Women’s Stories of Assault, Fear, and Finding Friendship

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Home Street Home –

April 14, 2018 – A third of L.A.’s homeless population are women — and “once a shelter is full, it’s full.” … Every time Graciela Fernandez gets off the bus at Skid Row, she clutches her industrial-grade, cross-body bag with thick straps. She checks the road in both directions and scans for danger. Carefully, she makes her way down the street she called home until just three months ago. Fernandez first arrived at Skid Row early one morning in July 2015, wearing nothing but a tank top, her underwear and ripped sneakers. She’d fled an abusive boyfriend who, she says, had threatened her with a knife and trapped her in a remote house for days. At 4:00 that July morning, she searched the line of colorful tents for Connie Revoiro. Fernandez had met Revoiro, who goes by the name “Mama Cuba,” on a scouting trip to the area three weeks before. Now Mama Cuba was her only hope. “I searched from tent to tent to tent until I found her,” Fernandez said one day this past October. “It was awful. I didn’t come out of Mama Cuba’s tent for three or four days. I was terrified. Wherever she would go, I was there, because I was so scared.”