Street Roots • July 29-August 4, 2016
News
Page 12
20,000 people, live there. It’s this little
village that was way out of the loop. The
folks who were occupying what looked like a
small housing development or condo
development. The local politics seemed
pretty right wing. The local city council
supported the PP (Partido Popular), the
right wing party that was in power
nationally. So the local city council had zero
sympathy and were not interested at all in
what the occupiers were doing and were
really upset with the occupiers. This
particular group of occupiers were these
working-class women, for the most part it
was women.
They let themselves in and they brought
their families into this space. What’s
interesting about these places is the power
and the plumbing was still connected
because these were developments that were
meant to be occupied.
The local city council, they cut the power,
and that didn’t get the folks out. And then
they cut the water and that still didn’t get
the folks out. They were living in
increasingly difficult situations. But the
dignity of these folks - these young
mothers were determined to give their
children, their families, a life that was sort
of a proper, middle-class kind of life.
They were keeping these abandoned,
unoccupied buildings incredibly clean. They
had adopted this place as their home and
they really treated it like their home. No
matter how bad the situation got, no matter
what the city council threw at them, they
were still determined to live as normal a life
as they could.
They were interested in having us film
them. At a certain point we said, “What do
you want to do when we turn the cameras
on? It’s totally up to you.” They said, “Why
don’t you film us cleaning the house?” We
just started filming them as they’re
sweeping, tidying up the furniture and
propping up the pillows on the beds. They
wanted the world to see them as normal
people, good mothers, good housekeepers
living normal lives in this extraordinary
situation. It was really moving. It was
beautiful in this way.
IM A G E C O U R T E S Y O F B IL L B R O W N A N D S A B IN E G R U F F A T
Spanish housing activists from the documentary “Segregation Nation. ” The film will be screened Aug. 2 a t the N W Film Festival.
FILM, from page 7
we all share as citizens in terms of the right
to housing and the right to public space. It
was a very different scene in Spain because
of that. It did make me despair a little bit
about the United States and the much more
militaristic, much more aggressive,
response to activists in this country.
J.P.: Is there anyone standing up for the
homeless there? Anyone in the nonprofit, for-
profit or public sectors? Do they have any
advocates on their side?
S.G.: There’s an organization called PAH,
Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca.
It’s a nonprofit, a really great network of
activists across Spain. There would be a
PAH office in all the different cities. And
they worked together to help people who
were having issues with banks. We
interviewed quite a few of the network of
PAH representatives in the film. They
would look at people’s mortgage contracts
and say “The bank is not allowed to do
this.” They had lawyers on hand that people
could meet with. They had a lot of
documentation to help people. The banks
were sometimes committing fraud but also
giving them documents that were illegal,
forcing them to make payments that they
weren’t necessarily required to make.
These lawyers were on hand to kind of fight
back, to fight with the banks about
individual mortgages. That was very helpful.
They would also be the ones that would
stage the sit-ins at the evictions.
J.P.: Were there any particular fam ily or
individual stories that stuck out to you as
being a particularly egregious injustice when
they lost their home?
S.G.: When we were in Seville in the
southern part of Spain, some of the
activists we were working with let us know
about a little village that was maybe 50
kilometers away called Bollullos. I don’t
know how many people, maybe 10,000,
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