UA Journal

Rock the Casket | New Orleans Jazz Funerals Celebrate the End of the Struggle

Elke Weesjes — Fri, 17 May 2013 13:58:31 +0000

By Patrick Meyer

New Orleans Jazz Funerals Celebrate the End of the Struggle

Unlike most port cities in the American South, New Orleans is very Catholic. And with Catholicism come the longstanding and elaborate “Old World” rituals. And unlike anywhere else in the world, New Orleans has its very own jazz funeral, a communal celebration where grief is danced out of the body and cast off into the air with soaring jazz cadenzas, carnival-worthy costumes, and respect for a time-honored ritual that allows the deceased to be shepherded to their final resting place with great fanfare and joy. A loud and triumphant alternative to Western expectations when it comes to rituals of grief and loss, the jazz funeral’s genealogical roots are wholly African, using joy and music instead of sadness and silence, to recognize death not as a “fearful obscenity,” but what author William J. Shafer sees as a communal “celebration of life as much as a recognition of the triumph of death.”

So how did the jazz funeral become a strictly New Orleanian phenomenon? And why is it still being honored today? Dean Reynolds, a Ph.D candidate in ethnomusicology, uses NYC’s hip-hop movement as a counter-example. Reynolds wonders why “New York City developed the language of hip-hop to address social and racial issues while New Orleans stayed closer to its roots?” Reynolds acknowledges that New Orleans has it’s own brand of hip-hop (bounce music) and other modernized genres, but finds it worth noting that the jazz funeral has been sustained in its original form. Still, his question is a valid one, considering the complicated algorithm of religion, geography, and hegemony that inevitably results in a thing like a jazz funeral. Is it the difference between something having roots in the church and having roots in the streets? Can we feel the same pain as those who came before us? Is tradition defined through strife, or is it the vehicle best-suited to navigate this terrain?

Different attitudes towards slavery

The answer to why the jazz funeral emerged in New Orleans is embedded in the American history of slavery, and more particularly, the story of which slaves were brought where. The majority of enslaved Africans in New Orleans were from Senegal and Gambia. Their relatively high educational level (many spoke French and were proficient in math and advanced agricultural techniques) allowed them to navigate their way to freedom more easily than slaves in other southern states. Many bore mixed-race children (Creoles) whose lightened pigment ensured freedom. And unlike British Protestant slave drivers, who were hell-bent on erasing the slaves’ indigenous culture, French Catholic slave owners adopted a more laissez-faire approach to native instruments, religion, and congregations. And while enslaved people could eventually buy their freedom in other states, it was much easier to do so in southern Louisiana than anywhere else in the south. By the time the Civil War broke out, mixed-race Creoles had been free for generations, and their culture flourished unmolested by slavery’s repressive grip.

The role of social aid and pleasure clubs

African-American social aid and pleasure clubs also played a key role in the proliferation of jazz funerals. Born out of the benevolent societies of the mid-1800’s, these clubs provided blacks and Creoles with early, unregulated forms of life insurance, health care, and welfare. Club members were also ensured a proper burial. With the yellow fever epidemic of the 1850′s in full swing, funerals were plentiful. As jazz music’s popularity snowballed in the early 20th century, brass bands became the funeral band of choice. At this point, the jazz funeral’s wholly African roots come full circle from ancestor to descendant: the social aid and pleasure clubs of today ensure a fitting funeral to its members just as the indigenous African tribes did, complete with music and communal celebration.

The funeral brass bands, using their new form of music, which they re-imagined from old religious spirituals and hymns, played on European orchestral instruments like the trumpet, trombone, tuba, and marching drums instead of the hand drum and voice. Jazz funerals subsequently provided an arena for jazz music to grow and players like Sidney Bichet and Louis Armstrong to hone their craft.

Between celebration and mockery

The service part of a jazz funeral is pretty standard. It’s held inside a church or funeral home and conducted according to the deceased’s religious affiliation. As the funeral is being dismissed to travel to the cemetery, the band assembles outside the venue, instruments in hand. The pallbearers emerge carrying the coffin and the trumpet sounds a tone. The band follows into a dirge or spiritual (“Just a Closer Walk With Thee” and “I’ll Fly Away” are popular choices), and the slow, mournful music continues as the casket makes its way through the neighborhood, a gathering crowd increasing in size behind it.

Pallbearers often sway the casket to the rhythm of the band, allowing the deceased one last dance before being lowered into the grave. It’s a poignant sight for some: a giant silver casket floating boozily atop a throng of people while lines of trumpets sound somber chords and trombones and tubas moan out the lower registers. To unfamiliar outsiders, it can “cross the line between celebration and mockery.” Bethany Bultman, co-founder of the New Orleans Musician’s Clinic, maintains that “it’s not up to the average American to decide what is appropriate or not” at funerals, recalling in particular musician “Uncle” Lionel Batiste’s wake in which his body was propped up in a standing position, complete with a crisp white jacket and cane.

Greatest free parties on the planet

Once the casket is lowered, the music and mood abruptly changes to one of upbeat celebration. The band switches to a higher tempo, favoring tunes like “When the Saints Go Marching In” and “Didn’t He Ramble.” This is truly the moment of catharsis; grief is shed in favor of exuberance, moaning and crying turn into singing and clapping. A community has come together to help bury one of its own and console a mourning family together. The first line is the band and family, but the second line is a random assortment of respectful hanger-ons, described astutely by Frank Tippett as “young and old, black and white, genteel and funky, sober and not entirely so.” Everyone is invited to the second line (just like anybody is welcome to have a jazz funeral) as long as they respect the tradition.

“We live in an area stricken by poverty, inequality, racism, corporate greed, and struck over and over again by natural disaster, but we still stick together and hold our traditions sacred.”

Madelyn Flynn, a New Orleans native and musician now living in New York, muses how New Yorkers must first “pay a cover charge, stand in long lines, and basically be put through situations to make you feel like you don’t belong, when a city like New Orleans is hosting the greatest free parties on the planet because it is our tradition.” Flynn finds New Orleanians to be an “exceptionally emotionally outward” bunch. “We live in an area stricken by poverty, inequality, racism, corporate greed, and struck over and over again by natural disaster, but we still stick together and hold our traditions sacred. We look out for each other. We lean on each other. In a second line parade, you can see that publicly.”

The struggle is over

That public aspect is an important part of the grieving process. Bultman notes how “grief is seen as a very solitary process,” whereas jazz funerals “make [death] a community celebration, where the people provide support for the person grieving” by “breaking down that weight bearing wall” and “turning sadness into celebration.” Western institutions, especially the church, have worked to define ways people should behave and feel concerning death. Many of these codes are based around the idea that death and loss are sad things, and those who are grieving should behave accordingly. Jazz funerals and second line parades bring the grieving process back to Africa, celebrating that the deceased’s struggles are over and they are in a comfortable and beautiful place instead of lamenting a loss that is gone and will never return.

Coded behavior, whether the restrictive, tight-lipped grief of the Western church or the loud, rhythmic catharsis of the jazz funeral, is deeply-ingrained behavior, learned from years of repetition. And although jazz music is seen as obsolete within the pop music spectrum and brass instruments have been phased out in favor of electric guitars, keyboards, and electronic-heavy genres, the jazz funeral is still pretty much the same. Bultman acknowledges that “brass bands are constantly evolving, but they know where they come from. They can play hip-hop and other styles that are more modern, but they would never go out in the street and dishonor the dead with something outside of the tradition at a funeral.”

Slavery’s after-effects are partly perpetuated by the white dominant culture that refuses to acknowledge them.

Perhaps the jazz funeral has kept the same form in order to assuage a black American experience that continues to feel the same type of pain. Slavery and Jim Crow have been abolished, but their after-effects are deep and far-reaching. Dr. Joy Degruy, author of “Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s History of Enduring Injury and Healing”, believes that slavery’s after-effects are partly perpetuated by the white dominant culture that refuses to acknowledge them. DeGruy finds “many European Americans have a very hard time even hearing a person of color express their experiences.” The prevailing psychological mechanism clings to the idea, ‘I’ve not experienced it, so it cannot be happening for you.’ DeGruy has found aspects of PTSS in black communities stemming from this lack of recognition. “(African-Americans) begin to doubt themselves, their experiences, and their worth in society because they have been so invalidated their whole lives.” It’s almost as though the whips and plantations have been exchanged for police batons and public housing projects. Hegemonic power structure be damned, jazz funerals ensure that the dead are remembered and respected, remaining an important outlet for African-Americans wearing the scars that stretch from the slave trade to post-Katrina New Orleans.

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References

Leary, J. D. (2005) Post traumatic slave syndrome: America’s legacy of enduring injury and healing. Portland Or. Uptone Press

Shafer, W.J. (1977) Brass Bands and New Orleans Jazz. Louisiana State University Press

Trippett, F. “In Louisiana, A Jazzman’s Last Ride.” Time Magazine, April 20, 1981.

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Patrick Meyer is a musician living in New York. During the day he plays music in the subway and at night he tutors students preparing for the SAT and Regents tests. He loves his pitbull, dancehall reggae, and Eddie Murphy stand-up from the 1980′s.

Photography by Derek Bridges

Opinion | Reproducing Violence: Rihanna, Chris Brown and the Aestheticization of the Ciudad Juarez Femicides – By Laura Ellen Joyce

Elke Weesjes — Mon, 06 May 2013 17:15:47 +0000

By: Laura Ellen Joyce

When the initial furore over the Juarez-inspired Fall/Winter 2010 collection designed by Rodarte in collaboration with MAC cosmetics hit the fashion blogs, I had only recently become aware of the femicides on the Mexican-US borders. Though the situation has been ongoing for more than twenty years, and during that period thousands of women have gone missing, and hundreds more found murdered, there has been scant media attention in the mainstream (UK) media. My first awareness of the situation came from watching Missing Young Woman (Señorita Extraviada), a documentary directed by Lourdes Portillo, which was shown at the Transnational Feminisms conference 2009 at the University of Manchester. What strikes me is that I had to find this information out, in a context which was academic, niche, and, in some senses, elite. This documentary, at least, presented material which was made by a Mexican woman, and which allowed the women in Juarez to speak for themselves. Conversely, shortly afterwards, there came mass media, mainstream US representations of the femicides through fashion, cosmetics and high profile advertising campaigns which did not offer any Mexican voices or perspectives. Though I cannot claim the lived experience of the Juarez women, I would still like to offer a critique of the reproductions and appropriations of violence which have emerged from the commercial aestheticization of the murders by Rodarte and MAC.

Over the last twenty years or so, hundreds of women have been discovered murdered, dismembered, mutilated and dumped on both Mexican and US soil, in cases which are specifically referred to as the Juarez femicides.[1] The majority of the murdered, sexually violated women are young girls between eleven and twenty-two who have been working in the US-owned factories, or maquiladoras, which occupy the borderlands on the Mexican side. These murders have a clear relationship with the US economy, as the material conditions of maquiladora workers – shifts which end in the middle of the night or begin in the early morning, journeys from homes which are two hours walk away from the factories – mean that women are more vulnerable to attack. The plants which the women work in create these conditions, in the face of obvious danger to the women they employ.

Pic. 1 A traveling art installation by Irene Simmons called ‘ReDressing Injustice’ protests the ongoing violence against women in the border town of Juarez, Mexico – copyright: detritus

This relationship between material gain to the US economy, balanced against Mexican losses, is reproduced through the MAC/ Rodarte campaign. Two US businesswomen, Kate and Laura Mulleavy, of the fashion label Rodarte, collaborated with MAC, a global, multinational cosmetics company, to create a line of products, which were marketed as an artistic response to the deaths in Juarez. MAC intended to trade on the mythology of the Juarez murders without offering any support, financial or otherwise, as a result of their profits.

Since I started to investigate this phenomenon, the case has become more complex, since Chris Brown, the pop star, got a neck tattoo, based, he says, on the promotional material produced by MAC for the Rodarte sisters’ campaign. The image, which is of a skull, bears a striking resemblance to the police photographs of his ex, and now current once again, girlfriend, superstar Rihanna, after she had undergone a severe beating from him. The controversy over gendered violence, race and exploitation, begun by Rodarte and MAC, came back, haunting, once again. I am interested in these connections, and in what happens when domestic violence collides with globalism, fashion and murder.

Laura and Kate Mulleavy explained in an interview with style.com that the inspiration behind their collection came from a road trip to Mexico, where they saw the maquiladora workers walking to work in the middle of the night as their shifts dictated in a ‘hazy, dreamlike landscape’. This landscape, presumably, was the catalyst behind the names for their products such as Sleepwalker, Ghost Town and Softly Drifting. The catwalk show that accompanied the launch of both the fashion range and the cosmetics created a dreamlike mise en scene using candle sculptures, confetti and standard songs like ‘Moon River’, to gloss over the realities of a woman’s walk, alone, across a desert at night in a landscape that was littered with female bodies.

Though they do not explicitly cite the murders, the Mulleavys have titles for their products including Bordertown, Factory, and Badlands. There is also an ambiguous and contested reference to the Quinceanera. The product with this name conjures the mythology and ritual of the Mexican party for girls who turn fifteen. There is an uncomfortable, rotten relationship here between what the sisters are willing to admit to, and the frisson of death, murder and sex that they are trading on to sell their products. By looking at the names of each of these products, it is possible to see how they interact with the Juarez landscape, the US-Mexican relationship and the oppressive global capitalism which is at least partly responsible for the cosmetic erasure of these dead, often nameless, women.

Bordertown

Though it is impossible to examine the entire relationship between the US and Mexico here, it is important to isolate the specific affect of the border in this case. When Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte worked with MAC to create their Fall/Winter 2010 makeup collection and based their ideas on the working women of Juarez, Rodarte tapped into the borderland mythologies of Juarez and created an illusory fantasy world which sought to simultaneously obliterate and venerate the dead women. The models for their catwalk show had hollow blackened eyes, green-white pallor and lips that had been bloodlessly ‘lip-erased’ with a product specifically designed for the purpose. There can be almost no question that what the sisters sought to do was use the frisson of sex, death and borderland cachet to sell products. What they also reveal in the naming of this product is the inherent connection between US business and the Mexican maquiladoras. In fact, as a 2011 news report states that ‘Big Business Booms on the Mexican Border’. It might not seem like an ideal business environment, but foreign companies are investing heavily in Juarez and other violence-plagued cities along the border. Cheap labor and proximity to the huge U.S. market are outweighing concerns about security and welfare. Clearly this vampiric commercial relationship is present in the Rodarte’s products and campaign.

White Gold

The fact that the sisters chose to use such loaded colour terms is interesting. I think it is a reflection not only of the maquiladoras which produce expensive white goods for export, by using the slave labour of young girls and women, but also of the racial differential at work here. White women are producing cosmetics made for white skin, presented at catwalk shows featuring white models. The collection trades on the misery and suffering of Mexican women. None of the profit from this goes into Mexico, but, rather, as with the maquiladoras, it is going directly into the US economy. There is a further, disturbing aspect to White Gold and it relates to the money being brought into Juarez by tourists, tourists who come for sex with young Mexican girls. As Alicia de Gaspar Alba writes, the tourist web site for Juarez actually delineates this relationship and uses it as a selling point for the area:

Prostitution is legal here … every week hundreds of young Mexican girls arrive in Juarez from all over Mexico. Most of these young ladies are looking for work that will be a primary source of income for their families back home, while many will begin their careers in one of the various maquiladora factories in the area often they end up in the many bars and brothels.[2]

These young Mexican girls, many of whom are under fifteen, will not have the chance to take part in their traditional coming-of-age ceremony or quinceañera, another of the brand names. Later in her >article, Nicole Phelps wrote of the catwalk show that: ‘The show ended with a quartet of ethereal, unraveling, rather beautiful white dresses that alternately called to mind quinceañera parties, corpse brides, and, if you wanted to look at it through a really dark prism, the ghosts of the victims of Juárez’s drug wars.’ This collapsing of the two states of being for young girls, either innocent quinceañeras or murder victims, is obviously something that Rodarte were tapping into. It is traditional that young Mexican girls do not wear make-up or high-heels until this coming of age ceremony, which indicates the strictness of the Catholic codes in operation. The maquilas or girls who work in the factories and are therefore considered dangerously economically independent, are widely believed to transgress and subvert this code.

Factory

In Spanish, maquillar is to make up, to assemble. The women in the factories are asked to repeat simple mechanical operations thousands of times a day to make up the products which will be sold by global corporations. At the same time their images are being assembled, made up and aestheticized to create a cosmetic erasure of the crimes to which they are subject. When two American women and a global company make profit from this dangerous cosmetic erasure, in order to sell products, the borders between bodies, countries, art and crime become leaky through the act, and the symbiosis between the women of Juarez and the products they inspired is shown to be illusory.

In fact, one of the products is actually called Ghost Town, in response to the ghostly women who the Mulleavy sisters observed. This ghostliness was picked up on by poet, academic and blogger, Joyelle McSweeney, whose theory of the necropastoral has been key in understanding the artistic and aesthetic aspect of the Rodarte campaign. In an attempt to understand, if not condone, the aesthetics of the decision, McSweeney blogged the following:

The Mulleavy’s Art-Crime was to make the situation acute, to mass-produce a fake face that could be applied to one’s own fake face, a mask for a mask. But rather than conceal one fake-reality with another, Mulleavy’s death masks double up on capitalism’s fakism, supersaturates it, makes capitalism’s fakery and death-production excessive to itself and visible, makes it hurt and appall, exposes its waxen and corpse-pale and fake mask-face. And, of course, it was the Mulleavy’s Art-Crime, the spectre of their presumed profit, that was found to be unbearably ‘appalling’, their ghost-makeup factory that was shut down.

Pic. 2 MAC/Rodarte Winter/Fall 2010 Collection

It is interesting that McSweeney refers to the actions of the Mulleavy’s as resembling an art-crime. Because there are two ways in which beauty bloggers and journalists responded negatively to the range. One of these was to denounce the lack of ‘art’ in the range, and the other was to demonize the sisters for their uneasy relationship to the crimes. In fact, the blogger Yinka Odusote of Vex in the City blogged that: ‘There’s absolutely no way that this can be condoned or passed off as being artistic. I find it insulting that MAC thought they could pass this off without one of its customers making a connection.’ And indeed it is hard not to make the connection with the Mexican crimes when considering the product named Badlands. Vogue went so far as to comment that: “The designer duo’s new range was inspired by Juarez, an impoverished factory town in Mexico, famous for its high rape and murder rates.’ It feels somewhat reductive to call Juarez an ‘impoverished factory town in Mexico’ particularly as there is such a contested and complex relationship between the Mexican and US economies. But the seeds were sown by the word choices that Rodarte made. To associate Juarez with the word Badlands gives the lie to the statements the sisters made in relation to their inspiration. It is, in fact, closer to the art-crime McSweeney mentions than the vague, hazy dreamscape they continually allude to.

An Emblem of Violence

Though the ghost factory was shut down, as McSweeney frames it, the campaign lives on in the recent coverage of Chris Brown’s tattoo and its relation to both the Juarez murders and the images of his beaten girlfriend Rihanna.

Rihanna is an international superstar. She is so well known that her every action is scrutinised by the media. Rihanna has been roundly criticized by the media, by feminists, by parents who say she is a poor role model for the thirteen – seventeen year old girls who make up a large part of her demographic. Though there is genuine cause for concern, there is a potentially raced element to this criticism, and much of the extreme abuse aimed at both Chris Brown and Rihanna has been racially motivated.

Recently, Chris Brown had another tattoo removed which spelled out the name of his last girlfriend. This indicates that the idea of the tattoo has currency in their relationship. By explicitly stating that the removal of the tattoo was in deference to Rihanna and their relationship, the opposite assertion can be made – that the creation of a tattoo within the same period, within their renewed relationship, is also meaningful. Whether he intended the tattoo to be a specific representation of Rihanna’s bloodied face or not, there is significance in the fact that the source material comes from the Juarez femicides, and the relationship to gendered violence against women of colour is too obvious to ignore.

Just as with the Rodarte and MAC collaboration, there is endless speculation and analysis amongst bloggers with regard to Chris Brown and Rihanna. On March 18th 2013,, Ben Branstetter, writing at Thought Catalog, had this to say:

If Chris Brown speaks to you through his music, his songs don’t lose that quality because he beat Rihanna. It’s still the same music and likely still holds the same meaning … And it can often be astonishing what we are willing to forgive.

A day later, on March 19th, Now Magazine reported that Rihanna will marry Chris Brown in a carnival atmosphere, wearing a bikini this July. They claim that it is her ‘“F*ck you!” to the world’. Contrast this with the police description of the altercation between Rihanna and Brown:

Brown looked at Robyn F. and stated, ‘I’m going to beat the sh– out of you when we get home! You wait and see!’ The detective said ‘Robyn F.’ then used her cell phone to call her personal assistant Jennifer Rosales, who did not answer. Robyn F. pretended to talk to her and stated, ‘I’m on my way home. Make sure the police are there when I get there.’ After Robyn F. faked the call, Brown looked at her and stated, ‘You just did the stupidest thing ever! Now I’m really going to kill you!’Brown resumed punching Robyn F. and she interlocked her fingers behind her head and brought her elbows forward to protect her face. She then bent over at the waist, placing her elbows and face near her lap in [an] attempt to protect her face and head from the barrage of punches being levied upon her by Brown.

This fear, this moment of terror and desperation, her attempt to defend herself which led to further, increased violence, is one instance of domestic abuse which is the corollary of the femicidal, genocidal violence in Juarez. In researching this topic, I have been reminded of the importance of current debates around intersectionality, and the necessity of reading culture in this way. There can be no feminist reading of the Juarez femicides without understanding classed, economic, and raced readings. In the case of Chris Brown and Rihanna, this collapsing of boundaries between domestic and genocidal violence is made legible, is literally written on the body. Until we understand the cultural, structural violence being done to women of colour, to women everywhere, we will never understand specific instances of domestic violence. Chris Brown’s tattoo is an emblem, a distillation of that violence, haunted by the victims of Juarez.

I can’t write this article without mentioning Steubenville, and the kind of rape apologism that has been perpetrated not only by bloggers, but by national and international news sources. We need no more evidence that we live in a rape culture, a violence culture, a murder culture where women are blamed, essentially, for their very existence. The news that Chris Brown and Rihanna will be celebrating their July carnival wedding, with ‘all the people who stood by them during their rocky relationship’ is another instance of that culture – blame is turned outwards, on those who did not stand by the ‘rocky relationship’, those who see only the cycle of abuse. There may have been no apology from Brown for what he did, but the Rodarte sisters did, in fact, give this statement once the backlash reached fever pitch:

Our makeup collaboration with M•A•C developed from inspirations on a road trip that we took in Texas last year, from El Paso to Marfa. The ethereal nature of this landscape influenced the creative development and desert palette of the collection. We are truly saddened about injustice in Juarez and it is a very important issue to us. The M•A•C collaboration was intended as a celebration of the beauty of the landscape and people in the areas that we traveled.

The Rodarte sisters may be ‘truly saddened’ but they are not taking any responsibility. They hold that the inspiration was the beauty of the landscape, not the murders. But when they use names such as ghost town, factory and badlands, the haunting we are seeing is the haunting of capitalist exploitation, rather than the ghostly somnambulists that Rodarte invoke. When we see Chris Brown’s tattoo, it both elides and distills this haunting, and writes violence on the body, violence that is cultural, structural and commodifiable for gain.

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Footnotes:

[1] Alicia Gaspar De Alba and Georgina Guzmán, Making a Killing : Femicide, Free Trade, and La Frontera (University of Texas Press, Austin Texas 2010)

[2] Alicia Gaspar, Ibid p. 79.

Laura Ellen Joyce is a doctoral student at Sussex University in creative and critical writing. She writes about necrophilia, psychoanalytic theories, the queer uncanny, and pornography as well as 21st century literature and radical new writing. She is project co-ordinator of the AHRC/ University of Sussex project: Global Queer Cinema. Her novel, The Museum of Atheism, was published in November 2012.

Ordinary People Doing Remarkable Things: Part 4 – Dr. Alan Shapiro | Children’s Health Fund

Elke Weesjes — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 16:00:59 +0000

By: Elke Weesjes, Ph.D and Lori Peek, Ph.D

Paul Simon and Dr. Irwin Redlener

In 1987, Irwin Redlener, and singer/songwriter, Paul Simon, founded Children’s Health Fund (CHF) with the goal of providing comprehensive health care to homeless and medically underserved children. Today, under the leadership of Dr. Redlener, Mr. Simon, and Executive Director, Karen Redlener, CHF sustains a national network of 25 programs serving some of America’s most impoverished communities.

This post, the first of a two-part series on CHF, features Alan Shapiro, MD. He is Senior Medical Director of the New York Children’s Health Project and of the South Bronx Health Center and Center for Child Health and Resiliency, both affiliated with CHF and Montefiore Medical Center. Recently, Dr. Shapiro talked to us about the history of Children’s Health Fund, his work in the South Bronx, and how he, after more than two decades of serving some of the most at-risk and marginalized children and families in the nation, is still hopeful and optimistic about the future.

Welfare Hotels and Warehoused Families

The 1980s in New York City were characterized by a significant rise in poverty and an equally dramatic decline in quality of living among the city’s most disenfranchised. Affordable housing options were few, with numerous individuals and families competing for the limited spaces. The result was a substantial increase in homelessness, especially among low-income families with children. Dr. Shapiro described what it was like: “Families were warehoused in large hotels, mostly in midtown Manhattan. They became known as “welfare hotels.” The two largest and most ‘infamous’ ones were the Prince George and the Martinique Hotel. They were just horrendous; housing hundreds of homeless families, with almost no social services and dangerous conditions for children.”

The welfare hotels were not a new phenomenon. Already in the mid 1960s, Ne¬w York City, faced with a desperate shortage of low-cost housing, began locating homeless families on public assistance in hotels. What started as an ostensibly “temporary” emergency-response measure soon became a monstrous problem. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the number of welfare families housed in hotels throughout the city was increasing at a shocking rate of 10 percent a month.[1]

By 1987—the year Children’s Health Fund was founded—an estimated 10,000 children and 5,000 adults lived in 63 welfare hotels spread across the City. Back then, the hotels charged the government an average of $1,600 to $1,800 a month to house a family of four. A family had to stay for 18 months before becoming eligible to transition to city-owned housing. Many of the residents felt that for that amount of money, they could surely rent something better than a small converted hotel room lined with bunk beds; but to the City, there was a financial rationale behind the large payment and the long wait. New York City government only paid a quarter of the housing bill. The remainder was funded by the State and Federal governments. Long story short, it was cheaper for the City to keep homeless families in hotels than to renovate apartment buildings or single-family homes.[2]

Inside a welfare hotel in the late 1980s. Picture by: Dr. Irwin Redlener

As Dr. Shapiro described, the Martinique was one of the most notorious welfare hotels in New York City. At the height of the problem, 440 families lived in this hotel. Over a thousand residents were children and nearly half of them were five years and younger. The residential rooms were very small. On average, there was one bed for every two occupants of a room. There was no place to play and school-aged children had nowhere to do their homework. There were no kitchens and although most people used them, hotplates were not officially allowed; as such, there was no room for families to cook and serve proper meals. Besides the lack of space, there were significant issues related to hygiene, healthcare access, and safety. The family homelessness problem coincided with the crack epidemic and drugs and sex workers were ubiquitous, especially in the welfare hotels. Consequently, children often had to share their living-space with drug addicts, pimps, and prostitutes.

In the summer of 1987, the city was threatened with a termination of Federal funds to continue subsidizing the hotel bills. Mayor Ed Koch consequently pledged to empty the welfare hotels by July 1990. The most notorious symbol of New York City’s failure to give homeless families safe and decent shelter, the Martinique, was closed first. Over the course of the following few years, all of the other welfare hotels were shut down too.[3]

In 1992, a year after the last welfare hotel closed its doors, there were still thousands of homeless families and around 10,000 homeless children living in New York City shelters. With the shuttering of the hotels, families and children were frequently placed in so-called “congregate shelters.” These facilities, often regarded as the worst solution, were generally converted armories that consisted of a huge room lined with large numbers of cots side by side. Bathrooms were shared by many and privacy was limited. These shelters were designed for homeless single adults but were also used for families with infants and children. It is clear that shutting down the hotels did not end the crisis of family homelessness in New York. On the contrary, the situation had only worsened and CHF clearly had their work cut out for them.[4]

From New York to Peru to the South Bronx

Dr.Shapiro, whose family was from the Bronx and who was raised in the suburbs of New York, graduated from the State University of New York (SUNY) Downstate Medical College in Brooklyn, New York City in 1987. He went on to do his pediatric residency training at Montefiore Medical Center’s Residency Program in Social Medicine—a residency program that focused on underserved populations and health disparities. He finished his pediatric residency training in 1990.

Blue clinic on wheels

Training in the 1980’s in cities like New York brought young physicians like Dr. Shapiro face to face with some of the most challenging social and medical problems of the second half of the twentieth century. The situation was dire at that time, as Dr. Shapiro recalled: “For the most part, the poor were disproportionately affected by the drug and HIV epidemic. The hospital wards, including pediatrics, were sometimes half filled with patients requiring HIV treatment. As a physician in training it was humbling to be faced with the AIDS epidemic and the co-morbidities associated with it. We were also facing a drug epidemic. The newborn nurseries were filled with infants needing drug detoxification. In retrospect, it was a very shocking time in our history.”

Even though shocking, working in the field with vulnerable children was something he already had experienced before, albeit in a very different context. While still in medical school, Shapiro traveled abroad and worked with a malnutrition program in Lima, Peru. He thought he had found his calling: “I was very interested in international health. I went to Lima for four months and worked in the slums that surround the city. I was exposed to abject poverty of the likes I had never seen. The team I worked with went door-to-door implementing a community based intervention. That is when the career light bulb went on. It was at that point that I knew I wanted to work in a community setting… Or, as they say, ‘in the trenches’.”

Back in New York in the late 1980s, while completing his residency, Shapiro soon realized that the city was not really all that different than an underdeveloped country in terms of the dire need for medical services among the most disadvantaged. During his residency, Dr. Shapiro was again working “in the field,” but this time in New York: “Then, as a resident… I did this incredible elective with the Children’s Health Fund’s New York Children’s Health Project, working on a mobile medical clinic in New York City’s homeless family shelters. I completely loved it and realized then that this was the type of work I was cut out for.”

In addition to his time in Lima and work as a medical resident in New York City, Dr. Shapiro, who comes from a family that had a lot of political consciousness, was also influenced by the Civil Rights movement and felt motivated to seek social change in the face of injustice and inequality: “I was always very much affected by injustice… Obviously, growing up in the ‘60s and ‘70s, you were confronted by the Civil Rights Movement and the racial injustice that movement was responding to… I didn’t want to go into medicine to go into private practice. For me, medicine had endless possibilities for fighting inequality. I was really looking at the disparities in health care in America. That’s what motivated me then, and has continued to keep the fire under me.”

Dr. Shapiro’s personal vision for a more just and equitable future for all children and families aligns closely with the organizational vision of Children’s Health Fund. Fortunately enough, as he was completing his residency, he got a call inviting him to apply for a pediatric position in one of the recently established CHF Mobile Medical Clinics. As he noted: “I was incredibly fortunate they were looking to hire three pediatricians at the time. The timing was perfect! I took the job and I’ve never left.” Now, for over two decades, he has been hard at work and remains committed to the organization that he believes so deeply in and has helped build.

As a pediatrician in one of the CHF’s mobile medical units, Dr. Shapiro and his team began offering high quality medical care, a “medical home,” to children who needed it most. He visited shelters and welfare hotels on a regular basis. Soon families were counting on the big blue clinic on wheels to appear at their shelter to receive health care for their children: “The irony is that these families were only able to be seen in a medical home at their homeless shelter!” The regular appearance of the “big blue bus” dramatized the lack of primary care in the communities where these poor families came from.

The extent of the problem became painfully clear when a major nationwide measles epidemic broke out in 1989-1991. The epidemic primarily involved unvaccinated racial and ethnic minority children who were on average less than five years old and lived in inner city areas. Tens of thousands of people got infected, thousands were hospitalized, and 123 died.[5] To Dr. Shapiro and many others, this outbreak was an eye-opening experience. He was stunned: “I mean, this was in the 1990s, the measles vaccine has been around for how many years? Measles was supposed to have been eradicated in 1987. Yet thousands of children were getting really sick. It said to the public health world and to clinicians, educators, community leaders, and the government, our healthcare system is broken.”

Dr. Shapiro at the clinic

The silver lining of the measles epidemic was that it spawned a movement to improve primary care, including new resources dedicated to improving access to health care, as Dr. Shapiro described: “In 1992, CHF’s flagship program, New York Children’s Health Project, now affiliated with Montefiore Medical Center, was the recipient of a New York State grant to develop a new health center in an underserved area of NYC. In 1993, we opened up a new clinic in the South Bronx. It began as a hybrid site for us. That means the clinic was three storefronts patched together with a mobile unit parked in front. We chose the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx because we knew it was one of the neediest communities in the city. In fact, it lies in the nation’s poorest congressional district.”

Ironically, the brand new clinic, meant to foster health and well-being, was established not far from the site of the infamous 1993 Valentine’s Massacre, which resulted in the slaying of six people, including three teenagers. Although this crime was especially heinous, murder certainly was not unusual in the area. Especially in the 1980s and early 1990s, the South Bronx was notorious for violence, open air drug sales, prostitution, and poverty. Families were torn apart by these and other social ills.

But even during that dark era in the history of the Bronx, Shapiro, ever an optimist, remembered the resiliency of the youth: “One of the things that really impressed me as a pediatrician was the kids I saw, especially the teenagers. The teenagers we saw in the early and mid-90s reminded me of the enfant savage… the wild child. These kids were raised basically without parents. So many of the kids we saw were raising themselves—their parents were struggling to survive, often working more than one job, or there were those that succumbed to HIV and the drug epidemic. The community had really been devastated. I had kids coming to me, the toughest boys you’d ever see, breaking down in my office because they would see their families falling apart. I’ll never forget being at a total loss of words after one such young man told me he would see his mom prostituting.”

As a consequence of the dire circumstances that the children and youth were often faced with, the CHF adjusted some of its policies and procedures. As Dr. Shapiro described: “This was not your typical pediatric practice. We would allow kids hang out in our waiting room just so they could have a safe place to be kids. The memory of the patients I cared for during that time—hundreds of them—have never left me to this day.”

New Challenges and Old Problems

Two decades after the opening of the clinic, the South Bronx has changed markedly. Neighborhoods have stabilized, the crack epidemic has abated, more residents are in stable employment, and there are lower rates of alcohol and drug abuse and disease transmission. Although the South Bronx is in transition, the problems are far from solved. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that over a quarter million people in this area are still living in poverty, affecting a staggering one out of two children. Crime rates are still extraordinarily high compared to the rest of New York and to the United States as a whole.

Following the measles, crack, and AIDS epidemics, a new and substantial public health crisis is currently affecting this already vulnerable area. Obesity is on the rise in the South Bronx, and it has been for years now. Whereas the health center used to have a “Failure to Thrive” clinic for children whose weight or rate of weight gain was significantly below that of other children of similar age and gender, it now has an obesity clinic. Sadly, both of these issues—hunger and obesity—stem from the same root cause: poverty.

To address the obesity crisis, Children’s Health Fund and Montefiore have developed a successful program consisting of group nutritional counseling for weight management, diabetes, and other chronic diseases. There are also one-to-one sessions focusing on dietary and lifestyle modifications. (In the next “Ordinary People Doing Remarkable Things” post, we feature Sandra Arevalo, Administrator of Nutrition Services, who described those activities to us.)

Dr. Shapiro with patient

Dr. Shapiro, who is keenly aware of the complex interplay between individuals and their social contexts, talks about what is next: “We are developing innovative programs that will help mitigate the stress that many poor families face. We are trying to change the paradigm of primary care. Instead of one-on-one traditional visits that often last no longer than 15 to 20 minutes, we are moving toward a group primary model of care.” When we asked him for specific examples, he described the pioneering Prenatal and Well Baby groups that they have established: “We have groups of 8-10 pregnant women or parents with their infants, age 0-18 months, participate in a two hour visit. With this amount of time, we feel we can really get at important topics such as healthy eating, parenting, safety, and healthy relationships in a way that the typical visit does not allow for.” The center is also looking to bring in services that address economic and legal needs. Shapiro grew visibly excited as he talked about helping families gain access to “benefits, financial experts, and lawyers on site at the health center. This would help us move to a comprehensive ‘one-stop-shopping’ model that could benefit the families we serve.”

As part of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the South Bronx Health Center received several rounds of stimulus funds from the Federal government to increase primary care services. With additional support Children’s Health Fund, which matched the stimulus funding, the center was able to double in size. It currently has two buildings in the South Bronx; one for adult’s and women’s health, and another clinic, located just across the street, that is dedicated to pediatric and adolescent care.

The homeless program still exists and has actually grown over the years. Again, when the New York Children’s Health Project first began in 1987, there were approximately 5,000 families and 10,000 children living in shelters across the city. Today, that number has doubled to 10,000 families and about 20,000 children without homes.[6] As a consequence, the program, and Dr. Shapiro, are busier than ever.

A Beacon of Hope

The figures on poverty and homelessness and obesity—and the list goes on—would likely discourage most people. But Dr. Shapiro is more motivated than ever. Even after years of working with underprivileged children and adults, he stays positive and never experienced the feeling of wanting to give up: “As a pediatrician, I feel like I am a born optimist. Seeing just one child grow up and be successful is all it takes. And I have been lucky enough to see many, many children, facing incredible hurdles, grow up to be teachers, nurses, bankers, and even doctors. In fact, one of my former patients recently graduated medical school and is now doing his residency here in the Bronx. My dream is that I will be able to hire him to work with us—that will be full circle!” After taking a breath, he continued to describe what keeps him so hopeful: “In the clinic, every time I see a child or family, whether they are doing well or have lost everything and are living in a shelter or on the street, it gives me motivation to keep making change. I have tons of kids who are doing really amazing things, they are great parents, they are working in school, they’ve gone to college… So it’s not all doom and gloom you know.”

Dr. Shapiro is also driven by the realization that the children and youth whom he serves are just as capable as any other young people; they just often need more support: “You know, these kids have such great potential, and given the chance, they can reach the same goals and dreams as more fortunate children. What really drives me is knowing that children growing up in poverty are not given the same chance as those who don’t. Enormous human potential is wasted if these kids are not given the chance to reach their full potential. One of our jobs is to be able to identify that potential and help them get to where they need to get to.”

25th anniversary CHF benefit concert

Above and beyond his own personal passion and drive, another reason that Dr. Shapiro and his colleagues at the center have been so successful is that they have been committed over the long-term to the children and families of the South Bronx. Dr. Shapiro noted that people often ask him: “How could you have been here so long?” And he replies: “You know, when I came into this community, I said I wasn’t going to leave. I have been given incredible opportunities to follow my dream. It is also a very unique opportunity to watch a community evolve and literally rise from the ashes. There is a long way to go, however, so I will probably stay around for many years to come.”

When compared to other publicly and privately insured population groups across the country, patients at Dr. Shapiro’s offices actually have better than average health outcomes. He proudly shared: “When we look at our own statistics, our health outcomes are not only better than the city, in general, but they’re also better than other children around the country or adults around the country… If we can have better outcomes when serving the poorest populations in the country, other programs could do it too. That is amazing progress. I say to myself, Wow, we are a beacon, and we could be replicated.”

Giving and Getting Involved

We were inspired learning more from Dr. Shapiro about all the great work that he and his team are doing in the South Bronx. If you, too, are interested in learning more about Children’s Health Fund and about how you can contribute or otherwise get involved, please visit http://www.childrenshealthfund.org/.

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[1] William Friedman and Robert Anson: “Welfare: Hotels without Hope.” Time Magazine, January 04, 1971.

[2] Lydia Chavez. “Welfare Hotel Children: Tomorrow’s Poor.” New York Times. July 16, 1987.

[3] Josh Barbanel. “As a Hotel is Emptied, The Poor Move On. New York Times, December 27, 1988.

[4] Roy Grant. 1993. “No Place to Call Home.” In Working Together with Children and Families: Case Studies in Early Intervention, edited by P.J. McWilliam and D. Bailey. Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes Publishing. Accessed on April 23, 2013, http://www.cmiproject.net/Stories/no_place_tocall_home.htm

[5] Alan R. Hinman, Walter A. Orenstein, and Anne Schuchat. 2011. “Vaccine-Preventable Diseases, Immunizations, and MMWR—1961-2011.” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Atlanta, GA: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Accessed on April 23, 2013, http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/su6004a9.htm.

[6] Roy Grant, Delaney Gracy, and Irwin Redlener. 2012. Still in Peril: The Continuing Impact of Poverty and Policy on America’s Most Vulnerable Children. A Children’s Health Fund White Paper. New York: Children’s Health Fund.

[7] We are grateful for Andrea Braxmeier, Manager of Media Relations for the Children’s Health Fund, for providing the photographs featured in this article and for her additional feedback.

Surviving Sandy: Staying Put in Far Rockaway

Elke Weesjes — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 19:05:26 +0000

This article about hurricane Sandy and the problems of evacuation, was first published in the January issue of the United Academics Magazine. Parts of this publication’s content have now been made available for those who don’t have an Ipad and/or UA magazine subscription. I hope that by republishing this story on my blog, people are reminded of the horrendous events of October 2012. For many of us, life has gone back to normal, but in the areas hit hardest, like the Rockaways, life is a struggle. Many displaced Sandy survivors are still living in hotel rooms. Their future is uncertain and they and many other victims still need your help.

SURVIVING SANDY: STAYING PUT IN FAR ROCKAWAY| By Elke Weesjes PhD and Lori Peek PhD

Hurricane Sandy churned across the Caribbean and up the eastern seaboard of the U.S. in late October of 2012, leaving a path of death and destruction in its wake. This article focuses on the decision making among some of those who stayed behind in the storm—and how we might use that information to better prepare for the disasters of the future.
Storm of the Century

Food line in Far Rockaway

The night before Hurricane Sandy made its U.S. landfall, Chris Christy, Governor of New Jersey, declared that people who ignore warnings and evacuation orders are “both stupid and selfish.” New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg took a more measured approach, asking city dwellers to evacuate low-lying areas so they would not endanger rescue workers. All the while, police and other emergency officials drove through evacuation zones broadcasting warnings and imploring residents to leave.

Sandy was, indeed, a massive weather system that warranted serious alarm. In the days leading up to the U.S. landfall, the storm barreled across the Atlantic, killing at least 120 in several Caribbean nations. As Sandy approached the U.S. east coast, meteorologists warned that the system could “explode” and media outlets dubbed it “the storm of the century.”

Even in the face of the dire forecasts and the death and destruction already caused, hundreds of thousands of people in the most threatened regions of New York and New Jersey ignored mandatory evacuation orders and opted instead to ride out the storm. In the end, more than 130 people perished in the U.S. as a consequence of Sandy, many of whom drowned in their homes or while trying to leave when it was already too late. Countless others narrowly escaped death because fellow residents or rescue workers saved them. We, like others, questioned why so many people would risk everything and stay behind. As we watched the devastation unfold, we also asked ourselves what we could learn that might help convince those in the future to leave storm-threatened areas.

Puzzling Responses

Research conducted following Hurricane Katrina is instructive in this regard. Just weeks after that storm, social scientists surveyed Katrina survivors about their decision to stay behind. One such study, which was led by Mollyann Brodie from the Kaiser Family Foundation, revealed many reasons that people did not leave in advance of Katrina.

*These numbers sum to over 100% because participants could mark more than one reason for why they did not evacuate.

While most of the factors identified in Brodie’s post-Katrina survey are self-explanatory, one of the most puzzling is the response category that revealed that over one-third of respondents “just didn’t want to leave.” Why would individuals not want to leave in the face of such a terrible threat? What social forces and factors might influence their decision?

Another study helps shed light on this issue. Nicole Stephens, a Stanford University psychologist, co-authored Why Did They ‘‘Choose’’ to Stay? Perspectives of Hurricane Katrina Observers and Survivors, which compared the perspectives of New Orleans residents who had to make an evacuation decision in Katrina, with the views of outside observers. Stephens’ team carried out two studies; in the first, they analyzed how outside observers perceived survivors who evacuated or stayed behind in New Orleans. The group of observers described people who evacuated positively (using words like “self-reliant” and “hard working”) and those who stayed behind negatively (they were seen as “careless,” “passive,” “hopeless”). In the second survey, the research team analyzed interviews with survivors and found that those who stayed behind did not feel powerless or passive. The “stayers” actually depicted themselves as connected with their neighbors and more communitarian than independent in spirit. Their stories emphasized interdependence, strength, and caring for others. “Leavers,” interestingly, emphasized independence, choice, and control rather than social relationships.

A Tale of Two Evacuations

Red Cross in Far Rockaway

After Sandy, we learned of a similar dynamic among the “stayers” in Far Rockaway in Queens. This neighborhood is located on the west end of the Rockaway peninsula. The peninsula as a whole was hit especially hard; more than 80 houses burned down to the ground and most of the others flooded halfway up or were knocked right off their foundations by powerful storm surge. At least nine people died there.

Like in New Orleans following Katrina, in the Rockaways, a “tale of two evacuations,” seemed to emerge after Sandy. Many survivors who evacuated prior to Sandy lived in the primarily middle class, White enclave of Breezy Point, whereas survivors who stayed lived in primarily low-income or working class African American areas of the Rockaways.

Soon after Sandy’s landfall, we spent time in areas affected by the disaster and conducted informal interviews with a small number of Far Rockaway residents, members of the National Guard who were distributing food in the area, a federal emergency responder, and a member of the Occupy Sandy movement. This was not meant to be a systematic or large-scale study; instead, we set out to gather preliminary evidence to help understand some of the reasons that people may have stayed put in Sandy.

Scared of Shelters

Clothing donations in Far Rockaway

What was quickly apparent to us was that the evacuation decisions that Far Rockaway residents made were shaped by the myriad factors identified by Brodie. But the more we listened to their stories, the more we realized how much other things mattered as well, including, and most especially, considerations of community and fears of seeking refuge in public shelters. The Far Rockaway residents interviewed for this article spoke time and time again of the importance of maintaining community ties in the face of the storm and of protecting oneself and one another from harm.

Perhaps we should not have been surprised by this. Stephens’s team had found something similar among “stayers” in Katrina. And we were aware that long before Sandy, community had provided a special kind of shelter from many ongoing “storms” that low-income Blacks in Far Rockaway regularly confronted. For example, residents, many of whom had been displaced as a consequence of gentrification and then relocated into densely populated public housing buildings, had found ways to protect and support one another. Far Rockaway had only minimal access to basic services and amenities before Sandy.

After Sandy, help took five days to arrive to those whose homes had been damaged or destroyed. Vital services were not restored to some of the most impoverished areas in the Rockaways for nearly eight weeks after the disaster. As the two-month anniversary of Superstorm Sandy approached, the advocacy group Queens Congregations United for Action, reported that about 11,000 Far Rockaway residents still lacked heat, hot water, and electricity.

Fema in Breezy Point

In the face of the additional crises that followed Sandy, residents of Far Rockaway once again bonded together. Sharon Anderson, manager of Queens Library’s at Far Rockaway, is a prime example of someone who stayed behind to help. Three days after Sandy’s landfall, she took the initiative to re-open the library. Soon after, people who had lost everything flocked there for shelter, just as those who had the capacity to give began sending supplies. Anderson described the situation: “We had no lights, no heat, we had nothing. Yet we were getting donations, so we became a kind of distribution center. The outpouring from all over the country was unbelievable. People were pulling up with truckloads of donations. I remember in particular this gentleman who brought a rented van full of supplies. We were able to give people water, dry clothes, and blankets. Local church groups donated thousands of hot meals… The effort was amazing.”

Like many people in her neighborhood, Anderson decided to ride out the storm at home. When we asked her why she didn’t leave, she commented: “I don’t do shelters, after hearing what was going on in shelters during Katrina, I knew I wasn’t going to go into a shelter. Besides that, I didn’t want to leave. I don’t know if that is classed as being stubborn but I didn’t want to run, I just wanted to stick it out.”

Breezy Point beach house

The fear of shelters was also often mentioned as a reason why people in Far Rockaway did not evacuate. Justin Samuels shared his perspective: “A large number of people decided to stay at home during the hurricane, me included. After all, where could I go? … Staying in a shelter with strangers and who-knows-what conditions just isn’t appealing, particularly if you’re stuck there for a couple of days. I remember during Katrina people got sick in such shelters.”

For New Yorkers, this fear of public shelters was likely influenced not only by the lingering memories of Katrina-Superdome horror stories but also by the experiences of people familiar with homeless shelters in New York. Like many other residents of Far Rockaway—where poverty is widespread—Anderson knows a number of people whose circumstances forced them to make use of the city’s shelters. Their negative experiences exacerbated her own fear of shelters, as did her memories of Katrina coverage: “The governor in New Jersey said that if people decided to stay that they [emergency services] weren’t going to get them. People like him have to understand that it isn’t easy to pack up and go somewhere else. There is a real fear of the unknown. We knew there were shelters and that we could go there, but I know what happened after Katrina in the stadium—rapes, muggings, theft; I am not going to walk into that. The armories used as shelters in New York City are old and nobody is watching what anybody is doing, I know people who are homeless but walk out of the shelters because they feel unsafe. That’s on a good day. Do you think that I am going to go in there when a disaster like a hurricane happens? No way. I would rather stay somewhere where it is cold, but safe.”

Not Selfish and Stupid

Resilience and anger in Breezy Point

The testimonies of Sandy survivors like Anderson and Samuels reveal some of the complexities of evacuation decision making for individuals, as well as the challenges facing those tasked with ensuring public safety in the face of disaster. Rather than referring to such “stayers” as “selfish and stupid,” it would be beneficial to more carefully consider the various forces that impel individuals to stay behind in a disaster. Countless studies in the social science literature offer insight into this matter, and undoubtedly, future research from Sandy will reveal more important findings.

Devastated Breezy Point

For now, our post-Sandy interviews show that some people will be resistant to leaving, no matter how dire the threat, because they are either too fearful to go to a shelter or because they are hesitant to leave loved ones and their beloved community behind. If the ultimate goal is to move vulnerable individuals out of harm’s way, how could we use this knowledge for the social good? First, keeping communities intact is critical. Some of the people who “just didn’t want to leave” in Sandy, refused to go because they did not want to be separated from their community. If evacuation plans considered how groups could evacuate as collectives rather than simply as individuals, we might go a long ways in convincing people to leave. Second, and related to the prior point, if groups were able to evacuate together, then they might feel safer in shelters and other unfamiliar settings. For example, think if entire city blocks or even neighborhoods were encouraged to regroup at particular shelters. What a difference that might make! Third, members of the public should be reassured that if they do evacuate to shelters, that these will be safe havens rather than scary spaces. In the post-Katrina era, many people are profoundly fearful of mass shelter settings, a fact that emergency managers must be aware of and deal with through treating all shelter residents with the utmost care and respect.

Pictures:by Elke Weesjes

With a special thanks to Sharon Anderson

Please donate to the Queens Library Foundation. Their website is www.queenslibraryfoundation.org.

References:

Nicole M. Stephens, MarYam G. Hamedani, Hazel Rose Markus, Hilary B. Bergsieker,and Liyam Eloul (2009). Why Did They “Choose” to Stay? Perspectives of Hurricane Katrina Observers and Survivors

Mollyann Brodie, Kaiser Family Foundation: Survey of Hurrican Katrina Evacuation.(2005)

‘Don’t Move’ – A Short History of Post-Mortem Photography

Elke Weesjes — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 15:20:06 +0000

We are all familiar with photographs of death. From Margaret Bourke-White’s coverage of Nazi concentration camps and Eddie Adam’s world famous image of General Loan shooting a Viet Cong soldier in the head, to the 2013 World Press Photo of the Year, depicting the bodies of two children carried by their uncles to a mosque for their funeral in Gaza City. Photography immortalizes places, people and events. It celebrates life and commemorates death.

Recording death is nothing new. Death and photography have been historically intertwined from as early as the mid-19th century when the daguerreotype process was invented by the French artist and physicist Louis Daguerre (1787-1851). In this process, images fixed themselves not to paper but to silver-coated copper and the copper was then covered by glass. Only one plate could be made at a time and the process required between three and ten minutes of complete stillness.

In America, in the period from its invention in 1839 to 1860, when other photographic processes like the ambrotypes and tintypes took over, the desire to immortalize the self sold thirty million daguerreotypes. By 1850 there were over 70 daguerreotype studios in New York City alone.

Before the advent of photography, individuals were celebrated and remembered through the visual medium of painting, but since it was costly it was limited to the rich, famous and powerful. With the introduction of the daguerreotype the masses, including lower classes and minorities, could own a lasting remembrance.

Unfortunately not everyone lived long enough to have their photo taken. People who wanted to preserve the images of those who died prematurely relied on so called post-mortem photography. In an era characterized by high infant mortality rates it is no surprise that these photographs were largely of children and infants, although adults and the elderly are represented too. These pictures, which helped people converse about death and deal with their grief, were displayed alongside other photographs in the household as part of the image inventory of families.

In these pictures, children lie on beds or sit on their parent’s lap. Some are strapped on rocking horses. Older children and adults are often held up with posing stands or placed on chairs. Some are posing as if they are awake, others seem asleep, resting peacefully. The daguerreotypist’s job, was to evoke the past, preserve youth and create an image that would in some ways project the soul to anyone who laid eyes on it. Because the process took minutes of stillness, the deceased are always in focus. The living on the other hand are sometimes blurry.

In many early images the effect of life was enhanced by adding a rosy tint to the cheeks of the deceased, or pupils were painted onto the photographic print. Later examples don’t show the same effort to create a lifelike appearance and depict the dead lying in a coffin surrounded by funeral attendees.

Because of the developments in photography, it was no longer necessary to pose and sit still for minutes. George Eastman’s ‘you-press-the-button-we-do-the-rest’ Kodak camera went on the market in 1888, revolutionizing photography. Eastman who was the founder of Kodak, developed dry gel on film which replaced the photographic plate and the toxic chemicals used by daguerreotypists. Furthermore the introduction of the Kodak Brownie, in 1901, made photography available for the mass market. Commercial photography became a tool for the documentation of the living rather than the dead and by the 1930s post-mortem photography had fallen somewhat out of style.

This decrease in popularity of the postmortem image, was also related to the decline in mortality. Life expectancy began to improve radically and consequently families were less often struck by the death of family members or relatives. In America, in the first few decades of the 20th century, infant mortality dropped from a rate of over 125 deaths per 1000 live births at the end of the 19th century to a rate of less than 50 by 1940. Death became a phenomenon associated with the elderly and the culture and mourning traditions surrounding death and dying changed.

According to Jay Ruby, author of Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America (1995), post-mortem and funeral photography was not a bizarre Victorian custom that became virtually nonexistent and confined to a few ethnic enclaves. Based on his data he concludes that photographing corpses of family members and relatives continues to be an important, if not common, occurrence in American life throughout the 20th century. And it still exists today. It is a photographic activity that many – in particular African Americans, Asian Americans and Polish Americans – privately practice, but seldom circulate outside the trusted circle of close friends and relatives. Besides ‘amateur’ post-mortem photography, there are also contemporary examples of professional services who arrange memorial images. The most well known organisation which specialises in this kind of photography is Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, a Colorado-based nonprofit founded in 2005 by Cheryl Haggard and Sandra Puc. 7,000 professional photographers in 25 countries volunteer their time to this organisation. They capture the bittersweet farewell of parents and their lost babies in tasteful black-and-white photos.

Those people who still practice this custom understand that memorial images – now often deemed disrespectful, eerie, or morbid – are actually wonderful artifacts that document an unspoken part of our social history, and can be seen as icons or reminders of love and loss.

Further reading:

Michael Lesy: Wisconsin Death Trip (1973)

James Van Der Zee: Harlem Book of the Dead (1978)

Stanley Burns: Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America (1990)

Barbara Norfleet: Looking at Death (1993)

Jay Ruby: Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America (1995)

Charlotte Rodgers and Lydia Maskell: Contemporary Western Book of the Dead (2012)

Visit the ‘Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep’ website here

Interview with New APPS (Art, Politics, Philosophy and Science) Blogger Catarina Dutilh Novaes

Elke Weesjes — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 00:50:56 +0000

John Protevi, Professor of Philosophy at Louisiana State University, launched a blog called New APPS in September 2010. He felt that the philosophical blogosphere was too hegemonic and that there was a need for different perspectives, thus he created a platform where a group of professional philosophers could share their (alternative) voices on Arts, Politics, Philosophy and Science (APPS). He brought together a number of people who he either already knew personally, or who he had seen making interesting contributions in the blogosphere. One of the people he invited was Catarina Dutilh Novaes, assistant professor and Rosalind Franklin fellow at the Department of Theoretical Philosophy of the University of Groningen:

Q & A Catarina Dutilh Novaes

You joined the blog in October 2010, can you tell me a little bit more about the blog, its content and contributors?

“One of the motivations was that John wanted to create a venue for more communication between the two main traditions currently in philosophy, the so-called analytic and continental traditions. The blog has contributors from both camps, and many (though not all) of us are interested in both traditions. In this respect I think the blog has been extremely successful, in particular in showing that there is no real, philosophical reason why these two traditions should not talk to each other and cross-fertilize.

Another point in common among the various contributors is that many of us engage actively with other disciplines outside philosophy. Many of us work on the interface with psychology and cognitive science (Berit, Helen, myself, Mohan, John), some are very conversant with math and/or linguistics (Mark, Jon, Dennis), and Eric is very active within philosophy of economics. So all of us have a vision of philosophy where active engagement with other disciplines is a must. John Protevi likes to say that philosophy must be ‘empirically responsible’, i.e. philosophical theories should at least be compatible with the current findings of our best sciences, rather than speculative ‘just-so’ stories.”

At United Academics we are trying to connect science and society, and we feel that the most appropriate way of doing so is through blogs and online open access journals. We still meet a lot of resistance from the ‘old guard’ within the academic community. What is your experience with academics and new forms of media like a blog.

“My guess is that a significant number of professional philosophers read blogs quite regularly (but then again, these are the ones I’m in touch with, so it’s hard to quantify! Selection bias…). At this point, blogs play an important role in the organization of the discipline as a whole, mostly as a result of the activities of a very influential blogger, Brian Leiter, who has been active for many years. Another influential philosophical blog is the Feminist Philosophers, who have done so much to bring the issue of gender (im)balance to the fore in debates within the profession.
I have personally never encountered outright rejection of blogging as a form of philosophical practice. In my experience, whenever I meet new people in the profession, most of them already know who I am through my blogging activity (I think it is fair to say that NewAPPS is the second most-read philosophy blog, after the Leiter Reports), and nobody has ever criticized it to my face, so to speak… There is the question of whether blogging can be said to constitute ‘serious’ philosophy or whether it is just an amusing sidekick. Personally, my own philosophical work has benefited tremendously from my interactions with readers through the blog, so to me it is ‘serious work’. But it is not (yet) something that is seen by administrators as ‘counting points’ in a tenure or promotion case, so we are not there yet…”

Which topics generate the most traffic?

“Our most popular posts are those related to issues and controversies in the profession, for example the so-called ‘Synthese affair’ almost 2 years ago – a case where the editors-in-chief of one of the discipline’s main journals appeared to have made severe judgment mistakes and were severely attacked by some members of the profession. Generally, a post attacking a famous philosopher and inciting controversy generates a lot of traffic! People love fights, be they professional philosophers or not… Posts that have some connection with sex also tend to attract traffic, but mostly only if they are also somewhat controversial (such as a post by me comparing male circumcision with female genital alteration).”

Does this knowledge then influence future blog posts? Do the New APPS bloggers try to cater to a certain audience based on what attracts readers?

“Responses to the popularity of different topics vary a bit per blogger (some are more concerned with traffic than others), but in any case we all agree that we should avoid becoming a kind of philosophical ‘tabloid’ at all costs. So I’d say that for the most part, we do not take traffic into account much in our decisions on what to blog about. We care very much about credibility, and feel that our more polemic posts are taken seriously precisely because they are among very serious, scholarly posts that are not particularly ‘sexy’ in terms of popularity.”

The current issue of the Journal of Social Sciences deals with several aspects of the Enlightenment. What would the great thinkers of this era think of a blog: making knowledge available to a wider (non) academic audience?

“For me personally, the whole idea of knowledge being accessible is a big concern, both when it comes to content and sheer availability. I studied philosophy in Brazil, and at the time the libraries there had very limited resources, so I had first-hand experience of what it is like not to have easy access to knowledge. The beauty of a blog is that it is fully accessible to anyone with an internet connection, anywhere in the world (well, not including places where there is censorship of the internet…). I also make my academic writing (papers) freely available on my website, for the same reason. Open access is a movement that is gathering strength, as it is becoming increasingly clear that the absurd prices that academic presses charge for journal subscriptions are simply unacceptable. If every researcher made their work available on their websites (even if in pre-print version, which is not copyrighted), soon the outrageous prices of journals would be a thing of the past. And this is absolutely in the spirit of the great Enlightenment figures of the 18th century.

In terms of format, blog posts can be seen as short philosophical essays, as the general idea (at least at NewAPPS) is to make them not much longer than 1.000 words. It is a genre in and of itself — to say something accessible and yet non-trivial in around 1.000 words — and I for one have very much enjoyed learning the genre. I became much more aware of how to write something ‘catchy’, something that would entice the reader to continue reading, to make use of humor, to play with the reader’s emotions. Titles are very important, and my general principle for titles of blog posts is that they should cause some sort of ‘cognitive dissonance’ and thus prickle the reader to read on. I think there is still much room to experiment with alternative media for the expression of philosophical ideas, and for now my own practice is still too much text-based, but it’s a start! Here again, there is an interesting comparison with the Enlightenment philosophers, who experimented with different genres so as to reach wider audiences: short novels, pamphlets, plays etc.

But ultimately, the content has to be worth reading, and at the same time remain reasonably accessible. Not all my blog posts are equally accessible (in some, I am mostly brainstorming about a serious research idea), but I generally aim at writing something that the non-academic but educated person (or the philosophy undergraduate) could understand, at least partially. But then again, not everything that the Enlightenment philosophers wrote was equally accessible!

Finally, another characteristic of the Enlightenment philosophers was to focus on societally relevant topics such as political philosophy, rather than concentrating exclusively on esoteric metaphysical confabulations. At NewAPPS we are very committed to this societal dimension (hence the P for politics). For example, one of our contributors, Lisa Guenther, is a professional philosopher, as well as an active campaigner against solitary confinement and capital punishment. She holds regular meetings with inmates to discuss philosophy and other topics (see for example her post http://www.newappsblog.com/2013/01/reading-plato-on-death-row.html), and her posts include her thoughts and experiences on these matters. She makes me proud to be a philosopher! (and her co-blogger) This is a great example of how philosophical engagement with societal problems is not a thing of the past.”

As you mentioned before, the New APPS is (probably) the second most read philosophy blog. It is clear that Protevi’s initiative has been hugely successful. Where do you intend to go from here?

“One of John’s goals was to foster some kind of geographical plurality, as he felt that the philosophical blogosphere was too much focused on the philosophical community in the USA. Besides having a number of North American contributors (John, Mark, Roberta, Jon, Dennis, Jeff), the blog has been able to include quite a bit on philosophy in continental Europe as many of the contributors (Eric, Helen, myself) work in Europe. But we would like to include more on philosophy outside of Europe and the US, so in this respect there is room for improvement! Although I have to say that some of us are originally from places other than where we work (Mohan comes from India, Berit from Denmark, I am from Brazil), so that adds a bit of geographical variation to the mix.”
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BIOGRAPHY: Catarina Dutilh Novaes is an assistant professor and Rosalind Franklin fellow at the Department of Theoretical Philosophy of the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Groningen. She is also an external member of the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy and an editor for the Review of Symbolic Logic. Her main fields of research are history and philosophy of logic. She blogs for New APPS http://www.newappsblog.com and M-Phi; a blog dedicated to mathematical philosophy http://m-phi.blogspot.com.

NEW JOURNAL OUT: THE ENLIGHTENMENT – POLITICAL, ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL ASPECTS. READ IT HERE: http://www.united-academics.org/journal/

A Bat in a Jar – Wet Specimen and the History of the Curiosity Cabinet – By: Elke Weesjes

Elke Weesjes — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 19:37:39 +0000

Selection of ethically sourced specimen
Sue Jeiven teaching her wet specimen workshop
My little bat
Tableaux by Frederik Ruysch
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Frederik Ruysch, by:
Jan van Neck
As some of you may already know, at United Academics we are currently building an app for our Journal of Social Sciences. The theme of our first fully interactive Ipad issue is ‘Morbid Curiosity.’ The guest editor of this endlessly fascinating issue is the endlessly talented Joanna Ebenstein, founder of the Brooklyn Morbid Anatomy Library and Museum and co-founder of the art and event space Observatory. This issue includes an array of exciting articles discussing unique topics ranging from preserved tattooed skins and Bolivian skull worship to the history of mourning rituals and Mexican crime scene photographs. In addition, we are also publishing a biographical piece on taxidermy. In this article, author Shannon Daugherty discusses the history of the craft, with a particular focus on the work of Walter Potter, the famous 19th century taxidermist. But the person central to Daugherty’s article is her friend and colleague Sue Jeiven, who is a professional tattoo artist and an amateur taxidermist.

Jeiven teaches taxidermy classes at the Brooklyn Observatory. She followed in Walter Potter’s footsteps and specialized in anthropomorphic taxidermy. This means attributing human characteristics to taxidermied animals. Jeiven’s animals wear clothes, are usually posed in tableaux, and often represent a parable or a story. In last week’s workshop, Jeiven went outside of her comfort zone and taught a group of enthusiasts the arcane art of wet specimens. These stunning artifacts fill natural history, medical, and anatomy museums. They are deceptively simple to the eye, but in fact, demand special skills to do properly. And Jeiven’s students were lucky; these skills are generally taught only in professional apprenticeships rather than classes for the general public. I was fortunate to be among her students; this blog post describes my experience.

On that night, I went from an observing outsider who was invited to sit in on Jeiven’s class and take notes, to an active participant, massaging the dead animal of my choice – a tiny little bat – until his frozen and stiff limbs appeared somewhat more lifelike. Jeiven showed us how to mix the chemicals, what jars to use, how to place the specimen inside of the jar, and how to make labels with waterproof ink using the classic scientific system. After three hours we all left the class with our own finished piece, and the knowledge to source our own materials and create our own work in the future.

Frederik Ruysch – Science meets Art

The class started with an illustrated lecture showcasing the history of artful preparations. One of the people whose work was briefly discussed was Frederik Ruysch (1638-1731). This Dutch anatomist and botanist was a pioneer in techniques of preserving organs and tissue. In addition to his scientific contributions, he made artistic arrangements of the materials. The late Stephen Jay Gould, evolutionary theorist at Harvard University, sums up Ruysch’s work as follows:

“Ruysch made about a dozen tableaux, constructed of human fetal skeletons with backgrounds of other body parts, on allegorical themes of death and the transiency of life… Ruysch built the ‘geological’ landscapes of these tableaux from gallstones and kidneystones, and ‘botanical’ backgrounds from injected and hardened major veins and arteries for “trees,” and more ramified tissue of lungs and smaller vessels for ‘bushes’ and ‘grass.’ The fetal skeletons, several per tableaux, were ornamented with symbols of death and short life – hands may hold mayflies (which live but a day in their adult state); skulls bemoan their fate by weeping into ‘handkerchiefs’ made of elegantly injected mesentery or brain meninges; ‘snakes’ and ‘worms,’ symbols of corruption made of intestine, wind around pelvis and rib cage. Quotations and moral exhortations, emphasizing the brevity of life and the vanity of earthly riches, festooned the compositions. One fetal skeleton holding a string of pearls in its hand proclaims, ‘Why should I long for the things of this world?’ Another, playing a violin with a bow made of a dried artery, sings, ‘Ah fate, ah bitter fate.’”[1]

Besides these tableaux or installations, Ruysch was also known for creating natural history assemblages to decorate the tops of jars of preserved animal specimens. Unfortunately, none of these pieces are known to have survived, but some of the drawings show how artful and elegant his work was.

Intrigued by the life and contributions of my fellow country man and hungry for more information, I decided to do some more research into the subject of preservation. Where does the human fascination with death specimens come from? When did it start and how has this macabre interest developed over the years?

Curiosity Cabinets

Two books have been particularly helpful in answering my questions: Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums by Stephen T. Asma and Type Casting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality by Elisabeth Ewen and Stuart Ewen. Both books discuss the all important emergence of curiosity cabinets or Wunderkammerm (encyclopedic collections of types of objects belonging to natural history, geology, archeology, and ethnography) in the 15th and 16th centuries.

Skeleton of Siamese Twin in the Kunstkamera
Ewen and Ewen note that the practice of creating curiosity cabinets goes back to the Middle Ages, when the Catholic Church assembled relics of saint’s artifacts associated with Jesus and the Madonna to provide believers with concrete evidence and firsthand access to stories from the Old and New Testament. Myriad religious souvenirs were brought back from the Holy Land as part of the crusades and people viewed them with a fervent sense of awe. “In sealed cases, some ornately crafted a panoply of sacred remnants could be found, including such items as a drop of the Virgin’s milk, a pot that figured at the miracle at Cana, a scrap of a martyr’s shroud, nails, or a fragment of wood from the true cross or the comb of Mary Magdalene.”[2] Human remains were also brought into Europe; for example, the arm of the apostle James and parts of the skeleton of John the Baptist. Interestingly, alongside these sacrosanct objects ‘legendary’ artifacts like griffin’s eggs, tortoise shells, and unicorn’s horns were also part of the same collection.

When touched, relics were supposed to have miraculous physical and spiritual healing powers. By the mid-14th century, pilgrimages to churches with important relics had become massively large events and consequently almost no one could touch or even see them, making the trip a waste of time for the many who sought out their healing powers. Strangely enough, it was science that provided a solution: “Metal badges, which had long been sold as mementos of pilgrimages now were stamped with convex mirrors at the center so that people could hold them high above their heads and absorb the magic from distant displays of holy objects [...] In a world where it was widely assumed that optical devices would capture and preserve the visible truths of the material world, a central technology of objective science was beginning to frame even the rituals of religious mysticism.”[3] It would not be long, now, until science would replace religion as the primary collector of ‘miraculous’ objects.

The Secularization of Wonder

From the mid-15th century onwards, under influence of the Renaissance, collections of ‘miraculous’ objects became primarily associated with scientific learning and were connected with the discovery (and colonization) of new lands and the expansion of global trade. Collecting bizarre human remains and animal and plant exotica became a prominent feature of aristocratic and upper-middle class life.

Most European countries, at the time of the Enlightenment (17th and 18th century), had established some laws to protect the medical study of human cadavers, although it was generally only legal to dissect executed murderers. Whereas the dissection of non-criminal Christian bodies was seen as a sacrilege, bones of non-Christian people outside of Europe were commonly displayed. For some people in the medical profession, like Ruysch who was a chief instructor of midwives and ‘legal doctor’ to the court, it was possible to legally obtain scores of human cadavers. Ruysch subsequently used fetal skeletons for his tableaux and preserved abortives in jars.

Ruysch created natural history assemblages to decorate the tops of jars of preserved animal specimens
Kunstkamera

Czar Peter the Great (1672-1725) was a great admirer of Ruysch and a fervent collector of oddities. In 1697, he visited Ruysch and viewed his large collection of specimens. On his second visit, in 1717, Peter bought Ruysch’s complete repository of curiosities – including about 2,000 unique specimens – for the sum of 30,000 guilders.

Peter then brought the collection to Russia where it became the central feature of the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, also known as the Kunstkamera. Opening his cabinet to the Russian public, Peter wanted to introduce his people to the facts of modern European scientific knowledge. He strongly believed that the specimens would cure the Russian masses of superstitious beliefs concerning nature. He also, for instance, encouraged research of deformities in an attempt to debunk people’s fear of monsters.

Some say that Ruysch’s secret preserving technique was included in the price paid by Peter. Ruysch used an alcohol based mixture, but the exact ingredients were a ‘trade secret’.

It was Ruysch’s contemporary, natural philosopher, chemist and physicist Robert Boyle (1627-1691), who had discovered that natural history specimens could be preserved in “spirit of wine” (ethyl alcohol). The cost of ethyl alcohol was high and people experimented with different mixtures.

Preserved Siamese Twin in the Kunstkamera
Even though Boyle discovered the wet preservation technique, it wasn’t until the Scottish surgeon and anatomist John Hunter (1728-1793) that the process was perfected to the level of art. Hunter realized that the preserving jars had to be sealed in a very rigorous fashion; they were first “sealed with a cap of pig’s bladder, then with a cap of tin and over that a seal of lead, and lastly another pig’s bladder stretched over the top. The nearly imperceptible support filaments that suspended the specimens were linen threads soaked in molten beeswax.”[4] Well into the 20th century the linen thread technique is the preferred method, although an alternative is found for the alcohol solution. The discovery of this alternative called formaldehyde, is a major turning point for collectors in most branches of the natural sciences. This organic compound was first made in 1859 by the Russian scientist, Alexander Mikhailovich Butlerov. The advantages of formaldehyde over alcohol is that less shrinkage and bleaching occur. Besides a change in preserving liquid the introductions of plastics in the mid-20th century also proved to be an advance; acrylic containers can easily be custom-built for each specimen, and they cut down on the visual distortions of round glass jars.[5]

Fascination with Morbidity

Workshop with Sue Jeiven
Today, museums specialized in medical oddities and preserved specimen like the Kunstkamera in St. Petersburg and the Hunterian Museum in London continue to attract visitors from all over the world. These collections are as educational and fascinating as they were 300 years ago. Maybe even more so, since the aspect of time should be taken into consideration. After all, it is even more intriguing to look at something so lifelike and real, while knowing it has been dead for centuries. When I was prepping my little bat – who by the way wasn’t killed for the purpose of the workshop – I thought about immortality and how preserving him really celebrates his life. When I am old and wrinkly, my bat will still look young and fresh, his body is frozen in time. Like many others, I too am fascinated by preserved specimen, especially the odd and deformed ones. Before being introduced to the craft itself, I visited many medical and natural museums in Europe and closely observed jarred fetuses and two headed pigs. I feel people’s attraction to these oddities is related to the peculiar mixed emotions they bring on and as such I couldn’t agree more with Asma who said that his excitement for this kind of material ‘swings like a pendulum between the gutter of morbid fascination and the ponderings of “pure” knowledge.’[6]
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[1] Stephen Jay Gould (Editor) and Rosamond Wolff Purcell (Photographer), Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors (W. W. Norton & Company New York 1992).

[2] Ewen and Ewen, Type Casting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality (Seven Stories Press New York 2006) 31.

[3] Ibid, p 33.

[4] Stephen Asma, Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums (Oxford University Press 2001) p 75.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid, Introduction p.XIV.

For more information about Sue Jeiven and other exciting workshops at Brooklyn Observatory: click here.

Innocence Assassinated – Living in Mexico’s drug war | By: Katie Orlinsky

Elke Weesjes — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 18:59:03 +0000

Reyna Sanchez walks to her Quinceañera in Colonia Zapata, one of the most dangerous neighborhoods of Acapulco, Mexico

A memorial at the main plaza in Morelia, Mexico held on the Day of the Dead, the anniversary of an attack by La Familia cartel that left eight dead and hundreds wounded

Nancy Diaz Bustamante and her daughter Melissa Rivera at home in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico

Nancy and her five-year-old son Armando argue at the dinner table

The mother and aunts of Guadalupe Sujey Castillo at her funeral in Ciudad Juarez.

Secundino Rubio Peralta and Margarita del Carmen Villegas hold a photograph of their son Bonfilio Rubio in Tlapa, Mexico

Schoolgirls after class in Acapulco, Mexico

Driving through Colonia Zapeta, a crime-ridden neighborhood in Acapulco

Josefina Campa leaves her job at a maquila factory in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico

Women march at the Revolutionary Day parade in Ciudad Juarez during the height of the city’s drug war violence in 2010

A young girl watches an ambulance drive by in the Anapra neighborhood of Ciudad Juerez

I met Katie Orlinsky – award-winning photojournalist from New York City – at a birthday party in December 2012. We started to talk and I mentioned that, earlier that day, I had interviewed documentary maker Bernardo Ruiz about his film Reportero (click here for interview). Katie, who was familiar with Ruiz’ documentary, told me that she too was working on a project about the drug war in Mexico, focusing on the story behind the well-known narrative of the fighting between cartels and the army; the innocent victims trapped in a cycle of violence and crime. Immediately intrigued by each other’s work, Katie and I had a long conversation about Reportero, her own photo story project and her upcoming gallery event organized by the Alexia Foundation themed “Stories that Drive Change”. (Katie was awarded first place in the 2012 Alexia Foundation Student Awards and last month, on the 23rd of January she submitted her final project at the Foundation’s gallery event) We made a deal; I would help her do research and collect data for her story, and she would allow me to publish her project on my blog. Her exhibit was a roaring success and naturally I am very proud to present you with Katie’s project:

Innocence Assassinated Living in Mexico’s Drug War

“Asesinato” is the Spanish word for murder. The term has become ubiquitous in Mexican daily life, plastered across newspaper front pages and heard everywhere from the evening news to the corner store. Yet behind the well-known narrative of these daily “asesinatos” lies a lesscovered story: the innocents trapped in an environment of violence, misery and crime.

Mexico’s pernicious violence is more than an armed conflict. It is a humanitarian crisis that has changed the lives of tens of thousands of innocent people. The total drug war death toll has now reached over 50,000 people since 2006. Most murders leave behind a family struggling with loss and financial survival.

“Innocence Assassinated” focuses on the living victims of Mexico’s drug war: orphans, widows, female inmates and young people growing up in neighborhoods inundated by drug gang violence. It aims to tell the story of those who have been left behind.

The feminization of the drug war is an important facet of this emergency. Women have been widowed at alarming rates, left to fend for themselves in a shattered economy. Some are easily lured into criminal activity such as drug trafficking and kidnapping, at times the only financial options available to support their children and elderly parents. these past three years have seen a 400 percent increase in the number of women imprisoned for federal crimes in Mexico.

In addition, there are countless children that have been orphaned and scarred by a childhood engulfed with violence and insecurity. An entire generation has known nothing but the drug war. Soon they will be teenagers, lacking the education, family structure, and economic security necessary to protect them from recruitment by gangs.

The story of the drug war is often simplified. Six years of gruesome tabloid photos, frightening gossip and six-digit death statistics have numbed the public. But a deeper contextual understanding of the conditions that have allowed the war to thrive is crucial. “Innocence Assassinated” seeks to investigate the very culture of violence, misogyny and systemic poverty that has entrenched the drug war into the fabric of Mexican society.

Innocent Victims

NANCY AND MELISSA

In the fall of 2009 Gonzalo Rivera was shot and killed while attending the funeral of his best friend. His girlfriend Nancy Diaz Bustamante watched him die. She was seven months pregnant with their fourth child at the time. “He was my life. He was my love,” Nancy said, as she sat in the bedroom of the two-room, one-story concrete home she lives in with her five children in Ciudad Juarez. “It’s hard to survive. We need help.”

Nancy was still a teenager when she had her first child. She has never attended college or been formally employed, and struggles to find a way to provide for her family in Ciudad Juarez. Unemployment in Juarez and across the country – already at staggeringly high levels – has only worsened over the past five years with the financial collapse and shuttering of American factories along the border. In addition to Nancy’s financial troubles, her five-year-old son Armando has become an unruly and violent child. He is having a particularly difficult time coping with his father’s death. Armando is just one of the more than 10,000 children dealing with the death of a parent since 2008 in Juarez, a city that doesn’t even have the resources to investigate it’s own murders, let alone provide mental health services.
GUADULPE SUJEY
On November 15, 2010, Guadalupe Sujey Castillo Flores was killed by a stray bullet while sitting on a bus at a gas station in Ciudad Juarez. Less than two months earlier, the twenty-two year old was reciting vows at her wedding. “She was so sweet, always kind and with a smile,” her aunt said as she sat outside the funeral home where close to sixty of Guadalupe’s family members and friends gathered to mourn. “No one expected this to happen.”

Guadalupe worked at a maquila, one of the many large factories that operate in free-trade-zone border cities like Juarez. She was riding the maquila’s private transport bus at 6 a.m. on her way to work on “Revolution Day,” a national holiday commemorating the start of the Mexican Revolution. Many people take this day off from work, but maquila workers make less than $80 a week and often try to work as much as possible.

Thee maquila bus stopped at a gas station, unaware that the station was being robbed. Two gunmen fired bullets into the air before fleeing the scene, and one of the bullets hit Guadalupe in the neck. She died less then an hour later. In the year of Guadalupe’s death, 465 women were killed in Ciudad Juarez.
BONFOLIO
On June 20, 2009, soldiers stopped a bus carrying forty passengers at a military checkpoint outside of Huamuxtitlán in the Montaña region of Guerrero, Mexico. They searched the passengers and the bus for drugs, and then allowed it to leave. Yet as soon as the driver took off, one of the soldiers indiscriminately opened fire on the vehicle. A thirty-year-old passenger named Bonfilo Rubio was killed in the crossfire.

“That they would just shoot at a bus filled with people…they didn’t care,” said Jose Rubio, Bonfilio’s brother. “It’s like they were just animals. For them it was like killing a goat.”

Days after Bonfilio’s death, while the family was still in mourning, a local army commander called their home. He offered 160,000 pesos, less than $13,000, as financial compensation for Bonfilio’s murder. The family refused. “We don’t want just any punishment, we want a big punishment,” said Secundino Rubio Peralta, Bonfilio’s father. “We won’t stop fighting.”

Drug related violence throughout the Mexican state of Guerrero is currently at an all time high, but it is nothing new for the rural indigenous communities living in the Montaña region. A collision of poverty, drug trafficking and militarization has resulted in violence and abuse against these communities for decades.

Guerrero is one of Mexico’s poorest states, but it is also the country’s largest producer of poppy. Opium poppies and marijuana are cultivated throughout the region. Corrupt military and drug traffickers make a profit from the crops, while the local population lives in poverty and fear. Between April 2005 to May 2011, human rights groups have recorded at least 200 disappearances at the hands of uniformed soldiers in Guerrero.

Narco Zones
ACAPULCO
Movie stars like Elizabeth Taylor made Acapulco famous, but the days of sexy parties on the cliffs of this seaside resort city are long gone. La Costera, the main avenue that runs along the Acapulco coastline, still boasts gaudy hotels, chain restaurants, and attractions like bungee jumping. But instead of convertibles and tour busses, weapon-wielding federal police and military trucks now zoom up and down the street. The occasional cruise ship still docks in the city’s gigantic ports and a handful of Hawaiian shirt wearing tourists can sometimes be found meandering around the boardwalk jewelry stands, but by sunset the streets are empty and the tourists are back on their ships.

These days, there are two Acapulcos, conveniently separated by a mountain – the relatively safe, tourist-town Acapulco, and then there is the “other side,” where a war is taking place between the Sinaloa and Familia Michoacana drug cartels. When I arrived in Acapulco on the afternoon of Saturday, January 8th in 2011, fifteen decapitated bodies had been found earlier that morning outside a shopping center in the city’s commercial district. By the time I got to the crime scene all that was left was a burned out car and some roadside DVD vendors and taxi drivers, none of whom would say a word about what they saw that morning. I don’t blame them; one never knows who could still be lingering at a crime scene. In cities like Acapulco, the unassuming teenager in Adidas sneakers on the corner could be an aguilla, or hired lookout for drug cartels.

A visit to the municipal police headquarters and morgue didn’t provide any additional information, but there were a lot of bodies. The smell of death was everywhere. Families of the victims clustered across the station patio talking on cell phones, crying and angry.

Nearby masked soldiers perched atop army trucks. They remained stationed in the headquarters, with no plan of heading out into the streets. “We let them kill each other first,” an officer told me. By the end of the day the body count had doubled to thirty.
JUAREZ
Ciudad Juarez is known as the “front-line” of the drug war. Minutes away from El Paso, Texas, this border city of an estimated 1.3 million people is inundated by violent crime. More than 10,000 people have been killed in Juarez since 2008. In 2010, Juarez’s bloodiest year, approximately 3,000 were killed.

During this time many residents of El Paso were too scared to cross over to their sister city, and downtown Juarez grew less busy. Once the harsh afternoon light faded, and the giant red desert sky disappeared over the mountains, it was time to go home. Evenings were quiet in a place once known for its nightlife. Even now, with life calmer and businesses reopening, people in El Paso continue to fear Juarez.

“Aren’t you scared?” El Paso locals will often ask me. “Yes,” I tell them. Everyone in Juarez is scared. Fear and mistrust are just a part of daily life there, like traffic jams or the temperature dropping. The citizens of Juarez continue to go on with life, whether or not eight people are killed that day. They still wait for the bus to take them home, despite rumors of bus drivers employed by criminals who prey on commuters. Women still sell homemade candy bars in the middle of the highway, as pick-up trucks filled with ski mask-wearing federal police officers go zooming by.

Violence and crime are part of the daily fabric of life in Juarez; it is nothing new. The maquilas, created in the free-trade zone along the US-Mexico border in the 1990s led to an influx of low-wage, largely female workers to Ciudad Juarez. But very quickly, these female factory workers became targets of violent crimes. Over the past 18 years, more than 1,000 women in Juarez have been murdered or gone missing, in an alarming trend known as “femicides.”

Today it is widely assumed that most deaths and disappearances are linked to the wider drug war. But some local Juarez activists say femicides are on the rise again after the murders of two prominent activists. Marisela Escobedo, a mother who fought to bring her daughter’s killer to justice, was gunned down in front of the Chihuahua governor’s office in December 2010. In January 2011, feminist poet Susana Chavez was killed and her mutilated body dumped on a Juarez street.

Women at War

An inmate and her daughter in the Ciudad Juarez Women’s Prison

Karla Soloria, 27 in prison for drug and weapons trafficking

Eunice Ramirez, 19, and Claudia Ramirez 21, in prison for kidnapping

Julia Fragozo, 28, in prison for drug trafficking

Family members line up outside the Ciudad Juarez Municipal State Prison on visiting day
A young boy in the Monaña region of Guerrero, Mexico, where large amounts of opium poppy and marijuana are cultivated
It was the night shift at the offices of El Diario de Juarez newspaper in November 2010. Local journalists were about to take me to some crime scenes and we waited for the black hand-held police scanner to tell us about the next “assassinato,” or murder. In Ciudad Juarez, Mexico’s “murder capital” at the time, assassinatos were a daily occurrence, with an average of eight people killed per day.

Soon I noticed the men huddled in a corner around a bright laptop screen. “I’ll set her free!” a middle-aged crime photographer yelled. They were looking at photos of Eunice Ramirez, a slim, tall young woman with shoulder-length reddish brown hair, flawless skin and breast implants. In one of the images she wore a sparkly bikini top and jeans. In another shot, the nineteen-year-old stood between two women, all three wearing the same bright red belly shirts. We must have looked through nearly a dozen sexy snapshots, but one photo I saw on the Internet that evening struck me most. In place of Ramirez’s tank top and tight pants she wore an oversized striped t-shirt and dark blue pajama bottoms. Her hair looked limp and lifeless, and her pretty face lacked the usual heavy makeup.

The photo was taken at the Ciudad Juarez Attorney General’s Office on Oct. 30, 2010. In the picture, Eunice Ramirez stands in a line along with 14 other accused kidnappers. To her left is a tiny, frazzled-looking woman with messy hair and smudged eye makeup. This is Claudia Leticia, Ramirez’s 21-year-old sister.

The sisters were arrested as members of the kidnapping gang “El Arquis.” Ramirez allegedly worked as a part-time model and her Facebook page, stocked with sexy photos, was made public after the arrest. Her case quickly became notorious.

In November 2010, Eunice and Claudia Ramirez joined 148 other women at the Ciudad Juarez prison for women, known as the Cereso (Center for Social Rehabilitation). Two years later, the total number of women in the Cereso stood at 228. More women are participating in Mexico’s drug war than ever before and more are getting arrested. According to the Mexican government’s National Women’s Institute, the number of females imprisoned for federal crimes in Mexico rose 400 percent between 2007 and 2010. Before I visited the prison, I had spent months working with drug war widows and orphans. I associated the feminization of violence in Mexico with widows mourning over their husbands’ shot up bodies. Yet the night I saw the photos of Eunice Ramirez I began to question my assumption of women as solely those left behind on the margins. After I visited the prison, I saw first-hand the thin line that divides criminal and victim in Mexico’s drug war. The growing trend of female involvement in organized crime goes beyond the sensationalized idea of the beautiful narco-girlfriend, or the glamorous yet dangerous “Queen Pin.” Indeed, we see that wealthy drug traffickers have girlfriends, wives, and daughters who get sucked in to the life. Some of these women even excel at their newfound professions, such as the former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel known as the “Queen of the Pacific.” However, the Queen of the Pacific is not the norm; most of the women involved in the drug war will never be the queens of anything. Instead, they are humble spies, smugglers, lookouts, decoys, and bait. They are the invariably poor, female foot soldiers in a war that exploits widespread unemployment and the traditionally marginal role of women in Mexican society to its advantage.

In Juarez, the middle-aged lady selling fried potatoes doused in chili sauce on the street corner could actually be making her money as a lookout for a drug cartel. The mother driving to visit her grandmother in a distant town could have thousands of pesos of dirty money hidden in a diaper bag. The teenage girl crossing the border every afternoon on her way home from school in El Paso could have a newly purchased handgun in her backpack ready to sell on the street. Now, anyone in drug war zones like Juarez could be involved in crime, actively, peripherally, or just once.

The Juarez women’s prison is like a Petri dish in the complex laboratory that is the drug war’s feminization. There I heard the story of Karla Soloria, a woman who had kids too young and was simply looking for a good time. I chatted with Julia Fragozo, pulled over in a car full of marijuana and duped by the man she loved. And I finally met Eunice Ramirez, the sexy babe used as bait to lure men into kidnapping. Each woman I met in the Cereso had a unique story to tell, but at the same time they represented the larger narrative of so many Juarez women. Innocent or guilty, imprisoned or free, they have a voice, and stories that can be used as cautionary tales for thousands of vulnerable young women living in Mexico’s drug war zones.
KARLA
Karla Soloria, a Ciudad Juarez native, was drawn to the fast life. Before her arrest, she worked in residential real estate, a middle-class job. As the violence in Mexico grew, the Juarez property market plummeted, and Karla had a hard time making a living. She struggled to support her son and elderly mother as a single mom.

For years, Karla was overworked, exhausted, and lonely. When her son was old enough to enter kindergarten, she finally felt comfortable leaving him at home with his grandmother, and hit the party scene. “I wanted to make up for lost time,” she recalled with a slight sense of shame. “I wanted my freedom.” There were times in Juarez when just driving across town to the bars risked death, but danger didn’t stop Karla. “Before I got to prison, I just cared about having fun,” she said. Going out with “those men” made her “feel good and important.”

The narco-lifestyle appeals to many women across Mexico. The glamour and excitement of money, dangerous men and fast cars, or the pure escapism of drinking and partying, tempts. The music, fashion and culture associated with drug trafficking has grown particularly popular in Northern Mexican cities where you can “make it” by being a criminal, or for women, by dating one. Karla’s fun was cut short one night at a party when soldiers stormed the house and found a stash of drugs, illegal guns and ammunition hidden in a back room. They arrested everyone there and Karla was sentenced to seven years for drugs and arms trafficking. She claims she is innocent, guilty only of getting mixed up with the wrong crowd. She mentioned briefly there were some off-duty police officers at the house she was arrested at, but wouldn’t go into detail.

“I regret not seeing the danger in what I was doing and trusting people that I thought I knew,” she said.

Karla had time to reflect behind bars, where she realized something a lot of women find out too late — that a fast life often ends in death. “In a way, we are safe in here,” she once told me. “If we were on the outside maybe we would be dead.”
EUNICE AND CLAUDIA
Eunice Ramirez called herself a model, but in reality she was a nini. “Nini” is short for “ni estudia, ni trabaja” or “neither studies, nor works.” The ninis comprise a social group of wayward Mexican youth who are prime targets for recruitment by traffickers. At the time of her arrest Eunice had a ninth-grade education. According to records from the Chihuahua State Department of Education, she had learning problems and abandoned her studies after her third attempt to complete freshman year. In addition to a lack of education, Eunice had never been registered as officially employed in Mexico. For a girl like Eunice, beauty was her only ticket. But sometimes beauty can be an ugly thing.

“We don’t know why they came for us,” said Claudia Leticia Ramirez, Eunice’s older sister, when we met in the prison. Claudia showed me the scars she claimed the Federal Police left on her wrists when they came to her house to lead her off in handcuffs. Yet when sentencing time arrived roughly a year later, Claudia ratted out her own sister, accusing Eunice of luring the kidnapping victim to the destination where he was abducted.

When I first met Eunice Ramirez I was expecting a bombshell seductress. What I found instead was a gangly teenager with a speech impediment. Her dyed bright red hair was not glamorous, but rather struck me as a misguided teenage fashion statement. The obvious implants in her breasts, shown off in a low-cut turquoise tank top, suggested that even in prison, she did not want to let her purchase go to waste.

In his testimony, Arturo Puentes Gonzalez, the Arquis gang-leader, claimed Eunice was involved in the kidnapping because “she needed money.” Lower-level members of the Arquis gang like Eunice made only $200 to $500 per kidnapping. Arturo Gonzalez testified that Eunice first approached him via her boyfriend “David” who was allegedly involved in the kidnapping business. Eunice had recently met the victim, a rich 18-yearold son of a Juarez businessman. She said he owned several luxury vehicles, including a Hummer, and that she knew where to find him. The young man was then kidnapped at a restaurant owned by his family. His parents reported the crime to the authorities, which is rare in Mexico, and a special federal kidnapping branch rescued the victim and caught the Arquis gang members— an even rarer outcome.

Eunice Ramirez, Claudia Leticia Ramirez, their brother Rodolfo, Claudia’s husband “El Pelon,” Arturo Gonzalez and seven other Arquis gang members were all sentenced to life in prison. They are among the first Mexican kidnappers to receive life convictions after the passage of a “zero tolerance” law in late 2010.

Over the past few years drug cartels in Mexico have expanded from transporting drugs to using street gangs to carry out operations like human trafficking, extortion and kidnapping. According to Juarez human rights activist Gustavo de la Rosa, these local gangs often have female members. Women raise less suspicion among authorities, and beautiful women, like Eunice Ramirez, can be deployed as “honey-traps.”
JULIA
Three years ago Julia Fragozo was arrested for transporting drugs. She says her husband borrowed a car to take her on a “fun” weekend away from their hometown Parachua, just outside Chihuahua city.

“I thought we were going to have a great time,” she said. Then they passed a checkpoint. Soldiers searched their car and found a large quantity of marijuana. The couple was arrested immediately. Julia Fragozo was sentenced to ten years in prison. She claims she had no idea drugs were stashed in the vehicle. Julia was 29 when we met. She was striking, with long legs, hazel eyes and wavy black hair down to her belly button. Before prison Julia worked a variety of odd jobs, including a brief stint in a maquila. Mostly, though, she stayed at home and cared for her disabled uncle and two infant children. She describes being apart from them as “a slow agony…I need them. To see them, to hug them, but they are so far away.” As we spoke, children of other inmates shouted and played badminton in the background. Children visit the prison frequently, and some young children who were born in prison or lack suitable guardians live inside the prison with their mothers.

However no one was coming to see Julia. Her family stopped visiting her over a year ago, and her husband was sent to a different prison. Not that she would have wanted to see him. She blames him for what happened and they split up shortly after the arrest.“There are bad people in this world,” she said, “I regret that I didn’t take the time to reflect on what was happening around me. I was close to people that really weren’t there for me.”

Despite her protests of innocence, Julia did admit to the same thing that almost every other woman in the prison acknowledged– trusting the wrong people. According to Lydia Cordero of the Juarez women’s organization Casa Amiga, stories like Julia’s have become increasingly common, with more women getting involved in crime because of their husband, boyfriend or someone very close to them.

Made in Mexico Sold in the USA

In 2006, newly elected Mexican President Felipe Calderon declared war on his country’s drug cartels. He intended to take a stand against the violence, corruption, and narcotics trafficking that had been increasing in Mexico since 2000. Yet the violence only worsened. By challenging the status quo — an understanding between drug cartels and corrupt officials — Calderon attempted to attack something so deep-rooted in Mexican society that he essentially attacked Mexico itself. Seven years later, the country is engulfed in violence and a war between rival cartels and authorities rages on.

Much of the encouragement for this war on drugs comes from the United States government. Since 2008, the U.S. has spent $1.6 billion to back and train Mexico’s military and police force, funds that could have been used to support social and educational programs in Mexico or to treat drug addiction in the United States. Yet despite this sizable investment, the drug war shows no sign of slowing down. In fact, the U.S. funds, arms, and manages money for the very cartels it aims to destroy.

More than 60,000 guns made or bought in the U.S. have been linked to drug cartel violence, and banks like Wachovia and Bank of America have been accused of laundering money from Mexican drug trafficking. The British bank HSBC was recently forced to pay a $1.92 billion settlement for providing a similar service to the cartels.

The U.S. is the number one consumer of drugs produced in and smuggled through Mexico. Mexican drug cartels make nearly $40 billion a year from marijuana, meth, and cocaine sales within the U.S. Anyone who purchases drugs from Mexico helps finance these cartels.
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KATIE ORLINSKY is a photojournalist from New York City. She regularly works for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and various non-profit organizations around the world. Her work has been published in Life, Newsweek, Le Monde, Stern, Time, Paris Match, Adbusters and the International Herald Tribune among others. Katie graduated from the Colorado College with a BA in Political Science and Latin American Studies. She is currently a part-time student at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and is a contributor with Corbis Images.

Her website is: http://www.katieorlinsky.com/#

For more information about Katie and the Alexia Foundation go to: http://www.alexiafoundation.org/stories/KatieOrlinsky
Text and Photographs by: Katie Orlinsky

West Germany “Forgets to Remember” – Kurt Maetzig: German Film Maker 1911-2012

Elke Weesjes — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 19:46:07 +0000

By: Richard McKenzie
The 1979 showing of the American movie Holocaust on West German TV became an occasion for a mass outpouring of grief and shock as a reaction to the stark depiction of the Holocaust in Germany and Europe. Jewish commentator Julius Schoeps said of the reaction that “[f]or many people in the Federal Republic, “Holocaust” was an emotional introduction, the first encounter with the almost incomprehensible horrors of the Nazi regime. More than just a few became aware for the first time that they had repressed the murder of the Jews that was committed in the name of the German people and had previously avoided dealing with the past.”[1]

It was claimed by many that the film presented the Holocaust for the first time to the German public. However, the emotional reaction that greeted the film may also be taken as evidence that, to borrow a phrase from BBC Radio 4, the West Germans had “forgotten to remember” the work of the earlier Trȕmmerfilm (Rubblefilm) directors such as Kurt Maetzig, who became the most prolific director of the genre. He would go on to become one of the GDR’s leading directors from the 1940s to the 1970s and died this year on the 8th August. His three DEFA [Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft] Trȕmmerfilms; Ehe Im Schatten( Marriage in the Shadows) 1947, Die Buntkarierten (Girls in Gingham) 1949 and Der Rat der Götter (Council of the Gods) 1950 revealed the daily miseries of the Holocaust and took German history to task as he strove to remind Germans – East and West- of their bitter past. Born in Berlin on the 25th January 1911 Maetzig’s own life story was imprinted with the collapse of Weimar and the struggle against fascism. When he was interviewed about his life in the 1990s he described his life history thus “[I] lived under the Kaiser and experienced the First World War, went to school in the Weimar Republic and had my first political experiences during that period. Miraculously I survived fascism and the Second World War and in 1945 went to the place I felt I could be most actively involved in fighting the root causes of fascism and saw my own future in a state struggling to achieve socialism. I saw its mistakes early on and stayed because I thought it could be reformed. I experienced its disintegration and rightful collapse and now I’m living in a capitalist society again […] in the interests of us all, I sincerely hope that I will be spared a revival of fascism.”[2]

Remembering rubble

In 1947 Der Spiegel described the new Trümmerfilm genre as one where films “deal with the problems of today from the point of view of the little man” [3] and which are political but do not necessarily point the “finger of guilt”[4]at any one person or group. The magazine was clear that these films were an important step in dealing with the Nazi past and the “berubbled and crazy present” of the Occupation period.[5] The genre is one that spans both sides of the ever- firming Iron Curtain in the 1940s but is closely associated with the first films of the Soviet Zone of Occupation (SBZ) whose DEFA film studios had the remit to ”take part in the fight for the democratic reconstruction of Germany, and the root and branch removal of fascism and militarism from the minds of every German…”.[6] Filmmakers like Maetzig and his colleagues in the SBZ chose the path of combining storytelling with a strong message to create a “critical cinema”[7] as called for by the returned exiled playwright Friedrich Wolf. In this vein even in August 1945 the Soviet Occupation forces called together a nascent film group under the Zentralverwaltung für Volksbildung, (Central Organisation for the People’s Education) made up of German politicians and practitioners who had either been members of the KPD or in the socialist resistance during National Socialism. This group of cultural leaders[8] then called a film group together to create the Filmaktiv (Filmactive). With his background in the socialist resistance and film making technology Kurt Maetzig was a key member of this group and together with the other film makers would go on to develop, not only the Trȕmmerfilm genre but also establish anti-fascism as the key guiding principle of Maetzig and the other DEFA film makers.

It is possible to argue that Kurt Maetzig was born into the film industry and would have been prominent in the National Socialist Bablesberg film factory had it not been for his mother’s Jewish heritage. His father purchased a movie film duplication company in the 1920s which exposed Maetzig to the full range of film technologies from an early age. He studied in Munich and at the Sorbonne in Paris during the early 1930s. Following a short traineeship in film production he opened his own animation studio which produced cartoons and titles for films in 1935. These first steps in the film industry were halted, however, when in 1937 he was banned from making films by the Nazis for being half Jewish. This banning would eventually give Maetzig a unique standing amongst Trȕmmerfilm directors as of the 35 directors who would go on to produce Trȕmmerfilme only four, Maetzig, Slatan Dudow, Peter Lorre and the little known Erich Freund would have no career under National Socialism. The remaining Trümmerfilm directors would all have some sort of National Socialist UFA past. Despite being half Jewish he avoided deportation through the ministrations of influential friends and he made his living running a chemical company which was involved in the film industry. He joined the underground Communist Party (KPD) in 1944. The capitulation saw him attempting to resurrect the German film industry by trying to restart a derelict Luftwaffe propaganda studio near Berlin, but he quickly abandoned this and moved to the eastern sector of Berlin. The film makers of DEFA were driven by a powerful motivation to, as another DEFA director put it, “answer the question of how Fascism could have come to Germany”.[9] Maetzig stands out from his fellow fellow DEFA Trümmerfilm pioneers; Gerhard Lamprecht, Wolfgang Staudte, Georg Klaren and Peter Pewas, not only in his zeal for examining this question but also in remaining in East Germany throughout his career rather than fleeing westwards. When questioned about this, following the collapse of the Wall Maetzig replied that “I never considered leaving the German Democratic Republic, because I felt that I could only fight for the kind of democratic socialism I was hoping for from within the system and not from without.”[10] Maetzig would remain a key film maker and film functionary for the first 30 years of DEFA’s existence and would morph into a key commentator on DEFA’s output in the post-unification period.

Four seasons of a film career

Maetzig’s film career had four seasons, that of Trȕmmer pioneer, unwilling Socialist Realist propagandist, functionary filmmaker and rebel, then finally cultural commentator when the wall came down. His first season is, perhaps, the most significant and the one where Germany’s culpability and sin was most vehemently examined and criticised by Maetzig. In this Stunde Null (Year Zero) atmosphere of a berubbled new beginning Maetzig began not as a feature film director, but as the director of DEFA’s newsreel Wochenschau [The Week in Review]. Maetzig was director, chief reporter and voice-over artist who was determined to present the news in such a way as to counter the syrupy melodramatic kitsch of the Nazi’s news output. He coined Wochenschau’s powerful strapline “See for yourself, hear for yourself, judge for yourself”. He continued making Wochenschau and its successor Der Augenzeuge [Eye Witness] until 1959 but it would be as a feature film director that he would make his mark.

In 1946 he was one of the four directors to hold a license to make movies in the Soviet Zone. He began with a powerful piece of Vergangenheitsbewȁltigung, (‘coming to terms with the past’) and grappling with the memories of a destructive century. His first feature film, Ehe Im Schatten, tells a story which mirrors his own backstory and is based on the biography of prominent German film actor, Joachim Gottschalk, who committed suicide with his Jewish wife in 1941 because of the pressure that this brought on the pair as he struggled for work and she was threatened with deportation. Maetzig has described that when the original idea for the film was put to him by theatre director Hans Schweikart it “shocked me very deeply because I had seen in my own circles many such tragedies. My mother had died fleeing from the Gestapo and I had many friends who I had seen persecuted.”[11] He fictionalised the story and set it in the context of a domestic relationship between fictional German actor Hans Wieland and his Jewish wife Elisabeth Maurer. Maetzig claimed that he wanted to “open up people’s hearts”[12] to the horrors of the Holocaust. The Holocaust is shown through a series of domestic vignettes rather than through a broad depiction of the horrors of the concentration camps. The most telling vignette is played out in the Berlin Jewish ration card office. Elisabeth Maurer is shown queuing for her ration cards with those yet to be deported. Initially there are two queues of people waiting to receive their cards. One is for Jews only and the other is for people who are married to non-Jews or are half Jewish. Eventually the queue for the “pure bred” Jews disappears and eventually the numbers in the queue for mixed race Jews slowly diminishes to hardly any people at all. As with the Gottschalks, Weiland and his wife see no way out and finally commit suicide. The film ends with a dedication to Gottschalk and his wife.

The dedication to the Gottschalks may have been the most shocking part the film in 1947. Following his suicide in 1941, Gottschalk simply became a “non-person” in Nazi Germany and few people knew the truth of his fate. So affecting was the first showing of the film, which was the first DEFA film to be simultaneously premiered in all four sectors of Berlin, that Der Spiegel commented “not a hand moved when the curtain came down. It wasn’t possible to tell whether this was because of the audience’s trepidation, or shock at having seen the horror of the last 12 years played out before them.”[13] Emotions around the film ran strong. When it was given its West Zone premiere in Hamburg there were protests amongst the audience when the premiere was gate-crashed by Viet Harlan who had directed the infamously anti sematic Nazi film Jud Sȕß (Germany, 1940) and who had not been invited.[14] Maetzig’s film was so effective in highlighting the Holocaust that, although the British were to ban all films made in the SBZ from presentation in its zone in 1948, Ehe im Schatten with its powerful and measured storytelling fitted perfectly with the British view of re-education and remained free for presentation in the cinemas of the British Zone.[15] The film was seen by 10 million people in Germany[16] and after Ehe Im Schatten it would be impossible for the German public to say “Wir haben es einfach nich gewuβt…. [we simply didn’t know]…”.

His next Trȕmmerfilm; Die Buntkarierten, examined Germany’s history from the 1890s to the capitulation. It shows German history through the story of the film’s main protagonist , a working class woman, Guste, whose family is slowly destroyed by capitalism and war until a new start is made in 1945. Such an obviously didactic film, pushing a strongly socialist view of German history might be assumed to only find favour in the SBZ, however it won plaudits in the West as well. The SED’s official organ, Neues Deutschland, welcomed the film saying “ a 100% YES to this film..” but surprisingly the American Zone’s Neue Zeitung described it as a “fantastic epic..” too. Even Der Spiegel reviewed the film as a “..romp through history with spirit and humour.”[17] Maetzig’s final Trȕmmerfilm Der Rat der Götter 1950 accuses German industry of supporting and benefiting from fascism. With the division of Germany formalised in 1949 with the creation of the GDR and Federal Republic the western press was much less fulsome in its welcome. Der Spiegel claimed that when the curtain went down the audience refused to applaud.[18] From the perspective of the 21st century it may appear that these DEFA films must have been influenced and controlled by the Soviet occupation authorities. Maetzig however was at pains to emphasise that at the beginning of DEFA’s production from1946 to around 1949 film makers had total freedom to make the “critical” films they wanted.[19] This freedom to make the “critical” films was not, however, to last. The establishment of the GDR in 1949 forced film makers to change direction as Maetzig commented that “ this wonderful first period lasted only three or four years, then everything changed with the creation of the GDR and censorship pass[ing] in to the hands of the new State authorities…”[20]

It was in this period, post 1949, of strong state control that the doctrines of Socialist Realist film making came to the fore. In this second season of his career Maetzig changed, or was forced to change, from making edgy and angry Trȕmmerfilme to being the unwilling director of the hagiographical and propagandist Ernst Thȁlmann films, Ernst Thälmann – Sohn seiner Klasse (Ernst Thälmann – Son of his Class) 1954 and Ernst Thälmann – Führer seiner Klasse (Ernst Thälmann – Leader of his Class) 1955. Maetzig would later claim that the films gave him “red ears”[21] of embarrassment when he thought about them afterwards. He claimed that he had been selected to direct the film, rather than having chosen the project himself and that he simply set out to make a biopic about Thälmann. The result was somewhat different and the film was to bring him into gentle conflict with the General Secretary of the SED and the GDR’s leader Walter Ulbricht. As a convinced Stalinist, Ulbricht felt he had the right to involve himself in the production of the movies and such was his interference that Maetzig warned him that “if you are on the operating table and the doctor is about to make the first incision it is not a good idea to tell him where to make the first cut.”[22] Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalinism in 1956 and the slow puncturing of the Socialist Realism aesthetic allowed Meatzig to catch the New Wave of film making in the 1960’s and move in to his third season of film making.

The 1960s and 1970s saw Maetzig change direction to direct East Germany’s first science fiction film, Der schweigende Stern (‘The Silent Star’) 1960 and end his career with his final film Mann gegen Mann (Man against Man) in 1976. As a film maker and part of the DEFA censorship process he is regularly quoted in the documents of the East German film censor but it is as the director of the 1965 film Das Kaninchen bin ich (‘The rabbit is me’) that he became most famous. The film, a love story which criticises the East German legal system fell foul of the SED when DEFA’s output was aggressively criticised at the now infamous 11th Plenum of the SED in December 1965. In his speech to the Plenum the future General Secretary of the SED, Erich Honecker, said “these works of art [... ]hinder the development of a socialist consciousness on the part of the working classes […]. The matter is quite straightforward […] we cannot afford to propagate nihilistic, defeatist and immoral philosophies in literature, film, drama and television.”[23] This blistering attack on DEFA and, in particular, Maetzig’s film caused most of DEFA’s 1965 output to be shelved. His film gave its name to all the shelved DEFA films, which are now commonly known as “Kaninchen” films. Despite this set-back, Maetzig continued. However his output slowly declined until he made his final film in 1976. His own “Kaninchen” film would remain unseen until 1990 when the collapse of the GDR allowed Das Kaninchen bin ich to be seen in public for the first time.

“Lest We Forget”

Paradoxically, the collapse of the GDR gave Maetzig a new career direction. The final season of his career was not as a film maker but as creative commentator and defender of DEFA film making in the new unified Berlin Republic. At the end of his life he became the de-facto spokesman for the DEFA, speaking at conferences and giving interviews explaining his career and the motives behind his films. This role of “representative” and practitioner of “critical cinema” make him a pivotal character in the narrative of post war German film making. The DEFA Stiftung, which controls and promotes the DEFA archive, in its obituary of him described him as a director whose works “reflect like no other the tumultuous history of GDR film and whose films reflect the shadows, arguments and fears of East German film makers”.[24] This description omits the fact that he was the most prolific of all the Trȕmmerfilm directors who’s own back story and early films cannot fail to remind Germans of the horrors of National Socialism and the daily consequences of the Holocaust.

This and other obituaries clearly forgot that his Trümmerfilme highlighted the old sins of National Socialism and pointed to a new socialist future of the “critical” citizen, this all at a time when socialism was seen as a positive choice for Europe’s citizens. His Trümmerfilme pushed Maetzig in to the front line of the battle for German memory, but by 1979 and the broadcast of Holocaust his confrontation with the past had seemingly been forgotten by the comfortable burgers of the Federal Republic. Memory is flexible but what is clear is that Maetzig’s Ehe Im Schatten powerfully presents the daily terrors of the Holocaust and that we dare not “forget to remember” his Trümmerfilme again.
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Biography

Richard McKenzie studies at Reading University where his Phd, Looking at the foundations of a ‘New Germany’ – An investigation of East and West German genre films dealing with World War II, will investigate the Trümmerfilm genre on an East/West and gendered basis. Richard has published in United Academics and runs a resource in English reviewing German War films www.germanwarfilm.co.uk. He also speaks regularly on the subject at various film conferences around the UK. Richard’s MA examined two critical East German war films, Die Abenteuer des Werner Holt and Ich war neunzehn. He has studied in Reading, Göttingen and Kiev and relaxes by standing for election in unwinnable constituencies.

Footnotes:

[1] Source: Julius H. Schoeps, “Angst vor der Vergangenheit? Notizen zu den Reaktionen auf ‘Holocaust’” [“Fear of the Past? Notes on the Reaction to ‘Holocaust’”]; reprinted in Peter Märtesheimer and Ivo Frenzel, eds., Im Kreuzfeuer. Der Fernsehfilm ‘ Holocaust.’ Eine Nation ist betroffen [In the Crossfire. The Television Film ‘Holocaust.’ A Nation is Moved]. Frankfurt am Main, 1979, pp. 325-27. Translation: Allison Brown

[2] Brady, Martin (1999) Discussion with Kurt Maetzig: In Allan, Seán and Sandford John (Eds)DEFA East German Cinema 1946-1992, New York and London, Berghahn Books p 78

[3] Spiegelonline.de, (1947 ), Stimmen aus Parkett und Rang, Man Mag keine Ruinen, http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-38936605.html (Accessed 23/6/2012)

[4] Spiegelonline.de, (1947), Ein Auto fährt durch zwölf Jahre Menschen in unmenschlicher Zeit http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-41122894.html (Accessed 29/09/2012)

[5] Spiegelonline.de, (1947), Von der krummen Tour auf den Kran,Und über uns der Himmel http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-41123921.html (Accessed 29/09/2012)

[6] Berghahn, Daniela, (2005), Hollywood behind the Wall, The cinema of East Germany, Manchester, Manchester University Press. p 38

[7] Allen, Seán (1999) DEFA: An Historical Overview: In Allan, Seán and Sandford John (Eds) DEFA East German Cinema 1946-1992, New York and London, Berghahn Books p 3

[8] The Zentralverwaltung für Volksbildung consisted of: Carl Haucher, Willy Schiller, Kurt Maetzig, Alfred Lindemann, Adolf Fisher and Hans Klering . FIlmaktiv also included the above plus Fredrich Wolf, Gerhard Lamprecht, Wolfgang Staudte, Georg Klaren and Peter Pewas.

[9] Kunert, Joachim (2010) Letter to author

[10] Brady, Martin (1999) Discussion with Kurt Maetzig: In Allan, Seán and Sandford John (Eds) DEFA East German Cinema 1946-1992, New York and London, Berghahn Books p 84

[11] Brady, Martin (1999) Discussion with Kurt Maetzig: In Allan, Seán and Sandford John (Eds) DEFA East German Cinema 1946-1992, New York and London, Berghahn Books p 81

[12]ibid

[13] Spiegelonline.de, (1948), Butter frisch vom Gras Zonengebundene Heiterkeit http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-44417116.html (Accessed 29/09/2012)

[14] Spiegelonline.de, (1948 O), Kompensation auf weißer Wand, Premiere mit Zwischenfall http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-44416428.html Accessed 21/11/12

[15] (Foreign Office (1947-1950) FO1056/266)

[16] Brady, Martin (1999) Discussion with Kurt Maetzig: In Allan, Seán and Sandford John (Eds) DEFA East German Cinema 1946-1992, New York and London, Berghahn Books p 81

[17] Spiegelonline.de, (1949), Siebzig Jahre mit Buntkarierten, Vom Funk auf die Leinwand http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-44437283.html (Accessed 29/09/2012)

[18] Spiegelonline.de, (1950), IG-FARBEN, Die volle Wahrheit http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-44448749.html (Accessed 29/09/2012)

[19] Brady, Martin (1999) Discussion with Kurt Maetzig: In Allan, Seán and Sandford John (Eds) DEFA East German Cinema 1946-1992, New York and London, Berghahn Books p 83

[20] Ibid

[21] Brady, Martin (1999) Discussion with Kurt Maetzig: In Allan, Seán and Sandford John (Eds) DEFA East German Cinema 1946-1992, New York and London, Berghahn Books p 84

[22] Kurt Maetzig: Stalinistische Ästhetik im zweiteiligen Propagandafilm über Ernst Thälmann, Gedächtnis der Nation Youtube channel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOCEZvA30HU&feature=relmfu accessed 14/11/12

[23] Allen, Seán (1999) DEFA: An Historical Overview: In Allan, Seán and Sandford John (Eds) DEFA East German Cinema 1946-1992, New York and London, Berghahn Books pp12-13

[24] Defa Stiftung http://www.defa.de/cms/docs/attachments/95afb5b5-7260-4396-9cbb-09291687d2af/PM-Kurt-Maetzig-8.8.2012.pdf Accessed 20/11/12

Ordinary People Doing Remarkable Things: Part 3 – Andrew So | South Bronx United

Elke Weesjes — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 16:32:24 +0000

Since the 1980s the ruins of the Bronx have been replaced by thousands of new housing units. The past few years in particular, have seen the urban landscape of the borough change significantly. In 2009, the new Yankee Stadium was completed and according to an article in the New York Times last year, there are clear signs of gentrification of certain areas with newcomers being attracted by affordable real estate. But it will take more than a stadium and a few yoga studios to shake off the darker image of the Bronx. The South Bronx for example, which is the poorest district in the US, struggles with remnants of its turbulent past. Gang related violence, drug use and prostitution is still commonplace in certain areas. But it isn’t all doom and gloom. A number of determined people with a bottom up approach, who work with local community organizations, might just be able to turn the neighborhood around. One of these people is Andrew So – co-founder of South Bronx United – a man with vision who brought a community together.

Doomed to Fail

The South Bronx of the late 1970s was an unimaginable wasteland. It was an urban wilderness, a frightening no-man’s land existing of deserted stretches of real estate and plots of rubble. At its worst, which was right around the time President Jimmy Carter visited the South Bronx in October 1977, thousands of buildings were abandoned.

The intentional destruction of the Bronx was long in the making. After WWII factories were closed at the same time as waves of immigrants came to New York looking for a better life. New immigration and the clearing out of slums in Manhattan resulted in a serious overcrowding of neighborhoods in the South Bronx. Urban renewal, with its high-rise housing projects, destroyed street life. Jobs moved to suburban industrial parks and mass suburbanization took place. New highways were also built, destroying neighborhoods in the process. The construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway, from 1948 to 1963, was the final nail in the coffin for the Bronx. The expressway cut across 113 streets, seven major roads, one subway line, and five elevated lines, displacing 60,000 people. Under the influence of New York City’s financial crisis of 1975, financial institutions decided not to invest in certain areas. Federal funds combined with a new dependence on welfare and diminishing city services resulted in anger, frustration and a loss of hope. A sharp rise in drug use and violence was the next step.

The property value plummeted and because of the redlining* by banks and insurance companies, owners were unable to sell their property at any price. Facing default on back property taxes and mortgages, landlords began to burn their buildings for the insurance money. In the 1970s, the borough averaged 12,000 arson fires a year; over thirty a day.

Transition
Today, drug trafficking, gang activity and prostitution are all still common throughout the South Bronx and although the crime rates have dropped, they are still very high compared to other areas. With 38 per cent of individuals living below the poverty rate, the South Bronx is the poorest district in the US, with high hunger rates and high obesity rates, both symptoms of poverty. Its school districts perform the lowest in the state of New York.

These statistics are shocking, especially considering the fact that the situation has improved significantly compared to how it used to be. But things are looking up. Besides the aforementioned housing developments, successful programs have been launched by the Health Department and the Department of Education. Community-police relations are being addressed and streets that were not more than desolated slabs of asphalt are being transformed into inviting green spaces at the same time that access to the waterfront is being improved providing a place for leisure and recreational opportunities.

Local efforts have been particularly vital in the transformation of devastated neighborhoods into vibrant communities. Non-profit organizations and other community revitalization initiatives are building communities from the ground up. Neighborhood based organizations and an army of determined people are participating in the rebirth of the South Bronx.

Andrew So – A Man With a Mission

One of these determined people making a difference in the Bronx is Andrew So, Executive Director and co-founder of South Bronx United (SBU). Founded in 2009, SBU is a nonprofit youth development organization that uses soccer as a vehicle for social change. It currently serves about 600 boys and girls, between the age of four and nineteen. Born out of the idea that community youth needed an engaging program to connect with that would also keep them off the streets, the organization has now successfully brought together youth from all the diverse backgrounds that make up the Bronx.

Andrew was born in Connecticut but grew up in California. After finishing his Bachelor’s degree from Stanford University he moved to New York where he earned a Masters of Science in Education from the Bank Street College in New York. He taught mathematics and special education at New Day Academy, a public secondary school in the Morrisania neighborhood of the Bronx and also served as a special education coordinator. He has worked with Bronx youth in various other capacities from counselor to advisor to coach. Currently he runs the organization full-time.

In the past six years Andrew has seen quite a few changes in the area: “you can definitely see new developments. A lot of it hasn’t followed through yet, so we don’t know how it is going to turn out and whether it will be good or bad. Will it be better housing for existing residents or is it meant for new people from outside (gentrification)?”

Local studies have found that millions of dollars leave the community every year because residents were shopping somewhere else. Since these reports (2007) efforts have been made to bring back businesses to the area. These efforts seem to be paying off: “A lot more businesses are opening up; economically things are happening. The Yankee stadium area is also being developed which is good because up till now baseball fans would go to the stadium for a game, but straight afterwards they get on the subway and leave. People don’t experience any other parts of the Bronx, maybe building restaurants and hotels will change this”, according to Andrew.

South Bronx United first started practicing on the corner of a baseball field at St Mary’s recreational center – about 1.5 miles away from the Yankee Stadium. When a new field opened close to the stadium in 2009 they moved: “They built that field because the Yankees made an agreement to replace the parks (the stadium was built on what had been 24 acres of public park land) that were destroyed in the process of building their new stadium. There was quite a bit of controversy about it, spending $1.5 billion (the most expensive baseball stadium ever built) on a stadium, while there was already one there. For years there were no parks, leaving many community sports teams displaced, but the recreational grounds they replaced these parks with, are great. We started practicing immediately after it was finished, it is great to play on beautiful turf rather than a muddy baseball field”.

Pay-to-Play

SBU Seniors v. NASA United
Compared to basketball, which is very much developed as an inner city sport, soccer is a suburban sport. It has few inner city programs and is a so called pay-to-play sport. European soccer teams look all over the world for the youngest and most talented soccer players. These prospects aren’t charged for their uniform, equipment, travel, tournament and coaching fees. Instead the club pays them and even their families may receive some financial benefit. The situation in the US is quite different. The best coaches work in suburban areas. The more games their club teams win and the more tournaments their teams attend, the more players will fight for the chance to pay the club to play on next year’s team. In this model poor areas get left behind (inner-city and rural areas) and there is a big risk that US club coaches do not develop their talent but instead, sign as many players up as possible. The pay-to-play model makes a relatively cheap sport like soccer very expensive says Andrew: “for those kids who are interested in playing soccer it is easy and cheap (compared to for example football, baseball or ice hockey) to get started. But because competitive/organized soccer in the US is pay-to-play and costs anywhere between 2000 and 4000 dollars a year, none of our kids at SBU played in competitive soccer teams before.”

A Unifying Sport

SBU literacy day

Before SBU was founded, there were some existing soccer programs, like neighborhood/community programs, family leagues, Mexican, African and Honduran leagues. Andrew envisaged something more than this. He wanted to unite youth from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds in one club: “I did after-school soccer practice at the school I worked and I saw kids from all over the word, Ivory Coast, Mexico, Nigeria; who all loved the sport, and who were all very talented. Other kids whose families have been in the US for a long time like Dominican, Puerto Rican and African American, didn’t know anything about soccer, but they wanted to do something after school. They wanted to be part of something, part of a team, be with friends in a positive environment, rather than just being out on the streets. So that is really where SBU started. ‘United’ is a term used often in soccer and there are many teams which have ‘united’ in their name. But in our case, ‘united’ really means something, we are uniting different people from all sorts of different backgrounds”.

Today, South Bronx United is the most diverse soccer club around. Uniting about 600 kids from over 30 countries, it is a true success story. But for Andrew it was never just about the number of soccer players at SBU: ” I didn’t just want to have a big soccer club. It was really important, especially in the South Bronx, to have the educational component, and having the goal to motivate the children to stay in school, doing well in school and making sure that they graduate and go to college”.

More Than Just A Soccer Club

SSBU 97 strikers visit Princeton University, on the Left: Andrew So
SBU has three soccer programs; the travel program, which is a competitive program involving year-round high quality training (the boys and girls who are part of the travel program are required to participate in education and character development programming). Secondly there is a recreational program which is open to all children and thirdly there is a developmental program which is all about character development for children with special events, clinics and camps. The educational component Andrew talks about falls into two categories: an after school tutoring program and a college prep program. Besides an extensive mentoring program, SBU is about to hire their first full time social worker: “We want to meet the needs of youth and families and strengthen the academic services and social support we provide. In order to do so it is important to have a professional social worker and a one-to-one mentoring program. All our high school seniors are matched up with mentors (volunteers).We provide a support network; make sure that kids have someone to go to. Many of them have parents who are absent, or who are working late. Some parents are, for example, taxi drivers; they work double shifts and never see their kids. If these children don’t come to us, they end up going to peers, or end up in gangs or street groups which takes the kids off track.”

Future Plans

Most programs are up and running and are incredibly successful. But there is always room for improvement. Two areas in particular need more work according to Andrew. Trying to address the high rates of obesity in the South Bronx, the SBU finds it hard to reach children who struggle with weight issues. With a few exceptions, most children who want to play soccer and sign up for SBU are not overweight.

SBU Rising Stars at Larchmont
Another group that is hard to reach is girls. The club has five boy’s groups and only two girl’s groups and really struggles to recruit more girls. SBU is not an exception; New York City doesn’t have a girl’s soccer team: “There isn’t much out there for girls who want to play soccer. A lot of our boys have sisters and they know about the sport, but many refuse to play. Also, it is challenging to determine how to address those cultural norms that frown upon women’s sports. We tried to contact schools and let them know we have a program. A lot of it is through word of mouth, flyers and posters. Boys bring girls from their school. There are some strategies, but we need to improve them. With the boys we hardly had to do any recruitment, but it is much more difficult with the girls”.

Andrew feels these issues can be addressed and more people can be reached once SBU has developed school programs: “If we can go into schools it is much easier to reach kids. The US Soccer Foundation funds and runs successful programs which are all about health and nutrition. The toughest groups to reach, like girls and kids who aren’t already physically active, are easier to reach in schools. But this is something we are working on!”

Help out!

Non-profit organizations like South Bronx United are helping change the landscape but only thanks to public support. Ninety percent of South Bronx United’s funding comes individual donations, business contributions, and foundation support. You can help change the lives of Bronx youth through soccer and education, by making a donation at www.southbronxunited.org/donate
* Redlining is the practice of arbitrarily denying or limiting financial services to specific neighborhoods, generally because its residents are people of color or are poor.