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JVAH

@jakevah

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Screenwriter. Political organizer @wfplosangeles @swing_left_losfeliz. Drummer @theoilbarons. Grown man trying to sell Star Wars toys @buythetoysluke

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We did it. by @jakevah

Q: What’s scarier than vampires, zombies, or werewolves?
A: Corporate billionaires buying our elections!

Luckily, we have people on our side. Join us for a Halloween Costume Canvass in East LA for our slate of WFP champions: Angela Gonzales Torres for Congress, Sarah Rascon for State Senate, and Jane Kim for Insurance Commissioner. RSVP at link in bio.

Costumes highly encouraged! by @jakevah

The Landlord at Sherman oaks square, bypassed community feedback to get this permits for remodeling. Let’s hold them accountable and demand that they let our legacy small businesses stay operating. Please show up Nov 19 at 6:30pm at the Sherman oaks library 14245 Moorpark St, Sherman Oaks, CA 91423 by @jakevah

Come on out TOMORROW Saturday 10/24 to canvass for Angela Gonzales-Torres @angela4congress and Sarah Rascón @rasconforsenate !!!

We'll be at Highland Park Rec canvassing from 230p-530p register via the mobilize link in our bio! by @jakevah

These emails were not originally written for an audience. They began inside a legal crisis. Over time, the correspondence became a record of detention, motherhood, marriage, fear, ordinary life, hope, anger, humor and friendship.

Months before we discussed sharing excerpts publicly, I wrote that someday we should call them “Love Letters Between Maryam & Marium.” Maryam answered that the emails already had a place in the book she was writing in her head, and that she was grateful to have me as her “sister and witness.”

That word — witness — is the premise of the series.
The letters remain hers and mine. We are opening only the pieces Maryam chooses to share. by @jakevah

Can’t believe I get to go to work with these people every day. Jimmy Gomez doesn’t stand a chance (✊🪵)! Thank you Angela, Cyndi, Lily, and Vicky for all of it. by @jakevah

By July, my correspondence with Maryam had become something different from the emails that first brought us together.

Maryam was living inside an experience she never chose and trying to understand a world that no longer made sense to her. I could not change where she was. Sometimes all I could do was remind her that she had not been forgotten.

Maryam wrote back that I had become her “soul sister,” one of the people she trusted enough to keep close.

Then she described what had happened to her family another way: “We were forced to become part of history in ways I didn’t want to.”

These emails are part of the record of that history. But they are also the record of a friendship being formed inside it. by @jakevah

Detention is experienced not only through hearings and legal filings, but through thousands of ordinary dependencies. Here it was salt and hot water.

Maryam and her son were getting sick. She spent a morning trying to obtain a small amount of salt. Two days later she wrote that the unit had no hot water.
Her own summary was better than anything I could write: “Hot water, no salt, Salt, no hot water... round and round.”

Her son’s name is redacted for privacy. by @jakevah