenplay, all of us houseless povertyskolaz at POOR Magazine launched a collaboration with Green Diamond Films, a grassroots film production company, led by a son of African-Portuguese povertyskolaz Adrian Diamond, and began shooting the movie. Filmed entirely on the streets of Deep East and North Oakland, the Tenderloin and Mission Districts of San Francisco, we began production on this no-budget film that took a series of three insane weekends of non-stop dedicated work by all of us.

“Noooooooo, don’t take my wheelchair,” Reggie (played by Aunti Frances Moore) wails up into the sky facing the jaws of the looming bulldozer as it crashes down on her only mode of mobility and the tent she was sleeping in.

Reggie’s character is based on a compilation of three ancestors of eviction, gentrification and homelessness—Iris Canada, who was evicted at 100 years old from her life-long home in the Fillmore district of San Francisco, Papa Bear, a Black war veteran and panhandler who died on the streets of the Tenderloin after receiving 280 tickets for the sole act of sleeping outside, and Kenneth X, a janitor who was illegally evicted from his North Oakland home of 11 years and made houseless—as well as Aunti Frances herself.

We also deal with themes of domestic violence, gentrification of our towns and barrios, racism, trauma, job loss, mental illness, institutionalization, criminalization, police Terror, ableism and classism, all aspects of this capitalist system that lead to our ending up on the street. And dying on the street.
The title of the movie alone tells a huge aspect of the multiple acts of state terror called sweeps, casually and commonly used against disabled, houseless people when we live on the street or in our vehicles without a physical address. Nothing, and no-one, is spared, and we have no recourse to stop the State or retrieve our precious belongings, cars or RV’s… or in many cases, our bodies. 

“James had already moved from three other locations and had nowhere else to go when they ran over him with a backhoe,” Shawn continued describing the violent death on Christmas eve of 2024 of James Edward Oakley.

Hundreds of disabled elders who make up the majority of houseless people  lose their lives to the violence of homelessness, from being run over by bulldozers like James Edward Oakley, Cornelius Taylor and Shannon Marie Bigley, whose stories run through this movie, as well as young people profiled and murdered for survival crimes like Banko Brown, who was killed outside a Walgreens store in San Francisco, and Steven Taylor, killed in a Walmart in San Leandro.

In addition, disabled elders like Anjileen “Green Eyes” Swan from Los Angeles who are already medically fragile and then get “swept” and lose their medicine and meager shelters, often die from the physical and mental trauma. Elders like JT who died after losing everything in the East 12th St Sweep in Oakland a few months back. And then straight up anti-poor people hate, like another ancestors we honor, Luis Temaj, burned alive for sleeping outside in San Francisco’s Mission District.

Stephanie Grant, a single parent of five children was houseless and pregnant in 2016 when she witnessed the murder by police of her friend and fellow houseless neighbor, Luis Demetrio Gongora Pat.

“Luis was my friend, he helped me all the time because I was pregnant when I was homeless,” Grant said. “Luis was a very sweet man, he did nothing wrong, his only crime was being homeless.” Luis is one of the many ancestors of homelessness we tell the story of and honor in Crushing Wheelchairs.

From our baby pictures to our ancestors’ ashes, from our wheelchairs and walkers to our insulin, nothing is sacred when you are outside. Our bodies and belongings struggle with what I call the violence of exposure. We are not protected, like housed people, by the privilege of privacy. 

In the state of California, the governor has claimed that our bodies are equivalent to trash and is proposing yet another anti-houseless people bill.  In the city and county of so-called San Francisco (Yelamu), the mayor has deemed our presence a blight, and passed a ban of all houseless peoples living in their RVs, and in so-called Los Angeles (Tovaangar and Tatavian lands)  where, on average, six unhoused people die everyday, our outside communities (encampments) are being destroyed, evicted, and disappeared.

In Huchiun (Oakland), like all of these cities, there are multiple anti-poor laws on the books that make living without a home a crime, but then on top of all of those, in September City Council member Ken Houston proposed yet another law called the Encampment Abatement Policy, which, among other things deems houseless peoples bodies criminal just for being outside in so-called Oakland and if passed would lead to the death of more of us houseless residents. After a mass show of support from housed allies, his measure was tabled. For now. 

This movie lifts up the stories of what we were before we were transformed into an objectified, criminalized “thing” aka the homeless people… and were, just like many of you reading this story, housed and in struggle to stay housed. We are no different. We just can’t hide our trauma behind a roof and a door.

This movie also highlights solutions. Because we have them. Community Reparations, radical redistribution by housed people working in tandem with houseless people, Homefulness and Wood Street Commons. Solutions created by us for us that work because they are based on our own lived experience. Our Poverty Scholarship, as we call it at POOR Magazine

“Myself and my daughters were houseless for over a year and it was really bad for our mental and physical health, so along with an organization called Reclaiming Our Homes we took abandoned homes because we learned that we can’t rely on the legal system, it has never worked for us, it was never meant to,” said Martha Escudero at the Benefit Trailer Screening at All Power Books in Tovaangar (LA). 

This movie is also art and and spirit and includes poetry from powerful poets like Luis Rodriguez, Ayodele Nzinga, Tongo Eisen-martin, Devorah Major and me, PovertySkola, and Dee Allen, Muteado Silencio and Frances Moore, to name a few. It also includes prayer from 1st Nations and indigenous prayer-bringers and land stewards Corrina Gould, Lyn Eagle Feather, Tony Gonzalez and Jose Cuellar and Street Preachers Harry Louis Williams and Brother Mink. 

This movie is an emergency. This movie is medicine. For all of us, houseless and housed residents of occupied Turtle Island, because sweeping humans to nowhere is not an “answer” to homelessness, it’s a death sentence.   

Our Bay Area premieres of the movie are coming up. Please join us November 9th at 12:30pm at the Roxie and December 6th at 6pm at the New Parkway in Oakland, with an LA date at Vidiots coming soon.. Tickets are sliding scale starting at free for houseless povertyskolaz  and will be available at the Roxie or by emailing us poormag@gmail.com – or going to www.poormagazine.org -We got NO Hollywood love on this movie, so please help us spread this urgent medicine far and wide and contact us for a screening in your town or community.