Space on Campus

SPACE on ca m pus

S i en n a Rui z

Introduction Space on this campus is political in all elements in which we consider it. There is no such thing as an empty space or a neutral building. All spaces are embedded with meaning that affect the ways we navigate campus.

The construction and regulation of space is based upon notions of who deserves access to space, who looks and acts like a worthy subject of the university. Students and community members of color have been harassed by campus police for the simple act of taking up space. We are all subject to the ways that space is produced on this campus, but the students and community members who are already mistreated and underrepresented by campus administration bear the brunt of exclusion from campus spaces.

In three parts, this zine explores three spaces on campus: the WashU Co-op, Martinville, and memorials of the 1904 World’s Fair. Interspersed between each section are re-imaginings of frat row, a space that has been continuously reproduced by this university despite the violence and infractions committed there while spaces for marginalized students have been actively taken down.

This zine aims to re-examine space at a time when WashU is growing physically larger and quieting the stories of those who get left aside or pushed away in this haze of development. I offer this zine as a means to begin to change the narrative on space on campus and the ways it frames our experiencesat this university.

Part 1

The WashU C o -o p

My first semester living in the WashU Co-op would be our building’s last. I entered bright eyed and nervous into the building that held the only parties I frequented, the only concerts I saw. I knew a few people in the building but had never lived with them.

I stepped lightly through halls too timid to make my presence known.

The tightness in my chest did not dissipate after a few days, and my rapid heartbeat lingered. I did not suddenly feel at home. Instead, my shy love for the group and our building required an easing into.

It took minutes sitting silently at meetings and carefully considering my votes when required. It took reading and re-reading, and reading one more time just to be sure, of the recipes for meals that I would end up burning anyways but laughing off at the table. It took sticking my hand in the slime of the garbage disposal of our communal kitchen and cleaning up the ambiguous chemicals of the cracked fluorescent lights in the laundry room for me to be able to take deep breaths in the renovated basement and consider it my own.

Loving and living in the Co-op with the knowledge that the building was going to be shut down filled me with a desperation I had never felt before. What worth did my love have in a building that was condemned, if that very love had a clear expiration date? It reminded me of the hours spent in my childhood, on the beach with my sisters making cities in the sand that were doomed to collapse no matter how high we built a wall or how deep we built a moat. The tide would always take away the shells we fought over, the plants we ran to collect. We would always go home sunburnt, with sand in our hair and no trace of our work near the waves.

Previous page: 6018 Pershing Ave., formerly the main building of the Co-op

The clock was ticking, was ticking, and I could not cope with the fact that neither the walls I painted nor the memories I built would last.

I still live in the Co-op today as it exists in another building in the Skinker-Debaliviere neighborhood, and this new version of the Co-op has profoundly challenged my understandings of space, time, and relationships. We mourn the loss of our building that functioned as a democratic event space unlike any other at WashU while also recognizing that, as resident Rachel Jackson says, “there’s something incredibly powerful about the current iteration of the Co-op because our continuation as a community has surpassed the confines of the physical space we occupied since our conception.”

As a community, we have fought to exist on our own terms and defy WashU’s indifference. We occupy a new building with no communal space but leave the doors open and switch hosting meals every night, rethinking the boundaries between private and common space in our own homes. In a way, this is the Co-op as it has always been despite the lack of a central location. Longtime resident Emi Hann noted: “Something that I think is always special and unique about the Co-op as a space is that it has survived temporal and spatial instability. It is always in flux, the membership changes every 6 months...but there’s somehow a core thread that passes through it all that we’ve been able to pass down through a strange mixture of WashU people. I feel like the space was important because we had agency in our homes, and we had agency in building a home for ourselves that I don’t think anyone else at WashU could have. But our community was so much more than this space.”

The Co-op has always existed primarily in the commitments members hold to each other, a fact clearer now more than ever. The Co-op blooms in our interactions and shared values, creating a

bond independent of a set membership or physical space.

According to Dan Koff, one of the original designers of the Co-op, shared meals in individual apartments were how the Co-op had its start. It is then the interpersonal relationships that function in whatever space they are in that are foundational to the community rather than the other way around.

In this light, memories of the old building carry a different weight.

Our alterations to the building were not meaningless simply because there are no evidence anymore. Instead, their momentary existences have more value in the communal process they entailed and the relationships they facilitated than any physical mark they left behind. Resident Rachel Roberts, who with her roommates covered their old apartment in murals, says, “The temporary nature [of the Co-op] inspired me to make my space completely my own. Because it was going to crumble I could change it.� The love that others and I had for the dilapidated building we inhabited was not contradictory to its fate but indicative of a new type of love, one that transforms the contours of physical space into interpersonal commitments.

Learn more about the WashU Co-op here: - https://www.facebook.com/wash.coop/ - https://www.wupr.org/2019/11/26/mourning-a-commonspace/

Next page: 6015 Pershing Ave., the additional building of the Co-op closed in 2018

Re-imagining Frat Row Directions: Please draw how you would rework space on frat row at WashU if you had the power to do so. What would you have in this space and why? Feel free to write or add anything you like, all mediums of art are welcome.

Part 2

M ar t i nv il l e

On a day in late March, I walked out of the library and back into the sunlight. I put my essay to side and made my way towards the tents in the distance. It was where I stopped almost every day now between classes or after work. When I arrived, there were only two others there slowly painting banners to hang from the trees, and I was quickly put to work painting thick black letters that spelled out “$15 FOR ALL CAMPUS WORKERS.” As I slowly filled in the letters with a shaky hand, I talked to the man next to me painting the letters above my own. He introduced himself and explained how he was a graduate student in Japanese but had done his undergraduate and master’s degrees in the Bay Area. I lit up and talked about growing up in Oakland, California, and we soon bonded over a shared interest in writing about California. In much the same way throughout the occupation, I would meet physics students, social workers, and organizers who I would never have known otherwise. Martinville was a place where I began to settle and look people in the eye as we conversed on a campus where I had always been conditioned to keep my head down and pass unnoticed.

Starting on March 15th, 2019 the Washington University Graduate Workers Union (now the Washington University Undergraduate and Graduate Workers Union), occupied space on campus to protest for a $15 minimum wage for campus workers and healthcare for all. Members took shifts watching the sites, and every night there would at least be one person sleeping in a tent overnight despite the constant spring rain. People ate dinner under tarps and typed their assignments on the lawn chairs beside camp. We were a makeshift community, an ever-changing group that had only our presences to wield against the resources of the university.

Last page: Encampemnt by Brookings Hall, photo courtesy of StudLife

Trent McDonald, one of the organizers of the protest, explained that the inspiration for the action came from a long activist tradition of occupying space both at WashU and around the country. McDonald explained: “Doing research on what kind of campaigns about direct action protests that have worked to increase wages on campus, we went back to the beginning, the earliest point we could find. The Fight for $15 starts in 2012 in New York, so we do a lot of research on that, but particularly being a campus it’s different than fast food or warehousing or big commercial enterprises. The earliest example we found – still in contemporary America – was about wages and campus protest at Harvard in 2003 or 2004, where undergrads mostly with some staff and faculty staked a sit in in Massachusetts Hall, the admin HQ and then moved to a tent city occupation. Tent city protests have a long international history, but that maximized our message. Previously we had been doing short one-off actions descended from the Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies, and their model was direct join, direct action. Whatever the issue was, it’s not about sitting at the table and trying to bargain for it, it’s like what do you do when your boss says, ‘I’m not gonna do that’? You have to bring them to the table…

We had a small sit in in the cafeteria, small rallies. Finally we needed to do something bigger and bolder, so what happened at Harvard?

After a few weeks they formed a committee, and no one had ever had a minimum wage shift to a living wage and have it be so successful over time.”

In Boston, Harvard’s higher minimum wage had a lasting impact on the working class people who worked at the university. Janitors and fry cooks could live comfortable off of their salaries, a goal for WashU workers who live in one of the most hyper-segregated cities along racial and economic lines. Protest to secure material benefits for some of the most underserved people working at an institution worth $8 billion had the potential to change the realities of thousands of St. Louis citizens.

Martinville however was much more than a site of political organizing. It was a central location where I could always meet someone new that I did not know before. It was a place where I could share a meal with the people who graded my exams and laugh with students in other departments whom I would never meet in a class. I played with dogs and huddled to watch movies on perfectly manicured grass that I never sat on before. I did not need an expensive hammock, a pickup soccer group, or a nice outfit to take pictures of in order to take up space on the open quad. I could come in any form, and I knew I would always be welcomed.

To truly live on central campus property radically changed the meaning of the space for many. For one student who lived at the camp, it was the opportunity to truly belong on campus and feel the freedom to “run around Brookings barefoot,� a dream they never envisioned before. For international students who were threatened with deportation if they visibly protested their working conditions, it was a constant reminder of representation and support from others. Embodied protest in the middle of campus facilitated new ways of being and engaging with a school that divides and isolates.

It brought me in community with others in the heart of a space I thought I could never love.

Learn more about Martinville/WUGWU: - https://wugwu.org/ - https://www.studlife.com/scene/2019/04/21/inside-martinville-a-look-at-the-students-behind-the-fight-for-15-brookings-occupation/ Next page: Martinville, photo courtesy of WUGWU Facebook

Re-imagining Frat Row

Part 3

M e m or y of t h e 1904 Wor l d ’s F a ir

In 1904, St. Louis was chosen to host one of the largest events in the world. It was a city believed to be on the precipice of becoming a major hub, a bustling trade center on the Mississippi River poised to be the beating heart of the Midwest. Grandiose buildings were constructed in the European style throughout Forest Park, reaching all the way to Brookings Hall on WashU’s campus. To celebrate the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase, the glory of the West and of America was on full display, with all of the turn of the century’s new technology to observe. One could walk through buildings dedicated to everything from the “Manufacturers” to the countries of the world, from the technology to the stolen lands of empire.

Behind Wydown Ave, one could walk through the “Philippines,” an exhibit meant to show off America’s recently acquired colony. After the Spanish-American war, the United States annexed the Philippines in 1898 and then governor general of the colony William Howard Taft wanted a, “novel way to introduce the far-flung, new colony to his fellow Americans” (Silva, “Little Brown Brothers’ St. Louis Blues: The Philippine Exposition, 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair). More than 1,000 Filipino people were brought to St. Louis as “living exhibits,” performing supposedly authentic tribal functions for spectators. The Philippine exhibit was the largest of all countries represented at the Fair, with daily performances of ritual that were wildly popular amongst those who visited. Even the buildings outside the exhibit showcased the wonders of the colony: The Fisheries Building displayed the largest collection of seashells in the world and a thousand mounted specimens of the different fishes of the islands. The Ethnological Museum housed the most extensive exhibit of crafts, clothing, pottery and implements of the various tribes. Nothing was spared in showing off America’s

Last page: Olympic Rings

newest possession. (Silva)

Today, the World’s Fair lives on at WashU’s campus through our renamed athletic field and newly built sculpture showcasing the Olympic rings. The rings and “Francis Olympic Field” are a sleek rebranding of a shameful event. The archaic massive construction efforts and athletic events of the World’s Fair are reconstrued as the more modern and more familiar “Olympics” to be referenced in tours and brochures in an effort to increase the university’s name recognition. There are artists reckoning with the legacy of the World’s Fair, like Janna Añonuevo Langholz who started the Filipino Artists Directory to record the names of 1,200 Filipino artists currently working in an effort to counteract the cruel legacy of the Fair by, “exhibiting their work around the country, as opposed to being exhibited.”

Yet this is not the Fair that WashU remembers, much like how the St. Louis in which we are located is not the one WashU cares to showcase. WashU hangs onto the myth of empire, the grand dreams of a city on the verge of becoming a sensation. It refuses to see the broken, fragmented city split up into a thousand parts whose marginalized communities still manage to survive. There is no monument to the groups who were abused on our very campus, no recognition of the groups that continue to struggle in our city.

Instead, gates and sculptures reach towards the sky, clearly delineating the boundary of a field most often left empty while people walk around it.

Learn more about the legacy of the World’s Fair here: - http://www.positivelyfilipino.com/magazine/2013/6/littlebrown-brothers-st-louis-blues-the-philippine-exposition-1904-stlouis-worlds-fair - https://www.jannalangholz.com/filipino-american-artist-directory - https://www.studlife.com/forum/2018/09/28/op-ed-wus-olympic-rings-a-spectacular-commemoration-of-racism/

Next page: Francis Olympic Field gates