Remembering the Dead: A Visit to San Jose’s Hacienda Cemetery
With Halloween and Día de los Muertos upon us, we dispatched a local writer to document her favorite cemetery in the Bay — which features a one-arm burial site.
Culture
What’s Behind Our Name? A COYOTE That Showed Us How To Howl
Margo St. James’s sex worker advocacy group first coined COYOTE, which stood for Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics.
Naming a publication is fun until it’s not, at which point it becomes a major pain in the ass. How does one encapsulate a set of values, a sense of place, and a tone in something pithy, catchy and memorable?
We found all of the above in the Bay Area’s pesky, wily coyote. As this publication took shape, we embraced the animal we named ourselves after — howls, claws, fangs, and all. We are fierce and unapologetic. We are adaptive and playful. We are COYOTE Media Collective.
But we are not the first COYOTE in the Bay Area.
In 1973, a smart and charismatic San Francisco resident named Margo St. James launched a powerful advocacy organization that shifted narratives on sex work beyond sensationalized headlines on arrests and toward nuanced conversations about patriarchy, power, labor, and the resilient workers at the center of it all.