some antecedents to this project

Several months ago a student at UMass, Chris, wrote to Precarias to interview us. The interview you can see here. But then we continued corresponding…

19 December 2005, Maggie to Chris
now a question for you: i am very curious about the US context, the
possibilities and experiments afoot there in the heartland of
hyper-precarity. (i am myself from the US but have been living here so
long that i feel totally out of touch with things there…) i would
love to hear what you’re working on and discovering there, what kind of
strategies you are coming across, etc. Someday in the not-so-distant
future some of us from precarias are thinking about trying to get some
money to travel to the US and explore/interview groups and projects
there, we’d love your input.

20 December 2005, Chris to Maggie
Before returning to college, I had MANY jobs. I worked in phone surveys,
bookstores, food service, and worked in many more through temp agencies. In
any place, and with anyone I worked with, I surprised that people always
thought that they would be able to make their way back up the economic ladder,
and that the pet food warehouse or the hummus factory was just a sidetrack on
the way to a great career. Even in the so-called “permanent” jobs, there’s a
pressure from the boss to leave. After all, there’s plenty of better work
available! “You’re young, just quit before your benefits become too much for
us, or you qualify for too many raises. We can help you work up the desire
for leaving if you need some more motivation.”

Almost everyone I worked with in that time came from different backgrounds.
Many were students, but many more were newly single mothers, middle management
who had lost their jobs because of drug habits, prisoners just released and
left to fend for themselves, immigrants whose family just brought them here…

Where I am, it is mostly rural. There is a disconnect between the urban areas
and the predominantly middle-class and white farm towns and college towns.
The public tranport is designed to make it hard for people (probably mostly
for students)to travel between them. When I talk with people from the cities,
they think that college town people are a joke – no matter what we say, there
is connection between what we say and how we act. These are the hidden wokers
in the campus food service, the cleaning people in the in the dorms, the
construction wokers building a fancy new facade for the library, the teaching
assistants new arrived from Korea or Puerto Rico. Students don’t even know
that there hidden poor urban areas in their backyards…

3 January 2006. Maggie to Chris
isn’t that interesting in the US, how these situations are so often seen
(especially among white and urban people, it must be said: i get the sense
that the dynamic of expectations is really different if you’re rural or
non-white)as just a brief stepping stone to something else: this idea or
almost inevitable upward progress… i’m told there are a couple of books
written recently about the gradual dawning upon the lower-middle class
that its not going up anymore but rather sinking down the class-ranks,
even if sort of artificially buoyed by credit-consumerism, but i’m very
curious about how that is being lived there these days.

in spain its sort of different, in terms of generational history,
expectations, etc: here there really is a very clear memory of fordist-era
labor movements, workers rights, class-consciousness, etc. which all got
thrown for a loop in the 80s with industrial reconversion… and after 15
years of massive unemployment etc lots of working class families have sort
of the fiction of advance: universities are still public so many realize
the dream of university education, and the folks feel proud cause the kid
wears a suit to work (as a telephone operator or a “permanent intern”)
which increases a sense of prestige but actually represents quite a
serious loss in terms of real income, possibility of organizing,
stability, rights, etc… and its only now very recently that anyone
begins to acknowledge all this and a discourse about precariousness gets -
very tentatively – elaborated.

anyway, i am so interested in your reflections on all this, your
experiences. like i said i’m sort of hungry for tales of america, how
these things are working there, responses, etc.

we have, among the little group of precarias, a sort of general strategy
we call “being a double-agent in your own life”, that is, when we have to
do shitty humiliating stupid things (filing for papers with the police,
getting called in by the boss, doing dumb job interviews, negotiating for
day care services, whatever…)we try to always write (or voice-record)
accounts of the experience, with little notes on how things work,
subjective experiences, advice to others, etc. that way a) we don’t feel
that these things are so totally futile and lonely and b) we accumulate a
real bulk of knowledge about how these processes and spaces work, which
can later be turned into workshops or self-defense dossiers, etc…
anyway, i would totally recommend that you do this, write about these
experiences in the US in different little jobs and sectors, tell about
them, we would be so so so happy to share them and talk, even though its
long distance…

12 March, 2006 Chris to Maggie
How are things there? It’s been so long, what’s happening there?

In regards to the lower middle class, I agree completely. Not only has it
dawned on them that there is no longer mobility for them, but they can see
themselves sliding down the class hierarchy. And it’s true! In the US, they
are very reactionary, and the right is exploiting this. People are being led to
believe that the problem lies in undocumented immigrants taking all their work
and stealing their tax dollars by using social services. The US/Mexico border
is swamped with violent, racist militias. There is bill under consideration at
the end of this month that could make coming into the US “illegaly” a felony
and paying, harboring, or otherwise helping an “illegal” person would be aiding
in a felony, also a felony. This would effectively criminalize groups who
provide water, food, and shelter for people making the long, dangerous, desert
trek. By the time that these people see the bigger picture, it will be too
late… If you coul pass on any names associated with these books or people
doing work on this, please let me know!

Here, I think that only a vague idea of precarity is creeping onto the minds of
the population, they just lack a vocabulary for talking about it, even in
academia. Younger people in college are seeing a precarious future
post-college. Many of them are seeing family and friends laid off from the very
same jobs that they were aspiring to. At the same time, the price for a PUBLIC
education is rising exponetially. They are seeing time and money wasted on
something that increasing looks like it will not serve them afterwards. At one
talk and in the class on race, gender, and migration in Western Europe did the
idea of precariousness get tossed about, but then it was mostly in the context
of precarity as a European phenomenon. I have found no articles dealing with
precarity in the US context. I’m not sure why this is…

I have begun to journal about my work, and perhaps I will include my experiences with the mega-bureaucracy at the university. I am going to transcribe them into, maybe a Livejournal. I will email you again soon with a link once I get that working. I am excited about sharing stories, and hearing about how things work elsewhere, learning and strategizing… perhaps I will encourage others to use it as well, and create a safe online place for this dialogue.

13 March, 2006 Maggie to Chris
quickly, two things I want to mention to you:

just a couple of days ago i made a big decision that i’m very excited (and kind of nervous) about: i’m going to take 4-5 months (hopefully june-october 2006) to travel around the US, doing something like a precarias ‘drift’ but on the road, a la americana. i attach a letter i sent to some friends in the US, and a very rough draft of the proposal. the whole idea is still very up in the air, but i know myself enough to know that if i don’t make a commitment to an idea then i’ll never actually do it… so this is the commitment, the details will come later. perhaps you would like to participate somehow? or know others who might?

the other is that i think the idea of doing a live-journal is fantastic and look forward to seeing it. some people in these european networks of precarious-research are trying to coordinate a ‘ring of weblogs’, sort of along these lines, just so various different local projects can be in touch. of course sometimes these macro-networking-initiatives can become more trouble than they’re worth if they suck energy or originality from the actual local content of each project, but still, in principle its a nice idea. i send you the latest draft of that proposal too.

let me know what you think of either/both.

18 March 2006. Chris to Maggie
I think that the draft proposal hits the mark in the widest way possible. I’m
not sure if you are starting to come up with specifics of the itinerary yet, but
what do you have in mind? In areas of the south affected tremedously by
hurricane Katrina, social support networks are really being tested. The state
has revealed itself to be ineffective in providing anything for people. This
has been analyzed again and again in terms of race and class (lower class males
of color) but I have yet to see an analysis of this in terms of poor WOMEN of
color.
…
Networks of support function and are experienced differently from city to city
and region to region. The race/gender/class dymanmics of a collective in Boston
are much different from the dynamics of a rural collective, based simply an hour
or two outside the city.
…
I think that the idea of film as a medium is great. Are you familiar with a
German filmaker, Hito Steyerl, who made a derive-type film about Berlin? It
mainly focused on the complex history of Potsdammer Platz and the co-opting of
public spaces by the state and the historical context of such places… I was
planning a similar project in Holyoke (a local de-industrialized urban area that
has a strong Irish-American background and now a growing Latin@ majority) in
which I was going to examine the histories of certain parts of the city and
their contempoary identities. I was trying to use the project to understand the
way that racism functions in a de-industrialized New England city. I never was
able to secure resources…