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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Honkala's passion is personal. A striking woman with long black hair, high cheekbones and a manner that alternates between goofy weariness and fiery intensity, she's spent much of her life on welfare and parts of it homeless. She grew up poor, with a stepfather who sexually abused her. Her first husband was a heroin addict, and the marriage lasted a month -- long enough for her to get pregnant with her eldest son. When she gave birth to Mark Webber, now an up-and-coming indie film actor, she was 17 and living in her car.
Honkala and her son were on public assistance for much of his childhood. She managed to complete three years at the University of Minnesota, where she was studying to be a teacher, but during her time there, money problems rendered them homeless again. It was nine months before they had a permanent place to live, thanks to a marriage that brought her to Philadelphia. That marriage ended, too, but Honkala stayed in Philadelphia, where in 1991 she founded the Kensington Welfare Rights Union. Today she lives in a small house in Philadelphia with her 2-year-old son Guillermo.
Based in the poorest section of the city, KWRU is at once radical and practical, built around the conviction that since people have a right to a home, they have a right to seize housing if the government can't or won't provide it. To that end, Honkala has built tent cities and moved homeless families into abandoned buildings. KWRU operates four "Human Rights Houses," where homeless people who've enlisted in her movement can stay while they search for permanent places to live. The group posts fliers at welfare offices and other places where poor people gather. Honkala claims that KWRU has helped over 500 people find housing since its inception. The group gets no public funding, relying on volunteer work and private donations. At one point, she danced topless to finance it.
In his 1997 book "Myth of the Welfare Queen," journalist David Zucchino followed Honkala and another welfare mother for a year. He begins her story at a vacant lot where a factory called Quaker Lace had burned down and where Honkala had created an encampment housing dozens of people. "Cheri, a young welfare mother herself, was a woman who loved to create dramatic and politically charged spectacles," he wrote. "That summer she was at war with society over its treatment of the poor. She sought to dramatize the city, state and federal policies that had set destitute people adrift. The lot Quaker Lace was to be Cheri's boldest tableau yet. She envisioned a small city of the poor rising from the fire's ashes, populated by struggling welfare mothers like Mariluz and Elba, whose meager lives would be on public display."
In addition to the tent cities, Honkala has staged innumerable marches and sit-ins throughout the country, getting arrested more than 80 times in the process. In 2000, she led several thousand people on an un-permitted march against the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. With mothers pushing strollers and people in wheelchairs at the front of the demonstration, the police chose not to beat it back. She's hoping the same thing happens this year in New York, but post-9/11, the police are in a less accommodating mood.
In addition to KWRU, Honkala heads the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, a coalition of anti-poverty groups across the continent. She was recently invited to Quito, Ecuador, for the Americas Social Forum, an international progressive conference where organizers had her speak in front of a giant banner reading "Fuck You Bush." Despite the travel, activism for her is devoid of glamour. It's grinding work in the ugliest parts of America, done with the conviction that the day will come when such work will no longer be necessary.
"We're focused on the basic necessities of life -- who took them away and how to get them back," says Honkala. "Someday we'll live in a world where we won't have to go to marches. We can play with our kids, we can decorate our homes, because we'll have homes."
Right now, she and a dozen or so of her followers are embarked on a six-week-long pilgrimage called March For Our Lives through New Jersey. Initially, they were going to erect tent cities -- they call them "Bushvilles," a reference to the Hoovervilles of the Depression -- on the outskirts of New York, where they could both house and mobilize the area's poorest people in preparation for the Republican Convention.
This year, though, police foiled her plan by destroying the Bushvilles as soon as the group could set them up. So Honkala, who's no stranger to long marches, decided to take the campaign on the road, creating a mobile Bushville that would camp out in a different town every night. Most days her group, wearing matching white T-shirts, walks 20 miles through the grimmer precincts of New Jersey. Each night they show up on the doorsteps of churches, asking for a place to sleep. Sometimes they camp outside. Once in a while they'll rent two rooms at a seedy motel, one for men and one for women. They pool their food stamps to buy sliced bread and cold cuts and subsist on a diet of sandwiches and soda.
