A San Franciscan “Pueblo me llamo”

The Sea Lion, the Bridge, and the Pogrom

A new site logo has dropped: it’s a sea lion, sittin’ on a rock in the Bay, channeling Mr. Redding, with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. It’s a reclamation of heritage, both personal and municipal. To understand what I mean by that, I need to explain its origins in a racist 19th-century rag.

Illustration of the Beale Street Wharf fire of July 25, 1877 by George Frederick Keller
Illustration of the Beale Street Wharf fire of July 25, 1877

Coöpting a Genocidal San Francisco

The new seal is inspired by the masthead of the 1884 The San Franciscan newspaper, a periodical so racist it openly called for the ethnic cleansing of Chinese San Franciscans in an 1885 editorial1. That was eight years after the anti-Chinese pogrom of 1877.

The 1884 newspaper masthead of a sea lion on a rock in front of the bridge-less Golden Gate Strait.
Original 1884 art

Now, in a more civilized time, it’s been revived in high resolution for 2025 by a Mexican of mostly Native descent living on Beale Street, the same street burned during that July’s anti-Chinese riot.

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The Workers Who Had Never Heard of Vacation

Baldemar Velásquez, president and founder of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), spoke to a small group of San Francisco labor activists about the challenges of organizing migrant farmworkers in the Midwest and South. In the hour-long conversation, Don1 Baldemar recounted more than half a century of successful organizing campaigns that FLOC has led. Lessons from the Campbell’s Soup boycott featured heavily, from dealing with scabs to working with family farmers to ensure they understood that FLOC had the entire supply chain in its sights.

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A 30-Year-Old Message

I mentioned earlier this week that growing up, I was lucky to have access to the Internet before the web. This meant I was able to take full advantage when I figured out how to use my dad’s dial-up account at Vanderbilt University during Christmas break in early January 1995.

Being a kid, one of my first instincts was to find a game to play online. With web search engines still rudimentary back then, I turned to Usenet, which I had been using for a few years. I posted a message to comp.sys.mac.games to help me find a game I could play over TCP/IP. For the sake of posterity, I posted the full message here. A less detailed version is also available on the Usenet Archives.

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