Erika went to the tribal courts to apply for custody of the girls, a process which requires a six-month waiting period. She had lived in the building without incident for years, but the new manager began threatening her and citing her for building violations. Erika tells me she watched him treat other residents with kindness but with her he was always rude. She has one word to describe what happened: prejudice. “I tried to explain my side of things. I had been a good tenant for five years, and how could this, all of a sudden, be such a problem? It was traumatizing for me. He didn’t just come and knock on the door or give me papers. He would bang on the door hard and say, ‘Open up,’ and scream and yell and be hysterical about it every time he came. It just scared the crap out of me. I don’t know why, but I was so intimidated by him.” Within months, Erika and the girls were evicted. She had four kids and no place to live. And soon no job. The story gets worse. The manager claimed they had left the apartment in a mess and charged them $4,000. “We had washed walls and cleaned carpets,” explained Erika. “I took pictures of it to prove that we had left it in really good condition, and they still charged me.”
“I’ve lived pretty much an isolated life with going to school and working. I’ve been bringing the girls into my home one by one and raising them in a really quiet, stable environment. I’ve done everything to protect that way of life, and now we’re thrust into this whole other dynamic. You have to be really cautious and careful and watchful, because the children are the ones that suffer the most.” After being evicted, Erika’s best option was to take the girls to a shelter. “We ended up staying there for five months, and then we were asked to leave, because they couldn’t help us anymore.”
Erika and the four girls have been living in the basement of a two-bedroom house. Her sister, her sister’s boyfriend and his brother live on the main floor. “They drink a lot,” says Erika. “Like five days out of the week they’re drunk.” And when they drink, Erika and the kids become targets for abuse. “We basically live downstairs and have our meals and stuff in the basement and just kind of keep to ourselves, or we go for drives or go to the park a lot. So, we kind of, you know, keep a low profile in the home, and we’ve been living like that for about two-and-a-half years.”
Their possessions had been stored in an empty house in the country that was recently rented out. Erika didn’t have gas money to get to the house and pleaded for time to get her things out – it was a lot of memorabilia. But her pleas went unheeded and she lost everything. It’s a huge emotional loss for Erika but, at the moment, she sees it as the least of her troubles. Her thirteen-year-old was recently raped by a trusted family member. (More on this in Chapter 7.) Erika decided to let go of her possessions and focus on the future.
Erika has applied for housing on the reservation. Standing Rock housing policies prohibit drug use and she is hoping that the fact that she doesn’t drink, smoke, or do drugs will help her. But even so, the waiting time for affordable housing on the reservation is years long. Erika is working with the tribal leadership to get their case expedited to stabilize life for the children. She is afraid to rent an apartment off of the reservation, even if she could afford it. “I’m still so frightened by confrontations with landlords. I mean, I’m amazed at myself, because I’ve been a really strong person all my life, very independent, very straightforward, and now I cower. I just shiver every time I think about dealing with a landlord. I’m scared they’re going to kick me out, or something’s going to happen, and I’ll be on the street with four girls again and a very limited income. So, it’s really frightening. I know that I’m at the disadvantage, because I’m Native. They think automatically that I’m stupid or I’m uneducated, that I’m not an equal, and don’t deserve the same respect that someone else might. I see that everywhere I go.”
The sense of Erika as a capable, professional person is palpable to me as we talk, as is her paralyzing sense of vulnerability. “My life is like a yellow caution sign, because I’m just always so concerned with the girls’ safety and their well-being from the time we wake up.” The daily routine for Erika and the girls starts early. The school bus arrives at 7 a.m. for the older girls in junior high and Erika is there to meet the driver every day, to make sure the driver knows her, as she sends the girls off for the ten-mile trip to the nearest school. In South Dakota, thirty-four school districts have opted for a four-day week to save money on transportation. This means that Erika’s two older girls are picked up for junior high at 7 a.m. and returned home at 4:30 or 5 p.m.
Her youngest child has just started at a local kindergarten and Erika hopes this will enable her to get back to work and so be able to provide a better living situation for the children. For now, while the girls are in school, Erika runs an informal taxi service. “Someone might hire me to drive to McLaughlin. That’s how I get my gas money. It’s $10 a ride to McLaughlin and back.” She also acts as an informal taxi for neighbors when she makes the sixty-mile round trip to Mobridge for groceries and household goods. The thought of car trouble is too distressing to even talk about. So much depends on having a vehicle that runs – even if it is held together with Bondo and duct tape.
This is what it means to be part of the struggling class: to work consistently in a breathtakingly vulnerable situation, with few resources, and with an unfounded hope that you can build a better life. If the isolation of the rural landscape suggests some similarities between Appalachia and Standing Rock, few places could be more different from this reservation than Oakland, California. And yet, even here, the daily lives of the struggling class bear remarkable similarities.
Oakland, California
Oakland, California is a racially diverse city with demographics that are roughly 29% white; 26.5% Latinx; 22.5% African American; 15.2% Asian.32 Wealthy neighborhoods, like those in the Oakland hills, are home to families of color as well as white families. The city’s poor communities, however, are overwhelming Black and Latinx. Home to 429,082 people, Oakland has a population density of 7,676 people per square mile. (By contrast, Athens County has 130.7 people per square mile and Standing Rock has about nine people per square mile.)
The Oakland commercial district is an eclectic mix of old and new storefronts that give this part of the city a working-class bohemian reputation. Lakeshore Avenue is home to multiple cafés, bakeries, and small restaurants. Peet’s Coffee operates a large café just a few hundred feet away from a Starbucks. The upscale Peet’s is designed to invite people to linger – for the price of a cup of coffee, patrons settle into books or conversations that can last hours. The neighborhood is home to an old-fashioned donut shop, an artisanal bakery, a small greengrocer and a trendy gift store. Yoga studios and high-end hair salons (for women and men) take up significant real estate. Just one block over from Lakeshore Avenue on Grand Avenue, the picture is a little different. The high-end chains have not invested in Grand Avenue as they have on Lakeshore Avenue. The storefronts show signs of wear and age, and closed stores are prevalent. For an outsider, this makes it hard to tell if the community is gentrifying or collapsing.
The Lakeshore district is ringed by hills to the east. A