Texans live on the front lines of class struggle in America. Amid massive income inequality, the lowest legal minimum wage in the country, more worker deaths than any other state, and almost no protections for tenants, we face a familiar enemy: capitalists and their representatives in government. In Texas, they tend to be particularly cruel and raw. Our state government is led by a far-right Republican Party that traffics in racist and xenophobic fearmongering and punitive policy that exploits and targets marginalized people.

In Austin, where I live, we also face well-funded, reactionary opposition from groups that are often willing to back Democrats as long as policy is to their liking. In the campaigns I’ve been a part of here, we’ve faced fierce opposition from both camps. In recent months, this opposition has grown vicious as we’ve waged a campaign to stand with our poorest neighbors against laws that criminalized their very existence.

In 1996, at the request of the Downtown Austin Alliance (a business advocacy group made up of “owners of commercial properties valued over $500,000” in downtown Austin) and Mayor Bruce Todd, a Democrat, Austin criminalized homelessness through three new city ordinances. Life on the street is nearly impossible without sleeping and lying down in public, camping (the definition of which includes simply resting with one’s belongings), and asking for money. All were made illegal by the 1996 ordinances.