Abstract
Building on her earlier work on homelessness in Santa Barbara, in Hobo Jungle: A Homeless Community in Paradise Michele Wakin tells the remarkable story of a beachfront strip of land that plays host to a series of homeless settlements throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. It’s a story pieced together through archival records, unpublished writings, press coverage, minutes of contentious meetings, and her own seasoned fieldwork and advocacy.
“The jungle” originated in a spontaneous offer of refuge in the early 1900s by estate owner Lillian Child, who had been put out by the sight of police officers rousting hoboes encamped at the edge of her property. As far as she was concerned, men “who don’t look like criminals and can behave themselves” were welcome to stay. For the next half-century, they did so, unmolested, building shacks and a semblance of community. For Child, what had begun fitfully as a gesture of moral indignation hardened into a principled commitment: to secure and protect this habitat for otherwise unaccommodated men. During this time, its changing roster of occupants was able to “live simply on borrowed land and borrowed time” (p. 69). Its patron’s stipulation that a modicum of order must prevail was taken to heart and informally enforced. A local economy—dependent on swapping, scavenging, and civic forbearance—took shape. Incredibly, two of its formative members were also amateur documentarians, and their letters, scrapbooks, and broadsides help Wakin to flesh out the mundane details of everyday life at the jungle.
All that changed with Child’s death and the absence of any provision for its continuation in her will. From that point (1953) to the present, the jungle becomes contested terrain, caught up in a series of political, commercial, and civil disputes. The clash of interests couldn’t be clearer. Aesthetics, tourism, fear (real or imagined), and privilege are arrayed against the faded promise of a once prominent heiress. The townsfolk have law, propriety, money, power, and the ability to ride out a siege; the jungle has none of these. A motley “repertoire of contention” (Tilly), ranging from organized protest to street theater, is occasionally on display. But, for the most part, it’s an uneven fight. What modest victories are won prove to be provisional, dependent on allies from within the settled community, Wakin among them.
Among the strongest features of Wakin’s account is its acute sense—still rare in most ethnographies of homelessness in the United States—of time passing. Being there for the long run, and tracking the changing fortunes of self-governance, civic acceptance, labor market utility, penal harassment, relief and service ventures, and the moral repute of its occupants: all this enables Wakin to take stock of the shifting set of affordances that set the de facto parameters of “community” in this enclave. The trajectory, however, is not the long-hoped-for arc of justice. Instead, it’s one of slow, seemingly ineluctable dispossession.
Gender, too, makes a welcome appearance here, both as a feature of the terrain surveyed and as research equipage. Wakin’s closing reflections on fieldwork are offered with the gloves off. Revealingly, in these remarks the jungle is stripped down to “a place beyond rules, structure or order . . . tangled with addiction, mental illness, and the night” (p. 188). For a young cisgender woman in the company of largely unattached men, things get difficult and, on occasion, dangerous. Gender provided both a “window” into the position occupied by (the few) other female occupants and a complicating factor in forming relationships. For the most part, though, she wears her vulnerability lightly. She notes, without elaborating, that at one point during the project she withdrew from classes; the contrast between the raw precarity of the jungle and the scrubbed confines of academic life was too much.
But perhaps Wakin’s strongest suit, informed by both archival work and ethnographic commitment, is her feel for the ordeal of homelessness as lived. The pathways to the street are many and varied; exits from it tend to be selective, moralized, few and, all too often, fatal. Cheap gestures of pity and the occasional act of organized solidarity aside, time on the street is time suffered. Violence is an ever-present threat, sometimes at the hands of other marginal and displaced habitués and sometimes at the hands of appointed stewards of civil order. (Gender, Wakin shows, is the great vulnerability divide here; Bourgois and Schonberg’s work [2009] on the streets of San Francisco could have provided useful parallels and analysis.) But there is also the slow-acting caustic of symbolic violence, interactions with the public that are invariably “fraught with unequal power and with shame” (p. 116).
It’s a neat twist on the social model of disability, notable because it is usually assumed that the corrosive impact of street life is the result of duration, deprivation, and unmet medical need. Wakin argues otherwise: that it’s not so much the duress of the condition as it is the social reception accorded it that accounts for the weathering and, ultimately, the entrapment of street life. Criminalization, bigotry, shelterization, and the two-faced clemency of service organizations all get their due. But it’s the grudging public, inconstant in its sympathy and reflexive in its disdain, that supplies “the death by a thousand paper cuts” (p. 168) of disregard and misrecognition.
It’s the social response to homelessness that converts separation into exile, waystation into “vortex,” state into trait, resistance into resignation. Put differently, their predicament is constituted by our becoming reconciled to half-measures of quasi-belonging. “Assistance” that sustains marginality and privation is both renewable fuel and forgiving alibi for ignoring deeper issues of need and membership. “Equal access to basic human comforts” regardless of perceived moral worth and “keeping everyone safe” no matter their station in life may not sound like much to ask (p. 182). Still, but for a select few (p. 203, n. 3), it has proven maddeningly elusive.
This book would teach wonderfully. (Because the configuration of space figures so highly in her telling, a set of maps showing the changing boundaries of the jungle throughout its history would have been helpful.) Don’t be misled by the anomaly of the makeshift or the labored irony of “paradise.” Wakin has produced a solid ethnography that morphs into an urgent, necessary, and humane moral indictment for our times.
Postscript: This text, with entries dated as late as 2020, is likely the last pre-COVID account of the jungle. Things had gotten ugly. They were about, one suspects, to get pandemically uglier.