 I'll be reading from a new book, but I'm not reading a new poem because there was no other poem I could read today other than the poem honoring Juana Briones, the mother of San Francisco. And Francisco Herrera tells me that she is the mother of his campaign. So I would like you all to join me in calling down her spirit today because we're taking back San Francisco. Juana Briones was an indigenous woman. She was a Mexican. What little information you do come across about her calls her Hispanic, but she was born in Santa Cruz, which was of course Mexico before they invaded, right? She was basically the first woman at least in recorded history to own property in San Francisco. And all of Washington Square Park was her ranch. But that's not what's really significant about her. That's not what makes her the mother of San Francisco. She was a healer. She was a humanitarian. She did incredible things. She was the first woman to divorce her husband. First woman in the state of California and one of only three in the country who divorced their husband for abuse. So she is a champion to us on many, many, many different levels. So hopefully the poem conveys the rest about her that I would like to share with you. Ode to Juana Briones. They say it was her hands wide and brown. The hands of Maria Juana de la Trinidad Briones y Tapia Miranda. The magic they say was in those hands. She held out to a Polinaria Miranda that caresses his strong soldiers' shoulders and needed the bread. She fed him. With hands that cradled his manhood and his babies, all 11 of them. Yes, they say it was Juana Briones' kind Mexican mestizo hands with just a tinge of African in them. The veins of hard-earned love running through them, wide and brown. And it had to have been them that refused him after every beating that taught her the art of self-preservation and defense that stopped the bleeding, that carried the children on her back as she went from house to house healing the sick, mending them to mend herself, perfecting the art of laying on of hands, feeding, singing to them, bringing forth their babies in a baptism of blood that honored them and sanctified her. Hands that followed her mother's precise instructions practiced her art of knowing. The curanderas, mysteries, made her strong enough to say no more to him, to work the courts and divorce him unheard of in 1837. Impossible for an illiterate mestizo, they claimed. A mere woman of the earth to do this. But she did. Things that milked the cows, planted row after row of maize, just as her mother, Sidoro, had taught her to do, that stitched tiny beads onto her baby's dresses in the muted light of evening. But it was her indigenous, inbred genius and her raging, once enslaved spirit. Her Mexican sense of serving that made her need to know them, feed them. The dock hands, fresh off the boat, starving, sickly beaten. She harbored them, healed their pock-marred bodies, rinsed the rot from their scurvyed mouth, accepted not one cent from them. And it was her ancient knowing, her ancestral DNA that returned her to the old ways, made her walk softly among them, sway like them, that made her dawn her handmade moccasins and walk for miles just to learn from them. And it had to have been the Indian in her that gave her legs of lead to stand her ground when they tried to take her land, that held her up so she could endure the loss of four of her children within one year. It must have been her need to sing and chant that prompted her to adopt little Cecilia Kowala adding yet one more to her ample flock. And surely it was that unbent back that made her flee the madness brought to her family by the U.S. that fought their attempted theft of her land and left. Bought Rancho La Purisma Concepcion in Los Altos from the grand old Oloni, Gorgonia and his son Jose Ramon. Maria Juana de la Trinidad Etapia Briones, the woman who embodied a continent and shaped a culture of generosity in this city of love. A monument of a woman, they said, a woman of black, brown blood and well-worn man-woman hands, leader of the enslaved, healer of the sick, harbor of the hated, food-growing woman, fierce mother woman, life-giving woman, bowing down to no man woman. Juana Briones claimed it all as her own, made them mark her name upon their maps. Playa Juana Briones, a partera who delivered them all with her wide, brown mestizo hands. Thank you.