"You're the reason I live" and the accompanying guilt

In First Gen: A Memoir, Alejandra Campoverdi mentioned how her mother and grandmother often told her that she was the reason they lived. This is something my own mother has told me many times since I was a child. Much like Campoverdi, I have felt a lot of pressure knowing that my mom's life is in my hands as much as my own is. 

My mom met my father at a country western bar when she was in her 30s. She has always said that she married the first man who asked. They had a terrible marriage that ended four years after my birth. I am the only child of both of my parents. My mom quit her travel agent job when she was pregnant with me and didn't go back to work until I was in high school. She never tried to remarry or date. 

Growing up, it felt like my mom and me against the world. We spent all of our time together, and she always made every effort to make my childhood enjoyable. She was always the parent volunteer for field trips. She DIYed games and decorations for every one of my birthdays, inviting all of my classmates to a party. She even borrowed money from family friends to take me to Disneyland for my tenth birthday. 

As I started getting older, it was clear that this close relationship developed into a case of childhood parentification. As already mentioned in a couple of previous blog posts, a parentified child is one who has taken on the responsibilities of a parent, which is not developmentally appropriate for their age. Parentification can be like having to take care of a sibling or being responsible for the family financially, but it can also be emotional, as discussed by Campoverdi. 

I was a substitute therapist for my mom starting at a young age. She frequently talked about her stress relating to my dad, money, family dynamics, etc. For Campoverdi, her emotional parentification left her hiding her own feelings in order to not stress anyone out. This was the same for me. I have grown up learning to stifle my true feelings or emotions because I did not want to add to pre-existing stress. The emotional sponge I became led to my mother seeing me as less of a daughter and more of a best friend. 

    "You're the reason I live..."

I have heard variations of this phrase many times. 

My mom had a semi-exciting life before I existed. In high school, she was a theater kid who played major roles in renditions of West Side Story and Fiddler on The Roof. After graduating, she moved from rural southern Oregon to Portland with her sister and spent time traveling around the state as the lead singer of a band. Even in her 30s, she and her friends often frequented the same country western bar where she met my father. 

Upon having me, she sacrificed any possibility of returning to the life she had before. She moved back to southern Oregon to be closer to her parents and grandma. She gave up what could have been a prosperous career. She spent all of her time doing whatever she could to raise me. Any job that she was able to get after my birth never paid enough to keep us afloat. Everything that she did from that point forward was for me. 

When I went to undergrad, I stayed in state. This allowed me to visit home and still do whatever I could for the family. The Covid-19 pandemic was a blessing for my mom because I no longer had the means nor a reason to stay away from home. 

Soon after the pandemic, my mom and I were kicked out of the home my great-grandma provided us since my parents divorced. I became responsible for working and paying rent in the new apartment we had found. This was not a happy time for her, but at least she had me, or so she would tell me. We were roommates and spent almost every free minute together. 

I was not happy in this environment. I had only ever lived in Oregon. I was working as an administrative assistant. I did not have the means to go anywhere or do much of anything. I knew I wanted to leave. 

I wanted to be the one who broke the generational cycle that has persisted with the women in my family: staying in Oregon, marrying the first man who asked, and working secretarial jobs. I knew I needed to go to law school and to do it out of state. This seemed necessary to have a happy life. 

Going to law school out of state meant that my mom could not afford to live in the apartment by herself. She ended up moving in with her parents, who cause her overwhelming stress. In law school, I am the happiest I have ever been. Unfortunately, my happiness has come at the cost of my mom's wellbeing. She is the unhappiest she has ever been. Not because she's told me explicitly, but because I still serve as her substitute therapist. 

I talk to her multiple times a day, and each time I sit and listen to her speak of mistreatment and misery. She spends every waking hour at the beck and call of my grandparents. She never makes time for herself. She has told me that the only thing keeping her sane is the thought of moving to California with me someday. 

So yes, I have done what so many other first-gen students have done to seek more for myself and my family, yet I feel overwhelming guilt knowing that my happiness has been sought at the expense of my mom who has sacrificed so much for me. I've taken away my mom's free-time, her chance at a life she can be proud of, and her best friend. 

So, am I really the reason my mom lives, or am I the reason that she gave up living in the first place? 

The impact of place on who gets ahead

I've read lots of books about the impact of place on who gets ahead in life--and who does not.  I assign excerpts of many of them to students in my seminars on Law and Rural Livelihoods and The First-Gen Experience in Scholarly and Popular Literature.  We read excerpts, for example, from Sheryll Cashin's Place, Not Race.  The famous economist Raj Chetty has also focused on zipcode as destiny.   

So I was particularly interested to see coverage in the Daily Yonder (a news source oriented to rural issues) of a new book by a famous sociologist who studies poverty and inequality, Kathryn Edin, and colleagues Timothy Nelson and Luke Shaefer:  The Injustice of Place:  Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America.  Here are some excerpts from early in the book that mention rural places specifically, including in the first two paragraphs, which follow:   

IT IS HARD TO SAY exactly when we first noticed the pattern. Just before we hit the outskirts of a Cotton Belt town, the fields would give way to a string of gleaming white antebellum homes with large lawns, old-growth trees, and grand entrances framed by columns reaching two or three stories high. Merging onto the majestic arterial boulevards leading into town, we would see more imposing homes presiding over meticulously manicured grounds. 

In Sparta, a rural hamlet near Augusta, Georgia, it appears as though someone has invested millions to restore an elegant Greek Revival home. New windows and shutters gleam. Yet just across the street lies a dilapidated shack, one room deep, with a sagging roof. Over in Demopolis, Alabama, sits the venerable Gaineswood, a massive structure known for its elaborate interior suites, including domed ceilings, remarkable decorative arts, and original antebellum furnishings. Left out of the photos on Gaineswood’s website and tourist brochures are the aging wood cottages in varying states of disrepair, the tumbledown trailers, and the sagging modular houses that flank the historic home.  (page 1) 

The scholars undertook in this book to study poor places, whereas they had previously studied poor people.  They also decided to study health in addition to income.  Here's more on their methodology:

To assess the level of disadvantage in a community, such as a county or a city, we combined traditional income-based measures with other markers, including health. Especially in the United States, health outcomes vary tremendously by race, ethnicity, and income. In 2008, life expectancy for highly educated white males was eighty years, but only sixty-six for low-educated Black men, whose average life span resembled numbers seen in Pakistan and Mongolia. In 2011, the infant mortality rate for Black mothers in the United States was comparable to that in Grenada and just a bit better than that in Tonga. The rate for non-Hispanic whites was much closer to that in Germany and the Netherlands. Meanwhile, a tidal wave of new research was showing that a person’s health is shaped more by their context—their income, family circumstances, and community characteristics, for example—than by their genetic profiles or the medical care they receive. 

Ultimately, as the scope of our study of place-based disadvantage grew, we chose to incorporate two well-measured health outcomes, one that captured conditions at the start of life and the other at the end. In a particular community, what were a baby’s chances of being born with low birth weight, which is closely associated with infant mortality and other threats to children’s health? In that community, how long could the average person expect to live? 

We also recognized the importance of measuring whether disadvantage in a particular place persisted for children growing up there. Especially in the American context, it is almost an article of faith that kids should have the opportunity to do better than their parents. Recently, a team of economists employed confidential IRS data to create a measure of intergenerational mobility (the chance that children born low-income could rise up the economic ladder) for every city and county in the nation. These researchers used tax records to follow children born in the 1980s through adulthood to see where they stood on the income ladder compared to their parents. It was already understood that there were big differences in intergenerational mobility by parental income, ethnicity, and race, but the most stunning revelation of this new research was how much variation there was by place. In some communities, a child born into poverty would probably stay low-income as an adult. Yet in others, they had a much better chance of reaching the middle class. It seemed clear to us that to measure the depth of disadvantage in a community, it would be important to include the rate of mobility from one generation to the next. (pp. 3-4) 

This follows several pages later--and reveals a rural surprise to the authors:    

Immediately, we could see from the rankings that the geographical pattern was stark. The first surprise—especially for three professors who had spent our careers studying urban poverty—was that the “most disadvantaged” places on our index were mostly rural. There is considerable poverty in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. But in our apples-to-apples comparison, none of those cities ranked even among the 600 most disadvantaged places in the nation. For the most part, the only cities and urban counties to find themselves among the most disadvantaged were a relatively small number of industrial municipalities in the Northeast and Midwest, such as Cleveland, Detroit, and Rochester. 

Among the rural counties at the top of the list, what we found didn’t fit what most people think of as “rural.” While some of these were majority-white, many, indeed most, were communities of Black and Hispanic Americans. We could see, too, that many places with large Native American populations ranked among the most disadvantaged in the nation (19 of the top 200). Beyond these, though, not one community in the western part of the United States registered among the “most disadvantaged” (those in the top fifth). While some might say we ought to have considered the impact of the high cost of living on poverty—those costs are higher in some places—there are trade-offs. Although people pay more for housing in those places, there are at the same time structural advantages in those areas of the country, such as good health care systems, a more generous safety net, public transportation, and higher-quality schools. This, we think, is why some high-cost big cities like San Francisco and Seattle fall further down our index than expected. We also found that those living in the 200 most disadvantaged places on our index were just as prone to have major difficulties paying for housing as those in America’s 500 largest cities. 

Apart from predominantly Native American communities, the places that our index identified as “most disadvantaged” most often are found in three regions—Appalachia, South Texas, and the vast southern Cotton Belt running across seven states. (pp. 5-6) 

* * * 

Across rural America, monuments, celebrations, and museums are markers of local pride. Indeed, Crystal City has vigorously defended its claim to the title “Spinach Capital of the World” against upstart Alma, Arkansas—also a former spinach mecca that has erected multiple statues of Popeye. Yet in South Texas, the vast Cotton Belt, central Appalachia, and the Pee Dee region of South Carolina, these symbols celebrate a past that is fraught, to say the least. They commemorate the very industries that, for a century or more, spelled misery and hardship for thousands, if not millions, while profiting only a few. They memorialize the intensive resource extraction and resulting human exploitation that made these places America’s internal colonies. 

How did the identities of these communities become so bound to the economic legacies of the past? (p. 21) 

And, skipping to much later in the book, this is especially intersting regarding the diploma divide and how higher education is increasingly seen by some as a culprit: 

Most often, emerging leaders trying to set a new course have the odds stacked against them—as was the case with Cornejo’s coalition and later with the slate of La Raza candidates who came into office in South Texas in the early 1970s. People at every level are hoping for their failure: when they stumble, it is all the easier to blame the community for its own problems. Universities could certainly play a role in helping to equip local leaders with the tools needed to succeed, perhaps through a model like the USDA’s community- and university-based Cooperative Extension System. Recently, one community leader told us that while his state’s flagship university is not beloved in most rural towns, the extension service is immensely popular because it provides knowledge and resources the community values. Using university extension programs as a conduit for equipping local leaders might help higher ed prove its worth in many far-flung communities. (p. 237) 

Altogether, the book uses the word "rural" 67 times, but many of those are in end notes/sources.  Here's a WHYY segment on the book.  

Edin's prior books did not pay particular attention to rural poverty or other rural issues.  She is perhaps most famous for Promises I Can Keep:  Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage (2005) (with Maria Kefalas); Doing the Best I Can:  Fatherhood in the Inner City (2013) (also with Nelson) and $2.00 a Day:  Living on Almost Nothing in America (2015) (also with Shaefer). 

Crossposted to Legal Ruralism.  

A personal reflection on structural racism (Part 1)

On my first day of law school I woke up early to perfect my hair, makeup, and outfit (that no one would even see because we were on zoom). I was so excited to see the faces of my section mates. I knew that I would stick with these people for the entirety of the school year. Since I did not already know anyone who was a law student, I realized these were the people who I would lean on for all of the upcoming struggles of 1L year. I logged onto my first class's zoom meeting and eagerly began scrolling through the faces of Martin Luther King Hall's Class of 2023 Section D. To my surprise, I was the only Black person in my entire section at King Hall.

Since then, I have been the only Black student in more courses than those in which I have not been. I have literally never been in a more non-black space in my life than here at King Hall. This reality has greatly shifted my view on the world.

This isn't my first time at a predominately white institution (PWI). However, in undergrad I was surrounded by Black people in both of my majors in African-American Studies and sociology. By choosing these two majors, I isolated myself from the statistical reality that only 5% of the student body was the same race as me. 

I remember feeling slightly uneasy during my first weeks of general education classes. Going from my high school that is 84% minority to a sea of white faces will do that to anyone. As Michelle Obama states in Becoming, when she recounted her time at Princeton, "It takes energy to be the only black person in a lecture hall...". After I found my people, however, I honestly tuned out the white sea. If anything, I started seeing them as the minority because I didn't know more than a couple dozen of their names whereas I knew almost every Black person on campus. I would never have guessed these names made up only 5% of the school's population because they were the entire institution to me.

At law school, however, there is no escaping the white sea. It's everywhere. Especially during the confines of zoom school during my 1L year. This has made me think long and hard about the world around me, specifically about this country's commitment to white supremacy. In No, I Won't Stop Saying "White Supremacy," Robin Diangelo gives the sociologist's definition of white supremacy as "...a highly descriptive term for the culture we live in; a culture which positions white people and all that is associated with them (whiteness) as ideal." 

I first learned about structural racism as an Af-Am major. We discussed redlining and I thought back to my hometown, Merced, California. In Merced, the south side of the city is majority black and brown. Ironically, Martin Luther King, Jr. Way splits Merced into the nice side of town and the hood. One of my UCLA professor's gave us the link to a website that allowed us to enter the name of a city to see how it was once redlined. It showed an almost exact replica of the racial makeup of Merced till this day. 

While discussing redlining, we learned about the different ways it impacted minority communities. The obvious way is the crippling effect it had on these communities' ability to generate generational wealth through buying, owning, and passing down real estate. I thought back to my family moving almost every year while I was growing up; we had to do that after our lease was up. This never stuck me as odd because a lot of people around me also moved a lot. I had no clue of the privilege it is to grow up in the same home and neighborhood throughout your childhood, and have that home passed down through generations. 

We then learned of environmental racism. I thought of mornings, when my brothers, who grew up with debilitating asthma, always showered first so they had enough time to take their thirty-minute-long breathing treatments before we left for school. 

We learned about food desserts and zoning laws. I thought about how I did not know what an organic food was until I moved to Westwood, Los Angeles because there were no healthy grocery stores in or near my neighborhood where I grew up. I also thought about the plethora of liquor stores in walking distance from wherever I lived. While attending a Merced City Council meeting I learned that our city council did not allow liquor stores to be zoned on the north side of town because they "interfered with the quality of life." This same quality of life was not maintained for those of us who lived on the other side of the railroad tracks. 

We learned about how property taxes fund public schools at the local level. Because property values in different areas are vastly different, the tax revenues that come from different neighborhoods are also vastly different. This creates thousands and thousands of dollars in funding gaps per student. I thought back to high school sporting events when we traveled to the nearby suburb of Turlock. We came to refer to the schools there as Beverly Hills academies because of the glaring differences in resources. They had nicely architected, two-story, brick buildings with fountains in front. Our campus was riddled with portable classrooms and chipped paint. They had huge, freshly painted gymnasiums and football stadiums on campus. Our home games were played at Merced Junior College because we did not have our own facilities.

This is a small portion of a long list of different ways structural racism has influenced the world around me. My undergraduate education opened my eyes to most of this while fueling my long-standing desire to become a lawyer. Growing up, I already felt like the world around me was racist. I actually used to believe that there was just a lot of racist individuals who made individual decisions over and over again that eventually made the world the way it is. I had no clue that what I was really experiencing were racist laws, racist structures, and racist policies. 

My younger siblings and I at my undergraduate graduation

Ode to social resentment

I still remember the first time I was called a social resentment. I was at a college friend's house and we were talking about school. It all started because one of the guys who was there made a "joke", insinuating that everyone in Puente Alto was a delinquent (without knowing that I was from there). As fighting was not an option nor did it interest me, I laughed in his face and told him that it was easy to talk about others when you are born with innumerable privileges. 

Social resentment is a term used by rich people for those of us who were born in poor parts of the country, and we feel anger for frequently not having the same opportunities as those who were born in golden cradles, with parents with power and influence. Honestly, how can you not feel anger against those who have always had everything? How can you be indifferent, when they treat you and your people like criminals just for being born in a certain place? 

I am tired of always hearing that I am where I am "despite" being from Puente Alto. Being categorized as one of "the good guys" from the place where I was born, as Adam Kirk points out, as if, unlike me, the rest are some kind of pest to be fought. 

It's draining seeing people from my locality having to try three times harder than those who were more fortunate at my university just because their parents aren't lawyers, or because they don't come from elite bilingual schools. 

Moreover, I am tired of lying about where I come from, because I feel ashamed, or worse, I am afraid to say that I come from Puente Alto. Unfortunately, I know that if I say it in an interview they will not hire me because of the stigma it carries. 

I also feel anger against the system, which is designed so that those of us who come from poor places are made to believe that we cannot succeed. In school, we are constantly reminded not to think about university, that it is not for us, that we should study a technical career. If you are a woman, please don't get pregnant before leaving school. Please, let's at least finish high school. Then, we can work as cleaning assistants (since without a college degree they won't hire you anywhere). 

My schoolmates and I, that day we dressed ironically as others think we are because we are from Puente Alto (this is the stereotype of how young and low-income people dress). 

Lastly, I feel a little bit of anger towards myself, for denying so many times who I was, to try to fit in with people who don't care. I apologize to the Michelle of the past, the little girl who was proud of her origins and her friends. And I apologize to my friends, and my family, for all the times I pretended to be someone I'm not and denied them for fear of stigma. 

What do the children of the rich know about effort, what do they know about struggling to achieve a decent place in society? And yes, today, thanks to my parents, I don't feel the disparity, but I will always be grateful for where I come from. Grateful for my neighbors, who became my friends and taught me that if you have a loaf of bread and your friend doesn't have any, give him half. That if you are in trouble, we are all in trouble. That, if you are having a hard time, you help them, even if it means sacrifice. They taught me what it means to be loyal and care about each other. "Criminals" as the rich like to label them, have been braver and more loyal trying to protect me, than many of the wealthy "friends" I have had. 

I am convinced that there are no people more supportive than those who have nothing, and still help each other to get ahead. I don't want to romanticize life in poverty, people help each other by sharing what they don't have because they don't have anyone else. The State does not exist except to repress the poor and the rich and their charities are conspicuous by their absence. 

And yes, many of my friends and neighbors in Puente Alto today do not do the "right" things. They are not lawyers or doctors or engineers, but what is the right thing to do when you have to bring food to your table and nobody is willing to help you? How do you judge morally from your position of privilege a person who never had your help or education? 

This photo was taken by me at a protest against the former president of Chile, Sebastián Piñera. We are outside a subway station located in Puente Alto, burning a figure with his face on it.

Today at least I see with hope how Puente Alto is waking up, and people are starting to protest against the government, a result of the poverty and lack of opportunities one faces almost as a birthright. At last, little by little, more and more, we are utilising social resentment. Allowing ourselves to stand up for what we consider unjust. Tired of running a lifetime to try to achieve what many are born with. Despite all of this, they dare to call us delinquents. 

Sorry, but I don't buy into the meritocracy story.