 So, my name is Kenya Alcocer, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico. I arrived to the United States in 1990, and we lived in Watts. Right after the Watts riots, my mom decided to move us somewhere else. I started doing a lot of organizing in high school, mostly around sex education. The high school I went to had high percentages of teen pregnancies. Then I started organizing around access to higher education, knowing that I was undocumented. I knew I wasn't going to be able to have access to it. So, working with then assembly member, my functional fireball, we were able to pass AB 540, which gave access to higher education for undocumented students. At the same time that I was doing that, organizing my aunts who lived in the housing projects in Boyle Heights, Piqualizo, they were going through a process where they were going to demolish the projects and they were going to be evicted. And so, that's where Union de Vecinos was formed. And in 1996, my aunts started organizing against the demolition of the projects by the time that their home was about to be demolished. It was like around early 2000s. And that's when I got introduced to Union de Vecinos in the early 2000s. And in 2003, I started working for the organization, but organizing in the outskirts of the housing projects in Boyle Heights. While knocking on doors, we were talking to folks about the different issues that were happening in Boyle Heights. But folks felt that how can we fix the environment, for example, if our air is contaminated, if they haven't fixed a pothole that's in their front yard, in their streets that's been there for 20 years. So we started doing a lot of community organizing around different issues. And then by 2005, a lot of our community members started talking about the issues that they were having in their homes. And that's how we started getting involved in ensuring that folks were organizing around not just their block, because we were forming neighborhood committees, but we were also starting to organize buildings and tenants that had issues with either repairs or being harassed. And that's how Union de Vecinos started organizing. And essentially, that's when we created within Union de Vecinos our own tenants union. Later on in 2015, while we were fighting against gentrification, a lot of non-profits started coming into our neighborhood saying that they were going to build affordable housing. When the first affordable housing came up, we started noticing that none of the folks that needed that affordable housing were getting access to it. So we started questioning who was this housing for and what did they mean when they were saying affordable because it wasn't affordable for folks. So at the time in order for you to qualify for this housing, you have to be making $40,000 a year. A lot of the members of our community in Boehites were making $30,000 or below, a lot of them $15,000, and they didn't qualify for this housing. And that is when a lot of foundations, because we were attacking some of these organizations that were saying that this was affordable housing, decided to withdraw their funding from Union de Vecinos and kind of got a lot of backlash in that sense. That's when we decided that we wanted to be a organization that was not tied to the nonprofit industrial complex and that was really committed and has always been committed to the community and that our struggle was always for the poorest of the poor and that was where we were going to continue to fight from that front. At that point, that is when we call on our allies and friends from all over the city to figure out a strategy of how to keep Union de Vecinos running in Boehites. But while we were having those conversations, interestingly enough, a lot of those folks were talking about the issues that they were having in their neighborhoods, a lot of the issues that they were having as tenants. And that is when we started talking about building the Los Angeles Tenants Union. The Los Angeles Tenants Union, it's been a space where tenants are the ones determining their future and determining what is their demands and their asks and what is the things that we're fighting against. And at the very beginning, we understood that we were not just fighting as tenants, we were fighting as full human beings, not just to live in a home that is habitable, that it's affordable, but to live in a neighborhood and in a city that really responded to the needs of the poor and dispossessed. I think that we've learned a lot from the 2008 housing crisis, and we take a lot of information from that. I think that it is an incomplete fight if we're just talking about tenants in general. And we've been having these conversations a lot because during the 2008 crisis, a lot of our tenants had these corporate landlords. A lot of these tenants had these massive banks that started owning their property because they repossessed them from whoever was owning them at the time. Fighting back against those folks is very hard. And I think that that's what we've been learning through. We learned how to push back, how to make sure that the city was responding to tenants. So when now moving forward to 2020, when the pandemic hit, I think that a lot of our tenants had a lot of clarity that they weren't gonna put their livelihoods in danger for someone that had shelter, had food, had healthcare security, and that is their landlords. They didn't have any of that. So I think that the realization that we could not just say we're gonna pay a rent, but not be able to buy food and not be able to have access to healthcare was a possibility for any of them. And I think that that has risen the consciousness of a lot of tenants, not just in the city of LA, but across the country, when in April 2020, 30% of the population across the board in the United States wasn't able to pay their rent. All of them got laid off. A lot of people had to shelter and couldn't get out. So I think COVID has given us the ability to really talk about what are the rents really mean and what does debt really mean? Because tenants are being forced to pay back this debt. But if you're a consumer of a credit card, you can always file for bankruptcy. Poor people are not given that option. So for us, the fight, I think it's a fight against rent debt right now. It is a fight against massive evictions. And it is a fight where we're changing the discourse of like, what are we paying rent for? Because all these landlords can't afford to survive. We can't. So for us, it's like a continuation of a fight of reclaiming our homes. And here in the United States, it's been a hard fight because constitutionally, we don't have rights to the land as people, as in other countries in Latin America, for example, where people can take over a land and then require their government to provide resources and to provide materials for them to build their own homes. Here in the United States, we don't have that. So I think for us, it's like a question of like, how are we going to fight back to make sure that we're making a lot of these housing, public housing, for example. How are we socializing the housing in a way that helps our communities to have sustainable homes? And how do we fight? And I think that one of the things that it's very important, it's a huge component to this, is that we're no longer just talking about apartments or homes. We're also talking about our tents. A lot of our folks lost their homes and had to build a tent at a park or at a steering corner. And now we have all these outhouse folks that are fighting to maintain their right to where they're living at. A huge fight was Echo Park, for example. The Echo Park folks organized during COVID had an encampment that allowed them to be safe and they were taking care of themselves. They were taking care of each other in ways that you go to shelters and they weren't doing so. So how do we continue to fight for the right to your roof, for the right to your home? Whether that home is a mobile home, it's a tent, or it's an apartment, or it's an actual house. We need to figure out ways in which we are determining what our home is and how we can protect it. Well, I think the pandemic made it very clear. I mean, our tenants, when the pandemic hit, the first worry was we're not gonna be able to pay our rent. But after that, we started having conversations about we cannot pay our rent, but we can also afford food. We cannot, we don't have access to healthcare. The jobs in which we're working are at our forcing us to work without PPE. There was wage theft happening at the time too. Some folks had to go on strike. We had members that are also members of the 5 for 15 movement. And then we started realizing that our members are not only members of Unión de Vecinos or LATU. They're also members of 5 for 15, Ground Game LA, because they provide mutual aid work. So one of the things that I think that was important for us is to realize that we need to be an organization that is fighting for everything and not just one thing and that we need to make sure that we're connecting every single issue together because our communities don't live a single issue a day. I mean, they're not just immigrants one day. They're not just workers another day or tenants another day. They are facing harassment, whether it's at home by their landlords or whether it's at work by their employers or managers. So we need to make sure that we're fighting at every single front and that folks feel that they are protected in every single way. And it's not, I mean, your home obviously has to be the piece where you go to, but the outside world is also impacting that piece. And we need to make sure that they have a safe place not just to go to to run away from things but that they can go to to enjoy their children to enjoy their lives. So for us, the people submit it gives us the ability to look at our work not just as local. And when we talk about the tenants union, the Los Angeles tenants union has been able to influence other cities to join and build their own tenants union. So Englewood, Glendale, Pasadena, Los Angeles tenants unions has fostered that care. We're now part of Autune, which is the autonomous tenants union networks. And that is national and even international because there's folks in Canada. So one of the things that for us this summit, it's important for us to understand that the housing struggle, it's not a local struggle. It's not a California struggle. It's a national and international struggle. And we need to make sure that we are having discussions about how people are gonna have the abilities to be able to say the right to housing, the right to clean water, the right to environmental justice. It's a right that it's guaranteed for every single person in this planet, the right to food. It's not something that we're just seeking for the city of Los Angeles because it is very easy to lose things if you're the only community that it's fighting for. This is something that needs to be globalized and something that needs to be international in order for us to truly change the power dynamics of who owns the housing and who controls the housing.