The Spanish Roots of the 99%

On September 19^th, 2011, Luis Moreno-Caballud and Begoña Santa-Cecilia returned to their apartment after three days of intense discussions and assemblies in New York City’s Zuccotti Park.  As members of Occupy Wall Street’s original Outreach Committee, they were frustrated by what he had seen in the park since the beginning of the occupation on September 17^th.  They had imagined that the encampment in the heart of Wall Street would be something like the acampadas they had seen in Spain earlier that year, large open tent camps in public plazas where diverse groups of people had congregated.  Yet it still wasn’t happening.  Zuccotti Park was ringed by police vans, protestors in bandannas yelled at officers and passerbys from the sidewalk, and the assemblies themselves had become fractious.  They decided to send an email to the Outreach Committee, the “working-group” responsible for communicating Occupy’s message to the outside…