The Clenched Fist

In six months of attempting to rally passengers behind “Fare-Strike Thursdays,” Dipti Baranwal had grown used to the drivers’ reactions: a nod of the head, a sidelong wink, a shout of disapproval, a threat to call the cops. But never until this balmy afternoon at Rosemead and Crenshaw had the 21-year-old organizer for the pugnacious Bus Riders Union been caught like a mouse in a trap. “Get off the bus!” the driver shrieked. Baranwal’s comrade, Olivia Udovic, had already slipped onto the bus and begun announcing that the union was staging its weekly no-pay protest. As in other BRU demonstrations, Baranwal and Udovic were not only trying to pressure the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to buy more buses for its often-decrepit fleet. They were proselytizing. They were trying to shape L.A.’s mostly poor, working-class and minority bus riders into a militant constituency to overturn what they call the MTA’s “transit racism.”

Even had Baranwal been willing to back off just then, the driver’s off-the-bus order would have been impossible to obey because he had slammed the 310’s doors shut on the left side of her body and wouldn’t let go. Her leg and most of an arm dangled inside the bus, while the rest of her remained on the curb. As she struggled amid the shouting, half-swallowed by the bus’ door, Baranwal’s bright yellow T-shirt was also shouting the BRU’s populist slogan--No Somos Sardinas! Emblazoned across it was an open-topped view of a bus rolled up like a sardine can, revealing tightly packed riders raising fists of revolt.

Half a minute went by, and the driver still hadn’t released Baranwal. Then he opened the door just enough to let go of her limbs, slammed it shut and revved up the engine to take off. He’d decided to strand not only the BRU demonstrators but a half-dozen paying patrons who had been waiting for this uptown Crenshaw district bus for 20 minutes. Martin Hernandez, a full-time BRU organizer with a background in performance art, bounded in front of the 310’s gargantuan windshield and flashed his valid MTA bus pass. Chris Jones, a high school sophomore recently recruited to the BRU’s cause, jotted down the driver’s badge number. “I’m writing the MTA about that!”

The driver slammed the brakes, opened the door, and the three remaining BRU activists climbed on board. Over the next few hours, Baranwal, Udovic, Hernandez and Jones would approach their potential constituents with an unfailing concern and infinite patience so different from the persona the BRU displays at monthly MTA meetings. There, members abandon all gentleness: They are doctrinaire, dour, obstreperous and seething, speaking their brand of truth to the hated MTA board.

“Obviously, when we’re talking to riders, they’re the people who are suffering, who are going to push the organization forward,” Udovic said. “And all of us, whether we’re transit-dependent or not, have a lot of reasons to have a lot of anger at the MTA. The MTA are the people who are causing our members to suffer.”

The BRU, which claims 3,000 members, was formed eight years ago by people who saw L.A.’s woeful public bus service and gleaming subway construction plans as an obscene symbol of the gulf dividing L.A.’s poor and affluent. That view was endlessly reinforced during the recent MTA strike by scenes of stranded nannies, janitors, security guards, fast-food cashiers and garment workers--the bus system’s main constituency.

Early on, the union sued the MTA, demanding better bus service on civil-rights grounds. The suit forced the agency into a 1996 federal court consent decree in which the MTA agreed to incrementally reduce overcrowding and improve service, which led to the largest expansion of its bus fleet in two decades. The 10-year consent decree also gave the Bus Riders Union legal standing as the representative of the agency’s riders--but that only served to make the activists even angrier: The MTA continued insisting it could not afford nor was legally bound to comply with the bus expansion deal--even though it had signed the consent decree to prevent the union’s lawsuit from going to trial.

It was 2:30 p.m. when the northbound 310 swallowed Baranwal. The bus was not as overcrowded as it would be at rush hour. The personalities in transit--old radicals and young evangelists, domestic workers and aspiring auto mechanics, proper matrons and smart-aleck teenagers--were given room enough to breathe. As Baranwal made her way through, some passengers greeted her as indignantly as the driver had, but it was undeniable: her altercation with the driver had captured the bus riders’ attention.

Now Baranwal made her pitch. She handed out fare-strike cards bearing the same cartoon as her T-shirt: fists pumping through the roof of the sardine-can bus. So, she asked two passengers, Jasmine Garrison and John Johnson: What do you guys think about the MTA’s service?

“This bus is terrible,” Garrison said. “There’s writing all over the place, the windows are all broken. The seats are all torn down.”

“And you can hear the rattling,” Baranwal said helpfully. “You know, if your car was making that kind of noise, you wouldn’t even be able to drive it.”

On Route 207 Southbound

To ride this Western Avenue bus was to feel its pain and to know that the MTA had fallen short of the consent decree. Two years ago, when a federal court found that the MTA was in massive violation of its ’96 agreement to reduce the scores of bus riders left standing at rush hour, the agency voted to buy 2,095 replacement buses through 2004. But a year later, in what it insisted was an effort to protect its power to set transit priorities, the MTA appealed U.S. District Judge Terry Hatter’s order to immediately purchase 248 buses. The appeal is still pending.

On the 207 southbound, the chattering of the windows set your teeth grinding; the shuddering of its loosened bolts, after a few blocks, caused friction in sore joints. As the 207 lumbered over cracks and bumps in the road, your lower vertebrae absorbed the impact that the bus’ shocks could no longer take upon themselves. There was surrender in the postures of the passengers, only some of it attributable to their exhaustion. Standing or seated, their forms were a chiropractor’s dream: sprawled, hunched, slumped, drooped, sunken, jostled, semi-collapsed. The bus’ windows, grimed over with dust and scratches and graffiti, dulled the view of the streets outside, while the din of the interior made conversation a burden best abandoned after a few hellos.

It is against this backdrop that the Bus Riders Union rages. In its worldview, the MTA’s sacrifice of its bus system on the altar of the multibillion-dollar Red Line and other rail projects is part of a larger Orwellian nightmare where politicians of all ethnicities are revealed as front-people doing the bidding of corporations and contractors; where immigrants from Third World countries are oppressed by the same Yankee imperialism that caused many of them to flee their homelands; where a broken-down bus becomes a symbol of the rulers’ desire to degrade the poor.

Perhaps, if the MTA should suddenly buy twice the number of new buses that the federal court has demanded, restore express routes in areas that have been cut off and add others, denounce the extension of the Blue Line into Pasadena and make an abject apology for the entire Red Line program and all its former profligacies--perhaps, then, the Bus Riders might consider unclenching their fists.

“Five years ago,” BRU founder Eric Mann is saying, “we were a figment of our own imagination, a dream in our own eyes.”

Then, as now, union activists were bodily removed from MTA meetings as they hurled damnation at the MTA board. But with the consent decree, Mann and his comrades became more than militant scourges. They became the court-appointed equivalent of legal guardians for the entire MTA ridership until 2006.

The union’s civil-rights lawsuit, filed with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, had accused the MTA of giving “separate but unequal” treatment to the mostly minority bus riders by bleeding the bus system of money to build the rail system. Rather than risk trial, the MTA gave the activists a distinct legal standing. In the same way the ACLU sued Los Angeles County over jail overcrowding and won the legal right to monitor conditions, the BRU became a player.

But don’t ask Mann to abandon the inflammatory rhetoric of the outcast. He continues to warn of battles in the street, not just the courtroom. Take the monthly bus pass. The MTA had been set to abolish it, but the consent decree saved it. “Now,” Mann observes with some satisfaction, “[if] they try to raise the monthly bus fare by a few dollars, they know . . . all hell is going to break loose.”

If Mann and his BRU comrades were secretly worried that legitimation by the courts might take the wind out of their radical sails, allowing them to get what they demanded through legal means, the MTA has put such fears to rest. In the MTA, the BRU has chosen an adversary whose institutional arrogance and poor judgment can always be relied upon. Here is an organization that built an opulent marble-lined $480-million headquarters for itself worthy of a Fortune 500 corporation while its bus service was going down the drain; which amassed billions of dollars in debt to pursue a scandal-plagued, truncated rail system; which last year flouted the federal court’s mandate so brazenly that even Judge Hatter cautioned the MTA about acting like “former segregationists” of the South.

During the recent strike by MTA drivers, the BRU activists picketed alongside bus drivers. But in the political realm they seem more comfortable with enemies, which they can find even among seemingly natural political allies. At a recent speech by Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader, for example, union members shouted out slogans questioning his commitment to fight racism and larded down the Q&A; session with their agenda until many in the audience were grumbling against them. When the BRU determined that mayoral candidate Antonio Villaraigosa, the former Assembly speaker, had departed from his anti-rail orthodoxy, they began taunting him at public appearances.

This passion grew out of the death of a plant that manufactured cars.

The Cornell-educated Mann had worked at General Motors’ Camaro assembly plant in Van Nuys during the ‘80s, and when the auto manufacturer decided to shut it down, a coalition that also included actor Ed Asner and U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) fought unsuccessfully to keep it open. The coalition survived and changed its focus to industrial pollution, particularly in poor neighborhoods, a syndrome the left calls “environmental racism.” The center evolved into the broader Labor/Community Strategy Center. One of the projects the center spun off in 1992 was the Bus Riders Union.

Despite the union’s small membership, Mann believes that at least 40,000 passengers “identify” with the group, allowing him to claim BRU representation for nearly 10% of the systems’ 450,000 riders. For funding, the Strategy Center and union have relied not so much on dues (some members pay only a dollar) as on grants from foundations such as Nathan Cummings, Jesse Smith Noyes and the Rockefeller. Contributions totaled $881,000 in 1998.

There are certainly some self-defined socialists among BRU’s leaders, but Mann, who drew a salary of $88,000 in 1998, refuses to characterize the union that way. It is not anti-capitalist, he says, merely “anti-corporate. There are many points of view, but all [our members] see the privatization of public life and the profit motive as the greatest obstacle” to having government serve the masses instead of an economic elite.”

The anger that wells from this movement comes from the heart of Mann. It is what sets him apart from other social activists. You can hear it in his vow to “train organizers and get the poor to fight,” his ready explanation for “why I hate liberals,” his branding of the MTA’s policies as “the most grotesque, race-based discrimination in an urban center right now probably in the U.S.” Complex, self-righteous, closely reasoned yet free of apparent doubt, Mann does not limit himself to critiquing L.A.’s broken-down buses. Sit down with him at a bar and he’ll connect the dots of oppression, from the MTA to the larger class struggle in the U.S., to the economic hegemony of the International Money Fund and World Trade Organization to low-wage factories in Mexico, to U.S. support of torture in Latin America.

This struggle, Mann tells you, isn’t the ‘60s, when the enemy was entrenched white males. This is a struggle against L.A.’s “multiracial corporate class.” Politicians of all ethnicities and both genders are culpable, he says. “From [Mayor Richard] Riordan, who says he’s trying to run the city like a business, from [MTA board members] Yvonne Brathwaite Burke [an African American] to Gloria Molina [a Latina], the train is a symbol of personal power.” What the union wants to tell the poor riders it tries to organize is that by refusing to upgrade bus service, the MTA has reinforced second-class citizenship and sown the seeds of self-hatred. “We’re trying to get poor people to realize that when [the powers that be] say the bus is dirty, they really mean: ‘You are dirty.’ . . . Everything they say bad about the buses is a code word for you. But they’re the ones who make the buses like that. You’re not dirty; the MTA is dirty. You’re not cattle. It’s the MTA that treats you like cattle.”

On Route 210 Limited Southbound

After a few minutes of passing out leaflets, BRU activist Udovic was upstaged. By fomenting the weekly fare strike, she had inadvertently unleashed the creative talents of a gray-bearded passenger named James. Inspired by her talk, James raised a stumpy walking stick wrapped in duct tape to his lips as if it were a microphone.

“We need more buses,” James started chanting as the 210 huffed up a commercial stretch of lower Crenshaw.

A claque of Inglewood high school girls sitting opposite furnished the background vocals.

“Boom, boom, boom boom,” went the schoolgirls.

“We don’t need pretty speeches. . . .”

“Boom, boom, boom boom.”

“We need more buses, every 15 minutes at nighttime.”

“Right now, right now, right now.”

“We’re going to get more buses if we strike.”

“Every Thursday!” Udovic chimed in.

Raised by activist parents, the 22-year-old Udovic already was maintaining a social-issues workload in high school that would burden most careerists--fighting anti-gay rights legislation in Oregon, doing solidarity work for indigenous people and laborers in Central America, and protesting U.S. intervention in El Salvador. At Stanford, she majored in comparative studies in race and ethnicity.

When she enrolled as a trainee in the Labor/Community Strategy Center’s National School for Strategic Organizing, she met Baranwal, who had grown up on the outskirts of Akron, Ohio. They were trainees whose 13-hour workdays for low pay included bus organizing--seeking out the people Mann calls “the opinion-makers of the oppressed.” Trainees were also taught how to protest MTA board policies during public hearings. (The Wilshire leg of the Red Line terminates at the BRU office above the Wiltern Theatre at Western and Wilshire, providing clean, direct transportation for hectoring the MTA.) In classes, they were taught subjects such as “United Front Theory and Practice” and “Environmental Justice: Challenging the Corporate State Agenda.” A couple months after this day on the bus, Baranwal would leave to finish college in Indiana; Udovic committed to stay on until December.

Abruptly, gray-bearded James stopped singing.

“Right now, every night on the bus, people’s lives are endangered,” he said. His song had been mild, but his speech was agitated and shrill. “I don’t know what the MTA directors are thinking. I think it should be mandatory that all the MTA directors should take the bus home once a year, and wait like we do.”

“If they ride it,” Udovic said helpfully, “they’ll know what they have to do. Here’s a card you can send to Gloria Molina.”

“Does she wait for the bus?” James demanded rhetorically.

“No she doesn’t,” Udovic said, “and that’s what you can write about, that you want her to ride the bus.”

But in a few blocks, James and his duct-taped cane were gone. And the postcard lay blank on an empty seat, bound not for Molina’s office, but for the clean-up crews of the MTA yards.