Serfs Up in Dogstown

Rocio Anica

The Occupy Venice Beach movement began in front of the post office and Chamber of Commerce when two poets posted tents right across the street, next to the Venice Torso in the middle of Windward Circle, two blocks from the boardwalk.

Every day, taunting passing SUVs heading to yoga class and raw food restaurants, Lucy and Deb raised their posterboard signs from the dollar store and cardboard from the dumpster of the post office. “WE ARE THE 99 PERCENT” and “Main Street > Wall Street” and “Ur Capitalism is Feudalism. We Are NOT Ur Serfs.” To keep themselves entertained and skill-sharpened, Lucy used a portable type-writer to craft stream-of-consciousness political poetry while Deb played the bongos while hum-singing political parodies of popular songs by people who were now definitely the one percent. 

It warmed the hearts of locals to see two of their own. They had often seen Lucy and Deb out on the water on their longboards, attending their religion of saltwater and sun.

Conversely, Lucy and Deb served as points of mockery for those who had disdain for the impressive displays of unity against authority in the financial district of New York and downtown Los Angeles. 

Lucy and Deb were so inconsequential to people like that, that when the mayor of Los Angeles had absorbed extra-military consultations to affect a devastation against his city’s encampment, Venice Beach’s encampment was left alone.

Soon, though, Lucy and Deb were joined by people who had wandered over from the boardwalk, people who had slept against shopping carts under tarps for years and who had no interest in holding up signs with the two protestors. The Windward Circle crowd grew and grew. 

One day, police cars crept up to the curb, nearest where most of the inhabitants had set up their tents.

“Who is in charge here?” one of the officers asked. In truth, he wasn’t looking for the right answer. He had been sent to sow discontent by one of the members of the Chamber of Commerce. 

“Are you the leader?” he started asking people milling around the Torso, people sitting cross-legged in front of their tents nearby, people watching from the sidewalk.

“One of your leaders called us, you know,” he said, loudly. “One of your organizers sent us here to clear you homeless because it hurts their cause. They wanted us to take away you protest posers not holding posters.” 

The police then rounded up everyone including Lucy and Deb, who refused to identify themselves in the spirit of the movement. Everyone was arrested that night.

“Then I said, ‘the protest posers not holding posters,’” the policeman would say at the police station’s coffee machine counter the next day. “Protest. Posers. Posters. I could be a poet. I really could.”

Rocio Anica is a Chicana who was at the Occupy Wall Street protests on the West Coast. She continues her protest art. The bombs continue falling. You are breaking her heart.