Street Democracy: Vendors, Violence, and Public Space in Late Twentieth Century Mexico

    Professor Garcia introduces the Mexican vendor’s struggle with two facts mostly unknown outside of the country; the vendor’s union is one of the biggest in Mexico, and unlike other unions, it is independent of the ruling party. If Mexico’s labor unions are mostly under government control without autonomy, then this doesn’t look good. The book focuses on the city of Puebla (in the middle of the country) where open-air markets are the primary source of purchase and the vendors are mostly women. Communist sympathies abounded in the 70’s and 80’s, along with theater productions about the vendors’ plight.

    

It seems like many of the women vendors are in it because they can’t find other jobs. Some of the characters in this study are illiterate, or failed to get jobs in the industries that existed in Puebla 30 years ago. Race and class play a huge part, because the wealthy city people didn’t want the shouts of the vendors or the mess of their wares. The Spanish and Lebanese industrialists, with their palatial homes, did not want to open their windows and smell cooking oil or hear crying babies. While the elite were consuming goods from enclosed stores in the shopping centers, the less affluent bought food, clothes, and other things from open-air vendors.

Throughout the book, classism, sexism, and racism come into play. I was shocked at how sexist Mexicans were towards women who worked in factories; they were thought to be diseased. Even the leftist unions disliked seeing women in factories because it didn’t jive with (what was in their eyes) the sanctity of motherhood and domesticity (never mind that these women would probably have rather stayed home like the rich Lebanese wives.) The classism is abundant in every part of the vendors’ struggle, starting with the way the poor often buy from street sellers because of the lower prices. It seems that the attitude towards street business changed when cars became commonplace and walking in the road was no longer safe. It also seems like the upper classes (keep in mind there was little upward mobility) didn’t like seeing lower-class people (often rural migrants) so close to their mansions.

    

The author manages to find a trove of resources for this book, going back to the 1940’s. Things don’t end well in this book. Puebla’s vendor district was turned into a shopping mall that nobody liked, with a food court that nobody wanted (selling the same disgusting food that American food courts assault us with) and the city had lots of urban renewal projects that failed. Activists for vendor causes were continually harassed by the government. Nothing changed.

Mapping Manhattan

    Becky Cooper travels the city with a blank image of Manhattan, asking unknown people to fill in the areas that are important to them. One author writes in the places where she lost her gloves, umbrellas, earrings, books, etc. A recurring theme in the book is how Manhattanites stick to certain areas and don’t venture beyond. This is something I can relate to, as I never ventured into Harlem until I started working as a substitute teacher back in 2002. By that time I had been living here for six years. I only went into Harlem to teach, never for a construction job or takeout delivery. I worked a Rice High School, right on the corner of 123^rd and Lennox (or Malcolm X. Boulevard, if you prefer) and every time I went to the Staples store, everybody thought I worked there (big white guy, shirt and tie.) Whenever I’m in that area, I always remember those days, even though the school is now gone.

    One lovestruck New Yorker colors “her” city in pink (after all, she’s a kid) and marks the tops half – titled “I’ve never been there” – in yellow. A grown woman draws in the sites of her first NYC trip (at age 7 in 1967) where her grandparents showed her the city in the era of Eloise. She saw a little man with a funny moustache and pet ocelot (later ID’d as Salvador Dali) and the MOMA sculpture garden (she thought it was someone’s backyard). Then she had lunch at a Times Square automat.

    Every New Yorker has fond memories of their time here. I could draw a map of every art store where I bought materials, some of them closed, some have simply come under new management.

White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America

    Joan C. Williams describes the White American working class as shifting from being honored (like the famous WPA murals) to being ignored by the elites. The author cites the old stereotype of Terry Molloy (from Kazan’s On the Waterfront) as the sort of thing that liberal Americans were trying to understand. Then came Archie Bunker, then Al Bundy, then Homer Simpson – all of them crude, silly, or both – as the new stereotype working man. This book explores two things; the reason the elites look down on the blue collar (or study it like a specimen) and the reason the blue-collar sneer at (what they consider the phony) accomplishments of the elites.

    Williams begins by showing how the poor-middle-rich divide isn’t that clear anymore, especially since a 45k-earning mechanic and a 100k-earning lawyer both think they’re middle class. She also refers to the recent J.D. Vance memoir Hillbilly Elegy (okay, who wouldn’t refer to it?) where the hardworking poor (full time work, low pay) feel as though they’re “paying for the party” of the non-working poor (no job, no discipline, lots of drug use) and become resentful. There’s also the problem of how the better jobs (like construction) go to men while there are few good jobs for an uneducated woman.

    I disagree with the author on a few things. For one, I see many women from low-income families who go to junior college, get a two-year degree in health or paralegal studies, and start earning 45k per year right away. Then again, 45k per year is great when you’re single, but gets stretched thin when you have children. Some nursing jobs pay high five-figure salaries, but even that can wear thin. High salaries are taxed higher, and make your kids ineligible for public-funded daycare (or kindergarten in some states.) This was one of the things discussed in the New York Times article Angela Whittaker’s Climb (way back in 2005, featured in the collection Class Matters.) Even at a salary of 85k, you end up spending most of your salary on taxes, healthcare, and a home in a low-crime neighborhood.

    The author also discusses a question rolling off the tongues of Americans; why don’t the working classes of the Rust Belt just abandon ship and move away? The answer is twofold – there’s safety and familiarity. First off, moving away from everything you know is hard, no matter what your social class. I recently met an army veteran in Delaware who works in construction in his hometown – not always steady – but it’s easier to live in Delaware than New York. If he took a job in NYC at the same salary, he could afford to live in the South Bronx (not good) or somewhere an hour and a half away by train. Let me add something else here, the transit in NYC is no longer reliable. If you’ve ever been to Delaware, you’ll see it’s easier to get around by car. That might be why in a lot of these states, law enforcement jobs are very popular. You get good pay, benefits, and the training can get you a higher-paid job in a suburban police department, so you could end up with good pay AND live in a good neighborhood, not far from your job.

    Another topic discussed here is college. The private versus state college choice has a lot to do with social life and networking versus practicality. Are you looking to get the education and graduate as soon as you can, or do you want to have the luxury of partying and playing sports for the next four years? This was another thing that I noticed in Delaware; the college grads all majored in lucrative skills, like business and science, while students at NYU and Columbia often pick arts majors that get them nowhere.

   I disagree with the chapter on pushing (or not pushing) their kids to succeed. A lot of them do, but their priorities are different. They just want their kids to grow up to be self-supporting, everything else is unnecessary. Take for instance the book Almost a Woman by Esmeralda Santiago; her mother tells her “none of this starving actor business for you, when you graduate you’re getting a job.” Williams finds, correctly, that elite kids being overscheduled with too many activities, and pressured to read at the age of five. I agree that a lot of it is unnecessary; I was a lousy reader even at age eight, but I could make my own breakfast, tie my own shoes, and do a lot of things for myself. She’s right in that the working class don’t need for their children to read at age six, they just need their children to pull their own weight. But I disagree with the way she makes it look like it’s wrong. Both classes have priorities, and for the elite the priority is to get their children into the best schools.

    Another thing I disagree with is her take on the issue of racism among the White working classes. The real problem is that priorities are different in Black and White families. Here in New York City (and I bet in others too) there’s a huge amount of nepotism in the construction business, and the Italian-Americans hire their own. Same thing with Albanian-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Indian-Americans, and just about every other ethnic group. If you’re Italian-American from Staten Island, and you hate school no problem – someone in your family, or a friend of you parents, can give you a job. It’ll be in their roofing business, garage, restaurant, take your pick. If you’re a Hasidic Jew and you get kicked out of Yeshiva for punching out the Rabbi – no problem, you’ll have a job at BH photo the next day!

    I agree with her take on how the elites fail to connect with the blue-collar classes. The Republicans do a better job at winning over the factory workers, builders, and farmers, but the Democrats don’t seem interested. Obama and Clinton only seemed interested in college professors and Wall Street, while failing to get the support of police unions and army veterans. I would welcome a second installment to this book, particularly one about the successes of the White working class. If their ways work for them, there’s got to be a reason.

   I’m going to sign off with a personal experience with this topic. Years ago, in the summer of 1998, I worked in a county printing shop, where all the county’s parking tickets and public service flyers were printed. The men in the shop, all White, and all unionized, were guaranteed Republican voters. When election time came around, you could guarantee they’d vote for Bush, McCain, Romney, and Trump. Same thing with state & local. But when the Republicans took office, what was the first thing they always did? Bust their union!

The New Urban Crisis

   Richard Florida went from Newark-born son of a factory foreman to Rutgers student to long-term professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg. He saw how Pittsburg kept hemorrhaging its population, no matter how many tax breaks it offered. He asks why all the tech companies were going to Boston, New York City, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley, when the cost of living in those places was so high? What was unattractive about Pittsburg if the living cost was so law and there were so many financial incentives to be there?  The answer is that the talent was in Boston, NYC, and the West Coast, but nobody with the talent wanted to live in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.

    Professor Florida’s research shows cities, not the suburbs, to be the most government-dependent. Factory closings make the city ground zero for unemployment, along with a loss of income tax revenue, and if the houses are deserted, they lose property tax income and the schools suffer. Worse still, poverty has been reaching the suburbs in the last few years (and this is not the first book about it) so there’s less refuge for those fleeing the city. He blames a lot of it on poor infrastructure in cities and suburbs, especially in car-dependent communities (forget about biking to work in the snow) where no car means no getting to work. I remember being a teenager in Nassau County, and my summer job options were limited to camp counselor (lucky to make minimum wage there) unless I found one in the city ($8 to use the LIRR) or found a job nearby (forget about biking to work on the highway) in the county.

    Gentrification (now a dirtier word than NIMBY) is a problem too. He recounts taking flak for suggesting that small, quiet jets be allowed to land in Toronto. The response was an extreme “absolutely no” even though the city needed the revenue. It was the elites who were against the jets at the airports (turboprop only) even though there wouldn’t really be much noise from them (we’re talking about small jets, not 747’s.) All the “no noise” and “no building” demands were going on at the same time as a financial deficit, and into the strife waded Rob Ford, the big unhealthy drug-using mayor, who tore up the bike lanes and plowed up the nostalgia. The people who voted for him were the less-educated, fed up with stagnation and with little use for creative arts districts. They welcomed the malls because they provided jobs.

    At the same time, Florida is not entirely sympathetic to the anti-gentrification lobby. He criticizes Spike Lee, and his analogy of “white mothers pushing strollers down 125^th street at 3am” which he equates with neocolonialism. However, the author cites how 40 years ago the Black leadership criticized “White flight,” while at the same time attacked the few Whites who moved in as interlopers. If you read Judith Maitloff’s memoir Home Girl then you’ll see an unusual shift; in the early 2000’s, it was the educated Black residents who were happy to see Whites moving into Harlem. Elderly Black men and women, part of Harlem’s creative class (a lot of them were educators) were fed up with the crime and filth. They were fed up with the Dominican drug dealers, and fed up with the out-of-state plated cars pulling up to buy drugs. They were happy to see White people moving in. It makes you think.

    I don’t agree with a lot of his descriptions of gentrification, however. Soho wasn’t really gentrified (nobody got evicted), it simply went from an industrial zone to a residential one. The artist’s lofts were all owned by the artists, sold to them as co-op apartments. Take for instance 80 Wooster Street, one of the early artist spaces in the area. The artists bought the lofts for $10,000 each in the 1970’s, and so what if they sold them 20 years later for 50 times that? These artists paid their dues, and they’re entitled to profit. As for it becoming a place of overpriced stores, that’s life, it’s going to happen one way or the other. Furthermore, thanks to rent-control and tenant protections, few people were evicted from their homes in NYC. The real problem is that when the rent-controlled tenant’s daughter turns 22 and wants her own place, she won’t find an affordable one nearby. Will she opt for an apartment in a disreputable area, or a safe and cheap neighborhood that’s an hour and a half from her job?

    As for the “creative class” that the author doesn’t seem to like, they’re hardly powerful by any means. The average creative types in Manhattan and Brooklyn are making less than $45k and are crammed five to an apartment. As far as the poor go, the author quotes Patrick Sharkey’s book Stuck in Place, about multi-generational poverty. Newcomers can’t be responsible for a problem that existed long before they arrived.

    I’ll sum up by saying that no building in this country has lasted since the dawn of time. The author mentions childhood trips to the Woodbridge Mall in New Jersey, a wonderful suburban experience. What the author forgets is that the mall was built on the site of the old Woodbridge clay pits, and the backwoods people who lived there must have been evicted. Did anybody hear their complaints?

Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign

    When it came to dealing with the working classes, Hillary focused on the Flint water crisis, which meant she was doing two things wrong; focusing on only one community, and reminding everyone of how bad things were. Then, in a desperate bid to kick Sanders, she falsely accused him of voting no to the auto industry bailout. If her elbowing and grandstanding weren’t enough, she was now resorting to outright lying. Fact checkers went haywire on her, as Sanders had voted yes to the bailout. Nobody was happy with her now. Especially not the people who supported her.

    The authors argue that Hillary’s incredible myopia cost her the vote in the Rust Belt states, and that is where it mattered most. Winning over the White American working class voters would mean success or defeat, and she failed. It’s all in the chapter titled The Canary In the Auto Plant, which is perfectly apt, considering that old factory cities are the proverbial canary in the coal mine. The state of Michigan is full of working-class White voters, and whatever she’d do – or not do – would resonate all over the USA. Her failure to win the Rust Belt is what resonated. The working classes felt like she was demonizing them.

    This book stresses Hillary’s complete and utter failure to connect with the White voters who had no college education. Be it Michigan, Ohio, New Hampshire, or Missouri, she ended up alienating everyone. The authors Allen and Parnes suggest that her six-figure speaking fees may have been part of the problem along with her chummy relationship with Wall Street tycoons. It made her look like a pawn of big business, and though Wall Street tycoons are powerful, they are few in number. Though Irish and Polish-American auto workers are probably not going to be seen at an a “ban Wall Street” rally, they’re not going to have much use for a dinner party full of CEO’s. The laid-off workers would probably have liked for her to meet with them and show some concern for THEIR needs, not just those of the 1%. All she needed was to win over one UAW chapter, and she’d have won over all of them. Though not expressly mentioned in the book, a lot of Hillary’s campaign cash was raised by her husband Bill, who shamelessly profits off his status as an ex-president.

    The authors don’t talk about Trump much, after all he’s not the subject of the book. But they do stress that he concentrated on the electoral vote by winning over entire states, particularly in the Rust Belt. After that, he went for that states where Obama had won in 2008. His tough-talking bravado impressed a lot of people there, and it swung the vote in his favor. There’s also a possibility that older Black voters may have voted for Trump; those that are fed up with crime and disorder may have been looking for a president who’d get tough.

    I always had the vibe that Hillary Clinton was elbowing her way into the spotlight, and this book confirms it. She comes across here as I always saw her; a ranting, domineering tyrant, and according to this book, nobody was fooled. Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, had a strong following among working class whites, which Hillary did not. In fact, it seems like she was deliberately avoiding them. Not smart.