Funeral for Santa Lucas: Mother, Evicted Tenant

Dear Friends and Comrades,

 

With broken hearts, we share that a member of our community, Santa Lucas, passed away on Monday, September 13, 2021, two months after she and her 22 year old daughter and caretaker Iris Jimenez were evicted from their home in the Hermon neighborhood of Los Angeles.

 

The night before the Sheriff's were scheduled to arrive to pull Santa and Iris out of their home and push them onto the streets, Santa was transported to the hospital with the assistance of members of the tenants union. After being subjected to the violence of eviction (by a landlord who spent years harassing Iris and Santa and refusing to conduct repairs), Santa was then subjected to the violence of medical neglect and racism. She was transferred from Glendale Adventist Hospital to Chandler Convalescent Hospital in Glendale, CA, where no nurse was available to speak her language, and where her pleas for medical help addressing complications with her paracentesis went unanswered. Her condition deteriorated so severely that she barely recognized Iris.

 

Iris advocated tirelessly for her mom during this period. She was able to advocate for a change to a different long term care facility in Los Feliz, and Santa appeared to be doing better. However, the morning of Monday, September 13th, Iris was informed that her mom had been taken back to the hospital again for an infection, and that she had died that morning of cardiac arrest. The exact circumstances of Santa's death remain shrouded in mystery for Iris, who has struggled to obtain complete copies of Santa's medical records.

 

We are calling on our community again to support Iris in raising funds for her mother's funeral, and to hire an attorney to investigate Santa's death and pursue any legal action Iris is entitled to. Santa deserves to be remembered with dignity, and Iris deserves reparations for the violence inflicted against her and her mother. Back in July, we wrote the following words asking for financial support for Iris and Santa in the wake of their displacement. Now, in the wake of Santa's death, these words continue to ring true:

 

 

"With the help and solidarity of NELo members, Iris has been tirelessly looking for resources to assist her and her disabled mother with housing, social services, and medical treatment, TO NO AVAIL. They have only been met with a vast and confusing bureaucracy that has refused to help them at every turn. ALL state and local institutions, who receive tens of millions of tax-payer money every year to purportedly "serve" the most vulnerable among us, have somehow been unable to provide the urgent, lifesaving support this 22 year old woman and her disabled mother need to survive. It is up to their community, and the power we possess as a collective, to provide the material support they need."

 

 

 

Of course, not only did the bureaucracy of government agencies and non-profits fail to help Iris and Santa stay together, and housed, and healthy, those same institutions actively participated in the violence of their eviction and of Santa's mistreatment and death. This is what we mean when we say in the tenants union that eviction = death.

 

 

 

While state violence and the callous, intentional neglect of our communities continues to cause the untimely deaths of our cherished family members, we will continue to fight for life. We fight not just for our survival, but to live out our lives fully and with dignity. Help Iris fight for her life and her future by donating what you can.

 

 

 

Solidarity.