John (a false name) stands at the street corner that I pass by every morning in Oakland, when I walk my dog. An elder black man in his late sixties, John wears the same brown jacket each day, through summer heat and fall chill, and a weathered baseball hat. He shuffles up to cars that line up to caravan over the Bay Bridge into San Francisco and asks, “Do you have fifty cents?” John is also a mobile storefront for “loosies”—or, individually sold cigarettes—hawking them to neighborhood residents for a quarter a piece. On a good day, John pockets $20, a helpful supplement to his monthly Social Security payments, which he says are his only source of income otherwise.

Robert Neuwirth, author of the new book “The Stealth of Nations,” would say that John is a member of System D, an informal economy involving 1.8 billion people (that’s half of the workers in the world) who make their money doing jobs “that fly under the radar, that don’t get registered, incorporated, or licensed, that are not paying taxes (or may be paying less than they should), and are somehow camouflaging their operations.” Neuwirth stresses that his definition “rules out criminal enterprises—those businesses that commit a crime, regarding what they do, and not how they do it.” Excluding activities like drug smuggling, for example, from the informal economy, it still accounts for $10 trillion in global trade annually.

In this country, Neuwirth told me, the informal economy makes up a deceptively small slice of our gross domestic product, 8 to 9 percent, but that translates into $1 trillion in economic activity. And that number is growing. “[There’s] no question that in hard times, when people are desperate for extra income, moonlighting and other forms of cash-only work become important survival mechanisms,” explained Neuwirth.

This can take the form of a teacher, who lost her job and is now running a childcare center out of her home. Or, my friend Marites (also a false name), an Asian-American woman in her mid-thirties who quit her white-collar job only to find reemployment difficult. She survives on the cash tips she earns when volunteering for an LGBT jitney service. These sorts of off-the-books hustles are keeping many families afloat these days, because not much else is forthcoming from the public or private sector.

President Obama’s $447 billion jobs pitch has fizzled in the Senate, even as Majority Leader Harry Reid tries to revive pieces of it (like a $60 billion measure to strengthen transportation infrastructure), a Sisyphean task. The House, on the other hand, agreed to pass a tax measure, with both parties celebrating this transcendence over party politics. But as Jennifer Steinhauer notes for the New York Times, legislators merely repealed a tax measure that hadn’t even been implemented yet. That’s what passes for job creation these days. And as an employer, the government shed 34,000 workers in September, the bulk due to austerity measures in cities and counties.

Meanwhile, in September, the private sector created about 100,000 new jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s a mere 7 percent of jobs needed to meaningfully reduce the 14 million people now unemployed, or 4 percent if you count the 25 million unemployed and underemployed. A recent new National Employment Law Project report, “Filling the Good Jobs Deficit,” estimated that we’re running an 11 million-job deficit, when you count both the jobs we lost in the Great Recession and those needed to keep up with population growth. The report goes on to say that any growth in employment that we have experienced has been in bad jobs, paying lower wages.

What score would the informal economy earn, I wonder? Neuwirth agreed with me that informal economies may offer more opportunities at present for people of color and Native Americans than the formal sector. “[Poor] people and people of color have historically been ignored and redlined by financial institutions. At the same time, governments are also hard-up, so they are raising the costs of licenses and inspections,” he expalined. “This double-bind makes it impossible for people to start businesses through approved channels.”

Opportunities created in the informal sector also stay within the communities where they’re launched, Neuwirth added. “A local vendor who is your neighbor tends to spend money in the neighborhood. This means that the money he or she earns circulates in the community and doesn’t leave the area to feed corporate profits. Street vendors buy in small quantities, so they also tend to buy from other local merchants. So the informal economy is actually an important tool for community economic empowerment and autonomous development.”

Perhaps a better frame for thinking about exchanges outside of state intervention and capitalism is the community economy, also known as solidarity economy, where members of the community collectively own and operate the means of production, so to speak. This is a better catch-all term because it’s not defined by what it’s not—the formal capitalist economy—but by what it’s for—the needs of the community. (Anthropologist Keith Hart, credited with coining the term informal economy in the 1970s, has similar issues with it.) A community economy collectivizes the struggle we all share to sustain ourselves during this endless recession; that’s unlike the informal economy, in which each individual hustles to get by.

Pockets of community economies are flourishing across the nation, as people decide to take their economic resilience into their own hands. Alliance to Develop Power, for instance, in western Massachusetts, is an example I’ve written about previously. They own and operate a community economy worth over $80 million, diversified in tenant housing cooperatives and a worker-owned contracting firm, creating 60 jobs for its members. Similar projects are afoot in New York City, some showcased in a series of film shorts called “Portraits of the Solidarity Economy.” The film will premiere Nov. 12 in New York, details here.

Once a month, a movement courses through the streets of Los Angeles. Moving together, in solidarity, Black cyclists are spurred forward by the revolutions of their wheels. Each individual coming together to join the flood that takes over the streets. Their momentum stirs the air, setting in motion a gale that blows clear across the Internet to other locales like Brooklyn, New York. Biking will never be the same.

Freedom Rides, as the organized bicycle rides for the Black community are known, was started by James Spooner. The rides draw about a dozen riders of varying ages and backgrounds; women outnumber the men. Controversy also flares around the ride, as members of L.A.’s fixed gear community attacked the “segregated bike rides” as “racist”, asking if “this ride is a joke”.

James is no stranger to asking difficult questions about race and racial identity. “Race is a complex issue and you have to break some eggs”, he explained recently, over the phone. He authored the documentary Afropunk about Blacks in the punk scene and a semi-autobiographical narrative, White Lies Black Sheep, about a Black youth in search of himself in the white rock and roll world. Both films explore the double consciousness people of color experience in a predominantly white subculture.

The only Black or Brown person at a rock show. You sense that you are estranged, within yourself, from the language and culture you were raised in, as well as from your white peers, who consider you as their token friend of color. You are still the Other.

White kids have a ride. So do women. Why can’t we? Join the fifth Freedom Ride this Sunday at 1pm. The starting point changes monthly so the riders can explore different parts of the city. This Sunday’s ride starts at the Vons parking lot at the corner of Fairfax and Pico, pays homage to Michael Jackson at the dead pop star’s house, and ends with a meal at a Black-owned restaurant. Check the Freedom Ride’s Facebook Group for details.

FREEDOM RIDES 2009 (Los Angeles) from Tara Conley on Vimeo.

The man with matted dreadlocks and a weathered face from the sun squinted at me. He wore a white tee shirt grey with wear and slung a tattered jean jacket over his shoulder, hot from the afternoon sun. “Why would you want to go there?”

Why indeed. Like many, I followed the flood of news coverage of the tent cities supposedly popping up across the country, according to the New York Times, as the recession devastated the hardworking, middle class home owners of this country. Leaving in its wake, jobless professionals evicted or foreclosed on their homes. My curiosity piqued by Oprah and other stories , I headed to Sacramento to see the tent city with my own eyes.

I spent the two-hour drive with my partner discussing our ambivalence about being voyeurs of other peoples’ misery. We strategized about how to approach residents respectfully. Nothing could prepare us for the landscape that greeted us: Miles of wasteland bisected by train tracks, concrete levee walls, and a tangle of electrical power grids alongside the American River. The skyline of downtown Sacramento was barely visible in the distant horizon. The lack of trees magnified the afternoon heat and the sun beat down on the assorted tents and tarps arranged in clusters, some around campfires.

Marcela Grice, 38, a Black woman was reading a novel when I walked up to her. She wore thick glasses that enlarged her eyes and she spoke softly. She sat on a blanket near her tent, which was barely large enough to fit a dog let alone a human. She and her husband Andy, 45, had just got off the bus from South Carolina four days ago. Marcela worked at an auto parts factory down south, but was laid off last summer. The Grices were drawn to Sacramento because they heard there were jobs available.

Upon arriving here, they learned that employment was just as scarce in Sacramento and were now homeless as well as jobless. They arrived at the tent city this morning because they were repelled by the nastiness of the downtown residents. “We were pushed out by the police over there,” explained Andy, “They didn’t like us because we were an eyesore.”

The Applied Research Center has been working on a research report, Race and Recession: How racial injustice rigged the economy and how to change the rules, on the impact of the recession on communities of color, to be released May 18.  We’ve been traveling across the country, seeing how the economic downturn has been affecting people of color.  We found similar threads in peoples’ stories: inability to get a job because of discrimination or background checks, exploitation and non-sustainable wages when employed, loss of homes due to foreclosure or eviction from homes owned now by banks, and the lack of a public safety net to catch people of color hit by these desperate times.

As much as our findings are dismal, we also highlight policy solutions and practices that can reverse some of the disproportionate burden people of color are bearing in this economic downturn. How can we ensure that good jobs paying a livable wage are available to people of color? Can we eliminate the barriers to employment that keep people of color in low wage, precarious occupations? And, can we preserve home ownership for communities of color, sometimes the only vestige of wealth generations of families have access to?

A freight train announced its impending arrival by blasting its horn, loudly, while still miles away. I surveyed the landscape to catch sight of the train. I saw a camera crew wade through an area with tents on the opposite side of the tracks. Far off near the power lines, a photographer with an expensive camera slung around his neck interviewed two residents.

The media circus was in town and the main attraction was the homeless. Reporters had decided that the sign of our depressed times were contemporary equivalents of Hoovervilles and shanty towns, now filled with Joe Plumbers and Soccer Moms, foreclosed on their McMansions, and occupying tents. Instead, the residents I talked had been homeless even before this present recession struck. Rose Aguilar wrote an excellent analysis of this for Alternet. More than half of the residents in my vicinity on the day of my visit were people of color. A survey conducted by a local group, Ending Chronic Homeless Initiative, of 29 residents last month found that more than half have been homeless for more than one year. Under 20-percent have been without a home for less than one year.

Many suffered from challenges that typically leave people on the outskirts of social and economic wellbeing. 64% are disabled and 43% suffer from emotional problems. About 17% were interested in attending drug and alcohol recovery housing. 14% were veterans.  Informally, out of the six residents I spoke with, half admitted that they were on parole or had some record.

Jay, 26, was a baby-faced Black youth from Oakland. He has lived in Sacramento since 2002. He wore a large, oversized hooded sweatshirt and his braided hair reached his shoulders. He looked younger than 26, more like 17 or 18. His voice was soft and he cast his eyes to the ground when he spoke to me.

Jay was on parole, he ran out of money and had no where else to go. He heard about the encampment from people while walking around the city. He was jobless, he is looking for a job in construction or anything work that’s available. “Sometimes it feels like having a criminal record is a disadvantage. They should ban the box here, like in San Francisco. Your record has nothing to do with a job. Unless, you’re a bank robber working in a bank.” He smiled and dimpled at his own joke.

One of ARC’s findings in our Race and Recession report is that background checks on prospective or current employees effectively prevents Black and brown people from being employed. Black and Latinos are disproportionately represented among our nation’s incarcerated population, particularly men. Employers use the existence of criminal records as an excuse to screen out black and brown men.

Jay’s girlfriend Cora, a young Latina and Black woman, maintained that she lived in a house in Elk Grove as she stood wearing pajamas and socks in the middle of a circle of tents. She was also jobless. “It’s hard to get jobs now as a person of color because people are racist.” She submitted four applications to TJ Maxx, but didn’t get called back. A white manager told her that they weren’t hiring although an employee said that they were.

Returning home, I followed the news of the city shut down the tent city and forced the residents to relocate, to remove the “eyesore” so close to the state capital. Some were moved to a shelter at the state fairgrounds, located at the periphery of the city.  The residents of the budding community scattered, some going to the fairgrounds, others to overflow shelters, and still some stay on, refusing to be moved.

Where else can people go?  “Sacramento has so many foreclosures,” Marcela said. “Why not let people live there?”

Cortland Bell, 39, a supervisor of the kitchen at the downtown Radisson Hotel, came up and introduced himself to me when I talked to the residents. A reedy Black man with long limbs and a slim stature, Cortland has lived in Sacramento for over 20 years but hails originally from Los Angeles. He was dressed in business casual, khaki pants and a button down shirt, attire appropriate for a working professional on a weekend.

“I’m walking through here because I know I could be here,” Cortland shared. He swept his arm to encompass all the tents in sight, “History and racism caused this. The U.S. is just as racist as it’s ever been.”

“Everyone in the U.S. is one paycheck away from being homeless,” said Fred Williams, 50, a black man originally from Youngstown, Ohio. “When they stop the war, the economy will go back up. Then, and only then. Until then, we’re stuck.”

Published by the Institute for Human Geography Inc, a non-profit charitable foundation incorporated in the State of Massachusetts, US. Mass ID number 000971232
Address: P.O. Box 307, Bolton, Massachusetts, 01740-0307 US
Email Address: insthugeog at gmail.com

Call for submissions and donations

We are starting a new journal in Human Geography broadly conceived to cover topics ranging from geopolitics, through cultural and economic issues, to political ecology. We envisage a well written, critical, intellectual journal, not full of empirical detail, and not encumbered by too many citations, a journal that can be read in its entirety. The journal will be peer reviewed -but we want to give positive, helpful reviews of papers, and not savage them or decline to publish based on minor points made by reviewers who hide behind anonymity. We plan a mix of longer papers up to 7500 words and shorter papers of up to 3000 words, with timely opinion pieces and book review essays interspersed within the body of the main text of the journal. We plan a paper version of the journal for the moment, followed soon after by a web site with multi-media content.

The proposal to start the journal is motivated by two main concerns:

(1) Need to retain control of the value produced by academic labor. Over the last twenty years, journals that once were owned and produced by universities and academic and professional associations have come to be controlled, in part or in whole, by publishing houses that increasingly are concentrated in a few multinational media conglomerates. This means that the surplus (monetary) value produced by the academic labor that writes the content of journals ends up as profit for media capital. It also means that corporations control the fund of knowledge produced by academic labor. We are determined to resist this trend -”Take Back Our Knowledge”. Hence we have founded a non-profit corporation “Institute for Human Geography Inc”, as owner of a new journal Human Geography – the Institute’s officers are drawn from the Board of Editors. This Institute will not establish relations of any kind with commercial publishing houses. Let it be clear, we are not proposing an open access, web based journal. However, individual subscriptions, when offered later this year, will be at a low cost, with institutional subscriptions at a moderate cost, and certainly less than they are being charged at the moment -multinational publishers charge institutions annual subscription rates in the range of $250-$5000 a year. A single journal can generate half a million to a million dollars a year in profit. We could use this money to sponsor radical research…but only if ownership and control over the knowledge we produce is kept out of corporate hands. As soon as we have a surplus we will announce the availability of radical-geographic research grants, and appoint a committee to administer them.

(2) Need for a new publishing outlet for articles on topics of political significance conceived from critical, perspectives. The critical politics that fueled the radical geography movement are being dissipated in philosophical-theoretical niceties and empirical evasions. Particularly, articles written from specifically Marxian philosophical-theoretical and political positions face a difficult time-young academics have to deny their radical politics to get published. While we can try to change this, we feel it is necessary to also begin a new journal that consciously favors political as well as theoretically-based articles from various left positions that definitely include socialism. Additionally the wide range of urgent social and political issues thrown up by capitalist globalization is not being fully addressed. Some of the most basic issues (the Iraq War, global finance capitalism, environmental crisis…) are hardly mentioned in the existing journals. Hence we favor a new, more extensive and politically inclusive journal of broadly, but very politically, conceived Human Geography.

So we announce the start of a new journal called Human Geography. We invite your interest, comment and support. We could use donations to fuel the start-up of the journal – please make checks out to Institute for Human Geography, and $100 gets you two years of free issues. We invite you to submit papers, opinion pieces, reviews and editorials to our editorial board. If you have an idea for a contribution let us know what you have in mind, so that we can provide immediate feedback – please email your proposal or paper to the respective editors:

Richard Peet for substantive articles
Derek Gregory for opinion pieces and editorials
Salvatore Engel-DiMauro for book reviews and review essays

Human Geography Editor: Richard Peet, Graduate School of Geography, Clark University
Editorials and Opinions Editor: Derek Gregory, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia
Book Review Editor: Salvatore Engel-DiMauro, Department of Geography, SUNY New Paltz

Editorial Board:

Waquar Ahmed, Pennsylvania State University
Swapna Banerjee-Guha, Tata Institute of Social Sciences
Patrick Bond, University of KwaZulu-Natal
Myrna Breitbart, Hampshire College
B.S. Butola, Jawaharlal Nehru University
Ipsita Chatterjee, Pennsylvania State University
Kevin Cox, Ohio State University
Mike Davis, University of California, Irvine
Annette Desmarais, University of Regina
Jody Emel, Clark University
Salvatore Engel-DiMauro, State University of New York, New Paltz
Emily Gilbert, University of Toronto
Ruthie Gilmore, University of Southern California.
Jim Glassman, University of British Columbia
Jon Goss, University of Hawaii
Derek Gregory, University of British Columbia
Elaine Hartwick, Framingham State College
David Harvey, City University of New York
Andy Herod, University of Georgia
Nik Heynen, University of Georgia
Maria Kaika, Manchester University
Mazen Labban, University of Miami
Jenna Loyd , Syracuse University

Emerging Geographies: Mapping, Tracking, and Tracing
Conference Date: April 18, 2008

Deadline for submissions **has been extended** to February 20, 2008

Maps of worlds are often depicted as stories already told, already written. If we acknowledge these geographies as emerging and in process, how can we map, track, and trace these worlds as they become entangled with and produce various scales of time and space?

Instead of assuming the regions of Cold War geography, emerging geographies encourage scholarship that investigates how the world looks from various locations and “out of the way” places to understand geographies as formed and contingent. We are interested in how histories are lived in the present, how they shape our current worlds, and are alive within these worlds. Emerging geographies track the longue durée and uncover alternative and layered histories. This tracking requires an engagement with histories that pays attention to complex, situated entanglements and the significance of details. Emerging geographies map the active ways in which social landscapes are constructed and regions are made. They ask: how do geographies come into being?

We are looking for papers from advanced graduate students and posters from all graduate students that describe and analyze emerging geographies for a one-day graduate student conference at the Department of Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz. The deadline for submissions has been extended to February 20, 2008. Distinguished scholars across the disciplines such as Donna Haraway, James Ferguson, and Donald Moore will comment upon the papers and convene discussions.

Examples of possible paper or poster topics include:

• In the early 20th century, evangelical missionaries divided Guatemala into spheres of influence in order to avoid inter-denominational competition. What legacies might remain of those geographies?

• The state of India mobilizes a 500 million year-old geological connection between their nation and Antarctica to argue for the modern-day presence of a research station within an Antarctic protected area. How are sciences being strategically used to make geopolitical claims?

• Several Jewish groups in the US, Europe, and South Africa use DNA evidence to assert that Lemba people are a lost tribe of Israel and part of a Jewish Diaspora. How does this evidence situate people in the world?

We encourage submissions that de-center human agency in the making of emergent geographies. Deadline for submissions **has been extended** to February 20, 2008. Please send a one-page abstract to: emerginggeographies@gmail.com, and indicate that your submission is for the Emerging Geographies Conference.