Account of the intersection shutdown at Westheimer and Postoak : Houston Indymedia

A friend of mine told me "be at the Westheimer - Postoak intersection at 1:25pm". I brought a camera to work to document whatever this ambiguous event would be, but clocked out and left without bringing it with me.

I ended up getting a little mixed up exiting 610 and was runnign a little late (probably 1:35) going south on Postoak from San Felipe. I was thinking to myelf "good lord, how can people deal with being out here in this crazy gridlocked traffic!?" I ended up getting halfway down to Westheimer and then butting into a turn lane and into the parking lot on the east side, and parked right next to the starbucks.

I realized that the hellish traffic of the Galleria are was even more gummed up than usual today, because there was a small group of people sitting in a circle in the center of the intersection, who were handcuffed themselves to each other and trash cans with purpule stencilns of raised fists with brooms painted on them.

As I walked up, the intersection was also completly blocked by janitors and suporters who had filled the crosswalks and were chanting and making noise.

For those of ya'll who cant remmeber what the Westheimer Postoak intersection looks like; its huge. its the one right there with the giant yuppiest starbucks on the northeast corner, about a block north from Neiman Marcus. Both Westheimer and Postoak are 3 lane roads at that point as well as a turn lane which makes 7 lanes across on each crosswalk. All 4 crosswalks were blocked by people standing in front of the cars.

i sent text messages to an indymedia friend with updates of how the situation was developing, she didn't get a chance to post them as breaking news and my phone wont show me the timestamp on them but I'll try to piece together how things happend to the best of my memory.

at around 1:45 I noticed the first cops. Thye had to park in the parking lot and had to walk into the intersection. There seemed to be some quick negotiation with reps from the SEIU and as more cops showed up, a majority of the janitors moved onto the sidewalk to avoid police harrasment. For probably 5 minutes traffic started to flow, driving though the intersection, around those who were locked down. this looked really dangerous and some of the cars were honking.

Some of the more gung-ho janitors and organizers continued to mill around and set up another human corrdon on the west bound Westheimer. The cops asked us to move agian not so politley and we got onto the sidewalks and espinades. after letting traffic go a little longer and what seemed to me as close calls, more cops arrived and began directing traffic and forcing everyone to turn right, jut trying to empty the streets. A little while later we noticed that the cops had blocked traffic a block away in every direction(in the galleria those block are really big) to clear out the intersection.

Sometime after 2, perhaps 2:15 a lot of other folks started showing up. A fire engeine arrived, mounted police, and a truck pulling a trailer of metal barricades. 5 or 10 minutes after that, there were more cops with a giant truck (it looked like a huge u-haul) that I think might have been SWAT or some kind of Special Tactics Unit. There were a bunch of cops with black t-shits with white stars on them.

Durring this time, the protesters on the sidewalks were maintaining vibrant loud chants and songs from 3 of the corners. There was initially a whole buch of crossing from one corner to the next and making noise, but the horse cops were perched like vultures, there was this old dude in front of my corner that would just point at you if your foot touched the pavement, the obvious implication being if a cop is pointing at you, you should flee or get trampled. I never saw him speak a word, just point at people angrily.

at about 2:30, a van that had a cage and bench in it pulled up, and the cops and firemen all moved in to start making arrests. The arrest process was really slow. They did it one person at a time, starting with the men, cuting them loose from metal handcuffs with boltcutters and then attaching plastic handcuffs. It seemmed like there were trying to arrign the first 2 dudes right there, but they seemed to stop doing it with the later arrestees.

Each person they picked up was meet with cheers and rounds of applause from the the corners, as well as chants of "we're with you!, we're with you!"

When they finished with the arrests of the dudes, there appeared to be a braif pause before they started arresting the ladies. I thougt they might try to move the people out of intersection, as the circle had been broken up into chunks by the removal of half those present. They didn't do that though, it a couple minutes they started cutting the women loose and from my vantage point they were placing them in the same van. The last woman they arested went limp they had to pick her up and cary her into a squad car.

Once they finaly got everyone out of the street, the whole process started speeding up. They got the trash cans out of the way quickly, the janitors on the corners started to leave, and by 5 or 10 minutes after 3, they had oppend the intersection up to traffic again.

I chatted with some of the organizers afterwards, I told them I though they'd executed an amazing action, shutting down that intersection for more than an hour and a half is huge, especially when I have been feeling that radical social movments have really been weak here in Houston as of late. The organizer also though of the action as very succesfull and are optomistic that they are winning the strike. The huge amount of international pressure that has been put on the building owners by unions and other groups around the world is really making the owners sweat.

This is an impressive escalation of tactics, and to my knowledge, one of the first times anything like it has been done here. everybody pay attention to what the SEIU is up to and get ready to throw down in support .

ariba la union, abajo la exploitacion!

[note to editors: I wrote this as a news article, I do not want racist, anti-worker or other hostil comments on this article, thanks!]