The Fight to Save the Town

Reimagining Discarded America

Michelle Wilde Anderson

• Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781501196003
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A sweeping and eye-opening study of wealth inequality and the dismantling of local government in four working-class US cities that passionately argues for reinvestment in people-centered leadership and offers "a welcome reminder of what government can accomplish if given the chance" ( San Francisco Chronicle ). Decades of cuts to local government amidst rising concentrations of poverty have wreaked havoc on communities left behind by the modern economy. Some of these discarded places are rural. Others are big cities, small cities, or historic suburbs. Some vote blue, others red. Some are the most diverse communities in America, while others are nearly all white, all Latino, or all Black. All are routinely trashed by outsiders for their poverty and their politics. Mostly, their governments are just broke. Forty years after the anti-tax revolution began protecting wealthy taxpayers and their cities, our high-poverty cities and counties have run out of services to cut, properties to sell, bills to defer, and risky loans to take.In this "astute and powerful vision for improving America" ( Publishers Weekly ), urban law expert and author Michelle Wilde Anderson offers unsparing, humanistic portraits of the hardships left behind in four such places. But this book is not a eulogy or a lament. Instead, Anderson travels to four blue-collar communities that are poor, broke, and progressing. Networks of leaders and residents in these places are facing down some of the hardest challenges in American poverty today. In Stockton, California, locals are finding ways, beyond the police department, to reduce gun violence and treat the trauma it leaves behind. In Josephine County, Oregon, community leaders have enacted new taxes to support basic services in a rural area with fiercely anti-government politics. In Lawrence, Massachusetts, leaders are figuring out how to improve job security and wages in an era of backbreaking poverty for the working class. And a social movement in Detroit, Michigan, is pioneering ways to stabilize low-income housing after a wave of foreclosures and housing loss.Our smallest governments shape people's safety, comfort, and life chances. For decades, these governments have no longer just reflected inequality—they have helped drive it. But it doesn't have to be that way. Anderson shows that "if we learn to save our towns, we will also be learning to save ourselves" ( The New York Times Book Review).

CHAPTER ONE

“I Won’t Give Up On You, Ever” Stockton, California

When Jasmine Dellafosse was a teenager at Edison High School in Stockton, ten of her peers were killed across a two-year period between 2010 and 2012. Judhromia Johnson, Jr., age seventeen, the football team’s MVP, was shot while riding in a car on his way to practice. Fernando Aguilar, sixteen, and Edgar Alcauter, eighteen, were killed at a graduation party. Juan Juarez-Martinez, seventeen, was shot while riding his bike. Xavier Javier Plascencia, eighteen, was killed while walking on a sidewalk at noon on a Monday. Joe Xiong, fifteen, was shot, along with eight others who did not die, at a birthday party. Jorge Angulo, eighteen, was shot while sitting in a pickup truck with friends. Alejandro Vizcarra, sixteen, was shot in front of his home. Travae Vance, eighteen, was chased into a field and shot dead just months after his graduation from Edison. Searching for these youth, I found an eleventh who was no longer in school, an eighteen-year-old named Angelo Peraza who was shot in a car. There were also at least three other students at Stockton’s Stagg High killed during that time.

When you search just about any one of these victims’ names plus the word Stockton on YouTube, you’ll find teen-made memorial videos with lyrics, photo montages, and messages of love to the dead. Once you find the first such video, YouTube’s algorithms start queuing others—a channel for mourning made by surviving Stockton youth. I also came across a funeral home’s online guestbook for Angelo Peraza’s family and friends. He died in 2011, but the entries in the guestbook have continued. His mother, and sometimes other family members, use it to reach out to him. They wish him happy birthday, tell him about 49ers games. They try to report cheerful news from Christmas, but they admit that the sinkhole of his absence is biggest on holidays. Peraza’s mother uses the guestbook like a grief diary, talking of the “life sentence” that she has gotten from his death, remembering and describing his skin, inputting poems about loss. She rearranges the words “I miss you” so she can say them again and again—sometimes with spaces between the letters, sometimes vertically, sometimes across the frame in a long diagonal as if she were marking time.

This is what trauma from violence looks like. Not the trauma handled in hospital emergency rooms, but the trauma that comes and stays for the people who emerge from that hospital alive, the family members who ran down hallways to find the ICU, the people who witnessed what it looks like when a human body takes a bullet. The trauma of Dellafosse, her classmates, their parents, their teachers, as death kept coming at them and erasing people they knew. That trauma that very likely preceded the shooters’ capacity to pull those triggers.

But back in 2011, Edison High School did not have counselors equipped to help students and families process the trauma of their losses. Teachers gathered students in the library to let them cry, but “the only people who really helped us grieve through it were friends,” Dellafosse said. After the first shooting, when they lost J. J., Edison principal Brian Biedermann told the local newspaper, “Nothing ever prepares you for this. There’s no class, no training that teaches you to prepare for the loss of a student. I told the kids, just like you, I’m confused, hurt, don’t know how to act. We just lost a family member.”

In the aftermath of this violence, Stockton did what many cities do: punishment, fear, denial. They sent in police officers. They prosecuted shooters where they could. With just one counselor per 850 students, the school district spent about $3 million per year to fund a school police department, resulting in nearly 2,000 arrests of students between July 2012 and November 2016. Officers cited disruption, marijuana possession, truancy, and curfew violations for well over half of those arrests. There were no ceremonies to mark the death toll in the city, no public memorials in which outsiders expressed empathy, no sense that the killings had an endpoint where recovery could begin. Journalists publicized the rising body count, and city leaders answered with a recommitment to crime fighting—a two-step routine that treated the deaths as a sign of social depravity rather than suffering. When the homicide rate stopped breaking records, outsiders stopped paying attention at all.

Stockton then tried to forget. It had been doing the same since at least 1989, when a white man opened fire with an AK-47 at the city’s Cleveland Elementary School, killing five children and wounding thirty-two others. All of the dead and most of the wounded were Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees, already traumatized by the violence they had fled. It was the worst K-12 school shooting in American history and remained so until the 1999 massacre at Columbine High in Colorado. But many people in Stockton and elsewhere have never heard of the Cleveland School shooting, says Dillon Delvo, who works to preserve Filipino history in the city. “Can you imagine Newtown forgetting what happened to them?” The failure to memorialize became a failure to treat the damage, and both carried a message to surviving youth and their parents: society doesn’t notice if you die. There is no one but you to defend yourself and your families.

Delvo, Dellafosse, and many others in Stockton are coming to terms with the degree of trauma carried by the city’s children and families, passing from parents to children. They are facing the humiliation and hopelessness created by racial segregation and intergenerational poverty. These efforts work to heal youth before they enter school charged with fear and armored in bravado. Advocates are working to de-normalize violence while normalizing mental health support, to teach coping skills and unteach powerlessness. They are cleaning up the fallout of mass incarceration and imagining a world beyond it.

This is the work of healing beyond the hospital and public safety beyond the police department. For the first time, Stockton has a critical mass of leaders who invest time and political capital in caring for the city’s most traumatized people and neighborhoods.

At the moment Dellafosse said the word “ten” to tell me of her lost peers in high school, tears started rolling down her face. They fell on her shirt, which was printed with a photograph of her friend, another youth leader named Brandon Harrison. In the photo, Harrison smiles and wears a T-shirt that said, “HOPE DEALER,” with a silhouette of Africa inside the letter O. He was gone too, killed at age twenty. Dellafosse was wearing Harrison’s image to attend the arraignment of his alleged shooter.

Harrison had been part of that movement to stop the violence. In a speech to other youth in 2016 at a rally for “Schools Not Prisons,” he called on his peers to summon the courage they would need. He asked them, What kind of ancestor do you want to be? He pushed them to resist becoming another generation suffocated by trauma, another generation without power or purpose. He called on them to be hope dealers. Healers. To honor his life, his loved ones keep that message close.

CITY OF ANCESTORS, CITY OF ORPHANS

Stockton’s American Story

Stockton, this unfamous California city, looks like the world. One-fourth of city residents were born abroad. In this, the most diverse big city in America, first kisses cross color lines. Community potlucks are Black, white, brown, and multilingual. In 2017, more than 22 million people watched a homemade Fourth of July video of a spontaneous gathering on a residential street in Stockton. Two boom boxes traded off—one with Mexican music, the other with Punjabi music—as each group taught the other their dance moves. With the oldest Jewish cemetery in California and America’s first Sikh Gurdwara, with a concrete modernist mosque and a bejeweled Cambodian temple, Stockton’s people have long worshiped the free exercise of religion upon which America was founded.

Some families have centuries of ancestry connected to the region through the pre-colonial Yokuts and Miwok tribes, who lived along the Delta marshes in winter and the Sierra Foothills in summer. Some locals of Mexican and Spanish descent trace heritage back to Alta California before the Mexican–American War, when the city’s namesake Robert Stockton conquered California soil for the United States in 1846.

Some local families date their histories to the Gold Rush. Chain-smoking under ornamental mustaches, fortune seekers from across the Americas, Europe, and China converged on Stockton as a transport depot to the gold mines. They would cram into stagecoach rides where, in the words of an appalled British writer in 1856, “for some incomprehensible reason, when stages meet, the recognition of friends is announced by enormously swearing at each other.” The Transcontinental Railroad of the 1860s, that most ruthless and mighty of nation-building infrastructure, drew thousands of Chinese migrants to labor in lethal conditions to tunnel the Sierra Nevadas and, somehow, bridge western river canyons. These migrants built Stockton’s Chinatown into Samfow, the “Third City” behind San Francisco and Sacramento. People say that nearly every Stockton family, rich or poor, has eaten dinner at New On Lock Sam, a local Chinese restaurant that dates back to 1898.

The Philippine–American War brought a fresh wave of newcomers, survivors of the death and disease caused by America’s imperial effort to rule in Southeast Asia in 1900. Thousands fled their island nation by steamer ship to reach the Port of San Francisco, where they took an overpriced taxi ride to Stockton and delivered their men to California farms that hungered for stoop labor. Filipino farmworkers migrated among harvests across the west, but the small businesses of Stockton’s Little Manila district gave them a permanent address. Each year, as labor rotations brought workers back to Stockton, they could rifle through boxes of collected letters, checking for news from their families across the ocean.

The Jim Crow Era drew migrants to Stockton from the American South. Thousands of African American children of slavery escaped the racial violence and debt peonage of sharecropping for the San Joaquin Valley, where boosters claimed they would find “[g]rapes as big as jade eggs and watermelons the size of small boats and cotton fields that didn’t quit.” The Dust Bowl followed: with eyes glazed over by loss and post-apocalyptic shock, survivors of the dark blizzards suffocating the Great Plains made it to western farm labor camps. Stockton’s migrant camp is now a poor neighborhood known as Okieville. As late as the 1980s, lifetime Stockton resident Larry Johnson told me, “If you wanted a fight, Okieville was always the best place to go. Grandma, grandpa—anyone was ready.”

One hundred years of systematic recruitment across Mexico—sometimes offering lawful immigration status, sometimes not—provided California’s vast “industrial plantations” with a flow of yet unbroken newcomers. Later, lines of refugees fleeing gang violence and civil war in Central America and Mexico survived the border crossing to tend and harvest crops like asparagus, tomatoes, and almonds. From 1975 to the late 1980s, more than 30,000 refugees of the Vietnam War and the Khmer Rouge came from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos to Stockton and its region through resettlement programs. Silicon Valley has attracted the newest wave of prospectors, who left behind hometowns across the world in hopes of making a fortune, or at least a living, in California. They have not yet made it to pay dirt.

Stockton should be a symbol of the racial diversity at the heart of America’s future. But so, too, it embodies the racial violence at the heart of America’s history. Yokuts tribal villages were nearly wiped out by the Franciscan mission system, a calamitous malaria outbreak in 1833, and the “clearest case of genocide in the history of the American frontier.” The Ku Klux Klan and others used bombing, arson, and lynching to terrorize Filipinos in the 1920s and 30s. Public officials assembled Japanese-Americans at a detention center at the fairgrounds in Stockton in 1942 before forced relocation to internment camps. Banks used racially restrictive covenants and mortgage redlining to bar non-whites from northern neighborhoods through the 1950s. City leaders bulldozed homes, business districts, and heritage sites in Little Manila, Chinatown, and Japantown in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1990s to make way for a freeway, a gas station, and a McDonald’s.

Even though there are no plaques marking the city’s redlining boundaries from the late 1930s, it is not hard to guess which streets enjoyed early public investment and mortgage lending, and which were marked as unworthy. Sidewalk canopies of ash, plum, pistachio, oaks, and redwood trees now shade those streets once color-coded as all-white and optimal for investment. Their sturdy trunks and arching branches reflect public dollars spent long ago. The redlined zones of Black, Latino, Asian-American, and mixed-race families, which were deemed high risk for investment, have sidewalks that are mostly a barren landscape of cracked concrete and scrappy grasses. These neighborhoods have a mismatched scattering of street trees, most of which are scrawny young things planted by nonprofits. By the time neighborhoods of all racial compositions could compete for public dollars for beautification and infrastructure, there were few dollars to go around. Between 1979 and 2016, the federal funding allocated to neighborhood development decreased 80 percent.

For decades, police stops helped enforce racial segregation in daily life. Gino Avila, a Latino counselor with Point Break Adolescent Resources, works long and high-risk hours trying to draw youth and men out of “the life” tangled up with crime. He describes his work as following the message of Saint Francis: “Preach the gospel. When necessary, use words.” Yet Avila explains that he has been pulled over repeatedly by police when he’s driving to reach his bank or the big grocery stores on the north side of town. Even when he shows his ID card showing his work for a well-known youth organization, officers have said, “You shouldn’t be up here.”

Stockton is a big city of 310,000 people, but its roots and setting make it feel more rural. Major dairy operations share the region with fields and orchards growing nuts, cherries, tomatoes, potatoes, grains, and beans. The city’s canneries, tanneries, and warehouses feed transport lines that feed the nation. Two freeways and a railroad meet Stockton’s inland seaport along the San Joaquin River, offering land and marine highways for moving goods between California’s fertile interior and the metropolitan areas of San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, and Sacramento, and global points beyond. At this strategic crossroads, the city built a manufacturing hub of farm machinery, construction materials, food packaging, and processed foods. Stockton has managed to hold on to some of these production lines, but this city that invented the Caterpillar tractor and Duraflame log has mostly lost its better-paid manufacturing jobs.

Like every other major city that went through a municipal bankruptcy in the Great Recession (including Detroit, San Bernardino, and Vallejo), Stockton spent much of its modern history supporting the American military. Shipyards and a U.S. Naval supply and communications facility in Stockton on Rough and Ready Island employed tens of thousands of workers in World War II. The shipyards closed over time, and Rough and Ready was decommissioned in 1995. Today, that land is used for transportation and warehousing businesses, where lower-wage workers sort and move imports and exports.

Stockton’s region has gained jobs in the service sector, education, and medicine, but its lower-skilled workers work more hours for lower pay. Even in the national growth years of 2015–2020, unemployment averaged 8.3 percent. One in four people younger than eighteen live below the federal poverty line—a ratio that would climb dramatically if corrected for California’s high cost of living. Well over half of the tenants in the city pay more than 30 percent of their income for rent. More than one-third of homeowners in the city pay more than 30 percent of their income toward their mortgage.

Former city councilman Jesús Andrade called it a “badge of honor” that Stockton has always made a home for California farmworkers. But food systems don’t pay those workers a livable income, which increases poverty in Stockton. Farm labor entails seasons of sixty-hour weeks of work in extreme heat or biting frost, interspersed with periods of time with no income at all. The average annual income of farmworkers employed by farm labor contractors (which is typically how Stockton farmworkers find work) is about $18,720 a year. The living wage income needed to support one adult and one child in San Joaquin County is $42,000 per year. The San Joaquin Valley region has eight of the ten counties with the highest crop value in California, as well as seven of the ten counties in the state with the highest rate of child poverty.

Too many parents are gone from dawn to dusk to reach faraway and low-paid jobs. Nearly one in ten working adults in the city commutes more than ninety minutes per day. Subcontractors’ trucks and vans come through South Stockton at four o’clock in the morning to collect farmworkers or other manual laborers for the long drive to reach regional fields or construction sites. Hospitals and universities in Silicon Valley, including Stanford University, run commuter buses and vans for their low-wage workforce departing Stockton hours before dawn. Some workers spend nights in the Bay Area with friends or family to avoid commute rounds. In a high-crime environment, parental absences for low-wage work create ad...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Prologue
• Introduction: “Aren’t We the Government?”
• Chapter One: “I Won’t Give Up On You, Ever”
• Chapter Two: Man in the Arena
• Chapter Three: “Marching, Marching, in the Beauty of the Day”
• Chapter Four: Do Not Bid
• Chapter Five: Facing Forward
• Epilogue: In Honor of a Gateway City
• Author’s Note
• About the Author
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright