ACROSS THE TRACKS
By David Bacon
The Nation, 3/6/23
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/across-the-tracks/
https://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2023/03/across-tracks.html
The tracks divide downtown from west Fresno, and a man crosses as the rain begins.
This project is supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, EconomicHardship.org
In the San Joaquin Valley, the most productive agricultural area in the world, poverty is endemic. Fresno, crisscrossed by irrigation canals and railroad tracks, is the working-class capital and largest city of California’s San Joaquin Valley, a city where people speak Spanish as readily as English.
Here the polarization of rich and poor is a constant theme in its history, and the story of its present. The banks and growers of the valley built ornate office buildings and movie palaces when the downtown was their showplace. Now, as developers abandoned it for the suburbs, the theater entrances and building doorways have become sleeping spaces, refuges from the rain for those with no fixed home.
Crossing the tracks to the neighborhood where many of the unhoused people in Fresno live.
Fresno has one of the oldest Mexican barrios in a state where the Mexican presence goes back decades. Here the abandonment is visible in closed theaters and dancehalls, leaving their marquee as evidence while small tacquerias try to survive. Today the street in front of the Azteca Theater is hauntingly empty at night, but older residents remember when Cesar Chavez and a column of grape strikers stopped in front on F Street in 1966. The strikers were marching from Delano to Sacramento, and hundreds turned out to hear Chavez speak in the street outside.
Bisecting downtown are the railroad tracks and the old Highway 99, a defining geography for the settlements of unhoused people. Here community activists and the homeless themselves have pressured a normally-intransigent city government to provide at least enough housing to keep the dream of life off the streets alive. In 2019 Fresno had a larger percentage of «unsheltered» homeless people than any other city in the country – that is, people sleeping on sidewalks, in cars or in places the government calls «not suitable for human habitation.»
Danny Alfiro burns paper in a trash basket to stay warm in a December night.
People try to survive no matter their circumstances. In Fresno they often win community support as they fight for living space in a hard, bare-knuckle city. Mike Rhodes co-founded Community Alliance, one of California’s longest-lived community newspapers in California, and spent 18 years denouncing the city for its abuse of homeless people.
Rhodes’ book, Dispatches from the War Zone, recounts the many efforts for years by the city to drive encampments off the streets, and the community’s resistance. At one point he asked the city manager, «With about a thousand homeless people in the downtown area, and inadequate shelter space available, what is the city going to do with people who are homeless?» With no answer about where people should go, Lisa Apper, with the Saint Benedict Catholic Worker, stood in front of the garbage trucks where people’s possessions would have been thrown, saying, «We have got to take a stand for justice.»
Along the tracks someone has abandoned a shopping cart with a few belongings.
MORE THAN A WALL/MAS QUE UN MURO
Exhibition at University of Texas
David Bacon
Moody Fellow Professional-in-Residence
Moody College of Communications – DMC 5.102
School of Journalism and Media
Moody Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
University of Texas at Austin
This exhibition inaugurates the new gallery at the School of Journalism and Media.
