99% Invisible - 515- Super Citizens

Episode Date: November 23, 2022

Los Angeles' El Peatonito is part of a subset of real life superheroes who are more focused on things like picking up trash and taking on civic issues than catching criminals in alleys.These super citizens take their inspiration from comic books but in some ways have more ambitious goals than defeating a make believe villain. They are out to solve big societal problems. Wherever a city is plagued by traffic accidents, or people are living on the streets…these heroes heed the call of service. Super CitizensCheck out David Weinberg's brilliant series The Superhero Complex

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. On the afternoon of June 18th in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Echo Park at the intersection of sunset boulevard and Logan Street, people were going about their day, having brunch at trendy cafes and perusing a local bookstore. When suddenly, they saw something extraordinary. A battle between good and evil. That's reporter and friend of the show, David Weinberg.

Some of the people who saw the confrontation probably thought a movie or a commercial was being filmed. Why else would a guy in a superhero outfit attempt to move a car with his bare hands? It all started when a woman in a white cheap pulled up to the traffic light to make a right turn onto sunset boulevard. Now, it's perfectly legal to make a right turn on red in California. What you're not supposed to do is block the crosswalk while you wait your turn. And that's exactly what happened here. It was at this precise moment that our hero emerged from the shadows to save the day. He was wearing a black and white striped cape and a mask.

This caped crusader bravely approached the front of the car, placed his hands on the hood and started pushing. My name is Piatonito. I'm the pedestrian luchador of Vigilante of the streets, fighting for pedestrian rights. El Piatonito, He's a real life superhero. Yeah, I don't like to much the word superhero. I feel it sounds pretentious, I don't know.

But I like more vigilante or in Spanish, the word luchador, that it's a fighter, a fighter of the streets. El Pea Toneito models his look on Mexican wrestlers. But this hero does not wage his battles in the ring. He fights in the dangerous, smog-choked, traffic clogged metropolises wherever the humble pedestrian faces their most dangerous villain, the automobile. The people of Los Angeles are very much in need of a hero like El Piazzanino. Because in many ways, the city's leaders have failed to protect them from automobiles.

Every 30 hours, a person in Los Angeles is killed in a car-related incident. It's the leading cause of the children in California car crashes, and all because we wanted to go fast in the streets. And the main job of the government is to protect our lives. The life is sacred. El Péa Tnito is not some lone crusader fighting for us mortals. There are real life superheroes all over the world, scouring the streets of their towns, doing their part to fill in the gaps

where local authorities have failed. David recently made a whole podcast about real-life superheroes. It's called the superhero complex. While working on it, I discovered a whole world of costume vigilantes and do-gooders, some of whom were hell-bent on catching criminals and getting into fights, but Alpe Attenito was part of a different subset of real-life superheroes, who were more focused on things like picking up trash and taking on civic issues. They take their inspiration from comic books, but in some ways, these real-life heroes have more ambitious goals than defeating a make-believe villain.

They are out to solve big societal problems, wherever a city is plagued by traffic accidents or people are living on the streets, these heroes heed the call of service. When I first heard about real-life superheroes, I was skeptical of them. I thought surely they just wanted attention, whilst they dressed up in ridiculous costumes. But then I started to spend time with some of them,

attacked along on neighborhood patrols, and-hand the work they were doing. And I came away inspired by their dedication to helping people in need. And I felt guilty about judging them for the way they dressed. And to be totally honest, I'm not a superhero guy. I never connected with the comics or the shows as a kid. But now I actually think real life superheroes, like El Peo Tignito, are way cooler than any Marvel or DC character.

And there are a lot of civic doodgoaters who came before him. Take, for example, Jim Phillips, a Chicago middle school teacher from the 1960s, who called himself the Fox. The Fox says he took his name from the Fox River, which runs through Northern Illinois, west of Chicago. He's managed to avoid police and private detectives who tried to track him down.

The Fox agreed to his first television interview. The Fox defended his community against the heartless corporations that were dumping toxic waste into local rivers. His calling card was a note signed with a fox face in place of the letter O. Legend has it, the fox would canoe down the river to put caps on drainage pipes that were releasing pollutants into the water. Once he even dumped 50 pounds of sewage from like Michigan into the office of the company responsible for it. In the early 1980s, another hero joined this tradition, a man named Willie Perry,

who became known as the Birmingham Batman. Willie Perry drove around Birmingham, Alabama, in a souped up 1971 Ford Thunderbird with a Batman license plate in the words, Rescueship, painted on the hood. Mostly, he focused on helping stranded motorists. My car here was next to out. I didn't have a spare. And I was stranded. I was on the highway with my keys, move on, stop to help. And elongated, strange, calm. Today, there are actually dozens of good Samaritan heroes

doing important civic work all around the world. For example, a woman in Nagoya, Japan, who goes by the moniker, Clean Panther. I guess there are about 40 heroes in Japan. Clean Panther wears a blue, red, and black kimono, with a futuristic yellow panther mask that covers her whole head. Many of the superheroes in Japan focus on picking up litter. My main activity is clean up town, so name it clean, and also combined with batter. I love black panther, the Marvel superhero. Clean Panther and her superhero crew would go on litter patrols, picking up trash in

Ngoia, Japan's fourth largest city. These heroes were important inspirations to modern do-gutters, like El Pé Neto, but the person who really inspired him, the most successful hero of them all, was Super Civico. In the mid-1990s, Super Civico roamed the streets of Bogota, Colombia. He wore yellow spandex, red underpants, and a cape with a letter C across his chest. His name literally translates to super-citizen. Super-Civico's real name is Antonis Mocos. He's a mathematician and philosopher with thick

glasses and a sandy beard. In 1993, Mocos was the chancellor of the National University of Columbia. At that time, the South American nation was in turmoil. The government was notoriously corrupt, kidnapping, assassinations, and extortion were common, as drug cartels and rebel groups like the FARC clashed with the government. The gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else seemed to be widening, as slums grew across the city.

The local government of Bogota wasn't capable of meeting the basic needs of its citizens. And this unrest spilled out into every aspect of life, especially at the National University in Bogota. The students were fed up, many of them were sympathetic to the FARC, a Marxist rebel group. Others identified as anarchists, and together, they did seem to agree on one thing at least. They were not going to allow for peaceful discussions. This was war.

At one campus event, students threw smoke bombs on the stage. Another time, they threw feces at the political candidates on stage for a debate. Mokus was attacked while giving his speech one day, but the next time he was confronted by the Raudy students, he did something that would shock the nation. On October 28th, 1993, Mokus walked to the edge of the stage, turned his back to the crowd, pulled down his pants, and moond them. The Mokus moonding set a pretty clear message to the protesters and it became national news. Now typically showing your butthole to thousands of students would be a career ending move. And in one way it was, he didn't work at the university after that. But it also made him a star. Many Colombians found the whole thing refreshing.

This is a clip from a short film called Cities on Speed, Bogota Change. The mooning incident becomes a national scandal, and Mogos is forced to resign his position. But among the general public, he becomes a symbol of honesty. Moku's sudden popularity inspires him to run for mayor. Against all tradition, he runs as an independent without support from any political party. Antonis Moku won the election in a landslide and became the first independent candidate to become mayor of Bogota. And once he took office, he made it clear that he was unlike any politician Bogota had ever seen.

He would bring props to interviews, like a giant stuffed carrot, which is the word used in Columbia to call someone a nerd. At one point, he got 45,000 citizens to gather in the streets and inflate balloons. They were painted with the image of someone who had persecuted them in some way. The citizens popped the balloons in a form of city-wide performance therapy. Mokus' methods were unusual. But nothing prepared people for Mokus' greatest stunt of all. He began patrolling the streets as Super Sivico. As far as I can tell, Mocus was the first political leader to create a superhero identity

complete with a costume and then walk the streets as a superhero. Here is a news clip of Super Sivico in action. A news reporter walks alongside Mocus, who's wearing skin-tight yellow spandex. As they walk, SuperCivico tears down old crumbling posters from a wall and collects trash that he takes to a dumpster. He says to the reporter, we want to have a beautiful city. The reporter narrates the video as SuperCivico jumps onto a concrete wall and starts running. His red cape flowing behind him.

As the reporter says, using his super legs, he climbs the protest against visual pollution. One time, SuperCivico turned up on TV naked and took a shower while promoting increased water conservation. And it worked. After his stunt, water use in the city dropped by roughly 14%. As mayor of Bogota, Mokus embraced the idea of street theater, sometimes in ways that baffled even his supporters. For example, he fired all of the notoriously corrupt traffic police. And he told them if they wanted to be rehired, they would first have to be trained as professional mimes. Yes, you heard that right, mimes. Most of the traffic police scoffed, but about 400 did return to the force. And so, across Bogota, the people saw something extraordinary.

Over 400 mimes with white painted faces and fluorescent dungarees fanned out across the city. They would hand out soccer-style red cards and mock drivers who flaunted the rules. It sounds absurd, but this actually makes sense to me. I think it's far too easy for us to be reactionary, to respond with anger when we're told that we are wrong. But by using humor and street theater, it changes the whole equation. It's a lot harder to get mad at a mime or a guy in a cape because you look ridiculous.

The mime patrol brings down the temperature. And ultimately, the best argument for Mokas' methods were the results he achieved. There was a 50% drop in traffic fatalities under Mokas. This superhero mayor, Super Civico, also brought down homicide rates by 70%. Mokas served one term as mayor, which is the maximum there because of term limits. After leaving office Moga's ran for president of Columbia in 1998, he lost, but in 2001, he came back to Bogota and won a second term as mayor before stepping down in 2003.

SuperCivico is no longer doing good deeds on the streets of Bogota, but his street theater revolution has inspired another generation of heroes, including a young political science student named Jorge. A.K.A. the Crosse walk crusader. A.K.A. he who can stop a Jeep with his bare hands on the streets of Los Angeles. Jorge grew up in Mexico City, whereas a, he was afraid to walk the streets. They were chaotic cars everywhere. It was very dangerous, noise, pollution. So yeah, it was hostile and stressful to walk. So I always told my mother that I don't like to walk the streets. It's terrible. He became passionate about road safety, but he had a hard time getting others to share his excitement.

One night in February of 2012, Jorge and his best friend went to catch a lucha libre wrestling match. And it was something they did all the time, but that night was different. Jorge watched the masked luchador fighters throw each other around the ring in their gleaming costumes, and a crazy idea popped into his head. The theatrics of the luchilebre made him think of Antonis Mokas. What if he followed

in Mokas' footsteps and used the iconic Mexican luchidor as a vehicle to spread the word about better urban planning? You know people love to see a theater and spectacles in the streets, and that's a great way to send a message in a peaceful way. We need to do something fun. Why not after the match we buy a cape and a mask and go out to the streets to fight for the rights of pedestrians? And just like that, a new hero was born. El Péato Nito, that's Spanish for the pedestrian. For his first few outings, El Péato Nito wore a $3 cape.

Then he got an upgrade. I told my grandmother to help me design my cape. And my cape has white and black stripes, just like pedestrian crosswalk. With his new suit, L. Paye Tignito set out to brave the onslaught of rush hour in Mexico City. He wove through road raging drivers and toxic exhaust fumes with his black and white crosswalk cape streaming out behind him. I push back cars that are obstructing the crosswalk. I paint the sidewalks and I paint crosswalks and bikeways without any permits. Did anyone try to fight you when you would go out? A few times, yes.

Especially when I walk on the top of cars. This is El Pea Tornito's most controversial tactic. He walks on the top of cars to really make the driver feel shame for their bad behavior. The owners get mad and they start to be aggressive, but then I'm very friendly. You know, I do my best to never escalate conflict. Pea Tnito doesn't think of his luchador persona as a character he's playing. It's just him, a mild mannered academic in a costume that has meant to draw attention

to a very serious problem in an engaging way. It's a challenge because we have normalized chaotic streets. We have normalized that if somebody dies in the streets, it was an accident. Advocates, we hate the word accident because there are not accidents. Somebody designed the street. Somebody was a reckless driver.

After graduating from high school, Jorge moved to Los Angeles to study urban planning at UCLA. After that, he stayed in LA to work on infrastructure issues. He made a capstone project called the pedestrian battle of Los Angeles, named for the Regigants the Machine Alpum. His work is based on a global campaign called Vision Zero, which is pushing for communities around the world to reach the goal of zero traffic fatalities and severe injuries. But his work isn't just academic. Every so often, he still pulls out the cape and mask. On a recent Saturday afternoon last summer, El Peato Nito was fully clad in his luchidor

mask and cape prowling the streets of Los Angeles, on the lookout for anyone who might be putting pedestrians in danger. And it didn't take long for him to encounter his first villain. A guy parked his car in a crosswalk and then walked inside a restaurant where he stood in line waiting to pick up food. So Paya Taniuto went up to the window of the restaurant and tried to get the guys attention.

But the crosswalk menace was unfazed by the man in the luch door mask and Kate calling him out. He pretended like he didn't see Péritanito. He's ignoring me, you know? Like, you're parked in the crosswalk. You know, I'm not going to be viled in, you know? Like, that's not my style. But at least he knows that he's doing something illegal

and he shouldn't be parked on the crosswalk. Paya Teneito's goal is to get people's attention. He wants everyone to look at the folks who are putting pedestrians in danger. He wants them to feel shame and to change their naughty ways. The absurdity of facing down a superhero forces drivers to think differently about car culture. In a city where five or six pedestrians die every week from car-related incidents. You know, don't take me wrong. The car is a great invention, and yeah, there's something of freedom about cars. But if we analyze the numbers of crashes, pollution, space taken by cars, we have failed this experiment.

For all his theatrics, El Péri-Tanito's work on the streets can only accomplish so much. For bigger changes to happen, we need activism on a broader scale. That's why Péri-Tanito works alongside other pedestrian activists, and a grassroots organization called Sunset for All. They put together a proposal to improve the city's bike lane infrastructure and to improve sidewalks, build more shade structures, and bus stops, and expand access to public parks. In September, Los Angeles City Council member Mitch O'Farell issued a formal motion to support their project. It was a small but important victory for the people fighting in the pedestrian battle

of Los Angeles. I love El Peo Tnito and the fun and absurdity that he brings to everyday life. But for real change to happen, we also need different kinds of heroes, bold thinking community members who become leaders for the right reason, to serve the people, leaders who will actually bring meaningful change to our neighborhoods. More with David Weinberg after this. So I'm back with David Weinberg. Hey David.

Hey Robin, how's it going? I'm really good. Thank you for that story. It was so much fun. You recently made a whole show about real life superheroes called superhero complex. And for, you know, for our show, we talked about some of the more civic-minded, friendly real life superheroes. But on your show, you do some research and talk about a kind of more sinister, vigilante flipside. Yeah, it's true, but these are not people that I've spent time with. I was looking back through history at people who've maybe set a precedent for the real life superhero movement, folks who've taken the law into their own hands.

And in the US, vigilantes have looked like a lot of things, sometimes really ugly, like the clan or insurrectionists. And one group that I read up on who actually have similarities to real life superheroes is a group called the Bald Nobbers. The Bald Nobbers were an example of this sort of group that wore masks and they executed vigilante justice in the wild west. So this is T. Crulos. He's the author of a book called Heroes in the Night

Inside the Real Life Superhero Movement. And he writes about the bald nobbers. They were active in Missouri from 1885 to 1889. And they looked pretty terrifying. They wore like suit coats, backwards, and they dawned at these homemade masks that had devil horns protruding from the top. And this red and white stitching around their eyes and mouth.

I imagine it would have been like terrifying to see these guys like galloping across the plains on horseback and whips in their hands and they're basically looking to kill suspected horse thieves. So they started out by hanging people that were cattle thieves or stuff like that. But as their reign sort of went on, they became a little bit more petty, I think, like you could be visited by the bald nobbers and whipped if you were accused of being ornery. Yeah, and it wasn't just people with an

irritable disposition that the nobbers went after. Back then, a lot of the poor couples in the community, they couldn't afford to pay their marriage license fees, so they were technically not married, but they lived together as a family. And the bald nobbers believed these unwed couples were living in sin, and so they basically went around just beating these people. It's kind of an example of vigilanteism that's fun out of control. As time goes on, you get other groups that I would say are similar to that. You have groups like the Minutemen who patrol the border. They're also armed. You have groups like the Guardian Angels who are not armed, but are also, you know, in a sort of uniform slash costume that patrol the streets, looking for crimes. Do you find that a group like this, like the bald numbers, has some DNA with real life

superhero movement or is this a totally different thing? You know, I think one thing that all the real life superheroes had in common with the bald numbers is that they all believed in their hearts that they were out to do good. And the difference, I think, is that a lot of the real life superiors are actually doing good and their intentions are good. But with the bald nobbers, I would say a lot of their intentions were not good and things got out of hand quickly.

And another key distinction is that the bald nobbers had weapons. They were shootouts and whips. And every single real life superhero that I talked to was vehemilia posed to any sort of weapon or gun that was sort of like against their ethos. How does the existence of this darker element impact

how you think about real life superheroes? Like the impulse towards, you know, vigilanceism could be civic minded, but also it could be, you know, really bad. So having seen all sides of this, what do you think of this desire people have to take the law into their own hands? Well, I think the desire to do good in your community

is a good one. And I will say that all the real life superheroes that I spent time with for the show had good intentions. And I would say I largely agree with their intentions and the things they were trying to do, where it gets complicated is a lot of times, you know, in my reporting, I found situations where the real life superheroes stepped into a situation

and I think sometimes it got worse. And part of that, I think, is that if you're gonna be the type of person that's gonna take the lawn to your own hands or just go into these situations that can get very dangerous very quickly, there has to be some level of training and we all have to agree as a society, like how we want people to handle a lot.

Ideally, it would be to de-escalate these situations. And when you have real life superheroes, we don't have that oversight over them. They're just operating on their own. And so that's where I think it gets kind of messy, even when their intentions are good. Yeah, well, this is really fascinating as a culture and I hope people check out the superhero complex

because it's such a good series. I really appreciate you making it. Oh, thank you so much. This is really lovely to hear. Thanks for sharing part of the story with us, David. Yeah, anytime. 99% Invisible with Produce this week by David Weinberg, edited by Chris Barupé, original music by Swan Riel, sound mix by Martin Gonzales, fact checking by Graham Haysha. Our senior editor is Delaney Hall, Kurt Colstead is the digital director, Residine includes

Jason D'Alyone, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Leigh, Lashmadan, Jacob Maldonado Medina, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, Sophia Klatsker, intern Olivia Green, and me Roman Mars. Special thanks to David Waters, Carolyn Thornham, and Amalia Sortland. We are part of the Stitcher & Serious XM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building, in beautifultown Oakland California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI org.PI.org. Tell me what you do me a favor.

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