Foxconn suicides

            Seeing the living and working conditions of the bead makers in Mardi Gras- Made in China reminded me of the current scandal taking place at the moment with Foxconn, Apple’s production company in China. Large numbers of suicides of the workers have taken place.  14 deaths by suicide and 4 attempted suicides occurred between January and November of 2011. It is unclear if this is because of low wages and bad working conditions or if it is the common “copycat suicide” situation. In the past week this scandal has made headlines twice. As we all know, Apple is a huge company, and their products take an insanely large amount of complicated and difficult manufacturing. Apple has to make each intricate piece perfectly and cheaply. One Chinese report on Foxconn decried it a labor camp.

            The suicides are terrible, but many people are arguing that the working conditions of Foxconn, although bad, aren’t any worse than the other manufacturing companies in China, it is just more widely known because Apple is so popular. This calls to the fact that Chinese working conditions are very poorly covered by media, and therefor no one really knows how bad they are. It is kind of depressing that it takes a huge company, like Apple, to shed light on the situation, and even then people think that it is just this one company that has conditions bad enough to make people commit suicide. In reality, the conditions are just as bad in most large Chinese companies.

One Block

Throughout this section on New Orleans, the themes of community and rebuilding continue to reappear. Trouble in The Water showed how one community, specifically Kimberly Roberts’s community in the 9^th ward, dealt with not only the Hurricane itself, but also the repercussions afterward. Similar to Treme, the book deals with the aftermath and the desire to have the community survive in spite of social/economic circumstances. While Trouble in the Water did this through a documentary style, One Block looks at similar issues with interviews, but mostly through pictures.

The book, One Block: A New Orleans Neighborhood Rebuilds shows the process of rebuilding through the lens of a single block on the lower 9^th ward from 2006 to 2010. The photographer Dave Anderson “compassionate treatment of the neighborhood’s difficult circumstances has drawn comparisons to the work of Dorothea Lange and other Farm Security Administration–funded photographers.” He lived on the street with the people during the project and formed close personal relationships with them. Through his focus, he shows the resilience and dilemma of coming home for the New Orleans people that is echoed in the many other projects in this unit. He does this through personal portraits and through documenting the physical time-lapse of the rebuilding process, proving that the struggle still existed long after media coverage had ended.  The focus on individuals also echoes the personal narratives found in A.D. especially in regards to what possessions he chooses to focus on, such as a toy bus on the side of the road or pictures in a window. Below is Dave Anderson talking about the project and a link to the site. 

One Block Official Site

Mardi Gras Indians Battle with Copyrights

An issue that interested me first in the book, “Authentic New Orleans,” which I read for my book report, was the culture of Mardi Gras Indians. Even after our readings in class on the subject, I still had questions. So naturally, I turned to the internet, and found an article in the NY Times about a recent attempt by Mardi Gras Indians across the 30 tribes found in New Orleans to copyright the designs for their suits, thus ensuring that they would see the benefit of sales for things like art prints, calendars, and tourism ads that featured the suits they work so hard on.

The legal issues surrounding this type of copyright infringement are many: high fashion cannot be copyrighted because it is functional, not art, but what real functional purpose do these suits serve? Are these suits clothes or are they sculpture? How would one go about preventing copyright infringement without prohibiting any photography of the suits? It became more obvious to me why someone would seek monetary benefit from these suits because of this article as well: each individual suit costs upwards of $6,000-$10,000. 

Even though the article suggested that the profits from these copyrights would be used to offset the costs of tribal live, as members of Indian tribes traditionally come from economically marginalized communities and in times past the suits were burned after their three yearly appearances during the season, it seems Indians would profit more from not making such elaborate suits in the first place! But as the Indians make clear in the article, it’s not about the money and I’m sure the communal and cultural value of the tribes goes far beyond any savings from not making the suits or profits from copyrighted sales.

All in all the article was not hopeful for the outcome of the copyright campaign, but it does not look like a little bump like intellectual property theft is going to keep the tribes from celebrating Mardi Gras in their usual elaborate way.

Prisoners and Hurricane Katrina

          Before this class, I had never learned about Hurricane Katrina. Everything I knew about it I had learned in seventh grade from television broadcasts I watched with my family during and immediately after the storm. I thought I knew everything there was to know about the storm. The levees in New Orleans broke, many areas of the city were flooded and a lot of people died. The movie “Trouble the Water” was shocking because it provided first hand accounts of how backwards our country is. Instead of supporting the people of New Orleans, the United States turned their back on them. The destructiveness of Hurricane Katrina was a result of the failure of so many people. Personal narratives help illustrate the devastating effects these failures can have on people.

In the documentary, Kym’s brother was trapped inside of a New Orleans prison during the storm. According to an article published in Humans Rights Watch (http://www.hrw.org/news/2005/09/21/new-orleans-prisoners-abandoned-floodwaters) hundreds of prisoners were abandoned in the cities prisons, with nothing to eat or drink for days “as floodwaters rose toward the ceiling.” During the four to five days that the prisoners were trapped the generators died and the toilets backed up, so they were left to drown in small, dark cells that were filled with human waste. When the prisoners were finally evacuated, 571 men were unaccounted for.

            As is the case with most natural disasters, stories of human resilience have emerged. Inmates that were held in the common areas helped other prisoners out of their cells. They comforted each other and tried to get help. According to the article, “Many of the men held at jail had been arrested for offenses like criminal trespass, public drunkenness or disorderly conduct. Many had not even been brought before a judge and charged, much less been convicted.” The story of the prisoners is just one of many blatant human rights abuses that occurred during and after Hurricane Katrina. 

The Mardis Gras Wookies

It turns out the Mardis Gras Indians are not the only counterculture response to the traditional Carnival. Although rooted in a drunken joke rather than any sort of racial or political foundation, the Intergalactic Krewe of Chewbacchus are similar to the Maris Gras Indians in that they are finding their own niche in response to the festivals of Mardis Gras. The Chewbacchus are named for Han Solo’s trusty co pilot in Star Wars, as well as the Roman god of wine. This year, they held their all things sci-fi parade the Saturday before Fat Tuesday. Last year, in their inaugural run, they drew over 400 members.

The parade is pretty self-explanatory: a bunch of people who like Star Wars decided to have a sci-fi themed Mardis Gras. This may seem extremely different from the Mardis Gras Indians, but the two groups do have some distinct similarities. The Chewbacchus seek to be inclusive: “‘With other krewes, people pay thousands of dollars to pay artists that make their floats for them,’ said Ryan Ballard, one of the Chewbacchus founders. ‘We want to make a place for people to do it themselves.’” Furthermore, to ride on a float, one need not submit recommendations or put their name on a waiting list. While there are still dues to ride, they are a relatively negligible $42 dollars, a number referencing Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The Chewbacchus have created a new space for people to seek celebration and solidarity within an established tradition. As someone who understood all the references made in the article where I learned about this Star Wars Mardis Gras, I think that’s pretty cool.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/18/us/wookiee-invasion-at-new-orleans-mardi-gras-parade.html?_r=1&ref=louisiana 

Gender in New Orleans: "FestiGals"

Gender in New Orleans: “FestiGals”

I was browsing a New Orleans tourism website when I found a link to “FestiGals 2012,” with an accompanying image of ecstatic women clinking champagne glasses. Given our discussions of gender, commercialism, and festivals in New Orleans, I was quite interested in what on earth “FestiGals” would be.

The opening paragraph of the event says, “…this is more than just a fashion show and a shopping spree and all of the other stereotypes many people normally associate with women. It's also an education and a bonding experience. A call-out to women to take pride in who they are and what they do.” At first, I was pleasantly surprised to read this description. We had previously discussed the male homosocial traditions of the Mardi Gras Indians and the imagery of women flashing their breasts for Mardi Gras beads, so I hoped to read about an event where women could enjoy New Orleans in an “educational and bonding experience.”

Reading on, it appeared that FestiGals would be a “party with a purpose,” because it contained inspirational seminars and empowerment workshops. But after examining the events at the festival, I was underwhelmed: New Orleans FestiGals participants are invited to privately visit an antique retailer, tour a French quarter home and garden, watch a culinary demo with a New Orleans chef, partake in a “Bodacious Bra Auction,” go on a “Stiletto Stroll,” shop, visit spas, or “chill” at the pool. It remained unclear to me how any of these activities went against the aforementioned stereotypes about women, or what purpose they were lending to what appeared to be a commercialized weekend-long party.

While this isolated event is by no means a commentary on gender relations in New Orleans as a whole, I did think it was a telling intersection of consumerism, party culture, and homosocial female experience. Why are the events limited to shopping, cooking, home décor, and stereotypically female interests? In a city known for its extravagant parties, why is this female-centric event falsely touted as a “party with a purpose” and “more than just a fashion show and a shopping spree”? 

To read more about the event and work through these questions, click here.

Robert Taylor Homes

In the late 1950s and early 1960s the Chicago Housing Project (1937) began to build large high rise buildings in order to provide affordable housing to replace some of the city’s slums.  The houses were named Robert Taylor buildings after a civil rights activist and CHA member who resigned over the board’s refusal to endorse a racial integration project in 1950.  The project planned to build twenty-eight sixteen story buildings that housed a total of 11, 000 residents.   What started as a well- meaning project to create safer and better housing for the city’s poor turned into nothing short of disaster.

In reality the project packed up to 27,000 people into its 4,415 units.  It took the poorest and most crime-ridden sector of the population and stacked them on top of each other in a hot concrete box.  At one point the unemployment rate in the Robert Taylor buildings was as high as ninety five percent (statistic includes children).  Gang violence was prominent.  In a single weekend there were 300 incidents of shootings and twenty-eight deaths in the buildings.  My grandfather worked on relocation for residents of the buildings in the 1960’s and told my mother that he encountered several young children who had never stepped foot outside of the building in their lifetime. 

In 1993 the project was scrapped and residents began to move out of the buildings into new low- rise mixed income communities.  In March of 2007 the last of the twenty-eight buildings was demolished.  

While researching this topic I found a lot of “hard” culture about the Robert Taylor buildings.  Setting aside demographics and statistical data I would like to hear about the lifestyle of residents of the buildings.  Although ridden with drugs, crime, and poverty I am sure that a culture unlike any other arose from these projects that had a huge impact on thousands of Chicagoans.    Sudhir Venkatesh takes a look at individual stories and community culture within the Robert Taylor buildings in his book American Project: Rise and Fall of the Modern Ghetto.

Sources:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/chi-chicagodays-roberttaylor-story,0,4036277.story

http://www.metropolismag.com/html/content_0102/ob/ob02.html

Picture (The homes)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=105x6419982