The hyper privatization of housing and gentrification in Los Angeles has dramatically shifted the racial, class, and cultural landscape of aggrieved neighborhoods. The timely need to address housing injustices––eviction, landlord harassment, and drastic rent increases in gentrifying neighborhoods is needed to further address mechanisms of capitalism that dehumanize and commodify housing. In this thesis, I analyze how Latina Mothers transform moments of housing injustices into empowerment and activism Focusing on LA County's rent control campaign led by local Los Angeles tenant coalition, Unincorporated Tenants United (UTU), I highlight the role of the Latina Mother canvassers. It was witnessed and analyzed that the Latina Mother canvassers enacted forms of placemaking, which I describe as homemaking while engaging with vulnerable tenants facing different forms of housing injustices. Informed by previous housing trauma, the Latina Mother canvassers displayed forms of homemaking, that I describe as: testimonio sharing, comadriando (gossiping), and (re)imagination of community through housing justice. Applying a homemaking framework to Woman of Color (WOC) Mother activism in aggrieved communities then allows for a nuanced analysis of social order, mechanisms of dispossession that influence local organizing, and collective community care that sustains a movement.

The rise of evictions, houselessness, and criminalization for severely rent burdened tenants has necessitated sustainable and transformative justice-centered discourse and praxis that is accountable to the public. In recent years, the eviction epidemic, prompted by predatory gentrification processes, has exacerbated, creating a tenant crisis occurring in, but not limited to, major cities like Los Angeles. Undocumented, queer, and multi-generational tenants, populations most affected by this crisis, have been and continue to unite in confronting and resisting the ongoing disruption of the ways in which property is increasingly valued over people. They do so through grassroots frameworks that enact direct actions like rent strikes, boycotts, and popular political education that provoke local officials and housing policies to recognize and uphold the dire need of pro-tenant protections that restrict mechanisms of harm within the scope of housing injustices. Such examples of predatory housing financialization are landlords illegally overcharging rent, illegally evicting tenants, and enacting harassment upon tenants. This project highlights such moments in three interconnected ways. I first examine how housing organizers critique the limitations of local governments who influence tenant policies. I also analyze the ways that state-funded housing organizations, like the Los Angeles Center for Community Law & Action (LACCLA), face systemic barriers as a non-profit, due to its contingency of state funding through grants and protocols that inhibit autonomous decision making, while also working towards tenant-centered housing justice initiatives with grassroots housing organizations. Additionally, I discuss the role of the local and transnational housing brigade to Venezuela that brought Los Angeles housing organizers together with Venezuelan communes to discuss and envision liberated housing futures. This project ultimately examines tenant organizing in Los Angeles as a unique and transformative place where many unite across diverse diasporas, yet find common ground in social injustice, community organizing, and fostering global solidarity.