Gathering in solidarity with ongoing anti-Wall Street protests in New York, a group of mostly young people, numbering about 200 at its peak, brought San Antonio onto a national bandwagon Thursday.
“Occupy San Antonio!” the group shouted from dawn to dusk. “We are the 99 percent!”
Members repeatedly decried concentrations of wealth and power at a morning assembly in Travis Park and during a scrupulously well-behaved sidewalk march to the Alamo, the Grand Hyatt, CPS Energy offices, federal offices, Main Plaza and City Hall.
The group, like others that began popping up in many major U.S. cities this week, was piggybacking on Occupy Wall Street.
That campout by the young and disaffected started Sept. 17 in Lower Manhattan and eventually drew support from more organized groups and labor unions, whose members have swelled the protesters’ numbers into the thousands.
The concerns over Wall Street practices and economic inequality reverberated up to the White House on Thursday, with President Barack Obama saying the protesters are expressing the frustrations of the American public, the Associated Press reported.
Los Angeles police arrested 11 demonstrators who entered a Bank of America branch during a downtown march by hundreds of people Thursday.
San Antonio participants said the discontent is driven by a belief that corporations, financial institutions and a small handful of people control too much of the country’s resources and direction. It differentiates this protest from others in the past, said Meghan Owen, 30, who’s on workers compensation.
“We need to cut off the head of the beast in order to succeed,” she said. “We’ve always been told to work from the bottom up, but it has never worked in the past. This time, we’re going to take it all at the same time.”
The protest “was extremely peaceful” and the marchers didn’t interfere with traffic flow, San Antonio Police Department spokeswoman Sandy Gutierrez said.
“Peacemaking Committee” members made sure of that, said Vaughn Tangero, 28, who is unemployed and homeless. Though meeting for only a week, the group formed transportation, medics, legal and food committees.
“We’re leaderless but we’re organized,” Tangero said.
And it doesn’t counter the spontaneity that sparked Occupy Wall Street, said Rosa Martinez, 25, a digital design student at San Antonio College.
“We have a general assembly here; everyone votes,” she said.
Conflicting views were occasionally expressed, however. Stopping by to get a feel for the movement’s mentality, Vietnam veteran David Fasci, 60, said it was an insult to see a University of Texas at San Antonio student wearing nothing but fake marijuana leaves and a U.S. flag.
The history major, Vonia Smith, 27, said she wore a flag diaper to demonstrate “that the government is full of crap.”
It started with a Facebook page that local musician Bryan Hamilton, 28, created Sept. 28 for a few friends who wanted to join Occupy Austin. Then it snowballed.
“We thought, ‘Why should people have to go to Austin? We have problems here in San Antonio,’” he said.
About 30 protesters planned to spend the night at HemisFair Park, where the chants and cheers continued past sundown.
Though the fervor in San Antonio paled in comparison to the protest in New York and those she witnessed as a little girl in the 1960s, Evelyn Adamo, 51, said she still saw a “reawakening of a consciousness” in Thursday’s event.
“They started seeing the troubles around them and they realized they have the power to change that with love,” she said of past demonstrations. “That is what is happening today — things are not working, and people are waking up.”
