Bloodless Coup

These are the people in your neighborhood...

A story in the NYT about family, housing, and local ordinances. It turns out that "pro-family" actually meant "like-us-waspy-suburbanites."

For decades, the family has been at the center of America's culture wars. Often, the quarrelers break into predictable camps. The traditionalist side takes the family for something natural, self-evident and unchanging, with certain absolute rights that no government can violate. The reformist side holds that the family is a "social construct" that is destined to change as individuals make choices and governments pass laws that reflect new mores.

But look now. The traditionalists are hoist with their own petard. When the real desiderata of American life — convenient parking and garbage-free sidewalks — are at stake, Joe Sixpack is as willing to meddle with the traditional family as are Heather's Two Mommies. And sheltering distant relatives in various kinds of trouble — the laid-off, the dropped-out, the pregnant — is what American (extended) families have always been for. The American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, handed a rare opportunity to cast its foes as un-American, was planning to sue Manassas not just because it "targets families based on their nationality" but also for "an unconstitutional government infringement on the right of family members to live together." The new ordinance began to look like a losing hand. In January, the city repealed it.

But the battle may only be beginning. After all, the restrictive definition of family that was just drubbed in Manassas differs little from standard suburban operating procedure. In threatening Manassas with a lawsuit, the A.C.L.U. cited a 1977 Supreme Court decision that rejected an attempt to limit tenants to members of a nuclear family. "The tradition of uncles, aunts, cousins and especially grandparents sharing a household along with parents and children," wrote Justice Lewis Powell Jr., "has roots equally venerable and equally deserving of constitutional recognition." This is little help. Powell's words may be soaring enough to bully small-town politicians with, but they date from before the days of, for instance, covenanted child-free apartment complexes. The day-care industry, Medicaid and assisted living have all made the multigenerational family less desirable, less workable and less "normal." In short, no one in the Virginia case came up with an idea of the "single-family home" that possessed a sturdy internal logic.

Perhaps that means that, in Manassas and towns like it, it has lost its logic. The crisis in Manassas had two aspects. On the one hand, Latino immigrants do retain a robust esteem for the extended family, which many other Americans have fallen away from. On the other, whether legal or illegal, they crowd into these houses at least partly because they cannot afford to do anything else. There are now entire regions of the country — including parts of Northern Virginia — where there is no affordable traditional housing for those who work at, or near, the minimum wage.

Whether we think the purpose of families is producing babies, fostering love, tending the aged or protecting chastity, they have one thing in common. They are organized to address concrete problems, not to dispense utopian malarkey. Governments can kick problems down the road in a way that families cannot — whether the problem is a husband drinking his wages away or housing prices that have lost their apparent logical relation to hourly pay. The immigrants in Manassas are behaving like families in this sense. They are adapting their city's "single-family" housing stock to the realities of the labor market — with an indifference to government say-so that used to be called Yankee ingenuity.

This story reminded me of growing up in South Florida, and the culture clash between old Florida and Latin American Florida. Of course, I realize that oldest Florida is Hispanic, and Native American, and African, but old Florida in this sense is pre-Castro. After the Triumph of the Revolution Castro came to power, and even before for those who saw the writing on the wall, the lack of cultural comprehension was there too.

One of the things I remember hearing was "why do the Cubans leave their front doors open all the time?" I suppose, if there is going to be a misunderstanding, puzzled head scratching over door locking habits is probably not so bad. As a small child, it never occurred to me that the person who was puzzled might just ask his neighbor, "hey, do you mind if I ask...?" Not to mention that I didn't understand that "why do the Cubans" meant something more than "why does that family at the end of the block..."

As an adult, when I go home, I see this gap, and the improbability of bridging it, with a different eye. A view colored by studying social science, by living in several countries in Latin America and visiting more, by degrees in Latin American studies, and proficiency in the language of the region. And the gap is more complicated but class and race than it used to be, as the white middle class that fled the Cuban revolutionary transformation has become more diverse since the 1980s, as Central Americans and Haitians have become larger proportions of the population.

A few years ago I took a trip home, and it turned out that the cheapest flight was not to Palm Beach International airport, but to Miami. So I flew to Miami, and took the Tri-Rail up to West Palm Beach, where my family could pick me up at the train station. There are two main groups - that I could tell - that used the Tri-Rail that day. Local retirees, and tourists (plus me, of course). On the train, there were a couple of tourists, middle aged, middle class ladies who were, I found out later, from Central America. They were clearly confused about where they were and where they were going, and had a map out, trying to figure out where to get off the train and catch the bus to the mall. I'd never been on the Tri-Rail before, and I sure as hell didn't know anything about the Miami bus system, but as I sat there and watched the retirees look down their noses at the tourists, I had that same old feeling: why don't you people just get up and talk? So, I did, and with my semi-rusty portuñol (though in all liklihood the women probably spoke some English, but since they were chatting to each other in Spanish, I took the plunge), asked the ladies if they were lost, asked them what they were trying to find, apologized for not being totally familiar with the bus but at least familiar enough with the train map to get them to the right stop, listened to them talk about their girls' shopping vacation to Florida for a minute, and wished them a pleasant stay and happy shopping as they left the train. The retirees glared at me. I think I was supposed to feel chastised for violating some social norm. I couldn't help thinking that had these glaring people taken a cruise to a Caribbean port, and not been greeted by helpful people speaking English, they would have been insulted. And thinking about it now, I'll bet those retirees had more in common with the ladies from Honduras than they did with me, since they were probably all middle class moms who like shopping, and were out for an excursion with their female friends. The barriers to asking, to talking, to understanding, however, were stronger than the incentives to stand up and find the plentiful common ground.

This New York Times piece reminded me of that train trip because it's another manifestation of how class, race, language and nationality interfere with the recognition of shared values. And how we find out that the rhetoric of values frequently masks the fear of difference.

Posted by binky at February 26, 2006 12:48 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Latin America