• ARCHIVE COLLECTIVE

AFTER ECHO PARK LAKE ARCHIVE COLLECTIVE

The After Echo Park Lake Archive Collective formed as a project joining university and movement-based scholars to collectively archive an organized encampment community that lived at Echo Park Lake from Fall 2018 until March 2021. The archive’s intent is to make historical record of this community’s practice of collective organization from beginning to end and beyond, documenting the politics, culture, and economy of people whose own histories are excluded from the official record.

FEATURED PUBLICATIONS

TENTS AND TENANTS: After Echo Park Lake

by the After Echo Park Lake Archive Collective via UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy

It’s Only Possible To Fail If We Forget

by Annie Powers via The Skid Row ArtsZine

MEMBERS OF THE COLLECTIVE

  • Ayman Ahmed
    Ayman is an unhoused organizer who played a pivotal role developing the community at Echo Park Lake, including the design of formal infrastructure, harm reduction and mutual aid systems, and political strategy. He was a key theorist, outlining the cultural and political ambitions of the encampment, placing it within a longer history of struggle over urban land.
  • Emma Christie
    Emma is a graduate student in Social Welfare and Public Policy at UCLA. She believes in total prison abolition and her current research uses mixed methods to trace the experiences of people who die in police custody in Southern California.
  • Amanda Darouie
    Amanda is a community member living in so-called Echo Park. She organizes to build bridges between housed and unhoused neighbors in order to alleviate the precarity of living outside. Inspired to interrogate the systems that perpetuate scarcity and resist the power of money over life, she created Echo Park Mutual Aid to support those most affected by the volatility of gentrification.
  • Lloyd Edward
    Lloyd is the Work Therapy Coordinator for The Midnight Mission in Los Angeles. As a former unhoused resident and organizer for Street Watch LA, Lloyd assisted in organizing community events on behalf of the unhoused. He has also been involved in community outreach to encampment residents and assisted in providing the unhoused with legal aid information and essential resources.
  • Greer Little
    Greer is an undergraduate student in Anthropology at UCLA and is an organizer with Echo Park Mutual Aid and the Los Angeles Tenants Union. Her scholarship focuses on visions for community, care, and belonging among Black unhoused neighbors within the neighborhoods of Los Feliz, Silverlake, and Echo Park.
  • Kristy Lovich
    Kristy is the Manager of Community Programs and Research with the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. She is also an artist and cultural organizer whose practice takes aim at complicit institutions and networks of political power that effectively create, commodify, and criminalize homelessness.
  • Jed Parriott
    Jed is an artist and community organizer living in Los Angeles. Jed has organized to bring unhoused and housed tenants together in solidarity against systems of criminalization and displacement, and to build power in the fight for housing as a human right.
  • Annie Powers
    Annie is a doctoral student in History at UCLA who studies the organized political movements of unhoused people in the United States. She is also an organizer with Union de Vecinos, the Eastside Local of the Los Angeles Tenants Union.
  • Adrian "WallSt" Segura
    WallSt is an organizer with Echo Park Mutual Aid. As a resident of the Echo Park Lake encampment, he played a lead role in organizing the community’s resistance to police violence and eviction.
  • William Sens, Jr.
    Will is an artist and community organizer living in Los Angeles. He has spent six cumulative years living on the streets, volunteering as an activist for Unhoused Tenants Against Carceral Housing, Street Watch LA, Echo Park Rising, Food Not Bombs, and Earth First.
  • Sonja Verdugo
    Sonja is an organizer with Ground Game LA, working for labor and housing justice and equality for all. She brings her experience as someone who has lived on the streets and in temporary hotels to advocate fiercely for others, and fight for real systemic change that will improve the quality of life for unhoused people.
  • Leonardo Vilchis-Zarate
    Leonardo is a PhD student in Chicana, Chicano, and Central American Studies Program at UCLA. Leonardo is a tenant organizer and researcher and his research looks at the legacy of late 20th century neoliberalism, namely the demolition of public housing, and its relationship to the present crisis for housed and unhoused tenants.