Tag: Race

Categories
Visualizing Urban Poverty

Blighted: Slums, Renewal, and Photographic Depictions of New York’s Poor

Ryan Sullivan

Introduction 

For many years, West 98th and 99th Streets between Columbus Avenue and Central Park West was the site of a vibrant African-American quarter known as the “Old Community.” The area started out as a small settlement, but by the 1920s, had blossomed into something of a miniature Harlem with its own Renaissance. Billie Holiday, Arturo Schomburg, and the actress Butterfly McQueen of “Gone with the Wind” fame all called the Upper West Side neighborhood home. After the Second World War, the Old Community was still populated by African-Americans, but bohemians and free spirits had given way to poor and working-class families. Despite their lack of wealth, residents possessed a tremendous amount of comradery, togetherness, and local pride. It was the type of place where households relied on their next-door neighbors as much as they did each other. As Jane Jacobs would say, there were “eyes on the street,” her metaphor for the natural protective surveillance that occurs on vibrant city blocks. Jim Torain of the West 99th and 98th Street Old Community Association described the area as “like a big extended family.” Linda Burstion, who grew up on 98th Street recalled; “it was just a great neighborhood to live in, I remember playing jacks, eating ices, playing stickball and dodgeball, jumping double Dutch and when it got really hot out, they would open up the fire hydrants.” This is not to say that the Old Community escaped the problems that plagued minority enclaves, but communal bonds and kinship ties provided residents with a strong sense of hope for the future. Then, almost overnight, the Old Community was gone.

The Old Community’s disappearance was the product of mid-century urban reform and slum clearance which culminated in the sweeping 1949 Federal Housing Act. The bill’s infamous Title I clause, “Slum Clearance and Community Development and Redevelopment” federally authorized $1 billion in loans to help cities acquire “slums” like Old Community for public or private use.  The law did not, however, require that affordable accommodations be built for ousted tenants, and many of those who lost their homes to demolition were not re-housed at all. The few that did get relocated found themselves in massive housing projects, cut off from the intimacy of street communities and segregated as never before. 

Renewal advocates relied on the word blight more than anything else to secure public and political approval for their efforts.  Blight, they explained, was a malignant disease that threatened to turn healthy areas into slums. But lawmakers included no legislative definition for blight, which allowed these local leaders and developers great discretion about where and what parts of the city were suitable for clearance and replacement. To demonstrate blighted conditions to a wide audience, Title I proponents used a range of visual aids including brochures, maps, and most importantly—photographs. Examining these images reveals a great deal about the attitudes and presumptions held in postwar America about the urban poor. 

The Birth of City Planning 

To understand how blight emerged as a concept, we must understand the professionalization of city planning. In its modern form, city planning is very much a response to the changing dynamics of urban America in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Rapid urbanization, immigration, and industrialization created lamentable living conditions which shocked middle class onlookers. Most agreed with pioneering documentary photographer and social reformer Jacob Riis when he said, “cities had become nurseries of crime, and of the vices and disorderly courses which lead to crime.” 

Riding the wave of popular urban reform movements, institutions like Harvard and Yale began granting degrees in city planning, urban design, and architecture. By the 1910s city planners were building a new lexicon of terms filled with quasi scientific metaphors. The first use of “blight” to describe urban areas is uncertain, but scholars have pointed to the area around the Brooklyn Naval Yard which was described in a 1911 edition of the New York Times, as “a blighted neighborhood.” In the mid-1920’s, C. Earl Morrow and Charles Herrick, two students at Harvard’s Graduate School of Landscape Architecture published an influential article in City Planning. In the essay, they defined blight as “… a district [where]  normal development has been frustrated. Ordinarily property values are an index of the situation: wherever property values fail to keep pace with the increase in other similar districts in the same city, or have decreased, the district may be termed a blighted district” Therefore, blight is defined as slowing of the property values in one portion of the city when compared to other parts of the city, the result of which is a hindrance to “normal development.” While Morrow and Herrick’s definition of blight has several weaknesses, it stands as a landmark. It is the first serious attempt to give a precise, scientific, urban definition to the word—and it placed the meaning of blight firmly within a capitalist framework that defined good and bad areas of a city narrowly on property values alone.

Despite the efforts of city planners to define blight using scientific and empirical data, the term remained vague and amorphous throughout the first half of the 20th century. The slum, being the ultimate nadir of physical urban conditions, was relatively easy to define, but blight was something that existed in the eye of the beholder. Without a universal definition, the only metric to judge blight was perception. In other words—we all know it when we see it.   With the term almost always applied to spaces where Anglo-American families did not live, blight became infused with racial and ethnic prejudice.  By mid-century, most city planners could not—or did not care to—distinguish blighted areas from minority areas and vice versa.

Photographs as Conveyors of Truth  

The birth of the modern city planning profession coalesced with the rise of documentary photography in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During this time, many in the public believed photographs were inherently true and that cameras presented subjects as they really were. This credence also dominated Progressive reform and intellectual settings. Pictures thus became a reliable form of qualitative research and were used as evidence to advance the specific ideological underpinnings of the reformist vision in the areas of housing, philanthropy, education, and public health.  

Despite the insistence that photographs represented objective conditions, photographers and social reformers found themselves working harder and harder to establish the ideological meaning of the photographs they took. Jacob Riis, who made a career out of exposing urban conditions is an example of how ideology and photography are interconnected. Riis never allowed ambiguity to creep into his photos, not wanting his audience to draw conclusions that did not align with his reformist agenda. In lectures, Riis frequently included anecdotes about his subjects to advance ideological narratives that included the people photographed as well as his audiences. The result was a combination of entertainment and morality with photographs functioning as the mediated visual truth.  Even when he was not lecturing, Riis always presented his photos with captions and text, making sure that his interpretation was always clear.

Policymakers discovered the power of photographic interpretation when they sought to portray the poor during the Great Depression. The Farm Security Administration (FSA) desperately wanted to legitimize many of its controversial programs such as the resettlement of landless farmers, the building of model towns, and the establishment of rural cooperatives through publicity. FSA officials made calculated decisions over which photographs to include, how to present them, and what captions to write. The FSA documentary photographer thus became not only a cameraman “but a scenarist, dramatist, and director as well,’’ aiming at ‘‘not only the influencing of the subject before the camera, but also the influencing of the person looking at the finished print.” According to Tim Cressel, author of The Tramp in America: “FSA photography was an important propaganda tool that served to legitimate the New Deal . . . they [the photographs] were part of a national attempt to order society and nature through the application of rational scientific principles during a chronic depression . . . The images of migrants were a way of saying that things need to be made better for these people living disordered lives. They needed migrant camps—nicely ordered, geometric simulations of ‘normal life’, which the FSA also photographed.” 

The photographs used by urban renewal advocates may not have been as prominent as those of the FSA, but it is likely that Title I proponents were aware of the influence photographs had on the public. By employing this medium, they sought to combine scientific objectivity and rationalism with emotional appeal and popular understandings of the meaning and conditions of poverty to shape public opinion and further their ultimate agenda.  

“Demonstrations of Blight”

An invigorated push for urban redevelopment gained political steam once the Second World War ended. When President Truman signed the 1949 Housing Act, he proclaimed that the legislation “opens up the prospect of decent homes in wholesome for low-income families now living in the squalor of the slums”, and will equip “the Federal Government, for the first time, with effective means for aiding cities.” Idealists hoped the bill would uplift the poor, eliminate unsanitary conditions, and bring order to the messiness of urban life. But others, specifically businessmen and civic leaders, saw an opportunity to redevelop areas in strategic parts of their city that had experienced undesirable demographic and racial changes.

The Title I provision delegated leadership to local municipalities to acquire local lands for the purpose of redevelopment, and Robert Moses was soon named chairman of the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance. Between 1949 and 1960, Moses made New York City the capital of renewal, planning thirty-five slum clearing projects, completing seventeen, and receiving $65.8 million in Title I funds. To justify and promote these urban renewal projects, Moses published brochures for each renewal site (See Figure 1 for an example). These brochures were made of glossy paper and filled with statistics, graphics, charts, and photographs. According to historian Samuel Zipp, “the clean, orderly feeling of the designs, bold titles, seemingly objective amassing of data and photographs bled to the edges of the page.”   This made for a heightened sense of contrast with the dark, seemingly all-pervasive decay on display in the uncaptioned photos. Moses instructed his underlings that he did not want long texts in the slum clearance publications: ‘‘It’s the schedules themselves, the plans and pictures that count with the statement that we mean business, that the procedure will be entirely fair and orderly and that hardships will be, so far as humanly possible, avoided.” Moses’s direction gave the impression that the brochure’s photographs captured objective slum conditions that could be universally understood and accepted. Taking cues from both Riis and FSA photographers, these brochures presented a powerful visual argument and further demonstrated how a sophisticated use of visual material can shape perceptions.

Given that the brochures were intended to justify the clearance of areas designated as ‘‘slums,’’ the most important section was entitled ‘‘Demonstration of Blight” (Figure 2).  Here, the authors described matters such as land use, the condition and age of existing structures, zoning, and population density. The photographs that displayed ‘‘blighted’’ conditions in the most persuasive manner explored three themes: empty lots, back alleys, and abandoned buildings. Empty lots (Figure 3) appeared twenty-two times in the brochures and represented the most popular depiction of blight. Moses and his team implied that when a building was missing, that space was underutilized and would eventually be filled by garbage. Back alleys appeared twenty times. Mostly dark, these photos indicated that portions of the buildings did not receive proper sunlight. Abandoned buildings appeared seventeen times. Once again, abandoned buildings were viewed as natural statements of urban blight. They had a similar representational function as empty lots; abandoned buildings were uneconomic and the fact that their owners had not repaired them meant they were beyond repair or that their owners were not optimistic about the profitability of these buildings.

Race equals Blight

Many images included in “Demonstration of Blight” emphasized elements that made the built environment appear disorderly, obsolete, and beyond repair. Squalor and idleness were often associated with Black and Latino neighborhoods. But surprisingly, people are centered in only a few photos. According to urbanist Themis Chronopoulos “in these types of photographs, the presence of people is incidental,” because Moses and his staff members viewed “blight as a physical problem that required physical solutions.”

But upon closer look, the human subjects included in the photos are much more than incidental passersby. In one photograph, two Black men appear to be chatting on a stoop (Figure 4). At first glance, one might think the picture is meant to show the decay of the townhouse behind them. But there is a more coded message being relayed. The two Black men appear to be conversing in broad daylight, implying idleness or even unemployment. In another image, a young man is pictured crossing the street (Figure 5). This photograph was intended to show that commercial establishments existed in residential buildings and that the people frequenting these stores were doing so in a disorderly fashion. Although this photo is meant to demonstrate blight, the neighborhood appears to be quite vibrant, active, and safe.  Taken on West 63rd street, this area was once called San Juan Hill— a minority community made up of Black and Latino residents. The only evidence of blight in this photo is its subject’s apparent ethnicity. In a third photograph, also taken in San Juan Hill, a grocery store is shown with a soft drink sign on the ground floor of a brownstone (Figure 6). This image made the point that commercial establishments existed in residential streets, which according to modernist planning theories was unacceptable. Further, there is a sign advertising furnished rooms and apartments in the photograph. This detail implied that some of the buildings had been converted into single-room occupancies, attracting low-income and possibly homeless people. A caption for this photograph asked the question: ‘‘Is this a place for a woman and her child?” Although the picture is not in focus, the woman and boy’s dark features and complexion is meant to reinforce blight.

For the people who resided in these neighborhoods, the 1949 Housing Act destroyed lives and broke up families. In San Juan Hill, more than 7,000 lower-class families were displaced. Few, if any, of the 4,400 new housing units were intended for the area’s previous residents.  Similar demolitions occurred in the Bronx, Stuyvesant Town, East Harlem, and Manhattanville. The ousted population was 40% Black or Hispanic at a time when those demographics made up only a little over 10% of the city’s overall population, meaning that a large proportion of evicted tenants faced extreme discrimination in finding new housing. Today, most experts believe that the 1949 Housing Act and its urban renewal programs were in fact fostering the slums they were meant to erase. Although policy makers abandoned the methods of the bill, the widely viewed images created by Title I proponents made a lasting impression on the American public by reinforcing negative racial stereotypes.

Conclusions

In postwar New York, renewal advocates used photographs and visual aids to show blight. Images of empty lots, abandoned buildings, and nonwhite subjects were all used to demonstrate malignant urban decay and disease, and harmful visual depictions have continued to plague communities of color. In the 1990s, Rudolph Giuliani campaigned on the “broken windows theory,” which suggested that cleaning up the visible signs of disorder — like graffiti, loitering, panhandling and prostitution — would prevent more serious crimes. Such tactics did not make crime go down, but they helped minority incarceration rates go up.

As for the term blight— it is still used by those in power. In 2017, President Trump delivered his “New Deal for African Americans” at a Black church congregation in North Carolina and said: “I will … propose tax holidays for inner-city investment, and new tax incentives to get foreign companies to relocate in blighted American neighborhoods. I will further empower cities and states to seek a federal disaster designation for blighted communities to initiate the rebuilding of vital infrastructure, the demolition of abandoned properties, and the increased presence of law enforcement.” His repeated use of the word blight is telling.

Epilogue 

The neighborhoods destroyed by Title I were not slums or blighted areas, and many former residents recall vibrant and supportive communities. The Old Community was one of the first neighborhoods to be destroyed by the 1949 Housing Act.  But for the actual people who lived on blocks like 98th Street, the old neighborhood was never far from their minds. Sixty years after displacement, a bit of a reunion took place. A handful of former residents happily gathered and laughed at Frederick Douglass Center on Columbus Avenue (Figure 7). It seems all the seams all that was missing was the block, cleared long ago.

Bibliography

Chronopoulos, Themis. “Robert Moses and the Visual Dimension of Physical Disorder: Efforts to Demonstrate Urban Blight in the Age of Slum Clearance. ” Journal of Planning History 13, no. 3 (2014): 207–33.

Craghead, A. B. “Blighted Ambitions: Federal Policy, Public Housing, and Redevelopment on the West Coast, 1937-1954.” UC Berkeley. (2020) ProQuest ID: Craghead_berkeley_0028E_19828. Merritt ID: ark:/13030/m5m09ndm. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/33c953w2 

Cresswell, Tim. The Tramp in America, London, UK: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2001

Forest, Steven C. “The Effect of title I of the 1949 Federal Housing Act on New York Cooperative and Condominium Conversation Plans.” Fordham Urban Law Journal, 13, no 3. (1985): 723-61.

Harry Truman,  “Statement by the President Upon Signing the Housing Act of 1949” ( press release, Washington,   DC, July 15, 1949), https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/public-papers/157/statement-president-upon-signing-housing-act-1949    

Hoffman, von Alexander. “A Study in Contradictions: The Origins and Legacy of the Housing Act of 1949” Housing Policy Debate 11, no. 2 (2000): 302-338.

Mock. Brentin, “The Data Can’t Be Ignored: ‘Stop and Frisk’ Doesn’t Work.” Bloomberg CityLab, August 2016. 

Mock, Brentin, “The Meaning of Blight.” Bloomberg CityLab, February 2017.

Riis, Jacob. How The Other Half Lives. New York: Garrett Press, 1970.

Schweber, Nate. 2017. “A Community Erased by Slum Clearance Is Reunited,” New York Times, Oct 2017.

The American Housing Act of 1949 (P.L. 81-171), https://legcounsel.house.gov/Comps/81-171.pdf

Williams, Keith “How Lincoln Center Was Built (It Wasn’t Pretty)” New York Times, December 2017.

Zipp, Samuel Taylor. Manhattan Projects: Cold War Urbanism in the Age of Urban Renewal, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Figure 1 Excerpts from the Lincoln Square Slum Clearance Plan released by Robert Moses’s Committee on Slum Clearance in 1956. Images courtesy of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc., Archives.

Figure 2 Buildings demonstrating ‘‘blighted’’ conditions in the Manhattantown slum clearance site in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Source: Committee on Slum Clearance, Manhattantown: Slum Clearance Plan Under Title I of the Housing Act of 1949.

Figure 3 Empty lot with children playing in the Lincoln Square site. Source:  Committee on Slum Clearance, Lincoln Square: Slum Clearance Plan Under Title I of the Housing Act of 1949 as Amended (New York: The Committee, May 28, 1956)

Figure 4 Buildings that were viewed as obsolete in the Pratt Institute slum clearance area. Source: Committee on Slum Clearance, Pratt Institute Area

Figure 5 Commercial area in Lincoln Square. Source: Committee on Slum Clearance, Lincoln Square

Figure 6 Brownstones with rooming houses and a grocery store in Lincoln Square. Source: Committee on Slum Clearance, Lincoln Square

Figure 7 West 99th and 98th Street Reunion, Circa 1981. Photo courtesy of John Cornwall Collection

Categories
Media, Wealth, & Poverty in Post-War America

Film Portrayals of Wealth and Poverty in Undocumented Immigration

Jared Brooks

Films produced in both Mexico and the United States have explored the concept of traveling to the U.S. as an undocumented immigrant from both economic and social perspectives. The themes they addressed, similar to academic works on the history of undocumented migration, focused predominantly on community, economic opportunities, and the ways in which immigrant communities adjust to ideas about the American dream. Movies serve as one of the few means of diffusing key issues on wealth and poverty in undocumented immigration to transnational audiences. Films made through collaborations between production companies in the U.S. and Mexico such as Ya No Estoy Aquí (2019) and Sin Nombre (2009) have been provided to audiences via paid subscription streamers such as Netflix and Amazon. These films were then dubbed or subtitled in a variety of languages in attempts to make them accessible to wide audiences. Spanish-language films produced in the U.S. on undocumented immigration, such as El Norte (1983), also portrayed similar economic ideas about success which are interwoven with individuals in the films fleeing violence, poverty, and political strife. The films El Norte, Sin Nombre, and Ya No Estoy Aquí all swirl around the struggles of impoverished undocumented immigrants to make it in the United States. Each relies upon a rigid characterization of undocumented migrants as devoted to their hometowns, patiently absorbing economic exploitation, and attempting to reconcile economic exploitation with an unobtainable American dream.

Released to American Audiences in 1984, El Norte portrays a brother and sister traveling from Guatemala together to the United States. For many U.S. viewers, it was their first experience with a story of undocumented immigration from the perspective of those migrating. The plot of El Norte begins with Rosa and Enrique Xuncax, siblings in a Guatemalan Mayan family who encounter political violence in their village. The film focused specifically on tensions between the military government of Guatemala and laborers. Their father speaks to Enrique about the wealthy coming to Guatemala (though not specifying from where) and taking advantage of the land by exploiting the workers, who are treated as “just a pair of arms.” A military raid on the village leaves their father dead and mother arrested, and Rosa and Enrique, fearing for their own lives, decide they must flee Guatemala. Part two of the film focuses specifically on their travels through Mexico, encountering both helpful strangers and individuals critical of their Mayan heritage. Their economic situation also becomes harsher as they struggle to find the money for someone to smuggle them across the border. The third and final section of the film delves into the complexities that Enrique and Rosa discover as undocumented migrants in the United States, including issues of healthcare, employment, and the cost of living. In addition to its vivid cinematography, the enduring popularity of El Norte emerged from the pertinence of Rosa and Enrique’s experiences to every generation of undocumented communities. Both El Norte and Sin Nombre demonstrate the challenges to survive as an undocumented immigrant. Rosa, for example, dies from an infection she contracted after being afraid to go to a hospital and risk being deported to Guatemala. She works as long as she is able to, recalling the words of her mother: “they told us that in the north you could make a lot of money, but they never told us you had to spend so much.” The images of an idealized suburban home her neighbor described to her start to fade with the reality of wealth and poverty she begins to experience. 

The release of Sin Nombre by director Cary Fukunaga introduced American audiences to a unique hybrid of documentary and storyline on the relationship between a former gang member named Willy and a migrant woman from Honduras named Sayra. The interconnected themes between El Norte and Sin Nombre have been noted by Yajaira M. Padilla, demonstrating how both films address the issue of “Central American Non-belonging” experienced by immigrants from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala to the United States. Director Fukunaga took a different approach towards Sin Nombre by following firsthand a train from southern Mexico towards the U.S. border, aptly nicknamed “the beast” by migrants who travel on it. Fukunaga intertwined his narrative of Willy and Sayra with the experiences of the migrants on the train and demonstrated a clear binary of wealth and poverty to U.S. audiences. The plot of Willie focuses on him fleeing from the gang he is involved in, Mara Salvatrucha, colloquially referred to as MS-13, a notorious gang with roots in both Los Angeles, California, and El Salvador. Sayra, on the same train, is leaving Honduras with several of her family members while she comes to befriend Willie. The fictional narrative of Sayra and Willie, filled with gang violence, robbery, a lack of food and water, and an economically unsustainable situation was complemented by the real experiences of both migrants and Mexican residents who live along the path of the beast; some of the residents ostracized the ‘poorer’ migrants from Central America, while others offered whatever wealth and resources they had to those traveling on the beast. The experiences of migrants from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala are portrayed in films as a synthesis of staying financially afloat while being subjected to a new transnational identity in Mexico, in which the entire nation becomes “an extended border zone.” 

For U.S. audiences, films such as El Norte and Sin Nombre were made by their writers and directors to challenge rhetoric towards migrant communities deemed as either unworthy of economic success or the creators of their own poverty. These films also attempted to dispel a certain trope; the idea that “America is upheld as a nation to be loved and coveted by immigrants, who, if good to America, will be loved in return.” Ultimately, “the road and the final destination are the very sites of the continuous re-inscription of hegemonic norms and not a liberation from them.”  The experiences of economic exploitation are not applicable solely to Central American migrants. Why then, was the film focus predominantly on undocumented immigrants from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala? Certain authors have provided insights into how these communities in the U.S. shape associations with wealth and poverty. The storylines from Central American migrants touched on the transnational significance of that journey when migrants arrive in the United States. At the time Sin Nombre was released to American audiences, 68% of Honduran immigrants living in the U.S. were undocumented. Beginning in the early 1990s, many migrants from El Salvador arrived as either undocumented immigrants or as refugees. With the influx of Salvadoran migrants to Los Angeles, California, much of the U.S. media rhetoric on both refugees and undocumented migrants associated these communities only with deportations, gang violence, and poverty. As Elana Zilberg argues, the rhetoric that intertwined undocumented migrants with deportation and poverty “treated poverty as an individual pathology rather than as a consequence of the socioeconomic exclusion immanent in the economic system itself.” Films such as Sin Nombre shifted the focus away from individual poverty pathology towards larger socioeconomic structures. In Sin Nombre, it was neither Sayra nor Willy who were responsible for their own poverty, but nor was it the person robbing them either. For U.S. audiences, the issue of who to blame for poverty became a complicated issue. What was certain was that, in each of these films, the individual was not to blame for situations that were portrayed as inevitable. Main characters had to, instead, undergo a shift in their own identities to adjust to surviving the American dream. Films like Sin Nombre displayed the relationship between wealth, poverty, and the development of “this new transnational identity” produced by the clashing of a triple-border crossing with what was supposed to be an American promise for economic opportunity. The transnational dynamics of migrants on ‘the beast’ force a renegotiation of identity as well, in which the least poor are the most powerful while instances of solidarity between various migrants on top of the train sharing food, praying, and talking with each other are occasional opportunities to bridge national and class divisions. 

The overview of wealth and poverty in the United States amongst undocumented immigrant communities normally did not include the physical crossing of the border itself. Of these three films, El Norte is the only film in which the actual crossing is a significant act. While the storyline of Sin Nombre focuses predominantly on the dynamics of wealth and poverty relative to both the travels of migrants and their arrival in the United States, Ya No Estoy Aquí delves into the life of a teenager from northern Mexico living undocumented in Queens, New York City. The film, made in Mexico by director Fernando Frías de la Parra and released to American audiences under the name “I’m No Longer Here,” provides a more immediate and direct context of what wealth and poverty look like for a teenager making attempts to reconcile his new life alone with his memories, hobbies, and family of his home in Monterrey. The story is about a seventeen-year-old named Ulises, who has to flee Monterrey after being caught in the middle of a violent misunderstanding between two rival gangs and putting his entire family at risk. He arrives in the United States, more secure of his physical safety but unsure of his ability to find work and be economically secure. The portrayals of Ulises, who attempts to bridge his economic challenges with his desire to return home, are expressed through his interactions with other Mexican and Colombian immigrants who offer words of advice. One of them, acknowledging his challenges, states “but in this country, you’re not the first nor the last.” Similar to instances from El Norte and Sin Nombre, this single phrase is interconnected with Yajaira M. Padilla’s description of being “subsumed within the ranks of an exploitable and invisible labor force” and Zilberg’s refutation of individual poverty pathology. 

For each main character in the films, they must ultimately choose between economic security and physical safety. Enrique, in El Norte, must decide between taking a well-paying job in Chicago or being with his sister in Los Angeles while she is gravely ill. Sayra contacts distant acquaintances in New Jersey to establish herself in the United States, but loses all of her company on the beast, including her friend Willie. Ulises, unable to achieve economic security and feeling isolated while living alone in Queens, ultimately returns to Monterrey despite the physical danger it puts him in. Not all undocumented immigration experiences involve this rigid dichotomy between physical and economical security. However, these films did attempt to make a clear argument to their audiences; economic exploitation and uncertainty could be as intimidating as instances of physical violence. The threats of economic instability are absorbed by characters such as Rosa, who has her view of well-kept lawns with sprinklers, waxed cars in a driveway, and the Good Housekeeping magazines of her godmother more gradually shattered while, simultaneously, the nostalgia of her hometown erodes away when she accepts she cannot return home as an accused political dissident. Ultimately, these characters are portrayed as either having to bend under the economic exploitation they endure or return to the hometowns they fled. The lived experiences of undocumented immigrants cannot always be reduced to that ultimatum. These films did portray how a lack of citizenship created fewer opportunities for economic security. They attempted to dispel the myth of individual poverty pathology that was projected onto undocumented immigrants, heavily popularized in the 1990s that blamed each individual migrant for their own economic problems. 

Bibliography:  

Ettinger, Patrick. Imaginary Lines: Border Enforcement and the Origins of Undocumented Immigration, 1882-1930. University of Texas Press: Austin, Texas (2009) 

Frías de la Parra, Fernando, dir. Ya No Estoy Aquí, 2019. Panorama Global, PPW Films, distributed through Netflix (2019). 

Fukunaga, Cary, dir. Sin Nombre, 2009; Mexico City, Mexico: Focus Features LLC.  

González, JesusÁngel. “New Frontiers for Post-Western Cinema: Frozen River, Sin Nombre, Winter’s Bone.” Western American Literature: A Journal of Literary, Cultural, and Place Studies. The University of Nebraska Press: Volume 50, Number 1, (Spring, 2015) 

Maciel, David. El Norte: The U.S.-Mexican Border in Contemporary Cinema. Institute for Regional Studies of the Californias. San Diego State University: San Diego, California (1990) 

Nava, Gregory, dir. El Norte. 1983; Tijuana, Mexico and San Diego, California, USA: PBS American Playhouse. Archived edition (2017) 

Oliviero, Katie E. “Sensational Nation and the Minutemen: Gendered Citizenship and Moral Vulnerabilities” Signs, Vol. 36, No. 3, pp. 679-706. The University of Chicago Press (2011) 

Padilla, Yajaira M. “Central American Non-belonging: Reading ‘El Norte’ in Cary Fukunaga’s Sin Nombre. The Latin American Road Movie: Edited by Verónica Garibotto and Jorge Pérez. Palgrave Macmillan US (2016) 

Padilla, Yajaira M. “The Central American Transnational Imaginary: Defining the Transnational and Gendered Contours of Central American Immigrant Experience.” Latino Studies 11.2: pp.150-66 (2013) 

Zilberg, Elana. Space of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis Between Los Angeles and San Salvador. Duke University Press: Durham (2011) 

Select articles from The New York Times and The Washington Post attached below:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/movies/dreamers-undocumented-immigrants-hollywood.html

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/11/15/how-immigrants-come-to-be-seen-as-americans/tv-and-film-have-mixed-portrayals-of-immigrants

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/26/AR2006052600393.html

Categories
Media, Wealth, & Poverty in Post-War America

Race, Culture, and Dependency: American Media Portrayal of Israelis and Arabs in 1967

Cierra S. Bakhsh 

 When we see conversations about the Middle East on the news or in articles, the discussions are usually riddled with violence, terrorism, and fear. However, when we see Israel mentioned in the same broadcast content, we usually see positive reports, like business developments or diplomatic relations. Israel is at the heart of the Middle East, but why is its media attention and portrayal different than that of the rest of the Arab world? 

This juxtaposition is illuminated in the American media during the Six-Day War, fought between Israel, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Major American newspaper outlets, like the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post glorified Israel for winning. While American viewers saw the new, powerful role of Israel as a champion of the Middle East, the Palestinians and Arabs in the surrounding area were not portrayed as strong and successful, rather, they were portrayed as poor refugees who would come to be dependent on Israel. How do we explain this phenomenon? 

To do so, we must analyze how the American media portrayed Arabs and examine how these portrayals were possible. To do so, I will conduct a brief case study of articles from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post. I will analyze two newspaper articles from each outlet written between June 8, 1967 to June 15, 1967, and illuminate how each article “others” the Arab. Discussion of the “other” is crucial here because it allows us to further understand the complexity of the varying portrayals. The type of “othering” that I will refer to will be one of racial and cultural differences as produced by poverty knowledge, and Edward Said’s theory on orientalism. Focusing on how Arabs were framed as “others” indicates that in the face of global wealth and poverty, American media sides with the global force that is aligned with itself.

Historical Background

Although the Arab region surrounding British-mandate Palestine was rocked with instability, its shakiness intensified in 1948 when Israel was officially declared and recognized as a state. As a result, the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab conflicts emerged. The conflicts have manifested into three major wars: the War of Independence, also known as the Nakba (1948), the Six-Day War (1967), and the Yom Kippur War (1973). Of these three wars, the Six-Day War was the most detrimental for the conflict – especially in regards to Palestinians and the surrounding Arab countries. In a military feat, Israel managed to annex the Golan Heights, West Bank, and Sinai Desert, thus expanding the Jewish state while disrupting the Arab states. This expansion and disruption was heavily reported in American print media, but the way that the Israelis and Arabs were portrayed were massively different. For example, the Israeli Defense Forces did not win the war through military triumph, but won through a U.N.-mandated ceasefire, requiring all sides to stop the violence. Since the Arab army was well-trained and responded well to Israeli attacks, this Arab strength was not portrayed in American print media, rather, they were portrayed as weak, poor, and dependent.

Poverty Knowledge and Orientalism

The differing depictions of Israelis and Arabs in the American media are attributed through the phenomenon of the “other”, where this Arab “othering” can be explained through poverty knowledge and orientalism.

Coined by historian Alice O’Connor, poverty knowledge is an academic concept where characteristics and behavior of impoverished groups are measured, which became “a project of twentieth-century liberalism, dating from the 1960s and the Great Society, but more deeply rooted in the rise of the new liberalism that enveloped European-American political culture”.  This “new liberalism” here refers to individual rights, such as free speech and religion, but the newest right here is: welfare. Studying the characteristics and behavior of the impoverished led poverty knowledge scientists to determine that welfare status was crucial in deciding what poverty was and how it could be measured. So when poverty scientists analyzed the groups that were on welfare and receiving assistance, they found that black Americans were the most dependent, giving poverty knowledge a racial component. O’Connor tells us that the “‘race problem’ within the black and white paradigm traced roots of racial inequality to a wide range of social and cultural disadvantages rooted in white prejudices, and embraced integration and assimilation as desirable social goals” – meaning that blacks were encouraged to assimilate into white society, but were unable to due to white cultural prejudices. Therefore, poverty knowledge is the study of poverty, but this study emphasizes that racial “others” are prone to being poor and dependent. 

What is the connection between the American study of poverty knowledge and Israeli-Arab media portrayals? First, the American black experience is not comparable to the Arab experience in American media, as the two groups are completely different and endure their own types of biases and prejudices. However, what connects the two groups – especially in the American sense – is that they are labeled as the “other”. In her book, Epic Encounters, historian Melani McAlister indicates that the Arab and black “othering” is quite similar. She tells us that when the Middle East was being discussed more in American media, many reporters and Americans struggled to define what an Arab is. Were Arabs considered white? Were Arabs considered black due the Middle East being geographically in Africa? Could Americans associate black Muslims with Arab Muslims?  Here, McAlister emphasizes the important yet ambiguous racial distinctions amongst Arabs and blacks, and that the struggle to effectively label Arabs made it easy for the American media to coin Arabs as another “other”, where the Arabs were a threat to Israeli wealth and success while blacks were a threat to American wealth and success. Therefore, McAlister emphasizes that the racial component of the “other” further allows for negative disparities to be made. 

The “other” is almost always portrayed negatively by American media because they do not align with what an American is supposed to be – they are not how an American looks, acts, and works. Although blacks and Arabs do not fit the American image, Israelis do. It is crucial to note though that not all Israelis are Jews, and many Jews are also considered as “others”. The difference between the othering of Jews and Arabs is that Jews are consistently portrayed with the rich, business-domineering stereotype, while Arabs came to be portrayed with a poor, degenerate stereotype. The American media seemed to have associated  Israeli identity with the common, yet misconstrued stereotype that Jews are rich and successful, and the media did so by latching on to Israeli cultural familiarity. American media felt comfortable reporting on Israel because Israeli culture and politics provided a sense of familiarity, while Arab politics and culture were completely foreign and “other”. Many Israelis spoke English, making it easier for Americans to report on Israeli news and politics, while the surrounding Arabs spoke Arabic, making it difficult for an English-speaking American reporter. Many Israelis even looked familiar to Americans – most of them have European heritage and look like a large component of Americans, while Arabs look different, with darker skin and hair, and features. Here, the racial component kicks in because not only are Arabs “others” for some Israelis, they are “others” for Americans.

The key term here is “familiarity”. Since Israelis were portrayed as familiar to Americans, it was easy to “other” the Arabs, but we can understand this lack of familiarity through Edward Said’s Orientalism. Said’s theory on orientalism states that orientalism is a way of seeing that distorts how the West understands and portrays the East, also known as the Orient. The east consists of the Middle East and Asia, and western cultures associate Oriental peoples as being exotic, backwards, and uncivilized, where this view has a long tradition of being the lens that the Middle East is seen through. Therefore, the common representation of Arabs was that although they looked and acted in a certain spectacular, exotic way, their looks and attitudes were attributed to their backwardness. This “backwards” association with Arabs immediately “others”  them from the modern Israeli. Western cultures, like Israeli and American, associate backwardness with barbarity and dependency, and this dependency further emphasizes the racial and cultural differences between Arabs and Israelis. The unfamiliar, “other” Arab came to be dependent on the modern, innovative Israeli, thus depending on Israel to become more progressive. Essentially, orientalism confirms the view that since Arabs were seen as backwards, they were also seen as poor and dependent. 

Therefore, this backwards association with Arabs – in conjunction with the understanding of poverty knowledge – allows us to see how simple it was for the American media to designate Arabs as poor and dependent. Arabs were historically viewed as uncivilized and backwards, and with the familiarity of Israeli culture to Americans, it was essentially easy for the American media to further push and adopt this portrayal, and we see this portrayal in newspaper articles from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post. 

The “Other” Arab in American Newspaper Outlets

For this brief case study, I will demonstrate how these six articles, two each from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post respectively, display how Arabs were depicted as the “other” through poverty knowledge and orientalism. Of the two articles each from the three newspaper outlets, one article discusses the refugee problem caused by the Six-Day War and the other discusses how the Arabs lost the war. The articles discussing the refugee problem are a direct application of how poverty knowledge creates the poor, dependent, racially different Arab, and the articles discussing the Arab military loss exemplify orientalism’s contention of the backwards Arab.

The three articles dealing with the refugee problem are the NYT’s Arab Refugees Moving into Jordan by Dana Schmidt, the LAT’s Arab Refugees Stream into a Reluctant Jordan by Ray Moseley and Joseph Grigg, and the WP’s Refugee Relief. All three articles focus on the same problem, which is that Palestinians displaced from their homes amidst the Six-Day War have become refugees, where they moved quickly into Jordan. Each article indicates that Jordan was reluctant to accept these refugees, but each differs in how they describe aid to the refugees. In Schmidt’s NYT article, she indicates that although Jordanians were reluctant to accept refugees, the Israeli Defense Forces supplied buses to transport thousands of refugees into neighboring Jordan, or else they would have no other mode of transportation there. Therefore, Schmidt indicates that the refugees have become dependent on the IDF for movement – something that should be done freely, but the refugees were so poor and so lost that they needed external assistance.

Moseley and Grigg’s LAT article mirrors the same concern as Schmidt where Jordanians were reluctant to accept refugees, but the two indicate that the IDF have been air-lifting food and water to Palestinian refugees and surrounding Arab communities affected by the war. The two also emphasize that “Uncle Sam will pay most of the bills since the Arab refugee relief work is handled by the U.S.-financed U.N. Relief and Works Agency”, telling us that not only do these Arab refugees depend on the IDF for necessities, they depend on the U.S. and U.N. funding to cover their costs – insinuating a type of welfare-based relationship.

The welfare-based relationship between the U.S. and the refugees is also discussed in the WP’s Refugee Relief. The unnamed author states that “The immediate welfare of the refugees is a problem of a quite different magnitude from their eventual settlement” and that “Washington must treat its relief contributions as a temporary palliative and not a permanent role”. Here, the author tells us that although Washington must provide welfare to Arab refugees, this welfare must not be a permanent endeavor, as permanent welfare could encourage further dependency.

In each of these articles, the theme of the dependent Arab is prevalent. In the NYT piece, we are told that the refugees depended on the IDF for buses to travel to Jordan, in the LAT piece, we see that the U.S. is obligated to support the refugees, and in the WP piece, American welfare to the refugees is required but must not be extended. All three articles highlight the trope of the poor, dependent Arab who needed external forces like the IDF and the U.S. to function. It is significant to note that in each article, the refugees are referred to as Arab refugees although they are clear Palestinian refugees. The journalists in each of these pieces did not differentiate between Palestinian and Arab, and compiled the various Palestinian refugees into one general Arab refugee group. This simplifying of the refugees generalizes the wider Arab refugee group, which comprises Syrians, Egyptians, and Jordanians, and associates the wider group with being poor and dependent, thus expanding the portrayal of the poor, dependent Arab. Therefore, not only are Palestinian refugees viewed as dependent, the wider Arab refugee group is viewed the same way. Here, poverty knowledge’s welfare and racial component is evident and cooperative because Arab refugees, racially different than IDF soldiers and American aid providers, were dependent on these groups.

In the remaining articles, orientalist attitudes are apparent. These articles are NYT’s Why Israel Prevailed: Her Spirit and Modern Organization are Contrasted with Arab Feudalism by Hanson Baldwin, LAT’s Israel Insists She Will Win the War, and the WP’s Israel to Hold Sinai Until It’s Assured of No Blockades. These three articles discuss Israel’s military feat in the Six-Day War while emphasizing that their military prowess overpowered the backwards, old-fashioned Arab armies. In each article, we not only see poverty knowledge’s making of the poor, dependent Arab but we see orientalism’s confirmation of the backwards Arab. In Baldwin’s NYT article, he outlines the military triumph of the Israeli army over the Arab army. He explains that the Israeli army is modern and well-organized, which led to their win, while the Arab army was stuck on feudalism and disorganization. He makes the effort to explain that when the Egyptian army was British-trained in the 1940’s, it was strong and powerful, but when Nasser claimed presidency in the 1950’s and instituted socialism, the Egyptian military went downhill, thus giving the Israeli military the upper hand. Here, Baldwin demonstrates that the aggressor is the Egyptian military which was stuck on “feudalism”. Feudalism is a system of land ownership where a king, or in this case, Nasser, controlled all of the land, but dispersed it to those who fought for him, a.k.a., the Egyptian military. Baldwin’s referral to Nasser’s Egyptian army as feudalistic degrades the Egyptian army, pushing it back into the middle ages while the Israeli army soared as a modern archetype. Here, orientalism is evident because the Egyptians and wider Arab army are spoken about as backwards and weak, and dependent on the Israeli military as a new model.

The LAT article reflects the same idea of the backwards Arab. In this article, by an unnamed author, it is emphasized that the Six-Day War was strictly for Israelis to claim and enforce their new rule in the Middle East. The article states that the war was fought so that the surrounding Arabs could “…recognize Israel’s permanent existence…[and enforce] security against the Arab guerilla raids that helped bring about the war”. Here, the article illuminates the Arab refusal to accept Israel as a new state, assuming that Arabs needed to attack and wage a war to fight against this new, emerging power. Although it is not as overt as the previous article, traces of orientalism are present here because the article contends that Arabs cannot fight against or accept the new direction that the Middle East is headed in terms of Israeli politics and culture. Since Arabs cannot accept this move forward, they are stuck in the past – fighting a war to ensure their place in the past is untouched.

The WP’s Israel to Hold Sinai Until It’s Assured of No Blockades combines the concerns of the NYT and LAT articles while managing to uphold the trope of the backwards Arab. In this article, with an unnamed author, Arab military actions are highlighted. In regards to the Arab military, the article makes sure to emphasize that during the war, members of the Syrian army shelled down Palestinian villages in the West Bank, where the Syrian army was ruthless enough to attack their own fellow Arabs – emphasizing the uncivil Arab. The article tells us that some Arabs donated blood and raised funds for the IDF, while the IDF ensured that all Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, holding refugee status or not, was being supplied well with aid and proper food – also emphasizing the backwards Arab because these Palestinians were so out of touch with the new reality, that they depended on the IDF and UN aid for help, which also emphasizes poverty knowledge’s dependency creation. This article’s two contentions of the backwards Arab, whether we look at how the Syrian army attacked Palestinian villages or how Palestinian refugees and non-refugees accepted western aid, displays how easily Arabs are framed as backwards and un-modern.

Clearly, each of these articles accentuates how Arabs were portrayed as backwards and uncivil. Baldwin’s NYT article blatantly calls the Egyptian army “feudal”, indicating that they were so backwards that their military strategies were medieval, the LAT article emphasizes how Arabs were reluctant to accept the new direction of the Middle East, and the WP article affirms the Arab army’s uncivil belligerency and dependence on Israelis and other western aid. It is crucial to note that in each of these articles, the IDF or Israelis were never to blame for the war. Each article confirms the Arab as the violent aggressor while the IDF fought back to maintain their country’s safety, although Israel’s national agenda was to expand. Essentially, it was easy for the American media to pin the Arab as the aggressor because since they were already traditionally viewed as backwards, uncivil, and sometimes barbaric, it was impossible to portray the modern, American-associated Israeli as the aggressor.

Conclusion

This phenomenon of the Arab “other” in American media did not end with the Six-Day War though, rather – the negative portrayals just began. The decades after the Six-Day War marked turmoil in the Middle East, with the Yom Kippur War (1973), Gulf War (1990), and most recently, the War on Terror (2001). With continued unrest in the Middle East, American media, such as news broadcasts and popular media, like television shows and movies, continued to propagate twisted views of Arabs. For example, when Saudi Arabia was developing its oil refineries and establishing itself as one of the richest countries in the world, documentaries were premiered that showcased Saudis, especially Saudi women, as poor, veiled, and oppressed – instilling feelings of fear about Saudi Arabia to lessen its appeal to Americans. Instilling fear in American audiences continued with television shows, like Looney Tunes’ Ali Baba Bunny, where Bugs Bunny escapes from a barrel of boiling oil owned by an Arab sultan. This cartoon short indicates that oil-money Arabs are vile, doing whatever it takes for one to not steal their riches. Essentially, the negative news media allowed popular media to adopt the same trope of the “other”, and now violent Arab, and popular media reached a far wider audience, further perpetuating this view. Therefore, this continued cynical portrayal of Arabs tells us that in relation to wealth and poverty, the American media will degrade other national identities and their strengths in order to uphold America’s image as the world’s richest, most powerful nation – although that may not be the case.

Through O’Connor’s poverty knowledge and applying Said’s theory of orientalism, we see how Arabs were designated as the “other” through racial, cultural, and historical lenses, and these lenses indicate that American media portrayals usually have complex racial elements. Race in American media is used as a separator and distinguisher, and when race is combined with cultural and economic facets, the three help perpetuate the victimized, “other” aggressor. 

Ultimately, from 1967 onward, the American media’s juxtaposed portrayal of Israelis and Arabs was detrimental. Israel’s achievements were always highlighted, while Arab achievements like military development and developing oil refineries, were pushed under the rug. It seems as if the American media sought to ensure to Americans that Arabs were backwards and not aligned with America’s forward, modern mentality. Therefore, American media’s sharp distinction between Israeli and Arab portrayals succeeded through “othering” the Arab. The concept of the “other” is a complicated, complex one, but for the purposes of this blog, it is crucial to analyze and understand how racial and cultural components work together to convey a sense of otherness in order to maintain a public image. 

Bibliography

Ashcroft, William. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Routledge, 1994.

McAlister, Melani. Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945. University of California Press, 2007. 

Ghareeb, Edmund, Peter Jennings, Ronald Koven, James McCartney, Lee Eggerstrom, and Marilyn Robinson. “The American Media and the Palestine Problem.” Journal of Palestine Studies 5, no. 1/2 (1975): 127-49. Accessed January 3, 2021. doi:10.2307/2535687.

GOODMAN, MICAH. CATCH-67: The Left, the Right, and the Legacy of the Six-day War. YALE UNIVERSITY Press, 2019.

Ibrahim, Dina. “The Middle East in American Media: A 20th-Century Overview.” International Communication Gazette 71, no. 6 (October 2009): 511–24. https://doi.org/10.1177/1748048509339793.

O’Connor, Alice. Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History. Princeton University Press, 2009.

Shaheen, Jack G. “Media Coverage of the Middle East: Perception and Foreign Policy.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 482 (1985): 160-75. Accessed January 3, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1046388.

css.php