CHAPTER 7
Social Capital Privilege
The key to this is the center. That’s where people get their information. Information is the key to it. It’s where you found out what you needed to know, where you got the latest information from.
—Joe, Westviller, Westville Resiliency Is Us Center
In this chapter, I draw on my observations of the participation experiences of Westvillers and Eastvillers in a momentarily “desegregated” interactional space of the Westville disaster response area in search of disaster aid. I also contrast this site with other sites in Brooklyn, which provide counterfactuals to leverage my conclusions. The two categories of Rockaway residents, which I have given the pseudonyms Eastvillers and Westvillers, occupy long-standing, divergent economic realities of residential clusters bearing distinct racial and socioeconomic demographics.
Resiliency Is Us Incubates Bridging Social Capital
The “thirty-thousand-foot view” of disaster response activity at the Westville Resiliency Is Us disaster response center and surrounding area may have resembled an ant colony carrying out an egalitarian distribution of disaster resources. A casual observer might have concluded that disaster response organizations create networking spaces that buffer against the forces sustaining the enduring material inequality of the external environment. The Westville Resiliency Is Us center arranged in plain sight food products, winter clothing, cleaning supplies, and printed information about government aid programs. I did not discern major coordination issues at this center, beyond the late arrival of Resiliency Is Us to The Rockaways. Friendly volunteers were eager to provide relief and recovery assistance to whoever made it to the Westville disaster response center. My field notes of resident perceptions offered no overarching suspicion or particular concern with NGO discrimination or corruption. Initial observations and face-to-face conversations with Westville NGO “patrons” would support the notion of the egalitarian idealism one might expect of disaster response centers.
I waded through the sand-dusted streets of Westville and happened upon this make-shift center toward the end of a well-traveled street in Westville. Over the course of my fieldwork on the peninsula, I would repeatedly return to this fulcrum of disaster response activity. In the early wake of Sandy’s landfall, I peered into the distant gazes of shivering Rockaway disaster survivors who poured out of their cold and damp homes, making their way past piles of rubble, and finally were received into the warmth of the generator-powered, Westville disaster response center. Disaster survivors dragged their tired bodies along to serving tables, where they would eventually clasp their frigid fingers around thin cups of hot beverages and plates of hot, cooked meals. Once fed, thawed, and swaddled in ill-fitting winter coats, disaster survivors would delve into stacks and rolls of relief supplies, often at the beckoning of the center’s field manager or an eager NGO volunteer.
Joe was now nursing the cup of coffee that a Resiliency Is Us volunteer had poured from behind the row of serving tables lining the far wall of this makeshift NGO disaster response center nestled in this affluent, homeowner community of Westville. Just a few days earlier, the Atlantic Ocean had breached its shores and engulfed the basements and first floors of homes and buildings that lined this and surrounding Westville streets. Joe explained, “The key to this is the center. That’s where people get their information. Information is the key to it. It’s where you found out what you needed to know, where you got the latest information from.” The structure abutted the steel fence enclosing the repurposed court on this well-traveled street in Westville. Resiliency Is Us had launched its disaster response efforts on the peninsula from this makeshift site. This site had morphed into this lucrative fulcrum of disaster response activity for Westvillers.
Joe’s statements hinted at the significant role the Westville Resiliency Is Us disaster response center played in the early phase of the post-disaster recovery of Westvillers. Joe was a Westville homeowner and landlord of rental apartments in Eastville. Inside this makeshift NGO disaster response center, Joe and I sat at one of the long white event tables and chairs, fit for ten guests. I hunched over across the table toward Joe, as I listened intently to firsthand accounts of his subjective experiences with disaster assistance and recovery. I marveled at the calm and certainty of recovery he exuded, as he relayed in past tense the chaotic, uncertain beginnings of what were now successively accomplished disaster recovery milestones, which he attributes to NGO-mediated disaster assistance. Joe’s disaster narrative stood in stark contrast to those of Eastvillers I would meet later that day. Many Eastvillers I had met, spoken with, and observed by that time had not yet experienced such successive bursts of progress toward recovery, nor would they ever experience such, even several months into the official disaster response on The Rockaways.
Joe’s emphasis on information illustrates an interpretive use of the Westville Resiliency Is Us disaster response center as a repurposed site of interaction for accessing pertinent disaster information, not mere material supplies. Joe’s own experience of gaining access to “the ‘latest’ information” confirms the centrality of receiving this information in his recovery trajectory. However, his awareness was not simply his entrepreneurial ingenuity. Joe’s insight is rooted by his particular capacity to secure this unique access to a timely, constantly updating information stream that helped him navigate the shifting context of institutional support. In this respect, Joe’s experience closely resembles that of other similarly situated Rockaway residents: these are the economically privileged White (in the context of The Rockaways, Irish) Westvillers.
Observations and conversations in the Westville disaster area confirmed that the key to gaining effective disaster assistance was the unencumbered access to nonofficial, informally transferred, time-sensitive information about disaster relief and recovery programs that often required immediate action. What produced this informal information stream? My observations of activities around the Westville disaster response area point to the emergence of a medium of information exchange: the informal relationships forged between Westvillers and Resiliency Is Us responders over a brief period of time. The clustering of Westvillers in conversing about daily developments and sharing information updates around the Resiliency Is Us center further created a feedback loop where information circulated among these conversing Westvillers in and around the Resiliency Is Us disaster response center, helping to incubate bridging social capital.
Through this word-of-mouth augmentation process, Westvillers benefited from early bird advantages, such as getting on a waiting list for repairs. This was significant because these repairs were worth thousands of dollars in savings from avoidance of assuming additional debt and preventing loss of equity in personal resources, which were common in areas outside Westville. A less tangible but real benefit was the lessened time, energy, and frustration spent on trying to navigate disaster-related programs. Westvillers were also able to influence some NGO decisions on the ground, such as keeping the Westville NGO center running, by communicating to responders the center’s continued importance to the community.
Westvillers and NGO Responders Forge New Social Ties
According to social capital theory, a common type of bonding social capital stems from the familial or friendship tie, characterized by strong affect and expressiveness. The bonds created between Westville residents and volunteers exuded these qualities. In many ways the volunteers fulfilled a surrogate role of familial or friendship ties. In the absence of bloodlines and long years of routine relationship building, we can gauge the achievement of closeness and strength of resident-responder bonds, through expectations and displays of volunteers’ emotional commitment and the psychological and material value to individual residents. We expect that familial and friendship ties are dependable and characteristic of an elevated level of commitment and certainly are self-sacrificing during periods of crisis. However, these ties form quickly and last for the duration of volunteer deployment ranging from a couple to several weeks. One indicator of the surrogating of this relationship is the trade-off decision to voluntarily miss one’s own sentimental family traditions or one’s own economic pursuits beyond the initial “sympathy” commitment to become a volunteer leading up to deployment to a disaster area.
The context of acute crisis catalyzes the process of forming these bonding social ties. The gravity of the loss and harm of surviving disaster sets much of the tenor of resident-responder relations. Several days after the flood waters had receded, Sandy’s enormity continued to inscribe the facial expressions, intonations, sighs, long silences, and tearful accounts that communicated fragile emotional states of uncertainty, disappointment, hopelessness, and utter disbelief of misfortune. Volunteers from out of town responded to and even reciprocated these sentiments, sometimes moved to tears as they recounted personal stories of residents they spoke with, assisted, encouraged, and consoled. It is important to note, however, that this positive affect often responded to not just the needs of these disaster survivors but also their expectations. Responders’ growing feelings of obligation to fulfill resident expectations, such as playing the role of confidant or conversation partner, all point to the beginnings of forging stronger, closer bonds in a shorter timeframe than is typical in routine environments.
In these respects, the particular context of the Westville Resiliency Is Us disaster response center conjured a quality of survivor-to-responder relations that presented as strong as, at least during the term of volunteer deployment, surrogate friendship or familial ties. At the person-person-block level, my observations and conversations with volunteers and Westville residents in and around the Resiliency Is Us center revealed that relations between Westville residents and Westville NGO volunteers were becoming less impersonal and transactional and more informal and personal. Verbal and nonverbal expressive aspects of interactions corroborated strong affect and empathy relayed in the mutual sharing of personal stories and even personal items. In the following accounts, I illustrate, through extended examples, how such rapid descent into a deepened personal connection occurs. First is an account of a forty-year-old, out-of-town Westville NGO volunteer with a background in emergency services. Here, she recounts her experiences with a Westville disaster survivor she met earlier that Christmas Day outside the Resiliency Is Us disaster response center, where we were now standing and conversing:
This has been a blessing, and I can’t expand on that enough especially today and seeing the people that are coming in here today and listening to their stories—uh—I was talking to a gentleman earlier. And after talking for a little bit, he said, “Can I come back and have a cup of coffee with you?” And I said, “Absolutely.” So, he took his dog home and came back, and we talked a little bit more . . . And he spoke about his parents a little bit [also details about their background and his siblings] and then we talked about the devastation . . . but he also told me he wrote a book . . . and he was going to bring one back for me today and I hope I do see him. [Pauses, smiles] Very, very dear soul.
As the above account of the Westville NGO responder illustrates, the affect conveyed in the narration of such stories of the residents goes beyond the sympathy one feels when one sees a person in need. The thematic content of these accounts falls outside the scope of physical or psychological needs and solicitations or offers of disaster assistance. Instead, over the course of just a couple of interactions, the needle quickly moves from a transactional role interfacing to informal, interpersonal relating through successive disclosures of personal aspects of one’s life. The NGO volunteer also personalized the interaction beyond interfacing through prescribed roles by identifying the survivor by name.
The NGO volunteer restates his request, “Can I come back and have a cup of coffee with you?,” which denotes that his return was not simply to have a cup of coffee, but that he would be honoring the verbal commitment of returning to the tent to informally relate further with the particular volunteer. She responds “Absolutely,” revealing that she had not found the request strange or intrusive, suggesting that the stories he had begun to share had moved the interaction toward more personal, less formal expectations. Again, during the second conversation, he offers her a gift of a book: “He was going to bring one back for me today.” She also expresses in her account that she wants him to bring the book, and she says with a smile, “I hope I do see him,” indicating an expectation that he will fulfill his promise to her. Not only is there an expectation that he will give her the book, but there is also the additional expectation of seeing him again. Her use of the term of endearment “very, very dear soul” suggests the interaction has achieved a degree of empathy and positive affect for the resident. This statement also reveals the NGO volunteer’s confidence, or at least a mild level of trust, in the resident’s character. That is, there is at least enough trust to allow her to attest to me, in his absence and without my asking, that he is a “dear soul.”
Beyond the substance and tenor of relating, these NGO volunteer-resident relations required larger investments of time and physical and emotional energy, sometimes even at the expense of other familial, professional, or business commitments in the routine lives of NGO volunteers back in their home states. To continue with this illustrative case, the NGO volunteer immediately makes the following statement:
It makes me so thankful for what I have. You know, today is Christmas Day, and I was supposed to go home today originally, and I asked to be extended for another week, so I’m going home on New Year’s Day. And my daughter [and I] . . . had Christmas all planned out, and it was kind of her first experience. She has her apartment and her car and her first Christmas in her new apartment, and she was really excited. And I called her, and I said this is what’s going to happen. [She opted to extend her volunteer stay in New York.] And I’ll be back. She said, “Mom, I’m so bummed you’re not going to be around for any of the holiday season,” and I said, “I’m going to know you for the rest of your life. Some of these folks need help now.” She thought about it for a while and then said, “Yeah, ok, alright. I get it.” I talked to her a couple times since, and then I extended, so I called her and said, you know, I was a little hesitant. [Directed to me] Because, you know, she was a little disappointed the first time. And said, “I’ve been extended for a week.” She said, “Okay.” I said, “Really?” She said, “Yeah, you know what? You really want to do this. This is what you want to do, and I support you 100 percent, and if you do come that day, I’ll make sure I take off work and spend the day with you, when you come back.”
Social capital theorists also define social capital as the expectation of and fulfillment of obligations. Another opportunity to uncover the nature of the relationships that were budding in this Westville NGO center is the phenomenological analysis of observations and perspectives of residents when expectations of commitment went unfulfilled. Residents’ statements conveyed expectations indicative of a sense of a heightened expectation of obligatory personal commitment. For example, one resident who looked quite despondent, pointing to a bag containing two neatly wrapped gifts, stated his disappointment that two volunteers for whom he had bought gifts were no longer here and didn’t even say goodbye. Such reactions convey a degree of emotional attachment discernible through the level of despondence associated with sudden loss of a close tie such as a friend.
The following appraisal of volunteers’ presence and work illustrates a benefit that is distinct from the institutional support of disaster assistance. Such visible and audible expressions went beyond the usual commendation of service satisfactorily rendered but resonated a near-umbilical dependence. One poignant example of this distinction appears in the following statements of a sixty-year-old Westville resident as he discusses the distinct types of agency-mediated and organization-mediated disaster assistance he received:
The volunteers was probably the most important because—uh—you never really felt that the government was here—to help us—yeah—the army was there periodically—yeah—you never felt—we felt like we were on our own—yeah—FEMA was here to help with financial things, but there was no sense of security that the government was stepping in or even the city trying to remediate these issues.
Even in the absence of such declarative comparison, residents spoke of the emotional impact of their interactions with volunteers. A sixty-year-old retired elementary school teacher enunciates in her classroom voice, “The volunteers are beyond belief. They’re so hardworking, and they couldn’t be nicer. They make my life very pleasant!”
The above examples of NGO resident-volunteer relations are not one-sided but reciprocal. Westvillers filled an emotional void for out-of-town responders. The sudden change in geographic location, beyond the experience of jet lag, led to a sense of “freefall” for volunteers coming in from other states. NGO volunteers showed signs of spatial and temporal disorientation. Many of these volunteers reported not having a sense of the time of day or the number of days elapsed. Some repeatedly expressed embarrassment due to a lack of general awareness of their geographic location relative to the impacted neighborhood, as well as a lack of local knowledge of surrounding streets. Some NGO volunteers also expressed not feeling equipped with locally relevant knowledge and skills pertinent to the particular disaster, despite having experience with other disasters. For these reasons, I posit that the forging of social ties between out-of-town NGO volunteers and residents was a function of mutual dependence and mutual capacity for providing emotional, informational, and social support.
How Information Diffuses through Westville Disaster Area
Daily conversations with residents served as both informational and emotionally grounding experiences for volunteers. Newcomer volunteers also learned from residents about new developments in the Westville disaster area. I observed Westville residents share with newcomer volunteers the problems they encountered using cleaning supplies and protocol the NGO provided them in the form of printed flyers, brochures, and forms. As weeks went by, residents shared their improvisations to these prescribed methods and relative successes. Residents relayed the developments with gutting their basements and the disappearance and later reappearance of mold. Volunteers learned from residents and turned around and shared mold remediation concoctions and rituals residents had perfected through trial and error. Westville residents who had tried nonworking numbers also shared alternate contact information as well as effective strategies for avoiding long wait times and reaching contractors. They also reported changes and their success with particular programs.
These “testimonials” served as a bottom-up information stream of updated information from the disaster area around the Resiliency Is Us Center where volunteers were stationed. This informal transmission of pertinent information became the centerpiece of this center. In particular, the volunteers were unwittingly becoming invaluable knowledge brokers of an emerging informal disaster assistance networking process as they relayed this updated information to other residents. The specificity, relevance, and immediacy of this informally relayed disaster information stood in contrast to the instantly obsolete and nonspecific information and guidance on the crisp leaves of flyers and brochures stacked on the Resiliency Is Us disaster response center’s information tables.
The “unofficial” disaster information was location-and time-specific and instructive on acquiring and manipulating the specific disaster supplies circulating in the local environment, knowledge of delays and mishaps, selecting and securing repair services, and replacing large equipment, work tools, and lost personal items. Most significant was experience-tested information about maneuvering administrative hurdles to secure program benefits in short order, such as getting on waiting lists for programs with short application windows. Together, these resulted in early bird monetary advantages over others who were not privy to such privileged informational access.
Although Eastvillers frequented the Resiliency Is Us disaster response center and surrounding areas, forming social capital with NGO responders was an interactional accomplishment unique to patrons who resided in Westville. How did Westvillers accomplish this feat? Observations inside the Resiliency Is Us center suggest that Westvillers who were patrons had a unique capacity to transform transactional encounters into informal bonds. I argue that this capacity rested in their relative ease of incorporation into this uniquely beneficial, mutually reinforcing, ecological relationship rooted in the placement of the Resiliency Is Us disaster response center near the homes of Westvillers.
Westvillers Capture Public Goods, Eastvillers Crowded Out
In the Westville Resiliency Is Us disaster response center, there were clear distinctions in the way that Westvillers and Eastvillers related to others in the Center. As illustrated in the previous sections, this difference is significant because these newly forged social bonds connect Westvillers to informational resources pertinent to their prospects of disaster recovery. The formation of social capital–yielding bonds affords timely and advantageous informational access to institutionalized resources during the crucial initial period of disaster response. These social bonds that disaster survivors strike with NGO responders are particularly significant because longstanding networks and their social capital become compromised due to displacement and dispossession. Large nongovernmental organizations, in comparison with small local community-based organizations, have greater and more direct access to governmental disaster resources.
The subsequent section illustrates some mechanisms that point to why Westvillers and Eastvillers had different opportunities for forging social capital–yielding bonds with NGO responders. Westvillers, the economically privileged White residents of Westville, employed symbolic inclusionary projects and exclusionary narratives. I argue that together, these projects and narratives helped set the stage for the interactional environment for deciphering deservingness and undeservingness regarding disaster resources by establishing parameters of legitimate and illegitimate claims and around presumptions of belonging and trustworthiness. I illustrate this in the following vignettes, narratives, and projects that Westvillers employed, which enabled them to forge strong affective bonds with nonlocal, NGO volunteers and the field site manager.
Westvillers Become Regulars, Eastvillers Remain Visitors
One of the engagements of Westvillers was the project of becoming regulars in the Resiliency Is Us center. Becoming a regular meant coming to the center every day, even several times a day, engaging in small talk and laughter, and relaying personal disaster stories. This undertaking involved learning the names of volunteers and ensuring that volunteers knew theirs, as well as using conversational cues such as “See you tomorrow” as they were leaving. Westville residents had converted the space of the Westville center to a street corner café.
Regulars knew the “waiters” and “waitresses” by their first names, and disaster responders knew what their resident patrons were “ordering” today. Of course, there was no money exchanged, but it had the ambiance of an old diner full of patrons. At times when I sat to interview residents, one resident, usually male, would perform a hand gesture toward the food, insisting I get something to eat as if he were saying to put it on his tab as his guest. I had qualms about eating because although I was there during the daylight hours, I knew I had the option of riding the bus back over the bay and grounding myself back into my reality of routine life, where I could order at a real restaurant or even cook if I was not too exhausted. I knew this was a public space, but the behaviors of Westville disaster survivors and responders blurred the lines.
On the other hand, Eastvillers who were non-White and economically deprived engaged the space inside the center as guests. They did not engage as regulars as Westvillers did. The racially minoritized from Eastville came to the Resiliency Is Us center, but unlike Westvillers most remained outside, where there was an array of visibly stored disaster supplies. Westvillers outnumbered Eastvillers in the Westville center. The few racially minoritized Eastvillers who ventured into the center walked past the information table and approached the tables where volunteers served them plates of food. Eastvillers sat at the tables furthest away from the traffic near serving tables. They did not interact much with other residents, and their verbal interactions with responders did not exceed responses to questions about what sides they wanted on their plates and if they had already received a coat. Eastviller engagement in the Westville center was basically “pack and go,” as they often left immediately upon eating. Even for the few who stayed for several hours, there was still little to no interaction with other residents and NGO volunteers.
However, Eastvillers were not cultural isolates. Their limited interactions were location induced. The way that Eastvillers perceived themselves in the Westville urban space and the way they interacted within the Westville Resiliency Is Us disaster response center reflected the spatialization of race and class, split between Westville and Eastville. Samoa, a sixty-four-year-old Eastviller and Native American woman, had moved from North Dakota several years previously and had a clandestine living arrangement with her boyfriend in a single-room occupancy (SRO) paid by social services. Sitting at the Westville Center where she came for lunch every other day, she joked about the Westville residents. Samoa said, “They are filthy rich, I heard. In order to live here you have to be filthy rich, but look at them. [Smiles and jerks her chin upward and toward them] You can’t tell they’re rich. They look like you and me.” Samoa had been a resident of The Rockaways for some years and yet had never traversed this Westville area before Sandy, reflected in her statement “I heard.” She fixed her eyes upward, constantly looking away. Samoa was associating race position with class location in this context. She assumed that since neither of us was White, neither of us had Westville money. By her use of the pronoun “they,” she also distanced herself from the experience of the impact of the storm on Westvillers. She continued to joke wryly that disasters are a consequence of sin and that the “poor” Westvillers had never had the experience of need, something all too familiar to Eastvillers.
Ricky’s case presented some elements of anomaly: a Black male Eastviller and his White fiancée, who didn’t wish to speak with me. Ricky, on the other hand, welcomed our conversations. First, they were an interracial couple in a place that many residents described as being a White Irish area. Several residents confirmed that Irish Whites of this area enjoyed the highest status and class position. The couple were also not homeowners. In fact, now they were homeless. Ricky was a sixty-year-old man who had lived in a three-quarter house in Eastville, where all his personal belongings were flood damaged. He and his fiancée, who was pregnant at the time, would come to the Westville Resiliency Is Us disaster response center and stay there all day, huddled together at the table at the center of the room. They did not interact with others, but they did spend long hours there.
I spoke with one of the mental health professionals in Westville, a sixty-year-old White male with an academic position from out of state, who volunteered with a large NGO as a mental health consultant for residents. He had mentioned that part of what he did was to initiate conversation with residents in order to determine if they needed mental health services. I later also had an opportunity to observe his interactions after we spoke. While the NGO responder invited himself to sit next to various residents and talk to them informally, this responder did not approach Ricky, although he would have been the perfect candidate for such services since he had endured chronic stress due to poverty, substance dependence, recent storm-induced homelessness, and numerous bureaucratic hurdles in order to find permanent housing. Ricky later told me that he would just “snap” at people for no reason—something he thought occurred more since the storm. In an environment buzzing with “small talk,” no one engaged Ricky in conversation.
The distinction of who belonged to Westville and who did not resurfaced in several conversations and experiences in the area. I would come to understand that Black bodies, mine included, were hyper-visible in the Resiliency Is Us center. Carl, a Westviller and Resiliency Is Us center patron, relayed the unprompted story of the Black pastor who came to the center. He described him as neatly and elegantly dressed. He said that all eyes were on this man. The pastor dropped off bags of clothes and left. According to Carl, everyone stopped and stared at him, but no one went up to talk to him. Carl also mentioned that some residents were not happy to see persons from other parts of The Rockaway coming to serve them, even as volunteers.
“Clean” versus “Dirty” Exclusionary Narratives
The notion that Eastvillers were out of place when they trekked to the Resiliency Is Us center and surrounding area was most notable in my conversations with Westvillers. Carl recounts a scene outside the Westville center, where he thought some individuals were receiving unentitled assistance:
People who weren’t involved were taking clothes—which they really shouldn’t be doing—taking away from the people here who needed it. People were coming in all dressed nicely. They weren’t in this. People who were in this didn’t take showers for days—we know who they are. People driving up taking water. Taking food that didn’t belong to them. That was allowed to happen.
I would later hear this resonant exclusionary narrative, similar to Carl’s, from a passenger on a bus ride from Eastville heading toward Westville. Iman, a White working-class male in his sixties, was informally and occasionally employed as a mechanic. At first, I thought he was from Eastville, but once he started talking, I recognized the familiar narrative. He confirmed my suspicion that this narrative was an early form of social closure when he said he was from Westville and patronized Resiliency Is Us but had only gone to Eastville to retrieve mail. Sandy’s destruction had diverted Westville mail delivery to the Eastville post office. I engaged Iman in conversation, asking:
SM: How did you find out about the Westville center?
IMAN: When I was looking for socks at a dispatching center between Eastville and Westville. They told me, ‘We got centers thirteen blocks down in Eastville or sixteen blocks in Westville.’ I walked nine blocks from my apartment to the Westville center and nine blocks back.
SM: Did you interact with other residents there?
IMAN: Yes—and a few cheats who came back from Brooklyn and Queens who parked their cars somewhere else. That’s when they instituted the rule that you had to show ID that you were from Rockaway.
SM: How did you know where they came from? [Pause] How did you know who came from the neighborhood and who didn’t?
IMAN: Basically, because most of the people from Rockaway were dirty—Come on, how do you take a shower? How do you clean yourself up very well with no heat, no hot water, and some people didn’t even have running water? The Rockaway residents—and no offense because I was one of them—were dirty even several weeks after the storm. These people were perfectly clean. Like they had taken a bath that morning—looked clean like they had taken a bath that morning. Obviously, you’re not from Rockaway. How do you get to take a bath when 90 percent of Rockaway don’t have heat, don’t have water?
SM: Anything else?
IMAN: So, they started instituting that—after that everyone who came to the center had to show something valid.
SM: Any other differences from the people that made them stand out? The people from outside?
IMAN: Some of them took carts, but the carts were clean too. Your cart is dirty! ’Cause you can’t clean that all the time. You’re clean and you have a clean cart?!
Interestingly, after getting more details of the timing, I realized that I had seen firsthand on an earlier trip some of the events Carl was describing. As I walked up the street leading to the Westville Resiliency Is Us disaster response center and the Westville Catholic Church, I immediately noticed a small crowd of patrons outside. I counted upward of fifty women and men, mostly women, standing in line outside the church near the Westville warming center, where Carl would be talking to me on a subsequent trip. After speaking to some of these Westville Resiliency Is Us disaster response center patrons, it was clear that most were from Eastville. Among those I talked with briefly were West Indians who conversed in English and, among them, Haitian immigrants who were only able to converse with me in creole as well as Mexican immigrants who spoke primarily Spanish (indicating recency of arrival in the United States) and native-born African Americans.
Some of the women told me that they had heard that the Westville Catholic Church would be handing out food and basic supplies there. Some had heard from their neighbors and others from coworkers. Some had borrowed cars or received rides since they had lost their cars to the flood waters. What was most remarkable was that they were only now hearing about this location although it had been open for several weeks by then. I learned from talking with them that these non-White working-class and first-generation immigrants were there seeking supplies because the stores had closed due to flooding, and that their perishable food had spoiled due to lack of electricity. Their late arrival was a function of the slower diffusion of information through flyers and their networks in Eastville and the further distance of the apartment buildings where they resided.
Recall that neither Carl nor Iman ever mentioned that “clean” and “dirty” were proxies for race. Their categorizations were about who they thought belonged and who did not, and, by extension, who could lay claim to disaster resources and who could not. These boundary-making and counterintuitive symbolic narratives around the “clean” and the “dirty” indicated preliminary stages of exclusionary practices of social closure and hoarding. Despite the lack of race-specific language, which may be an artifact of my own racial minoritization, the most crucial distinction was that economically deprived Black and Brown Eastville residents were the object of scrutiny.
Carl and Iman were drawing a symbolic distinction between those they considered to be Westville community residents and therefore deserving “disaster victims” who bore the visible markers of loss and devastation and those who did not. According to Iman’s account, the response to these events led to requirements of showing identification or proof of address, suggesting that these boundary-making projects had real consequences for residents who would not be able to furnish these documents.
Kacie, who had begun volunteering in the Westville make-shift center from its inception, indirectly confirmed Iman’s assertion as notable. She told me that “Monsignor,” the priest who oversaw some of the volunteer activities at the center, warned volunteers, “You don’t say, ‘You don’t live below this street, so you don’t come here.’ ” Such institutionalized rules would negatively impact Rockaway’s formerly incarcerated and undocumented immigrants, who do not have these documents. These categories of residents lived in Eastville.