On September 30, our fascinating cast of storytellers and musicians will gather onstage at Berkeley’s magical Greek Theatre to share new, original stories and songs about what California and the West sound like today. We thought you’d like to learn more about some of the people you’ll see onstage with us at this first-of-its-kind music and storytelling event.

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Shamir

Shamir’s 2015 debut album was “one of the year’s most striking collections, full of energy and optimism” (NPR). The 21-year-old has also been called “a thoroughly modern pop star” who “writes futuristic, candy-coloured love songs, refuses to be defined by gender and just wants to bring everyone together” (The Guardian).

Lil B

Berkeley-raised Lil B has been called “the most important rapper of the decade so far” (LA Weekly). He’s collaborated with Chance the Rapper, Kehlani, and Frank Ocean, among others, as well as given motivational lectures at MIT and NYU.

Mark Kozelek, aka Sun Kil Moon

Pitchfork named Sun Kil Moon’s Benji one of the 10 best albums of this decade, writing, “How could a record that sounds so simple and states things so plainly be this moving?”

Thao Nguyen of Thao & the Get Down Stay Down

NPR named “Astonished Man,” the first single off San Francisco-based musician Thao Nguyen’s new album, one of the 100 best songs of 2016. Thao and her band have worked with Andrew Bird, Joanna Newsom, Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs (more on that here), and toured the U.S. with WNYC’s Radiolab. She has also done extensive volunteer work with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, which inspired the band’s album We the Common.

Janna Levin

Janna Levin is a theoretical cosmologist and Guggenheim Fellow. Her latest book, Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space, has been called “astonishing” (Wall Street Journal) and “exquisite” (The New York Times). According to Maria Popova of Brain Pickings, one of Levin’s personal stories about her improbable relationship with her husband was “in my book, the greatest story ever told on The Moth.”

Bethany Cosentino of Best Coast

Best Coast’s unique duo has been described as “a lo-fi ’60s garage rock and surfing band fronted by a girl group singer” (The Guardian). Lead singer Bethany Cosentino takes inspiration from the Beach Boys, the Beatles, Loretta Lynn, Dusty Springfield, Patsy Cline, the Eagles, and Fleetwood Mac.

Jason Chung, aka Nosaj Thing

Jason Chung has produced tracks for Kendrick Lamar, Kid Cudi, and Chance the Rapper, and even remixed Philip Glass. He got his start at Low End Theory, the now-famous weekly experimental music show in Los Angeles. He has an “ear for odd, left-field sounds and makes gorgeously haunted, glitchy hip-hop” (The California Sunday Magazine).

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Naomi Zeichner

Naomi Zeichner started as an intern at The FADER and is now the acclaimed magazine’s Editor-in-Chief. Recode has called The FADER “music’s most important magazine.”

Al Letson and Reveal

Al Letson is the host of Reveal, a radio show from the Center for Investigative Reporting “committed to shining a bright light on injustice and protecting the most vulnerable in our society.” Letson also created State of the Re:Union, an award-winning podcast that aired from 2010 to 2015, highlighting one American city or town in each episode. Harvard’s Nieman Foundation named the State of the Re:Union episode “The Hospital Always Wins” among the best narrative journalism stories of 2013.

Georgia Anne Muldrow

Georgia Anne Muldrow has been described as “one of the most daring and important (albeit underappreciated) artists of her time” (AllMusic). “She’s incredible,” artist and actor Mos Def told The New York Times. “She’s like Flack, Nina Simone, Ella, she’s something else. She’s like religion. It’s heavy, vibrational music. I’ve never heard a human being sing like this. Her voice is wildly, finely expressive. It’s so singular.”

Mark “Frosty” McNeill

“Dublab constantly proves that there’s always something new and beautiful to listen to, and no one works harder to bring new and inspiring sounds to the L.A. community and beyond.” — Lainna Fader to the Los Angeles Times

Mark “Frosty” McNeill co-founded dublab, a Los Angeles–based nonprofit web radio station that was one of the first 24-hour stations to broadcast on the internet. Its early DJ roster included many of the biggest names in L.A.’s hip-hop and electronic music scenes: DNTEL, Carlos Niño, and Low-End Theory co-founder Nobody. Since then, dublab has helped avant-garde composer Julia Holter, beat collagist Matthewdavid, and experimental producer Daedelus get their starts.

Jace Clayton, aka DJ/rupture

Jace Clayton’s newest book, Uproot: Travels in 21st Century Music and Digital Culture, has been featured on All Things Considered and in the Los Angeles Times and The Guardian, among others. Clayton, aka DJ/rupture, “inspires a special tenor of admiration from music critics because, in addition to crafting literate, reference-rich, and conversational music, he often writes about it just as adeptly. It’s not a stretch, if we’re honest, to say that he writes about music more skillfully and illuminatingly than the majority of us who have ever done it full-time” (Pitchfork).

Laurel Braitman

Laurel Braitman is a science historian and writer. Her debut book, Animal Madness, was a New York Times bestseller. She’s a TED Fellow, a Writer-in-Residence at the Stanford School of Medicine, and an affiliate artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts.

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Jon Mooallem

Jon Mooallem is a Pop-Up Magazine regular. You may have heard his This American Life story about a drunk moose in Alaska, or the one about a contentious elementary school play about gentrification in San Francisco (a version of which debuted at Pop-Up). He recently wrote about The Cloud Appreciation Society for The New York Times Magazine, where he is a contributing writer, and his California Sunday Magazine feature about an effort to “redesign death” is one of the most popular stories our magazine has ever published. His debut book, Wild Ones, was one of The New York Times Book Review’s 100 Notable Books of 2013.

Tim Hussin

Tim Hussin is a filmmaker and photographer who helped launch The San Francisco Chronicle’s popular video series The Regulars. (Above: one of his favorite episodes, about a speakeasy in a signal tower atop Yerba Buena Island.) Tim also co-directed (with Erin Brethauer) Last Men Standing, about men who “had the remarkable luck to survive AIDS, and the brutal misfortune to live on.”

Jaeah Lee

Jaeah Lee is a freelance journalist living in San Francisco. She was most recently a reporter at Mother Jones, where she led the newsroom’s coverage on policing after Ferguson and wrote about criminal justice, income inequality, and race, among other subjects. Lee has won awards from the Online News Association and The Society of Professional Journalists.

Josh Kun

Josh Kun just won a 2016 MacArthur “Genius Grant.” He is a Professor of Communication at USC who studies the arts and the politics of cultural connection, spanning topics such as popular music, globalization, the US-Mexico border, Los Angeles, and Jewish-American musical history. He also works as a journalist, an essayist, and a curator, and is currently a commissioned artist in the SFMOMA “Public Knowledge” series.

Whitney Jones, Alex Kapelman, Afi Yellow-Duke

Whitney Jones, Alex Kapelman, and Afi Yellow-Duke produce Pitch, a critically acclaimed podcast about music. New York called it the one music podcast you should start with, writing that Pitch “tackles less-explored music-related topics, such as corporate placement with music and the notion of selling out, or how a trans man’s vocals changed when he took testosterone.” The Atlantic named their episode, “Take a Little Ride With Coors Light,” one of the 50 best podcast episodes of 2015.

AshleyAnne Krigbaum & Adrian Spinelli

Adrian Spinelli, from music magazine Paste, San Francisco Chronicle, and festival blog Fest300, and producer Ashleyanne Krigbaum, of KALW, are the hosts of the Noise Pop Podcast.

Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir

The Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir was founded in 1986 as an outgrowth of a gospel music workshop. It has toured globally, produced multiple CDs, and appeared in films and on television (and on MC Hammer’s “2 Legit 2 Quit”!). In 2015, Oakland Magazine’s “Best of Oakland and the East Bay” named it Best Arts Organization.

Los Jornaleros Del Norte

Los Jornaleros del Norte (Laborers of the North) is a band comprised of day laborers. It is affiliated with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON). The band has performed at numerous protests and marches, including the fight for $15 minimum wage at Los Angeles City Hall.

Magik*Magik Orchestra

Magik*Magik Orchestra is a made-to-order orchestra, the size of which has ranged from a single violinist to an 80-piece symphony and choir. The M*MO has worked with more than 150 artists and institutions since its 2008 debut, including Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, Death Cab for Cutie, the Dodos, and Sting. Magik*Magik is releasing a new album on October 14. You can listen to its music on Spotify and pre-order here.

Hope to see you at the show! If you still need tickets, they’re available here!

Drownings, shootings, high-speed accidents, immigrants in labor — the life of a border paramedic

By Abe Streep
Photographs by Michael Lundgren and Susan Meiselas

For the paramedics in Laredo, Texas, the only event more concerning than a Dallas Cowboys’ loss is a fight night. Saturday, May 7, the eve of Mother’s Day, was fight night. Throughout the afternoon, the cemeteries were full of people carrying flowers to their mothers’ tombstones, bright tributes laid down in the searing heat. That evening, much of the town gathered around flat screens to watch the Mexican champion Canelo Álvarez and a British contender named Amir Khan slug it out for the middleweight title. Not many were rooting for Khan.

Before the fight started, I joined the medics at Station 7, down by the Rio Grande next to a rough neighborhood nicknamed Las Canta Ranas — The Singing Frogs. Pickup trucks were parked diagonally out back, near an unused weight rack. Inside the station, air conditioning blasted, and men sat around the dining-room table in blue Laredo Fire Department uniforms. Behind them, on the wall, was a sign featuring an owl that read WE NEVER SLEEP.

The TV was on. The TV is always on in the fire stations, streaming sports highlights, car-buying shows, life-hacking shows, and action movies. Now it was showing a Jurassic Park sequel — dinosaurs racing around onscreen, a woman running to her truck. Alfred de la Cruz, a 5-foot-6 paramedic who goes by Fred and has his kids’ names tattooed on his forearms, nodded at the TV and said, “There’s no way that jeep starts.”

Fernando Mata cackled. Thirty-eight with a wide-open smile and a spherical physique, Mata (nobody calls him Fernando) is revered in the station. He had entered the profession as a 110-pound single father on food stamps, but that was a lot of 911 calls and Whataburgers ago. He served himself some ice cream and told a story about the time when he nearly choked to death while fishing with his paramedic friend Bobby. “Bobby shows up with some double cheeseburgers,” Mata said. “We grab ’em like animals. BOOM! We get ’em, right? It was a complete occlusion.” Mata signaled to Bobby that he was choking, Bobby gave him a Heimlich thrust, and the burger popped out. Point being that they were calm because of their training. “It was so funny,” Mata said. “I call Bobby my fat angel. He’s fatter than me.”

First responders love gallows humor, and I heard a lot of stories like this when I spent time with the paramedics of Laredo this past spring. I was accompanying them because they have an unusually clear view of the most politicized stretch of land in the country: the U.S.-Mexico border. Located in southwest Texas on the Rio Grande, Laredo is one of the least diverse cities in the country — its population is 96 percent Latino. According to the census, that adds up to 255,000 souls. But this figure accounts for only the documented. The actual number, everyone told me, is closer to 300,000. Just across the river is Nuevo Laredo, a city of nearly 400,000 dominated by the Zetas drug cartel.

Like all border towns, Laredo is swamped by law enforcement. Uniforms are everywhere: the olive green of Border Patrol, or La Migra, which has about 1,600 agents in the area; the navy blue of Customs and Border Protection, whose agents check the documentation of people crossing Laredo’s five bridges. There are sheriff’s officers, constables, and highway patrol; in less public view, three for-profit detention facilities employ a small force of correctional officers. Working for La Migra or in a private prison can be a complicated arrangement in a town that’s almost entirely Latino — steady employment with the whiff of betrayal. Paramedics, on the other hand, are legally bound to treat anyone in need. The only questions they ask concern a patient’s medical history. Border Patrol agents get spit as a topping at a local takeout joint; paramedics get discounts.

A blue light lit up overhead and an automated female voice intoned, “Ambulance, special duty.” Fred rose. He sometimes calls himself the Angel of Death, because when he is on the R.Q., or rescue unit, bad things tend to happen. Two nights earlier, he had transported two patients who eventually died. The electronic voice above continued, “Patient with a low sugar dose,” and everyone sighed. It was just a frequent flier — a regular, someone who occasionally calls in with low blood sugar, dizziness, or general exhaustion.

Fred left, lights flashing and sirens wailing. The fight started, and calls sped up. A boy was hit in the face with a baseball bat. A woman complaining of fatigue turned out to be a heroin addict. Fred had to break down a door to reach a guy who’d been beaten to a pulp. Cars wrecked. Then a call came in. Something about a girl at the mouth of Chacon Creek. Something down by the river.

The medics have a saying for nights like this: Se suelto el diablo. The devil is loose.

The language in the fire stations is a fast blend of English and Spanish. While speaking Spanish isn’t technically a prerequisite, you’d be hard-pressed to find a Laredo medic who doesn’t. Seen from this angle, the city’s 388 firefighters reflect the population they serve. Seen from another, the department is remiss: While it’s full of brothers, uncles, and nephews, it doesn’t include any women, or females, the word used by most of the guys. Station life is dominated by movies and cookouts and practical jokes. “It’s awesome,” Fred said. “Kind of like being in a frat house.”

It’s an exclusive frat house. In 2015, 4 percent of applicants to the fire department were accepted as cadets, and less than half of those became paramedics. Getting into Harvard is three times easier. The medics then rise to engine drivers, captains, chiefs, and administrators and can retire with generous pensions after 20 years. Some guys, though, stay on the R.Q., tending to drownings, shootings, stabbings, overdoses, and high-speed accidents. “I had no clue,” a medic named Rudy told me, “what I got myself into.”

When I arrived in late April, I found my way to Station 7, a 35-year-old, tan-brick building that Mata showed off with pride: the parking lot; the grill; the dining room where everyone hangs out, covered in firefighter paraphernalia and American flags, dominated by the huge TV, and opening onto a kitchen with a high-end gas range. The locker room felt old and lived in, the wooden cubbies stuffed with Alka-Seltzer and decorated with Cowboys stars and photos of kids.

It was noon, the golden hour when calls rarely come in. In the bunkroom, men lay on mattresses in the darkness, their faces illuminated by the glow of iPhones. The TV was off. Then, at 1 p.m., it flicked on again. A call came in for a kid locked in a car. I hopped into the back of the bright-red ambulance. Fred was the attendant, meaning he was both the primary caregiver and the DJ. On the radio, he cranked Journey, Steve Perry singing, “Someday love will find you” above the siren’s howl.

We went to check on the kid, but by the time we arrived, someone had opened the car door. Then a call came from Walmart, where a pregnant girl accused of shoplifting claimed a policeman had pushed her to the floor, hurting her unborn child. But when Fred offered to take her to the hospital, she declined; the cop smirked. The calls started to mount. Blood poured from the skull of the loser of a bar fight. A woman with lung cancer breathed through an artificial oxygen mask, tendrils of gas rising off her face as the medics wheeled her past her altars to the Virgin of Guadalupe. People called in with dizziness, nerves, fatigue, and other codes for loneliness.

Many of the calls were in the old, south part of town, a leafy and slow neighborhood of fading beauty that bears no resemblance to the subdivisions and box stores of the wealthier north side, which has metastasized since the enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994. It is widely known among the medics that much of the town’s undocumented population lives on the south side. The medics treated everyone with the same robotic efficiency. They’d walk into the patient’s home, diagnose the injury, and, if necessary, wheel him off on a stretcher, attaching electrodes to his chest and a saline lock to his hand in the ambulance. The medics never asked about health insurance. As Fred told me, “We never give someone a reason not to go to the hospital.”

One day, a philosophical medic named Joey Lopez Jr., who also works as an emergency-room nurse, took me to float the river in a kayak, alerting his buddies with Border Patrol in advance. We put in north of town, on a private ranch, and paddled down. The riverbanks were lined with salt cedar, hackberry, invasive cane, and discarded clothing; the flyway was thick with green kingfishers, white-collared seedeaters, painted buntings, gray hawks, and Border Patrol helicopters buzzing low over the water.

Joey is an enthusiastic birdwatcher and kayaker, the river his sanctuary. It was also the site of one of his worst calls. He once responded to a wreck in which a coyote was being chased by Border Patrol. The smuggler floored the gas pedal, pointed the car in the direction of the river, then rolled out of the vehicle just before sending his human cargo hurtling to their deaths. I asked Joey whether he stayed in touch with any of the undocumented migrants he’d treated over the years. “We transport them, and they’re gone,” he said. “They’re ghosts to us.”

Once, when I returned to Station 7 following an ambulance ride with Fred, a show about aliens was on the TV.

“Do you believe in aliens?” Mata asked. I said I didn’t.

“You came to South Texas to do a story,” he said, “and you don’t believe in aliens?”

He laughed, as did everyone else. Station 7 is less than a mile from the Rio Grande. Until about ten years ago, the medics were responsible for body recovery in the river. Then the fire department’s union objected, and the Laredo Medical Examiner’s office took over the duty. The medics don’t miss that work. Mata once had to shoo a feeding vulture off a floating body. “The skin sloshes off in your hand,” he said. “This is still in my mind.”

The Rio Grande is now significantly smaller than when Spanish missionaries first crossed it. Dams and drought will do that. The cities may be geographically closer than they’ve ever been, but in almost every other way, they’ve never been further apart. Up until the early 2000s, Americans frequently crossed into Nuevo Laredo to eat, party, or get quick, affordable medical care. Those days are over thanks to a series of cartel-related massacres. Three years ago, 23 people were found hanged from a Nuevo Laredo bridge or decapitated.

I asked the guys at the station if they crossed the river, and the answer was a universal no. One of the station’s drivers is a circumspect, large guy with a sharp grin named Angel Garcia. Forty-six, Angel became a firefighter when his shoe-exporting business faltered. Upon joining the department, he found it a lot like being on a sports team, which he liked. Angel told me he doesn’t allow his children to go to Mexico, a common refrain among the guys. His son doesn’t speak Spanish; his mother, who was born in Mexico, doesn’t speak English. Two of Mata’s kids speak Spanish, and two don’t. Fred, who learned Spanish only after joining the fire department, joked, “My kids are total gringos, bro.”

For the most part, the medics live in the shining northern part of town — farther away from the border and deeper into America. A medic who was born in Nuevo Laredo was frequently mocked by the other guys for his heavy accent. They sometimes called him an Aztec. But the few white guys in the department can also be the butt of jokes. A medic from Tennessee asked if I like NASCAR after we first met. When I said I didn’t, he looked relieved. “A lot of guys assume I’m all into NASCAR because I’m white,” he told me. Another medic was partly of Anglo and partly of Mexican descent. He spoke lightning-quick Spanish and cooked up elaborate Mexican meals. Over dinner, someone asked him what he’d do if Trump were elected. “I’m moving to Mexico!” he yelled.

Hundreds of people still pass over Laredo’s bridges every day carrying various kinds of visas, and some get hurt. Many are U.S. residents who suffer injuries while visiting family in Mexico, and some are Mexican women with late-stage pregnancies hoping to deliver children — “anchor babies,” in the crude parlance — on U.S. soil. The baby deliveries make for some of the happiest calls. “The best feeling in the world,” I heard it described. Some of the most unhappy calls also happen at the river. That’s because critical patients often arrive at the bridge in the Mexican ambulances, or the Cruz Roja. I asked the medics if they’d ride in a Cruz Roja ambulance, and they all laughed. One said, “They’re good guys, but they’re not really trained. They usually ask for supplies. They work with nothing.” Everyone has a Cruz Roja story: a medic pulling traction on a patient’s neck with a rope and a sack of beans, or a soda bottle pinch-hitting as a catheter repository.

I saw Cruz Roja one hot Sunday when two medics got a call from Bridge 2. We pulled into a bay at the north end next to a small red vehicle that said Rescate. Inside were a mother and daughter, both U.S. citizens, who had been in a car accident in Mexico 12 hours earlier. The daughter was throwing up and suffering seizures, with purple marks on her forehead — signs of potentially critical head trauma. According to the mother, the Mexican hospitals had refused to treat her because the family didn’t have enough cash.

While Customs and Border Protection officers patrolled and German shepherds sniffed vehicles, one of the medics negotiated with the Cruz Roja driver over a foam backboard. The girl was strapped to it, but the driver wanted to take it back before transferring her. The Laredo medic refused, and the haggling further delayed the ­emergency-room visit. “It’s messed up,” the medic said, after finally dropping the girl at the ER. “When it’s kids, it affects you more.” The Cruz Roja guy followed closely behind, hoping to reclaim his backboard.

I later told the guys at Station 7 about this call. Someone wondered aloud whether the Cruz Roja medics wore bulletproof vests. Mata said, “I don’t think a vest would help you very much over there.”

Laredo is located in Webb County, a flat block of land three times the size of Rhode Island extending north and east from the Rio Grande. Most of its 3,400 square miles is a brush of mesquite, cactus, and huisache — privately owned ranchland. Outside the city limits, only about 14,000 people live in the county. Picture a thorny expanse with the population density of Western Sahara and comparable heat. Undocumented immigrants are often found dehydrated, abandoned by coyotes in the 105-degree summer. Border Patrol usually arrives first. Then come the medics.

Laredo Fire provided ambulance care for Webb County until 2012, when the department demanded more money. The county balked and began looking for a private alternative. Angel Garcia, along with two partners, had started an ambulance company called Angel Care and offered to keep three vehicles on call for $64,000 per month. He then hired 30 or so buddies from the fire department to work on their off days. Most Angel Care paramedics I spoke with said that while the ambulances might not look as nice as the city’s, the services are the same, given the personnel overlap. They also said that their most gruesome calls are accidents out on rural highways — wrecks in which a pickup full of migrants flips at 80 or 100 miles per hour.

I went down to Angel Care’s office one afternoon. Two white Ford Econoline ambulances were parked out front of a strip mall that houses a loan service, a car-window-tinting shop, an automobile wheel shop, a Western-wear store, and two Mexican restaurants. When I walked in, I found Fred waking up from a nap. He’d just come off a 24-hour shift at Station 7 and was now on at Angel Care for 24 more hours. “It’s mostly chill here,” he said. “But this is where we see the bad traumas. This is where I saw my first severed arm.”

He sat on the couch and watched TV along with his partner, Polo, a mustachioed 44-year-old sheriff’s deputy with EMT training who works at Angel Care on his off days. We talked for a while about the bad wrecks they’d both seen, then Polo took out his cellphone and scrolled through to a series of photos.

The images showed a gravel pile, body bags leaking blood, and a lot of bright lights. On February 18, Polo was working with the sheriff’s department when he received a call at about 4 in the morning for a rollover 32 miles out on Highway 59. When he arrived, he found an overturned Dodge Ram missing one of its front wheels, bodies scattered on the shoulder, and “a shitload” of Border Patrol agents. None of the Border Patrol agents or the Webb County firefighters who responded were EMTs or paramedics, so Polo started triaging the wounded. One patient, a young Guatemalan, was missing half his face, the skin dangling off. Polo put him on a backboard and affixed a C collar. Soon Angel Care’s first ambulance showed up. Polo loaded up the Guatemalan and backboarded another patient, a teenage Mexican boy, but then the kid’s pulse stopped. “Four died,” Polo said, “and four went on the ambulance.”

I asked if it was a Border Patrol chase. There was a pause.

“Border Patrol was there,” he said. “They’re not going to say they were chasing.”

The door to Angel Care opened, and a new guy walked in: Rey Veliz, a soft-spoken 46-year-old Navy vet.

I asked again about Border Patrol chases. This time Polo chuckled.

“That happens very often, man,” Rey said.

“There’s no evidence. We’re not there,” Polo said.

“We’re not there to ask who caused the accident. That’s not our job,” Rey said.

“They’ve had fatalities before when they’re chasing,” Polo said.

The men started trading stories about bad calls over the drone of the TV. Just a couple of days earlier, Polo had transported two women who were run over by a coyote in Rio Bravo. On Thanksgiving weekend, Rey had picked up a migrant with an open fracture on a ranch.

“There’s a lot of stuff you will never know about that happens here,” Polo said.

For dinner, Fred and I went to one of the strip mall’s Mexican restaurants. Fred had been a running back for his high school football team, but in the year after entering the department he ballooned from 180 to 216 pounds. Then one of his best friends, the star quarterback on the team, who was also a firefighter, died of cancer, and Fred dedicated himself to fitness with maniacal resolve. He works out once or twice a day, often at 5 in the morning, sweating it out at a Crunch gym.

As we ate, he told me about the time he pulled a 1-year-old girl out of a wrecked car following a head-on collision. “It was a Ford F-150 versus a Ford Focus,” he said. The girl was in the smaller vehicle. “The mom was dead, and there was this little pocket of steel around her, like the Lord himself had protected her.” The girl survived. I asked Fred if he was religious. “In this job, you have to believe in something,” he said, “because if not, you’re going to lose your sanity. Every time we work something real tragic, something is taken from us. I don’t know what’s taken, but something is taken from me.”

After I left, the images from the February rollover stuck in my head. I kept imagining an 18-year-old boy flying out of the truck after riding up the gravel pile, a kid missing half his face, four dead among the windshield glass. I spent a long time trying to figure out whether this accident was caused by a Border Patrol chase. The attorney for two of the surviving migrants said that his clients felt as though they were being pursued, but they couldn’t say by whom, since they were hunched down in the cab of the truck. I did learn that a father and son were in the vehicle, that the deceased 18-year-old Mexican boy’s name was Gerardo Vasquez-Gutierrez, and that someone of the same name had been arrested crossing the Rio Grande in January, just weeks before the accident. I also learned that, since January, at least four deadly crashes in the county were the result of Border Patrol chases. I asked Border Patrol’s public information officer about it. “There’s a misconception that these are chases,” she said. “We call them failure-to-yield scenarios.”

Later I drove out to the site of the accident. The windshield glass was still there, shining like glitter among discarded soda bottles and a Chick-fil-A box. I thought about something else Joey had told me: “We can’t go anywhere without seeing ghosts.” On top of the gravel pile a sign read PROPERTY OF THE STATE OF TEXAS.

On another day, Rey Veliz, the Navy vet, offered to take me and a photographer to Rio Bravo, a rural area south of town. We hopped in Angel Care’s off-duty ambulance and drove until we reached a bunch of colonias — poor neighborhoods that have no running water. I asked Rey what percentage of calls Angel Care billed for, and he shrugged. “A lot of these people don’t have insurance,” he said.

Upon leaving the Navy, Rey had wanted to work in Border Patrol, but the agency had lost the results to his entrance exam. He is now relieved he ended up a paramedic. “It would be hard to see that type of human suffering day in and day out,” he told us. We drove down to the river and parked at an overlook. It smelled awful, because someone had discarded bait on the shore, but the river was green and beautiful, full of birdsong and ripples where alligator gar swirled near the surface.

“I like to fish here,” Rey said. “But I bring my gun.”

We got back in the ambulance and started to drive up the dirt road. Rey talked about growing up ten blocks from the river. “Back then it wasn’t a crime to help illegals,” he said. “I remember being in the front yard with my grandmother as she was watering her plants. You’d see four or five coming along, and they’d ask for water or food, and my grandmother would feed them.”

A green-and-white Border Patrol truck passed us, heading toward the river. Rey waved to the agents.

“I grew up being sympathetic to the illegals’ cause,” Rey continued. “Back in the day, Laredo and Nuevo Laredo were one and the same. And my mother had this bird feeder, and she — ” Rey stopped the ambulance. “These guys are pulling us over,” he said.

The Border Patrol vehicle had swooped around behind us, and four agents were now walking toward the ambulance. “See, this is what’s frustrating,” Rey said. His face flushed. “This is frustrating. As a citizen, to be treated like you’re breaking the law.” He rolled down his window.

“Yes, sir, how you doin’, man?” he asked.

A trim agent with a crew cut and his hand on his holster said, “Hi. What country are you guys citizens of?”

“We’re U.S. citizens,” Rey said. “We work with Angel Care. These are reporters, and I brought ’em down to see the river. That’s all.”

“You got anything in back?”

Rey indicated that there was nothing in the back besides ambulance equipment.

“Do you mind if we look in the back?”

Rey paused and asked, “Do you have to?”

The agent didn’t answer the question, instead summoning Rey out. Following the search, we drove on. Rey said, “I’m a service member. My kids are service members. My father-in-law served in Vietnam.” We toured Rio Bravo, where women sold used clothes off chain-link fences, then headed back to town, where Rey insisted on treating us to a lavish lunch.

“If nobody showed up illegally,” one medic told me, “there wouldn’t be any work here. We thrive off of this shittiness. We all make money off it.” The river creates an economy of desperation. Migrants come to Nuevo Laredo from elsewhere in Mexico and, increasingly, from Central American countries torn apart by gang violence. The coyotes pay tributes to the cartels. Teenage boys on the U.S. side work as scouts for the cartels, alerting them if La Migra is close. Border Patrol agents stake out the cane and chase down migrants. Correction officers monitor for-profit detention centers. Paramedics clean up the mess.

Before going to Station 7 for the Álvarez-Khan fight, I stopped for some chips and a Coke at a corner store where Mexican music blasted and customers paid in pesos. Two blocks away, the guys were all sitting around the long dinner table in their uniforms. It was covered with Styrofoam containers full of tough steak. Takeout night. “Less dishes,” Angel said with a smile.

The guys started talking about Trump.

“I don’t know, man, chinga,” said Mata. “The thing is about, like, what’s his face, nombre, the psycho, Trump, I don’t think he’s used to having to hear the word no too often. And that’s a big thing. The wall building, is it Arizona or esta New Mexico that has it?”

“Arizona has it,” said an older medic named Rick. “And they’re still scaling that thing.”

I wasn’t surprised to hear their antipathy toward Trump. I was more surprised when Rick declared, “We’re becoming a nation of freeloaders. That’s what gets me about esos, the illegals, and all that. There’s just too many freeloaders.”

Fred said, “I agree with that. Do it the right way — work your butt off. Do what you got to do to get your citizenship or residency or whatever the fuck.”

Mata said, “I told you guys a hundred times, I went to junior college, a single father. They’d say, ‘Here’s your food stamps.’ As soon as you got a job, they’d say, ‘Hey, you know what, you’re going to have to pay back the money for the food stamps.’ But I had cousins that said, ‘I’m not going to work because I’m not going to pay ’em back!’”

Rick said, “You have career food-stamp people! I’m not against people coming here, because that’s how my grandfather came here. But he did it the legal way. He became a citizen, he worked all his life, and he always paid everything back.”

I repeatedly heard this declaration or some version of it: that the medics’ forebears had paid back every cent, owed nothing, done it right. This account created an absolute and unyielding divide between them and the people they pick up bent and broken on the riverbanks and highways. They help everyone; they don’t ask questions; they are good Samaritans. They get discounts at fast-food restaurants for a reason. But they are on the right side of the law, and the undocumented are not. To hear the medics tell it, the ghosts who come across the river now are not the ghosts of their own past. The firefighters are Americans. “I was born here and raised here,” a young medic told me. “Well, not born. Naturalized at 3 or something and raised here. You know what I mean.”

I went into the pingpong room, where Angel was studying for a promotional exam. Angel is not romantic about much, including his family’s recent history. When his brothers root for Mexico in the World Cup, he suggests they go live across the river. But when I asked him what he thought about the undocumented immigrants he often picks up, he said, “These are hardworking people. Most of those people spent years making the money to get here to get minimum-wage jobs to help their family. Those people actually do the jobs that nobody wants here. I’m not going to go pick almonds for $5 an hour. It comes back to what I do here. The best thing you can do is prepare yourself to try and not be in those positions.” He gestured to his book, 500-odd pages of technical details about firefighting.

Not long before Álvarez knocked out Khan in the sixth round, the call from the river came in on the radio:

“Special duty, EMS, 1100 South Meadow Avenue. Shortness of breath.”

1100 South Meadow Avenue marks the place where Chacon Creek flows into the Rio Grande on the far side of town. When the medics arrived at the dance hall that leads the way to Chacon Creek, they saw a number of Border Patrol vehicles. There, in the parking lot, was their patient: a teenage girl. She was dripping wet and exhausted, just out of the river. She wore a T-shirt and sweats and looked to be about 15. She was shaking. The medics asked if she wanted care. She declined. She wanted her mother, who, she said, had swum from Mexico with her. But her mother hadn’t completed the crossing. The girl asked the medics if they could protect her. They couldn’t. They could only take her to the hospital, with Border Patrol following, for a checkup followed by detention. She wasn’t interested in that, so Border Patrol drove her away. According to an agency spokeswoman, the girl was “processed accordingly.”

Back at the station, the medics were shaken. The girl was so young and afraid. She could have been their sister or cousin or daughter. They told themselves there was nothing they could do. Another siren wailed, then another after that. Shifts and calls blurred together. Eventually, inevitably, the girl in the river would fade into memory.

Abe Streep is a contributing writer for The California Sunday Magazine. His work has appeared in Outside, Harper’s, and Wired, among other publications.

Michael Lundgren lives in the Sonoran Desert. Radius Books has just released his second monograph, Matter.

Susan Meiselas is a documentary photographer who lives in New York. She has been a member of Magnum Photos since 1976. In 2015, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Originally published at californiasunday.com on August 2, 2016.

The Devil Is Loose. was originally published in The California Sunday Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Persuading Latinos to vote Republican in the year of Trump

By Andy Kroll
Photograph by Caitlin O’Hara

On the Fourth of July, Sergio Arellano dragged himself out of bed before sunrise and pulled on baggy jeans and a T-shirt that read REPUBLICAN ACTION TEAM. As the strategic initiatives director for the Arizona Republican Party, Arellano is responsible for Latino outreach, and he was headed for Nogales, a border town whose population of 20,000 is overwhelmingly Latino and Democratic. In other words, he was going into enemy territory to promote Donald Trump, Senator John McCain (who is seeking a sixth term), and several other Republican candidates running for local office. Latinos make up 31 percent of Arizona’s population. That number is growing so rapidly that many think it’s only a matter of time before what was once a solidly red state shades purple and then turns blue. It is Arellano’s job to prevent this from happening.

The festivities in Nogales kicked off with a 10 a.m. parade through the center of town. The Republican float — ­a flatbed trailer festooned with patriotic bunting and placards — was sandwiched between the county sheriff in a vintage pickup and a group of cyclists. Arellano walked alongside the float, tossing out fistfuls of taffy and slapping high-fives with anyone who looked friendly. Thirty-two years old, Arellano served two tours as an infantryman in Iraq, where he survived an IED blast, and little seems to faze him. He relished the double takes in the crowd as the float rolled past. As he waved and shook hands, he asked aloud, “Do you see a Democratic Party float here, man?”

Nogales is the type of place where Arellano needs to make inroads. Its surrounding county hasn’t elected a Republican to the board of supervisors in 36 years, but over the same period, Democratic turnout has declined. For these reasons, Arellano insisted the Arizona Republican Party enter a float in the parade and urged the state chairman, Robert Graham, to come down from Phoenix to take part.

Over the past two years, Arellano has showed up in places where Repu­bli­cans rarely go — towns with Latino majorities like Rio Rico, Yuma, and Douglas. “People look at my sign,” he told me, “and say, ‘Republican? Aren’t you lost?’ And I’m like, ‘Nah, dude, we’re not lost. We know where we’re at.’ Most of them will walk by, but some will start engaging and talking.” Arellano has hosted neighborhood fiestas, handed out Thanksgiving turkeys, and started an internship program at the state GOP headquarters. He’s credited with helping Republican Martha McSally in her 2014 upset victory for Congress — she won by 167 votes — and his work has caught the attention of Republican leaders in Phoenix and Washington.

Then came Donald Trump and his promise to build the wall, and Arellano’s job suddenly got a lot harder. In most polls, 80 percent of Latinos say they oppose the man who’s acquired the nickname Don Trampa. (“Trampa” roughly translates to trickster.) Many observers believe that the Republican Party could lose the Latino vote for a generation in much the same way that Cali­fornia Governor Pete Wilson’s anti-immigrant ballot measures in the 1990s galvanized Latinos to reject the California Repu­blican Party and support Demo­crats in overwhelming numbers. “Sure, it’s worrisome,” Arellano told me as folks came up to greet him. “It’s concerning. But guess what? That’s why we’re out here.”

After the parade, Arellano shepherd­ed Graham and several Repu­­blican candidates to a Spanish-language radio station for interviews. Then he drove to a city park that was hosting a Fourth of July festival. The party was a sponsor of the event, and his volunteers had strung a huge GOP banner at the base of the stage where musical acts would perform.

Arellano seemed to know every­one. He introduced Graham to local businesspeople. He stopped and chatted with police officers and city council members, switching fluidly between English and Spanish. He had persuaded the festival’s headliner, the Mexican-American R&B star Frankie J, to sign autographs at the Republican tent. “It took an act of God to even get him here,” Arellano told me. No one could walk more than a few feet without seeing a red Arizona Republican Party balloon floating overhead.

At one point, a Democratic volun­teer wandered over to compliment Arellano. His tent, she said, was way more fun than hers. The Democrats’ idea of a good time was raffling off a papier-mâché piñata of Trump. Still, the Democrats were signing up a steady stream of prospective voters. Filling out the registration form out­side their tent, a young woman with a toddler on her hip paused at the section that required her to declare her party preference. She looked up and asked, “Which party is Trump?” Republican, someone replied. She checked the Democratic box.

“It is an uphill battle,” Arellano told me. “People say that Hispanics hate Republicans. They don’t hate any­body. You just have some activists that are really inflammatory. Unfortunately, those are the people who get the airtime.”

He was already planning to return to Nogales to organize for McCain and other down-ticket Republicans. What about Trump? Arellano was supporting him (“I’m backing anybody but Hillary”), but for a moment, his relentless optimism gave way. Trump had created a quandary for him, and he couldn’t help but shake his head. “If you’d told me two years ago that we’d be in this situation we’re in now,” he said, “I would’ve laughed and told you you’re wearing a tinfoil hat.”

Originally published at californiasunday.com on July 12, 2016.

How Will Arizona Latinos Vote in the Year of Trump? was originally published in The California Sunday Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We spent time with four different communities and asked them about their experiences. Here’s what we learned.

By Lauren Smiley
Photograph by Matt Mimiaga

In boomtown San Francisco, there’s little slack for kids still finding their way. Housing is crunched. Rents top New York’s. Today, roughly one in five homeless people is 25 or younger. The boom has even hit people helping these youth; in 2013, after 12 years of running a drop-in center in the Haight district, the Homeless Youth Alliance lost its lease (the space where it operated is now listed as renting for $9,000 a month). The nonprofit became homeless itself, resorting to offering roving services on the street.

The young and homeless are an especially vulnerable group. They’re more likely to be LGBTQ and more likely to sleep on the street than the general homeless population. In the 2015 Homeless Youth Count and Survey, 27 percent reported they had traded drugs and 20 percent had traded sex for a place to stay. Forty-three percent said they’d been assaulted.

The White House has set an ambitious goal to end youth and family homelessness by 2020. Here in San Francisco, lawmakers have committed new city funding. They are also in the process of working out legislation to open six “navigation centers” over the next two years. A pilot center, in the Mission, guides people into housing without the rigid rules that lead many people to avoid traditional shelters (no pets, no drinking, no partners). One of the new centers will likely be earmarked for youth, in the hopes of getting young people quickly off the streets.

We spent time with four different communities of homeless youth and asked them about their experiences. We also looked at some of the different ways people are trying to help. We heard a lot of tough stories, but also reasons for hope: For most young people, homelessness is not yet a chronic condition. Many describe it as a stop on the road to something else.

Young and Homeless was originally published in The California Sunday Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Moving Out

One in 23 children in the San Francisco public school district is homeless. Should the city help families leave?

Photographs by Taylor Johnson
Text by Lauren Smiley
Audio by Meradith Hoddinott

This is a part of our photography series on youth homelessness for the SF Homeless Project. Learn about the things that young people carry, being homeless and LGBTQ, and life on the road.

Soon after Martha Hurtado moved into her Oakland apartment, in the heart of Raiders country, she installed a “49ers corner.” She hung six Niners logo banners, dragged in two stadium seats from defunct Candlestick Park, spread a Niners comforter on the bed, tacked a pennant in the bathroom. Martha wasn’t this showy about her pride when she lived in San Francisco, where she was born and raised and worked for years as an usher at Candlestick Park. But the need to signal that she was San Franciscan surged three years ago, after she was evicted, “forced out,” as she says.

Evicted along with her was her elementary-school-age son, Nate, who became a part of San Francisco’s youngest cohort of homeless when they moved into a shelter. One out of 23 kids in the San Francisco public school district is living either in a shelter or doubled up in someone else’s home. That’s 2,400 students this past school year, enough to fill Mission High School two times over. Homelessness has a negative effect on focus and student achievement: A vast majority of homeless students surveyed nationally said it took a toll on their emotional and mental health.

“I tried to keep it like an adventure,” Martha says. “In our room [in the shelter], I had our laptops so we could watch movies.” Nate got counseling twice a week, made friends at the shelter, and was able to keep up his grades.

But that was a temporary fix. Nationally, the aim has been “rapid rehousing” — moving families as quickly as possible from a shelter into a new place of their own and then providing them with rental assistance to stay there. The Obama administration has requested $6 billion for rapid rehousing in this upcoming fiscal year’s budget, with the hope of solving family homelessness by 2020. San Francisco combined resources from its general fund with state and federal money and funding from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff to pump up the city’s program.

But when it comes to finding a place to use the subsidy, averaging $800 a month depending on income, a majority of families are making the same decision as many a San Franciscan teacher, line cook, and journalist before them: to leave. The most expedient housing solution for poor San Franciscan kids is not in San Francisco.

At Hamilton Family Center — the largest family shelter in the city — 60 percent of the San Franciscan clients receiving these rent subsidies have left for places as far as Sacramento, Vallejo, and Antioch. Hamilton’s former executive director, Jeff Kositsky (now director of the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing), says allowing families to use subsidies elsewhere just makes pragmatic sense. He was aiming for an immediate way to reduce the months-long waitlist for a family shelter in the city, a list on which one day Kositsky spotted his daughter’s classmate.

Schools are often the first to learn of a child who is either at risk of losing housing or already living homeless, so Hamilton also created a response team of case workers who, within three days of getting a referral from the school district, will visit the student’s house. The program is funded by a $1 million grant from Google; Kositsky says Google found the early detection shortcut “Googley.”

The subsidies end up being more cost effective than shelters. In San Francisco, it costs $120 a night to host a family in a shelter, or $43,800 a year. Meanwhile, the average rent subsidy costs around $9,500 a year, or $20,000 if you include staff time for case management. Staving off an eviction is the cheapest solution of all: $4,000. That’s one specific way the school team has been effective: Whereas many shelters only see families once they’ve been evicted, the Google-funded program has identified families at risk of getting thrown out of housing when it can still be averted.

Critics have objected to San Francisco’s subsidies being spent in other places. Many nonprofits are focused on pushing the city to build more affordable housing here, not sending its resources elsewhere. “It was something that we want to mitigate as much as possible,” says Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness. “Moving out of town can further destabilize kids in the schools since they’ve had so much instability. Switching schools creates a lot more trauma and behavioral problems.”

For that reason, the federal government allows students to stay in their home school until the end of the school year and to apply for a district transfer after that. Nate stayed in his Bernal Heights elementary after they moved to Oakland. Martha was driving back to the city anyway, for work at City College (advising their homeless students) and keeping him there made sense for other reasons, too: Her mom, who still lives in the city, could pitch in with child care.

Martha’s case exemplifies many of the city’s statistics for homeless families: 14 percent list eviction as the primary reason for their homelessness. The most common cause was domestic violence, at 27 percent.

For now, Martha and Nate are living in a tidy complex with an aquamarine pool, hugging leafy MacArthur Boulevard. Martha is looking for work locally. This upcoming school year, however, will be a difficult one; they have to transfer Nate to an Oakland elementary for fourth grade, and he’s rebelling. “He’s thinking he’ll live with his dad and just not go to school anymore,” Martha says.

The biggest test for the family will come when Martha graduates from Hamilton’s subsidy program, as she nears the end of its two-year expiration. Nationally, families often fall back into homelessness within one year after a subsidy ends — which is why some criticize rapid rehousing as putting families into houses without a plan for how they’ll eventually cover the rent. Hamilton, which has an income-planning program and monthly check-ins, says 90 percent of its families have stayed housed at least one year after leaving the program. Hamilton will also help connect them to social services in their new city. But if they want San Francisco’s help after that, they’ll need to move back.

Taylor Johnson is a photographer based in Oakland. She is currently working toward her BFA in photography at the California College of the Arts.

Lauren Smiley is a San Francisco journalist covering how the tech boom has changed the city.

Meradith Hoddinott is a radio producer based in Oakland. She has written and produced audio stories for Heritage Radio Network, 99% Invisible, and KALW’s Crosscurrents. In 2015, she founded the podcast Nordic Food Lab Radio in Copenhagen, Denmark.

A homeless mom’s answer: leave San Francisco was originally published in The California Sunday Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Runaways

On the road with homeless youth

Photographs by Matt Mimiaga
Text by Lauren Smiley
Audio by Amy Standen

This is a part of our photography series on youth homelessness for the SF Homeless Project. Learn about the things that young people carry, parenting in a shelter, and being homeless and LGBTQ.

Dirty Kids and Crusty Kids, as they call themselves, sooner or later end up in the Haight. They are the philosophical descendants of hippies — professing love for pot nugs and tattoos and the Grateful Dead and Rainbow Gatherings out in the wilderness. But they’ve also evolved their own reject culture with its own genus and species: Train-core are the rail hoppers. They’ve been around as long as the country has had rails, but they now convene in Facebook groups with names like Dirty Kid Couchsurfing Coalition and Heathen Train Riders. Rubber Trampers live out of their cars and pick up plain old hitchhikers. Asking for spare change is “spanging.” If you’re new to the scene, you’ll be called an “oogle,” but you can avoid that by wearing a “skank,” a handkerchief around your neck. (“If you don’t wear one of these, you’re going to be asked to buy drugs, guaranteed,” one tells me.) The whole scene is laced with marijuana and alcohol and ’shrooms, but harder drugs can creep in, too.

They may tell you they chose the traveling life, that they love it. They say that they do it for adventure, love of nature, rejection of capitalism, and “there’s so much to do in the city; you don’t have to be in one spot,” as one puts it. But some let on that they can’t exactly find a way out. “I don’t have a résumé for shit,” says a 26-year-old named Saydee Byers, who’s been hopping trains for eight years. “It’s so easy to run back to it.”

For much of the past fews months Saydee has been living out of a van in Oakland, but she frequently heads over to San Francisco to reunite with Dirty Kids from all across the country. This life started with a hitchhiking trip to get out of the ho-hum Northwest at age 18 — and no, she didn’t have a dysfunctional childhood, she makes sure to tell you. (Mom will still pay her cellphone bill from time to time.) “I’m a free sprit,” she says. “I like to not be told what to do.”

Statistically speaking, the path for Dirty Kids isn’t promising. The death rate for homeless youth under 25 in San Francisco is ten times greater than the state’s general youth population. Talk to Dirty Kids and they’ll tell you about losing friends to overdoses or car wrecks, about addictions and being narrowly revived by an emergency Narcan injection to counteract a heroin overdose. They’ll tell you about rumors of kids getting killed and encounters with creeps: “Some guy stood over us and started trying to masturbate on top of us while we were sleeping. It was really scary,” a 19-year-old girl tells me about her stop in Los Angeles. “So we had to chase him off with an ax.”

In San Francisco, the scene has lately turned darkly tense. Last year, three young drifters were accused of shooting a tourist dead in Golden Gate Park, then doing the same to a man walking his dog in Marin County. Last month saw new violence: Two men called Pizza Steve and Evil and who lived in the park turned on a man they accused of masturbating near kids, allegedly beating and dunking him in a pond at the park entrance over three days until he died. This month, a group in the park stabbed a passing man on Hippie Hill.

Since last fall’s murder, neighborhood property owners have said they’re fed up, voicing complaints at community meetings and in letters to the mayor. Police have ramped up their enforcement of drug crimes and have instituted a controversial zero-tolerance policy toward sitting and lying down in the district. The atmosphere has led many of the usual kids to skip town; a homeless-youth outreach center has seen its daily walk-ins cut in half, and many days you can stroll the length of Haight Street without encountering a single Dirty Kid sitting down or loitering.

A few adults, however, have tried a much different approach, offering the kids a viable alternative to traveling. A 40-something piercer named Christian Calinsky is hellbent on improving the image of Dirty Kids in the Haight; he himself was a Dirty Kid from the age of 12 to 34. “What seemed best for me was this brightly lit road like Vegas, and it was homelessness instead of the dark road of adulthood,” he explains. Now on the latter path, he and a co-founder started a program aimed at converting the kids into stewards of the neighborhood, sweeping and removing graffiti in exchange for food and a room in a residential hotel — where, importantly, they can live with their dogs and partners. “It took me about two years to get unferal,” Calinsky says of his own experience. “They now know some stability and some responsibility and it’s in ’em.”

More than 60 Dirty Kids in the group have graduated and are living somewhere indoors full time. But the program hasn’t worked for everyone: In 18 months, four kids have deserted, and Calinsky has kicked out ten others for breaking the (very flexible) rules. Even those in the program aren’t all completely sold. “The inside life is too comfortably boring,” says a 19-year-old girl named Gabrielle. “There’s nothing to do.”

Matt Mimiaga is a photographer based in Oakland. His long-term projects document generational cycles of homelessness, addiction, and incarceration.

Lauren Smiley is a San Francisco journalist covering how the tech boom has changed the city.

Amy Standen is a podcast producer and radio reporter based in San Francisco.

Hopping trains and hitching rides to the Bay Area was originally published in The California Sunday Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Taking Stock

The city has been sweeping up homeless encampments and confiscating belongings. We asked youth what they carry with them.

Photographs by Rian Dundon
Text by Lauren Smiley
Audio by Amy Standen

This is a part of our photography series on youth homelessness for the SF Homeless Project. Learn about parenting in a shelter, being homeless and LGBTQ, and life on the road.

The young homeless life is, by necessity, one that spurns possessions. “Money is evil,” says Gabrielle Wullschleger, a 19-year-old girl who, until recently, slept in Golden Gate Park. “When you’re inside, you’re more materialistic.”

Americans constantly discard the detritus of their country’s wealth, and in a boomtown like today’s San Francisco, it’s easy come, easy go. Trash bins yield old laptops and cellphones to be used or sold to fencers. Panhandling can net $40 on a good day on Market Street. Urban hunter-gatherers rifle through the “as is” cartons of clothes at Goodwill, $2 a pound. The Social Security office will hook you up with an Obama Phone — a government-subsidized acknowledgment that a phone is almost essential for survival.

But alongside this abundance is a city-imposed scarcity created by policies that seize belongings from homeless while doing little to solve the problem of having nowhere to keep them. Mayor Ed Lee mandated high-profile sweeps of encampments on Division Street (after homeless were forced to go there during the Super Bowl) and in the Mission (after a homeless man was shot dead there by the police).

A recent study by University of California researchers and the Coalition on Homelessness surveyed 351 homeless people in the city, finding that 46 percent had had things confiscated, and 38 percent had had their belongings destroyed by the city. Homeless people have pressed successful suits in small-claims courts for years, and, after recent sweeps, the ACLU and others issued Lee a demand letter to stop what they called illegal confiscation of personal property. If the mayor doesn’t respond with a new policy, the groups say they’ll sue.

In June, seemingly in response, moderate San Francisco supervisor Mark Farrell introduced a ballot measure for the November election proposing that the city create a policy banning encampments so long as the city gives 24 hours’ notice and offers an alternative-housing option. Progressive supervisors are countering that the shelters are maxed out and that there’s nowhere to send the campers.

Kirk Richard, a homeless man who looks to be in his 20s, lost the Ford Ranger he’d been living in to city impoundment. “The worst thing that I lost? Probably family artwork, shiny rocks, family silver.” The city gave him the option to pick up his car, but with all his parking tickets, he decided to cut the loss. “It sucks that the possessions went missing,” Richard says. “But you know, they’re just possessions.”

At the top of the list of many young homeless people’s most prized possessions are their dogs: dogs better cared for than their owners, puppies stored in backpacks worn over stomachs BabyBjörn-style. They are companions, and especially for the young itinerant types, sometimes their only one. “It’s nice to have someone to snuggle with,” one 20-something former camper tells me about his puppy, Steely. “It’s safer, and no matter how bad your day was, he still wants love.” There’s an economic perk, too — when panhandling, you can net three times as much.

The things young people carry are a mix of necessity and comfort.
A portable cellphone charger for the times when there is no outlet. A tablet to study Linux, hoping it will lead to a gig as a systems administrator. A diary of etchings. Pokémon miniatures. A young couple’s shared earrings — one of the pair in each of their ears. Stuff is on homeless people’s minds all the time: the ebb and flow of it, the finds and the inevitable losses. A scrawl of writing on Division Street reveals a dirge for the city’s recent plundering:

NEIL, THE COPS CAME AND TOOK EVERYONE’S STUFF. SORRY.

Rian Dundon is a photographer based in Oakland. His most recent book, FAN, is a visual memoir of China’s celebrity-industrial complex. He teaches documentary photography at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Lauren Smiley is a San Francisco journalist covering how the tech boom has changed the city.

Amy Standen is a podcast producer and radio reporter based in San Francisco.

What do homeless youth carry? was originally published in The California Sunday Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At Larkin Street

Forty-eight percent of San Francisco’s homeless youth are LGBTQ. Many find their way to the city’s largest youth homeless shelter.

Photographs by Preston Gannaway
Text by Lauren Smiley
Audio by Amy Standen

This is a part of our photography series on youth homelessness for the SF Homeless Project. Learn about the things that young people carry, parenting in a shelter, and life on the road.

Isabella Black had never heard the word transgender before she arrived in San Francisco. She just knew she didn’t fit in. Not with her family in North Dakota, who embarked on raging benders every weekend. Not with the folks in Bakersfield, where she stepped off a Greyhound alone when she was 15, thinking she had arrived at the California beach, and ended up staying six years. And especially not in her biologically male body. A Google search yielded results for the Larkin Street shelters in San Francisco, where she could get a bed and help going “from boy to girl,” as she put it back then, before she learned the lingo of transitioning. Isabella hopped a bus pointed north.

As computer science and MBA grads flock to the country’s tech capital, a parallel and decades older pilgrimage of gay and transgender youth continues apace. They’re attracted to the ideal of a city where the main thoroughfare is lined with rainbow flags come June, where City Hall started issuing marriage licenses to gay couples more than a decade ago, where Harvey Milk’s image dons something as banal as the foot-roller display at Whole Foods. Yet once here, they find the gay mecca has about as much room for poor gays as it does for poor straights, which is almost none. Milk’s Castro is the province of $12 Mai Tais and $3,500 one bedrooms. The mural reading GIVE ME YOUR TIRED, YOUR POOR, YOUR HUDDLED MASSES on the city’s largest homeless shelter down near SoMa’s drag clubs and gay bars is magical thinking in a neighborhood that also houses Pinterest and Airbnb.

The result is that 29 percent of San Francisco’s homeless identify as LGBTQ — and for homeless under 25 years old, that number creeps up to 48 percent. Statistically, gay homeless differ from the overall homeless population in hopeful ways: They are younger and more likely to be homeless for the first time; they’re less likely to have drug or alcohol addictions or mental-health problems. Mostly they need assistance from people who accept them and don’t threaten to send them back to the parents who kicked them out or the group homes they fled, says Matt Bartek, program manager at Larkin Street Youth Services, the city’s biggest youth shelter. Many of them carry the wounds of social rejection and say that their sexual identity contributed to them being homeless.

Larkin provides a haven for these youth, but like all city housing in San Francisco, it’s crunched for space. Larkin has just 72 shelter beds, in which people aged 18 to 25 can stay for 120 days. When Isabella arrived two years ago, the only space was a bunk in the male bunkroom. (Larkin usually houses people according to gender identity.) Isabella was one of the lucky ones: She quickly nabbed one of the 23 rooms in an LGBTQ-specific SRO in the Castro, a place that always has a waitlist. It’s one of the only LGBTQ-specific supportive housing programs for youth in the country, and unlike other housing programs, it’s a place where Isabella could start her gender transition with the help of a case manager who connected her to government programs that provide free hormones. The people under Larkin’s umbrella — including Spencer “SPULU” Pulu (24), Darneisha Love (23), and Jayson Dowker (22) — pay 30 percent of their income to “rent,” but Larkin holds it as a savings account, returning it to them when they leave the program after two years or on their 25th birthday.

In October, Isabella and her girlfriend, Angel, married at City Hall, surrounded by their Larkin friends, a surrogate family standing in for their absent biological ones. The newlyweds don’t live together: Couples aren’t allowed in Larkin housing’s SROs. But that’s just for the interim. In two years, after Isabella ages out of her current program, she figures she and her wife will probably have to skip town — this time not because of who they are, but because of how much they make.

Isabella

Darneisha

Jayson

SPULU

Preston Gannaway is a Pulitzer Prize–winning documentary and fine-art photographer. Born and raised in North Carolina, she now lives in Oakland.

Lauren Smiley is a San Francisco journalist covering how the tech boom has changed the city.

Amy Standen is a podcast producer and radio reporter based in San Francisco.

Additional support for this project was provided by the National Press Photographers Association and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Almost half of SF’s homeless youth are LGBTQ was originally published in The California Sunday Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At War

The women fighting the Colombian government tell their stories.

Photographs by Nadège Mazars
Text by Nadja Drost

The Western Hemisphere’s oldest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), is about to lay down its arms. After three-plus years of negotiations, the FARC and the Colombian government have signed a cease-fire. It is expected to lead shortly to a peace agreement, ending a conflict that has gone on for 52 years.

When it was founded, the FARC unified peasant self-defense groups against a notoriously oppressive government and elite. By the 1980s, it had transformed into a full-fledged Marxist insurgency that relied on extortion, kidnapping, and the drug trade to finance itself. All sides in the war — guerrillas, the army, and right-wing paramilitary groups — have committed atrocities. Bombings, massacres, land mines, executions, and forced disappearances have left 220,000 dead and more than 6 million Colombians displaced.

Years of mass desertions and U.S.-backed military offensives have cut deeply into the FARC’s ranks. Today, it has an estimated 7,000 armed fighters. Women make up approximately 30 to 40 percent of the force. Carrying out the same duties as men, from cooking to combat, many women inside the FARC say it is a haven from the traditional roles expected of them in machista Colombian society. But just how egalitarian the FARC is has been a contentious subject, particularly regarding the choices women have — or don’t have — when they become pregnant. With a peace deal imminent, the women of the FARC are now preparing to step out of their clandestine lives in jungle camps and remote hamlets.

I joined the FARC at a very early age, at 14. I come from a family that has been very persecuted by the government. One night at 1 a.m., the police arrived and kicked open the door, yelling. They let my father go, but they took my uncles away. We had another uncle who was indeed a guerrilla, but not the two who were disappeared. After what happened, my dad was filled with fear.

One day, the uncle who was a guerrilla sent an invitation. He wanted to see the family. He asked me, ‘So, niece, what are you up to?’ I told him that I was about to get baptized in the Adventist church. He told me, ‘Keep in mind that the government uses the shield of religion to keep intelligence on families.’

My cousins said to me, ‘Cousin, come, there’s a party tonight.’ So we went to the party and later to a rockola, and there I came across the pastor. I said, ‘Father, what are you doing here?’ And he said, ‘And you, here?’ He invited me, ‘Sit down. Will you drink something?’ He told me, ‘You live in an area where you see guerrilla.’ And I was thinking, ‘Why does he want to tell me this?’ He said, ‘Look, the conversation we’re going to have is just between us, because I can see that you want to help yourself and your family. If you pass along information that you saw the guerrilla, in which house they stayed, that’s enough for you to earn a salary.’

I thought about what my uncle had told me. Two services later, I discovered that the priest carried two bibles — one was personal, and the other was one he shared. In the personal one there was a pistol. When I discovered this, I told my uncle. The FARC organized an operation to capture him the next Saturday. He was a military officer disguised as a priest. From then on, I liked the idea of joining the FARC.

I appear on a Most Wanted list. It makes me proud because it makes me think that my work in the FARC, without firing bullets, is affecting the enemy. I’ve helped mobilize protests and strikes. I’m a humble woman who comes from poverty, and today, look at how I’ve got the government worried.

Nom de guerre: Yurluey ∙ Age: 32
Second in command of Political Organization, Teófilo Forero Column

In 2000, on September 7, we were caught in a military ambush. Only two of us got away. I didn’t feel anything when I got burned. I noticed later because I made the effort to grab something with my left arm, and I couldn’t. It took me seven days to get to the clinic. But it was already too late, and the only thing the doctors could do was amputate my arm. I can’t carry a rifle anymore, but I do carry another weapon — a pistol.

Because I was injured, the FARC gave me the opportunity to train in communications. For seven years, I worked in the radio station, Voice of Resistance of the Southern Bloc. If we eventually reach a peace agreement, I’d like to do communications for the political party the FARC will create.

In the FARC, you get wrapped up, and everyone is like your family. Here you forget about the people who brought you into the world. To reunite with my family? I don’t know. I’d feel emotion on the one hand, but it would also make me think because I don’t know if I’ll find them dead or alive.

Nom de guerre: Mary ∙ Age: 31
Communications specialist

It’s a long story. Basically, I was studying at university in Holland, and because of the way life happens, I ended up in Colombia doing an internship. I started to see the injustices that existed in Colombia, the way that people lived, the poverty, but also the terrorism of the state. After a long time, I decided to join the FARC.

A lot of guerrilleras, when they talk about machismo, they themselves recognize that they have machismo in their head. They recognize that when they join the movement, a lot of times they’re offered opportunities to move up, to take on certain responsibilities, and they don’t take advantage of them. That’s not universal. There are women in the FARC who come up; you see women who are commanders, who are part of a front’s leadership.

When we join, we’re told, ‘Here, contraception is obligatory.’ If a woman ends up pregnant, it can become very complicated in a situation of war. It can put at risk the life of an entire unit. The problem is not in having a child. You can find guerrillas all over who have children. The problem is the context of war. War is not a scenario to have children. You can’t. Besides, how are we going to force a guerrilla to carry diapers?

Nom de guerre: Alexandra Nariño ∙ Age: 38
Delegate to the peace talks in Havana

The paramilitary entered the village where I lived, and they killed a lot of people, including the father of my daughter. Maybe they would have killed me. I left my daughter in the crib — that dawn was so sad. I picked her up, gave her a kiss, put her to bed again, and I left for the guerrilla.

The change in my life was very abrupt. I was a very feminine woman, very weak. And I could no longer put on tight pants. I had to get used to carrying two arrobas [50 pounds] on my back sometimes, walking for days and nights without rest.

When my daughter was 14, she sent me a letter, saying that I had never been there for her happiest moments or for her difficult moments. So I told the commander, and he said, ‘Call for her and spend seven days with your daughter.’ I enjoyed those seven days with her so much. I caressed her. I kissed her. We had a happy time together. We changed from being a mother and daughter to friends. Sometimes when they bring me a letter, she says: ‘Mother, when are we going to live together? When am I going to tell you so many things about myself? When are the guerrilla going to stop so that we can see each other more?’

When people ask my mom about me, she says that I was killed a long time ago. It’s less risky. Not to have any link with me, it’s better.

I’ll tell you about how one goes about having a romantic relationship in the guerrilla. If I like someone, we ask for permission to be able to have a relationship, a night together, and if the two of you see that you get along well, then, simple, you ask for authorization from the commander to be together.

She might go on a mission for a month, he might go on a mission as well for a month, but you stay together. There are always risks, and you know that in any moment, you can die. So a guerrilla lives life with great intensity, enjoying it to the maximum. I’ve had a partner for 14 years here in the organization. We’ve shared beautiful times and difficult times, do you get me?

Nom de guerre: Judy ∙ Age: 34
Dentist

Nadja Drost is a Canadian journalist based in Bogotá. She has written and produced stories for the Atavist Magazine, Maclean’s magazine, CBC Radio, Radio Ambulante, and the PBS NewsHour.

Nadège Mazars is a French photographer who has lived in Colombia since 2007. Three years ago, she began her series, The Other Colombia, about the FARC. She received an Emergency Fund grant from the Magnum Foundation and the Prince Claus Fund in 2016.

Originally published at californiasunday.com on June 23, 2016.

Women at War: Colombian Rebel Soldiers Speak Out was originally published in The California Sunday Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Originally published at californiasunday.com on June 2, 2016

Backstage

Pink Bags of Chinatown was originally published in The California Sunday Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.