‘It Is Only Possible to Fail If We Forget’

“Tents and Tenants: After Echo Park Lake,” a public exhibition organized by the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy (II&D), captures the spirit of community and resistance that emerged in a settlement of tents in an iconic public park in the gentrified heart of Los Angeles.

The exhibition is part of an effort to preserve an important chapter in social movement history, when housed and unhoused organizers fought to protect the alternative world they created at the Echo Park Lake encampment, which was ultimately dismantled by police in March 2021, amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Presented with support from the Mellon Foundation, the exhibition is open to the public until March 30, 2025, at the Skid Row History Museum & Archive, a project of the Los Angeles Poverty Department.

This essay, “It Is Only Possible to Fail If We Forget” by II&D researcher Annie Powers, a PhD candidate in history at UCLA, originally appeared in the Skid Row Arts Zine and is reprinted with permission.

If, as Cuban militant Che Guevara put it, “the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love,” then the After Echo Park Lake Archive is a love letter to the future.

Convened by the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, the After Echo Park Lake Archive began with a collective of housed and unhoused scholar-organizers who participated in the encampment uprising — myself included. Organizing through, and bearing witness to, the afterlives of the Echo Park Lake eviction, the collective’s members experienced the ways in which the encampment was remembered — and, crucially, misremembered.

There were flashy news stories depicting the infrastructure built by encampment residents, the support of the homeless community by the housed community, and the mass eviction by militarized riot police. Marches, rallies, direct actions and eviction defenses at Echo Park Lake all made their way into print — itself an achievement. But beneath and preceding these public accounts, we knew, was the much longer, quieter work required to build the power to fight and the power to stay.

What about the months of weekly strategy meetings and outreach walks? Discussions during pick-up basketball games? Planning schematics for building the showers? Neither spontaneously formed nor perfect by any stretch of the imagination, the organizing between housed and unhoused tenants at Echo Park Lake offers key lessons, ideas and histories to homeless people’s movements of the present and future.

This became the principle of the archive: collecting records of the Echo Park Lake experience that might help housed and unhoused organizers of the future take up the fight in their own times and places. Specifically, this meant prioritizing materials not otherwise publicly available — those produced by encampment members and organizers themselves in the process of collective struggle.

Crucially, we include memories in this collection process, and so the archive contains oral histories with key participants in the Echo Park Lake encampment uprising. We opted to collect materials that would otherwise disappear, materials that tell stories not heard in the press, materials that offer a blueprint for the struggle at Echo Park Lake — not to copy-paste into new contexts, but so that organizers of the future can understand the conditions in which we operated and the paths we chose to take. We also make clear that the eviction from Echo Park Lake was not the end of the story: The people involved kept fighting back.

For members of the After Echo Park Lake Archive Collective, the archive attempts to historicize the future. When we began to organize, there were few examples to which we could look. We now understand that this is not because homeless people did not organize in the past, but because there is no historical consciousness of such movements in the United States.

The After Echo Park Lake Archive attempts to cut against such forgetting. We hope to pass on these lessons of love and life — and conflict, confusion and repression, too — to our descendants in struggle. Together, unhoused and housed people, organizing in solidarity, cracked open a window into a different world — one whose undergirding logic was not banishment but loving solidarity. Despite the mass eviction and the death and suffering it yielded, the archive suggests that we must not see Echo Park Lake as a failure — but part of a long arc of organized homeless people’s struggle in Los Angeles, the United States and the world.

It is only possible to fail if we forget.