Ode to a beautiful son bullied to death
Jose Emiliano Zambrano, 14, committed suicide because he was bullied for being houseless and without a mama
by Lisa ‘Tiny’ Gray-Garcia
José yo se (I know)
The pain of tryna fit in
Tryna be coo
Just tryna b left alone
Jose I know
houseless wit my mama in a shelter
On the street
In a tent
Cuz we had no money to eat and pay the rent
Jose yo se I know
those hateful words
How they come at yu
Until u r hiding in a corner whispering I don’t know what to do
– excerpt from “Para Jose: a Loveuary for a Good Sun” by Tiny
I peered out from under the bleachers to make sure no one was coming. I only hid in them because they said they were gonna “kill the homeless kid.” The homeless kid was me and they were a small cru of 10-year-olds who met me every day at the school entrance to bully me with a daily slow torture game because they found out me and my mama were houseless and sleeping in our car.
When I heard the tragic story of Jose Emiliano Zamora, who committed suicide because he had been bullied at his high school in Santa Clara for being houseless, staying in a shelter and having no mama, I was overwhelmed with grief for him and all the childhood victims of homelessness and bullying.
“My son was a nice boy. He didn’t deserve this,” said Jose’s father to a news reporter after his tragic death. Jose was a 14-year-old child. This was his first year at Santa Clara High School. He was involved in sports and had tried to fit in like all the kids, but he was mercilessly bullied when his peers and teammates found out he was houseless and lived in a shelter with his father..
“Don’t talk to the bums.”
“Don’t look at the homeless people.”
“They are all bums and drug dealers.”
Over 38% of children in Oakland Unified School District and 53% of children in San Francisco Unified are houseless or housing insecure, and every day more families with children join those ranks – and yet how is homelessness taught to teachers and students? It’s rarely, if ever, taught at all.
Conversely in this krapitaLOST system, we ARE taught very young, overtly and covertly through media, culture and our own families, that poor people are somehow less than. And if we ourselves are poor or houseless, we should be ashamed of our poverty and we should never talk about it or name our family’s struggle to have enough money to eat, to pay rent, to stay healthy or to live. Concurrently, we are taught that if we don’t have enough to pay for these things, there is inherently something wrong with us.
Children are warned to avoid “those people” – “the homeless,” “the bums” – because we are viewed as crazy, sick, or dangerous and because our lives are exposed to the world. Because as I often teach, as houseless people, we don’t have the privilege of privacy. We struggle with the violence of exposure; in other words, our entire lives, belongings and struggles are exposed to the world, whereas housed people can live the exact same broken lives as us but under the cover of a roof. This general sense of hate and disrespect is reflected by the state which also actively legislates against, attacks, harasses, targets, arrests and sweeps houseless humans like we are trash, which oftentimes leads to our death.
At the same time we are taught that people who accumulate, hoard and collect millions, billions and even trillions of bloodstained dollars, stolen land and luxury vehicles, to name a few of the hoarded items, are successful, powerful, beautiful and famous.
In this CONfusing climate of hate, how can you blame children, who learn everything from us adults, for believing that poverty and homelessness are bad.
“We need to teach our children love,” said one of the parents of a child who had been viciously bullied at the same high school as Jose at a beautiful ceremony in front of Santa Clara High School held for Jose last week.
“Jose’s life mattered, like all of our children’s lives matter,” said Laurie Valdez, an anti-poLice terror warrior, advocate and Shero and survivor of family poLice terror.
Then we have the sad sick world of violence and bullying which whether we like to admit it or not is also webbed into our culture and enabled through the age grade separated factory schools with hundreds of children left to their own mob rules, evolutionary devices, barely eldered or properly supervised and never taught love.
As a survivor of bullying due to my homelessness, it is one of the reasons I was afraid to go to school as a houseless child, but it is also what helped me tell my story. I was afraid and suicidal and thanks to being able to tell my mama everything and learning very young that there is something wrong with the system, not with us, for being poor, I resolved one day to tell my story, create curriculum and teach children the truth about poverty and homelessness. That’s why I launched a training on homelessness and poverty for classrooms and wrote the children’s books about me and my family’s experience, with protagonists who are displaced, evicted and houseless like “When Mama and Me Lived Outside,” which i believe should be in every classroom and school library in the US.
Jose should still be here. He was a good son who was just trying to fit in, but how can you fit into something that wants you out.
Homelessness isn’t going away. In fact, more children are ending up on the streets with their parents due to the greed of scamlords and worsening tech-based, gentrification-happy economy. It is urgent that we include curriculum on homelessness in schools. It is urgent that we bring more elders onto these behemoth campuses.
Children reflect the world, and the world is a more violent and dangerous place than ever. We don’t need to meet violence with more carceral “solutions” like killer poLice and punitive laws. We need to meet it with love, love like we teach our youth at Deecolonize Academy, a liberation school for houseless Indigenous children located on the land at Homefulness, love like all children have. And the reality is you don’t have to teach a child love; you just need to make it safe enough for them to show it to each other.
“I am so sorry that happened to you. I understand. I have experienced homelessness and have my own poverty story. We will always remember and pray for you. Love, Jayla.” All of our students at Deecolonize Academy, many of whom have survived bullying and/or homelessness themselves, wrote letters to Jose and his family expressing their love and sorrow that he went through that pain.
I stayed in those bleachers all day for fear of more hate and violent bullying. The next day I didn’t go back to school because our car-home was towed and i had to drop out of school to help work for my family. But that terror never left my body and I was forever afraid of school.
Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia, aka “povertyskola,” is a poet and teacher and the formerly houseless, incarcerated daughter of Dee and mama of Tiburcio, author of “Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America” and many more and co-founder of Homefulness, a homeless people’s solution to homelessness. Reach her at www.lisatinygraygarcia.com or @povertyskola on Twitter/X.
