FOR DEANNA

Ruth Wilson Gilmore

You HAVE DISLODGED A BOULDER: MOTHERS AND PRISONERS IN THE POST KEYNESIAN CALIFORNIA LANDSCAPE

The unprecedented expansion of US prisons during the final quarter of the twentieth century has produced many contradictions. Prisoners' families, stifled by sclerotic legal channels, are organizing to demand political remedies to the growing use of prisons as catch-all solutions for social problems. One such group, Mothers Reclaiming Our Children, developed in the midst of crisis-riven 1990s Los Angeles. The group has negotiated maternal, race, and class ideologies and practices — effectively tearing down the veil between reproductive and productive labor — in order to elaborate and pursue its political work. The project has not been easy: crisis is internally as well as externally central to the group's formation. In charting the group's development, the article examines, historically and ethnographically, the ways in which organizing is constrained by recognition. It concludes that non-reified recognition is produced when critical renovations of subjectivity, via collective assessments of structures, methods, and purpose, emerge as action in the discursive-material interstices of structure and agency.

INTRODUCTION Now that you have touched the women, you have struck a rock, you have dislodged a boulder, and you will be crushed.

— Women's Political Chant, Anti Pass-Law Move- ment, South Africa 1956 (A. Davis 1989: ix-x)

Mothers Reclaiming our Children (Mothers ROC) is a Los Angeles based multi-racial group that began to organize in November of 1992 in response to a growing crisis: the intensity with which the state was locking their children, of all ages, into the criminal justice system.1 At the outset, the ROC consisted of only a few mothers and others, women and men, led by founder and president Barbara Meredith and life-long activist Francie Arbol. The initial project was to mobilize in defense of Meredith's son, an ex- gangster, who had been instrumental in the historic Los Angeles gang truce. The ROC lost his case but gained the makings of a movement. By the spring of 1993, when the LA Four went to trial, Mothers ROC had developed a network throughout greater Los Angeles and achieved recogni- tion as an organization devoted to action rather than to commentary.2

The Mothers ROC mission is "to be seen, heard,

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a scholar-activist who divides her time between New York and California. She is a 1997 recipient of the Chancellor's Postdoc- toral Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley and Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley.

and felt in the interest of justice." To achieve this goal, Mothers ROC convenes its activism on the dispersed stages of the criminal justice system. The group extends an unconditional invitation to all mothers struggling on behalf of their children, and it reaches its audience in various ways. The primary method is leafleting public spaces around jails, prisons, police stations, and courthouses to announce the group's existence and purpose. When distributing flyers and business cards, members try to engage people in con- versations to explain further what Mothers ROC (whose members are known as ROCers) is and does. ROCers give talks and workshops at elementary and secondary schools, colleges and universities, churches, clubs, and (with decreasing frequency) carceral institutions. They also appear on regional and local radio and television programs. Using these means, Mothers ROC has established a presence at many locations throughout the political geography of the penal system.

ROCers have attracted hundreds of mothers who want to fight on behalf of their own children in the system. Many were already performing in solitude the arduous labor of being on the outside for someone — trying adequately to switch among the many and some- times conflicting roles required of caregivers, waged workers, and justice advocates. Some attend one meeting and never return, and others persist whether their person's case loses or wins. Often newcomers bring someone to the meeting for moral support — marriage or other partner, relative, child, friend from church or neighborhood, and that person also becomes active. Usually twenty-five women and men participate in each weekly gathering. Most of them learned about

12 Transforming Anthropology, Volume 8, Numbers 1&2

1999, Gilmore pp. 12-38

the ROC from one of the outreach practices noted a- bove or from an acquaintance who had direct contact with a member. The rest, however, were guided to the organization by their persons in custody. Among the tens of thousands awaiting trial or doing time in the juvenile detention camps and centers and in the county jails throughout the Southland, knowledge of Mothers ROC circulates by word-of-mouth, and a standard part of the message is that the women are willing to help with even apparently hopeless cases.

The ROC's principle is printed on every flyer: "We say there's no justice. What are we going to do about it? ... EDUCATE, ORGANIZE, EMPOWER." Mothers ROC makes no judgment about the innocence of charged persons whose families turn to the group. The group does not provide services to mothers but rather helps them learn how each part of the system works and, as we shall see, to grasp the ways in which crisis can be viewed as an opportunity rather than a con- straint. In the process, which can be thought of as cooperative self-help, the mothers transform their reproductive labor as primary caregivers into activism; the activism expands into the greater project to reclaim all children, regardless of race, age, residence, or alleged crime. Experienced ROCers team up with newcomers to call on investigators and attorneys. They research similar cases and become familiar with the policies and personalities of prosecutors and judges. In addition, ROCers attend each others' hearings or trials. They also observe courtroom practices in general, and monitor individual officers of the court or state's witnesses believed to promote injustice.3 The group's periodic demonstrations outside courthouses and police stations bring public attention to unfair practices. Finally, ROCers sponsor monthly legal workshops with activist attorneys and request research reports from scholar-activist members to help mothers become familiar with the bewildering details of the system in action.

Never an exclusively black organization, Mothers ROC presumed, at first, that it would appeal most strongly to African American women because the state seemed to concentrate its energies on taking their children. However, the sweeping character of the State's new laws, coupled with the organization's spatially extensive informational campaigns, brought Chicanas, other Latinas, and white women to Mothers ROC for help. Today, the group consists of black, brown, Asian American, and white women along with some men. Most participants currently have persons in custody. People come to meetings from all over Los Angeles County, western San Bernardino and Riverside

Counties, and northern Orange County. Their loved ones are in detention throughout California.

Mothers ROC self-consciously identifies with other Third-World activist mothers, the name deliberately invoking South African, Palestinian, and Central and South American women's struggles. As we shall see, the organization is neither spontaneous and naive, nor vanguard and dogmatic, but rather, to use Antonio Gramsci's formulation of a philosophy of praxis, "renovates and makes critical already-existing activi- ties" of both action and analysis to build a movement (Gramsci 1971:330-331).

FROM MILITARY KEYNESIANISM TO POST- KEYNESIAN MILITARISM The stories I will tell about Mothers ROC are evidence of how people organize against their abandonment and disposal within oppositional spaces delimited by gender, race, class, and violence. The crisis that Mothers ROC encounters is not unique to the group or the communities they represent. Rather, the crisis emerges from the objective conditions produced by changes in the forces, relations, and geography of capital accumulation in California. These changes, in turn, have produced surpluses of land, labor, finance capital, and state capacity.4 Since the early 1980s, power blocs have resolved great portions of these surpluses into the state's enormous, costly, and profit- able prison system. In expanding and coordinating across scales, its capacities to monitor, coerce, and punish, the state itself is in process of restructuring its own scale, form, and purpose. I call this restructuring the transition from military Keynesianism to post- Keynesian militarism.

During the "golden age" of US capitalism (1944-1974), the rapidly growing economy both generated and was partly dependent on the now legend- ary military/industrial complex that Dwight D. Eisen- hower spoke of with alarm during his final presidential address (Cook 1962, Glyn et al. 1990). In turn, the motley array of welfare-state bureaus that had devel- oped in the interstices of national sectoral, racial, and class conflict during the Great Depression provided the model for the Pentagon's post-War evolution into a major fiscally and politically insulated institution of the central state (Hooks 1991). New Deal agencies also achieved uneven measures of postwar success as the modes through which the state deployed programs to guarantee some measure of aggregate consumer de- mand (Gordon 1994). At the same time, more collec- tive forms of social investment — the highways, roads, and schools that constituted the major share of publicly-

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owned infrastructure from 1947-1993 (Gramlich 1994) — provided foundations for capital accumulation as well as for the social and spatial mobility of certain segments of the population. The intertwined sum of these parts constitutes the basic armature for military Keynesianism — or what O'Connor calls the "welfare- warfare state" (O'Connor 1973, see also M. Davis 1985, Mann 1988).

Although the welfare state is being dismantled, its "organized abandonment" (Harvey 1982:362), while signaling fundamental changes in power relations and policies, hardly means that "the state" itself is about to disappear. The state still systematizes relations be- tween capital and labor (Ahmad 1996). However, new and reorganizing power blocs that have led the assault on income guarantees and other provisions against individualized calamity have also invoked the default- legitimacy of government — defense — to promote both continued federal military might (against "interna- tional terrorists") and increased domestic policing might (against "urban terrorists").5

The project to incapacitate — or cage — the domestic security threat has resulted in California's fifteen year, five hundred percent increase in prisoners. Crime peaked in 1980, before the prison expansion movement began. Since 1988, the State legislature has passed more than twelve hundred new pieces of crimi- nal legislation (Greenwood 1994, LAO 1996). Notable among the types of laws are two tendencies: one, introduced with the Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention (STEP) Act of 1988, targets youths who may or may not be members of gangs (see also Califor- nia State Task Force 1986). The law requires local jurisdictions throughout the State to identify, by name, all suspected gangsters. The second, exemplified by the Three Strikes Law of 1994 extends the already well- established power for prosecutors and judges to punish defendants' past behavior and present offenses. Both kinds of laws "enhance" — or lengthen — sentences for crimes already on the books, and like many relatively new federal and state laws around the United States, both kinds of laws carry mandatory minimum sentences for certain kinds of offenses.6

In my view, a summary description of the state criminal system is this: it has become increasingly Fordist — indeed, in my view, the "punishment indus- try" (see also Austin 1990, Christie 1993, Davis 1995) is better understood as industrialized punishment when approached from a perspective that evaluates how the state accumulates and organizes the raw materials of offenses and transforms them into durable prisoners in durable cages. For California, as for much of the

United States, the purpose of prison has become inca- pacitation — which means, quite simply, to hold convicts for the term of their sentences in such a manner that they cannot commit other crimes (Butler 1995, Morris and Rothman 1995, Rosser 1983, Silver 1983). This stark time-space punishment disavows the penal system's earlier responsibility for, or concern with, rehabilitation (Cummins 1994) — or the latter's negative avatar, recidivism. Under statewide pressures to achieve efficiencies and economies in the context of expected growth, the California criminal justice system has internalized and specialized functions and services that, in scale and scope, follow organizational structures of what Chandler terms "the modern industrial enter- prise" (1990; see also, Ashley and Ramey 1996; Cali- fornia Department of Finance 1996; Legislative Ana- lyst's Office 1986, 1996).7

GENDER, POWER, RACE, AND SPACE Huge and powerful structural adjustments are not simply determinate of all social processes and out- comes. The rapid expansion of prisons also derives from the political, social, and ideological operations of the US racial state (Omi and Winant 1986). Racism alone does not, however, adequately explain for whom, and for what, the system works. The state's attempt to produce a geographical solution (incarceration) to political economic crisis is informed by racialized contradictions that are also gendered. These contradic- tions, in all of their everyday messiness, and the at- tempts by mother-activists to resolve them are the subject of this paper.

The political and analytical importance of the paper coheres in three major themes that all have to do with breaking boundaries. The first theme centers on how African American practices of social mothering produce a group of diverse women working toward common goals.8 The second theme explores how outreach projects successfully permeate the organization of highly (if not "hyper" — see Denton 1994) segregated social space and, in some measure, start a process of spatial reorganization. The final theme concerns mobilizing the symbolic power of motherhood to challenge the legitimacy of the changing state. As we shall see, Mothers Reclaiming Our Children refuses to be bound and isolated by the normative limitations of California's gender, class, and race hierarchies. While the organization does not model Utopia, it does enact both the possibilities and the difficulties of organizing across the many boundaries that rationalize and rein- force Apartheid America (Massey and Denton 1993; see also, Fernandes 1997).

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FREE GILBERT JONES: THE EARLY POLITI- CAL GEOGRAPHY OF MOTHERS ROC Mothers suffer a special pain when their children are incarcerated (lost to them). It was from this pain and suffering that Mothers ROC was born! We are an organization of Mothers (and others) whose children have been arrested and incarcerated. We fight against the police abuse, the false arrests and convictions, and the unfair treatment throughout the Justice System. We educate ourselves and our young about the workings of the Criminal Justice System.

— 1995 Flyer, Mothers Reclaiming Our Children.

Nobody disputes that on November 29, 1991 the Los Angeles Police Department shot George Noyes to death at the Imperial Courts public housing project, outside the homes of his mother and grandmother. The still-raging controversy concerns whether he was armed, whether he was kneeling, and whether he was begging for his life. According to members of the George Noyes Justice Committee, he was executed by a notoriously brutal policewoman. According to LAPD, he was a gangster run amok. No charges have ever been filed in the case.

The killing provoked the beginning of a grassroots rearrangement of power throughout South Central Los Angeles, producing along the way both the LA Gang Truce and Mothers Reclaiming Our Children. Formerly an active gang member, George had recently moved to Sacramento to get out of the life. He died while home for the Thanksgiving holidays. For his family members and friends who began organizing, the nature of George's violent end epitomized their collective experi- ence and dread of the LAPD.9

Two of the dead man's cousins, Gilbert and Jo- celyn, and their mother Barbara initiated the inquiry into and institution of the means by which those most vulnerable to state violence could begin systematically to shield themselves from it. Family, neighbors, and visitors at Imperial Courts, including George's mother, grandmother, siblings, aunt, and cousins began to testify among themselves about what they had seen, what they had heard, and how the death could only be explained as murder. Such practice is typical wherever poor people are harrassed, hurt, or killed by police (see for examples, Hall et al 1978, Piven and Cloward 1971). The political problem centers on what to do with the energy that fears and traumas produce. Does the state's discipline work? Does it terrorize everyone into silence by dividing the "good" from the "bad," by intensifying anxieties that lead to premature deaths due to alcohol- ism and drug addictions (including cigarettes), heart

disease, suicide, crimes of passion, and other killers of the urban working and workless poor (see Greenberg and Schneider 1994).

In order to persuade as many residents as possible that the death concerned them all, the family formed the George Noyes Justice Committee. The committee started meeting at Imperial Courts in the all-purpose room to figure out ways to fight the wrongful death. To mark the moment further, Barbara, Gilbert, and Jocelyn decided to walk the neighborhood. They started with the three South-Central public housing projects and asked the gangs to declare a one-day truce, so that all of George's family and friends — who lived scattered about the area — could attend the funeral. Los Angeles has a steady history of making and remaking itself along highly segregated lines and material pressures and limits that did not originate with gangs, but which keep certain kinds of people stuck in specific deindus- trialized areas (Marchand 1986, Oliver et al 1993, Soja 1989).

The dangers of the pilgrimage were many: Gilbert was a well-known gang-member who could not pass the streets freely. His sister, Jocelyn, and mother, Barbara, could not identify themselves as George's or Gilbert's relatives without simultaneously revealing their familial connections to, and therefore exposing themselves as, potential enemies. And finally, since neither Jocelyn nor Barbara lived in the public housing projects, residents might easily view them as outsiders making trouble in locations intensely surveilled through a number of means including helicopters, on-site security, caseworkers from income assistance programs, and periodic LAPD raids (M. Davis 1990).

To reassure residents that she was not an "outside agitator" but rather a grieving aunt, fearful mother, and good sister, Barbara started holding meetings for women, especially mothers, at Imperial Courts. She explains:

I believed we had to start taking care of our children. The police would not think they could get away with shooting our children down in cold blood if we took better care of them. So I started [what eventually became] Mothers ROC at Imperial Courts. We would meet once or twice a week. We talked about grooming, about how to brush and braid your daughter's hair. How your children should look when they leave your house. How they should talk to the police, to strangers, to each other. It seemed to me it was up to us to change things by doing what we already knew how to do. Our mothers had taught us everything. And our grandmothers, and our aunts, and the ladies next door. They all taught us so we could have a better life. So we have to teach our

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children for them to have a better life. I think we let them down because we stopped teaching them and talking to them.... My [late] husband and I both worked all day, every day, so our kids could have the things we never had. We thought it was the right thing to do, to work hard and to make our children's lives easier than our lives. But we didn't make their lives easier, we made them harder. And now we have to teach them, and let them teach us where we went wrong.

Bom on the eve of World War II, Barbara grew up in Louisiana enmeshed by formal and informal commu- nity networks of family and friends (see for example, hooks 1990: chs. 5-6). She married a career military man, lived on bases around the US including Alaska, and eventually settled in Los Angeles where she was widowed as her four children reached adulthood. While many African Americans in Los Angeles a- chieved modest prosperity during the defense boom of World War II, their segregation from good jobs started at the War's end, and every subsequent recession has hit the community with lasting severity. When the old heavy industries (steel, tire, auto, and to some degree oil) cut workers or closed plants, and the waterfront delaborized, direct loss of those jobs, in combination with the disappearance of jobs reliant on that industrial core, left the city's black working-class men without access to alternative, high-wage, local, industries (Grant et al 1996, Oliver et al 1993, Peery 1994, Soja 1989).

Many women from the "stranded communities" (Jones 1992) who were concentrated in the projects enthusiastically welcomed Barbara's meetings. They could talk about themselves, their hopes and disappoint- ments, their interrupted life-plans. As many as sixty mothers and daughters (and sometimes young sons, but rarely any boys more than four or five years old) might attend one of the sessions, and they eagerly put them- selves to the tasks of doing each other's hair and staging fashion shows while talking about their loved ones who had died violently, who were in prison, or who had simply disappeared. According to Barbara, most of the women were engaged in the informal economy, selling legal goods or providing lawful services for unreported income (see for example, Hartmann 1981, 1996). At the same time, concern about joblessness — their own, their children's fathers', their children's, and especially their sons' — dominated the discussions that did not focus on grooming, nutrition, or violently premature deaths. The women reported from experience what scholars prove again and again: in the United States, certain types of people have access to certain types of jobs. For black people looking out from the jail-like complex of the Courts, the landscape of legitimate work

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is an expanse of big, empty factories, minimum wage service jobs in retail or home health care, unreliable, slow, and expensive public transportation, and bad schools leading, in terms of education and skills, nowhere (see also Sklar 1995).

Before Barbara had become deeply involved with the women, but after she had held an organizational meeting to propose her strategy for action, she, Jocelyn, and Gilbert achieved the one-day truce for George's funeral. As they walked and talked with people in the three projects and along the streets between them, they emphasized how everyone could relate to a family who had lost a loved one to police violence. Rodney King's beating in March of that year provided a ready and politically-charged referent that even extremely hostile listeners could recognize, and it transformed highly segmented groupings into a provisional "we" who might mediate the gang-controlled divisions of Los Angeles' streets. Little by little, the older male gang members began to acknowledge their collective power and what it could mean for Rodney King, for George Noyes, for many others, and for themselves should they decide to allow everyone free passage through the streets of South Central for one day.

The men also agreed to a truce in the name of grieving mothers. They extended their common sense notion of the gangs as "families" and thereby recog- nized a central familial figure's claim on their care. "Mother" became, in name, George's mother, for whom Barbara, her sister, was a stand-in. Barbara's ability to speak from her heart, to express a mother's pain at losing a child, and to acknowledge her own son's gangster status without glorification or shame touched men for whom George's death was, at least at first, of minimal importance. On behalf of Barbara, of George's mother, of "mothers," the men agreed to redirect their power and to instruct the gangs to police their streets and themselves in order for the dead man's family to gather for a big, peaceful funeral.

Thus, Barbara forged an alliance among women in the projects, in spite of her own outsider status, by appealing to a power achieved through coordinated maternal practices; they made critical the activities of mothering as necessary, social, and consequential by doing, as a group, what they already knew how to do as individuals (Collins 1990). At the same time, she, Gilbert, and Jocelyn persuaded the gangs to rearticulate South Central's divisions and to shift their everyday capacity to act as extra-legal "shadow states" by re- aligning their practices from small-scale "inter-state" rivalries to an area-wide alliance.10

Both groups — mothers and gangs — quite rapidly

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developed a process of identification focused, at the outset, on realizing a common interest — a non-violent funeral for a man many of them did not know. But while they came together in the name of children and of mothers, their goal became actionable in the context of their more general interest to struggle against the conditions that required so much organizing to precede such a homely affair as a burial. The everyday brutality that provoked Barbara and her children to bring this particular funeral to the foreground of consciousness provided material and symbolic shape for what was to follow. The interest embodied by those who attended, or who enabled, George's peaceful service gave way to a sense of purpose not bounded by a gravesite or a day. The developing identity of purpose cast the spatially unified legal state as the legitimate object of resistance and opposition against which to organize future actions.

The next stage of organizing followed shortly after George's December 9 funeral. During the services, mothers and others who spoke in his memory called for a rally to protest the police murder. At the same time the Imam of a nearby independent mosque offered his house of worship as a sanctuary where the gangsters could work to extend the truce across time and space. The gang reconciliation first embraced the rally, more than five hunded people turned out at the 108th Street Station to accuse the police of murder and to announce the end of the community's passivity, vulnerability, and complicity with respect to the brutal treatment too-often doled out by the hands of the law (Dormer 1990)."

Gilbert and a number of other gang members, inspired by the turn of events, continued the peacemak- ing process, each day bringing in more people from a wider and wider region of South Central. Word went out through all sorts of networks alerting black gang- sters everywhere to the possibilities of the historic moment. Barbara attended every meeting at the mosque and continued to hold the self-help discussion groups at the Courts, where women from other projects would sometimes show up to see what was going on. Gang members from the truce meetings would come to report their progress, and women other than Barbara would also attend meetings at the mosque to monitor the proceedings. The George Noyes Justice Committee also continued to meet with the objective of finding an opening in fortress LAPD through which they could successfully lob their charges of wrongful death.

In the middle of February 1992, just as a Justice Committee fundraising dance at the Imperial Courts all- purpose room was about to end, LAPD showed up at the door to arrest Gilbert. They charged him with taking ten dollars during an armed robbery that alleg-

edly occurred outside the building moments earlier. The problem of justice for George immediately wid- ened to include his cousin Gilbert. Barbara, convinced that the purpose of her son's arrest was to stop the work she and her children had started, began to organize on his behalf as well.

While Gilbert was in custody, fighting for his freedom, the Los Angeles Uprising (April 29-May 2) significantly shifted the prevailing political mood of the city. Three days of "multicultural riots" (M. Davis 1993) produced both new unities and new divisions. The uprising began in the afternoon after a Simi Valley jury acquitted the four LAPD men who had beaten Rodney King, who had apparently committed several misdemeanors. Millions had viewed the LAPD four in action because the beating, videotaped by eyewitness George Holiday, had been extensively and intensively broadcast for more than a year (Gilmore 1993, Gooding-Williams 1993, Madhubuti 1993). Several hours before the verdict became public knowledge, the peacemakers of the Los Angeles gang worlds had signed the truce. Indeed, the riots did not produce the truce; rather, the truce, Mothers Reclaiming Our Children, and the uprising were all expressions of the same objective conditions that characterized relations between the state and stranded black, brown, and other poor communities throughout deindustrializing Los Angeles.

Like the LAPD 4's trial, Gilbert's also changed venue. But, unlike the movement of the officers' trial to Simi Valley, where they would be more likely to have a jury of their peers (police or retired military), the state re-sited Gilbert's case from Compton — where seating a black jury is quite easy — to the Long Beach courtroom of a notoriously "anti-gang" judge. Despite the testimony of numerous witnesses who were with him at the time of the robbery, the jury found Gilbert guilty, and despite further testimony at the sentencing hearing by former Governor Jerry Brown, Congress- woman Maxine Waters, and others concerning his peacemaking achievements, the judge bound the young man over to the custody of the California Department of Corrections (CDC) to serve seven years for a ten dollar robbery.

For Barbara, the injustice in both the LAPD 4 and Gilbert's cases made clear that the object of struggle was not only the South East station house of the LAPD Southern Division. It was the state, at many levels, that took her son away, just as it was the state, at many levels, that enabled the police to take her nephew's life. The CDC assigned her son to Susanville, a prison located more than five hundred miles from Los An-

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geles, near Reno, Nevada, where the White Aryan Brotherhood reputedly dominate the prisoner popula- tion. This assignment terrorized the family on two accounts: first, they feared that his notoriety as a black gang peace activist would bring him into conflict with the Aryans. Second, Barbara had suffered a heart attack during the fall of 1992, and she was not able to make the long journey to visit him. MROC launched a successful political campaign to have Gilbert moved closer to home, and he spent about half his time in Tehachapi, about one hundred fifty miles north of home, and was released on parole after serving three years and eleven months.12

The project to "Free Gilbert Jones" also marks the beginning of the formal organization of Mothers ROC. In alliance with a number of other South Central mothers, many of whom had children in custody as a result of the uprising, Barbara started to hold regular sidewalk protests downtown at the main Los Angeles County Courthouse and at Parker Center — the LAPD headquarters. During this phase, in November 1992, Los Angeles activist Francie Arbol met Barbara through the intervention of an LA-based writer/activist who had been impressed both by Gilbert's accomplishments and by Barbara's eloquent persistence. Together, Francie and Barbara founded Mothers ROC.

FROM IMPERIAL COURTS TO THE STATE COURTS The formation of Mothers ROC as a political group seeking justice coincided with the restructuring of a disbanded communist tendency that had organized in several US cities in the 1950s. An African American revolutionary founded the small party. His conscious- ness of race and class oppression developed while he rode the rails as a teenage laborer during the Great Depression and further evolved while he served in the Pacific Theater during World War II (Peery 1994). The group was renowned in radical Los Angeles circles for grassroots, issue-oriented organizing with non-party folks.

Francie Arbol joined the party as a teenager in the 1960s. She always worked on both workplace and community-based issues arising from exploitation and injustice, while raising her two daughters — mostly alone — on a bookkeeper's wages. She brought to Mothers ROC a systematic analysis of social structures and political economy, cast in colloquial terms, and a keen sensibility for how to get things done. Unafraid to engage in spirited debate, she also carries through on any project the group decides to pursue regardless of her opinion of it.

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When Francie and Barbara sat together to plan the contours of an action-oriented group of mothers, they met in the garage office of the disbanded party's ongoing community organization, the Equal Rights Congress (ERC). The office is about a mile north of the infamous intersection where Reginald Denny and the LA Four had their fateful encounter, and seventy-five blocks northwest from the site of George Noyes' murder. The garage sits on property belonging to the Society of Friends, and the living room of the small front house became Mothers ROC's regular meeting place. The house has long been a location for activists to meet, a surprisingly pacific oasis in the midst of a neighborhood in constant flux. People who live in South Central, as well as those from outlying communi- ties, are not afraid to go there because the house is not "of any particular group's turf.

By linking Mothers ROC to the other projects of the ERC, Barbara and Francie started out with ameni- ties others struggle long to acquire: an office, a tele- phone, one of the world's oldest copiers, and a conve- nient meeting place on neutral ground. They an- nounced a regular Wednesday evening meeting beginning in November, and someone has been there to greet mothers on a weekly basis ever since, regardless of weather or holiday schedule. African American mothers came — six, then ten, then twenty, then twenty- five or more. They came to talk about the injustice of the LAPD case compared with that of the LA Four; they came to talk about their own children's cases; they came because there was someone, at last, they could talk with about what concerned and frightened them most.

Who did not come? Most of the women who so enthusiastically participated in Barbara's mothering sessions down at Imperial Courts did not make the journey north. Mothers ROC's central premise did not change. Barbara has always been consistent in her invocation of collective mothering as the practice from which activism springs. However, the outright politics of the formal organization seems to have deterred some, especially given its dedication to confronting the state head on. This aspect seemed dangerous to people who, as noted earlier, live intensively policed lives. Fran- cie's role discouraged others who will not trust white people as a matter of course. And, finally, some came and left because rumors that communists controlled the new group spread rapidly, thanks to the inadvertently strategic intervention of two black policemen.

According to the story that circulated widely through the organization and beyond, the two policemen called on the mother of an LA Four

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defendant to warn her that her son's case would go much better if she disassociated herself from "those communists" in Mothers ROC. The purpose of the visit is open to dispute: some say the police were trying to break up the group, and others say they were trying to help a struggling black woman, known personally to one of them, who did not understand the consequences of her activism.13 The news provoked a crisis in the ROC. Some women wanted Francie expelled; others, including the mother in question, quit. Barbara and Francie held special meetings one weekend at several locations in the city and county, where they fielded questions and engaged in fiery debates about communists, racism, and justice.

Francie candidly discussed her reasons for having become a communist and also described how the party had, in her experience, outlived its usefulness. She also refused to quit the ROC and made clear to those who planned to flee her influence that if she was the biggest problem in their lives, they would not have joined the ROC in the first place. The brutality of policemen, the menace of prosecutors, and the meanness of judges with respect to their children were not responses to communism. But could the specter of communism make things worse? Barbara reminded the group that its purpose did not preclude any kind of person from joining and being active — as long as they worked toward the goal of justice for the children.

The debates followed an intricate pattern, demonstrating the rich complexities of common sense in this particular time and place (Gramsci 1971, Hall 1986). The systematic critique of state power with respect to criminalized children required the mothers also to question the authority of the state's representatives — police, judges, prosecutors, and other lawyers. If communism was bracketed the mothers would agree in one voice that their problem was, indeed, state violence and systemic injustice. Yet, when confronted by the post-1989 fact of a (former) communist in their midst, many of the women absolutely embraced the state's definition of the collective enemy for whom Francie, a tiny Anglo activist, was a stand-in. Most of the women had attended elementary school during the cold-war buildup in the 1950s, and the lessons they learned — whether lining up for civil defense drills or studying the geography of "the free world" — informed their current evaluation of possibility and danger. Further, the connection of communism with atheism sits ill with women for whom, as we shall see, God and prayer are vital sources of guidance and strength.

What Barbara and Francie and their allies had to do

was help the women see and say that their own children — not the "communists" — were "the enemy" now (Gilmore 1993). Even if the policemen represented authentic African American anti-communist fears rather than the designs of the county prosecutor, the outcome would not change. The ROC's children already labored under the greatest liability — that of having been designated "human sacrifice" (Brown 1992) in the ongoing drama of a state struggling and restructuring in the context of its own delegitimation at the "end of history." Others versed in radical traditions spoke up during the agonizing debates, but the heat stayed mainly on Francie, who stalwartly took it. Francie was not the only Anglo in the group at the time, but the combination of her whiteness, her radical roots, and her refusal to yield — plus her blunt confrontational style — kept her downstage center during the crisis.

The crisis resolved into a truce among those who stayed, forcing the group to mature quickly into an organization for itself despite substantial internal differences. The process heightened suspicions but also enhanced everybody's sense of political identity. That is, while disagreeing with the "politics" figured by Francie and others, the women enacted an alternative political vision by remaining in the fight as the ROC. They made clear to all who inquired that mothers, not some hidden cadre of white or black communists, openly and deliberately set the agendas for action. Severance of the ROC from the ERC gave symbolic emphasis to the organization's insistence on autonomy, even though the meeting place, office, and telephone number did not change.

In this period, the group's actions, formerly centered on the Gilbert Jones and LA Four cases, became generalized so that the ROC could act quickly and consistently on new cases. The ROC set up the systems of court monitoring, legal workshops, and outreach activites described at the beginning of this paper. The workshops became primary centers for people to learn about topics such as self-representation, sentence enhancement, and related issues. One crucial area emerges consistently in the workshops: the assumption that a private attorney is preferable to a public defender is rooted in US common sense assumptions that "you get what you pay for." The fact that working people, including the mothers, "pay" for all the public defenders via taxation is invisible in this schema. However, in the ROC, automatic distrust of public defenders has gradually given way to a view of how sectoral growth in industrialized punishment produces both overworked public defenders and a concomitant expansion of unscrupulous private lawyers

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looking to make a sure dollar.14

The shift in membership — from the proto for- mation at Imperial Courts to the fully-fledged Mothers ROC poised to do battle in the state courts — represented a change in the social position of the women as a group. Nearly all current ROCers perform waged work in the formal economy, and if they do not, it is because they are disabled (generally by ailments of poverty and stress such as heart disease and cancer) or they are retired. Many are homeowners who live in modest stucco or frame bungalows or condominiums. They are keenly conscious that they have something to lose (Sivanandan 1982). The structure of Mothers ROC gives them a framework for hope as well as for action, and it provides the basis for an expansion of their attention from seeking remedies in the courtroom (law) to exposing and changing the ways the system operates (politics).

ONE STATE + TWO LAWS = THREE STRIKES [W]hen the woes of the poor press most dangerously upon the rich, then an age searches most energetically to pierce the future for hope.

— Peter Linebaugh (1992:65)

Every Mothers ROC meeting is framed by prayer. At the beginning and end of each session the group holds hands in a circle and asks for protection and guidance. The women who lead the prayers have a gift for preaching. Their invocations set and summarize the seemingly endless agenda of reclaiming the children within a material context of spiritual hope realized through human action. Prayer helps span the visible and invisible social distances among ROCers for whom, in most cases, organized religion is a vital aspect of life. Prayer also demonstrates the power of attentive listening for group-building. Anyone in the group may comment affirmatively on the leader's devotional trajectory, and such encouragement of the speaker encourages the collectivity. And finally, by emphasizing the difficulty and urgency of the situation that has brought them together, prayer renews and strengthens the mothers' provisional unity. Individual differences, which occasionally produce incidents, need not become persistent organizational impediments — in a church or in the ROC.

The group meditation on power and powerlessness establishes the scene in which mothers are able to identify with each other. In 1994, the FBI recorded 11,500,000 arrests by federal, state, and local law enforcement. In 1995 the number increased to 14,500,000 (Statistical Abstract of the United States

20

1994, 1995). Arrest and incarceration are common in the US, yet those who are touched by law enforcement are so segregated in many different ways that the experience of confrontation with the legal system does not produce collective oppositional activities. In the ROC and elsewhere, the similarity of mothers' stories can produce a sense of commonalty, but there are no guarantees that such a sensibility will serve as the basis for collective action. Within a social order of wide and deep inequality — most forcefully expressed as racial inequality — mothers are cautious because they know not all children are equally vulnerable to the law's harsh punishments.

When Pearl Daye's thirty-one year-old son called from the police station to say he had been arrested for allegedly shoplifting a package of razor blades from a discount drugstore, she was confused — he had a steady job — and distressed — he had not been in any kind of trouble for more than eight years. Going to the station to post bail, Pearl found it set at an absolutely unattainable $650,000 because the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office charged Harry Daye with a third-strike felony rather than a petty theft misdemeanor. Suddenly, then, the African American man who seemed to have successfully put his life in order faced a mandatory minimum sentence of twenty- five years to life without possibility of parole.

As Pearl related the compounding events of Har- ry's arrest and accusation at her first Mothers ROC meeting, she often had to pause because of the almost unendurable anxiety of retelling and revealing seemingly unbelievable adverse family circumstances to strangers. However, the roomful of women recognized the Daye's drama as neither bureaucratic error nor bad dream, but rather as an increasingly ordinary conflict between families like theirs and the law. The plot had already become so familiar, one year into implementation of California's Three Strikes Law that, at certain moments, a number of women, as though they were a chorus, recited with Pearl what the Public Defender and others had told her — especially the (street name of the) guaranteed sentence: "Twenty-five to... without."

Harry Daye faced the death of freedom because, at that time, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's written policy was to enforce the Three Strikes Law vigorously. Such vigor includes charging defendants to ensure the longest possible prison sentences, regardless of the current character of the defendant's life. Harry's alleged petty theft constituted what California law designates a "wobbler" — an offense that can be classified and punished as either a misdemeanor or a

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felony. Three strikes and other minimum mandatory- sentence laws, conventionally portrayed to work with a machine-like disregard for individual circumstance, actually explicitly allow prosecutors and judges to use discretion "in the interest of justice." However, throughout California — especially in the southern counties where most prisoners are produced — the practice of prosecutorial or judicial discretion in favor of second or third "strike" defendants is so rare as to be newsworthy (see for example, Gorman 1996).

Pearl ended her introductory testimony to Mothers ROC with an observation about the entire system: "The way I see it there are two laws, one for the Black, and one for the White." Leticia Gonzales, a Chicana whose husband had started a "twenty-five to... without" sentence some months earlier disagreed. "No. I think there is one law for the People of Color, and another law for the White." By this time, everyone was talking. Francie Arbol proposed another structure: "Poor people, and rich people." But poor versus rich failed to explain the State versus O.J. Simpson: Why was the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office spending so much time and money to convict one black defendant?15 Therefore, the distinction could not be rich versus poor. At the same time, because virtually all the prisoners anyone in the room knew or could imagine were people of modest means from working-class families, the money question could not simply be dropped. Anti-black racism seemed to explain a great deal but could not account for all of poverty, powerlessness, and vulnerability before the law.

In the year or so before Pearl Daye brought her case to the ROC, Latino (mostly Chicano and Mexi- cano) prisoners surpassed African Americans as the largest group, in absolute numbers, in CDC custody.16

The unevenness in outcome for People of Color lies in the offense with which defendants are charged. For example, in Los Angeles County, white defendants are far more likely to have charges reduced from felonies to misdemeanors or dropped completely, while People of Color are more likely to have the harshest possible charge leveled against them (Schiraldi and Godfrey 1994, see also Nasar 1994). Both federal and California laws allow radically different treatment of people who have done essentially the same thing. Such police, prosecutorial, and judicial power, which, since its introduction in the early 1980s, has remained fundamentally impervious to challenges based on "equal protection" and other constitutional principles, provides both the means and the encouragement for application of substantively different rules and punishments to various kinds of defendants (see for

example, Butler 1995). It is not surprising, then, that the ROCers had a

hard time developing a brief characterization of how the law discriminates against and among those who are most vulnerable to the system. The law's ability to wobble makes routinely unequal punishments possible. At the same time, the wobble makes developing a common-sense definition of how such inequality is achieved and reproduced on a case-by-case basis very difficult indeed. Everyone who spoke — nearly everyone in the room — had no doubt that the system operates on a dual track. But how is each defendant routed?

Leticia Gonzales could match Pearl's story horror for horror. Her husband had been tried and convicted for shoplifting a pair of pants during the Christmas shopping rush. She is convinced that either nobody took anything, or that somebody else, who looks like her husband, took the things. "Why would he take some pants? He could buy them. And at Christmas, there are guards everywhere around at the stores. He's not stupid." However, since in his deep past he had been convicted on two counts of robbery, the petty theft of a pair of inexpensive trousers became, in his case, robbery, sending him down for "twenty-five to... without."

Leticia heard about the ROC from her husband who heard in the county jail. She was afraid to come to the meeting at first, because she did not know anybody, lived down in San Pedro, and was afraid she might not be welcomed. Much to her surprise, the group, still composed predominately of African Americans, did welcome her, and as the months went by, more and more Latinas showed up at the door. Mothers of sixteen year-olds charged with murder. Wives of second and third-strike defendants. Grandmothers of kids charged under the STEP Act. Indeed, the black and brown cadres of abuelas began to hold occasional caucuses — after the manner of the grandmothers of Argentina's Plaza de Mayo — to discuss their unique problems, which often centered on their status as undocumented primary caregivers to their children's children.

The number of Latinas attending meetings increased as the Los Angeles County prosecutor extended vigorous enforcement of California's 1200 new pieces of criminal legislation to brown as well as black defendants. The night of Pearl Daye's first visit, the ROC's debate about the law's unequal application continued well into the evening and spilled out onto the sidewalk after the regular meeting came to a close. The crucial issue in resolving the question had to do with

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maintaining organizational solidarity. Finally, one of the women proposed this solution: There are, as Pearl had said, two laws — one for black people and one for white people. Given how the prosecutors had started charging more and more brown and other poor defendants under the new laws, especially Three Strikes, then perhaps the explanation could be put this way: You have to be White to be prosecuted under white law, but you do not have to be Black to be prosecuted under black law. The resolution satisfied that evening's debaters as it provided a way to recognize the extension of prosecutorial practices without displacing the African Americans' indisputable experience of the most intensive application of the laws.

Not long after discovery of the black/white law solution, a local power broker came calling on the ROC. The African American man, who had made a small fortune running secured (locked-down) drug rehabilitation units for the State, wanted the ROC's blessing to build a private (owned by him) prison in the neighborhood where the State would send selected prisoners to serve the final year of their sentences. He assured the women that the prison would be run in accordance with community wishes, since the city would not grant a provisional use license without community approval. This visit crystallized, for many ROCers, the dynamic contradiction in the system they had taken on. If the ROC is right, then the prison is unnecessary. If the prison comes in, accompanied by "jobs" then part of the ROC's critique — poverty — will seem to have been addressed by expanding the specific object of the ROC's opposition — cages.

As the unabashed profiteer explained how much good the prison would bring to South Central, the ROCers listened closely. Then, in an orderly show of political passion, each one told him why, from her perspective, the ROC would never endorse the facility. His claim that somehow the community could control the inner workings of a prison because of its location struck them as ludicrous; they had learned that distance is not simply measured in miles and that the prison would not be a neighborhood or community facility, but rather a State facility run according to State rules. His promise that perhaps their own children could be in the prison elicited, at first, an emotional moment of hope on the part of some mothers, who drive fifteen year-old cars four hundred miles round-trip on Saturdays to see their sons. But the record of failures in many of the campaigns to have children moved closer to their families indicated that the people in the proposed South Central prison probably would not likely come from the area. The ROC told him, over and over, that they

would not remedy the disappearance of jobs at GM, Firestone, and Kaiser by putting half the population into prisons so the other half could make good money minding them. They sent him on his way, somewhat bruised by their blunt words.

The visit provoked the members to ask themselves what else they should be doing to stop the prison from going up in South Central. They reasoned that the prison would go up somewhere — the power broker assured them of that — and so protesting at the local level would not solve the problem. Clearly, the ROC had to expand its activities to a scale adequate to the challenge. At the next meeting they decided to take on the brutal Three Strikes Law in order to build a State- wide coalition of people who would be likely to help fight the expansion of prisons as the State's all purpose solution to social problems involving the poor. That project, inaugurated in January 1996, built slowly over a year, eventually culminating in a "Three Strikes Awareness Month," during which time teach-ins, radio and television appearances, and leafletting outside courthouses raised consciousness of the legislation's scattershot effect. While the scale of activity has grown so have uneasinesses and antagonisms as the ROC enters a new phase of organization, in which 4,167 South Normandie may remain the symbolic, but not necessarily the political, center of the group.

SITUATING MOTHERS ROC: SOME STRATEGIC HISTORICAL COMPARISONS We think organizations have to be the first step toward a social movement.

— Myles Horton, founder, Highlander Center (Horton and Freire 1990:124)

Mothers Reclaiming Our Children is part of a rich history of oppositional struggle and may be compared with several kinds of twentieth century movements whose systems, organizations, and/or practices resonate with the Los Angeles grassroots women's understanding of social conditions and their approach to social change. As with Mothers ROC, the organizations briefly examined in this section mingle reformist and radical ideologies and strategies; in the vision and substance of their political projects, they pose challenges to the oppressive system in question and to dominant structures of antisystemic movement. I believe such complexity expresses an organic relation between these struggles and the specific context of the crises from which they emerge. Here, I differentiate specificity from a narrow conception of localism. Thus, by organic I mean situatedness. In this move I follow

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Gramsci (1971) and gloss Haraway (1991). The way conflict emerges in a social structure is not inevitable, even though it may be understood at a higher level of abstraction to be an expression of a fundamental antagonism — such as class conflict. What happens at the local level has everything to do with forces operating at other scales, and it is my interest in the current project to reconcile the micro with the macro by showing how the drama of crisis "on the ground" is neither wholly determined by, nor remotely autonomous from, the larger crisis. I do not wish to ascribe intentions or dimensions to groupings where evidence indicates otherwise; rather, I wish to draw out the ways in which practical questions of method, argument, and/or structure powerfully engage crisis on the material and ideological stages where the conditions of crises unfold.

For Mothers ROC, then, three major conditions of existence — and categories of analysis — form the heart of the group's specific response to crisis. These consist of the embeddedness of African American and other working-class mothers in a world only minimally circumscribed by home; the problem of organizing the unorganized in the US according to strategies other than singular, insular identities (e.g., occupation, race, parental status); and the potential power of "motherhood" as a political foundation from which to confront an increasingly hostile state.

Women whose paid labor is crucial to the household economy, and who are normatively measured in the dominant discourse and the gross domestic product according to their performance in the gender- segmented labor market, embody different roles with respect to production, reproduction, and politics than women who evade such material and ideological constraints (Boris 1989). Such difference in the United States is further structured by race (Fields 1990). During the Progressive Era, African American "club" women who organized around issues of gender and work could not echo, on behalf of their sisters, the rhetoric of home and dependency espoused by white women reformers (Boris 1989, Giddings 1984, L. Gordon 1994). While immigrant European working class women ordinarily had to engage in waged labor, the standards by which white feminist/gender politics — dominated by native elites — strove to produce the "True" and then the "American" woman rested on the expectation that all such women should, at the earli- est economic opportunity, become dependent, full-time homemakers (Boris 1989, Carby 1987, Fraser and Gordon 1992, Gordon 1994). The gendered economic power of anti-black racism made such an expectation

for African American women impossible, since there was no likelihood that their own paid labor would soon become redundant or that their mates could ever gain a reliable family wage (Dalla Costa and James 1972, Fortunati 1995, Wilson 1987).

African American club activists' politics focused on ways to ameliorate working-class women's daily experiences within and between home and work, with the church typically serving as a semi-public arena where such women could gather in relative safety to organize for social change ( Giddings 1984; Gilkes 1979, 1989; Long 1986; Raboteau 1978; 1995; Sterling 1984; Washington 1986). Efforts centered on life's everyday details and included lessons in such areas as grooming, literacy, and better housekeeping for wage or for family. Club women used recognizable household relations to build women's political consciousness. The self-help lessons constituted strategies through which the most vulnerable members of the workforce could make themselves stronger against everyday assaults on their integrity — assaults typified by employer rape no less than paltry wages (A. Davis 1981). Activists insisted that black women must expect to act on a stage where no sturdy legal or customary curtain shielded the private from the public realm. The legacy of slavery, the reality of Jim Crow laws, and the discipline of lynching suspended any illusion that black women might either withdraw from the labor market — and the coercive social controls determining when and where they enter it — or turn to the state for protection or relief (A. Davis 1981, Giddings 1984, Ginzburg 1988, Jones 1985, Sterling 1984, White 1985).

In this historical context, motherhood functioned through and as an attribute of the woman-as-laborer, enacted as collective or social rather than individualized practice (Collins 1990, see also Kaplan 1982, White 1985). Club women included mothering lessons among their outreach projects because they rightly viewed the collective future of the race to depend on the children's successful preparation to participate in severely re- stricted, highly unstable job markets. In other words, the club women's specific conception of the politics of motherhood required good housekeeping to include, as a matter of course, deliberately raising children to survive in racially-defined, conflict-riven lives. These lives would be shaped by a constantly "changing same" (Jones 1966) of negative contingencies — exemplified by the nation's territory-wide, multi-scalar accumula- tion of both Jim Crow laws and de facto segregation practices in the early twentieth century (DuBois 1992[1935], Harper 1892, Marks 1989, Woods 1993). Most children might learn strictly to labor in whatever

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niche constituted their generation's market enclave (Willis 1977). At the same time, however, the constant restructuring of labor markets — most notably during wartime — meant that mothers were also educating their daughters and sons in ways of thinking that might lead to more radical consciousness of what change without progress meant, given the material and ideolog- ical positioning of black people in the racial state (Himes 1945, 1971; Lipsitz 1987; Omi and Winant 1986; Woods 1993).

While it may appear that the type of organizing club women espoused falls simply and squarely into Booker T. Washington's Tuskeegee model of coopera- tive apartheid, it also opened new possibilities for women to enlarge their scope of activity through emphasizing rather than minimizing black women's visibility in the world. Although dangerous, visibility also provided black women with peculiarly exploitable access to potentially political audiences because of their regular passage through public space. For example, women were often in the vanguard protesting state and state-sanctioned terrorism — in part because men were the ordinary victims of lynching and police brutality (Carby 1987, Ware 1992). Similarly, the Montgomery Bus Boycott — popularly viewed as a founding mo- ment of the post World War II civil rights movement — gained structure and strength from a church-based organization of women who built the scaffolding from which to dismantle US de jure apartheid around the issue of public transportation for African American do- mestic and other workers (Kelley 1994, Powledge 1991). For both the immediate Montgomery audience and for viewers of newsreels shown on televisions and in movie theaters across the United States, the boycott produced an unfamiliar and compelling image of urban black women walking in groups to and from the job, their apparent cheerfulness belying the fearful condi- tions in which they confronted the most readily perceiv- able ways in which US racism divides class and gender. In these women, foes recognized unanticipated adver- saries; allies, by contrast, recognized, through the women's actions, how familiar practices of everyday life might be rearranged in order to take on previously unimaginable tasks (Morris 1984).

Organizing is always constrained by recognition: How do people come to actively identify in and act through a group such that its collective end surpasses reification of characteristics (e.g., identity politics) or protection of a fixed set of interests (e.g., corporatist politics) and, instead, extends toward an evolving, purposeful social movement (e.g., class politics) (Gramsci 1971; Hall 1986, 1990; Zoleta-Nantes 1995)?

This question has particular importance when it comes to the age-old puzzle of organizing unorganized US workers, especially when the fundamental criterion for identification is not limited by a worksite or occupa- tional category. US labor history is dominated by worksite- and occupational-movement-building, with group boundaries established by employers or by skills. These boundaries, of course, negatively organize — and even disorganize — the excluded because US worksites and occupations are historically segregated by both gender and race (Cobble 1991, 1994; Johnston 1994; Milkman 1987; Roediger 1991; Wial 1993; Woods 1993).

In a few instances US labor movements have broadened their practices by engaging in a class rather than corporatist approach. Whereas most such efforts resulted in failure — crushed by the capitalist state's coercive and ideological apparatuses — some attempts along this way produced surprising results (Dubofsky 1969, P. Foner 1970, Wial 1993). When the Commu- nist Party attempted to organize workers in the rela- tively new steel district of Birmingham, Alabama during the 1930s, it ran into a sturdy wall of racism that prevented the CPUSA from forging a movement in which Whites could recognize themselves and black people as equally exploited workers rather than as properly unequal Americans. However, the organizers who traveled the urban mills and rural mines seeking out industrial laborers discovered an unanticipated audience for their arguments among predominately black sharecroppers. The Share Croppers Union adapted the CP analysis to their own precarious condi- tions, and the group grew rapidly, forming a network of cells in urban and rural locations throughout the region. One needed neither to be a sharecropper, nor employed, nor Black to participate in the union. Upwards of six thousand millworkers and miners, in addition to dispos- sessed farmers (busy or idle), found common cause in a social movement through their understanding of their collective "equality" — which was, at that time, their individual interchangeability and disposability on northern Alabama's agricultural and industrial produc- tion platforms.17 State forces eventually crushed the movement, yet the submerged remnants of the union, according to its indigenous leadership, formed the already-existing regional foundation for intra-wartime organizing and postwar anti-racist activism (James 1980, Kelley 1990, Painter 1979).

In the current period, Justice for Janitors (JO) is an innovative labor movement in which neither worksite nor occupation has served as a sufficient organizational structure in the low-wage service industry. Learning

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from history, JfJ's strategy is to exploit the otherwise inhibiting features of the labor market by pursuing a "geographical" approach to organization (Johnston 1994, Wial 1993). In the massive layoffs of the late 1970s and early 1980s, firms broke janitorial unions that African Americans and others had painstakingly built under the aegis of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) during and after World War II (James 1980). Industry subcontracted maintenance and, thereby, negated labor's hard-won worksite-by-worksite agreements.

The ensuing proliferation of small, easily reorga- nized janitorial service contractors has made actual employers moving targets and, thus, rendered tradi- tional forms of wage bargaining impossible to carry out and enforce.18 Further, janitors working under the new arrangements, often at less than minimum wage, are not the same people who fought wages up to ten dollars or more per hour by 1980.19 Thus, in addition to pressing employers for contracts, JfJ's solution is to organize both the actual market for janitorial services and the potential labor market for janitors. This areal approach limits employers' flexibility because it is their ac- tual and potential clients who agree to do business only with unionized contractors. The solution also requires that labor organizing be community organizing as well, as was the case with the CPUSA's work in 1930s greater-Birmingham. To appeal to former janitors in target areas and to potential janitors wherever they may be, JfJ proposes a bottom-up strategy to develop comprehensive regional plans that include but are not reducible to setting minimal standards for wages that employed individuals (janitors or not) can expect to pull down (Parker and Rodgers 1995, Wial 1993, see also Faue 1990, Woods 1993).20

The divisions between home and work, private and public, on the stage of capitalist culture constitute for many the normative limits to particular kinds of con- flict. When the political dimensions of breaches in those limits become apparent in crises, new possibilities for social movements unfold. As we have seen, black working-class women politicized the material and ideological distance between their paid and unwaged labor by traversing the streets. More recently, janitors around the US have taken their clandestine exploitation public on a number of fronts, combining community- based organizing with front-line, public sphere mili- tancy led by immigrants who gained experience as oppositional subjects of, for example, Salvadoran state terrorism (Pulido 1996).

In Argentina, under the fascist military government (1977-1983) the Madres of the Plaza de Mayo defied

the expectation that women should not meddle in affairs of the state — which is to say the male, or public, sphere — by organizing on the basis of a simple and culturally indisputable claim that mothers ought to know where their children are. The fascists' nightly raids to kidnap teenage and adult children, most of whom were never seen again, effectively coerced neighbors, who had not yet been touched, to avert their eyes and keep their mouths closed. However, a cadre of mothers, who first encountered each other in the interstices of the terrorist state — waiting rooms, courtrooms, and the information desks of jails and detention centers — eventually took their quest into the Plaza de Mayo. There, with the eyes of the nation and eventually the world on them, they demanded both the return of their disappeared and the identification and punishment of those who had perpetrated the terror. The mothers dressed for recognition, wearing head scarves made of diapers on which each had written or embroidered the name(s) of her disappeared (Anderson 1993, Bouvard 1994, Femenia 1987, Fisher 1989, Mellibovsky 1997, Sepiilveda 1996).

The Madres' fundamental position, echoing and echoed by similar movements in such places as South Africa, Palestine, and El Salvador, was and is that children are not alienable (Harlow 1992, Tula 1994). In order to make this position politically material in the face of continuous terror, the Madres permanently drew back the curtain between private and public, making "maternal" activism on behalf of children a daily job conducted as openly and methodically as possible. The Madres' persistence, both before and after the official admission that the children had died horribly, trans- formed the passion of individual grief into the politics of collective opposition. Betrayed in the early years by state and church officials alike, by military, police, bureaucrats, and priests, the Madres learned to suspect institutions as well as individuals, and as their analysis became enriched by experience, they situated their disappeared in the context of political economic crisis. Thus, when a re-democratized Argentina emerged, they did not return to hearth and home but rather expanded their political horizons. Currently, their politics focus on the effects of the country's structural adjustment program, which has widened and deepened poverty and reduced opportunities for young people (Fisher 1989, Sims 1996).

As we have seen, Mothers ROC does its work in a political economic climate as hostile, and often as bloody, as that which formed each group we have briefly examined. The ROC's solutions to the problems constituting the daily struggle to reclaim their children

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draw from the structural features of radical self-help, from the strategies of organizing on every platform where conflict is enacted and from the argument that mothers should extend their techniques as mothers beyond the veil of traditional domestic spheres. In a word, they enact the "consciencization" of motherhood (Freire 1970). The solutions are grounded in, but not bounded by, local conditions. Indeed, the organicism of Mothers ROC has to do precisely with its attention to the specific sites and scales of power that produce prison geographies and to the ways those sites and scales might be exploited for oppositional ends.

CONCLUSION: FROM THE CRISIS OF PLACE TO THE POLITICS OF SPACE A small, poor, multiracial group of working-class people, mostly prisoners' mothers, mobilize in the interstices of the politically abandoned, heavily policed, declining welfare state. They come forward, in the first instance, because they will not let their children go. They stay forward, in the spaces created by intensified imprisonment of their loved ones, because they encoun- ter many mothers and others in the same locations eager to join in the reclamation project. And they push further, because from those breaches they can see, and try to occupy, positions from which to collectively challenge the individualized involuntary migration of urban "surplus population" into rural prisons (O'Con- nor 1973).

"Arrest is the political art of individualizing disor- der" (Feldman 1991:109). Such individualization produces fragmentation rather than connection again and again for the millions arrested in the US each year, as each person and household, dealing with each arrest, must figure out how to undo the detention — which appears to be nothing more than a highly rationalized confrontation between the individual and the state. The larger disorder is then reified in the typologies of wrongdoing such as gang activity; alternatively, the larger disorder is mystified as "crime," which, like unemployment, is alleged to have a "natural" if chang- ing rate in a social formation (see for examples, Green- wood 1994, Wilson and Herrnstein 1985). ROCers gradually but decisively refuse both the individualized nature of their persons' arrests and the "naturalness" of crime, of poverty, of the power of the state (see also Anderson 1995, Derber 1996, Stabile 1996). They arrive at their critique through action. Action crucially includes the difficult work of identification — which entails production, not discovery, of a "suture or posi- tioning" (Hall 1990, see also Jackson 1991). Through the socially and spatially complex processes of identifi-

26

cation that are attentive to racial, class, and gender specificities as well as commonalties, the ROCers transform themselves and the external world.

By enlivening African American practices of social mothering, the ROCers engage a broadening commu- nity in their concern for the circumstances and fate of prisoners. That social opening provides avenues for all kinds of mothers (and others) to join in the work as the enormous labor confronting each mother tends to encourage all both to accept and extend help. I make no claim for "social mothering" as an exclusively or universally African American cultural practice; it is neither. However, Barbara Meredith's common sense invocation of mothering as collective action makes possible the group's integration of mothers with similar or quite different maternalist assumptions (Kaplan 1982, see also Traugott 1995). In other words, tech- niques developed over generations on behalf of black children and families within terror-demarcated, racially- defined enclaves, provide contemporary means to choreograph interracial political solidarity among all kinds of "mothers" losing their loved ones into the prison system. These mothers and others can and do identify each other in the small "public" spaces between their socially segregated residential living places and the "unitized" carceral quarters in which their children are caged. Some members are shy about jumping into the process, and others come to the ROC for help on their individual case only; but all who persist practice the "each one teach one" approach.21

The process of integrating different kinds of mothers and others into the ROC involves extensive outreach designed to permeate the social organization of space. These projects also catch people in the "betweens" of segregated lives: at work, for example, or on the bus. Such areal permeation, similar to (and literally overlapping) the Justice for Janitors Los Angeles crusade, raises a more general problem of identification. The ROCers easily recognize each other in the spaces of the criminal justice system. Outside those areas, what constitutes resemblance? If we are not all Black, and if all activists are not mothers, and if all prisoners are not (young) children, then who are we? Poor people who work. As a community of purpose, Mothers ROC acts on the basis of a simple inversion: We are not poor because our loved ones are in prison; rather, our loved ones are in prison because we are poor. It follows that outreach should target working poor people and their youth. Class, then, constitutes the context for this analysis and action but cannot displace or subsume experiential issues of race: poor People of Color have the most persons in prison (see also Hall

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1980). Nor does gender disappear on two accounts; first,

women who work to support their families and to free their loved ones encounter each other as laborers with similar triple work-days — job, home, justice. In addition, mothers who reject the disposal of their children and ask why they themselves should not be compensated for struggling against the state raise a challenge to both their children's and their own devalu- ations from the vantage of reproductive labor (Dalla Costa and James 1972, Fortunati 1995, Quick 1992).22

The communist organizational and analytical influences in the ROC help keep these overdetermined antago- nisms in the foreground of activism. As a result, Mothers ROC is building an alliance that women and men may enter from a number of positions and where they stay because the group's primary purpose retains clarity — even as members repeatedly clash when trying to produce an adequately comprehensive account of the world in which they struggle. In the context of shared antagonism, the activists "discover" (Kaplan 1982) — which is to say, they produce — the values they share; in turn, that collective work produces community solidarity, or political integration, enabling further action. Solidarity increases with increased knowledge concerning the complexity with which the state and its allies conduct the imprisoning project. The alliance tends toward a scale of resolution at which, for example, any individual police precinct house ceases to be the total presence of the state and shrinks back toward its systemic position — the neighborhood outpost of what the ROCers characterize as a military occupation that will require a political movement to dismantle it.23 As Mothers ROC seeks a wider regional membership, it also seeks to locate itself in a wider community of activism, reaching out nationally and internationally to organizations like itself.24 Such movement heightens the potential for connections between Mothers ROC and women throughout the global workforce who struggle daily against the actual processes and effects of worldwide structural adjust- ments.23

The ineluctable salience of gender structures is the means through which Mothers ROC critically deploys the ideological power of motherhood to challenge the legitimacy of the changing state. AH prisoners are somebody's children, and children are not alienable (see Cornell 1995). The racial and gendered social division of labor requires mothers of prisoners to live lives of high visibility; ROCers turn that visibility to a politically charged presence, voice, and movement against injustice, such that their activism becomes the

Transforming Anthropology, Volume 8, Numbers 1&2 1999, Gilmore pp. 12-38

centerpiece of their reproductive — and socially productive — labor (see Fisher 1989). As with moth- ers' movements in Latin America, South Africa, and Palestine, Mothers ROC's front-line relation to the state is not as a petitioner for a share in the social wage, but rather as an antagonist against the state's form and purpose with respect to the life chances of their family members and those like them. The insistence on the rights of mothers to children and children to mothers is not a defense of "traditional" domesticity as a separate sphere, rather it represents political activation around rising awareness of the ways that the working-class "domestic" is a site saturated by the racial state.

CODA The organization of space can indeed define relation- ships between people, activities, things and concepts.

— David Harvey (1989: 216)

In volume 1 of Capital, Marx (1967) takes great pains to explain how the capitalist mode of production depends on social and spatial qualities that, in turn, are the potential grounds for undoing exploitation. Cooper- ation, in his view, is a necessary feature of production processes that are organized into detail divisions of labor; the many workers who must congregate in a factory to produce goods constitute a fundamental social unit capable of rising up and expropriating the expropriators. In other words, the constrained coopera- tion among employee workers can become political cooperation among the class "workers." A significant body of anti-colonialist, feminist, anti-racist, and communist/workerist theory expands upon Marx's insight and finds the material of political action in the folds of contradiction — at "points of production" not limited to locations where commodities are made (see for examples, Dalla Costa and James 1972; Fanon 1961; Fortunati 1995; Hardt and Negri 1994; Harvey 1982; Lemelle 1992; Negri 1988, 1989; Robinson 1981). Such work, in making revisions to Marxist orthodoxy, also provides a dynamic analytical and organizational model for the production of social justice. By organizing surplus labor into cages, the state also pulls into its spheres of operation prisoners' mothers and other caregivers who, finding each other in the interstices of the system, can cooperate against the state's catch-all solution to social problems involving the poor.

The magnitude of imprisonment suggests the magnitude of possibility. And yet the magnitude starts small, over and over again. Gilda Garcia's testimony exemplifies the socio-spatial constraints of everyday

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life for ROCers and their families:

And then she [the public defender] said "The reason the prosecutor can add the extra time is because your son was within 500 feet of a school when he was picked up." My son went to bring his little brother home from school! That's why he was at the school. La migra waits by schools to catch people without green cards, and they detain anybody who looks like us. Anybody. We sent our son because he doesn't have a job, so if they stop him we don't lose any money. We're just making it. We can't afford to miss work just because INS needs to look good to... I don't mean any offense, but... they need to look good for the white people. They don't care about us, that we have jobs. It's all a show. But in the morning, as soon as my husband and I drive away to work, the [city] police are on our street, starting stuff, making our kids mad, telling them they are going to get them. One day I went back because I forgot something, and the police were there, outside of their cars. I asked them "What is wrong? What do you want here?" And

this one cop, his name is [knowing laughter in the room] told me "We're going to get your son," and he called my son names. He told me my son was in a gang. But see, 1 know he isn't in a gang because the gang they said he was in is in another neighborhood. My son could not live with us and be in that gang. I have relatives in that gang who have an auto body shop, and sometimes my son does some work for them to make a few dollars. But he could never join that gang because of where we live. Everyone knows that.

The political geography of the state's industrialized punishment system determines the scale of everyday struggle for Mothers ROC, which in turn is determinate of their concepts of motherhood. They discover that the scale of the body, at which disorder is individual- ized, requires multiple forms of political care. Their techniques of mothering, in and as Mothers ROC, extend past the limits of household, kinship, and neighborhood, past the limits of gender and racial divisions of social space, to embrace the political project to reclaim children of all ages whose mothers are losing them, at a net of fifty-five Statewide per business day, into the prison system.

Mothers Reclaiming Our Children has evolved from a self-help group that formed in response to a crisis of place — a police murder in South Central Los Angeles — to a political organization trying to build a powerful movement across the spaces of domestic militarism. The forces that control and contain poor working people, and especially People of Color, in prisons, in segregated neighborhoods, and in low- paying jobs have particular ideological and political reaches. For the ROC successfully to oppose the

28

disposal of their children, they organize to challenge the full reach of the powers arrayed against them. This involves building alliances of and as multiracial groups that can reproduce solid centers of activism throughout and across the "nested scales" of the rising prison state (Smith 1992). The means toward that end consist of renovating and making critical ideologies of mother- hood and techniques of mothering — derived from particular African American traditions — and extending them within the context of class struggle against state- organized (or at least state-complicit) structural adjust- ments that characterize the current period.

The South African women's political chant from which Mothers ROC derives its name presents a suc- cinct image of contradiction in action: From woman, to rock, to boulder, the singers predict their resolute consolidation into a force set in motion ("You have dislodged a boulder") by the very power they must crush.

NOTES For criticism and encouragement at various stages of this project, thanks to: Barbara Balliet, Ann Blum, Sue Cobble, Mike Davis, Allen Feldman, Leela Femandes, Ann Markusen, Neil Smith, Caridad Souza, and Brac- kette Williams; The Rutgers Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture 1995-96 Seminar. Special thanks to Craig Gilmore. Gratitude, respect, and honor to Mothers Reclaiming our Children. All errors are my responsibility.

A note on method: The formal research for the project was conducted from January-December 1996. The formal research was preceded and supplemented by the author's membership in the organization since shortly after its founding in 1992. I participated as a member in normal fashion as described in the text of this article. Because everyone in the group is expected to share any special knowledge or expertise, I was called upon several times to present research reports at workshops (as have other scholar-activists over the years). I did in-depth interviews with twelve members of the group, eleven of whom have or have had persons in custody; the interviews were topic-driven and open- ended but always included questions about how the member arrived at the organization, what her/his evaluation of its activities are, and where it could or should be headed. All names in this article are pseud- onyms.

1. A note on terms: When "State" is capitalized, it refers to California; in lower case, "state" refers to the political-geographic category, which I will discuss at a

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number of scales: US federal, California, Los Angeles County, Los Angeles City, and so forth. The state is not a monolith; the conflicts, coordinations, and compro- mises within and between various scales of the state are the subject of a different segment of this project. However, I do wish to underscore here that readers who find structural analysis debilitating might (ironically) find reassurance in the indisputable fact that "agency" figures in state practices just as in grassroots move- ments. What's different, of course, are the all-impor- tant attributes of power — including legitimacy (O'Connor 1973), as well as initiative and immunity (Clark 1984). The power blocs in Sacramento that have mustered great political and ideological energies on behalf of constructing the country's biggest prison system are not "the state" — but they have effectively brought about widespread, secular changes in how "the State" deals with criminal and judicial issues, have captured the resources (five billion dollars plus debt service in fiscal year 1997), and developed the bureau- cratic and architectural structures to maintain and augment the project. By seizing and developing this area of state capacity, the bloc, whose membership is not constant, has changed the state as a whole while creating a bureaucratic class-fragment that protects and advances its own interests (see Hobsbawm [1982] on the seizure of state power). The state remains, institu- tionally, "a contradictory object and subject of struggle" (DeJanvry 1981).

2. The LA Four were the young African American men charged with the widely televised beating of white truck driver Reginald Denny on April 29,1992, the first day of the Uprising. Opposition to the LA Four trial centered on the ideological use of the case to justify acquittal of the four Los Angeles Police Department officers for the televised beating of Rodney King. Reginald Denny himself objected to the railroading of his assailants AND also to the state and media's delib- erately ignoring the dozens of black people who saved him.

3. Officers of the court include judges, prosecutors, prosecution and defense attorneys, bailiffs; untrust- worthy witnesses include police and jailhouse infor- mants who trade time for testimony.

4. The theoretical and empirical elaboration of these surpluses and their transformation into prisons make up another segment of the project from which the present work is excerpted. Important here is the con- cept of crisis nicely summarized by Stuart Hall and Bill Schwarz: "the social formation cannot reproduce on the existing basis of social relations" (Hall with Schwarz 1988:96).

5. The fundamental policy change is the shift from a "bastard Keynesian" regime (Joan Robinson's phrase, cited in Turgeon 1996) to one defined by monetarist theories of the state's proper role in cycles and growth. For monetarists, the state's economic intervention should be limited to control of the money supply via interest rates; all other state interventions keep the business cycle from hitting its "natural" lows — and highs. Importantly, income guarantees keep wages artificially high and, therefore, interfere with workers' ability to maximize utility by making rational choices about when and where to enter or exit the labor market. Because in this system of equations, high wages cause inflation, then the antidote to inflation must be unem- ployment. The rightward drift of the Phillips curve since the mid-1950s suggests a "natural" rate of unem- ployment that has climbed from about two percent to six percent (Corbridge 1995). Economist Anwar Shaikh (1996) has demonstrated the weakness of the alleged causal relation between wages and inflation; his research shows that prices for basic commodities in relation to gold did not change over nearly two centu- ries — until currency went off the gold standard (see also Shaikh 1983). However, the "elegance" (i.e., simplicity) of the monetarist view — "too many dollars chasing too few goods" — is difficult to refute in a sound bite or two.

6. Mandatory minimum sentencing is called "truth in sentencing" by its supporters — in a perversion of the prisoners' rights movement of the 1950s-70s when those condemned to open-ended sentences for a wide variety of convictions sought to have sentencing stan- dardized so that local parole boards would have less power to act capriciously in individual cases. For more on mandatory minimums from a critical perspective, see the FAMM newsletters (various dates). For a view of the federal situation with respect to drugs, see Dan Baum(1996).

7. The tendency to internalize and specialize spans the branches of government so that, in the California Department of Corrections, no less than in the State Legislature, no less than in the county courts, similar and coordinated processes are evident (Ashley and Ramey 1996; California Department of Finance 1996; Legislative Analyst's Office 1995;Orozco 1995,1996.)

8. By social mothering 1 mean the the collective practices of "bloodmothers", "othermothers," and "community othermothers" (Collins 1990:115-39) who cooperate to raise, guide, and protect the children of actual and "fictive kin" (Stack 1974 cited in Collins above) and, by extension, the children of the extended

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community. 9. Helicopters are the premier symbol of Los

Angeles' capitalized, militarized police force; choppers pulse and hover overhead day and night, coordinating motorized ground forces from a superior and flexible vantage point — mobilely panoptic, although lacking the stealth Bentham envisioned. For a fine representa- tion of the "feel" of chopper surveillance, see John Singleton's uneven "Boyz 'n the Hood." Bear in mind that LAPD invented the Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) Team specifically to police politically orga- nized black people (cf. Bean 1973, M. Davis 1990, Sonenshein 1993).

10. Wolch (1989) developed the "shadow state" concept to theorize state-sanctioned non-governmental organizations (NGOs); I use it here to emphasize how gangs constitute, as Diego Vigil (1996) and others have argued, not only superior marketing forces for illegal substances but also territorially centralized rule-making bodies for a mosaic in-filling vast regions that the legal state has abandoned except in the form of militarized occupation and social services-based surveillance (Bing 1991, M. Davis 1990, Gilmore 1993, see also Fanon 1961). The point is not to romanticize gangs but rather to emphasize that all social formations — even stranded communities in deindustrialized urban centers — develop some means for maintaining order (Mann 1988); sometimes it is necessary to look beneath the surface of apparent disorder to grasp the logic of a particular system of order. Further, as Tilly (1985) argues, war-making, state-making, and organized crime are distinct with reference to those who produce and enforce the "law" but not so different in terms of actual practices, relations, and outcomes.

11. Notably, attendees at the rally — or "coming together" as many participants termed it — included survivors from prior generation's social movements, such as the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. Thus, the "coming together" commingled community mem- bers, who were developing their political consciousness in that particular moment of powerfully focused anger and grief, with activists representing theoretical tenden- cies and traditions that were forged in earlier struggles against state and state-sanctioned violence.

12. Prisoners are "unitized" — which is CDC jargon for "segregated." While individual wardens have power over the social organization of their pris- ons, the general policy is to keep prisoners in each facility separated by "race." California Department of Corrections demographic analyses use four basic categories: White, Black, Latino, Other. "Others" —

Asian-Pacific Islanders and Native Americans — are not housed separately but are distributed among the three principal groups, such that e.g., Samoans are usually Black, Filipinos are Latino, people of Chinese, Hmong, Lao or Vietnamese descent might be White or Latino but not Black, Native Americans are usually Latino but sometimes Black (Orozco 1996). According to the testimony of some prisoners, "unitizing" helps produce and reinforce animosities, keeps internal hierarchies intact, and discourages any kind of substan- tive cross-racial organizing on behalf of, e.g., prisoners' rights (cf. Eric Cummins 1994). Certainly, letters from prisoners to organs such as Prison News Service demonstrates how ignorant many are, as members of racialized groups, of each other's sentences, prospects, and perspectives.

13. A recurring irony in Mothers ROC cases — especially African Americans' — is how frequently the (extended) family knows or is related to a police, probation, parole, or corrections officer (the frequency is related, of course, to the the historical battle by black people to procure access to state jobs, which became a relatively secure labor market niche until the attack on government size launched in the past two decades). The irony has been quite useful in helping mothers take a systemic, rather than individualized, view of their struggle. Knowing, as they do, that their friend/relative is not a bad person and probably not a racist (although anti-black racism among black people is not uncom- mon), they then have to figure out another explanation for what is happening to their children, in which they can account for people "like" themselves on the other side (see for comparison, Gue"rin 1994).

14. Many new Mothers tell the same story — they mortgage the house or sell the car in order to pay a lawyer whose contract, it turns out, is only to take the case through the most routine rounds of court filings and appearances. Further, the question of mortgaging or selling has its own racialized contradictions. Oliver and Shapiro (1995) show the ways that, for black people, residential apartheid and lender redlining effectively limit access to (as well as growth of) the fundamental source of US household wealth: home equity. In the case of the ROCers who mortgage, they leverage lower-than-average equity at higher-than- average loan costs in order to — at best — maintain the status quo (a loved one kept out of prison) rather than to "invest" in the future in the form of education or other potentially remunerable family or personal development.

15. The Simpson criminal trial had not been resolved during this discussion, but even his acquital

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and the aftermath supported the ROCers' sense that a black man's trial is completely unlike a white man's trial.

16. Between 1977 and 1982 the number of white prisoners increased fifty percent while black prisoners doubled, producing nearly equal absolute numbers between the two groups; from that time forward black prisoners exceeded all other groups until 1994 when the steady increase in Latino incarceration shifted the balance.

17. In the United States, the word "equality" seems often to connote an upward leveling. Fortunati (1995) helpfully points out that other forms of "equality" (e.g., slavery) have analytical weight that requires political and organizational attention.

18. The companies that now hire janitors can disappear overnight, thanks to no fixed capital or other constraints holding them in place. Therefore, labor lacks the leverage it had when, for example, janitors negotiated contracts directly with the former employers (owners of hotels, restaurants, office buildings, facto- ries, and so forth) who are now clients.

19. In 1980 dollars. 20. According to a presentation given by a JfJ

organizing committee in Los Angeles in March 1993, organizing has, in some, cases stretched back to immi- grant janitors' towns of origin in Mexico and El Salva- dor. Insofar as it is common for people from a particu- lar region to migrate to both the same area and labor- market niche as their friends and families who precede them, JfJ started to work backward along the migratory path in an attempt to incorporate the wider-than-daily labor market into the movement's sphere of influence. During this same presentation, when challenged by a Sandinista cadre who asked an apparently simple question ("What became of the people who used to be janitors?") JO acknowledged their organizing had not extended to the former workers. JO pledged to expand its Southern California scope of activity and reach out to former janitors in the community who are, as noted above, mostly African Americans in a project that might well revive submerged knowledges from earlier labor and anti-racist struggles.

21. A recurrent theme in discussions among many of the shyer mothers is their avowal of and explanation for their own unfitness. They refute the dominant explanations — they don't take drugs, rely on welfare, or work in the sex industry. But what lingers is a doubt whether they, as women (and men) who might have trouble reading or who have been afraid to stand up to the law, can ever be fit mothers for loved ones caught

Transforming Anthropology, Volume 8, Numbers 1&2 1999, Gilmore pp. 12-38

in a system in which book-knowledge and various types of intimidation — intellectual as well as physical — feature centrally in outcomes of cases. Many ask me to accompany them to meetings with officials because they feel stronger knowing that I know all the words — as well as the demographics, statistics, history, etc. As they teach each other what they learn, all of the ROCers gain confidence; indeed, those who cannot read well flourish by using their substantial memories to chart and compare cases (compare with Gilmore 1991 on the boys in the California Youth Authority).

22. Cf. McKinnon's (1989) stridently clear exposi- tion of gender displacement/subsumption. The integra- tions are, of course, fragile; everything is at risk, and old structures and habits of inequality easily fill social spaces left vulnerable by uncertainty. For example, at a number of Mothers ROC meetings, men who have not been active in the organization will often steamroll discussions when the ROCers are trying to figure something out; and the ROCers let it happen, reenacting other relations of love, respect, and fear.

23. Markusen and Yudken's (1992) analysis of the cold war economy must be extended to the domestic warfare economy; see also Fanon (1961). At the same time that Mothers ROC has expanded, the LA gang truce has done so as well. By mid-1996, the LA truce included a number of Eastside and Westside Chicano and other Latino gangs. The Fourth Anniversary T- Shirt (1996) features a drawing of Malcolm X and Emiliano Zapata, the legend beneath their representa- tions reading, simply, "X y Z." Also note, gangs en- gaged in peacemaking have, on a national basis, changed their moniker from "gangs" to "street organiza- tions."

24. For example, a fairly recent newcomer to Mothers ROC is an immigrant Salvadorena who works nights as a janitor; as noted above, core cadres among militant labor organizers in Los Angeles include Salva- dorena refugees who are experienced in dealing with state terror and with challenging state legitimacy.

25. According to the United Nations International Labor Organisation, women do two-thirds of the world's work, receive five percent of the income, and own one percent of the assets. Activist Margaret Prescod of the Wages for Housework Campaign interprets these figures as illuminating both sexism and racism on a global scale (Gilmore 1993).

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