Activism – Dr JoAnn LoSavio

Rough Sleepers: Dr Jim McConnell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People by Tracy Kidder

Living in the urban PNW, homelessness is a very real, very visible flaw in our society, something that shows up in the local news daily. Encampments dot the city I live and work in, transient individuals spend their days roaming the streets I drive. Last semester I encountered students in my own classroom who were in middle of housing crises and were facing housing insecurity. [I helped them get set up with Passport, a housing insecurity program for students my campus offers.] I often wonder about those students who didn’t come forward or reach out to me and I hope they got the help they needed elsewhere.

Rough Sleepers is the book I needed to read. It is the book many of us need to read. I’m glad for the opportunity to have done so; I won this book in a Goodreads Giveaway and I am so pleased to have been selected.

Rough Sleepers revolves around a specific case study of homeless assistance, Dr Jim McConnell and the Street Team, who operate in, for, and with Boston’s homeless population. Kidder spent a number of years observing and interviewing McConnell and the Street Team, as well as other stakeholders — including homeless individuals — before compiling the book. The assistance program that is the focal point of Rough Sleepers has spanned decades and continues to do so, with the help of private donors. As a result of Kidder’s breadth and ethnographic method, Rough Sleepers possesses an intimate grassroots perspective; readers will feel like they’re along for the midnight van rides, sitting in the clinic with individuals like Tony and Rebecca. The voices of those involved is clear, even as they are filtered through Kidder’s lens.

Kidder also provides the reader with historical, social, and political context, allowing the reader to view the issue of homelessness as both a personal lived experience and a larger community concern. Federal and state administrations and policies, along with a capitalist system, have contributed to the problem of housing insecurity; the lives Kidder gives us a glimpse into show how the good intentions and limitations of government have inadvertently exacerbated homelessness in so many ways. In one case, the peripatetic movements that kept a homeless man safe at night made him ineligible to apply for housing as a “chronically homeless” individual.

For this reader, the stories of real people like Tony and Rebecca who lived and slept on the streets, were the most moving of those Kidder collected. These real-life cases strip the abstraction from homelessness as a societal issue. McConnell’s interviews also provide insight, from the perspective of an activist with decades of deep involvement. The Street Team and fund-raising observations give readers a view into the mechanics and politics of activism around this problem.

Readers should expect to feel discomfort, but this is not due to anything Kidder does; indeed, Kidder refrains from inserting supercilious remarks — to their credit! It is my opinion as a reviewer that this dissonance is the objective of Rough Sleepers. We, as readers, can (dare I say, ought to?) use the discomfort this book raises to mobilize our actions or reconsider their philosophies towards homelessness. Certainly, this book has given me cause to pause and think.

Someday Mija, You’ll Learn the Difference Between a Whore and a Working Woman: A Memoir
by Yvonne Martinez

This is an intensely powerful memoir; Martinez’s life is a scar tissue of intergenerational wounds. Someday Mija, You’ll Learn the Difference Between a Whore and a Working Woman is a serious treatment of what the traumas of racial violence, poverty, and sexual exploitation can do to a child and a family, and how Yvonne was able to weave these histories — her own, her mother’s, her grandmother’s, her family’s and her community’s — into a lifetime of “doing better.” This is not a memoir to be undertaken lightly.

*Celebrate Hispanic Heritage, September 15th to October 15th — but also, whenever and always!*

Someday Mija, You’ll Learn the Difference Between a Whore and a Working Woman is divided into two halves, the first reads like a novel and documents Martinez’s experiences as a child and growing up in a dysfunctional family. The second half addresses Yvonne’s life afterward, as an adult and specifically as an activist in the service of her community, as an organizer, and educator.

The two halves are intertwined: it is Martinez’s experiences growing up in an abusive and violent home that shapes her ability to understand the traumas that envelop her community. This shared experience is one not easily addressed by public health programs or the simple piling on of more and more education. Oppressive systems stemming from cultures steeped in patriarchy, sexual violence, and colonization cannot be wiped away, even replaced that easily. These cultures exist within even larger systems of oppression.

In Martinez’s case, however, these experiences also spurred them to take on systemic racism, sexism, violence, and poverty as institutions to be dismantled. This is a case of an individual working from within, for one’s own community (and for all communities). Change must be internal as well as external for it to sustain; Martinez’s life is proof of that.

A profound and consuming memoir that is in equal parts disturbing, sad, and inspiring.