My brother and I might have been raised by a single mother, but we were raised to be educated, active, and resilient human beings, so I’d never really thought of my family and I as vulnerable people. When I take a moment to think about the economics we’re steeped in today, however, I recognize a thin line we have to walk through between poverty and insolvency. With Davis’s analysis in mind, that line is magnified. Continuing with some more reflections on the preface for City of Quartz, another passage strikes me as being particularly relevant. Once again, in his updated preface of 2006, Davis writes:
“As manufacturing employment shrinks, an already precarious low-wage workforce is further compressed into a limited spectrum of service-sector jobs in restaurants, hotels, offices, theme parks, and private homes. This service-heavy economy, based upon a myriad of poorly-capitalized small businesses, is especially vulnerable to fluctuations in economic weather…“
When the financial meltdown of 2008 stormed the market, Davis’s insight proved to be prescient. Like the Titanic, the first to lose everything in the crash were the laborers at the bottom of the ship, or people like the garment workers, warehouse bodies, and millions more who’d no longer have work following the recession even while they were barely managing to pay rent in the first place. The second group of people to lose everything would be those just a level above the laborers, or people like my brother and I, as heirs of an economy which had no safety net for their immigrant parents, and barely any safety net for us as their children.
For yours truly, however, in 2008 there wasn’t much of a crash for my eyes to assess. I was barely an eighteen-year old high school graduate then, and all I knew was I was going to college at the same time that the country was getting ready to see its first Black president; I was excited about the future, and hopeful that I was a part of a new era of American culture. Plus, my mother had left the garment industry to start and run her own small business a few years prior, so I believed that my family’s destiny was always going to be a little different from those around us.
Our destiny would be different in its own way, but not different enough to distinguish my mother’s struggle to pay the rent from that of our neighbors next door, who cleaned houses for a living. As Davis’s text points out, our ability to level the crash was fragile, and though my mother’s little newsstand on Santa Monica boulevard managed to survive the next couple of years of the sour market, a “profit” has never been more difficult for her to garner than it is today.
The truth is that business for mom is not growing, but reeling further into yesterday’s memories with each passing day. In turn, seven years after Hope for an era of American Change, the only thing that’s different for me and my family is that the task now lies on my brother and I to step up and weather the storm. I can live with this destiny, as my mother managed to live with the fact that she’d have to raise two young men in Los Angeles on her own, but I know that all of us expected more from our country. Yet with the clock ticking, each minute that passes wanes my mother’s tiny bones further into exhaustion. This makes my post-graduate phase less about crafting my own destiny than about inheriting my mother’s, and all working class people’s. She needs significant health procedures done on her teeth and on her feet soon, and as Davis points out in his preface:
“The working poor in Los Angeles have only marginally better access to healthcare than they might possess in Mexico City or Rio de Janeiro.”
It’s true. As a recipient of Medi-Cal, like my mother before me, I know firsthand just how many benefits of the government’s health-care my family and I are actually able to access. Benefits include check-ups and diagnoses for our health needs, but the rest has to come out of pockets that are already drained.
Still, as Davis later points out in his preface:
“Wages in California have increased only for workers with a college degree…”
As I think about my education throughout the last couple of years, I believe firmly in my ability to gain a greater footing for me and my family to make it through the next seven years. Unlike my naive optimism in 2008, however, I’m not holding on to any hope for a presidential bailout anytime soon. As I reflect on the market for what it’s been to me and my family throughout the last decade, I realize that any upward mobility, like its downward counterpart, takes place one step at a time.
With more soon,