We can get any job we want as long as we put our minds to it!—Hank
The city of San Francisco lost twelve thousand manufacturing jobs between 1962 and 1972, the years when most of the Edgewater homeless were adolescents (Arthur D. Little Inc. 1975). The Edgewater Boulevard corridor, which had provided employment for most of the residents in the neighborhood up the hill, was particularly hard hit. Most of San Francisco’s largest factories were located off Edgewater. It was also the hub for the region’s transportation, communications, and utility sectors, including the Southern Pacific railroad and, most important, the shipyards. Throughout the mid-1950s, the Hunters Point navy shipyard was the engine of heavy industry in San Francisco, with eighty-five hundred employees (Military Analysis Network 1998); but in 1974 it closed down. Fifteen years later, the abandoned shipyard was declared toxic and designated a federal Superfund site. The land surrounding the housing projects off Edgewater Boulevard was also found to be environmentally contaminated—a result of decades of unregulated dumping by the area’s now-vanished heavy manufacturing sector.
In 1975, when most of the homeless in our scene were in their late teens and early twenties (crucial ages for integration into the manual labor force), a study commissioned by the city of San Francisco noted that the “[Edgewater] corridor” was in a “depressed state.” The authors projected the loss of another three thousand jobs by the year 2000, warning that “with modern warehousing techniques there is likely to be relatively little employment except in clerical jobs” (Arthur D. Little Inc. 1975:IV–100, IV–103, IV–107).
Economists have shown statistically that high rents, high levels of income inequality, and low rental vacancy rates are the three variables most consistently associated with elevated levels of homelessness in any given city (Quigley et al. 2001; U.S. Bureau of the Census 2001). From the 1990s through the 2000s, San Francisco County ranked number one in the nation with respect to all these variables and, predictably, its homeless population burgeoned. In polls, residents consistently declared that homelessness was their city’s most serious problem (National Low Income Housing Coalition 2006; San Francisco Chronicle 1999, September 21; see also Marcus 2005, which describes the contrast with New York City).
San Francisco’s housing problems were part of a national trend in rising income inequality and real estate speculation that was exacerbated by dramatic reductions in the federal budget for subsidized housing. President Richard Nixon initiated these cuts in the 1970s, and President Ronald Reagan accelerated them in the 1980s. During his first year in office, Reagan halved the federal budget for public housing and for section 8 subsidies (Bipartisan Millennial Housing Commission 2002; Sahlins 1987; Sternlieb and Listokin 1987). He did not, however, reduce federal support for freeways, home mortgages, or the generous tax rebates and monetarist policies that promote suburban sprawl and subsidize suburban lifestyles for the middle classes and the wealthy to the detriment of inner cities (Davis 1990; Sahlins 1987; Self 2005). By the middle of Reagan’s tenure, in 1985, there was a shortfall of 3.3 million low-cost rental units across the country, compared to a former surplus of 300,000 in 1977. In 1994, the year we began our fieldwork, eight hundred thousand families were officially wait-listed for the nation’s 1.3 million existing public housing apartments (Atlas and Dreier 1994).
Consistent with the consolidation of neoliberalism in the United States, most forms of federal assistance to local governments that funded social programs for the poor—such as job training, legal services, public transit, and Community Development Block Grants—were also reduced. By the last year of Reagan’s presidency, in 1988, the federal government was funding only 6 percent of big-city budgets, down from 22 percent in 1980 (Dreier 2004a). Free market forces further depleted the low-income rental housing stock in expensive cities like San Francisco, where real estate speculators aggressively gentrified poor neighborhoods. SRO hotel units, where the poorest of the poor have historically lived, were especially devastated. In 1999 only 19,618 units remained of the 33,000 low-income residential hotel units that had been available in San Francisco in 1975 (Groth 1994:2, 9; Hoenigman and SPUR Homelessness Task Force 2002:15, fig. 11).
The U.S. government’s retreat from the provision of services coincided with a major structural transformation in the economy as a result of globalization. The industries that had formerly employed the families of the Edgewater homeless disappeared from the Bay Area, effectively transforming San Francisco into a pressure cooker for producing lumpenized social sectors. The parents and grandparents of the Edgewater homeless, who had worked in shipyards, steel mills, and smelters and on the docks, became a generation of obsolete laborers. For example, Sonny’s father was laid off from the shipyards in his forties and was forced to work as a low-paid janitor for the rest of his life. Vernon’s father, who had immigrated with his entire family from Orange, Texas, “the last town before Louisiana, where everybody worked in the sugar mill and no one ever had no money,” worked as a longshoreman in San Francisco until he was displaced by labor-saving containerized shipping technology. At the end of his life, he found work as a cement mason.
Al’s grandfather worked at Bethlehem Steel, the Bay Area’s largest steel producer, which, in its heyday, supplied the metal to build the Golden Gate Bridge—over one hundred thousand tons. The plant where Al’s grandfather worked, just off Edgewater Boulevard, furnished material for the hulls of dozens of U.S. Navy ships. Nicknamed Gunboat, Al’s grandfather boxed for the union team against Jack Dempsey in the 1930s and subsequently became the local union’s vice president. A decade later, Carter’s father migrated to California from rural Louisiana and also sought work in the steel industry. He remained one step removed from its unionized labor force, finding employment only as a grinder with a company that subcontracted with Bethlehem Steel. In 1970, facing stiff competition from smaller, nonunion producers located overseas, Bethlehem lost a crucial bid to produce the steel for New York City’s World Trade Center Towers. Six years later, in a class struggle scenario typical of global industrial restructuring, Bethlehem Steel closed its San Francisco factory in order to punish its union for refusing to accept a 10 percent pay cut.
Frank’s father was an independent contractor painting billboards and signs. By the late 1980s, sign painting as a skilled trade was being eclipsed by computer-driven technology, including digital printing. Frank’s father was able to retire and supplement his income as a construction contractor during California’s residential real estate boom. Frank’s half-brothers also successfully retooled themselves: one became an art gallery owner; the other brokered leases for billboard advertising space and was eventually bought out by media giant Viacom for $2.1 million, allowing him to retire in his late thirties.
The Edgewater homeless were unable to adapt to the economic metamorphosis of the 1970s and 1980s. The structural adjustments caused by globalization were rendered even more disruptive by the historical shift in the U.S. mode of governance away from rehabilitative social service provision toward punitive containment. As noted in the introduction, rapid transformations in the mode of production produce the residual and problematic class category of the lumpen, a social sector vituperatively dismissed by Marx and Engels as “this scum of depraved elements from all classes” (Engels [1870] 2000:xii). Economically obsolete, members of the lumpen become unable or unwilling to engage in disciplined productive labor. They do not even form part of what Marx called “the reserve army of the unemployed” that factory owners draw upon to undermine unions and lower wages.
Only two of the homeless in our scene were old enough to have worked in the former industrial economy that had employed most of their parents:
Reggie: I worked at the shipyard. It was union. I welded. But I didn’t like it. There were too many fires, and you had to have a tracer when you’re hanging and a guy who follows you everywhere.
I fell a whole deck. Boom! My teeth was everywhere. They gave me four months of workers’ comp. But I didn’t go back afterwards.
Hank had the longest history of legal employment. In fact, his relationship to the labor market began prematurely when he was still in elementary school. According to Hank’s sister Barbara, the coercive child labor arrangement imposed on her brothers was connected to the transitional kinship obligations engendered by the migration patterns of their father’s extended family, combined with his worsening alcoholism.
Barbara: See, the problem was my uncle stayed in Tahiti, leaving his kids in San Francisco. So my father felt obligated to help raise my uncle’s boys, because my father’s brother had married my mother’s mother, my grandmother—they do that in Tahiti.
My father took more to them than his own boys. He had a machine shop, ABC Engineering, over a shop in Oakland, and all my brothers had to work there. But my father let my uncle’s boys go to school and gave them money. Meanwhile, the sad part was that his real sons had to work in the shop for nothing until real late and missed a lot of school. They were lucky to get five or ten bucks at the end of the week—he just beat them instead.
Friends and distant cousins would get my father drunk and he’d give you anything you wanted. And my brothers would have to try to run the shop and get the work out. Finally my father lost the shop and started drinking, just drinking.
Even if Hank’s father had not been a violent drunk, he and his boys would have lost their business because nearly all the foundries and machine shops producing for industrial markets disappeared from the Bay Area during the last quarter of the twentieth century. In his mid-twenties during the late 1970s, Hank found work as a welder in a foundry. We visited his last employer, who had relocated from San Francisco to a modest warehouse on the Oakland waterfront. Despite the company’s proud slogan, “Phoenix Iron Works Castings Since 1901,” there was no sign of activity. The semi-retired owner was dressed in army fatigues, and his cramped office was decorated with hunting trophies. He explained, “We don’t do foundry work here anymore. We just can’t compete with Third World imports. No one can. Now we broker to specialty markets for Hong Kong producers.” When we asked whether Hank had been a good worker, he chuckled, “He was a friendly guy, but he wasn’t a company man.”
Most of the Edgewater homeless were too young to have had access to the industrial work force. Instead, they spent their lives cycling in and out of marginal manual labor. At best, they worked in warehouses and in construction-related trades that were highly susceptible to economic fluctuations. Sal, for example, was an on-call loader at a unionized warehousing firm, “until they went belly-up, shutting and locking the doors without warning in 1992.” He had been replaced by labor-saving technology. “When I joined the Teamsters Union,” he noted, “there were nine thousand of us in San Francisco. Now there’s less than eight hundred fifty.” Petey also worked as a laborer in a warehouse and he too was “downsized”:
Me and my dad and my brother used to work at the same place. I was a forklift driver. My father was a truck driver and my brother, he was also a forklift driver. Things got tough and I ended up getting laid off. They call it “low man on the totem pole.” I ended up being the last one hired, the first one laid off—not fired. So I collected unemployment for about two years. I was getting three hundred fifty dollars every two weeks. Then I started throwing newspapers for three cents apiece. That’s good money—thirty dollars for a thousand.
Like Petey, Victor was laid off after working six years as a forklift driver at a corrugated cardboard box factory in South San Francisco. Felix passed through a half dozen delivery and service jobs: he drove a truck for the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper, delivered bread for the Parisian Bakery, and worked as a bellhop in a luxury hotel downtown.
Tina’s most stable job had been as a home healthcare attendant:
I was twenty-seven. I liked it. I got my license. I used to have my own car. You take your patients into your heart, but you not supposed to because they die on you. A couple of them died on me and I just had to stop getting attached to them. I really found out what my job description was talkin’ about, so I quit.
Spider-Bite Lou was a licensed plumber. Like Ben, he had served in the Merchant Marine during the Vietnam War. Max bartended for his father in the Italian North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco until they lost the lease when tourism and gentrification drove up the rents. Carter had been employed at Fort Ord, a military base that closed in 1994. He worked as a chef, a hospital orderly, and a firefighter and also did asbestos removal. “I lost my army jobs just being young and irresponsible. If I would of knew what I know now, just a little bit, I would have stayed in the military; best job I ever had. It was ‘career conditional’ to where I coulda bought a house, credit union, everything.” When we first met Carter, he was still on the margins of the legal labor force, working as a parking attendant at a luxury car dealership in downtown San Francisco.
Ben and Frank both worked briefly as carpenters for high-tech firms in Silicon Valley before the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. They reminisced about the electric-eye alarms that protected restricted research areas and monitored their movements. They laughed at the memory of the labor-saving robots being tested in those years: “one delivered shit from floor to floor and another vacuumed the rug.”
By the time the Bay Area’s dot-com and biotech sectors were in full swing in 1998 and 1999, the Edgewater homeless were too marginal to obtain stable employment. Their subjectivities had long since shifted from being rebellious young members of the disappearing industrial working class, the artisanal contractor economy, and the growing, but unstable, low-wage service sector to being middle-aged outlaw or outcast dopefiends. They did benefit marginally, however, from the trickle-down effects of the economic boom. Construction sites mushroomed throughout the city, and Carter’s opportunities for “wood licks” multiplied. Vernon began obtaining steadier, off-the-record house painting gigs from overbooked contractors. All of the whites, as well as Felix, found occasional day jobs cleaning yards, repairing fences, and performing other manual tasks, usually for former friends, acquaintances, and neighbors in the homeowning neighborhood up the hill. Felix lasted for six months as a taxi driver until an elderly woman who lived around the corner from him saw him nodding in his cab and reported him to management.
Ben was the only person on Edgewater Boulevard who managed to gain access to unionized employment, but it was only because his mother continued to pay his dues regularly to the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades. As a level 3 journeyman, he earned fifty-five dollars an hour to hang from the bottom of the San Francisco Bay Bridge and strip asbestos. Hoping that this steady employment would stabilize her son, Ben’s mother paid for him to receive methadone maintenance from a for-profit clinic. Unfortunately, Ben enjoyed the speedball effect of boosting the sedative effects of methadone with the stimulus of cocaine, and he increased his crack consumption dramatically (for a discussion of the dopamine-stimulating effects of cocaine on heroin and on methadone in the brain, see Martin et al. 2007; Leri et al. 2007). Soon he was smoking crack every day with Carter and Tina on his way to work, right after receiving his daily dose at the methadone clinic. He also stopped by at the end of the day as he headed home. During one of his after-work crack visits, still dressed in splattered painter’s pants and a flannel shirt, he proudly untangled a pile of cables from the trunk of his car to demonstrate to us how he chained himself to the underside of the Bay Bridge for his eight-hour “asbestos abatement” shifts.
Ben was eventually thrown out of the methadone program for “giving a dirty urine” containing cocaine during one of the clinic’s random surveillance tests. He was given forty-eight hours to appeal his case and had to request permission to leave work early to file for reinstatement. The methadone clinic readmitted him, but when his job supervisor discovered that Ben was in a drug treatment program, he immediately fired him. The union also sanctioned Ben: “There’s plenty of work, but they now see me as a fuck-up and call me last.”
He scrambled to find low-budget painting jobs along Edgewater Boulevard, at only a fraction of his former union wage. The manager of the local Pizza Hut hired him to clean up an old paint spill on the parking lot pavement. Kneeling on the ground, scrubbing the cement with a wire brush, Ben held up his hands to show us the skin peeling back from his cracked and bleeding cuticles. “Hell of a way to earn twenty dollars!” He was most irritated by the manager’s offer of free food as a bonus: “All they’re doing is paying me with pizza. I don’t wanna see another pizza. I’m pizza’d out.” He appreciated, however, a more substantial fringe benefit of this poorly paid side job: the freedom to take breaks any time he wanted to smoke crack and drink malt liquor.
The classically lumpen relationship of the Edgewater homeless to the organized working class was exemplified when a member of the ethnographic team overheard Felix arguing with Frank about who deserved the fifty-dollar cash payment they had just received for throwing cow brains and blood over the door of the Boilermakers Union hall downtown. “Fuck you. It’s mine. I threw the shit. You were too afraid.” (See Marx’s outrage over the betrayal of the Paris Commune in 1851 by members of “the rabble” who sold their violent services to Bonaparte’s military, which Marx describes as the “swamp flower of the peasant lumpen proletariat . . . a drunken soldiery . . . bought with whiskey and sausages” [(1852) 1963:130, 123].)
By the time we began our fieldwork in 1994, Edgewater Boulevard was already in an advanced state of decay. The few local, family-run businesses that still survived on this postindustrial corridor were losing out to suburban-based discount chains and fast-food restaurants. Large lots had been left vacant for over ten years by speculators who were lobbying the city to rezone the area for a shopping mall.
The owners of the remaining small businesses interacted closely with the homeless on the boulevard. Some chased the homeless away whenever they caught them loitering on their sidewalks. Most, however, developed patron-client relationships with their favorite individuals and intermittently hired them for odd jobs. Business owners came to know details of the life histories of the homeless—their family problems, interpersonal feuds, runins with the law, and patterns of drug binging. Some business owners offered logistical and moral support. For example, Macon, the owner of a construction supply depot, let several of the Edgewater homeless use his address for receiving welfare checks. He also paid out cash advances that could be reimbursed on a piecework basis by shoveling sand into the sandbags he sold at his depot. During the months when Hogan was pretending to be HIV positive, Macon paid for his enrollment in a drug treatment program. (Hogan dropped out after a week.) Chico’s Tunes, a car stereo installation shop, provided mail services and relayed messages from relatives for Tina and Carter. Chico also fenced stolen items, which he sent to his family members in Honduras. Some of the friendlier managers of the fast-food restaurants allowed the Edgewater homeless to use their restrooms; but others called the police on them when they saw them panhandling in their parking lots.
The homeless competed aggressively for the limited number of odd jobs offered by local business owners. Andy, a mover who lived up the hill, was the local employer most favored by the men in our network. He was eighty years old and owned a fourteen-foot van. He had no business license, but advertised his moving services in the free neighborhood weekly paper. Andy paid well by Edgewater Boulevard standards, forty dollars for an average day of labor and as much as sixty dollars for heavy ones. He also accommodated drug use and alcohol consumption. His daughter was a recovered heroin addict, and he hired Hank preferentially because she had been one of Hank’s running partners “back in the days.” Unfortunately, Andy rarely managed to line up more than a few jobs each month, and it was not unusual for several weeks to pass with no opportunities.
Everyone jockeyed jealously to take Hank’s place, and so, to Andy’s benefit, Hank pushed himself to extremes to maintain his privileged access to the irregular moving jobs. One late afternoon, Jeff found Hank sitting stiffly in a bus stop shelter pressing his lower back against the glass as if it were an electric heating pad. He had been “carrying pianos for Andy” for the past two days and his lower back was aching. “O-o-h, that warm sun feels good on my back. I just wasn’t in any kind of shape to work for Andy this morning but I had to go. If I don’t go, how am I goin’ to get my money?”
Andy recruited his day laborers by honking his car horn from the curb nearest the largest homeless encampment. Sometimes in the middle of the night, loud honking or backfiring on Edgewater Boulevard would startle Hank out of his sleep. Convinced he was about to miss a rendezvous with Andy, he would throw off his blankets, jump to his feet, and sprint down the highway embankment, screaming, “I’m coming, I’m coming.” When his camp-mates taunted him by shouting the wartime mortar round alert “Incoming!,” he would snap out of his altered state, embarrassed by their mockery of his claims to Vietnam shellshock.
Hank’s “flashbacks” in pursuit of legal employment, forty years after the bankruptcy of his father’s machine shop and twenty-five years after he had been laid off from the foundry (his last well-paid job), reveal the overlapping dimensions of abuse that often contribute to PTSD-like symptoms among the homeless. In Hank’s case, this vulnerability is especially “overdetermined” by a mix of political-economic and psycho-affective forces (for classic discussions of overdetermination in marxist theory and in psychoanalysis, see Althusser 1966 and Freud [1900] 1965). These forces include child labor and domestic violence associated with parental dislocation and alcoholism; the disappearance of San Francisco’s industrial economy in the post–World War II era; and, of course, the routine and ongoing interpersonal violence of survival on the street—all brought to a head by his extreme dependence on a fly-by-night employer to stave off heroin withdrawal symptoms. Those who employed the homeless invariably believed that they were doing them a favor by offering them work. In fact, these business owners usually paid homeless workers substantially less than they would have had to pay more stable employees, including undocumented Latino day laborers, for the same jobs.
Sammy, at the Crow’s Nest liquor store, was particularly adroit at manipulating the moral economy of heroin sharing for his own profit. For an eight-month stretch, he managed to persuade Felix to work for him for ten dollars a day, seven days a week, by “doing Felix the favor” of paying Frank an additional ten dollars a day as “rent” so that Felix could sleep on the floor of Frank’s van. Astutely, Sammy insisted on handing that daily rent payment directly to Frank at 7:00 A.M. every morning to ensure that Felix would come to work before the arrival of the beer delivery trucks, free from heroin withdrawal symptoms. Sammy knew that because of this arrangement Frank would be obligated to treat Felix to a morning “wake-up” shot in anticipation of the guaranteed 7:00 A.M. rent payment. Felix was embarrassed at earning the equivalent of two dollars per hour in such a dependent manner and tried to save face by telling us, “It’s okay, Sammy also treats me to free cigarettes and beer.”
Macon, at the construction supply depot, also engaged in a profitable strategy to maximize the productivity and obedience of physically addicted indigent laborers. Every Monday for almost a full year he “treated” Max and Frank to breakfast at a local diner and gave them enough cash to buy one bag of heroin. Frank and Max enjoyed Macon’s Monday breakfasts and considered him to be a generous and thoughtful patron. Heroin withdrawal and hunger are often acute for the homeless on Monday mornings because most businesses have been closed for thirty-six hours, emptying the streets of pedestrian traffic. This creates a long stretch of time with few opportunities to beg, borrow, steal, or work. Macon told us that as a Catholic and a recovered alcoholic who had binged on cocaine during the 1980s he felt a “sense of duty to help the homeless.” For several months, Frank and Max faithfully knocked on his door early Monday mornings and eagerly offered to shovel as many (or as few) sandbags as he might need that day. Macon sometimes told them to check back later in the afternoon if sales the previous day had been slow. Market demand for sandbags fluctuates during the rainy season depending on flooding conditions. By supplementing his minimal piece-rate payment system with one free breakfast and a ten-dollar tip, Macon was able to maintain adequate inventory without having to pay extra workers to stand by idly. Convinced that he was in spiritual “solidarity with the poor” and empathizing with the vulnerability of addiction, Macon followed just-in-time production principles, and his business obtained cheap, flexible, and grateful laborers.
Offering employment to the lowest bidder has its costs, however. Macon had to tolerate erratic conduct at his worksite. One busy December, when he hired Hank to shovel extra sandbags, Macon caught him in the main office using the coffeemaker to steam the smog inspection sticker off a customer’s license plate. He fired Hank on the spot, and two weeks later Hank’s van was towed for not having a California smog certificate. Spider-Bite Lou immediately replaced Hank as a steady shoveler, but halfway through the rainy season the police arrested him on an outstanding warrant.
Over the years, Frank, Max, and Felix proved to be Macon’s most stable laborers, despite their often problematic behaviors. Macon paid them eighteen dollars to shovel forty seventy-five-pound sandbags. It was not uncommon for them to take most of the day to complete the task.
As he shovels, Felix complains about “doin’ all the work.” Max, dressed in the bright yellow slicker overalls and rubber boots Macon provides to his homeless workers, is supposed to be helping him, but instead he is sitting hunched in the back of the lot on a pile of antique bricks, having thrown out his lower back this morning filling the first sandbag. He is also having trouble standing because of sores on his feet. The heavy rains of the past week have swollen his size 13 feet, making his toes chafe in his one-size-too-small sneakers. The sores on his toes are bright red and they look, as he says, “like cancers.”
Frank walks into the depot, flicking his wrist at Felix to flash the glass stem of a new crack pipe. Felix immediately drops his shovel and motions for Frank to follow him to the back of the supply shed. They crouch behind a stack of concrete and mortar sacks and Frank dumps the full ten dollars’ worth of crack on top of a bag of Play Sand (used for children’s sandboxes). As Frank loads the pipe, Felix reminds him that he had treated Frank to a big bag of dope earlier that morning, “so give me more than half.”
There is no front wall to the shed, so anyone walking by—a customer, another worker, or the boss—could easily catch us. Felix crouches lower to light the crack pipe. He cannot see over the bags, however, and when he hears footsteps outside, he jumps up, lowering the pipe to his side. Without skipping a beat, he points to the west, announcing in a clear, friendly voice as if I were a lost customer asking for directions, “ . . . and the Golden Gate Bridge is over there!” I lower my camera to my hip and struggle to keep a straight face so as not to attract more attention to us.
Seconds later, Felix crouches back down, takes another hit of crack, swivels on his feet to peer at an imaginary noise, inhales again, and swivels to peer out again. He repeats this frantic sequence three times in rapid succession, becoming increasingly agitated with each inhalation. Twice he interrupts his smoking to launch into another directions-giving alibi, even though I hear no footsteps anywhere outside. He is now in full-blown crack-induced paranoia and is hearing all kinds of imaginary noises. He launches into a brand-new alibi in an especially loud voice: “Jeff, can you give me a ride downtown to the GA [General Assistance] office?” While talking, he motions dramatically for Frank and me to stay still. He falls silent for ten long seconds to listen before squatting back down to smoke more crack.
Frank angrily demands the pipe, but just as he is loading it, Felix runs out of the shed into the main part of the lot shouting, “Be quick, quick! Macon wants us out of here.” Cursing, Frank starts to follow him out, but Felix runs back inside the shed. He is sweating profusely, droplets falling from his forehead. I ask if he is okay. He holds up his finger for me to be quiet, staring fixedly at the ground, trying to settle himself down.
Binging on crack often gives Felix bilious burps. He has to concentrate on holding them down so that he does not vomit. I start to worry that Felix might be having a heart attack or a seizure and I rehearse the procedure for CPR in my head. Felix reassures me that “it’s just a bit of indigestion.” When his bout of indigestion finally passes, he gnashes his teeth, already crashing from his crack rush. Meanwhile Frank has smoked up his portion and also starts tweaking in his distinct manner—pacing and muttering curses.
Following one of the many Caltrans offensives to rid highway embankments of homeless encampments, Frank and Max began to take refuge at night from the rain in Macon’s supply shed. They would wait for the sun to set before climbing the barbed-wire fence to lay their blankets out on the bags of cement. Each morning before the first delivery truck arrived at 5:30 A.M., they stashed their blankets under piles of construction materials and climbed back over the fence to report early to work via the front gate. They were eventually caught. Jeff came upon them that evening, huddled on a discarded sofa under a makeshift tarp in the alley behind the corner store.
Max: We overslept today! Macon walked in to meet the delivery truck and we’re asleep right there on the cement bags. “Whoa!”
Frank: Man, it was embarrassing! We started to pack up quickly to leave but Macon said, “Since you guys are already here you might as well get right to work.”
Through a “don’t-ask-don’t-tell” compromise with their boss, Max and Frank managed to continue sleeping discreetly in the shed for three more months. The arrangement worked well until Frank began selling ten-dollar bags of heroin from the premises. Frank’s heroin was of such good quality that Sal’s customers began shifting over to him. Dopesick addicts would call out for heroin from the other side of the barbed-wire fence at all hours. With this sudden influx of heroin income, Frank stopped shoveling and Max’s back fell apart under the strain of the solo workload. Spider-Bite Lou, newly released from jail, jumped at the opportunity to replace Max and Frank. Macon agreed to hire him and evicted Max and Frank for being “fire hazards,” pointing to the candle wax on the bags of cement in the storage shed where they slept. Unshaven, scraggly-haired, and shuffling on his still swollen and infected feet, Max went back to “flying a lame sign” on the traffic island, an income-generating strategy that shamed him. He groaned: “I hate it out here. I just gotta find a job.” He was not angry at Macon for evicting and firing him. Instead, he blamed Spider-Bite Lou for stealing his job by “badmouthing me to the boss.”
During this period, Frank painted a storefront sign for the owner of a printing press up the hill, whose son had died of a heroin overdose in the 1970s. The man became Frank’s new patron, lending him seven hundred dollars to buy a pickup truck with a camper shell from a friend of Jeff’s, who was a substance abuse counselor and a former heroin injector himself. Frank agreed to pay off the loan by cleaning the printing presses once a week.
Frank’s heroin supplier proved steadier than expected, and Frank was able to hire Max to sell for him. He forced Max to stand on the sidewalk some ten yards away from his pickup at all times, and, to further minimize his own risk of arrest, he forbade Max from sleeping in his “new camper.” This prompted so much criticism from everyone on the boulevard that Frank relented, although he did not allow Max to enter the vehicle during daylight hours in case the police were monitoring him.
Max received one free bag of heroin for every ten he sold. He did not complain because the bags he sold were cheap at ten dollars and the quality was good. Sales were brisk and Max worked all day long, “jacking up” the size of his habit. Hunger became his main problem, because he no longer took time out to panhandle in the McDonald’s parking lot, soliciting gifts of burgers and fries with his old sign, WILL WORK FOR FOOD GOD BLESS. Frank smoked up in crack the profits from Max’s brisk heroin sales. On binges Frank would often lose track of how much had been sold and accuse Max of stealing. Frank’s relationship with the printing shop owner also deteriorated, and he gave up trying to work off his remaining five-hundred-dollar debt for the camper shell and the pickup.
Despite repeated police crackdowns, Frank stayed in business for over two years. Max, his eyesight poor, his feet always aching, and his shoulders increasingly stooped, was a surprisingly effective salesman. Each dawn before leaving the camper, he would fill his mouth with ten bags of heroin packed in uninflated balloons. When a customer walked by him, Max would discreetly spit one of the balloons into his palm and shake hands with the passerby, exchanging heroin for money in one fluid motion. On a Friday afternoon, three police officers pounced on Max from behind and probed his mouth and under his tongue. Max had only one bag of heroin left at the time and managed to spit it out before being seized and searched. The officers combed the gutter and found the tiny packet in its bright red balloon. They then ripped apart Frank’s camper, but found only a few old syringes. At the time, the local police precinct was no longer instructing officers to arrest the homeless for possession of needles, so they left Frank alone when he pleaded, “Ah, come on! Can’t you see I’m just an old-time dopefiend? I don’t do nobody no harm. I work paintin’ signs.”
The judge released Max from jail three days after his arrest, because possession of one ten-dollar bag of heroin, an eighth of a gram, is not sufficient evidence to prove intent to sell. Three days in the county jail’s holding pen, however, condemned Max to full-blown opiate withdrawal symptoms. Immediately upon his release, he returned to selling on Edgewater Boulevard at the same spot. He was scared of being rearrested, but he was too dopesick not to take the risk.
The African-Americans tended to be more openly oppositional than the whites to the business owners along Edgewater Boulevard, who in turn often referred to them as “goddamn niggers.” Relations with the Yemeni and Palestinian storekeepers were especially antagonistic. The African-Americans routinely called them “motherfuckin’ A-rabs” and were frequently 86’ed for shoplifting, badgering customers for change, demanding free matches, or cursing over high prices. The whites adopted more subservient, dependent attitudes toward the storekeepers and were sometimes rewarded with odd jobs such as sweeping the sidewalk or stocking new deliveries. Some of the whites were also periodically 86’ed, but usually it was for being malodorous rather than for being oppositional. Nevertheless, out of earshot, they too engaged in xenophobic rants:
Frank: These fuckin’ A-rabs don’t know how to spend American money. They’ll give you twenty dollars for a whole day’s work if you’re lucky.
Spider-Bite Lou: All A-rabs are the same. They’re worse than the Chinese. They think you’re just a junkie—just shit! “Just give the man a Cisco; he’ll do anything for it.”
During our twelve years on Edgewater Boulevard, only two local businesses hired African-Americans from our social network, and they did so only at the height of California’s dotcom boom, when no whites were available. Sammy, at the Crow’s Nest liquor store, gave Carter “a chance” when Felix, his former steady worker, left to drive a taxi for six months. It was during the period when Frank and Max were selling heroin and when Andy, the mover, had enough jobs each week to keep Hank, Petey, and even Al busy most days. Ben was working at his unionized asbestos removal job under the Bay Bridge, and Spider-Bite Lou was shoveling sand at Macon’s.
After three weeks, Sammy confronted Carter and accused him of stealing bottles of vodka. In response, Carter quit the job in self-righteous outrage. Despite vehemently condemning “thieving niggers” when he told us this story, Sammy continued to commission large orders of stolen wood from Carter. He was remodeling his home and also placing special orders for discount wood for neighbors and cousins. With Sammy’s “help,” consequently, Carter reentered the illegal economy full time and rekindled his outlaw romance with Tina.
Carter: They got a gang of two-by-fours, two-by-sixes, four-by-fours, two-by-twelves out by where they’re [earthquake] retrofitting under the freeway. And after about four o’clock or four-thirty ain’t nobody back there. The workers kick off early. And with all the busy traffic and people coming and going, we just put on one of their construction hats, an orange one and a white one, and their reflector jackets, and we have a field day.
Tina: Yup, we put five of them six-by-twelves all up onto two carts. Bust our butts!
Carter: Discount Grocery’s shopping carts are the best ones for that because they’re all steel. . . .
Tina: We had one cart in the front and one in the back. I was pushin’ it. But then Mr. Big-shot-pocketful-of-money didn’t want to just issue me money when he got paid.
Carter: [angrily] Because Sammy backed out of his full order! Son-of-a-bitch only paid five cents a foot because he said the wood was damaged. It ain’t no money, and I didn’t take them penitentiary chances on motherfuckin’ state property just for that! Can’t be expecting to get top-notch, top-grade motherfuckin’ shit all the goddamn time. It don’t be that way.
But it’s okay because he set me up with another contractor who puts in bigger orders, and Sammy lets me store the wood behind his shop now.
Tina: Shit! Crow’s Nest Sammy even make Carter pay him to store his wood there.
The only other local business to hire the homeless African-Americans on Edgewater Boulevard was a Christmas tree seller who arrived each year to set up shop on the first Friday after Thanksgiving in the empty lot across from the A&C corner store. He paid just above minimum wage but offered steady work for ten hours a day, plus tips—all tax-free cash. More than half his workers were heroin injectors, and he accommodated their multiple lapses and petty rip-offs. This enabled him to tap into an inexpensive, just-in-time, seasonal labor force in order to sell several thousand trees during the four-week Christmas rush. The Edgewater homeless eagerly anticipated this opportunity for full-time work, even though few lasted for the entire month. Those who did gained weight and improved their relationships with the surrounding businesses on the boulevard.
Of all the homeless in our scene, Felix worked hardest and most consistently at the lot: “It’s fucking good money, slingin’ those trees, and it pumps you up.” This “worthy worker” persona allowed Felix to fleetingly reassert his Latino second-generation immigrant identity during the Christmas season. He would once again start referring to the “lame whites” and the “scandalous niggers.” He also asserted his wannabe-legal, Latino working-class identity by frequently referring to losing his taxi job “last year, when that old lady squealed on me,” many years after the fact. While Felix worked at the tree lot, the Mexican owner of the taqueria next to the A&C corner store, who just a few weeks earlier would have called the police on him for panhandling in front of her door, began treating him to an extra large bowl of her “soup of the day” before the start of his shift. Felix’s temporarily rehabilitated worker status during the Christmas season energized him and enabled him to gain weight, but it also exacerbated his unsanitary injection practices. His heroin supplier began fronting him a half dozen extra ten-dollar bags every morning to resell to co-workers from other neighborhoods. This allowed Felix to parlay free tastes from his new, outsider customers.
In a hurry on his mid-afternoon fifteen-minute break, Felix motions for me to accompany him into the abandoned shack in the alley behind the corner store. “Watch my back, Jeff.”
The floor of the shack is wet and slimy. Feces, soiled clothes, bottles of urine, and used cookers are scattered about. Two syringes are stuck in the wall, mimicking coat hooks. Felix is furious about the filth. Yesterday he walked in on Lou defecating in the corner. “There’s no excuse for that kind of behavior. Anyone can go right over to the McDonald’s and use the bathroom.”
I can tell he is feeling the preliminary symptoms of dopesickness. He is yawning heavily, and his nose is dripping. He clears each of his nostrils onto the ground, apologizing for being so messy. Steady wages have jacked up Felix’s habit, and he is already worried because this steady work ends in two weeks.
Sitting on an overturned computer monitor, Felix searches for a cooker among the debris. “Shit! There’s no water!” he mumbles, and kicks an overturned plastic bottle across the floor. He proceeds to poke his fingers, black from Christmas tree sap and mud, into each cooker to locate leftover water. Finally something inside one of the bottle-cap cookers jiggles with what looks for a second like jelly. It is water. He quickly dumps a full bag of heroin into the cooker and smiles as it splashes with a resounding clink.
When Carter was hired on the Christmas tree lot at the height of the dot-com boom in 1999, Jeff went to photograph him. He was in a rear annex to the lot, nailing tree stands. He called over to his fellow workers, who were serving customers in the front, to come pose for a group portrait. They ignored him. He called out several more times, practically pleading. Embarrassed, Jeff snapped a solo portrait.
As Jeff was walking away, Felix ran up to him, whispering that the boss had “fired Carter yesterday for going AWOL on his lunch break.” Apparently, the boss had caught Carter attempting to sneak back onto the lot an hour before closing time, pretending that he was returning from a fifteen-minute break. The next morning, Carter had returned to work, begging for a second chance. According to Felix, the boss made Carter confess in front of all the workers.
Felix: [imitating a nervous, stammering Carter] “I . . . I . . . guess . . . I guess . . . I really did take a five-hour break yesterday.”
[imitating the boss] “That’s more like it; now say it louder.”
Carter was rehired, but the boss placed him on “work punishment,” stacking deliveries and hammering stands in the back annex. He was explicitly denied contact with customers in the front lot, thereby losing the opportunity to earn tips. As Felix was explaining this, the boss suddenly noticed Jeff and walked over, politely warning, “If you’re not here to buy a tree, you gotta move on, buddy. Sorry, but I got to keep Felix working before I lose him.” The boss thought of himself as disciplining his workers fairly on the basis of performance—and Carter was, objectively, a lousy worker. Nevertheless, the only black employee on the lot was confined to the back annex, working for the lowest pay, performing the most menial task, and was not allowed to talk to the mostly white clientele. (For a discussion of “de facto apartheid” in the workplace, see Bourgois 1989:129–136; Holmes 2006). In later years, pressured by community action groups to diversify his labor force, the Christmas tree seller hired an African-American foreman, who successfully recruited a network of unemployed African-Americans from the nearby Hunters Point–Bayview neighborhood. This successful implementation of affirmative action infuriated the homeless whites on Edgewater Boulevard, convincing them that the world discriminates against white men.
Only three hours after Jeff was thrown off the Christmas tree lot, Philippe ran into Carter in front of the A&C corner store, where he was taking yet another extended impromptu break from work. Their conversation reveals their very different class-based dispositions toward risk and anxiety. Philippe was eager to document Carter’s experience with legal employment. He hoped Carter would prove to be a “worthy worker,” and he was nervous that Carter might get in trouble for taking an unscheduled break. He did not realize at the time that Carter had already been placed on work punishment, and he steered the conversation to the subject of earning tips, because he figured that eliciting tips was the aspect of the job most analogous to the excitement and sense of achievement found in street hustling (Bourgois 1997, 1998a:43, 64–65; Wacquant 1998). Philippe thought Carter would enjoy discussing how effective he was at “hustling tips.” Instead, Carter responded with an outburst of masculine bravado and a reasoned critique of economic exploitation:
Philippe: What’s up, Carter? Are you on break now?
Carter: No. I just took one ’cause I seen y’all from across the street.
Philippe: [laughing nervously] We’re gonna get you in trouble? You’ll have to go back to work soon.
Carter: Man, you know what? Just fuck ’em! What they gonna do, send me home? Fuck it. Pay me off, and I’m going.
Philippe: Well, if you’re not going back, let’s at least walk around the corner so the boss doesn’t see you. I don’t want you to get fired.
[walking to the back alley] The tips must be good? Are you earning good money slinging trees?
Carter: Oh, they been okay. . . . Uh . . . uh . . . uh, I mean, they been okay. . . . Uh, they ain’t all that great either.
I mean, the law of averages and chances on shit I do out here [pointing down the alley], on takin’ penitentiary chances . . . stealing, I do better than what I get over there [pointing toward the lot].
It’s just that this work is steady and keeping me out of trouble. It’s, uh . . . an hourly wage, and I know that’s guaranteed money.
Philippe: Isn’t it kind of nice to have a steady income?
Carter: Yeah. . . . [imitating a “whiter” voice] Yeah, yeah. [both laugh]
Philippe: But Carter, seriously, isn’t it a relief not to have to be hitting licks all the time? I mean, doesn’t stealing give you anxiety?
Carter: It gives me—[long pause, and then thoughtfully] a rush, Philippe. A fuckin’ rush! I mean, actually working over there [frowning in the direction of the tree lot], I be, in a way . . . bored. Unless I run across a little fine ol’ chick buyin’ a tree, or this ’n that. Otherwise I be bored.
Philippe: Explain to me the difference between working legally and hitting licks.
Carter: Taxes! [laughing] Fuckin’ taxes.
I don’t know. Shit! What the fuck you asking me for, Philippe? I’m the lowest man on the totem pole! You’re the professor workin’ legal.
Philippe: Well, is working boring for you?
Carter: No. It’s not boring to work, right, but if I had a motherfuckin’ dental plan, a benefit package, a credit union, and all of that . . . no motherfucker could pull me from my job. I’d be workin’ twenty-four/seven, with all the overtime I could get.
A job like this here is only gonna last a month, but I’m tryin’ to get all I could get. Save up enough money for a methadone program.
Philippe: Why can’t you save just as much money when you hit a good lick?
Carter: It depends on the lick. You gotta backtrack from what you had to do to survive up until the time that you was able to hit the lick, right.
If people took care of you up until that time, you gotta take care of them, naturally, right. And then you go from there on whatever you got left . . . to carry yourself along until you gotta do somethin’ else, right.
But I have a debt right now. I got a debt every morning. Shit! I wake up and start getting to sniffle—dopesick! I got a debt!
Philippe: Come on, let’s go back to the lot.
Despite Carter’s jesting about the boredom and exploitation of off-the-books legal day labor, he made a concerted attempt over the next three weeks to “go legal” while employed on the lot. He began saving up for the down payment required at that time by most private, for-profit methadone maintenance programs in San Francisco, about one hundred twenty dollars.
Here’s sixty dollars, Jeff, that’s a gram [of heroin]. Hold it for me till next week and I’ll have the other sixty. You see, I’m serious. I’m gonna try to get back on the stick. I swear it. I’m going to try this time, while I got a chance to do it, right now! The methadone will keep me from buyin’ dope and takin’ breaks to fix every day!
I can focus on bein’ clean, on goin’ and getting a valid driver’s license, on getting a driving job, and bein’ able to take a drug test and come up clean.
Carter stayed at the lot through the end of the Christmas season, even though he was never taken off work punishment and was never able to hustle tips. By the time his name finally came up on the methadone program’s month-long waiting list, his job had ended. He no longer had the stable income to pay for the program or the pragmatic motivation to “go clean.” In short, despite a plethora of good intentions, institutional and structural forces—the inadequacy of treatment programs and the instability of unregulated day labor jobs—had once again rerouted Carter into being an outlaw.
Like most patron-client relationships across steep divides of power and vulnerability (Scheper-Hughes 1992:98–127), the interface between homeless drug users and their employers ambiguously spans conviviality, compassion, exploitation, and humiliation. The worst employer on the boulevard was Bruce, the owner of a warehouse that sold repossessed furniture. For the last six years of our fieldwork, Al worked for Bruce for twenty dollars a day, moving furniture onto the sidewalk for display each morning and stowing the unsold items in the evening. It was an easy job, but he had to be on call all day to run errands and unload new shipments.
Every morning, Al jolted awake at 5:00 A.M., his chronic lower back pain exacerbated by oncoming heroin withdrawal symptoms. He had to wait until Bruce opened the warehouse at 7:30 A.M. to receive his previous day’s wages. Al did not drink alcohol, and Bruce knew that twenty dollars was sufficient to cover his daily dose of heroin as well as a nightcap of crack and a quart of milk at bedtime. Bruce not only paid badly but also was verbally abusive. Early in the employment arrangement, in order to avoid triggering an employer’s tax liability, he had refused to confirm to the welfare department that Al worked for him. Al consequently lost his monthly food stamps for failing to participate in welfare’s required workfare program. He began to express serious interest in entering drug treatment. “It’s like I’m a dog on a leash, a slave. All for twenty dollars each morning. Bruce gives me just enough so I can go cop, fix, and return to work.”
We visited Al at the warehouse at closing time to offer him a ride to a detox center. Caltrans was in the midst of an eviction offensive, and he had lost all his blankets:
Al: Carter hid the blankets last month when Caltrans came. And last week, I got lucky—a new Mexican guy on the boulevard grabbed my blankets for me just in time when he saw Caltrans drivin’ up. That was nice. So this week I been carting all my stuff here in the morning down from the camp. But I was late for work yesterday so I left a sign: “Caltrans: I’m at work. Please call [the warehouse telephone number] so I can get my stuff.” But they just cleared me out. They ripped down all the shelters.
Bruce, a burly fifty-year-old man with a thick Brooklyn accent, interrupted this conversation without saying hello: “You’s the guys writin’ stories about heroin addicts? Huh? What is there to write about junkies that people don’t already know?” We tried to explain diplomatically the public health and HIV prevention goals of our research, and Bruce exploded:
Why should society help? It’s their fuckin’ problem. No one holds a fuckin’ gun to their head and makes them shoot up! Who got them into the drugs? All they gotta do is look into the fuckin’ mirror. [shouting at us] I don’t want nothin’ to do with you! Get the fuck outta here!
[turning to Al and pointing to us] He and his buddy are just tryin’ to make money off a’ scumbags like you.
[turning back to us and pointing to Al] These guys are habitual criminals. They don’t need no fuckin’ breaks. Leeches, bloodsuckers, and snakes. . . . They’ll never change. Anything you give ’em for help they just put right back into their arms. Welfare, SSI, shoot up, drink up—what else they want for free?
Get the fuck outta here! You’re part of the fuckin’ problem. You don’t see the reality of their destruction.
Throughout the harangue, Al had continued moving the last set of overstuffed couches inside Bruce’s warehouse. He then sat on the curb to the side, waiting for us to finish, as if the argument had nothing to do with him. Later that evening, Al felt compelled to apologize for his boss’s tirade:
I don’t understand why he’s acting like that. I must have hit a nerve somewhere. He was just joking. You know in January his rent was raised from twenty-five hundred dollars to six thousand a month. Now he’s gotta earn twenty-four thousand just to break even with all his other stores.
Bruce eventually rewarded Al for his subservience by allowing him to sleep in the delivery truck parked in front of the warehouse, and Al stopped talking about wanting to quit heroin.
Carter was Al’s running partner at the time, but Bruce specifically forbade Carter from sleeping in the truck with Al. Carter was mystified by Al’s willingness to tolerate exploitation and subordination:
Al works his ass off. He’s a honest hard worker, right. But his boss literally fucks with him.
Al can barely motherfuckin’ get by to stay fixed and well in the morning where he can lift them heavy-ass credenzas and armoires.
And that motherfucker Bruce likes to make Al wait for his money. Al be sick, shittin’ on himself, waiting to get his heroin.
I don’t like that. That boss is chickenshit. He’s got Al living in his truck now. Al thinks that’s great, but it ain’t like his boss is doing him no great goddamn favor. He doin’ it for his own advantage on keeping Al close by. He didn’t want to have to start looking for Al when he needed him. But now if the boss decides at any given time that he needs to use the truck to make a delivery or load furniture, then he’ll throw Al’s shit out of the truck. That’s treatin’ Al fucked-up, right.
The boss got this Filipino broad and her mother or cousin or whoever it is also working for him. And those two gook bitches in there is gettin’ by flashin’ titties and fucking the boss. They got something to work with. They got a pussy. They don’t do shit!
Al ain’t got no pussy, so naturally he’s the motherfuckin’ likely subject to have to do all the work. Because he damn sure ain’t going to suck Bruce’s dick, right.
Carter’s insistence on sexualizing Bruce’s exploitation of Al in racist and misogynist terms was a common oppositional refrain we heard from the African-Americans in response to demeaning relationships in the legal labor market (see Bourgois 2003b:146–147). Their acute sense of insult can be understood as the painful sediment of the history of slavery in the United States. Unlike the whites, they frequently used the word slavery in everyday speech. In the 2000s, contemporary outrage over the unresolved brutality of U.S. slavery and racism often expresses itself in an idiom of sexual subjection. (See, for example, the work of African-American artist Kara Walker [2007–2008].) The African-Americans on Edgewater Boulevard also had an active social memory of the Jim Crow racial regime that their parents and grandparents fled when they migrated from the rural Deep South to San Francisco in the World War II era (Beck and Tolnay 1990; Broussard 1993). They occasionally returned to their parents’ hometowns for family reunions, many of them in eastern Texas, which, according to historical sociologists, had been “the center of Ku Klux Klan killings during the heyday of lynching” (Patterson 1998:173).
Many of the same African-American families had been subjected to indentured debt peonage as sharecroppers or rural plantation laborers. It was especially noxious to find themselves forced, two generations later, to reenter oppressive and unequal labor relationships, whether it be with openly demeaning patrons like Bruce, moralizing ones like Macon, or manipulative and openly racist ones like Sammy at the Crow’s Nest liquor store. Furthermore, after they arrived in the Bay Area, many of the parents of the African-American homeless worked in unionized industrial jobs. Decades later, they retained a memory and consciousness of workers’ rights and benefits.
Most of the whites were also second-generation descendants of poor rural immigrants; but, unlike the African-Americans, they did not retain a salient living memory of that migration experience, nor did they maintain contact with their parents’ and grandparents’ communities of origin. More important, most of the parents of the white addicts had been able to establish themselves as small-scale entrepreneurs by the 1960s and 1970s. When we asked them to tell us about their first job, most of the whites replied with a shrug of their shoulders, “Workin’ for my dad.” Global economic and technological transformations, however, broke up these small family-owned businesses.
From the perspective of class, both the African-Americans and the whites on Edgewater Boulevard were downwardly mobile, second-generation rural/urban migrants who had been lumpenized by their inability to maintain a foothold in a labor force restructured by multiple shifts in the mode of production. Despite sharing the subjectivity and habitus of the righteous dopefiend, they had very different conceptions of exploitation and subordination at work. Displacement from the unionized industrial labor force is a very different ideological experience from failure as a small-scale entrepreneur in a rapidly growing economy dominated by high-tech, finance, and services.
Poorly paid workers often become demoralized and blame themselves, at least partially, for their economic subordination. Under these conditions, a worker’s “bad attitude” in the workplace is understood and experienced by both employers and employees, irrespective of ethnicity, as either an individual moral characteristic or a cultural/racial essence (or both). Active racism in the day labor market remained a public secret on Edgewater Boulevard, because not hiring African-Americans was considered a “logical” business strategy.
On only one occasion were we able to elicit self-reflexive criticism from an employer of the homeless on discrimination in the day labor market:
I’m not like the other storekeepers. Whenever I have a chance, I always hire a black man because I feel that they are discriminated against. Racism is the great scourge of America. Homelessness, too! And if they are black, forget it! Here, people do not tolerate them.
This particular store owner represents the exception who proves the rule. He himself had suffered directly from nationalist discrimination in his youth. Born and raised in Cairo, he had been expelled to Lebanon when Egypt evicted its ethnic Lebanese citizens in a wave of nationalist jingoism during the 1960s.
Passive begging was an income-generating option that the African-Americans actively shunned. Most of the white drug users on Edgewater Boulevard generated a large proportion of their resources (money, food, clothing) by flying signs at passing cars: WILL WORK FOR FOOD. VIETNAM VET. GOD BLESS. They often spent hours at a stretch, their eyes on the ground, with an empty fast-food soda cup held aloft. They usually raised enough money to “stay well.” Although passersby were sometimes willing to contribute spare change to visibly needy whites on the street, they rarely spontaneously gave alms to even the oldest, feeblest African-Americans on the boulevard, because blacks were deemed intimidating or unworthy. The police also enforced public nuisance and panhandling laws more rigorously against blacks.
The African-Americans in our scene did not discuss their rejection of passive begging in terms of limited options resulting from racism. Instead, they referred to it as a function of their way of being in the world and of their natural sense of dignity. Furthermore, they reduced their opportunities for receiving charitable gifts and for avoiding police detection by engaging in flamboyant or oppositional behaviors such as conspicuously drinking alcohol in public and talking loudly on streetcorners. Once again, the outlaw habitus that offered them a sense of self-respect through asserting control of public space convinced those who interacted with them that they deserved their fate.
Philippe: How come you never fly a sign?
Carter: I just never, ever could do it. To me that’s just too odd. It’s just too . . . un-me. And I hate being told fuckin’ “No.” It really makes me mad.
I don’t give a fuck how desperate I am. I rather go take something instead of waitin’ on somebody who’s looking at me like I’m a piece of shit tellin’ me, “I ain’t got it!” or “Go get a job!” when they just stuffin’ some money in their pocket.
“Motherfucker, you got it and I’m takin’ it!”
That’s why I could never beg. It’s the rejection. I’m not going to be standing out there for two dollars here, or three dollars, when I know I’m gonna get fifty or hundred in one whomp! [smiling and slamming his fist]
Go for it! You just going to have to parlay and take penitentiary chances, right? I’m not bragging or actin’ like I’m better than nobody, but I just didn’t grow up on doing things like that—begging.
When the African-Americans did panhandle, they distinguished it from passive begging by engaging passersby actively, offering a service, a friendly quip, or a threat. Routine fieldnotes capture these distinct ethnic styles.
Max, Nickie, and Frank are all flying signs, positioned at opposite sides of the freeway’s entrance and exit ramps. Expressionless, they all lower their eyes or squint, unfocused, into the distance, with an expression of boredom or anxiety. Max complains in a low voice that he has been out for three hours and has raised only three dollars.
I walk farther down the boulevard to the gas station where I see Sonny carrying a blue nylon bag full of clothing, presumably scavenged and/or stolen items for sale. The worn red handle of a windshield squeegee is sticking out of the zipper of his bag. He offers to share a can of malt liquor with me, and we step behind a dumpster to keep out of the gas station attendant’s view and sip together.
A pickup truck with the name A-1 Glass stenciled on the door drives up to the pump, and Sonny calls out: “Hey, Mr. A-1 Glass, can I pump your gas?” The driver, a middle-aged Latino, chuckles but shakes his head. A half dozen more cars fill up. The drivers all turn down Sonny’s personalized offer to help.
Sonny complains that he has been hustling for four hours and has made only seven dollars. In the same breath, he proceeds to try to sell me an assortment of objects that he pulls out of his nylon bag as well as from the bulging recesses of his brand-new Gore-Tex winter jacket as if he were a magician: a 1921 Buffalo nickel, a 1901 Indian Head penny, a pack of dominoes, a large metal compass (which he describes as “an architect’s tool”), several tie clips and class rings from St. Ignatius High School. When I try to interrupt his sales pitch, he scolds, “Don’t go bein’ like them people, Jeff-er-y! Let me finish!”
Passersby from all ethnic groups, including other African-Americans, gave more easily and more generously to whites than to blacks. Flying a sign was especially lucrative on national holidays.
Spider-Bite Lou: Christmas is a great time for flyin’ signs, but Thanksgiving is even better. People are more—how do you say, giving. Last Christmas Eve, I made forty-four dollars in an hour and a half.
People surprise you. You might see someone in a junked-out car, you know. And it looks like the only difference between them and you is they got a vehicle. And all of a sudden, they’ll whip out a five-dollar bill.
Yesterday, one of my regulars, a Korean storekeeper, promised to give me a trailer if his business goes well. He gives me five dollars every Saturday evening; says it brings his business good luck.
The Chinese give real good, too, and the Filipinos are okay. I get a lot of hits from black women. Yesterday I got a ten-dollar hit from some white guys on their way to the 49ers football game.
There’s a Chinese guy on Sundays who’s usually good for a ten or a twenty if I catch him. I introduced myself last time when he handed me two twenties. He’s just a real humble kind of man.
Most of the homeless whites subsisted primarily on the food given to them when they panhandled in fast-food parking lots. They rarely visited soup kitchens because they found these institutional environments unwelcoming and excessively time-consuming. Sometimes private individuals came down to Edgewater Boulevard spontaneously to give the homeless clothes, blankets, or sleeping bags or to pay for haircuts and rounds of laundry at the laundromat. One of Petey’s “regulars” took him to a San Francisco 49ers’ football game. It was Petey’s first time at a professional sports event, and the seats were on the forty-yard line. The African-Americans, however, rarely received free food, clothes, or random acts of kindness from people whom Carter called “good Samaritans.” They resolutely refused to present themselves as pitiable, down-on-their-luck panhandlers. As a result, they often remained hungry and dopesick.
On rare occasions, motorists took seriously the entreaties for work displayed on the cardboard signs held up by the whites. An elderly white woman hired Nickie to clean her house once a week. One of Philippe’s neighbors, an African-American man who lived up the hill from Edgewater Boulevard, picked up Petey from his regular panhandling spot at the Taco Bell exit ramp and hired him to paint his backyard fence. During the second half of our fieldwork, a middle-aged white man named Paul brought Hogan into his home and allowed him to live in his garage for several years.
Hogan: Paul’s spent most of his life taking care of his mother. She died last year and he didn’t have no one else to talk to after work. He’d come by the Dockside’s parking lot at the end of the day, and I’d borrow a dollar or two dollars. And after a few years it got to where I was borrowing tens and twenties. That’s when he offered to let me stay in his garage.
He gives me twenty dollars every morning for my hit. He buys me clothes, shoes, cigarettes. So I help him around the house. He’s left his mom’s room just the way she had it. He cooks meals every night, frozen pasta. He’s Italian. So at least I eat once a day.
Paul was gay, but he made no sexual advances toward Hogan. His only requirement was that Hogan remain quietly in the garage when sexual partners visited.
In contrast to the generosity of private citizens, public welfare entitlements were difficult to access. Rarely were more than two or three individuals in our network receiving public assistance checks or food stamps at any given time. The whites negotiated the complicated, and sometimes humiliating, bureaucratic hoops more frequently than did African-Americans. Few, however, managed to remain on welfare for longer than a few months. Case managers have significant leeway in interpreting eligibility rules. When Frank was thrown off welfare one Christmas, he attributed his “bad luck” to the “bad mood” of his welfare worker: “Maybe it’s the holidays. I was an hour late, and usually he doesn’t care about that as long as my paperwork’s in order. But this time he said, ‘Maybe . . . I should send you through triage again.’ I was too dopesick, so I got up and left.” Heroin withdrawal symptoms made it difficult to fulfill the workfare requirements legislated by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act passed by the U.S. Congress in 1996. It took Frank over a year to successfully requalify for public assistance, but his payments lasted only three months because he failed to comply with workfare recertification.
Nickie was the only member of the Edgewater scene who stayed on welfare throughout the entire duration of our research. Women can qualify for support from welfare bureaucracies when they obey scripts of “worthy [single] motherhood” (Passaro 1996). Somehow Nickie successfully hid her heroin addiction from her social workers and maintained custody of her child. She never lost her housing project apartment despite repeated incarcerations for shoplifting. She also complied with her workfare obligation, washing city buses at the municipal depot for twenty hours per week.
The Edgewater homeless did not recognize the complex array of structural forces around ethnicity, gender, economy, public policy, law enforcement, and social stigma that shaped their subjectivities and habituses and constrained their survival options. Instead, as we have shown, they acted out socially structured roles through their everyday practices, confirming to themselves and to those around them that they deserved their fate. They also talked about race and culture in moral, essentialized terms. The whites condemned African-Americans for being thieves, and the African-Americans criticized the whites for “lacking initiative” and for “being too stupid and lazy to hit licks.” Both groups, however, engaged in petty, opportunistic theft. The whites pretended that they did not do so, whereas the African-Americans exaggerated their professional skills as criminals. They often reminisced about the dramatic criminal escapades of their youth, whereas the whites generally spoke in hyperbolic terms of past successes in the legal labor market.
Occasionally, the whites also celebrated memories of youthful illegal exploits, but their outlaw nostalgia differed from that of the African-Americans, reflecting distinct reservoirs of ethnic cultural capital. Frank, for example, spoke of smuggling kilos of heroin in a yacht from the Golden Triangle and claimed that Rolling Stone magazine had run a feature on his partner in crime, who had been arrested in Thailand. We were unable to locate the Rolling Stone article, but as chapter 4 describes, Frank’s father confirmed that his son had sold drugs to the Jefferson Airplane rock group and at one point had a “drawer full of about a hundred thousand dollars in cash.” Hank recounted a fantastic story of drilling a hole in the roof of San Francisco’s de Young Museum to heist antique dolls. Barbara, his sister, told us that Hank never burglarized the museum, but she confirmed that he was arrested for insurance fraud when he faked the theft of valuable porcelain dolls from his brother-in-law’s antique store.
Sonny referred to his glory days of being a big-time drug dealer. According to a 1987 police report, he was merely selling ten-dollar packets of heroin from his girlfriend’s housing project apartment. His supplier owned the garage where Sonny’s father had his car repaired.
Carter sought respect as an O.G. through braggadocio accounts of having been a “stickup artist” (see also Katz 1988:263–273):
I did three banks. One was two days before New Year’s Eve. We watched it on the news on the seventeenth floor of the Hyatt Regency, drinking champagne. The rush! You actually living out a movie, right—you open the bag and throw a stack of money, like playing a food fight.
It was great, but after doin’ a couple of banks, we robbed a House of Pancakes on Lombard Street and got caught. The police put a hundred seven holes in my van. Looked like a piece of Swiss cheese. Had us face down on the ground in the middle of the freeway. They had a SWAT team on our side and a helicopter landing on the other side of the guardrail. It was a do-or-die situation, you know, living on the edge. That’s the rush.
My partners was in the back of the van on the floor with two Samsonite thick briefcases full of ammunition. Boxes of bullets, brand-new bullets. Anything from twenty-two shorts to twenty-two longs to three fifty-sevens to nine millimeters, thirty-eight specials. We even had a motherfuckin’ German Lugar in there. And a sawed-off shotgun with a custom holster.
The D.A. messed the case up. Plus the witnesses had their stories all fucked up. I went to court every day for three months. I had three lawyers ’cause it was two codependents [sic]. The judge was mad. He said, “It’s motherfuckers like you that I’d like to put away forever.”
But we beat the robbery. They gave me a year for possession of firearms. They even gave the money back. “Robbery dismissed!” [pounding an imaginary gavel] It was seven thousand dollars cash because we did really detailed casing. That’s why we chose Thanksgiving morning. We knew they wouldn’t turn the money in till after the holidays.
According to the police report, only 596 dollars was taken from the International House of Pancakes that Thanksgiving morning, and a portion of the money was in “traveler’s checks and charge drafts.” Carter’s yellow van was, indeed, shot many times, but only in the tires, and only after it accidentally lurched forward when Carter forgot to shift out of gear after being ordered to get out of the car and crawl onto the ground. There is no mention in the police report of a getaway attempt, but there is a description of “two briefcases . . . containing seven handguns and a large amount of ammunition. Two of the handguns were identified as previously stolen weapons.”
The court records also confirm that the robbery charge was dismissed. Carter and his coconspirators benefited from the inability of the white witnesses to distinguish the three black male defendants from others in the police line-up. Ironically, according to the court records, Carter and his accomplices had originally been arrested precisely because of their skin color: black men running down the street often prompt suspicion in the United States.
[Witness X] testified . . . he was one block from the IHOP [International House of Pancakes] in his pickup truck. . . . As he started to turn left . . . a black man ran alongside the driver’s side of his truck. He saw another black man running on the sidewalk on the passenger side . . . the running men looked strange to Mr. [X] and he copied down the license plate of their van . . . and circled the block. When he saw a police car arriving at the IHOP [Witness X] . . . gave the officer the license number.
Sonny’s personal style was more gentlemanly than Carter’s, but he was no less committed to being an outlaw rather than a beggar: “It’s not beg, borrow, or steal. It’s beg, borrow, and steal. But I still like to think of myself as having morals. I never steal from people I know.” Court records confirm Sonny’s accounts of participating in an armed robbery and home invasion in the mansion of a wealthy, politically connected San Francisco socialite: “Entry was . . . made through a window. . . . Owner was tied up and threatened on numerous occasions and . . . bound in her own home. . . . [T]hey took . . . personal property . . . [and] also took an automobile.” Sonny considered himself to be a professional, and he favored intimidation tactics over violence. In addition to being an effective hustler, he was a friendly, good-humored person. He even expressed empathy for his victims:
We ransacked in and then, fuck! Somebody was in the kitchen. There she was. But she still hadn’t seen us, and we didn’t want her to see us. We told her, “Be cool about it. . . . Make no noise. . . . No one’s gonna get hurt. . . . Turn your head away.”
I could imagine the lady was pretty scared. We surprised her in her own home and we had a gun. I could imagine if somebody came in my mom’s home like that. She’d probably shit bricks!
But she tried to run away, so I grabbed her hair and told her to lay down while we tied her up. We didn’t want to tie her up too tight, just enough so she could get loose, but not while we were still there.
So then we got to ransackin’ and got to loadin’ up shit in her car, in the garage—jewelry, stereos, and even some stock exchange things.
We got her ring, worth about five or six thousand dollars, and my partner drove off to pawn it. Get us some quick cash. I made it back to my apartment, but the lady got loose too soon, and the police was swarming around. They stopped my partner. He drivin’ all crazy, right, through a red light. And he on parole and he got a warrant on him and got his billy club in his car. And so they got him for a weapon violation and he was locked up.
So then his mother and his brother had came to where I be stayin’ at my mom’s house, askin’ [whining], “Can I have this? Can I have that?”
I said, “Sure, that’s your son’s part.”
I gave both of them a lot of shit, whatever they wanted—stereos and TVs, because I had the good shit, like the nice jewelry, stashed to the side, so I just went on about my business.
About a week and a half later, I drove to my mom’s house and I’m coming down the hill and I see this white undercover police car parked. I opened my door to make a mad dash right by them, but then from behind me, “Click, click.” A police in plain clothes drew down on me with his gun.
We enter through the garage of my mom’s house. “You on probation,” they say. “Search and seizure.” I say, “Yeah. I know that, but you can only search me and my person and my place of residence, and I don’t stay upstairs. I stay right down here in this room in the garage.” And I say, “Mama, all you got to do is tell them you don’t want them searchin’ your house.”
But she doesn’t know nothin’ about this law stuff, but she finally got on that and said, “No. I don’t want y’all searchin’ my house.” And one of the police—they was actually acting kinda nice—says, “Well, he’s right and we can’t.”
So they didn’t search upstairs. In my room they started taking pictures of shoes, ’cause when we made the lady lay down, she was looking at our shoes. She never saw our faces, but she gave them a description of my shoes.
Well, the police are looking up and down, checking their list with jewelry and stuff like that. They lookin’ all up on the shelves. And suddenly I say to myself, “Goddamn. I got her husband’s watch on!” And they did everything except check the fuckin’ watch.
They did a whole interrogation. I’m tellin’ them I don’t have nothing to say, but they keep interrogatin’. Nothin’ about no memorandum [Miranda] rights. And in court, my lawyer, he played their interrogation tape to the judge. That’s how I beat the burglary case. I was never read my memoranda rights, man. But I also had probation, so the judge gave me the maximum on that previous drug sales charge—three and a half years.
See the lady, she was scared. She told the judge we was threatening to cut her finger off because we wanted to take her ring, and it wouldn’t come off.
But I had told my partner, “Fuck that ring!” It wouldn’t be worth it to cut the lady’s finger off to get the ring. I’m not into that violent kind of shit. It would make things worser than what they are.
She said in court, “I was really thankful to him that he said that. If not, I might have been missing a finger.”
Also, the lady, she a personal friend of the mayor, that Feinstein lady. And the judge, too. They all friends. They came out together in the parking lot. I saw them. They all belong to the same country club. They play tennis and golf. . . .
So the mayor had the police movin’ on it. It a top priority case. They wanted to wash my ass. And that’s why the judge sent me back to the pen again for three and a half years on a probation violation. I went to Soledad.
Shortly after this conversation, Sonny was incarcerated for breaking into a parked vehicle. This time, however, he ended up as the victim of violence and he spent a week under police guard in the county hospital’s surgery ward to have a metal plate inserted into his forehead. When he was released from county jail eight months later, he was partially blind in his left eye. The police report contains a handwritten statement by the owner of the vehicle, a contractor with a Spanish last name and limited English literacy skills. Sonny emerges from between the lines as a broken-down old man no longer capable of defending himself effectively, a far cry from the gun-wielding burglar of his youth:
Saw black male with toolboxes. . . . Relized they were mine . . . saw back window in Van broken. . . . Person tryed to run, grabed & pushed. . . . Made set down on butt. Jumped up and Tryed to run again. Shoved down & held him W/knee on chest by Throat . . . person when to corner, Tryed to run again (comb in right hand raised up in air) & Thought it was a knife, threw him against concrete. Grabed hand & removed comb. Made set down again.
The police report continues with a list of what Sonny was carrying in his jacket pocket:
ITEM: CRACK PIPE. DESCRIPTION: THREE-INCH PIECE OF ANTENNA TUBE WITH A RUBBER
MESH AROUND ONE END AND COPPER AROUND OPPOSITE END.
ITEM: TWO OFF-WHITE ROCKS WRAPPED IN MUNI TRANSFER.
ITEM: ONE HYPODERMIC NEEDLE FILLED WITH 30 CCS OF A BROWN LIQUID.
The African-Americans rarely discussed employment spontaneously or sought jobs during the years we knew them. Nevertheless, when we collected their work histories, they spoke positively about past involvement in the legal labor market. Their nostalgic reminiscences provide additional evidence that their celebration of an outlaw persona, which proudly rejected subordination and exploitation in the labor market, was not a personal choice. Rather, it was imposed on them by a legacy of exclusion from legal employment. Sonny spoke with fondness of his emergency employment in 1983 following a toxic chemical explosion in the Del Monte building downtown (New York Times 1983, June 2; San Francisco Chronicle 1983, May 16):
The best, most paying job I ever had, as far as making money, was when they had that chemical spill down there at One Market Plaza. Ten dollars twenty-four cents an hour. We worked ten hours a day, six days a week. Got paid every Friday.
And the job was easy as shit, you know what I’m sayin’. Wiping down a lot of chemicals. They called it PC . . . something. . . . Oh, yeah! PCB.
The first six months, everybody was working, but during that time you had to take . . . what was it? Biopsy! You know, they cut a little piece of meat off your ass. And if you were well, then you worked the last six months. You were the last one to be fired. Not fired, but let go.
I was okay, so I worked the second six months too. I worked security, and that wasn’t nothin’ but directing cars. Telling people walking by, “Go back this way. . . . You can’t go through this way. . . .” And we had straight overtime. Time-and-a-half, to fifteen an hour.
When pressed for more details, Sonny admitted, with some embarrassment, that this one year-long stint in toxic cleanup was the only legal job he had ever held. According to newspaper reports from the 1980s, the toxic risk of Sonny’s “best, most paying job” was not limited to “wiping down . . . PCBs.” He and his fellow workers were also exposed to “the more toxic tetrachlorodibenzofuran . . . a chemical relative of dioxin . . . known to cause cancer, liver damage and birth defects in laboratory animals” (San Francisco Chronicle 1983, May 16). Reggie and Carter, two other African-Americans, also spoke with pride about working temporary, but “well-paid,” toxic jobs: they both worked on U.S. military bases removing asbestos.
An additional indication of the lumpen status of the Edgewater homeless is apparent from the way so many of them referred to the prison system as one of their primary, long-term, “legal” employers. Much of their work while incarcerated had been routine. Nonetheless, they spoke of it with relish: Carter parlayed “mail delivery” into trafficking contraband; Frank worked in “agriculture” and fermented moonshine in the seedling sheds; Ben manufactured freeway signs and referred to those skills when applying for unionized tinsmith jobs; Hank worked in the cafeteria and laughed about the power that this position gave him over other inmates. The prison jobs they were proudest of were the most dangerous ones: Carter and Al had fought forest fires while in juvenile detention, and Sonny and Frank had done so as adults. They were paid only a fraction of the minimum wage to perform these dangerous jobs, yet their eagerness to talk about them suggests that they yearned for the sense of worth they achieved through engaging in this socially respected and quintessentially masculine hard work.
Frank was serving two years for first-degree burglary when the Loma Prieta earthquake hit San Francisco in 1989. He was sent to salvage materials from the wreckage:
They sent us to the Marina District, where all those buildings were crumpled down and shit. It was like a ghost town. All the buildings cracked, with big jacks holding them up. They had the streets barricaded, and our job was to go in there to haul stuff out.
The institutionalized racialization of the California correctional system and the normalization of extreme violence by prison guards also emerge between the lines of Frank’s prison work reminiscences:
The Busters, the Northern California Chicanos, controlled the pen. They knew how the system worked and had the best jobs. One of their fathers was a heroin dealer that I used to buy from, out on the street, and his son saved me when they tried to put a snitch jacket on me.
First, I worked in agriculture. But we got raided for fermenting pruno from fruit, sugar, and yeast that we’d get from the kitchen workers. I didn’t even get a chance to drink it.
Most of the guards were white, though, and they liked me. So they went easy on me, and I was assigned to firefighting as special work duty instead of being chained down for the pruno.
You see, the blacks used to fight the blacks, the Mexicans used to fight the Mexicans, and sometimes the Mexicans fought the blacks. The guards just stood by, laughin’. “Let the toads fight,” they’d say. And the Mexicans were swingin’ fence posts studded with barbed wire. But I was white, and they didn’t usually get involved with white guys.
In the mountains, we worked side by side with regular firemen, who got paid good. We only got a dollar an hour, but when you’re in prison that’s pretty good money, because we’d be out there twenty hours straight, cutting a firebreak. Sometimes for a week or more.
You gotta go through a training program. They give you these old fire tents. Some of them were so old they’d get rotten, and we called them Shake-n-Bake because the flame goes right through the holes. When the winds change, and there’s convection currents when you’re on the side of a hill, all of a sudden, the fire shoots right up that hill, and whap! Runs right over you. Two or three times I’ve heard of crews getting wiped out like that. You can’t get out of the damn way. And you’re gone.
Undocumented immigrants were the most visible, face-to-face competitors for the day labor jobs that the Edgewater homeless strove to obtain from local businesses and homeowners. On any given day, at rush hour along the boulevard, there were dozens of Asian and Latina women waiting at bus stops on their way to and from the few remaining factory sweatshops in the adjoining warehouse district. A half mile away in the Mission District, hundreds of young, healthy men, newly arrived from Mexico and Central America, lined the main street, waiting hopefully for employers. They were prepared to work hard for low wages.
This competition for day labor generated a palpable ethnic animosity. Petey, for example, in response to a passing motorist’s offer of three dollars to clean his car, “inside and out,” answered, “I ain’t no bean-and-rice-eating illegal!” A week before this incident, Andy, the mover, drove by Petey and picked up an undocumented laborer instead: “I know he saw me, because I was where I always am, standing here by the Taco Bell exit sign. He always passes up and down the boulevard at least twice lookin’ for me. But this time I saw that he had some Mexican sitting next to him in the van.” As a U.S.-born Latino, Felix aggressively differentiated himself from the undocumented: “I ain’t working for no wetback wages.” Max, consistent with his gentler personality, was more charitable. When he came back from a day of moving furniture for Andy, he marveled: “I never moved such heavy stuff in my life, but we got some Mexican kids from the Mission to help. They were good workers, and that made it much easier.”
The Edgewater homeless often preyed on Latino immigrants—even if not always successfully, as in Sonny’s beatdown over the toolbox. On another occasion, Jeff was an unwilling witness to a spur-of-the-moment theft of tools belonging to new-immigrant laborers.
I accompany Carter as he cases out a junkyard he plans to burglarize for recyclable metal later tonight. From behind a camper, we hear three men talking in Spanish. They are celebrating the end of the work week on this warm Friday summer evening, drinking beers.
At the foot of the warehouse loading ramp, there is a small green and tan canvas duffel bag. Its straps are crisscrossed and twisted to form a more secure single reinforced strap. Carter looks at the bag intently and slows down, but keeps walking. With feigned disinterest, he casually turns his head to the right and then to the left. Detecting that the bag is not within the view of the three men, he slowly walks back to inspect it more closely, patting it softly with the palm of his hand. I hear him mutter something about a drill, and then a more audible, “Please help me, God.”
Scanning once more in both directions, but this time more openly and more tensely, Carter whispers to me, “Why would they leave the bag back here out of sight and be sitting just ten feet away?” I pretend to ignore him, but remember that some of the guys say the toolbox that led to Sonny’s beatdown had been bait, left out by the construction worker to catch him red-handed.
Carter takes a deep breath, grabs the bag, spins around, and cradles it in both arms to his chest so that it is not visible from behind. Hissing, “Jeff, watch my back,” he walks briskly down the street.
A nervous smile fixed on his face, Carter deliberately slows his pace as he reaches the middle of the block. His back has now come into full view of the three Latino workers sitting on the warehouse loading dock. I hear him murmuring, “Oh, please, Lord, just let me get around that corner; please, please!” I can tell that his insides are coiled and he is ready to burst into a sprint at the slightest noise behind him.
Rounding the corner and out of sight, he lunges into a sprint. An empty rusted shopping cart happens to be lying on its side in the gutter, and he drops the canvas bag into it. He pushes it rapidly at a trot for another two blocks. After rounding two more corners, he finally stops to examine the bag’s contents. A well-worn leather work belt is neatly folded on top as a protective cover. Underneath is a power drill with an orange extension cord coiled into a tight ringlet. Further below lie a masonry hammer, a screwdriver, and some heavy-duty wire cutters.
I follow Carter three more blocks to an auto body repair yard that fences stolen goods. The owner, an Asian man, is busy with a customer, and we have to wait for an hour. Carter, still nervous, tells me he is planning to ask for forty dollars for all the stuff but will settle for thirty-five.
Feeling terrible for the workers who have just been ripped off, after what must have been a week of hard work, I ask Carter how damaging he thinks it will be to those workers to lose these tools. He pretends not to hear my question and giggles, “My ass was scared, walking with my back to the Mexicans.”
Carter leaves the fence’s shop cursing, with the duffel bag still underarm. Apparently, my camera “spooked the owner,” and he told Carter to leave and never return. “Motherfuckin’ chink,” Carter grumbles, “I’ll get your shop, later.”
We walk ten blocks to Chico’s Tunes, where Carter settles for ten dollars without much negotiating. He is visibly suffering from heroin withdrawal symptoms, and Chico knows that ten dollars is the current price for a bag of heroin. Cursing, Carter heads straight to Sal the dealer.
The Edgewater homeless and undocumented Latinos were confined to the same marginalized public spaces, sought the same poorly paid and unstable jobs, and scavenged for recyclables in the same gutters. This kind of structurally overdetermined setting acts as a pressure cooker for racialized ideologies. It is a microcosm of the larger, long-term patterns of immigration and inequality that have shaped U.S. history and helps explain the ongoing valence of racism in the United States. Ironically, Chico, a new-immigrant business owner, profited the most from the victimization of the undocumented Latino workers. Nonetheless, in manipulatively out-bargaining Carter (who had already vengefully vowed to burglarize yet another immigrant entrepreneur), Chico unwittingly fueled another round of racialized antagonisms.
Sonny was aware of the structural forces that limited his access to stable, well-paid employment. He specifically identified the multinational corporate logic for the deindustrialization of the Bay Area, where tens of thousands of factory jobs were lost in the 1970s and 1980s (Self 2003; Walker 1990; Wright 2004). Sonny could not stop himself, however, from echoing the conspiracy theories and anti-immigrant vitriol that prevailed on right-wing talk radio in California during our dozen years of fieldwork:
A lot of these companies move they business overseas where they ain’t got to pay all that money that they would pay here. And that takes jobs away from a lot of people.
It creates a lot of problems, too. It seems like these company people should want to think about home first.
They want to know why we got so much turmoil, so much problems, so many homeless people in this country. And that’s the reason why. Company people being greedy. Each day that go by, they sendin’ more and more people out in the streets to be homeless, where a lot of them turn to crime. A lot of them would do shit like we doin’, push a buggy to get cardboard, bottles, and shit like that, to try to more or less stay within the legal guidelines.
But don’t nobody want to starve, man. Hunger ain’t nothin’ nice. I used to take shit like that for granted a long time ago, you know, when I was coming up, until I became part of it, being out here [pointing to the cans in his buggy] and bein’ hungry; and it ain’t nothin’ nice, man.
Plus them companies got a lot of those illegals working for them. That’s where they save money. It keeps a lot of other folks from getting jobs. They don’t pay them right. But the illegals don’t care. Compared to what they would make at home, you know, they doin’ pretty good here.
And then they work for a good little ol’ while and then go back home with that money. That’s a nice little ol’ bundle they have within a year. They can live pretty good on that back home. They take care of they family.
I don’t blame them, you know. I’m just sayin’, them companies that do that, they keepin’ a lot of other folks from getting jobs. They hire twenty or thirty of them illegals, and that’s twenty or thirty other people that could be workin’ that’s been here all they lives and stuff but can’t find nothing; because they hiring all these aliens, because they ain’t got to pay them that much. Everywhere you go just about now you see a lot of them. . . . What do they call them? Foreigners. From other countries and stuff like that.
Even down at the welfare office. Shit! The majority of the people that work in there . . . you can’t understand what they be sayin’ when you talk to them.
And then they be actin’ like the money is theirs and shit, like this here [high-pitched voice], “You can’t get no money.”
[resuming normal voice] “Oh, you motherfucker. Shit! I been here all my life. And I got to go do all this here, just to get a few dollars from you all. And then you all come here. The government give you all money when you get here.”
They set ’em up with a little old business, give them a little old house where nine or ten of ’em might be staying, poolin’ they money together and shit, to open up a business.
And here we are. Out here in these streets struggling. Trying to do this, trying to do that, and can’t do nothin’ ’cause they giving all the jobs away to other people.
As an individual, Sonny was a polite, gentle man, who stole and scavenged aggressively to maintain his addiction to heroin and crack. Understanding him or any of the homeless on Edgewater Boulevard in absolute moral categories, such as worthy worker, or thief, or xenophobic dopefiend, overstates the parameters for individual agency and obscures structural forces. Sonny’s predicament is framed by a restructured global economy, institutionalized racism, a shredded welfare safety net, gentrification accompanied by a speculative real-estate market, and draconian drug laws. Depending on which fieldwork moment and theoretical lens one might select, consequently, the Edgewater homeless can be construed as exploited victims desperately seeking the dignity of legal day labor or as conniving, lazy, good-for-nothing addicts. In fact, like people everywhere buffeted by their moment in history and bounded by their personal fallabilities, they struggle to sustain some sense of agency and moral logic within the chronic crises enveloping their immediate social network.
