Latest posts by Jonathan Curiel

Standing before a sea of grass and trees, the man has a rake in his right hand and wears the kind of knee pads that gardeners often wear. That’s what he is: A gardener. But he’s also an undocumented immigrant from Villahermosa, in the south of Mexico, and his Bay Area life and Mexican backstory […]

“A writer’s writer” may be the most bittersweet label you can give someone who aspired to climb the ranks of the profession. It means they were never really popular, never really embraced by the public, never really sold a lot of books. Henry Miller was a successful author, but Henry Green was a writer’s writer. […]

In early October, when La Victoria Bakery was forced to close its doors after 67 years, loyal customers were in shock. A family dispute led to the Mexican bakery’s eviction, and led some customers to respond in the only way they knew: with street art. One woman made a yellow, red, and blue sign that read, […]

The history of American prostitution goes back to the beginning of America itself — back to the days of the Founding Fathers, when Benjamin Franklin and John Adams not only witnessed the world’s oldest profession but tolerated it. That tolerance might have been reluctant, but Franklin and Adams’ public acknowledgment and acceptance signaled a long […]

His name is Lazheri, and he’s a former mine worker who lives in a remote part of Tunisia’s Gafsa region. The mines near his village by the Algerian border produce material that’s used in agriculture around the world. Gafsa’s government- controlled mining company profits from the labor of people like Lazheri. But Lazheri’s village is […]

In the days before The Will to Live — Arab Liberation Mural was officially introduced, vandals spray-painted over some of its sections, including the faces of Leila Khaled, a prominent Palestinian activist who lives in Jordan, and Mehdi Ben Barka, a Moroccan activist who was murdered in France 50 years ago. By the time the […]

Every now and then, that cultural barometer called The Simpsons parodies the work of Charles and Ray Eames. Take the episode where, as soon as Homer and his family race to their living-room couch, the camera pans out from above their house — going higher and higher until it goes beyond the Milky Way (past funny aliens) […]

On a July day in Menlo Park, Serge Attukwei Clottey stood on a mechanical platform inside Facebook’s shimmering new building and looked up at his giant new artwork. The sculpture is two stories tall and more than 10 feet wide — a cascade of interlocking yellow pieces that Clottey, his team of assistants, and assorted well-wishers […]

Angela Davis is there. The longtime civil rights activist who’s now in her 70s is in the back row, along with Tarana Burke, who founded the #MeToo movement. In the front row are younger women like Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi and Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai. But the assemblage of women who stand tall in Lucia […]

She talked about getting death threats. She talked about hateful strangers wanting to harm her children. And she talked about “male toxicity” and the way it punishes women for being women. This wasn’t last week’s Brett Kavanaugh hearings in Washington, D.C. This was last week’s special event at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, […]