There's no appropriate soccer metaphor for San Francisco's sudden decision to retract its field reservation policy in light of the now-infamous "Mission Playground Is Not For Sale Video," which shows a group of tech employees displacing neighborhood Latino soccer players from a pocket park in the Mission. Perhaps we're better served with an expression from American football: The city called an audible. The video, meanwhile, became a perfect gentrification parable.
And local activists turned their attention to a different element of the conflict: a green sign posted outside the soccer field, listing its "open play hours."
"Permit holders have priority on the fields at all times," the sign says. "Permits will only be issued during open play hours for special events."
Within three weeks of the video getting posted to YouTube, someone had painted over those lines, and over another line that had posted the number for San Francisco's Recreation and Park Permit and Reservations Office. It was a small act of civil disobedience that spoke for an escalating culture war.
Soccer fields have become the latest battlefront in the city's debate over who should have access to public space. For years, Mission Playground was a hard-scrabble blacktop pitch where players got huge scabs from sliding on the ground. In 2012, though, the city spent $7.5 million installing new lights, astroturf, and a slew of other amenities, including the green signs that have now become a major point of contention. Not only do they indicate that the neighborhood field is now a commodity, they also symbolize who that commodity is for.
The signs are written exclusively in English, which strikes many people as an insult in a traditionally Spanish-speaking neighborhood. "It just seems like common sense that you'd have the sign in multiple languages, when you take into account the culture of where this park lies," community organizer Oscar Grande says.
In 2001, the Board of Supervisors passed a law to address that very sentiment, appropriately titled the Language Access Ordinance. While the law doesn't expressly require all city signs to be written in the city's three main languages — English, Spanish, and Chinese — it mandates that "official materials" be adapted to serve areas with a high concentration of non-English speakers.
So it's not a huge leap for Spanish-speaking soccer players in the Mission to ask for a culturally appropriate park sign.
Though the Mission Playground sign is now moot, the language issue is cause for hand-wringing at SF Rec & Park, whose administrators have asked the city's Office of Civic Engagement & Immigrant Affairs for advice on which park signs should be amended. A few "common-sense" translations certainly wouldn't hurt, OCEIA's Executive Director Adrienne Pon says.
And clearly, nothing will accelerate that process like an embarrassing viral video.
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