Tag: Social Justice

Water, Space, and Placemaking

Boom California on October 10, 2017

Dorie Dakin Perez

Like many so-called “boomerang” millennials, I found myself returning to the Central Valley to set down roots after living away for a decade. Looking at my hometown with new eyes and a burgeoning career as an urban anthropologist, the subject of change in insular Fresno and its spatial politics can be hard to swallow. More so, crisis conditions from the statewide drought had been an alarming yet helpful framing mechanism in which to visualize the physical and communal stratification of Valley life.

Water, or more specifically its absence, has helped shape the built environment of urbanization in Fresno. Such deficit thinking has continued to be a driving force in setting policy and placemaking practices^[1] in the City of Fresno, even as the city currently pursues an effort to revitalize its aging infrastructure to meet twenty-first century economic demands. Most interestingly, the production of an imagined future by groups of non-state actors eager to stake their claim on the community is where memory and planning intersect, sometimes painfully.

As much as the Central Valley’s agricultural interests have long positioned themselves as the major economic base for the region, the drought has revealed the lingering dispossession caused by such uneven concentrations of wealth. Regional concerns echo those claims of dispossession, highlighted in the media coverage of dry, unincorporated areas feeling the worst effects of the drought. A 2015 example of this was in the especially hard hit region of rural East Tulare County, where a humanitarian crisis occurred due to major water shortages and a lack of stable infrastructure. Yet it is the City of Fresno and the process of urbanization where such discourses of cultural deficit meet an engaged social placemaking through practices of memory and a general rethinking of the politics of space.

My ethnographic scholarship uses the recent five year drought, and the inequality it has made visible across different cultural platforms of space and place, to understand the Central Valley as a culture of historic extraction, be it natural resources, labor or public space. This social memory of dispossession^[2] is exemplified in the ways that nonstate actors in the City of Fresno, and the greater Central Valley, seek to revise social-spatial projects. Specifically, the push to stake a grassroots claim in the revitalization of the inner urban core of downtown Fresno, as well as the reimagining of space in and around the city, is part of this new project of place that small-scale community organizations are using to highlight the sunshine and noir of urban change. My use of the term “urban,” in a region known for its rural life and agricultural economy, is deliberate; “The urban is not a unit, but a process of transformation unfolding in diverse sites, territories and landscapes.”^[3]

The subject of water is never far behind when discussing land use policy and the Central Valley’s built environment. Changes in the conceptualization of these two resources—water and space—are the mechanisms of new social projects happening in Fresno. Through the application of a theoretical framework borrowed from urban geography, Henri Lefebvre’s idea of the “right to the city,” the twin issues of water and space are helpful for their potential to assist in making these projects of social construction manifested.

The right to the city is, therefore, far more than a right of individual access to the resources that the city embodies: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city more after our heart’s desire. It is, moreover, a collective rather than an individual right since changing the city inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power over the processes of urbanization.^[4]

Urban development and water resource management by competing interests seek different ends to their work, and yet together shape the social and physical landscape of the Central Valley. Two key case studies are the focus of my analysis that convene the spatial politics of place with the histories of dispossession that have become part of the collective social landscape.

Urban development and water resource management by competing interests seek different ends to their work, and yet together shape the social and physical landscape of the Central Valley.

Water and its infrastructure needs in the Central Valley were made material in the dry fountains along the Fulton Mall in downtown Fresno. From initial private investment to haphazard public enjoyment, the fountains once stood as beacons of modernity, offering shoppers a spot to linger as they returned to the revamped “cool” of 1960s urbanism chic. The fountains, all twenty-two of them, were in Fall 2015 mostly dried up and filled with trash or repurposed as planters. Refilled and drained at random, their visible deterioration echoed the nearly empty space of the Mall’s decaying Mid-Century Modern infrastructure. “Emptiness” remains a relative term. In the perception of the mainstream shopping public of Fresno, a lack of middle class shoppers present reads as evidence of emptiness, as ‘empty’ despite the “hundreds of people, mostly of color and of lower socioeconomic status, who walked the Mall each day.”^[5] Illegibility, of both a new kind of patron, who is not the white middle-class consumer benefiting and partaking in gentrification processes, and the natural resources like fountains and trees through which water flows on the Mall is inscribed in its initial problematization.

The Fulton Mall’s fountains, part of the initiative to find local artists who could help curate the space for a 1960s consumer base, and their removal as not representing the natural conditions of the Valley environment exemplify the different conceptualizations of public goods and a changing vision for the future. This decline, tracked for decades by The Fresno Bee daily newspaper and local business community newsletters, is part of the contestation of space and place that is underscored by the recent drought conditions that made water a necessary but insufficient condition for change in the Central Valley imaginary.

Blackstone Avenue is another dispirited infrastructural legacy, once the “center of town” where commercial interests were centered below Shaw Avenue away from the civic institutions of the city’s downtown. Similar to how rural space in the Valley has been divided up and intensified throughout the twentieth century, the commercial space on Blackstone has transitioned from retail to a concentration of auto and auto-service related enterprises, owned by non-residents who are seen by many within the transitioning neighborhoods around the central artery as the cause of urban blight that bleeds southward towards the neglected downtown. Both the Mall and Blackstone Avenue are the foci of revitalization efforts by government functionaries led by former Mayor Ashley Swearengin’s “I Believe in Downtown”^[6] campaign and community nonprofits who seek to tie physical revitalization with social transformation through engaged electoral participation and economic investment. The phantom force of water—its accessibility, disappearance, ties to nature as key to physical improvement and regulation as part of the broader technologies of power overlapping in downtown—is always present as part of a larger discussion of resources that have helped reproduce histories of dispossession and extraction that leave “ordinary cities”^[7] like Fresno a contested social terrain.

California, as a product and site of cultural production, is an outward-facing entity that valorizes a mythic, encrypted self-narrative of opportunity envisioned by generations of booster elites^[8] eager to develop the American West. California’s “sunniness” is coupled with its inherent noir,^[9] a hidden power phenomena that keeps its less desirable yet essential parts in shadow. The Central Valley is where those dual forces of noir and sunshine intersect, where the issues of urbanization and historical patterns of rural settlement coexist uncomfortably within the California project. An area east of the Coastal Range that includes the San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys, from Bakersfield to Chico, the Valley has always been socially embattled when not ignored as a political backwater. “Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another. The separation, of north from south, and even more acutely of west from east, from urban coast from the agricultural valleys… was profound, fueled by the rancor of water wars and by less tangible but even more rancorous differences in attitude and culture.”^[10] As Gerry Haslam has argued, the Central Valley serves as a liminal cultural space, the “Other California,” left out of a Southern California-centered focus on economic opportunity and cultural production:

I began to look more closely at the physical environment and saw things I should have noticed before. Just north of where I had grown up, I realized, lay a maimed environment, the bed of the largest freshwater lake in the West, now dried, plowed and irrigated: What had happened?^[11]

This naturally-occurring ecological event has intensified to unheard-of costs to human development. The statewide drought was deemed a disaster in 2014 by Gov. Jerry Brown and subject to federal intervention by 2015. The drought’s slow burn into the collective consciousness of those not in the business of agriculture^[12] has helped unearth some of the more human disasters and longstanding internal contradictions that make explicit the social constructions of place that re-emphasize the Valley’s history as a land of physical and social dispossession and struggle for cultural significance. The research agenda that informs this work is part of a broader focus on the anthropology of Fresno’s downtown redevelopment that informs my preliminary dissertation research on the cultural construction of urban space. Over the course of the last two years, I attended public meetings at the state, city and regional levels (Fresno City Council Meeting, 4 and 27 February, 2014; State Workshop on Water, January 2015; Kings River Irrigation District Board Meeting, August 2015) on urban redevelopment and water policy, as well as conducted unstructured and semi-structured interviews with informants working on these two issues within the city. One key part of this preliminary ethnographic analysis has been the data collected through fieldnotes from participant-observation efforts. I worked on projects, went to meetings and attended special events with various community organizations working outside the confines of political campaigns or government office.

Central Valley farmers have long fought against the movement of water from Northern California to the southern part of the state, using “L.A.” as a euphemism for waste, entitlement and bad planning policies.

The theoretical framework of Lefebvre’s “right to the city” can be used to understand California’s historical spatialization and put the recent water crisis into socio-political context. Henri Lefebvre, the primary member of the Marxist revival in mid-twentieth century cultural geography scholarship,^[13] argued that the city’s inherent benefits—social, political, and economic—were made possible by the diversity of people, opportunity and intensification of space and development. These social and economic resources found in cities should not be hindered by privatization as a phenomenon in a city available for public benefit, including the surrounding areas. This call for keeping some things, like economic markets and open urban space, public and publicly-administered was positioned squarely against the creeping privatization and divestment of public resource management that cities sought to systemize in the latter half of the twentieth century.^[14] Public goods, Lefebvre argued, were the only things not made into commodities for exchange by the economically-privileged few who gained the most from capitalism’s structural inequities. This idea was part of his more general discussion of the social production of space^[15] as something categorized and made into physical and representation modes for the organization and stratification of human development. Thus the built environment, and policies of land use and production, are part of this codification and reinscription of capitalistic social organization, where space makes some welcome and bars others from its production.

City/farm, urban/rural—the dispossession of space and the extraction of resources for a global market is a process that the Central Valley has always taken part in despite competing concerns over growing urbanization and the political economy and industrial concerns of agriculture. A recent focus on water is one of many historical cycles of political attention and eventual obfuscation. Central Valley farmers have long fought against the movement of water from Northern California to the southern part of the state, using “L.A.” as a euphemism for waste, entitlement and bad planning policies. For the last decade, signs along Highway 99 shout slogans like “Food Grows Where Water Flows,” vilifying the names of those legislators who vote for more environmental protections that limit industrial water use. This geographic division of resources and power are part of the political project of the state’s dualism; a shiny attractive Coast and a shadowed hinterland in complete symbiosis, the city’s “contado” that Gary Brechin wrote, “feeds the people,”^[16] yet remains unknowable.

Decades of benign neglect of water in the form of a lack of regulatory processes across the Central Valley has led to the depletion of groundwater from local water tables. Water meters that measure and charge for home water use are recent additions to the utility bills of Central Valley residents, a factor that historically increased the illegibility of its importance in the daily lives of residents. This lack of attention, given that other urban areas have for decades worked on multiple levels of governance to limit and control water use, poses questions about water’s centrality and value in Valley life. Was there a simplistic feeling of material abundance in the landscape, or rather, did power elites controlling the development of the Valley landscape see little need to quantify the use of water even as urban areas like Fresno started to compete with industrial agricultural operations for finite material resources? These type of questions about the relationship between the material conditions of Valley life ask questions that efforts like urban revitalization and placemaking seem to want to answer, the social response to physical and natural droughts.

This water crisis, similar to the “urban crisis” of the 1960s in its self-creation mythology,^[17] has afforded the social space in which different alternative imaginings of place and the politics of belonging can be articulated. Several groups have taken up the charge of not letting a crisis go to waste, using different but significant points of entry to discuss dispossession in urban form. The role of activism around issues of equity and resource distribution, the special relationship between space and water, development and history, has been ripe for discussion. At a regional level, dry wells in East Tulare County, south of Fresno, have highlighted the lack of infrastructure and muted governmental response to the physical needs of a largely poor community of Latinos. This inattention has spurred efforts by local organizations and non-state actors like the Valley Water Center and California Rural Legal Assistance to organize a disadvantaged community and link their concerns for the continuation of life in a culturally cohesive yet politically unincorporated part of the county to larger variables about representation and engagement in the formal political process. “All local residents should participate for, although corporate boards elsewhere may control the deeds to much land here, they do not know the call of a dove or the chill of river water slicing from the Sierra Nevada or the dawn smell of a freshly mown alfalfa field.”^[18] Countering the power of a decentralized planning regime and decades of developmental policy that are exclusive by their very nature is used as the mechanism by which the historiography of the Central Valley organizes its major themes.

The contestation over the revitalization of the Fresno Fulton Mall is where urban space and its complicated place in the cultural imaginings of place are centered in this analysis. An aging twentieth century pedestrian center in the heart of downtown Fresno, the history and cultural narrative of the Fresno Fulton Mall is contentious. Recent efforts to revitalize the three-block area as part of a national post-recession movement to gentrify deindustrialized urban areas, as well as a nod to the market demands of cities’ endless search for tax revenue, have frayed the tempers of longtime denizens who seek to preserve the space according to its ethos of Mid-Century Modern aesthetics.

This project is personal to me, challenging the division between emic and etic approaches to anthropological study. As one born in Fresno and gone for over a decade, the place-memory of home still retains meaning for me, especially in the older areas like the Fulton Mall that are untouched by urban redevelopment. Marx Arax understands this as part of returning home: “The stakes always seemed higher [in Fresno] than when I was writing about L.A. The reasons were obvious in one respect—it was my home—and yet I sensed a deeper explanation that had to do with how we as a society related to place…. It has been a messy affair, but I am still here, trying to put my finger on this place.”^[19] As the world urbanizes and the process of urbanization takes varied forms that go beyond the simplistic dichotomies of rural vs. urban, suburban vs. urban,^[20] the Mall has become meaningful to me and a new generation of citizen artists, activists, and planners.

Built to much fanfare in the early 1960s, the Mall became one of the first open-air pedestrian malls at the beginning of the suburban mall era. Anchored by J.C. Penny and other major department stores, the mall was the first major site of concentrated consumerism in Fresno, and attracted shoppers with its park-like setting. The choice to redevelop an already urban space was deliberate—planners including the nationally-recognized planner Victor Gruen and landscape architect Garrett Eckbo^[21] wanted to bring the suburban shopping experience to downtown Fresno, already in decline as citizens moved northward. Its success at the time of its opening in 1964 was quickly overshadowed by the creation of newer enclosed malls like Manchester Center in 1969 and Fashion Fair Mall on Shaw Avenue in the 1970s.^[22] As fewer shoppers came downtown, the Fulton Mall became a place where community events were held in Mariposa Plaza, the largest of the open areas in the three block mall setting, and a free speech stage was created as a commemoration of the site of a labor protest in the 1920s.

The turn from the Mall’s original plan as a place middle-class residents shop into de facto parkland for the urban poor was due to unimpeded and steady decline, as the vast majority of the major department stores left in the 1980s. The Mall’s genesis speaks to a planning ideology of another era, and contemporary proposals that seek to either crystallize its history or revamp it altogether manifest the competing pressures of real estate and community memory that counter each other within the sphere of Fresno planning politics. As it stands today, the Mall is under construction to be transformed into Fulton Street, reopening late 2017. The approved proposal to open the pedestrian mall to vehicular traffic and add over a one hundred parking spaces was stymied by a lawsuit filed by supports of the Downtown Fresno Coalition (DFC), which sought to keep the Mall a pedestrian-friendly place and thus were behind the unsuccessful push to get the site registered as a California Historic Landmark. As such efforts indicate, the mall serves as a place of nostalgia and distinction for many Fresnans despite its diminished state. The DFC utilizes the ideas of walkability, the need for the preservation of democratic public space, as well as green space in an urbanizing world, as the emotional pleas of an underdog argument bent on mobilizing the affective nature of place attachment.[23] The death of several trees by lack of water oft-rumored to be a coordinated effort by the city to encourage blight and make its case for redevelopment stronger, echoing a similar fight over changes in a historic Central American urban space discussed by anthropologist Setha Low:

The sense of loss in these stories is not with the place itself, but with the decoration and social participants, yet the stories communicate a sense of place attachment that has been disrupted physically, but not in memory, by ongoing social change.^[24]

The emotionality and use of memory in the argument for preservation touch on issues of aesthetics, in the access to public art and environmentalism, representing the interests of the denizen-activists of the DFC. Decidedly white, upper-middle class and college-educated, very few members live near Downtown and the Mall and most don’t visit its businesses and services. The Mall, to them, is understood as parkland and a place where public art can be enjoyed. The cost and prestige of the public art, led by some of the artists themselves, are often highlighted in the materials produced by the group. The transition from mainstream consumer sites like J.C. Penny to smaller, local retailers as well as the administrative offices of county agencies that cater to a largely Latino audience has been an uncomfortable one. The racial politics of space are deliberately softened by the social memory of postwar prosperity that centers on white consumers. As part of a series of events to mark its fiftieth anniversary of operations in 2014, a local filmmaker created a film that made the Mall its main subject. “We certainly don’t need more botanicas,” one woman commented during a Q&A session after viewing the documentary. Screenings and a series of walking tours were hosted in 2015 and 2016. This was also a response to the walking tours that are offered by a competing business association centering the Mall in a discussion of urban blight, focusing on future development plans in 2017 for the space that include private real estate.

Another significant project of place where space and water play a central developmental role is the A Better Blackstone neighborhood redevelopment project, northward in Fresno’s central core area. Blackstone Avenue serves as Fresno’s High Street, its central North-South conduit that shuttles people into and out of downtown, paralleling the main Highway 41 that intersects with Highway 99, the Valley’s main site of passage. Its demise has been well-documented, echoing concerns for a better investment of place:

No place with even a modicum of self-worth would allow such a disgrace, much less right down its spine. I venture it’s more complicated than that—and more simple. I doubt that anyone in City Hall actually planned on disfiguring Fresno this way. The Boulevard more or less developed, downtown to river, a century of progress, without any countervailing force ever saying “no.” In the process, its belief only got replicated.^[25]

A programmatic arm of a local nonprofit giant, A Better Blackstone is a multiyear project that is both ideational and outcome-specific. “We have come together to imagine what it would look like for Blackstone to thrive once again.”^[26] In its first months of work, the program sought to collect data on every business on the avenue itself as well as initiate direct contact with residents of the surrounding neighborhoods, no small feat.

At a community event called “Imagine Blackstone,” Summer 2015, local residents were asked to participate in this reimagining, both the possibilities of place in the central district and the realism of its current state of neglect. A photovoice project led by staff was displayed, and viewers were asked to stop and get their event pass stamped along a curated path of projects related to city services, civic education and spatial imagery. A fully stamped event pass meant free tacos and drinks on the hot August tarmac of Susan B. Anthony Elementary School. Pop-up parklets, like those trumpeted by urban civic leaders as solutions to the limited public space of gentrifying cities, were created using rolled up Astrotrurf and DIY park benches. Asked to take the lead on this exhibit display twenty minutes before the gate opened, I gamely tried my hand at curation and was assigned a twelve year old assistant who worked the scotch tape. There was a clear agenda of engagement that was being asked of participants by A Better Blackstone staffers: we as volunteers were tasked to stimulate conversation by asking how Blackstone is popularly and individually conceptualized (“bad” and “ugly” were common answers), and what, if any, factors could improve the thoroughfare (“Trees!”).

Methodologically and logistically, these conversations were happening on several fronts: Participants at the event wanted to know what photovoice as a method was, and second, why did all these photos matter to the redevelopment of their neighborhood? An ethnographic research methodology^[27] used by visual anthropologists, photovoice is both empirically sophisticated and immediately accessible. A photovoice project is typically a carefully administered elicitation of visual data collection through initial discussions of themes about a certain phenomenon, then cameras given to those involved as subjects. The ensuing photos and captions are pulled together to gain understanding of one’s emic view of the world-made material by the photographs, and narratives captured that expand discussion on the community-developed central theme in the user’s own voice. Here, local students and their parents were asked to take photos of their neighborhood around Blackstone Avenue that they deemed were either positive or negative depictions of local life, and then asked to write down why they chose those photos, describing them in their own words. Central Valley water, as ever, was omnipresent as a thematic core of the project yet hidden behind an understanding of issues that made it seem only tangential to the goals of placemaking and revitalization. Dead trees, stagnant canals and broken curbs were the problems of infrastructure cited by many participants in their commentary. A lack of water, and lack of nature, or rather, its re-envisionment as pop-up spaces of temporary comfort on the hot summer tarmac of Susan B. Anthony Elementary were evidence of the creativity that such spatial deficits could engender.

Water’s role as the unacknowledged shaper of events, even in its absence, is correlated with the reproduction of a deficit-centric cultural discourse found here in the tactics of Fresno interest groups.

The activism and organizational engagement of A Better Blackstone on issues of space are central to what Michel De Certeau understands as tactics used to make sense of urban planning regimes by residents looking to exert spatial agency in a complex spatial arrangement,^[28] and to a larger extent, is “tactical urbanism” in action. The bottom up, self-directed work of A Better Blackstone functions in a liminal space—quasi-governmental due to its close relationship with regional arms of government and public orientation as part of a forty year-old nonprofit, yet privately-funded by larger state and national foundation grants for goals that center on social justice and the promotion of public health.

Imagined landscapes were the goal of “walking audits” of the corridor during the hot summer months. Strollers were pushed by volunteers up and down the street in an effort to collect data and physically embody the imagination of what could be. Infrastructure needs were documented in great detail; wheels stuck in concrete cracks were photographed as evidence of infrastructural neglect. The search for shade in 100 degree temperatures was a constant reminder that nature had been categorically eliminated on Blackstone Avenue. A 10 a.m. walk in August 2015 found two groups of mothers directed in both Spanish and English by A Better Blackstone staffers, upon whom seeing the ten feet of shade found near a bus stop north of Olive Avenue broke out into happy exaltations. Apparently shade is a historic vestige in vehicle-centered planning. Open irrigation canals that crossed the city were noted for being concentrated in older, now poorer parts of town, brimming with dark fast-moving water that seemed to tempt in the summer heat.

The role volunteer groups, political organizations and nonprofit service agencies play in the discussion of urbanization has proved the singular counterweight in the face of the capitalist political economy of city leadership forced to play an unending game of growth liberalism. Whether the aims of the ten year A Better Blackstone project will be fulfilled is an ongoing question, but the actions taken by its leadership and that of the Downtown Fresno Coalition to fight perceived threats of spatial inequality are indicators of deep place attachment^[29] by historically overlooked groups. The attachment reproduced by socially-ascribed memory implicitly ties place as the physical bearer of culture within the production of space.^[30] Water’s role as the unacknowledged shaper of events, even in its absence, is correlated with the reproduction of a deficit-centric cultural discourse found here in the tactics of Fresno interest groups.

Water is the phantom subject of interest that spurs political movement on space and place in Fresno and throughout the broader Central Valley. The planning regime that produced the Fulton Mall, and the modern effort to revitalize it amidst calls to preserve its significance as a site of history and social memory for many city residents are cyclical development projects that further the production of space, as all states must be productive in the highly privatized spatial project that is the Central Valley. Yet it is this same planning regime that has created the blighted Blackstone Avenue, where water’s disappearance in the form of trees and urban nature are also felt. Understanding the social response to urban physical intervention is my ongoing effort to capture ethnographically the process of change and renewal that stem from these issues of place attachment, and from within a historical framework of deficit that has subsumed conceptions of the Valley for so long. Through the distribution and rethinking of water as a central resource, a human right rather than a commodity, a naturally-occurring resource to be redistributed by humans, its role in reshaping Fresno as a political project and cultural production makes visible the fault lines across which denizens and their institutions must negotiate. For me, it is the price of coming home.

Notes

All photos taken by Sydney Santana.

^[1] James Holston, Insurgent Citizenship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

^[2] Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

^[3] Neil Brenner and C. Schmid, “The ‘Urban Age’ in Question,” International Journal Urban and Regional Research 38 (2014): 731–55.

^[4] David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso Press, 2012).

^[5] Henry Delcore, “Pedestrian Survey,” Institute of Public Anthropology, California State University, Fresno (2010).

^[6] Downtown Fresno Partnership, “Do You Believe in Downtown?” video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpX02x91OiE, 14 March 2013.

^[7] Jennifer Robinson, Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development (New York: Routledge, 2007).

^[8] Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

^[9] Mike Davis, City of Quartz (London: Verso Books, 1990).

^[10] Joan Didion, Where I Was From (New York: Knopf, 2012), 64.

^[11] Gerald Haslam, The Other California (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2000), xv.

^[12] Mark Grossi and Marc Benjamin, “In San Joaquin Valley, Drought Fight Has Landed In the City,” The Fresno Bee, 22 August 2015, http://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article31823472.html.

^[13] Michael Dear, “The Los Angeles School of Urbanism: An Intellectual History,” Urban Geography, 24 (2013): 493-509.

^[14] Matthew Gandy, Concrete and Clay (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2012).

^[15] Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).

^[16] Gary Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

^[17] Thomas J. Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

^[18] Gerald Haslam, Haslam’s Valley (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2005), 206.

^[19] Marx Arax, West of the West: Dreamers, Believers, Builders and Killers in the Golden State (New York: Public Affairs Books, 2009), 27.

^[20] Neil Brenner, “Globalization as Reterritorialization: The Rescaling of Urban Governance in the European Union,” Urban Studies, 36 (1999): 431.

^[21] Marc Treib and Dorothée Imbert, Garrett Eckbo: Modern Landscapes for Living. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

^[22] Elliott Balch and Joe Moore, “The (Broken) Heart of Our City: A Downtown Timeline” (City of Fresno, 2012), https://www.fresno.gov/mayor/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2016/10/FultonMallTimeline.pdf.

[23] Irwin Altman and Setha Low, Place Attachment: A Conceptual Inquiry (New York: Plenum Press, 1992), 23.

^[24] Setha Low, On the Plaza (San Antonio: University of Texas Press, 2000).

^[25] Mark Arax, “Blackstone is the Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” The Fresno Bee, 13 December 2014, http://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/article19528338.html.

^[26] A Better Blackstone Association brochure, 2015, http://www.betterblackstone.com/.

^[27] Aline Gubrium and Krista Harper, Participatory Visual and Digital Research in Action (New York: Routledge, 2015).

^[28] Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

^[29] Irwin Altman and Setha Low, Place Attachment: A Conceptual Inquiry (New York: Plenum Press, 1992), 23.

^[30] Yi Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1974).

Dorie Dakin Perez is doctoral candidate in political anthropology and urban history at the University of California, Merced. Her research focuses on the cultural meaning-making of urban space and public policy as cultural change. Previously, she worked for the State Legislature and the Google X Self-Driving Car project. Her work can be found at www.dorieperez.org.

Copyright: © 2017 Dorie Dakin Perez. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Articles Photography/Art

What is a River in California?

Boom California on September 21, 2017

Highway Bridge, 2016, archival pigment print, 56 x 60 inches, Sayler/Morris. I-5 Bridge near the confluence of the American and Sacramento Rivers.*

Susannah Sayler
Edward Morris

What is a river? This is not a question we ask every day because it seems superfluous. Certainly, a river must be a flowing body of water of a certain size. Call it a river or a creek, but one way or another, flowing is the essential thing. Yet, what if a given river does not flow per se but is pushed and pulled mechanically? Or what if the flowing that defines a river is arrested and controlled through dams, canals and machine technology? What if the river no longer moves with inextricable desire towards a specific place like an ocean or a lake, but rather is widely dispersed into various uses? What if a river is wholly owned and apportioned the moment it comes out of the ground? Does all this change the essence of a river? Is it even still a river?

These speculative questions, for which the arts are particularly well suited, assume real significance in a state like present-day California that depends entirely on technological control of rivers for its prosperity and very survival. Seeing a river in California for what it is now—namely water-put-to-work—can abet a number of other vital inquiries, such as: if water in the state is essentially a resource or even a commodity, who owns it and how are these owners positioning themselves for the water shortages of the future due to climate change and population growth? How is the current regard for water connected to California’s murderous, colonial past,[1] and what can we gain from such an understanding? And/or how can California avoid its seemingly inevitable fate of privatized water markets, unreliable access to clean water for the poor and profound income inequality? Such questioning “prepares a free relationship” towards the issue, to quote Martin Heidegger. It reveals and opens. It renders something that appears universal, absolute and given—in this case our extractive attitude toward water and farming—as contingent and therefore mutable through political activism and civic engagement.

We make this particular connection to Heidegger despite all his baggage because he provides a number of indispensable analytic tools for perceiving what is really at stake with environmental issues, not to mention his inventive and evocative vocabulary. Further, an encounter with Heidegger’s investigation into the nature of rivers proved transformative to our own art-activist project Water Gold Soil. As artists working with the medium of landscape photography, we first looked towards what is visible in the land in order to represent the drought issue in California. A reading of Heidegger and other research then provoked us to consider what lies behind what can be seen. A key thought sits in Heidegger’s before-and-after comparison of the Rhine River found in “The Question Concerning Technology”:

The hydroelectric plant is set into the current of the Rhine. It sets the Rhine to supplying its hydraulic pressure, which then sets the turbines turning. This turning sets those machines in motion whose thrust sets going the electric current for which the long-distance power station and its network of cables are set up to dispatch electricity. In the context of the interlocking processes pertaining to the orderly disposition of electrical energy, even the Rhine itself appears to be something at our command. The hydroelectric plant is not built into the Rhine River as was the old wooden bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years. Rather the river is dammed up into the power plant…. What the river is now, namely, a water-power supplier, derives from the essence of the power station…. But, it will be replied, the Rhine is still a river in the landscape, is it not? Perhaps. But how? In no other way than as an object on call for inspection by a tour group ordered there by the vacation industry.[2]

Seeing the way “a river in the landscape” can actually be more fundamentally defined by its economic uses (power supplier, tourism and recreation site, irrigator) became the presiding impulse of our own project. Accordingly, we photographed the transition from the wilderness incarnation of this water flow in the Sierra Nevada to its first damming, and then on to its increasing subjection to rationalization and canalization, and finally to its dispersal in various end-uses, primarily agricultural. The most basic goal of the photography and the video we took was simply to reveal the “river” as economic rather than scenic—and by “river” here, we mean both our particular water flow and by extension all such “rivers” in California.

Water Gold Soil: Report, Draft 2, Sayler/Morris, 2015, 2-channel video installation, 17 min, TULCA Art Festival, Galway, Ireland. Voiceover text: “From this point on the water does that flow. They pushed it along with pumps. They extracted it from the Delta, and moved it into two canals. One headed for the big cities and one headed to the desert farms. The water commodity.”

This may seem obvious, but the productiveness of this enterprise became evident when an environmental organization giving us an award requested that we put more images of “beauty” and “wildness” into an exhibition of our work. Indeed, the typical maneuver of photographers working on environmental issues is to show a particular landscape as pure and beautiful and therefore worthy of protecting, or else to show “damage” to the land caused by the impurities of pollution and industrialization. However, such obsession with purity, which has historically motivated the environmental movement in the United States, deadens an adequate response to issues like climate change or water rights in California. In both cases, sufficiently powerful animus and solidarity must derive from a heightened sense of both the dangers and opportunities. Urgency comes from care for and protection of life, social justice, empathy, economic opportunity and restoration of the sacred. Each of these themes came together in Standing Rock.

The purity paradigm continues to grip the environmental community, but so long as it does it will jeopardize its efficacy. For such an interest in conservation, preservation, and beauty, tremendously understates the danger of our current ecological crisis and renders the ecological crisis the sole province of a privileged class. Here too Heidegger can be of some assistance, albeit with significant caveats. Heidegger’s description of the hydro-electric plant in the Rhine comes amid a larger discussion of what he identified as “the supreme danger” to mankind. This supreme danger presents itself to Heidegger first in the guise of “modern technology.” Modern technology for Heidegger differs from what precedes it in that “it puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored.” Heidegger terms this essential aspect of modern technology a “challenging forth,” which he contrasts with the gentler “bringing forth” (poiesis) of older technology. Poeisis, of course, is also the mode of the arts (i.e., poetry), the significance of which we explore below. In this connection, Heidegger contrasts the impact of a wooden bridge over the Rhine to that of the hydro-electric dam per the above quotation. The wooden bridge brings forth place, dwelling, cultivation of the land; whereas the dam challenges forth the river to yield energy that might in turn be used for industrial processes.[3]

To understand how this is not merely a nostalgic, wistful call for a return to a past primitivism, we must understand exactly what is so unreasonable about the demand Heidegger identifies that modern technology puts to nature. The danger here is not the loss of an attribute of the river we might call beautiful or the imposition of a stain on its purity that can ultimately be restored through effective advocacy; rather, the danger lies in the complete transformation in the nature of the river within a means-ends order. It has become, in Heidegger’s terminology, a “standing reserve.” The river is not alone. In a world dominated by modern technology, Heidegger writes:

Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a furthering ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We call it the standing reserve.[4]

Another way of saying this is that within the challenging forth of modern technology everything becomes a resource, or as Heidegger writes elsewhere “something is only through what it performs.”[5] Heidegger gives a couple of other examples besides the transformation of the river. He contrasts a windmill with coal power. Whereas with the windmill things “are left entirely to the wind’s blowing,” with coal “a tract of land is challenged in the hauling out” with the result that the “earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as mineral deposit.”[6] He also contrasts older farming techniques with industrial agriculture, emphasizing the lost values of care and maintenance, words which together we might call by a different name—sustainability.[7]

Water Gold Soil: Report, Draft 2, Sayler/Morris, 2015, 2-channel video (still), 17 min. The pipes depicted here in the right channel of the video are part of infrastructure originally built to support gold mining by regulating flow in the South Fork of the American River. The same infrastructure was later re-purposed for irrigation agriculture and suburban development. Voiceover text: “Pipes followed as if demanded by logic itself…. But the pipes were kept hidden, tucked away. So that a faucet could appear like a stream.”

By this logic, in order to answer the question, “What is a river in California?,” we must first answer the question of specifically what that river is used for, what it performs. It is not enough simply to observe that it is technological in some generic sense. Of course, a given river in California might have various uses. (It is illuminating in this regard to examine Bureau of Reclamation spreadsheets showing just who owns each acre foot of water in each river.) Notice, however, how Heidegger articulates the usage of the river in terms of a system: the water moves the turbines, which moves machines that create the electrical current, which in turn moves along cables to be stored and distributed. The underlying logic of the challenging forth is that it is extracting and storing energy with the purpose to further something else, namely some industry.

We chose to follow a water flow toward its end use specifically in the industry of large-scale agriculture because this is the dominant industry governing much of California’s water infrastructure. Jay Lund, one of the leading experts on water in California and editor of the California Water Blog, describes the system of water management in California, as follows:

By 1980, a vast network of reservoirs, canals and exploited aquifers transformed California. This system was largely designed to support an agricultural economy envisioned in the latter 1800s, which greatly exceeded the gold mining economy it replaced.[8]

In this single concise quotation, you have all the elements of our project: Water, Gold, Soil. The “agricultural economy” (i.e. soil) is the descendant of the gold mining economy, and both were entirely dependent on water—agriculture for obvious reasons, and gold because not only was gold first found in the rivers, but water in the form of sluices and later water cannons was essential to mining operations. As Norris Hundley writes of the gold mining industry in California: “they built hydraulic empires of dams, reservoirs, flumes, ditches, pipes and hoses. All this in turn required knowledge of advanced engineering principles, now introduced for the first time on a large scale in the West and later used to build other great public and private projects.”[9] In addition to the technological confidence and infrastructure, perhaps a more important legacy of the gold mining industry on the agriculture industry that supplanted it was the legal framework for how to regard ownership of a river in the first place. [10] In particular, the notion that one could claim a right to some water simply being the first to put it to some vaguely defined “beneficial use” originated in California with the Gold Rush. The havoc wrecked by the mixing of this “prior appropriation” right with other sorts of rights (namely riparian) has been well documented.

Water Gold Soil: Report, Draft 2, Sayler/Morris, 2015, 2-channel video (still), 17 min. Voiceover text: “They first discovered Gold near this place on the American River, setting off a worldwide hysteria that has been treated comprehensively by Brandt and others.”

However, Lund leaves out half of the equation. The other major driver of water infrastructure development in California was, and continues to be, real estate development and speculation. This story has been comprehensively told in Norris Hundley’s The Great Thirst and elsewhere. In fact, a strong argument can be made that agriculture in California is itself simply real estate investment in disguise. With a Heideggerian flourish we might say (as we do in a video piece that is part of our project): “Water spread over land by wind and rain transforms ground to nutrient. Water spread over land by pipes transforms ground to real estate.” Many in addition to Hundley have recited this history,[11] which in broad brush strokes looks like this: the government wrests away land populated by Native Americans and grants it outright to large corporations, including railroads and oil companies; the companies market the land to settlers who begin to farm it and increase its value under lease agreements; the same large landowners then successfully lobby the government for massive, multi-billion-dollar water infrastructure projects, cynically invoking the Jeffersonian image of the small farmer (this includes the San Luis reservoir, which is the hub of the water flow in our Water Gold Soil project); the construction of these projects is granted under the agreement that the large landowners will sell off their land into smaller parcels to support small business and families; this sell-off is never done and the military-scale federal investment in infrastructure is thereby translated into direct real estate gains by the large owners. Studies have shown the deleterious effects of corporate farming on communities, as the owners of these lands get rich while the people working on them are mired in some of the country’s most dire poverty.[12] In the ultimate irony, many communities within these farming districts (known perversely as water districts) completely lack access to any water at all, or else are subjected to poisonous levels of pollution.[13]

Water Gold Soil: Report, Draft 2, Sayler/Morris, 2015, 2-channel video (still), 17 min. Irrigation in Westlands Water District. Voiceover text: “Water spread over land by wind and clouds transforms ground to nutrient. Water spread over land by pipes transforms ground to real estate.”

Here we approach the crux of the argument and an identification both of what is valuable and vexing about Heidegger. For Heidegger, if the reduction of the natural world to a standing reserve is the danger, then the “supreme danger” is the reduction of humans themselves to the status of this standing reserve, as with the laborers of the Central Valley most obviously, but, in fact, as with all of us living within a world defined by modern technology. This reduction of nature, labor and all people to a standing reserve is a function not of technology itself but what Heidegger calls the essence of modern technology: enframing (Gestell). What sort of thing is enframing? One is tempted to call it a worldview, an orientation, a theory, a way of representing the world, or even an ideology, but Heidegger scrupulously avoids these sorts of epistemological terms—a fact that accounts for much of the difficulty of his text. For him, enframing is not simply a way of seeing things. It is itself generative as a mode of revealing the world, a mode of existence. Enframing reveals by ordering, framing, putting things into boxes. Enframing alters what is actual, not just how we see the actual. Under the sway of enframing, objects, and ultimately human beings themselves, turn into a mere function of their instrumentality.

However, while enframing is not itself a way of seeing, it is, paradoxically, both the by-product of and the necessary condition of a way of seeing, which Heidegger calls out as “modern mathematical science.”[14] Perhaps a helpful way of understanding the enframing concept is to see it as that force within “modern mathematical science’s” way of seeing that is productive of being—the binding force between epistemology and ontology. “Modern science’s way of representing pursues and entraps nature as a calculable coherence of forces,” Heidegger writes, and this “theory of nature prepares the way not just for modern technology but for the essence of modern technology [i.e., enframing].” Heidegger emphasizes that this occurs at a particular time in history—that is to say, something else came before. With an ecological dynamic, culture, in all its myriad modes of representation (scientific, artistic, conversational, etc.) is produced by, and in turn, propagates this ontological enframing force. Heidegger lays down the marker between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages: “What actuality is in Durer’s picture ‘The Columbine’ is determined differently from what is actual in a medieval fresco.”[15] Indeed, there is something crucial about this transition. The creeping ooze of enframing spread over the entire world as we moved through the epochs labeled the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Modernity and indeed Post-Modernity (which, we understand as neo-liberalism by another name). The story of enframing’s creep is the story of colonialism, and it is also the story of our project in which documentation of a given “river” is both real and allegorical. Our assembly of images and words is representational of an actual water flow at a given point in time, but also of the broader historical trajectory of the Age of Extraction. California is an interesting case study in the epistemo-ontological creep of enframing because it is so compressed and so stark.

Enframing II, Sayler/Morris, 2016, Archival pigment print with gold leaf, 20 x 24 inches. Appropriated image from United States Geological Society with permission.

Yet, in the final analysis we make quite different hay than Heidegger out of this recognition of enframing’s historicity. Heidegger’s primary concern throughout his work is Being, by which he means the essence of human existence. We will not follow him into these considerations, which are dense with thorns, except to say this overarching concern of Heidegger’s leads him to consider the “supreme danger” of enframing as bearing most importantly on man’s ability to continue to live as he essentially is—in all his aloneness and glory. This preoccupation of Heidegger’s, seeped in a brew of human exceptionalism and a pursuit of pure origins along with some other rather dubious notions, creates what seems to us like two blindingly obvious aporia in his questioning concerning technology, namely a consideration of agency in the development of enframing’s challenging forth, and relatedly a consideration of class and regional distinctions among the humans of this world. Who pushed forward the challenging forth of nature and labor that fell out of enframing like destiny? And who can stop it? In several places, Heidegger’s questioning brushes tantalizing close to Marx—for example in his observation that the challenging forth of technology is invested in “driving on to the maximum yield and the minimum expense”; or in his description of humans becoming a standing reserve, which seems to harken to Marx’s analysis of alienation. However, Heidegger does not pursue a material, economic understanding of what is threatening about the enframing phenomenon. This leads to a very nebulous conception of its origins and import, as well as to a misunderstanding of the ways in which we can engage in overcoming it.

Heidegger never forged an explicit political philosophy but expressed that a revolution in thinking was needed to avoid the tragic subjection of humans themselves to the status of a standing reserve. We do not normally think of Heidegger as an activist, but in the Introduction to Metaphysics he states: “we dare to take up the great and lengthy task of tearing down a world that has grown old and of building it truly anew.”[16] He had an exalted view of both philosophy and art in this process. In fact, it was to these activities alone that he ascribed any real power. The world had to be re-created through a heroic exertion of complicated thought, embodied best in poetry. Heidegger was silent about how this deep thought might be conveyed to the citizenry and how in turn it might lead to concrete changes in policy or political systems. Not surprisingly, this giant lacuna in Heidegger’s thought resulted in personal exhaustion and disillusionment, such that he ultimately declared in an interview with Das Spiegel: “philosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and endeavor” because “the greatness of what is to be thought is [all] too great.” Heidegger broodingly concluded that only “God can save us.”[17]

Taken as disillusionment on Heidegger’s part, this spirit all too commonly results from detaching the abstract work of world creating (via worldview changing) from the concrete work of political activism aimed specifically at agents of the danger. For there are indeed agents. Could not the mysterious ecological relation that Heidegger describes between the scientific mode of representation, enframing, the challenging forth of nature (and labor), and finally the transformation of the world into a standing reserve be more reductively described as the application of modern science towards making money? Does he not overlook the crucial ingredient of greed as the dominant driver of certain (though not all) humans and the force that adds the unreasonable challenging forth of nature (and labor) to enframing? The development of exploitative economic systems arose out of an ability to systematically demarcate and make predictions (about how to build a ship and navigate, about how to build a dam, about how much water is needed to get a certain size crop, about where gold might be, about how to make an equivalent exchange, etc.). Heidegger shows how the self-perpetuating logic of this system alters our worldview, cuts off pathways to the sacred and defeats humility. Yet, by failing to ascribe agency in the process, he concludes that “Human activity can never directly counter the danger.” This flies in the face of actual gains that social movements can and do make all the time, even as this more fundamental work of culture changing happens in the background. Shout out to: Cesar Chavez, to 350.org, to anti-fracking movements in New York, to dam-removal movements and their successes on the Yakima and other rivers, etc.

To state it simply, there are two fronts to changing the world: changing ideology (i.e., ways of seeing and representing); and changing material conditions. As such, the work of poets, artists and thinkers is symbiotic with the work of activists, not isolated a la Heidegger; it is on this level that we think of our work as art-activist. A poetic way of seeing the world—defined here as an investment in non-rational consciousness and empathic understanding—is absolutely required for an effective activism, not only because it opens up a new relation to the world, but also because it restores enchantment and inherently combats the challenging forth of enframing with the alternative form of revealing articulated by Heidegger as the bringing forth of poiesis. However, poetry/art do not happen in a vacuum and no real change can be achieved there without changes in material conditions, which is what Heidegger fundamentally missed. Once again, the phenomenon is an ecological cycle, a dialectic.

We believe in the role of the artist as historian, specifically in this sense of the art-activist who contributes to a transformation of worldview. To represent a river in California, our job is to show not only what it is now, but to represent its now-ness as a form of (avoidable) destiny—here again Heidegger is instructive, for he speaks of enframing and also poiesis not just as modes of revealing, but as modes of destining. History arrives, and it is always arriving. It is not unearthed intact. The image is the tool by which we convey this. As Benjamin said, “It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.”[18] This is the mode of the artist as historian.

With respect to California, we have found it illuminating to stare at a blank outline of the now-iconic shape that forms the boundaries of the state. That shape, which owes its Eastern contour to the desire to capture as much gold-harboring land as possible, has become one of the primary images of our project. It reflects all the capriciousness and violence, even absurdity, of political borders. These lines were drawn in 1849, the year after gold was discovered in the state. How was this same land understood before the lines were drawn? What was a river then? Is there a clue there to what it could be now?

11 October 1849, Sayler/Morris, 2016, Archival pigment print, 18 x 22 inches. Title refers to the date that the state legislature formally adopted the boundary lines of the State of California.

The creation of that shape we now know as the borders of California was an arrival, not an inception. The destining started with the Spanish lust for gold, which animated their colonial adventures. Some believe the very word California was invented by a Spanish fiction writer named Montalvo in the early 16th Century. Montalvo gave the name “California” to a fantastic land of desire and gold in his novel Las Sergas de Esplandián (published in 1510).[19] In this book, the inhabitants of California were all-powerful women who ate men after laying with them in order to bear children. There was gold everywhere. The women wore gold harnesses and hunted with gold weapons. Montalvo called it California because it was a caliphate, a land of infidels. Yet, he also placed the territory “very near to a side of Earthly paradise.”[20]

This was fantasy, but fantasy transforms fact. Ten years after Montalvo’s book was published, the colonist Hernan Cortes wrote a letter to the King of Spain from present-day Baja California, in which he purported to confirm the nearby existence of just such a place as Montalvo described (earthly paradise, lots of gold, only women who ate men, etc.).[21] Cortes was likely angling for continued investment in his colonizing enterprise, but it is telling that he thought his report would be both enticing and sufficiently credible to his benefactor. Not long after Cortes’ letter, maps begin appearing with Montalvo’s word “California” labeling some of the lands Cortes colonized[22] and after a while this became the accepted name of the region. Montalvo’s fantasy reified.

However, when the first Spanish mission entered into the territory of California more than two hundred years later in 1769, it was not the word “oro” (gold) that appeared obsessively in the diaries of its leaders, but the word “aqua.” Nearly every day that was their primary concern. They hunted down rivers.[23] They had to hold water before they could hold gold. On 24 January 1848, everything came together when some other colonists found gold laying around in the American River. The mass hysteria that followed produced the near extermination of the Native people and rapid industrialization.

Of course, this gold had been sitting in the rivers all along but the Native Americans did not value it. Seeing value in gold is a purely imaginative exercise and dependent on a given worldview (enframing). John Sutter, the owner of the land on which gold was found on California, remarked without apparent irony that:

It is very singular that the Indians never found a piece of gold and brought it to me, as they very often did other specimens found in the ravines. I requested them continually to bring me some curiosities from the mountains, for which I always recompensed them. I have received animals, birds, plants, young trees, wild fruits, pipe clay, stones, red ochre, etc., etc., but never a piece of gold.[24]

One is reminded of Marx’s paradigmatic, if racially tinged, account of the commodity fetish and the absurdity of a materialist theory of value: “The savages of Cuba regarded gold as a fetish of the Spaniards. They celebrated a feast in its honour, sang in a circle around it, and then threw it into the sea.”[25]

There is a paradox at the core of history: how do we see the present as a destining, as the seemingly inevitable outcome of past events with all the gravity that implies, and at the same time see that very destining as contingent and therefore as mutable? This sort of maneuver requires a negative capability that is not the province of science, including history performed as science, but is the province of art and myth. When we ask, “What is a river?,” we would do well to attend the poet, as Heidegger recommends. Paraphrasing Holderlein, Heidegger gave this answer to the question before us:

“As a vanishing, the river is underway into what has been. As full of intimation, it proceeds into what is coming.”[26]

Maidu Headmen with Treaty Commissioners, unknown photographer, c. 1851. Image courtesy of George Eastman House.

Notes

The Nisenan Maidu name for the American River was Kum Sayo, meaning Roundhouse River, referring to a structure that the Nisenan Maidu used for dances and other ceremonies. This building was the center of a Maidu community. A particularly large and important roundhouse was located at the mouth of the American River near its confluence with the Sacramento River, in the vicinity of this highway bridge. Other roundhouses could be found all along the American River. The domesticity implied in the Maidu name for the river contrasts with later names applied by European colonists: The River of Sorrows; Wild River (so named because of the ostensibly “wild” nature of the Maidu living there); the River Ojotska (a phonetic rendering of the Russian word for hunter); Rio de los Americanos (named for the American trappers that had begun to use the river).

[1] See Benjamin Madley, American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe 1846-1873 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017) and Brendan C. Lindsay, Murder State: California’s Native American Genocide 1846-1873 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015).

[2] Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper SanFrancisco, 1977), 297.

[3] These ideas are developed more fully in other Heidegger writing on rivers, most notably in Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’, trans. William McNeil and Julia Davis (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996) and “Build Dwelling Thinking” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1977), esp. 330-339.

[4] Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 296.

[5] Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’, 40 [emphasis in original].

[6] Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 296.

[7] Ibid, 297.

[8] Jay Lund, “What’s Next for California Water?,” https://californiawaterblog.com/2011/02/23/whats-next-for-california-water/, (23 February 2011). This history is obviously told in far greater detail in many other places, notably Norris Hundley Jr.’s definitive The Great Thirst: Californians and Water—A History, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

[9] Hundley, The Great Thirst, 77.

[10] See Hundley, The Great Thirst, 86, but there is also an extensive literature on this crucial question. To cite just two important examples: Donald J. Pisani, Water, Land, and Law in the West: The Limits of Public Policy, 1850-1920 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996), and more recently, Mark Kanazawa, Golden Rules: The Origins of California Water Law in the Gold Rush (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

[11] General accounts can be found in Hundley; see also Stephanie S. Pincetl, Transforming California: A Political History of Land Use and Development (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Walter Goldschmidt, As You Sow: Three Studies in the Social Consequences of Agribusiness (Monclair: Allanheld, Osmun & Co., 1978); Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman, The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire (New York: PublicAffairs, 2005). In our project we focused particularly on Westlands, an understanding of which we owe to in part to: Lloyd G. Carter, “Reaping Riches in a Wretched Region: Subsidized Industrial Farming and Its Link to Perpetual Poverty,” Golden Gate University Environmental Law Journal 3 (2009): 5-42, http://digitalcommons.law.ggu.edu/gguelj/vol3/iss1/3; and Ed Simmons, Westlands Water District: The First 25 Years, published by Westland Water District itself in 1983.

[12] See Goldschmidt, As You Sow (referenced above) and see also the work of Dean McCannell, which updated the legendary Goldschimdt study, and also the work of Paul Taylor (Dorothea Lange’s collaborator). An unpublished but excellent dissertation by Daniel J. O’Connell brings much of this work together: In the Struggle: Pedagogies of Politically Engaged Scholarship in the San Joaquin Valley of California, unpublished doctoral dissertation (Cornell University, 2011).

[13] For example, see http://pacinst.org/publication/human-costs-of-nitrate-contaminated-drinking-water-in-the-san-joaquin-valley/.

[14] It is hard to overcome thinking about causality in linear terms (which is itself a by-product of enframing). However, as ecological thinking is a thinking of relationships, it is also a thinking that dissolves linear causality in favor of cycles and dialectical relationships. Heidegger was perhaps more ecological than even he realized as his style of writing is cyclical.

[15] Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister, 25.

[16] Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 133.

[17] Martin Heidegger, “Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten,” Der Spiegel 30 (Mai 1976): 193-219, trans. W. Richardson as “Only a God Can Save Us,” in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker (n.p.: Precedent, 1981), ed. Thomas Sheehan, 45-67.

[18] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 462.

[19] Kevin Starr, California: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2007), 5; and Charles E. Chapman, A History of California: The Spanish Period (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1921), 59-65.

[20] “Sabed que a la diestra mano de las Indias existe una isla llamada California muy cerca de un costado del Paraíso Terrenal” from García Ordóñez de Montalvo, Las Sergas de Esplandián, Seville, 1510, as found http://www.aaregistry.org/historic_events/view/california-its-naming-heritage, 7 July 2016. See also the argument for the Persian origin of the term from Kari-i-farn (“the mountain of Paradise”), suggested earlier by Carey McWilliams, in Josef Chytry, Mountain of Paradise: Reflections of the Emergence of Greater California as a World Civilization (New York: Peter Lang, 2013), 13-15.

[21] Chapman, A History of California, 64.

[22] Ibid. 65-66.

[23] Hundley, The Great Thirst, 32; anyd https://pacificahistory.wikispaces.com/Portola+Expedition+1769+Diaries

[24] John A. Sutter, “The Discovery of Gold in California,” Hutchings’ California Magazine, November 1857, accessed 24 May 2017, http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist2/gold.html.

[25] Karl Marx, ‘Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood’ [1842], in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 1 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), 262-263.

[26] Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister,” 29.

Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris use photography, video, writing, and installation to investigate and to contribute to the development of ecological consciousness. Their work has been exhibited in diverse venues internationally. They are also co-founders of The Canary Project, a collective that produces art and media about climate change and other ecological issues. They teach in the Transmedia Department and are part of The Canary Lab at Syracuse University.

This essay is part of the artists’ larger Water Gold Soil project, which brought them to California late 2014 to document drought conditions as part of the ongoing A History of the Future project. Water Gold Soil: American River represents a river in present-day California. Yet, the river represented by Sayler/Morris hovers between the real and the allegorical and their time perspective shifts between the past, present and future. The project consists of an ongoing assembly of original photographic and video works, archival images, writing, maps and other media.

Copyright: © 2017 Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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Investigating STEM: Health Equity as Touchstone for the Future

Boom California on September 6, 2017

Cheryl Holzmeyer

Sometime over the past decade or so, a new acronym began permeating public discourse, lumping together fields from marine biology to nuclear engineering to kinesiology to topology: “STEM,” shorthand for Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics. Appearing especially in federal reports and policy discussions of global economic competition, commentators argued that so-called STEM education and STEM fields held the key to future U.S. prosperity. These arguments sprang up everywhere from the business press to reports by the National Academies.[1] California’s Department of Education frames STEM in similar terms, declaring that “Through STEM education, students learn to become problem solvers, innovators, creators, and collaborators and go on to fill the critical pipeline of engineers, scientists, and innovators so essential to the future of California and the nation.”[2]

But as Rodger Bybee asks in his book, The Case for STEM Education, published by the National Science Teachers Association: “If STEM Education Seems to be the Answer, What Was the Question?”[3]

For many industry stakeholders, the primary importance of STEM education is to ensure an adequate number of qualified workers in their particular economic sectors, to foster growth and global competitiveness. Absent such supply of human capital, the logic goes, these stakeholders see a U.S. “STEM crisis” of a particular kind, even while the existence and character of this purported STEM crisis is debated.[4]

Yet these narratives of STEM education are inadequate to address growing crises of social equity, ecological sustainability, and democracy associated with current paradigms of U.S. economic growth. As an article in PLOS Biology recently put it, “Justifying STEM education through the economic imperative demands a consideration of what the limitations of this imperative might be. The purported relationship between STEM education and economic growth rests upon the questionable assumption that economic development has no ecological costs or that those costs can be eliminated through continued GDP growth….”[5] Moreover, current paradigms of economic growth exacerbate social inequalities and environmental injustices, undermining possibilities for a truly flourishing society that supports everyone’s well-being. Merely increasing the number of students and workers prepared to fill “gaps in the STEM pipeline” will not address these more fundamental, structural issues.

Photograph provided by chuttersnap-233105 via unsplash.

These issues tend to be obscured by the supposed coherency of the STEM acronym, however. Contradictions often manifest across STEM fields—such as petroleum engineering, climate science, and public health—belying monolithic framings of STEM. Different STEM fields often involve disparate definitions and approaches to innovation as well, with new social justice challenges looming as automation and artificial intelligence gain ground, even as A.I. is viewed by some STEM advocates as a holy grail.[6] Yet as President Obama reflected on the future, at the end of his term in office:

What I do concern myself with, and the Democratic Party is going to have to concern itself with, is the fact that the confluence of globalization and technology is making the gap between rich and poor, the mismatch in power between capital and labor, greater all the time. And that’s true globally. The prescription that some offer, which is stop trade, reduce global integration, I don’t think is going to work…. If that’s not going to work, then we’re going to have to redesign the social compact in some fairly fundamental ways over the next twenty years…. [A]t some point, when the problem is not just Uber but driverless Uber, when radiologists are losing their jobs to A.I., then we’re going to have to figure out how do we maintain a cohesive society and a cohesive democracy in which productivity and wealth generation are not automatically linked to how many hours you put in, where the links between production and distribution are broken, in some sense. Because I can sit in my office, do a bunch of stuff, send it out over the Internet, and suddenly I just made a couple of million bucks, and the person who’s looking after my kid while I’m doing that has no leverage to get paid more than ten bucks an hour.[7]

In California, campaigns such as Silicon Valley Rising, affiliated with Working Partnerships USA, are already grappling with these social contradictions of innovation, as analyzed in their reports on contract workers,[8] by “taking on occupational segregation and severe income inequality with a comprehensive campaign to raise wages, create affordable housing and build a tech economy that works for everyone.”[9] STEM education oriented toward health equity could dialogue with such reports and organizing work, as well as with books like De-Bug: Voices from the Underside of Silicon Valley,[10] authored by members of the San Jose-based social justice organization, Silicon Valley De-Bug.

STEM education could also engage with public health research shaped by problem-frames and evidence from both credentialed scientists as well as community-based “street science.”[11] Silicon Valley De-Bug, for example, frames community organizing as a kind of science – a science for building community power, whether to mitigate power inequities in the criminal justice system or to fight displacement and gentrification. Through such STEM education, students would not only have opportunities to assess a wider array of evidence and evidentiary standards in the course of their inquiries; they could also pursue a broader range of questions about STEM fields and social values, the politics of research agenda-setting and policy-making, and the social relations and economic development paradigms toward which STEM fields are – and are not – directed.[12] Many engaged with the April 2017 Marches for Science articulated inspiring visions along these lines.[13]

Health Equity as Touchstone for Innovation and STEM Education

While Silicon Valley symbolizes the end of the metaphorical STEM pipeline for many, in California and beyond an array of organizations and a burgeoning body of research offer a touchstone for STEM education that is innovative on different terms: on behalf of health equity. Health equity emphasizes social justice and “attainment of the highest level of health for all people” as the foundation of a flourishing society, in which all people are valued equally.[14] As the American Public Health Association elaborates, achieving health equity entails that, “We optimize the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, learn and age. We work with other sectors to address the factors that influence health, including employment, housing, education, health care, public safety and food access. We name racism as a force in determining how these social determinants are distributed.”[15] Health equity initiatives strive to end the unnecessary, unjust suffering of so many people—particularly people of color and of low-income—experiencing premature death and illness in a country and state with vast economic and scientific resources. Health equity initiatives do not subscribe to a false binary between values—such as equity and social justice—and science. Rather, they draw on an extensive body of STEM research—variously referred to as social epidemiology or social determinants of health research—that examines population health and health inequities, with wide-ranging ethical implications. While this research is well-known within the public health field, it is too often unfamiliar to those in other fields of STEM research and education, from biotechnology to computer science. At the same time, the insights and causal relations surfaced by this body of research are often highly familiar to environmental justice activists, who have long been attuned to the ways in which the places and circumstances in which people “live, work, learn, and play” underpin public health and health equity.

In brief, social determinants of health are the resources and opportunities available to people in their daily lives, which in turn affect their health and well-being. Good jobs that pay a living wage, affordable housing, clean air and water, freedom from racism and discrimination – these variables are most important to promoting health and health equity for all, as demonstrated by a plethora of social epidemiology and social determinants of health research. The Director-General of the World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Determinants of Health, Dr. Margaret Chan, noted at the release of the commission’s 2008 final report (“Closing the gap in a generation: Health equity through action on the social determinants of health”): “This ends the debate decisively. Health care is an important determinant of health. Lifestyles are important determinants of health. But… it is factors in the social environment that determine access to health services and influence lifestyle choices in the first place.”[16] Recognizing these upstream, root causes of health inequities, the report called for “improv[ing] daily living conditions” and “tackl[ing] the inequitable distribution of power, money, and resources” as integral, necessary, and urgent to achieving greater health equity, in the U.S. and beyond. An array of multidisciplinary research syntheses complement and reinforce these conclusions.[17]

Environmental justice and health equity organizations have deep expertise and familiarity with these issues, whether explicitly or implicitly engaged with social determinants of health research. California-based organizations and coalitions[18] collectively offer a crucial touchstone to orient STEM fields toward the type of innovative economy that all Californians, and people everywhere, deserve.

RIchmondChevronAirWatchBayArea_Screen Shot 2017-09-10 at 7.03.27 PM

Air Watch Bay Area screenshot, with refinery fenceline and community air monitors, Richmond.

These reference points are all the more valuable given the challenges of responding to climate change and the relevance of environmental justice organizations and social determinants of health research in doing so. Extreme heat, drought, declining air quality, more frequent wildfires, and other environmental and economic upheavals tied to climate change are all impacting and poised to further impact public health and health equity for Californians. As environmental justice advocates and social determinants of health research demonstrate, it is vital to not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions to prevent additional climate change, but also to contest and mitigate communities’ unequal access to resources and vulnerabilities in the face of climate change—to close the “climate gap”[19] and work toward just transitions away from fossil fuel dependency and toward green job creation.[20] Accordingly, California’s Climate Change and Health Equity Program observes:

Climate change and health inequities share similar root causes: the inequitable distribution of social, political, and economic power. These power imbalances result in systems (economic, transportation, land use, etc.) and conditions that drive both health inequities and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. As a result, we see communities with inequitable living conditions, such as low-income communities of color living in more polluted areas, facing climate change impacts that compound and exacerbate existing vulnerabilities. Fair and healthy climate action requires addressing the inequities that create and intensify community vulnerabilities, through strategically directing extra investments in improving living conditions for and with people facing disadvantage.”[21]

However, even as many concerned with STEM fields decry U.S. students’ rankings on standardized math and science tests compared with students in Finland or Japan, and sound alarm bells about global economic competition, these STEM discussions tend not to simultaneously highlight the U.S.’s global outlier status as a wealthy country with high levels of poverty, preventable morbidity, infant mortality, and health inequities. This is an underappreciated STEM crisis—a failure of economic and political decision-makers to learn from and act on social determinants of health research. As elaborated in a 2013 report from the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, while the U.S. is among the wealthiest countries in the world, it is far from the healthiest. Indeed, the report—the first comprehensive comparison of the U.S. and 16 peer countries in terms of multiple diseases, injuries, and behaviors across the life span—found that the U.S. is “at or near the bottom in nine key areas of health: infant mortality and low birth weight; injuries and homicides; teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections; prevalence of HIV and AIDS; drug-related deaths; obesity and diabetes; heart disease; chronic lung disease; and disability.”[22] The report ultimately argued that, “Without action to reverse current trends, the health of Americans will probably continue to fall behind that of people in other high-income countries. The tragedy is not that the United States is losing a contest with other countries but that Americans are dying and suffering from illness and injury at rates that are demonstrably unnecessary.” More specifically, other researchers have noted that, “[U.S.] public investments in broad, cross-sectoral efforts to minimize the potential effect of such foundational drivers of poor health as poverty and racial residential segregation are pitifully few in comparison with those of other countries.”[23] Health equity is an innovative touchstone for STEM education in part because, despite pertaining population patterns of well-being, life, and death, social determinants of health research is not widely familiar in the U.S. or in California, nor have these been at the forefront of advocacy for STEM education and science literacy.

If STEM Education Seems to be the Answer, What Was the Question?

Attention to health equity and social determinants of health research suggests the need to reframe conventional STEM education narratives, with an eye to the kinds of economic growth that serve equitable prosperity, ecological sustainability, and democracy. Such a reframing, centered on social determinants of health and the crucial intersections of race, class, and place, is also needed to achieve existing STEM education goals, from closing achievement gaps to supporting underrepresented students in STEM fields. As one STEM education analyst commented on the “Sisyphean Task” of STEM equity and diversity, “While educators continue to do their part to improve the K-16 STEM learning and teaching environment, our efforts may be out-weighed by inaction or counter-productive conditions in other domains.”[24] Yet another possibility is that these efforts may be aided by action in other domains,[25] especially action by researchers, public health professionals, and activists working to promote health equity and environmental justice through multi-sectoral, system-oriented problem-solving.

In this era of proliferating assertions about STEM fields as sources of prosperity and problem solving, it is crucial to question what is meant by “STEM.” How does the public health field fit into the STEM landscape, particularly amid California’s combination of enormous wealth juxtaposed with deep health inequities? How might research on social determinants of health and health inequities reshape this landscape? How could all California STEM stakeholders contribute to the vision embodied in the California Office of Health Equity’s recent report to the California State Legislature?[26] Conversely, how might some STEM discussions obscure rather than illuminate key puzzles of social prosperity and innovation—even or perhaps especially while flying the banners of curiosity, inquiry, innovation, disruption, and challenging the status quo? What is missed when challenges are framed as grand, global and national—rather than regional, or attuned to particular zip codes and neighborhoods? How do the questions asked, and not asked, shape the possible answers—the ways people puzzle through and piece together worlds? California’s vibrant environmental justice and health equity communities offer cogent and inspiring starting points for future STEM inquiries.

March to stop the incinerator, December 2013, United Workers via Flickr.

Notes

Thank you to the editors and anonymous peer reviewers at Boom for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

[1] Committee on Prospering in the Global Economy of the 21^st Century: An Agenda for American Science and Technology, Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Better Future (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2007), http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11463/rising-above-the-gathering-storm-energizing-and-employing-america-for; Members of 2005 “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” Committee, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5 (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2010), http://www.nap.edu/catalog/12999/rising-above-the-gathering-storm-revisited-rapidly-approaching-category-5.

[2] http://www.cde.ca.gov/pd/ca/sc/stemintrod.asp.

[3] Rodger Bybee, The Case for STEM Education: Challenges and Opportunities (Arlington, VA: National Science Teachers Association, 2013).

[4] Michael Teitelbaum, Falling Behind? Boom, Bust, and the Global Race for Scientific Talent (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); Yi Xue and Richard C. Larson, “STEM crisis or STEM surplus? Yes and yes,” Monthly Labor Review, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2015, https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2015/article/stem-crisis-or-stem-surplus-yes-and-yes.htm.

[5] Brian M. Donovan, David Moreno Mateos, Jonathan F. Osborne, Daniel J. Bisaccio, “Revising the Economic Imperative for US STEM Education.” PLOS Biology 12 (2014): 3, http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001760.

[6] Lance Ulanoff, “Bill Gates: AI is the Holy Grail,” Mashable, 1 June 2016,

http://mashable.com/2016/06/01/bill-gates-ai-code-conference/#oogN_u01Jmqw.

[7] David Remnick, “Obama Reckons With a Trump Presidency,” 28 November 2016, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/28/obama-reckons-with-a-trump-presidency.

[8] Connie M. Razza and Louise Auerhahn, “A Hidden Crisis: Underemployment in Silicon Valley’s Hourly Workforce,” The Center for Popular Democracy & Working Partnerships USA, April 2016, http://www.wpusa.org/Publication/A_Hidden_Crisis.pdf; “Tech’s Diversity Problem: More Than Meets the Eye,” Working Partnerships USA, 2014, http://wpusa.org/Publication/Tech_Diversity_Report_2014.pdf.

[9] http://siliconvalleyrising.org/.

[10] Raj Jayadev and Jean Melesaine, De-Bug: Voices from the Underside of Silicon Valley, (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2016).

[11] Jason Corburn, Street Science: Community Knowledge and Environmental Health Justice, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005); Jason Corburn, Toward the Healthy City: People, Places, and the Politics of Urban Planning (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009).

[12] Brian Martin, “Strategies for Alternative Science,” in Scott Frickel and Kelly Moore, eds., The New Political Sociology of Science: Institutions, Networks, and Power (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006): 272-98, http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/06Frickel.html.

[13] Indigenous scientists, agency professionals, tribal professionals, educators, traditional practitioners, family, youth, elders and allies from Indigenous communities and homelands all over the living Earth, “Let Our Indigenous Voices Be Heard,” Indigenous Science March for Science Letter of Support, https://sites.google.com/view/indigenous-science-letter;

Science for the People editorial team, “Which Way for Science?” 18 April 2017, https://scienceforthepeople.org/2017/04/18/which-way-for-science/.

[14] Healthy People 2020: https://www.healthypeople.gov/2020/about/foundation-health-measures/Disparities.

[15] American Public Health Association on Health Equity: https://www.apha.org/topics-and-issues/health-equity.

[16] Margaret Chan, “Launch of the final report of the Commission on Social Determinants of Health,” World Health Organization, 28 August 2008, http://www.who.int/dg/speeches/2008/20080828/en/.

[17] These research syntheses include: Jack P. Shonkoff and Deborah A. Philips, From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2000), http://www.nap.edu/catalog/9824/from-neurons-to-neighborhoods-the-science-of-early-childhood-development; Nancy Krieger, Epidemiology and The People’s Health: Theory and Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, 2d edition (London: Bloomsbury, 2011); and research into the life-long ramifications of Adverse Childhood Experiences (or ACEs), e.g.: https://www.samhsa.gov/capt/practicing-effective-prevention/prevention-behavioral-health/adverse-childhood-experiences.

[18] For example, California Environmental Justice Coalition: https://cejcoalition.org/; Communities for a Better Environment: http://cbecal.org/; Greenaction for Health & Environmental Justice: http://greenaction.org/; the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment: http://www.crpe-ej.org/; Public Health Awakened: http://publichealthawakened.com/; among many others.

[19] Rachel Morello-Frosch, Manuel Pastor, Jim Sadd, and Seth Shonkoff, “The Climate Gap: Inequalities in How Climate Change Hurts Americans & How to Close the Gap,” 2009, https://dornsife.usc.edu/pere/climategap/.

[20] See Our Power Campaign: http://www.ourpowercampaign.org/about.

[21] California Climate Change and Health Equity Program: https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/OHE/Pages/CCHEP.aspx, emphasis in original.

[22] Steven H. Woolf and Laudan Aron, eds. U.S. Health in International Perspective: Shorter Lives, Poorer Health (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2013): http://www.nap.edu/catalog/13497/us-health-in-international-perspective-shorter-lives-poorer-health.

[23] Ronald Bayer and Sandro Galea, “Public Health in the Precision-Medicine Era,” The New England Journal of Medicine, 2015 Aug 6;373(6):499-501, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26244305.

[24] Douglas Haller, “STEM Equity & Diversity: A Sisyphean Task,” Huffington Post, 22 September 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/douglas-haller/stem-equity-diversity-a-s_b_3634985.html.

[25] Emily Zimmerman and Steven H. Woolf, “Understanding the Relationship Between Education and Health,” Institute of Medicine Discussion Paper, 2014, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e009/90cdb938751c718d74934ff1d3d8fad907a1.pdf.

[26] California Department of Public Health Office of Health Equity’s Report to the Legislature and the People of California, “Portrait of Promise: The California Statewide Plan to Promote Health and Mental Health Equity,” August 2015, http://www.cdph.ca.gov/programs/Documents/CDPHOHEDisparityReportAug2015.pdf.

Cheryl Holzmeyer lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is a postdoctoral fellow with the Fair Tech Collective at Drexel University. She conducts research and outreach for Air Watch Bay Area, a project focused on frontline community monitoring of air pollution from regional oil refineries. She completed her sociology Ph.D. at UC Berkeley and has taught courses on “Science, Technology, and Environmental Justice” at Stanford.

Copyright: © 2017 Cheryl Holzmeyer. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Articles

Reigniting Education in Juvie: Education is a right, even behind bars

Boom California on April 18, 2017

Anna Challet

Frequently overlooked in California’s ongoing discussions about criminal justice reform are the places at which many individuals have their first experience of being detained—juvenile halls. In 2014, California had more than 86,000 juvenile arrests and more than 51,000 juvenile court dispositions.

Further overlooked is the fact that kids continue going to school while they’re awaiting legal proceedings or after they’ve been committed to a facility (which might be a juvenile hall, a camp, or a ranch). Like all kids, young people in the juvenile justice system are entitled to an education—the California constitution does not make an exception for kids who are locked up. They enter what are known as ‘‘court schools,’’ for weeks, months, or even a year or more at a time. It’s a window that offers kids caught in the system a chance to change their course, and the system a chance to connect with kids who have few connections.

They connect with various teachers as well, which are the same mix seen at any public school—some who have been doing this sort of teaching for a long time and are committed to working in justice settings and others who are there for much shorter periods of time. The subjects taught, hours per day for instruction, and people teaching vary.

More than 47,000 kids spent time in one of California’s seventy-six court schools in 2014. The vast majority came from low-income households and were Black or Latino.

The schools offer an opportunity to change kids’ lives while they’re a captive audience. But in California, that opportunity is being wasted because the schools are failing. In a state preoccupied with reforming education and moving away from mass incarceration, the schools that exist at the intersection of these movements are habitually ignored, under-resourced, and not held accountable.

In a study released this spring, Youth Law Center (a national firm based in San Francisco that works on behalf of kids in the juvenile justice and child welfare systems) found that more than 40 percent of the kids in court schools don’t make any progress in reading or math while they’re there. Many even find that their skills actually decline. Most of the kids aren’t even assessed academically, despite assessments being a federal requirement for long-term students.

‘‘Juvenile court schools can be the first stop on moving young people into the prison pipeline, or they can be an opportunity to intervene,’’ says Youth Law Center (YLC) managing director Maria Ramiu. According to Ramiu, the kids in court schools have ‘‘high aspirations for what they want to do with their lives.’’ They’re hungry to learn, and the system meets them with low expectations.

Ayanna Rasheed. Photograph by Anna Challet.

YLC’s findings are borne out by the experiences of many young people who have spent time in the juvenile justice system. Ayanna Rasheed, now twenty-two and living in Oakland, entered the child welfare system as a baby. Today, she’s studying to become an emergency medical technician and wants to do advocacy work on behalf of kids in foster care. Her adolescence was marked by a series of unstable housing situations, and she spent much of her ninth-grade year in a juvenile facility in San Joaquin County.

Rasheed says that all of the students were taught the same material, regardless of grade level: “The math was the same math we learned in sixth grade.’’ To her knowledge, she didn’t receive credits for any of the work she did there; she says none of it appears on her transcript.

Moreover, she expresses frustration that none of the teachers made much of an impression on her. ‘‘They need to put some heart in it,’’ she says.

And yet, Rasheed’s experience isn’t universal. For Eddie Chavez, nineteen, who spent time in juvenile hall in Fresno County, court school ended up being a turning point in his life. ‘‘You have to focus no matter what because you have a guard watching you, and it’s so quiet, and you can’t mess around,’’ he says. ‘‘I think that’s what was able to keep me focused on my work, because I can’t focus in regular schools. Regular schools just aren’t for me.’’

Chavez recalls having a substitute history teacher for about a week in the court school who brought in a suit of armor and had the students try on the parts while they were learning about the Middle Ages. He also had an art teacher who, in addition to teaching Chavez how to draw, drew him a portrait of his girlfriend and his new baby who were waiting for him on the outside. Chavez still has the portrait. He says he ended up earning the most credits he’d ever gotten in any school.

While he was still in detention, he came into contact with Barrios Unidos, a violence-prevention organization. A mentor would come to the detention center and talk to youth about job training, work opportunities, and education before their release. Chavez ended up joining the organization’s character-building program when he got out and started going to support groups. The organization helped him get a job at thrift store in Fresno.

Chavez’s experience was exceptional, and far too many juveniles wind up with ones like Rasheed’s. Overhauling the system to be more responsive to the needs of young offenders in court schools is a mammoth undertaking. Change will come slowly, if at all. Yet, a number of alternative facilities are creating new models of providing treatment and education, improving the futures of young people in the system.

Margot Gibney was the founding executive director of Youth Treatment and Education Center (YTEC) in San Francisco, the city’s first juvenile ‘‘drug court,’’ which provided treatment, therapy, and high school classes for juvenile drug offenders. An independent study of the school’s students (between 2006 and 2010) found that their recidivism rate after one year was less than 10 percent, says Gibney.

Eddie Chavez. Photograph by Charlie Kaijo.

The educational approach at YTEC echoed the suit of armor moment that captured Chavez’s imagination. Describing her time there, Gibney recalls, ‘‘The kids were rapping the Constitution, creating machines to talk about the Industrial Revolution. We’d have family nights and the parents would come in and kids would teach what they learned, and the parents could see their children in a positive light instead of just coming to court and hearing about all the awful things they’d done.’’

Gibney also says it’s crucial to have highly trained staff who have first-hand knowledge of the communities that the kids come from. ‘‘Their education and where they go with their education is such a strong determinant in the options and opportunities for their lives,’’ she says. ‘‘You have to help them find the things that they can get really excited about.’’

Dr. Teri Delane fits that bill. She’s principal of Life Learning Academy, a charter school on San Francisco’s Treasure Island that serves at-risk youth and those involved in the juvenile justice system. Delane spent time in juvenile detention after being kicked out of high school because of heroin abuse. She says that what saved her life was becoming part of a community at the Delancey Street Foundation, a non-profit in San Francisco that supports people dealing with substance use disorders.

Life Learning Academy serves sixty students, about 40 percent of whom are on probation. Delane says that in the school’s eighteen-year history, they’ve never had an act of violence on campus. And, she notes, they have a 95 percent graduation rate.

For Delane, ‘‘It is not just about staff and everybody else giving to the student. It is the students becoming their own community and helping each other,’’ she says. ‘‘It’s not about just giving kids things. One of the most important things is giving back—a piece of your life has to be giving back. The kids work together and they give their word to nonviolence.’’

At the same time, she says, ‘‘We try to close the circle around them. In that circle are family support, community support, mentor support, job support, friendships, and a safe environment in which to live.’’

About a third of the kids in the school are currently homeless or unstably housed. Despite this, they get themselves up and make it to school every day. Many are sleeping couch to couch, and Delane knows of one who sleeps in Golden Gate Park. Finding housing for her students is critical, and the school is working on raising the money to open a residential facility behind the campus. ‘‘There will not be kids in our school that do not have a safe place to live and a safe place to thrive,’’ she says.

The decision to house kids who don’t have homes is an obvious one, with an enormous pay off. It’s a lot like the approaches trialed by successful alternative models for educating juvenile offenders and at-risk youth.

Margot Gibney emphasizes the need for caring adults who have high expectations and hold kids accountable. ‘‘The research shows that if there’s at least one person in a young person’s life that follows them and provides support in a positive way, that can be the strongest determining factor. However, if you have a team of people, a community, then you just take those benefits and you maximize them,’’ she says. ‘‘Young people don’t need programs—they need family, they need community, they need opportunities and safety.’’

They also need the support of an educational system that takes their aspirations seriously. At minimum, this ought to include teachers and mentors who understand these kids as the future of California, as those who will be shaping this state in the coming years.

Youth Law Center’s findings about the failure of court schools, operated by County Offices of Education, come at a time when the State of California has dramatically reordered the way schools are funded. With the desire to direct more money to districts with higher numbers of underserved youth, a major reform measure, the Local Control Funding Formula, went into effect in 2013; it allocates more money to districts with higher numbers of high-needs students. While all students in the juvenile justice system are considered high-needs, at this point it is unclear what impact this is having with court schools.

What seems to be the case is that while California education reform is addressing important areas, court schools go completely ignored. If this is true, the education reform movement is entirely missing the opportunity to address the needs of a cohort of students who want to learn and whose futures hang in the balance.

Notes

Anna Challet is a reporter with New America Media with a focus on health care, public health, and issues local to San Francisco. She has also written about child welfare and juvenile justice; housing and homelessness; and criminal justice, education, and immigration reform.

Charlie Kaijo contributed to the reporting.

Articles Photography/Art

Between Journalism and Fiction: Hunter S. Thompson and the Birth of Gonzo

Boom California on February 12, 2017

Peter Richardson

According to Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson was “the only twentieth-century equivalent of Mark Twain.”1 Wolfe’s comparison was meant to feature Thompson as a humorist, but biographical similarities also linked the two writers. Both Twain and Thompson arrived in San Francisco as obscure journalists, thrived on the city’s anarchic energies, and departed as national figures. Exactly one hundred years after Twain left San Francisco, Thompson moved to Colorado and created his most extravagant character: himself. The signature works that followed—along with his drug and alcohol consumption, gun fetish, and “fortified compound”—are strongly associated with Woody Creek, where he lived until his suicide in 2005. But if Thompson’s celebrity was a Colorado phenomenon, his literary formation played out in San Francisco during what he called “a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again.”2 That peak helped Thompson invent not only a literary genre, but also himself.

Thompson’s self-fashioning unfolded in stages. In 1960, he set off on a Beat-style cross-country drive that ended in Seattle. From there, he hitchhiked to San Francisco, where he visited City Lights Bookstore and other Beat shrines. After failing to find work, Thompson decamped for Big Sur, the Beat hangout and home of novelist Henry Miller, a major influence. (Although he staked out Miller’s mailbox, he never met his idol.) After two years of travel, Thompson moved to the Sonoma County town of Glen Ellen, home of Jack London, before settling with his wife and infant son at 318 Parnassus Avenue, not far from Haight-Ashbury. Scratching out a living as a freelance journalist, he covered the 1964 GOP convention at the Cow Palace and wrote an unpublished review of Tom Wolfe’s The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965). Editorial quarrels over the coverage of the convention and the Wolfe review led to his split from The National Observer, his primary outlet at the time.

Photograph of Hunter S. Thompson in the Hotel Jerome by David Hiser.

In January 1965, a destitute Thompson pitched story ideas to Carey McWilliams, then editor of The Nation. Before moving to New York City from Los Angeles in the 1950s, McWilliams had produced a stream of first-rate books and articles that established him as California’s shrewdest observer. His history of California farm labor, Factories in the Field (1939), impressed Thompson, who was compiling his own photographs for a book project called The Californians.³Thompson’s query letter to The Nation, which referred to McWilliams as “an old California hand,” played to that expertise. Thompson’s first story idea was about “the final collapse of the myth of San Francisco.” In his view, the city’s personality had gone from “neurotic to paranoid to what now looks like the first stages of a catatonic fit.” His fallback ideas were stories about Governor Pat Brown’s budget proposals and a job his wife had taken as a telephone solicitor for a dance studio. What would happen, Thompson wondered, if a black customer accepted the telephone offer? He imagined the dilemma of a hypothetical and hard-pressed solicitor: “Will Sally make the sale and chance the ultimate disaster—a coon showing up at the studio—or will she somehow ascertain the pigment, then do her duty and queer her only sale?”⁴

McWilliams would not have welcomed the racial epithets in the query letter. Indeed, his earlier work on racial discrimination earned him an interview with the state legislature’s Committee on Un-American Activities in California in 1943. Committee chair Jack Tenney quizzed McWilliams about his views on interracial marriage, which was still illegal in California. McWilliams, who was serving in state government at the time, said he thought the law should be abolished. Tenney later reported that McWilliams’s views were “identical with [sic] Communist Party ideology.”⁵

In his reply to Thompson, McWilliams suggested a piece about the Hells Angels motorcycle gang, which Thompson eagerly accepted. McWilliams’s editorial intervention turned out to be life-changing. Shortly after that article appeared, Thompson had a book contract with Random House and spent the next eighteen months researching and writing his first-person account of life with the motorcycle gang. Dedicated to McWilliams, Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga was Thompson’s first bestseller, a parade example of New Journalism and a shrewd critique of the mainstream media. For the rest of his career, McWilliams was the one editor whom he consistently and unhesitatingly admired. Throughout the 1960s, he wrote McWilliams almost weekly on a variety of topics. “More than any other person, Carey was responsible for the success of Hell’s Angels,” Thompson later acknowledged. “He encouraged me around every bend.”⁶

As Hell’s Angels made its way into the world, Thompson met Warren Hinckle, editor of Ramparts magazine. Founded in 1962 as a Catholic literary quarterly in Menlo Park, Ramparts had become an award-winning San Francisco muckraker that ran bombshell stories on Vietnam, the CIA, and the Black Panthers. Thompson, who was listed as a contributing editor but never wrote for the magazine, admired Hinckle’s swashbuckling style.

I met [Hinckle] through his magazine, Ramparts. I met him before Rolling Stone ever existed. Ramparts was a crossroads of my world in San Francisco, a slicker version of The Nation—with glossy covers and such. Warren had a genius for getting stories that could be placed on the front page of The New York Times. He had a beautiful eye for what story had a high, weird look to it. You know, busting the Defense Department—Ramparts was real left, radical. I paid a lot of attention to them and ended up being a columnist.⁷

A Thompson visit to the Ramparts office, where Hinckle kept a capuchin monkey named Henry Luce, quickly became legend. The two men left for drinks and returned to find Thompson’s backpack open, pills of various colors strewn across the floor, and a deranged Henry Luce racing around the office. He was rushed to the veterinarian’s office to have his stomach pumped. An unsympathetic Thompson later wrote to Hinckle, “That fucking monkey should be killed—or at least arrested—on general principles.”⁸

Thompson’s 1966 move to Colorado re-created the bucolic bohemianism of Big Sur, but he attended the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago with Hinckle and his colleagues. He told his editor at Random House that his Ramparts contacts assured him that “all manner of hell is going to break loose” in Chicago.⁹It was another turning point for Thompson, who was appalled by the police violence he witnessed there. Scampering from agitated officers on Michigan Avenue, Thompson found two cops posted outside his hotel blocking his retreat. As he recalled in a letter, “I finally just ran between the truncheons, screaming, ‘I live here, goddamnit! I’m paying fifty dollars a day!’” The experience rattled even a seasoned reporter who thrived on action. “I went from a state of Cold Shock on Monday, to Fear on Tuesday, then Rage, and finally Hysteria—which lasted for nearly a month,” he later wrote.¹⁰Having built his reputation covering the Hells Angels, San Francisco hippies, and student radicals in Berkeley, he began to target what he saw as the corruption and violence of mainstream American politics. “I went to the Democratic convention as a journalist and returned a raving beast,” he later told a fellow journalist.¹¹

To cover the convention and the mayhem outside its walls, Hinckle produced the Ramparts Wall Poster, which reported on the convention and related street activities. The posters were single full-folio sheets whose title and format recalled the publications of Mao Zedong’s Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution. (The motto for the Ramparts Wall Poster was “Up Against the Wall.”) Two years later, Thompson lifted the idea during his campaign for sheriff in Pitkin County, Colorado. He promised to send Hinckle a copy of his Aspen Wallposter. “And if the Wallposter name rings a bell,” he wrote Hinckle, “well, I’ll never deny it.”¹²

When Ramparts filed for bankruptcy in January 1969, Hinckle left to start a new magazine called Scanlan’s. In its first issue, he ran a Thompson piece, rejected by Playboy, on skier Jean-Claude Killy. Thompson focused on the difficulty of writing the story, which would become a major theme in his work. While preparing the piece, he was accompanied by Boston Globe writer Bill Cardoso. Thompson wrote Cardoso into the story, and the presence of a companion would become another signature theme. Later, Cardoso coined the term “Gonzo” to describe Thompson’s work.

Thompson was grateful that Hinckle published the Killy article, but he was unhappy with the magazine’s design. “Graphically, it was a fucking horror show,” he wrote to Hinckle. “It looks like it was put together by a compositor’s apprentice with a head full of Seconal.” He especially disliked the illustrations that accompanied the Killy article. “On lesser fronts, I want to impose a condition on anything I may or may not sell you in the future—to wit: That any ‘cartoon/illustration’ by Jim Nutt will not be allowed within 15 pages on either side of my byline.”¹³When Thompson offered to cover the 1970 Kentucky Derby for Scanlan’s, Hinckle paired him with Welsh illustrator Ralph Steadman, whose drawings became the visual counterpart to Thompson’s extravagant prose. After the Derby, Steadman recalled that Thompson was concerned. “This whole thing will probably finish me as a writer,” he said. “I have no story.”¹⁴Later, he confided to Steadman that the article was “useless, aside from the flashes of style & tone it captures.” The illustrations, on the other hand, were fine, and he proposed another collaboration. “I’d like nothing better than to work with you on another one of those savage binges again, & to that end I’ll tell my agent to bill us as a package—for good or ill.”¹⁵

Poster by Thomas W. Benton, courtesy of Gonzo Gallery.

Widely considered the first example of Gonzo journalism, “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” wasn’t the career-killer that Thompson initially feared. Writing to Hinckle in July 1970, Thompson proposed “a series of Ky. Derby-style articles (with Steadman) on things like the Super Bowl, Times Sq. on New Year’s eve, Mardi Gras, the Masters (golf) Tournament, the America’s Cup, Christmas Day with the Chicago Police, Grand National Rodeo in Denver…rape them all, quite systematically and then we could sell it as a book: ‘Amerikan Dreams.…’” The idea, in brief, was to “travel around the country and shit on everything.”¹⁶Thompson thought the “Rape Series on Amerikan Institutions,” which Hinckle wanted to call the Thompson-Steadman Report, was a “king-bitch dog-fucker of an idea.” He and Steadman “could go almost anywhere & turn out a series of articles so weird & frightful as to stagger every mind in journalism.”¹⁷

Although the circulation for Scanlan’s reached 150,000 within six months, it tanked after eight issues, and Thompson again needed a suitable outlet. Now settled in Colorado, he began writing for Rolling Stone, an upstart San Francisco magazine that focused on the counterculture and its music. Its cofounders, Jann Wenner and San Francisco Chronicle music columnist Ralph J. Gleason, were both Ramparts alumni, but Hinckle laid off Wenner and infuriated Gleason by writing “A Social History of the Hippies” a few months before the Summer of Love. Nevertheless, Wenner lifted design elements from Ramparts and used the Ramparts office to mock up the first issue, which appeared November 1967.

Thompson began contributing to Rolling Stone the following October, but his next major work was a long piece on a motorcycle race and National District Attorney’s Association meeting that he and Los Angeles attorney Oscar Acosta attended in Las Vegas. Sports Illustrated rejected the article, whose word count far exceeded the editor’s request, and Wenner agreed to run it as a two-part feature in Rolling Stone with Steadman’s illustrations. Thompson used the byline Raoul Duke, the “well-worn pseudonym” he had used to acquire weapons while running for Pitkin County sheriff.¹⁸The book version went to Random House, which published Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in 1972. Tom Wolfe’s blurb described the book as “a scorching, epochal sensation,” and it became Thompson’s Gonzo masterpiece. By that time, Thompson had been named chief of Rolling Stone’s National Affairs Desk. His reporting on the 1972 presidential election appeared in the magazine and was collected for Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72. Straight Arrow Books, another Wenner creation, published the book version in 1973.

Although Gonzo journalism is synonymous with Thompson’s output, the term masks his greatest achievement. From the beginning, Thompson considered himself a novelist and modeled himself on Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. Whenever necessary, he shrugged off journalism’s protocols to supercharge his prose. “Fiction is a bridge to truth that journalism can’t reach,” he told an editor at Knopf. “Facts are lies when they’re added up.”¹⁹That perspective wasn’t lost on his contemporaries. Political strategist Frank Mankiewicz observed that Thompson’s description of the 1972 presidential race was “the most accurate and least factual account of the campaign.”²⁰Likewise, novelist William Kennedy noted that his longtime friend seemed to be writing journalism while actually developing his fictional oeuvre. When his Random House editor asked whether Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was journalism or fiction, Thompson offered a lengthy reply questioning the distinction. In his view, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which he described as “a long rambling piece of personal journalism,” was “the first big breakthrough on this front.”²¹Wenner was less interested in such generic distinctions, and though Thompson complained privately about writing for a magazine preoccupied with what the Jackson 5 had for breakfast, Rolling Stone made him a celebrity. His notoriety even gave rise to a cartoon character, Uncle Duke in Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975. Although Thompson resented Trudeau’s invention, it amplified his fame.

Poster by Thomas W. Benton, courtesy of Gonzo Gallery.

Fifty years after the publication of Thompson’s key works, and more than a decade after his death, Thompson is still regarded primarily as a celebrity. Yet there is a great deal of evidence to support his own claim, made to a Vietnamese colonel in 1975, that he was “one of the best writers currently using the English language as both a musical instrument and a political weapon.”²² Four separate developments combined to push Thompson beyond traditional journalism. The first was his experience in Chicago while covering the 1968 Democratic National Convention, which transformed his understanding of American politics and stoked his outrage. The second was his pairing with Ralph Steadman, whose illustrations were an indispensable part of Gonzo’s success. Third was Thompson’s idea to produce a string of stories in the mold of the Kentucky Derby piece. Although the Thompson-Steadman Report never came off at Scanlan’s, Thompson produced Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in its image. The final factor was Thompson’s decision to write that landmark book in the voice of Raoul Duke. It was an attempt, he later told Tom Wolfe, to prevent the “grey little cocksuckers who run things” from “drawing that line between Journalism and Fiction.”²³

Well before Thompson visited Chicago, however, his literary formation was almost complete. “San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of,” he wrote in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. “Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run…but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world.”²⁴Thompson’s transformation required well-placed supporters and allies, and he was exceptionally fortunate to have worked with three California editors who shared his dissatisfaction with mainstream American journalism. McWilliams’s guidance, Hinckle’s audacity, and Wenner’s feeling for the countercultural zeitgeist were essential parts of Thompson’s self-creation. Unlike Twain, Thompson didn’t invent a new name for himself during his San Francisco sojourn; but much like his precursor, he left the city with everything he needed to become one of his generation’s most distinctive voices.

Thompson has at least one notable successor today. Matt Taibbi is profane, outlandish, scornful, and funny, and the Gonzo influence, especially in his early work, is unmistakable. His first solo book, Spanking the Donkey: On the Campaign Trail with the Democrats (2005), was an updated version of Thompson’s Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72. Taibbi even itemized the contents of his car trunk, as Thompson did at the beginning of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It was therefore fitting that Taibbi became a contributing editor at Rolling Stone following the book’s publication. After winning a National Magazine Award in 2008, he took on Goldman Sachs, the investment bank that he described as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”²⁵But Taibbi did more than impugn the Wall Street giant; he also explained its complicated hustles to general readers. That combination of bombast and clear explication made his claims increasingly difficult to ignore or refute. Wenner now regards Taibbi as “absolutely the first person to come along since Hunter who could be called Hunter’s peer.”²⁶

After Rolling Stone moved to New York City in 1977, Mother Jones became the standard-bearer for San Francisco independent journalism. Its founders—Adam Hochschild, Richard Parker, and Paul Jacobs—were Ramparts veterans, and their premier issue in 1976 won a National Magazine Award. If Rolling Stone inherited Ramparts’ id, Mother Jones has continued its knack for producing big whistleblower stories. In 2012, David Corn reported on GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s closed-door remarks about 47 percent of American voters being overly dependent on the government. That piece drew an awkward apology from Romney and earned Mother Jones the prestigious George Polk Award. Earlier this year, Mother Jones published Shane Bauer’s 35,000-word story about working for a private prison in Louisiana. Its website received two million hits in the first twelve hours, larger outlets picked up the story, and the Department of Justice later announced that it would no longer contract with private prisons.

It is unclear whether or how San Francisco might launch the next literary celebrity. The city today is increasingly dominated by high-tech corporations whose products have shattered the business models for American journalism and publishing. Despite these challenges, San Francisco outlets continue to occupy a distinct niche in today’s media ecology. From the Gold Rush on, the city’s writers have challenged the political and literary status quo with style. Despite his short sojourn in San Francisco, Hunter Thompson occupies a special place in that alternative tradition.

Poster by Thomas W. Benton, courtesy of Gonzo Gallery.

Notes

1
Jann S. Wenner and Corey Seymour, Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson (New York: Back Bay Books, 2008), 436.

2
Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (New York: Random House, 1972; 2d ed. Vintage Books, 1998), 66.

3
William McKeen, Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), 94.

4
Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: The Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman (New York: Villard Books, 1997), 481.

5
Peter Richardson, American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 128.

6
Thompson, The Proud Highway, xxvii.

7
Douglas Brinkley and Terry McDonell, “The Art of Journalism: An Interview with Hunter S. Thompson,” The Paris Review 156 (Fall 2000), http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/619/the-art-of-journalism-no-1-hunter-s-thompson.

8
Thompson, The Proud Highway, 639.

9
Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 15.

10
Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 78–81.

11
William McKeen, Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), 125.

12
Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America, 283.

13
Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America, 283.

14
Steadman, The Joke’s Over (Orlando: Harcourt Inc., 2006), 31.

15
Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America, 309–10.

16
Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America, 319.

17
Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America, 320.

18
Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America, 325.

19
Thompson, The Proud Highway, 529.

20
McKeen, Outlaw Journalist, 194.

21
Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America, 421.

22
Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America, 613.

23
Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America, 376.

24
Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 66–67.

25
Matt Taibbi, “The Great American Bubble Machine,” Rolling Stone, 13 July 2009.

26
Verini, James, “Lost Exile: The Unlikely Life and Sudden Death of The Exile, Russia’s Angriest Newspaper,” Vanity Fair, 24 February 2010. http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2010/02/exile-201002.

Photograph of Hunter S. Thompson by David Hiser.

Peter Richardson coordinates the American Studies and California Studies programs at San Francisco State University. He has written critically acclaimed books about the Grateful Dead, Ramparts magazine, and Carey McWilliams.

Articles

Anthropologist as Court Jester: Civil Disobedience and The People’s Café

Boom California on February 7, 2017

Nancy Scheper-Hughes

Segment of “Berkeley: A People’s Bicentennial History of Telegraph Avenue” by Osha Neumann, O’Brien Thiele, Hannah Kransberg, and Daniel Galvez. Photograph by Wally Gobetz, via Flickr.

“Just remember, Nancy, that you and I are just ‘passing’ as academics.”
—George A. DeVos (“the Fox” in Flemish), University of California professor of anthropology

The first act of civil disobedience doesn’t come easily to most people. We are raised to be obedient; it requires considerable discernment to decide what matters enough to justify going against our sociable inclinations to conform, to not make waves, as my beloved Dad put it. The phone or the doorbell rings, and we answer it. The Star-Spangled Banner strikes up at a baseball game, and we rise to salute the flag and strain to reach the impossible notes of a ghastly anthem with its “bombs bursting in air,” its references to fire, destruction, blood, and the “pollution” of our enemies, the “terror of flight and the gloom of the grave.” But sing it we do, on cue. Then, suddenly, there is a tipping point that brings one to their senses. Following the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, something snapped back home in the United States. Some ordinary people began to sit tight during the singing of the national anthem in our ballparks. The bench sitters were pelted with hot dogs and mustard, with snow cones and soft ice cream. They were told to stand up like men, even if they were women. They were called traitors, scum, cowards, and Commies, and told to get out of America. But, like Horton the Elephant, they sat and they sat. They refused to remove their baseball caps or place their right hands over their hearts in a display of patriotic loyalty. That took a lot of moral courage.

As a young Peace Corps Volunteer in rural Northeast Brazil, my band of nonspecialist “sanitary engineers” (latrine diggers) and “barefoot paramedics” arrived soon after the 1964 military coup (fully supported by the CIA) that clobbered the impoverished sugarcane cutters who had begun to organize with the Ligas Componese, the Peasant League Movement. The military officers in Recife learned that the “squatters” of the shantytown, Alto do Cruzeiro, in rural Pernabuco were holding mass meetings and that Dona Nanci was organizing a squatters association (UPAC, the Union of the People of Alto do Cruzeiro) to address the lack of potable water, the hunger, the infant mortality, and the premature deaths from uncontrolled infectious disease. But it was the indignity of pauper burials in shallow, collective graves using borrowed municipal tin coffins that poor people could no longer endure. UPAC organized around the slogan “Six Feet Under and a Proper Coffin.”

One afternoon, two sweaty men in uniform came to my mud hut, perched near the top of the hillside shantytown, and accompanied me to military headquarters in Recife, where I was questioned. I spoke of the useless suffering and meaningless (premature) deaths of infants and “angel babies.” I was released but placed under surveillance and a form of house arrest. I was not allowed to leave the town of Timbauba during the military investigation of UPAC. I could not meet with more than three people at a time. No elections of local leaders could take place. All organizing had to stop, and I had to give a daily report of my activities to a local judge, Dr. Geraldo. Three months later a verdict was reached: UPAC was banned and my visa was to be revoked. I was told to leave Brazil.

My Peace Corps directors threatened that if I was forced to leave my post, they would pull the other 500 volunteers out of the country with me. A compromise was reached: UPAC could still function in circumscribed ways. Our infant-toddler daycare center (the crèche) ran as a parent co-op alongside a community kitchen to feed those who were in the greatest need. Over the protests of sugar plantation owners and cattle ranchers worried that thirsty squatters would squander water needed for agribusiness, the Secretary of Public Works provided water pipes. The pipes were installed, and a water pump and a large water tank were installed on the top of the shantytown. Literacy classes continued at night, and a few rural workers learned to read, write, and use alfabetizaçao within the forbidden contest of political conscientizaçao. I could leave with my head up and with a collective that kept the crèche working for several years after I left Brazil.

On return to the United States, I wasn’t ready to resume my studies and I joined SNCC (the Black-power-oriented Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and spent two years (1967 and 1968) in Selma, Alabama, and its rural surrounds, especially Wilcox and Lowndes counties where we gathered household, medical, and family data to support a class action suit (Peoples vs. the US Department of Agriculture) representing 500 Black farm families, tenant farmers, and sharecroppers who were being denied federal subsidies, food commodities, FHA loans, and cotton allotment checks that were due them. It took more than twenty years for that suit to wind its way through the federal courts.

In the spring of 1969, I moved to Berkeley to work as a research assistant for my undergraduate mentor, the anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker, who had retired from Queens College and moved to North Berkeley where she lived next door to the Alfred and Theodora Kroeber compound on Arch Street. Her last research project was a study of “time and youth culture” in the Bay Area. Thanks to Hortense’s pressure, I applied to the graduate anthropology program at Berkeley. When Hortense died suddenly that summer, I was bereft and threw myself into the local political scene. I joined the first ragtag group of students and local activists to occupy the area that became known as People’s Park. Mayhem followed, including police shootings and demonstrations. I became pregnant and then became a single mother. But having lived among many single parents and grandparents with children, I learned from them how to manage.

Founding UC Berkeley Child Day Care Services

I joined a group of community activists and students who were trying to begin a student-parent child day care co-operative on the Berkeley campus. It was during this time that I met my husband Michael, a Harvard graduate and football player who suffered an injury that had disqualified him from the draft. His work as a child day care teacher alleviated some of his guilt about not serving in Vietnam. He had demonstrated against the war but would have fought in WWII, he said.

By the fall of 1970 we had negotiated with the ASUC (Associated Students of the University of California) and the university administration to use a vacant small redwood building on Galey Road, Girton Hall, while looking for a larger location. Girton could not handle more than fifteen children per hour, and the hours were distributed by a weekly lottery. Our attempts to be recognized and supported by the university administration failed. “We are not in the business of babysitting,” an assistant in the chancellor’s office told us. The collective decided to apply pressure by “occupying” the chancellor’s office with our infants and toddlers. We were to have been about twenty demonstrators or so, but when I arrived at 200 California Hall with my baby daughter, Jennifer, who I carried in a side sling, only two other mothers turned up. We managed to get inside the glass doors of the chancellor’s office and sat on the floor with our curious and playful toddlers; we said we would not leave until we could speak to then Chancellor Roger Heyns. However, the tables were turned, and we were locked down inside the reception area for several hours. The media came and dozens of our daycare parents cheered us on from outside. As our babies began to cry and needed their diapers changed, the university police finally let us leave without penalty.

What would we do next? I shared my experiences about the tactics of “occupations” that I learned in Brazil among the rural squatters who had occupied a rocky, steep hill (a rural favela) that they called Crucifix Hill, Alto do Cruzeiro. There, we had built a crèche for the children of rural workers whose infants were dying like flies as they left them home alone or in the care of other children or old neighbors—none of them capable caretakers. We did what Brazilians were doing all over the country, occupying land that was not being used.

We decided to apply the same tactics to our student-parent co-operative while we continued while we continued to investigate other buildings on campus that were under used. We chose a large basement in a high-rise university dorm on Durant Avenue and conducted a survey of the student residents to see if there were any objections to our using the site for our second childcare unit. The students were positive, and one morning we seamlessly executed the plan, bringing in cribs, playpens, blankets, and toys so that another thirty children of UC Berkeley students had access to the daycare co-operative.

There was one incident that put a chill on our project. An older graduate student with emotional problems related to a breakup with his wife set fire to a mattress that was used by the toddlers to play on. Luckily, the fire was set after the children had gone home, and it was immediately detected. Fire trucks arrived and extinguished it. Then the UC administration wisely closed that ad hoc childcare center and seriously began negotiating with us for the first time. The result was that the volunteer daycare teachers were employed under the title “lab technicians,” which they protested to the administration saying that they were not taking care of white mice or rats in a cage. By 1972, the Associated Students of the University of California administered the daycare program. Additional sites were negotiated, including childcare centers at the old Anna Head building near People’s Park, another in the basement of The First Congregational Church at Dana and Durant, and a year later at the Smyth-Fernwald UC Berkeley married student housing complex at the top of Dwight Way.

People’s Park: Installing The People’s Café

After I completed my doctorate in the anthropology department at Berkeley in 1976, my husband and I moved to Texas (Southern Methodist University) and then to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where I taught for several years, returning to Cal in 1982 to join the anthropology department as a professor. It was the Golden Age of Anthropology at Berkeley, and I was lucky to have enjoyed sharing Kroeber Hall with so many brilliant scholars and dedicated fieldworkers. Meanwhile, however, People’s Park was going to seed: runaway teens, Vietnam vets with PTSD, and former patients of the old state asylums vied for space in the park. Faculty and students avoided the place, except for the occasional weekend concerts. The crack epidemic brought some unsavory people into the park, where they were wheeling and dealing. In the late 1980s, we met John Cooper, the founder of The Berkeley Catholic Worker. Every morning he rode into People’s Park in his green pickup truck bearing steaming vats of hot coffee and donuts. Cooper was an impossible, irascible Berkeley saint. He had a Ph.D. from Stanford in physics and a tough addiction to alcohol. When he hit rock bottom, he lived as a tramp. He managed to recovered enough to drive a taxi around town and it was during one those long rides through the city that he had his Saint Paul on the way to Tarsus moment. He looked at the homeless denizens of the Berkeley streets, empathized with them, and decided that he would spend the rest of his life trying to make their lives easier and more dignified. John claimed to be an atheist who had a single God experience, the one that pulled him toward a radical love for the homeless of People’s Park and his dedication to the Catholic Workers, an anarchist-socialist movement founded in NYC by Dorothy Day and Peter Marin in the 1930s to respond to the basic needs of the homeless during the Great Depression by opening Catholic Worker hospitality homes and ‘agronomic universities.’

Segment of “Berkeley: A People’s Bicentennial History of Telegraph Avenue” by Osha Neumann, O’Brien Thiele, Hannah Kransberg, and Daniel Galvez. Photograph by Wally Gobetz, via Flickr.

Catholic Worker philosophy was based on a few principles: personalism, intimacy, pragmatism, and respect for the dignity and freedom of excluded individuals. In People’s Park, these included people without names and known only as “the Hate Man,” “Pig-Pen,” “the Orange Man,” Rosebud, and Gypsy. The Catholic Worker’s playbill also included radical action as needed. Over time, the Berkeley Catholic Workers broadened their commitment to include antinuclear protests and arrests at the Livermore Labs, along with various peace initiatives encouraged by our chaplain, the famous Father Bill O’Donnell, who taught us how to get arrested so as to maintain the dignity of both cops and demonstrators.

But primarily, the Berkeley Catholic Worker’s brief was to prepare and dispense gourmet breakfasts—old-fashioned Irish oatmeal and fresh cream, grits and cheese, hot croissants and Peet’s coffee (caf or decaf), and some weekend evening meals of hearty soups and stews (meat or vegetarian). “Why shouldn’t the homeless have choices?” John insisted. But serving hot meals out of an open, flatbed truck was not very convenient or dignified in the rainy season, and so John managed to wheedle some $50,000 from local donors so that our group could rent a nice, dry, and well-lit place in the vicinity of People’s Park.

An ideal space, managed by the university, close to the park was found, and John Cooper and I met with a dean—I forget who he was, but we called him the “Dean of Monies.” We explained our plans and how we would make sure that our CW hospitality house would be as well run and as integrated into the university community and campus as the ASUC child care program of which the university was quite proud. The dean’s answer to us was No, No, and Never. I recall looking at John, who for once in his life was totally defeated. He had worked so hard to pull together a significant amount of funds, and he had won the respect of the divided and divisive residents of People’s Park. It was heartbreaking; and although I was a full professor, totally dedicated to my students, to our doctoral program in critical medical anthropology, and to my research and writing, I was not willing to sacrifice the other part of my life, the life of a radical. I took one last look at John, and I said spontaneously to the dean: “Well, I guess we’ll just have to implement option two.” “And what would that be?’ the dean asked while John cocked his head at me, wondering what I had in mind. I replied, “We’ll just have to build a hospitality house in People’s Park.” “You do anything of the sort,” the Dean of Monies replied, “and it will be curtains for you,” or something along those lines.

Endless “clarification of thought” meetings took place among the Berkeley Catholic Workers. In the interim, we borrowed time by operating out of the basement of Mary Magdalene Church in North Berkeley, but it was too far from People’s Park where most of the homeless gathered. Finally, John Cooper and a small band of hard-core Berkeley Catholic Workers members—including my husband, Michael; my daughter, Jennifer; and me—agreed to take the more radical path.

Those who prayed—not John Cooper, who always insisted, “I’m not a Catholic; I don’t pray, and I don’t work”—went to Saint Joseph the Worker Church where Father Bill O’Donnell dedicated a monthly Mass to the Catholic Workers and advised us. We were a motley crew. John Cooper came to the Mass, but he sat grumpily on a folding chair at the back of the basement room where the Catholic Worker Mass was taking place, and he ducked out as soon as the “bloody kiss of peace” went round, and again when Holy Communion was distributed.

After one of those Masses, we decided that we would plant a People’s Café in People’s Park, occupying university-owned land. We purchased a beautiful (if such could be said) seventy-four-foot house trailer that we hauled from a construction site to the Berkeley Marina on the evening of 8 May 1989. A dozen of us spent the night at the marina in quiet contemplation. Father Bill came to give us a blessing. He reminded us that we would be breaking the law; we said we understood and would accept the consequences.

I annoyed the hell out of John Cooper every time I asked him during the cold night watch:

“John, what is the plan after we carry the trailer into People’s Park?”

“Dammit, Nancy, we’ll make a giant cauldron of oatmeal and one of grits, and we’ll start feeding people.”

“Yes, but what do we do when the police arrive?”

“Bag your negative energy. When the police come, we’ll know what to do.”

Segment of “Berkeley: A People’s Bicentennial History of Telegraph Avenue” by Osha Neumann, O’Brien Thiele, Hannah Kransberg, and Daniel Galvez. Photograph by Wally Gobetz, via Flickr.

I shut up and put my head on my knees, wanting the morning light to appear. At 5:00 A.M. we got into our cars and accompanied The People’s Café as it was hauled by union-motorists down University Avenue. John, seated inside the cab of the truck, blasted a tape of the Hallelujah Chorus, as we held our breaths. Arriving at People’s Park, we took our assigned posts and set to work following a minute-by-minute schedule. Our carpenter-member sawed down some wooden posts that boarded the park, so the trailer café could be driven inside the park. We punctured the tires of the mobile café so that it would be a permanent fixture. We arranged picnic tables with tablecloths and lit up the gas stoves. By 7:00 A.M., when campus police arrived, we had already served more than 150 people a hot breakfast under the white flowing banner “The People’s Café.” The first cop said, “Holy shit!”

In the months that followed, The People’s Café provided more than good food. Guests were welcomed inside the café where card tables, dominos, chess, and checkers were set up. Free haircuts were given, and basins for “washing up” were provided, as were small lockers to store small, special possessions. Then mayor of Berkeley, Loni Hancock, praised The People’s Café, which she was cited in the Berkeley news as calling “a little piece of heaven dropped down on People’s Park.” During its tenure, there were no violent incidents at the park. When crises arose, they were dealt with on the spot. Weapons were sometimes confiscated, but we never had to call on or involve the police. The People’s Café was a weapon-free and police-free zone. We were respected—but, of course, the university wanted us out.

After several months of failed negotiations with UC Berkeley’s Vice Chancellor for Business and Administrative Services, the university filed suit in Alameda County Superior Court asking for a court order to forcibly remove The People’s Café. The judge rejected the case: “You want to remove the café; you can,” she said. “It is on state property. Don’t ask the county to be party to this.” The judge said that she was a great admirer of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement. But ultimately after four wonderful years, the university police, armed and dangerous, entered the park and forcibly removed and eventually chopped up and destroyed The People’s Café. In its place, the university built volleyball courts for students.

Although he and a few companions reverted to bringing hot meals into park in the original green Catholic Worker pickup truck, John Cooper fell into a deep depression. It was never the same after that, and bad luck—bad ‘cess the Irish would say—followed. Gypsy, a much beloved street person, choked on a chicken bone while standing on his head in front of the Caffe Mediterraneum on Telegraph Avenue. Soon after, a nineteen-year-old runaway with a history of mental problems, known as Rosebud, who lived in The People’s Park, broke into University House, the campus home of the new and much loved Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien. Rosebud had a small machete. A security device alerted campus police, who arrived with a particular Berkeley police officer who had a history of violence and civil rights abuses. They found Rosebud cowering in the bathroom of the chancellor’s residence, and they shot her point-blank. Rosebud was a disturbed person, but John Cooper believed that her death could have been averted if The People’s Café and its staff of homeless veterans had been available to counsel her, just as we did many other disturbed people in People’s Park. Mad Lives Matter!

A few years later, John Cooper gave up and died of emphysema, neglect, and a broken heart. We grieved John’s death deeply, and I still miss him. John was a difficult man, a temperamental man, and at times a tempestuous man—but he was also a visionary. John confided that it all began in 1985 when, while driving his taxicab through the dismal backstreets of San Francisco, he experienced what he called gruffly, “an abrupt feeling that I should serve the poor.” John was also an educated man, and he left behind his bound Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University. He had a problem with alcohol but never had a drink before 5:00 P.M. He was a “disciplined” alcoholic and the first to admit it. He wrote weekly reflections in our Berkeley Catholic Worker newspaper that captured the spirit and writings of the original Penny Catholic Worker socialist newspaper that I read as a child in New York City. Cooper was an itinerant and virtually homeless intellectual, similar in spirit to the French worker-priest Peter Maurin, who accompanied Dorothy Day and helped her to think. John had a single vision: to dwell physically, psychologically, and spiritually with the homeless. He never turned back.

Segment of “Berkeley: A People’s Bicentennial History of Telegraph Avenue” by Osha Neumann, O’Brien Thiele, Hannah Kransberg, and Daniel Galvez. Photograph by Wally Gobetz, via Flickr.

In my 1995 article, “The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology,”¹I suggested ways of bringing together scholarship and moral and political commitment. In Death Without Weeping,²I argued for an anthropologic-pe-no-chao, anthropology-with-one’s feet on the ground, a committed, grounded, “barefoot” anthropology. We can write books that go against the grain by avoiding impenetrable prose so as to be accessible to broader publics. We can make ourselves available to the poor, the displaced and disgraced, as companheiros and companheiras. We can exchange gifts based on our labors, use royalties or awards, to support radical actions. We can seek to avoid the death-dealing treadmill of academic/professional achievement. We can be scholars as well as upstarts. We can take advantage of the incredible freedom that the academy has given us and not squander it on useless or obscurantist arguments. “Theorists and Methodologists—Get to Work!” Finally, in “Three Propositions for a Critically Applied Anthropology,”³I argued that there are times to “play the court jester, that sometimes mocking, sometimes ironic, but always mischievous, voice from the sidelines…to put on the white face of the harlequin…Don’t be seduced, be the seducer! Don’t be subverted, be the subverter! Laughter is the best medicine and the Rabelaisian love of the absurd, the grotesque, and for the tumbling of received wisdoms.”

There are times when civil disobedience is a just path toward human liberation. Today there is still hunger in the streets and newly exposed shocking hunger among our Berkeley student body—some of whom are so financially stressed by the rising cost of tuition, rent, and books that they limit themselves to one meal a day fortified by snacks of tortilla chips. I think of John Cooper as John the Good and wonder what he would say and write in his wise reflections in the Berkeley Catholic Worker newspaper, one cent per copy, just as Dorothy Day never changed the price. I think he’d say: Feed the hungry; visit the prisons; make friends with the drug dealers and the gangsters; open the doors of the university to the undocumented, to the former gang members, and let the homeless sit in on your classes. They all have a lot to teach us.

Notes

1
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology,” Cultural Anthropology 36 (1995): 409–440.

2
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

3
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “Three Propositions for a Critically Applied Medical Anthropology,” Social Science and Medicine (1991): 189–198.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes is the Chancellor’s Professor of Medical Anthropology at UC Berkeley. Her books, Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland and Death without Weeping: the Everyday Violence of Brazil (both by UC Press) have received multiple book awards including the Welcome Medal (Royal Anthropological Institute) for anthropology applied to medical problems and the J.I. Staley Prize for innovative work beyond traditional frontiers, adding new dimensions to our understanding of the human species.

Uncategorized

Call for Proposals and Submissions

Boom California on January 26, 2017

On behalf of the editorial board of Boom California, published by University of California Press, we seek proposals from scholars, students, and writers of California culture who wish to help cultivate critical discourse on California and its values, and to do so in a manner that is public-facing and relevant to our moment in history.

Boom California is a free refereed online media publication dedicated to inspiring lively and significant conversations about the vital social and cultural issues of our time in California and the world beyond. We host academic conversations in the form of peer reviewed articles that both highlight and advance scholarly discourse about California culture, and do so in a manner that is public-facing and oriented toward the social and practical concerns of ordinary Californians.

In light of our fast-changing world, Boom’s emphasis has shifted to concentrate on California social issues, and to cultivate underrepresented writers in the California landscape. More about the transition and Boom’s history can be found in the recent editorial (http://boom.ucpress.edu/content/6/4/1). As a peer review publication, we are looking for contributions in these areas related to California culture:

Immigration
Race
Inequality
Social Justice
Gender
Queer Studies
Labor
Latinx Population and Culture
Asian American Population and Culture
African American Population and Culture
Poverty
Social Movements

In addition to this, we are especially interested in proposals that address two areas of special concern to Boom this year:

the lives and experiences of undocumented Californians
the native Californian genocide consequent to the California Gold Rush, and today’s reckoning with this amidst native revivalism

Proposals for submissions may be sent to boom@ucpress.edu. For more on our submission process, please visit the relevant page on the Boom website (https://boomcalifornia.com/submissions/).

We look forward to journeying with you this year as part of the resistance.

Sincerely yours,

Jason S. Sexton, Editor

Unknown maker, Untitled (Clenched Fist), circa 1965. Collection of the Oakland Museum of California.

Articles

Urban Humanities Pedagogy: The Classroom, Education, and New Humanities

Boom California on January 23, 2017

Jonathan Banfill
Todd Presner
Maite Zubiaurre

At University of California, Los Angeles, the Humanities are located at both the historic and symbolic center of the university, on the main quad in three of the original buildings erected on the campus: Royce Hall, Powell Undergraduate Library, and the Humanities Building. They house departments that include dozens of world literatures and cultures stretching from the Middle East to the Americas, from Eastern Asia to Western Europe. The undergraduate library specializes in foundational texts of human civilization, including philosophy, history, literature, the sciences, and the arts. Founded in 1919, UCLA is nearing its first centenary, but the university builds—both literally and metaphorically—on humanistic and liberal arts traditions that are many centuries long and globally diffused. In this regard, one might bring to mind the shift from a theocentric worldview in the Medieval period, which cultivated the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic), to a more humanistic approach in the Renaissance period with its developing studia humanitatis, focused on history, Greek, and moral philosophy (ethics). This shift developed the idea that knowledge is culturally conditioned and increasingly that monocular perspectives on the world need to be displaced by multiperspectival, transdisciplinary approaches. The wellspring of humanistic knowledge came from many literary and vernacular sources, abetted by the rediscovery of classical texts in Greek and Arabic, preserved in Byzantine and Islamic sites of learning, and disseminated through transcriptions, translations, editing, and annotation practices, which were greatly accelerated by the invention of the printing press. The core disciplines that we recognize today as comprising the Humanities—literary and language studies, philosophy, art history, musicology, history, among others—have deep roots in these institutional, cultural, and technological histories.

Porosity by Maite Zubiaurre.

But yet, for all its grand ambitions for reckoning with the world, the university has remained by and large an isolated institution, walled in and often walled off from its surrounding community, accessible to a chosen few, stratified by economic, social, and racial differences, and perhaps too invested in the security of its storied past. What, after all, are the physical buildings meant to evoke, except a grand past of privilege and prestige? Royce Hall, UCLA’s architectural and cultural landmark, is built in the Lombard Romanesque style. Its towers reference Milan’s ancient Basilica of Sant’Ambrogio, which gained its Romanesque style in the twelfth century—800 years after it was built. Carved into stone above the stage in Royce Hall is an unattributed quote: “Education is learning to use the tools which the race has found indispensable.” It is attributed to Ernest Carroll Moore, a philosophy professor who served until 1936 as UCLA’s first provost. One may wonder: What tools has “the race” found to be “indispensable”? Pen and paper, paintbrush, camera, clay, word-processing machines, Photoshop? Is learning to use such tools enough, or might we need to interpret the objects created, assess their significance, and probe their conditions of possibility? And who, after all, can learn to use these tools found to be “indispensable” by “the race”? We know from Moore’s other writings on education, for example, that not every human being counted as part of “the race,” and we know all-too-well that racial thinking, eugenic paradigms, and social Darwinism were not just part and parcel of late nineteenth and early twentieth century thought but were also framing assumptions in his published writings.¹How do we confront these profound histories of exclusion and hierarchy that are literally inscribed in the edifices of the university? How do we open the university to other stories and histories, particularly those from the outside?

The bricks of UCLA’s Royce Hall tell a fascinating story—a story of continuity and venerability—that harkens back to the early twentieth century. As it happens, UCLA still acquires its bricks from the former Alberhill Coal and Clay Company, now renamed Pacific Clay, the same factory that produced the first bricks that set the foundation of the UC “branch” in Westwood in the late 1920s. This fact allowed Los Angeles–based New Zealand artist Fionna Connor to, in her words, read “the UCLA campus through the use of bricks” in her April 2016 installation Process Inter-rupted. Intriguingly, that installation took place in the same classroom where the Urban Humanities Initiative 2015–2016 cohort was working on several collaborative projects of precisely the type that leave behind brick walls—and even contribute to tearing them down. In reading the campus through its bricks, we might further ask: What do we know of the people who actually produced the bricks, who carted them to Westwood, who toiled in the Los Angeles sun to build the grand campus on land that was originally Gabrielino-Tongva? How does deep knowledge of the layered histories of places inform, or fail to inform, our positions, ways of knowing, and actions in the present? These are questions that come from historical, cultural-critical, and ethical perspectives influenced by the humanities.

Traditionally, brick and mortar stand for a university solidly anchored in the ivory tower model, where knowledge is produced, preserved, guarded, and stratified in countless ways. Many educational situations quietly reinforce the very social, economic, and racial hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion, of permitted speech and permissible discourse, where students are judged by their facility in reflecting predigested knowledge formed with the tools the race has found indispensable. Yet one may wonder about these tools. Following Audre Lorde, we might ask: Can the master’s tools dismantle the master’s house? Is it possible to use “the tools” and transform the ivory tower model and the brick walls themselves? Or, might entirely new tools need to be invented, ones that imagine and bring about new possibilities, futures that are distinct and different from the stratifications of the past built into the educational edifices themselves?

The Urban Humanities initiative is an attempt both to apply conventional tools in unconventional ways and to invent new tools by respecting the fundamental virtue of bricks, namely their porous nature. Porosity—that is, the ability to breath in and out, to open up to the world, and to rapidly and evenly transport and expand moisture (life) and knowledge—is the modus operandi, or better even, the modus vivendi of a new, “fluid” university model based on permeability, openness, interdisciplinarity, collaboration, and community engagement at the local, national, and transnational levels. Needless to say, the digital era and the relatively new reality of knowledge production and consumption patterns based on digital networking and widespread virtual learning has heavily contributed to the “softening” and increasing porousness of universities, with noticeable effects on the uses of their physical and institutional spaces. But it is not only digital tools that have enabled this softening; it is also an ethic based on diversity and difference that reimagines the public university as sites of engagement that are multidirectional and nonhierarchical in the past, present, and future.

Against the somber background of what Umberto Eco termed “apocalyptic” thinkers who mourn the downfall of the Humanities and perceive only the crisis of public education,²“integrated” and “generative” approaches optimistically speak of a radically “new ecology of teaching and learning” that not only acknowledges but also openly embraces the opportunities of a paradigm shift.³“What is different at this historical moment,” director of the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities Sidonie Smith contends, “is the intensification of cross-institutional [and cross-departmental and cross-divisional] collaborative activity in the humanities and opportunities for modeling collaborative graduate [and undergraduate] education.”⁴Therefore, in a fitting response to the zeitgeist and as part of a new ecology of teaching and learning, Smith’s “Manifesto for a Sustainable Humanities” proclaims the need of “preserving the intimacy of the small and [stewarding] the distinctiveness of the local while recognizing the attraction [and potential] of global networks,” and of “relishing the commitment to teaching through innovations in the classroom, among them explorations of participatory and project-based humanities inquiry.”⁵More importantly, she urges the Humanities to “reconceptualize the scholarly ecology as a flexible collaboratory, one that positions the scholar as singular producer of knowledge, but also as a member of a collaborative assemblage involving students, colleagues, computer engineers and graphic designers, project designers and strangers of the crowd.”⁶

La linea de Tijuana I by Jonathan Banfill and Maite Zubiaurre.

“Strangers of the crowd” may as well stand here for diverse communities not always sufficiently integrated into the knowledge networks or institutional formations that focus singularly on teaching the correct use of tools considered to be indispensable “for the race.” What about tools that stem from “beyond” or “outside” the university? What about ways of knowing, thinking, seeing, and building that come from communities not traditionally selected to partake in the knowledge formations and credentialing programs prized by the university? How does the university’s fundamental porosity expose students to possibilities and potentialities from the outside? And what does this mean for the mission of the university embedded in multiple critical networks that extend far beyond its walls to ways of creating and thinking that are “foreign” to it? Critically inflected forms of community engagement are certainly one of the imperatives of a new ecology of teaching and learning that shares with bricks the fundamental quality of porousness and permeability.

Intellectual and pedagogical initiatives such as Urban Humanities are based on and inspired by these principles. In the same way in which contemporary LA is now aligning itself with the global cities of the Pacific Rim, contemporary UCLA too is shifting, and amplifying its geographic and pedagogical scope in the same direction. Needless to say, by turning its gaze toward the Pacific, it is not only canvassing the far horizon, but also looking more intently at the demographics of the city and state it serves. Presently, 47 percent of Los Angeles County’s population is Hispanic or Latino, and 13 percent is Asian. Since 1 July 2014, Latinos have outnumbered non-Hispanic whites in California.⁷How does this demographic reality change the way we consider the context of UCLA in LA, in California, and along the borders between the United States and Mexico in the post-NAFTA world, and in the ever-mutating global flows?

In the summer of 2015, a diverse group of twenty-four graduate students and five faculty members came together for a three-week, intensive summer institute that used Los Angeles as a “learning laboratory” to put these concepts into practice. The students came from both Ph.D. and professional master’s programs in the humanities (literary studies, history, and Chican@ studies), architecture, and urban planning, and brought together a wide-range of positionalities, life experiences, and perspectives. Some participants had grown up in Tijuana or Mexico City; others had never set foot in Mexico. Through historical investigations, multimedia mapping projects, and spatial ethnographies, the institute was framed around the investigation of contested histories, erasures, and spatial injustices in Los Angeles. Students worked in collaborative, interdisciplinary teams to make films, produce “thick maps,”⁸and propose digital activist interventions, all with the goal of creating a foundation for a cross-disciplinary learning community prepared to work together for the remainder of the year.

In comparing Los Angeles and Mexico City, the pedagogical and research methods of the Urban Humanities were motivated by the bold question of whether it is possible to decolonize knowledge. Can knowledge ever be “decolonized”? The answers are far from clear-cut. We began with a relatively simply proposition: Rather than bring our knowledge and tools to Mexico City to “solve” a problem there, how might we study Mexico City in order to learn what knowledge and tools could be brought back to Los Angeles to help us see our “home city” differently? How might we identify, address, and challenge the spatial injustices in Los Angeles with toolsets, perspectives, and knowledge from another city and set of experiences? What kind of intellectual groundwork would have to be put in place to begin to orchestrate such a transformation? To do so, we would have to imagine new kinds of knowledge, new kinds of collaborations beyond the walls of the university, and utilize a range of tools to develop new kinds of speculative knowledge and historical awareness.

The summer institute acted as the foundational brick upon which the rest of the year was constructed, creating a new collective conception of what the classroom can be and how knowledge is generated. The classroom is not fixed; in fact, the chairs and tables themselves are mobile, rolling around to form new combinations. The walls are used as work space as well as the floor. Over three weeks, the classroom moved from Westwood to La Placita and Chinatown. One session focused on mapping the events of the 1871 Chinese massacre. Tables were pushed aside, a ten-foot-long map was unfurled on the floor, and students spent hours annotating it with a multiplicity of narratives, data, and comparative analyses—both historical and synchronic—culminating in contemporary examples of racial injustice and erasure.

La linea de Tijuana II by Jonathan Banfill and Maite Zubiaurre.

Other sessions left the classroom behind entirely. We moved into key sites in Los Angeles, and in this way the traditional classroom with its hierarchical ordered space was overcome. Urban Humanities propose something closer to a collaborative workshop, a messy garage or whimsical laboratory, where knowledge can be co-created with a spirit of porousness across borders both visible and invisible: disciplinary, national, linguistic, social, and cultural.

This spirit of a “new Humanities” continued throughout the academic year, where Los Angeles and Mexico City were put into productive conversation. The two seminars that followed worked to provide a flexible, open knowledge of the thematic confluences between the two cities—water, earthquakes, traffic and mobility, precarious housing, political and social violence—creating a dialogic circuit for deeper understanding. In the fall seminar, the focus was specifically on Mexico City: watching films and documentaries, reading novels and histories, and learning about events such as the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre and the 1985 earthquake. In the destructive aftermath of catastrophe, the idea was to apprehend the creativity of life in Mexico City as ways of rethinking, rebuilding, reimagining, and surviving after disasters, whether human-made or natural, contemporary or historical. How could such knowledge, creativity, and imagination be brought back to Los Angeles?

In the winter, we focused on the theme of borders and transgressions, where the US-Mexico border was not just understood in its embodied, physical, and geographic manifestation, but also as a symbolic, economic, and cultural formation. This included a study trip to Tijuana and San Diego where the abstract knowledge of the classroom encountered the reality of the border. The Tijuana experience was encapsulated by an evening visit to Playas de Tijuana, where the border fence extends across a sandy beach and disappears into the Pacific. Here, shrouded in an eerie ocean fog, we walked along the border, touched it, stuck our hands through the vertical openings, read the messages scrawled on the fence and the pieces of political art, truly feeling the immensity of the division as we peered back across to the United States. We were forced to materially confront our relationship with the border—including, for most of us, our privilege of being able to freely cross it back and forth—and to think through where our knowledge might better open up spaces for circulation and justice through such a seemingly insurmountable edifice.

The rest of the year followed such practice, continuously creating a growing bank of reflexive knowledge built across Los Angeles, Mexico City, and the geographic, cultural, linguistic, and social borderlands in between. By the time we arrived in Mexico City, a conceptual toolset existed for engaging in community projects. Each of the three partner organizations—an arts organization (inSite/Casa Gallina), an architecture firm (Productora and their LIGA space), and a city government urban think tank (Laboratorio para la Ciudad)—provided a different lens for interpreting the city. They first came to Los Angeles to work with us, and then we went to Mexico City to work with them on site. The idea was not to package and ship “expert” knowledge in either direction, but rather to forge partnerships, grow collaborations, and open critical perspectives for networks of engagement. In this two-way process, knowledge was “forged and produced,” to quote the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, “in the tension between practice and theory.”⁹

The result was a series of projects of engaged, speculative scholarship that were realized in specific urban sites characterized by spatial inequities and injustices. The goal was never to “master” Mexico City, but rather to engage with local community organizations around specific issues within the city—street vending, children’s safety, gentrification—in order to bring back knowledge, insights, and perspectives that might be applied to analogous issues in Los Angeles. As Peter Chesney, a Ph.D. student in history at UCLA, reflected: “The most important experience in Mexico City was learning about the limitations of our own systems of knowledge, so that we could come back to Los Angeles and speculate about a place we think we know.” This is what we did returning to LA and extending, at least conceptually, the work done in Mexico City in a series of humanistic, interventionist collaborations with community groups in Boyle Heights.

In the spring studio, the urban humanities students worked with five Los Angeles–based community organizations—Libros Schmibros, The East Los Angeles Community Corporation, From Lot to Spot, Multicultural Communities for Mobility, and Self Help Graphics—grappling with critical issues currently unfolding in Boyle Heights, a neighborhood rife with spatial contestations and tensions between the residents and the ambitions of developers, city planners, business leaders, transit authorities, and government policies. These community organizations work on literacy, housing, green space, transportation, and activist visual arts, respectively, trying to find ethical, ground-up ways to enact change, struggling with questions such as: How do you develop a neighborhood that protects its residents, rather than welcoming in outside gentrifying forces? How do you intervene in ways that are ethical and attuned to the needs of greater LA? As outsiders to the neighborhood, our students occupied a liminal zone inflected with perspectives, knowledge, and activist practices stemming from Mexico City.

The projects that emerged were attempts, however provisional, to fuse these experiences and imagine scenarios that were ethically grounded, truly collaborative, and imaginatively engaged with the possibilities of translational, humanistic knowledge: A magic storytelling box for child literacy, a manual for community greening, a fotonovella imagining a just future for the neighborhood, a successful city arts activation grant for making a series of installations advocating for bike commuter safety.

Now there is also transnational circulation of these projects, with ideas spreading back from Los Angeles to Mexico City: La Caja Mágica, the magic storytelling box, will soon to be deployed in Mexico City on the children’s safety project where Laboratorio para la Ciudad continues to claim a “right to the street” for children’s play spaces.

Mexicocitylosangeles/Losangelesmexicocity by Jonathan Banfill and Maite Zubiaurre.

None of these projects is a grand statement or a utopian solution. They are small-scale interventions, speculative collaborations that are inserted into the fabric of the city in order to expose and begin to address a spatial injustice. They open up the public university to the outside and bring the outside in. They are porous in every sense of the word. As such, urban humanities bring productive responses to the oft-heard cries of “crisis” in the humanities; they are experimental, engaged, and speculative forms of knowledge-making, rooted in humanities perspectives and values, charged with creating new knowledge, new kinds of tools, and new possibilities for opening up the walls of the university and addressing spatial injustices through transnational creativity and networks. This is a prototype for the “fluid” university based on permeability, openness, interdisciplinarity, collaboration, and community engagement. Indeed, the decolonization of knowledge is never complete, but it must also start somewhere. We see Urban Humanities as one such start.

Notes

1
Cf. the excellent discussion of Moore’s works and this inscription by our colleague Chon Noriega: http://www.chicano.ucla.edu/about/news/csrc-newsletter-january-2014.

2
While we don’t disagree with the many struggles faced by the public university in an age of neoliberal corporatization, we don’t see the university in ruin or the humanities in perpetual crisis. Cf. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Harvard University Press, 1997).

3
Sidonie Smith, A Manifesto for the Humanities: Transforming Doctoral Education in Good Enough Times (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 87.

4
Smith, 39.

5
Smith, 108.

6
Ibid.

7
http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-census-latinos-20150708-story.html.

8
“Thick mapping” is a key method in the urban humanities in which “mapping” is given dimensionality through a multiplicity of datasets, historical perspectives, narratives, and multimedia assets. The concept is derived from Clifford Geertz’s “thick description” and underscores the constructedness, contingency, and layeredness of spatial representations. For a fuller discussion, see Todd Presner, David Shepard, and Yoh Kawano, HyperCities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).

9
Paulo Freire, Letters to Cristina (New York: Routledge, 1996), 85.

Jonathan Banfill is a Ph.D. student at University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on interdisciplinary higher education across Asia Pacific.

Todd Presner is professor of Germanic languages, comparative literature, and Jewish studies at University of California, Los Angeles. He is also the chair of the Digital Humanities Program.

Maite Zubiaurre is professor of Spanish and Portuguese and of Germanic Languages, and Associate Dean for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, Humanities Division, at University of California, Los Angeles.

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