Culture
Where can you get Frida Kahlo trinkets and lemonades with quirky Spanish names like “la Soltera?” Mercado Latinx, of course. It’s a bi-monthly event in Oakland that’s all about Latinx culture.
Lindsey Page wanted to start a gym that met the needs of queer and trans POC. Today, she’s running Fruitvale’s Radically Fit gym.
Sudo Mesh volunteers are hopeful that with the new resources and the right work, they can blanket all of Oakland in a functioning mesh network—a free and open web—within 5 years.
Dance instructor Carla Service led her final Dancing Under the Stars class at Jack London Square on August 31.
Dr. Prince White, a deputy director for the Oakland social justice organization Urban Peace Movement, died on August 24 from a rare autoimmune disease he had been battling since May.
“Choose discomfort over resentment” reads the tattoo on Shenaaz Janmohamed’s right arm. The Oakland-based psychotherapist, who has Muslim South Asian origins, defines herself as a “queer femme mama.” She became a mother two years ago, and said that change gave her “clarity” to devote her time to healing her community: queer Muslims. Janmohamed is a minority within a minority. She identifies as a Shia queer, and is in a relationship with a genderqueer partner (a person who identifies with neither,…
Diana Days’ face was swollen. Bruised purplish-blue lines curved along the top of her cheeks beneath her grey eyes and full eyebrows—which she intentionally had not plucked while waiting for surgery—and followed her newly-shrunken brow bone. She had recently undergone a process known as “brow bossing,” in which the brow bone is sawed down by surgeons to give the face a more feminine appearance. “Women don’t usually have this here,” she said, her hands feeling around her brow ridge, a…
For the elderly, staying active can be difficult. But that’s not the case at the Lincoln Square Recreation Center in Oakland’s Chinatown.
Ameer Aziz was playing basketball with his 8-year-old son at an Oakland park near 19th Street when he noticed something strange: a man instructing kids about how to play basketball. “Eventually, I walk to him and ask him what was he doing. Was he a coach? And then he spoke with an African accent and said, ‘No, I just like basketball,’” recalled Aziz about the encounter. He remembered thinking it was weird, because the man was doing it for free….