On a recent Friday afternoon, the Blue Cat Café, in East Austin, hummed pleasantly with activity. Patrons lounged on couches or sat pecking away at their MacBooks as half a dozen cats roamed freely over and around them. A server went from table to table with an iPad, taking orders for whimsically named vegan dishes like Alley Cat Tacos and BBQ Briscat. Apart from the cats and the feline-themed decor, the cafe seemed like just another shabby-chic hipster hangout. Anyone willing to pay a $5 “kitty cover” could come inside, order a coffee, and play with the adoptable cats. The cozy atmosphere made it easy to forget that the cafe is ground zero for an intense public debate over gentrification, a flash point for long-standing tensions between the majority-Hispanic neighborhood and wealthier, whiter developers. It’s a conflict that has now expanded beyond the neighborhood, becoming yet another skirmish in the national battle between the alt-right and the radical left. All over a cat cafe. It started February 12, 2015, when F&F Real Estate Ventures bulldozed the Jumpolin piñata and party-supply store on East Cesar Chavez Street. Jumpolin’s owners, Monica and Sergio Lejarazu, arrived that morning to find the store flattened, their merchandise, computers, and business records crushed under the rubble. F&F claimed it had sent several eviction notices to the Lejarazus after assorted lease violations and nonpayment of rent. In a February 2015 interview with the Austin American-Statesman, the Lejarazus said they had not been notified of the building’s demolition. Longtime residents of the area were outraged. For decades, the neighborhood surrounding Jumpolin had been under siege by developers attracted to the below-market prices and proximity to downtown Austin. The overnight destruction of a beloved piñata store—part of a cluster of party-supply stores along East Cesar Chavez—seemed to crystallize neighborhood anger about the influx of hipster bars and luxury apartment buildings. A coalition of community groups, including People Organized in Defense of Earth and her Resources and the Austin chapters of the NAACP and the League of United Latin American Citizens, called for a boycott of F&F Real Estate’s properties. The Lejarazus sued the firm for unlawful demolition. Meanwhile, Jordan French and Darius Fisher, the owners of F&F, began looking for a new tenant.

A cafe employee.

Rebecca Gray was in the market. She’d dreamed of opening a “cat cafe” since hearing about two businesses—one in Montreal, one in Oakland—where patrons could sip cappuccinos and nosh on snacks in the company of resident felines. Gray, then 31, quit her job at an Austin start-up and got to work. She had a name—the Blue Cat Café, after her cat Max, a Russian blue—and $62,533 from a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign. Now she needed a space. With her business partner, Jacques Casimir, she looked all over Austin before settling on a former mechanic’s garage sitting toward the back of a seven-thousand-square-foot lot on East Cesar Chavez. Within 48 hours of visiting the property in July 2015, they had handed over the deposit and signed a five-year lease. The front of the lot, where Jumpolin once stood, would become cafe parking. Just how much Gray knew about the neighborhood’s antipathy to her new landlord depends on whom you ask. Gray says she knew French owned Jumpolin’s property, but was not aware that the neighborhood held him responsible for the store’s demolition. She claims that she believed the Lejarazus and F&F had reached a settlement (they hadn’t), and that she was unaware of a community boycott. Several East Austin community leaders dispute that, saying they reached out to Gray and Casimir to inform them of the boycott and to discourage them from signing the lease. The cafe celebrated its grand opening on October 17, 2015. The first patrons to arrive, many of them Kickstarter donors, were greeted by a line of protesters carrying signs (“Hey hipster, don’t be a pussy!”) and chanting slogans (“Pet your cat, sip your tea, on the ruins of Jumpolin”). The community, it seemed, was making good on its promise to boycott, and they wanted everyone to know it. When, two months later, the Lejarazus reached an undisclosed settlement with F&F over the demolition of Jumpolin and began scouting new locations for their store, Gray breathed a sigh of relief. The protesters, she thought, would now leave her alone. But neighborhood activists remained determined to carry on the boycott. Several of them, including veteran East Austin organizer Bertha Delgado, formed a group, Defend Our Hoodz—Defiende El Barrio. In February 2016, Defend Our Hoodz launched a Facebook page that would be moderated by Chris Ledesma, a young Chicano activist. The group used social media to organize increasingly vitriolic protests outside the cat cafe. More than once, employees called the police to keep demonstrators off the property. Video from July 2016 shows a gathering of sign-carrying protesters lining the sidewalk outside the cafe. “To all you white people, you look really f—ing comfortable right now because you’ve got a small army of pigs to protect you,” a man yells into a bullhorn. “How does it feel to need an army of pigs to protect you from the f—ing neighborhood? Get out!” On the morning of October 21, 2016, a few days after the cafe’s one-year anniversary, Gray arrived at work to find the locks superglued shut and “F— You Gentrified Scum” spray-painted in red on one of the exterior walls. Later that day, about a dozen protesters from Defend Our Hoodz arrived, many wearing red bandannas to hide their faces. Diane Ontiveros, who lives next door to the Blue Cat Café, witnessed a confrontation between Gray and the demonstrators. “They were trying to walk her off her property so they could get a hold of her, but I ran over and pulled her by her hand back this way,” she says. “One gentleman told me that I would pay for that.” The 57-year-old Ontiveros says she found a dead cat in her front yard the following day. (A spokesperson for Defend Our Hoodz denies responsibility for the graffiti, the vandalism, and the dead cat, attributing the acts to “people in the neighborhood.”) “The boycott, we didn’t see it as something symbolic. If somebody crosses the picket line, they are accountable.” Days later, Gray was interviewed by a reporter for InfoWars, the far-right, conspiracy-obsessed media organization founded by Austin radio show host Alex Jones. Thanks to the resulting story, the Blue Cat Café suddenly became a cause célèbre for the alt-right. Donations from around the world began pouring in to the cafe’s GoFundMe page, which had been created by Gray’s sister after the vandalism. “I hope these protesters die a slow horrible death,” one donor, who had chipped in $500, wrote on the page. “Those violent THUGS are disgusting RACIST vile human beings,” offered another. The GoFundMe campaign raised over $15,000, which Gray used for vandalism-related repairs and the installation of security cameras around the cafe. (Gray says she didn’t know what InfoWars was when she granted the interview. She says that not all of the donations were from Jones’s supporters, and since GoFundMe does not allow recipients to accept money on a selective basis, she was “happy to take away money from people with hate.”) Defend Our Hoodz viewed Gray’s InfoWars interview and willingness to take money from Jones’s followers as confirmation of their worst suspicions. “It just kind of solidified our argument, which is that gentrification rests on white supremacy,” the group’s spokesperson, who requested anonymity, says. “They don’t like that there’s this group that is consistently calling it out and is led by brown and non-white folks. They see that as a threat.” Around the time of the vandalism, Delgado began to distance herself from Defend Our Hoodz. “They were cursing, shouting out bad names,” she says. “That’s not the type of protesting that I was ever used to, and I’ve been protesting all my life . . . They were ripping signs off my neighbors’ property, kicking things. That was unacceptable. The people that Chris [Ledesma] started to bring around the group were not people who were from the neighborhood, and that started to scare me.” (Ledesma declined repeated interview requests.) One day Delgado logged in to the group’s Facebook page to discover that her administrator privileges had been revoked. She had been ousted from the group.

Demonstrators on June 12, 2017. Nick Wagner/Austin American-Statesman via AP Patrons inside the cafe. Left: Demonstrators on June 12, 2017. Nick Wagner/Austin American-Statesman via AP Right: Patrons inside the cafe.