On his death bed St. Francis, the saint whom San Francisco, CA is named after, told his brothers to never abandon the sacred spaces in his hometown of Assisi, Italy. He referred to the monastery of San Damiano and the Portiuncla church – “never abandon it, for that place is truly sacred. it is the house of god.” Scholar Paraclete Giants analyzes his statement; “it seemed to him that if the brothers remained attached to that bit of earth, that chapel, 10 feet long, those thatched huts, they would find there the living reminder of the poverty of the early days, and could never wander far from it” (165, Teachings of SF). The Franciscan Order founded in 1209 are Christian Monks, who disavow materialism. The preservation of values into land produce Franciscan sentimentality that applies a logic of spiritual landscaping and memory. How can we always remember what matters most ? The land keeps us spiritually grounded. The land should never forget us. Through images, stories, or in practices of love we pass on between our friends and family, we create memory ! The imminent poverty and looming homelessness of skateboarders in San Francisco isn’t explicitly voluntary like the friars, but it accounts for the ways in which we commune with each other. We share homes, and YAMO. We watch out for each other, keep one another safe, work in each other’s interests, car pool, adventure, and dedicate great amounts of time and energy to our shared practice, skateboarding, because of how much fun it is to be outside together. 

San Francisco was my brother Pablo’s chosen home, where he lived in an industrial warehouse. I ended up there after falling in love with my now dear wife Ashley shortly after he died skateboarding. She and Carlyn had organized a potluck at their house in the sunset and they kept pulling dish after dish out for the group of people who had gathered in their living room. Avocado pie, and dolmas, curry. We sat there eating, sharing stories and pictures, crying, laughing, smoking. Pablo was a brother to me, influencing me in every way that he lived, to skate, to play jazz, to take mushrooms. I wouldn’t have guessed that he would have had me living in San Francisco without him though, skating around with all of his homegirls, then trying to figure out how to make money there so I could stay. Rents and property values in The Bay area are among the highest in The United States.

People know San Francisco for its liberal history, gay culture, and homeless vs. tech millionaire income inequality crisis. San Francisco is one of the original homes of street skateboarding. Mark Gonzalez hit one of the first handrails with a boardslide in his 1991 “Video Days” part. The Justin Herman plaza (EMB) was filled with people skating the stair blocks. EMB is still skateable. When the city constructed a skatepark at the Civic Center Plaza in downtown SF in 2024, they worked with a lesser known cultural mediator to break up the enormous drug market gathering there. Skateboarders. BRUJAS threw their Anti-Prom there in partnership with Market Street Arts, who introduced us to the people at the parks department that work on permits. Aroma, emceelala, Vayda, BRUJAS, T4stemaker, and Lonald J. Bandz performed alongside skateboarders, adding to the cacophony already happening in the space. BRUJAS have been publicly supporting harm reduction since 2019, and these performances added yet another perspective on how to challenge the public dynamics of a class warzone.

The Franciscan Priests were also colonial mediators. In 1872 they petitioned the Spanish government occupying the Bay to recognize the land rights of Native Americans. The brutal colonialism of the Spanish in The Americas knew no boundaries of terror and even when the friars worked to defend Indigenous Americans, they failed to defend African people, instead offering their forced labor as a substitute. Bartolomé de Las Casas was a famous friar who petitioned against Indigenous slavery to King Ferdinand, but took a lifetime to recognize the inconsistency of his beliefs across all colonial labor subjects in the encomienda system who were exporting stolen gold to Spain.

The Bay area experienced a gold rush in the mid 1900’s spearheaded by a Mormon publicist, Samuel Brannan, founder of “The California Star.” The Mormon’s, who believe in Jesus, whose text, “The Book of Mormon” claims to hold pre-columbian information on Indigenous life and spiritual practices continued spiritually organized colonization. The European pursuit of property in The Americas, however, was inconsistent with the spiritual notion of propertyless-ness in discussion amongst the followers of St. Francis, a devout Christian. The friars once shared with the government how the settlers in San Jose’s cattle were destroying native people’s crops, and getting mixed up with native owned cattle. They created a land trust that was meant to distribute land back to the native, Ramaytush Ohlone people under conditions of conversion and citizenship.

Land return was unsuccessful, and now San Francisco is a city where people, in groups of hundreds, mill around, homeless, looking for drugs, each other, and ways to survive. Where it costs thousands of dollars to organize events safely in public space. The spiritual effort of organizing in public space, and of skateboarding, continues the rebellion against privatization that extends back to the establishment of the missions, and will never be co-opted in the interest of hiding violence and dispossession.

We know St. Francis is sitting in the civic center right now with nothing to his name, not even sainthood. He’s only got a skateboard ! In the St. Francis collection BRUJAS interrogates the spiritual assignment of land, prompted by the name of the legendary city of “San Francisco” in California. Prompted by the humble, monastic, all brown fashion of The Franciscan order of the catholic church who mediated the violence of the Spanish missions in the interest of converting, or “saving” their subjects. Prompted by the psychological techniques of warfare. Those psychological techniques of ownership historically emerging from the so-called “promise land.” The idea that joins spiritual labor and land occupation. Those techniques at play in every urban American city and neo-colonial outpost of imperial power. 

The immaterial perspective of St. Francis’s teachings demands the question of whether or not the application of spiritual meaning to land supports the cycle of material attachment, of displacement, of death and colonization. Is the land a spiritual manifestation or a material one ? And if both, then the land holds the same dilemma as the body, and must be considered life as well, self-determining, able to name itself, and free !

What would relinquishing our attachment to land look like, how would it be surrendered, and what would that do to support those who have been displaced, have lost their lives, and are fighting to stop genocide. This surrender we ask not only of the enemy, but of ourselves. How do we free the Lower East Side, how do we Free Palestine, The Bay Area, and any other land that has been tortured by the psychological and material warfare of ownership. 

Brown is a mixture of yellow, red, and blue, it signals humility, voluntary poverty, living without property, closeness with earth, communism, service to good and to god, and the legacy of St. Francis.

Life is inseparable from land, regardless of the architectural and technological techniques that work to remove us from it. All life is holy, as is all land, and may all people in any practice of self awareness and spiritual practice hold the space to do so. There is no representation needed of this truth, or particular place where it rings truer, but we hope that the colors of the earth, wherever they are worn, remind us. 

Respectfully in loving memory to all those we have lost, we will never forget how they lived ! 

BRUJAS