Illustration by Amanda Alten.

We are a hip and savvy youth.

We call our moms, Facebook our friends, LinkedIn our employers, email our professors and text everyone else.

So the question is, how do we date?

Between 2007 and 2009, 21 percent of heterosexual couples and 61 percent of same-sex couples in the United States met online, according to a study by Michael J. Rosenfeld, an associate professor of sociology at Stanford University.

With such high numbers, it is no longer plausible that online dating is something exclusively for the over-25 community. Even so, the social stigmas of finding a mate online continue to persist.

“You’d be shocked by how many people on campus have OkCupid accounts that they don’t talk about,” said Caitlin Emmons, a fourth-year American studies major at UC Santa Cruz.

Last summer, Emmons joined OkCupid out of curiosity. The disparity in the number of young users she saw on the site with the lack of open conversations about online dating piqued Emmons’ interest, and drove her to conduct academic research. In a paper she wrote on the subject, she found the prevalence of online dating has not removed its social stigma.

“It’s sort of like fight club,” Emmons said. “You don’t tell anyone until they break the rule, and then it’s like, ‘Oh, by the way, I’m doing this.’ And then you find out and there’s this instant discussion about it, but most people are not going to openly admit to it. It’s become more socially acceptable, yet it’s very much a social taboo.”

Jane Pinckard, associate director of the Center for Games and Playable Media at UCSC, said even though there is social taboo surrounding online dating, there is less stigma around it for the youth community now than ever before.

“When I was in my 20s, about 10 years ago, dating sites were still relatively new and it was seen as a last resort. You wouldn’t do it unless you were desperate,” Pinckard said. “Now I feel like it’s more, ‘Oh, OkCupid! That’s fun, I read their blog, it’s kind of funny.’”

OkCupid is the largest dating website in the United States, according to their blog OkTrends. This free site makes its matches through statistical analysis of its members’ answers to site-and user-generated quizzes.

While dating sites are not games, Pinckard said dating sites fit into the playable media mold.

“It’s media that’s for entertainment,” she said. “You can approach it with a playful attitude and it supports and enhances playful behaviors.”

The nonexistent price tag and playful quizzes draw youths to OkCupid’s casual atmosphere.

“I usually describe [OkCupid] as the Google of dating websites,” said Eryca Sender, a 21-year-old Santa Monica City College Student. “Since OkCupid is free, it’s kind of like everyone and not their mother, because that’s not the demographic.”

Illustration by Amanda Alten.

Still, Pinckard said she is a little surprised younger people are increasing their participation on dating websites.

“I always thought when you’re under 25 it’s easier to [meet people] because … you’re in different classes all the time, you’re meeting different people,” she said. “Once you get a job and you go to the same office with the same people, it gets a little harder.”

The assumption that college is a time of constant socialization and free time is quite common, but arguably highly inaccurate.

“I’m working on four or five different movies right now, and then I have work and classes,” said Tom Smith*, a 22-year-old UCSC student. “I want to talk to girls, but I never have time, so I’ll go 20 minutes online and I’ll meet someone really quick.”

Smith said he doesn’t like the idea that he is someone who needs a dating site to meet women, a classic stigma of using the sites.

“People always say ‘there’s no stigma about online dating,’ but they have to say that because there still is stigma about online dating,” 21-year-old Sender said.

On top of busy schedules, the average 20-something is shouldering debt or other money problems in an increasingly jobless market.

“In a lot of cases, what you see people turning to is romantic validation,” Emmons said. “You go home and turn on your account, and there are three messages waiting for you that have nothing to do with economic situation. They have nothing to do with your classes — it gives you an out.”

Convenience and entertainment are only two of many reasons young people are increasingly joining dating websites.

“I don’t think anyone goes to OkCupid if they’re super happy with their lives,” said Sender, who joined OkCupid after a breakup.

Life-changing events, like breakups or moves, are a common reason people join online dating sites, Emmons said. She said this is because life-changing “trigger events” often create a void in an person’s life. To fill the void, people try to adapt and re-develop their selves.

But what’s different about this online “you” is you become your own creator. With no one else posting on your wall or tagging you in silly photos, you become the auteur and editor of your image, Emmons said. Any responses you get to the profile re-enforce and validate the new self you have created, giving you confidence in your new life state.

For others, the impetus to join isn’t about life-changing events, but stagnancy.

“I was just kind of tired of waiting for something to happen,” said Lizzie Brozek, a 20-year-old student at Sonoma State University. “I felt like I had nothing to lose by trying online dating. The worst that could happen is that nothing would happen, and that was already happening.”

But for some, deciding to join is an act of impulse — or “whiskey,” as Smith said while laughing.

“It’s not a pretty story,” he said. “It was me, drunk, and I made a profile and then the next morning I had messages.”

Just as the reasons for joining vary, the types of relationships sought differ.

“There may still be a little sleazy factor because there are some sites — Match.com and even OkCupid — that are seen as temporary hookup facilitators rather than, ‘I’m just having fun and meeting people to date,’” Pinckard said.

But what sounds like a sleazy relationship to some may sound like an ideal relationship to others.

“There’s still that option to do short-term dating, which is essentially hooking up with a more PC title,” Emmons said.

Although she knows many people find long-term monogamous partners on OkCupid, Emmons said she feels real-life hook-up culture is just as prevalent on the Internet as in real life.

“A lot of people have mapped the college culture onto their OkCupid accounts,” Emmons said.

Cheap pickups are definitely one of the social customs that have made their way onto the Internet.

“I’ll get messages that are definitely form letters,” OkCupid user Sender said. “You can kind of tell when someone sent you and 20 other people the same thing. It’s pretty obvious, and it’s also kind of funny, because they actually think that works.”

She describes a message she received that listed the sender’s attributes and then offered for her to decide whether or not she wanted to fall in love with the sender.

What is her response?

“I blog about it,” Sender said. “I think a lot of people are ashamed of Internet dating, and initially I was, but now I kind of take it at face value and realize it’s more entertainment than actually dating.”

Sender is not alone in using this coping mechanism. Countless blogs and hash-tags have popped up on the Internet discussing the horrors and hilarity of online dating.

In some ways, a bad message is better than no message at all.

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at Log In to Love

Illustrations by Leigh Douglas

Editor’s Note: All information printed in this story has been done so with the sources’ expressed consent.

One night on campus, Jennifer Black* ended up at Porter Meadow with her new college friends. Black felt great about her acceptance to UC Santa Cruz, like she deserved to have her first drink. She didn’t know then that this decision would change her life forever.

“I had that attitude for the next year and I just drank and drank and drank,” Black said. “At first it started out as just plain fun, a lot of crazy adventures with zero inhibitions or fear. I only vaguely remember going to parties, because I would black out so frequently.”

Black, who is now 20, had to drop out of UCSC because of her addiction to alcohol.

“I didn’t start drinking until I got to college,” Black said. “I was always the last one to finish off a bottle and the first one suggesting to get another drink.”

While alcohol use is prevalent on most college campuses across the United States, some students take it to another level, where alcohol begins affecting their lives in a negative way. Although there are differences among binge drinking, alcohol abuse and alcoholism, all three exist at UCSC.

The Safer California Universities held a survey in 2010-11 that found that 41.1 percent of students at UCSC reported experiencing some kind of personal problem at least once during the past quarter as a result of drinking. In addition, 28.8 percent reported experiencing some kind of serious personal problem as a result of drinking, and 16.5 percent reported some form of public misconduct. Of the people who completed the surveys, 96.5 percent were full-time students and 60.8 percent were under 21 years old.

A handful of students are forced to deal with their alcohol dependency, but there are hundreds of students at UCSC and thousands across America who do not recognize their problem with alcohol.

Doug Smith*, a middle-aged man from Santa Cruz, has been in recovery for the past two years with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. Before recovery, Smith lost his job, house and family to alcoholism.

Smith, who had been using drugs and alcohol since he was 18, never felt that he had any problems with alcohol.

“It’s not even that you know you have a problem, it’s your family and your loved ones who notice it,” Smith said. “You’re just a young person, you think you’ve got everything in check, you think you’re wise, and then you just end up doing the wrong stuff.”

Jim Mosher, an attorney and alcohol policy consultant based in Felton, spoke to campus radio station KZSC in November 2011 about alcohol policy.

“Drinking on college campuses is a real serious problem,” Mosher said. “The brutal fact is that alcohol is the most abused drug in the country. It causes 4,700 young people to die each year.”

According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, “Approximately 5,000 young people under the age of 21 die as a result of underage drinking; this includes about 1,900 deaths from motor vehicle crashes, 1,600 as a result of homicides, 300 from suicide, as well as hundreds from other injuries such as falls, burns and drownings.”

At UCSC, an Alcoholics Anonymous group, Sober Slugs, meets twice a week for students to receive support dealing with alcoholism. At 8 p.m. sharp every Tuesday, the meeting begins with a moment of silence, followed by the Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference,” they say in unison.

As a result of the prevalence of alcohol abuse, college campuses like UCSC are reaching out to their students to provide a safe space to discuss their problems.

Alcoholics Anonymous is a 12-step program that helps men and women of all ages deal with alcoholism. Sober Slugs meets up twice a week on campus for students to help each other deal with their drinking. In Santa Cruz alone, there are over 20 different AA meetings at various locations across the county, including on-campus meetings.

Vince Velasquez, a UCSC graduate student who attends Sober Slugs meetings, knows he has a problem with alcohol.

“I like young people meetings better because I don’t feel so different; normal AA meetings have older people,” Vasquez said.  “It’s why I go to Sober Slug meetings, because I feel like I can relate to the people in the room.”

Black, who has struggled with making true friends in school, feels at home in meetings.

“AA was the first time I felt a part of a group of people that won’t judge me, where I felt like I could really fall apart and be accepted without drinking,” Black said.

Students come to the Sober Slug meetings with different lifestyles, backgrounds and reasons, but they all have one thing in common: alcohol addiction. Although the initial decision to take drugs or drink alcohol is largely a voluntary choice, the substances change the brain chemistry and cause a user to compulsively seek out a drug and use it, regardless of the negative consequences to the addict and those around them, said Jennifer Lowry, a clinical pharmacologist and medical toxicologist. In a U.K. study, the addictive properties of alcohol have a higher propensity for addiction than amphetamines, tobacco and ecstasy.

“There are so many people in AA, people you wouldn’t expect to be there,” Black said. “It doesn’t matter who you are or what you stand for. If you’re in the room trying to get clean and sober, you’re welcomed. I’ve never seen a more diverse and unusual group come together in that way, so peacefully.”

Black, who was new to Santa Cruz in 2009, turned to alcohol when she was nervous about making new friends and starting new relationships.

“Drinking came so natural to me and it felt so good for so many reasons, like all of a sudden I didn’t have fear anymore,” Black said.

Though Black made many friends through drinking, none are her friends today.

“When I first started drinking, I remember having heart-to-hearts with everybody. Suddenly everybody was my best friend,” she said. “But a lot of them were my friends because we had really awesome parties. They all supported my drinking.”

Since her great-grandfather’s generation, each generation of Black’s family has experienced alcoholism.

“I knew from a very early age to stay away from alcohol,” Black said, “but I was tired of walking on eggshells because of the fear I had around drinking.”

Black — who had been living in an apartment on campus — was no longer allowed to reside there after she left UCSC.

“After I dropped out, I was basically squatting on campus,” she said, “staying at different friends’ dorms or apartments until the RA would tell me to leave.”

Even at this point, Black continued to drink.

Naturally, not everyone who drinks is an alcoholic. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, a standard reference for psychiatrists and psychologists, there are different levels and variations of alcohol use.

The DSM classifies moderate use of alcohol as unproblematic. One bad incident with drinking is known as a critical incident.

When a pattern of negative consequences and multiple incidents is established, the individual is considered to have a substance abuse issue. A person is classified as alcohol-dependent when they have “tolerance; periodic loss of control of quantity and/or behavior, important activities reduced or given up because of use; moderation difficult or impossible.”

Fortunately, there are many resources and helpful individuals on campus at UCSC that serve to help those struggling with substance abuse issues.

Paul Willis, an alcohol and drug educator at UCSC, works on education, reduction and prevention programs that are created to support students. Willis is in charge of many prevention programs, including the Student Health and Outreach Program (SHOP) and Brief Alcohol Screening and Intervention for College Students (BASICS).

SHOP offers information, education, resources and support with alcohol and other drug use, sexually transmitted infections, rape crisis counseling, and sexual health, holistic health and stress management. BASICS is the two-session process with online survey/assessment that SHOP offers for students to reduce high-risk behaviors. Some of these students are already experiencing patterns of abuse or dependence. The majority are not.

“Everything we do is around harm reduction,” Willis said.

Between these and other similar programs, Willis offers information, resources and support for students. For potential alcoholics, the intention of these programs is to reduce high-risk behaviors of addiction.

UCSC requires all first-year and transfer students under 24 to take Alcohol Education (AEDU), a mandatory online pre-matriculation prevention course. It provides research-based information about alcohol and its effects. AEDU seeks to create a learning experience that will motivate behavior change, reset unrealistic expectations about the effects of alcohol, link choices about drinking to academic and personal success, and help students to practice healthier and safer decision-making. Through these and other programs, UCSC’s goal is to educate, assist and support students in making decisions about alcohol and other drugs.

Yet, despite all the resources, some students and even parents reinforce the myth that college is where you learn to drink, Willis said.

“Drinking and being reckless was a huge part of the college experience,” Black said. “In college, you don’t have to be responsible for how risky your actions are. The more hardcore you can drink, the cooler you are and that’s just the truth.”

Grad student and Sober Slugs member Velasquez agrees.

“At the college level, people feel like they need to drink to fit in,” Velasquez said.

Willis said although college plays a role in a student’s drinking experience, it’s not the only factor.

“It partly has to do with our society,” Willis said. “Young people start drinking and smoking pot in high school and already have patterns established before they get to college. Some of it is just continuing the patterns that are already there.”

Willis says he knows each individual person and situation is different, and cannot put any person into one category.

“For some students, it’s curiosity, or the pressure of wanting to make new friends,” Willis said. “The pressure is strong and alcohol does act as a stress reliever and makes it easier to be around people.”

Willis, who has been working with SHOP for the past 10 years, knows the importance of proper alcohol education.

“We’re just trying to educate people to make their own choices based on what are they looking for in school, what do they anticipate doing in life, and if alcohol has made consequences that made a mark, and do they want that to continue,” Willis said. “But we also reinforce and support students who don’t drink and smoke.”

Doug Smith, a Santa Cruz native, got involved with drugs and alcohol at an early age because he was hanging out with kids who were older than he was and who could easily access substances. Smith felt that his lifestyle of drinking beers and smoking marijuana was normal.

“Alcohol cost me my family, my business, my life, everything. I got really deep into it,” he said. “You don’t become an addict overnight; it takes a long time. First you use the drugs, and then they use you.”

Similarly, alcohol cost Black her college career.

“I lost so much of what college is really about while I was there,” she said. “I earned nothing and I ruined that experience for myself. I thought of myself as superhuman, like nothing could hurt me, but alcohol ruined me.”

Smith, who has depression and anxiety issues, felt the need to use alcohol to cope.

“It’s an escape,” he said. “You drink and you forget about all your problems, so you continue to drink to relax, but then it gets to a point where you want it every night. You need a shot in the morning so you don’t feel hungover.”

Smith calls drugs and alcohol “the great deceiver” because they led him to believe everything was fine, when in reality his life had gotten out of control.

“I missed out on a lot of things through the years I was an addict, but what’s done is done and I want to stay clean and sober,” he said.

Smith, who attends AA meetings, understands where he is in his journey.

“I’m an addict in recovery,” Smith said. “I get excited when young people come into the meetings. If they want advice, I’m willing to talk. If I can influence someone to stop using, then I’ve done my part.”

Black and Velasquez, who both attend Sober Slug meetings regularly, are “working the program” that AA offers. Black has been sober for over a year and Velasquez has been sober for at least five years. Both understand alcoholism is something they will have to deal with for the rest of their lives.

Even though Velasquez knows he has a problem, he doesn’t enjoy dealing with it.

“I don’t like going to meetings, I can’t stand it.” Velasquez said. “But I get something out of going to meetings. There are some really good things about AA.”

On rare occasions, when the problem of drinking isn’t dealt with, there are more severe consequences.

“Alcohol killed one of my friends,” Velasquez said. “He went to sleep [at a party] and never woke up. He was that wasted. After that, I knew it was time to get sober.”

When Smith was 21, he got a DUI and was forced by the courts to attend an AA meeting every day for two months. Smith attended meetings, but felt that he wasn’t an addict until he lost his family because of his alcohol use. Today Smith has been sober for two years.

“I wish I would have taken advantage of that experience and actually worked the program,” he said. “Don’t be afraid to change. It’s never too late. Being sober is a good way of life.”

*names have been changed

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at When Drinking Takes a Toll

Illustration by Jamie Morton

Leo Herbert, a lively and outspoken man in his mid seventies, still remembers April 21, 1971, the day he received a letter from the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) that said it needed to purchase the rights to his property.

Herbert’s home, located in the foothills of Hayward, California, 15 minutes south of Oakland, sat in the middle of a 10-mile corridor of land where Caltrans planned to develop a freeway that would link I-580 in Castro Valley with I-680 in Fremont.

“They said, ‘We need your house for a freeway, so [if] you go out and find a house that you want, then we will give you a fair price’,” said Herbert from his back patio, motioning to the vacant field behind his home where Caltrans planned to build the freeway.

In preparation for the construction of the “Foothill Freeway,” in some instances Caltrans utilized eminent domain, the process by which the state seizes private property, to purchase 620 parcels of land in the Hayward area during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Herbert was not threatened by eminent domain. He resisted the demands of Caltrans while others in the area were bought out by the agency, which then began to rent out the newly acquired property to tenants while freeway plans stalled.

During the next three decades, a series of lawsuits were filed against Caltrans by local environmental organizations and tenants, stymieing Caltrans’ freeway plans in Alameda County courts until the project was abandoned completely in the mid-2000s.

While freeway plans languished, Caltrans became one of the largest landlords in the Hayward area, amassing several hundred properties in a corridor from the Hayward foothills and Mission Boulevard east to the west, and north to south from unincorporated Alameda County to Industrial Boulevard in south Hayward.

Caltrans’ takeover of properties has had a lasting impact on neighborhoods like Herbert’s, which sits on the edge of the Hayward foothills, just east of downtown.

“That little house across the road was immaculate. You know what they use that for now? Storage,” said Herbert, pointing to the boarded-up home opposite his that was owned by his neighbor prior to the Caltrans buyout in 1971. “It’s a shame. They could have rented it out to so many people, people wanted to buy it, but they wouldn’t sell. It’s just a shed now.”

As of late, the proposed sale of these vacant Caltrans properties, along with hundreds of other occupied residencies owned by the state, has drawn controversy. Some long-term tenants who have lived in the constant shadow of the proposed freeway are unable to purchase the Caltrans residences they have come to call home.

“We have been given no definite time of when we have to be out, but it’s still annoying that we’re going to get a letter from Caltrans saying, ‘OK, it’s time to move,’” said Shannon Stewart, a Hayward Caltrans tenant who resides just east of downtown Hayward.

In 1970, La Raza Unida, an organization composed of predominantly low-income Hayward residents, brought a suit against the state of California which called for the blocking of the freeway proposal on the grounds that the project violated local environmental standards.

By the mid-1970s, plans to connect I-580 in Castro Valley with I-680 in Fremont were abandoned by the state, and an alternative plan dubbed the “Hayward Bypass” was implemented. The plan proposed the connection of I-580 in Castro Valley with Industrial Boulevard in South Hayward by means of a 5.3-mile corridor that would run through the Hayward foothills.

Sherman Lewis, who founded the Hayward Area Planning Association (HAPA) in 1978, has spent three decades fighting this proposal.

As he sat in the basement of his Hayward home surrounded by boxes and file cabinets full of research pertaining to the proposed freeway construction, Lewis recalled some of the factors that drove him to take a stand against the project.

“I was involved because I was pissed off, and you don’t want to piss off intellectuals,” Lewis said. “This was an extremely destructive project in many ways, they were subsidizing driving, and as a result destroying the environment.”

In 2001, HAPA and Citizens for Alternative Transportation (CATs) won a case against the state, which banned use of a half-cent sales tax titled Measure B, which was implemented in 1986 to fund the “Hayward Bypass” project.

According to Lewis, during the late 1990s, city leaders had performed what he called a “bait and switch” on the ballot, which lead voters to believe that Measure B funds were used to fund an alternative transportation project through Hayward, not the bypass project. He said the local government knew voters would not have approved due to its intended route through the Hayward foothills.

In 2004, “Hayward Bypass” project plans were all but ended for good by judges in an Alameda County appeals court.

Caltrans, deeming some homes ineligible to be purchased, leave some Hayward neighborhoods littered with vacant houses

By December 2009, after it became known Caltrans was planning to begin the sale of the properties, a settlement between Caltrans, the city of Hayward and Caltrans tenants was reached, designating which of a selected 193 Caltrans homes located in the corridor would qualify for purchase by tenants.

According to the settlement, structures that do not conform to single-family residence zoning qualifications are deemed ineligible for purchase.

The settlement also provides relocation assistance in the form of lump sum stipends for tenants unable to purchase their Caltrans homes, which is calculated according to the number bedrooms  and income level of single family residences. For example, a three-bedroom single family residence occupied by a low-income family would receive $22,310, which could be then used for moving expenses and relocation costs.

Stacy Sorensen, who works for the City of Hayward as the 238 Caltrans project manager, will monitor the sale process of the 107 Caltrans homes deemed eligible for purchase by the settlement.

“We work as the facilitator, the administrative piece to the pie, we work with tenants on receiving stipend amounts and work with tenants on purchasing their home or another home if they so choose,” Sorensen said. “We are looking forward to helping tenants make the best decision for them and their family both emotionally and financially, if you will.”

Since the 2009 settlement, nearly 50 Caltrans tenants have opted into the Opportunity to Purchase Program (OPP), which allows to buy their Caltrans homes if they qualify for purchase.

According to Sorensen, residents eligible to purchase their homes and have taken stipend checks, awarded to tenants in January of 2010, have until July 6th, 2012 to opt back into the program.

Although no Caltrans homes have been sold to tenants as of yet, Sorensen remains hopeful that in the coming months the first homes will be sold.

“We have a couple that are close, but as of today none have been sold,” Sorensen said. “There have been eight properties approved by Caltrans that are now ready to be purchased.”

Marilyn Batler, a long-term Caltrans tenant and Hayward resident, lives in one of the 45 homes deemed ineligible for purchase.

Batler said unless her house is declared a historical landmark, she will have to accept relocation assistance provided by the settlement and move elsewhere.

“They told me I would have to move in three months because of the freeway construction plans and I said ‘OK, whatever,’” said Batler, recalling when she began renting her Hayward Caltrans home in 1981. “If that would have happened back then it would have been alright, but after 30 years you kind of make a place your home.“

Batler’s home doesn’t meet single-family residence requirements zoning qualifications, and is not eligible for purchase.

“The way I saw it, they picked and chose the properties that they wanted for themselves. In my case they rezoned it from single-family residence to high density, then they turned around and said it is ineligible to purchase because the zoning didn’t conform,” said Batler, whose home and accompanying land was appraised at around $225,000.

While the 2009 settlement provided relocation assistance on behalf of the city of Hayward, Batler has developed a strong connection to her home and is fighting for the right to buy her property.

“Caltrans said, ‘We will offer you another house on the corner.’ No, I want the house that I have lived in for 30 years, I don’t want to move,” Batler said. “I have lived here half my life. You think I want to pack up and go?”

Some tenants who do have the option to purchase the homes they rent do not see this as a wise investment, largely due to the poor condition of the structures.

“The appraiser basically told me that I could never get a loan on my house, the retaining wall is falling back, looks like there is water leaking in through the foundation, there is a sink hole in the back yard that is falling in because Cal Trans didn’t put a replacement on leaking gutters,” said Bob Swanson, a longtime Caltrans tenant who lived in unincorporated Alameda County.

Swanson feels years of property neglect on behalf of Caltrans created an unrealistic purchasing scenario, and took the lump sum stipend provided through the 2009 settlement.

“There is no chance for me here, so I took my stipend and bought a house in Castro Valley and I am very happy with it,” Swanson said. “The cost to bring the Caltrans house up to code would be an incredible amount of money, and if I can’t get a loan on it then I can’t buy, so I bought a house that’s in way better shape and it works for me.”

Some long-term tenants who have lived with the Caltrans freeway project for years are unable to purchase the residences they have come to call home.

Shannon Stewart, a Caltrans tenant for nearly two decades, lives on a stretch of Fourth Street just east of downtown Hayward, where nearly 10 Caltrans houses sit vacant.

Stewart, whose home is surrounded on three sides by vacant Caltrans properties, claims the local Caltrans agent evicted several tenants more than five years ago, and the houses were never rented again due to plans to begin to sell off properties.

Although Caltrans public affairs spokesperson Tracy Brews acknowledged that most recently some Caltrans properties have been offered for sale, no timeline could be provided on when vacant houses like those in Stewart’s neighborhood would be sold.

“We are in a real dead spot,” Stewart said. “I keep my Christmas lights on year-round because the street is so dark. We petitioned the city of Hayward to put up another street light, but we got turned down.”

Stewart, who is upset with both state and city responses to the problem, said vacant homes attract suspicious activity to the neighborhood.

“We have people walking down our driveway all the time — it’s actually kind of scary,” said Stewart while, motioning down to the pathway which runs past her door and leads to a vacant home sitting virtually right behind her home.

Stewart also claims that Caltrans and police are largely unresponsive to the problems of trespassers. As of press time, Caltrans could not be reached for comment regarding this matter.

“We call the police [and] they don’t care; we call Caltrans they don’t care either,” Stewart said. “We have actually told them ‘There are people in the house right now, we have just watched them walk in and they are squatting on state property.’ But this is Hayward, they have real crime to fight.”

Stewart, who is not eligible to purchase her house due to its location on a land parcel with three other homes, plans to take her lump sum stipend and move.

According to City Project Manager Stacy Sorensen, the fate of Caltrans properties ineligible for purchase by tenants is still up in the air.

“Caltrans may sell them at auction, they may demolish them, they may leave them as they are, they may have the developer come in and take over,” Sorensen said.

Bunker Hill, which sits below Cal State East Bay, is unique in that it contains a substantial amount of the 41 homes labeled ‘unclassified’ by the September 2009 settlement. This means there has not yet been a decision on whether the homes will be made eligible for sale to tenants or sold to a private developer.

According to Lewis, longtime anti-Caltrans freeway activist, much of this decision rests on prospective development plans and the infrastructure of Bunker Hill, as much of area requires road widening and the installation of new sewage systems.

“One of the issues up there is that they need lot line adjustments, so determining the boundaries is one of the things we need to move forward with,” Sorenson said. “We are still talking with Caltrans about what that process looks like, then we can do a proper appraisal of properties.”

This could be a lengthy process, one that Melanie Cedeno, a seven-year resident of the neighborhood, believes may not be worth the wait, especially in light of the current state of her home.

“Up here, the biggest issue is retaining walls — the dirt is falling and they don’t do that stuff,” Cedeno said. “If they did a few things, with the foundation or any of the few things that need to be fixed before you a buy a home, I really would like to buy it, because it is really nice up here.”

While Cedeno and other tenants no longer live in the shadow of the proposed construction of a phantom freeway, uncertainty surrounding future living arrangements looms as they wait for a decision on when Caltrans will begin to sell off more property.

For tenants like Stewart, Caltrans’ mismanagement of a once well kept neighborhood has had such an effect that moving on will not seem as difficult a task a initially conceived.

“If the condition of the neighborhood was kept up I would have liked to stay,” Stewart said. “But it’s just no fun living in a dead zone.”

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at Failed Caltrans Freeway Looms Over Bay Area Renters

Illustration by Louise Leong

His house was marvelously crafted, constructed neatly between two ancient evergreens and overlooking a vegetable garden, orchard and sweeping fields and forests. Through the heavy oak door, the smell of stale, sweet smoke enveloped the entryway.

“Are you going to use my face for this? As long as you keep me out of the spotlight I’ll tell you the whole story — otherwise, you’ll get the PR version.”

That’s Rennold Mare, a retired real estate agent, who recently retired from another profession as well.

“I was a grower for 24 years, but I never considered myself one until the latter half of it,” Mare said. “It was always kind of a lie. I was passing the time making money, but trying to go elsewhere. I quit because it wasn’t worth it anymore. Profits are over.”

Mare wasn’t just any type of “grower”: He grew marijuana and sold it to friends and buyers across the state, first illegally and then legally under Proposition 215. Mare was one of many in Northern California’s so-called “Emerald Triangle” (the triad of Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity County, dubbed the “Emerald Triangle” in the 1960s) that provided financial stability for themselves or their families through this trade.

“We had the bare essentials,” he said, “and would make just enough to get through the year.”

Mare lived through an era of social transformation. As unemployment hit 10.8 percent in early 1983, many looked for alternatives to the deteriorating job market. One such alternative was black-market activity — a “very profitable niche,” Mare said.

The laissez-faire marijuana market has indeed had benefits — such as this unrestricted profit — but in recent history the unregulated cash crop has taken a toll both on the value of the industry and on the ecosystems that host cannabis production. To combat the economic downturn, marijuana-related businesses have sprung up to keep products competitive in an over-saturated market. Marijuana testing laboratories, regional collectives and brand-name labeling are new tools producers use to maintain price competition in the increasingly stagnant market.

But while some find strength in outsourcing consumer appeal, a campaign is taking hold of consumers in a different way, asking them to be conscious of what they smoke and reconsider eco-friendly products over energy-consuming cannabis.

“We’re trying to — on a statewide level — launch an education platform, because there’s a lot of misinformation about this [medical marijuana] movement,” said Alec Dixon, director of client relations at SC Laboratories, a new testing company based in Capitola, Calif.

SC Laboratories tests medical marijuana for various ingredients like pesticides, herbicides, plant growth regulators, molds and cannabinoid potency. There are over 80 different types of cannabinoids, a type of chemical compound, found within the cannabis plant. The most famous of these is tetrahydrocannabinol, better known as THC.

“People know very little and will often unknowingly smoke pesticides or mold,” Dixon said. “Some aren’t bad for your health — like powdery mildew, for example — but others like Botrytis [commonly known as bud rot] is a human pathogen, and Aspergillus, which is unseen to the human eye, can cause pulmonary aspergillosis [an organ fungal infection], which can be fatal.”

“People want to know, and are fascinated by the truth,” Dixon said. “Now that we have an audience, there is a podium to speak about the progress of this flower [cannabis]. We’re trying to say, ‘You should care,’ especially if you’re a conscious consumer, because many growers use carcinogenic plant growth regulators and toxic chemical additives to maximize yield.”

Testing labs have broadened the discussion on cannabis, replacing the “one cure for all” approach with distinct prescriptions for patients. The cannabinoid known as cannabidiol (CBD), has proven to be an anxiety suppressant, whereas THC is an anxiety agitator. The Brazilian Journal of Medical and Biological Research has classified CBD as an anti-inflammatory for those with arthritis or fibromyalgia, and an anti-psychotic for those with schizophrenia. But the variation in potency is a subtext to the main concern.

“If we’re going to truly call this medicine, then obviously we need to remove the toxicity from cultivation,” Dixon said. “Basically, we’re trying to clean up the industry. We’re working to educate collectives, educate patients and educate growers so there is a higher standard of treatment. Just like strawberries, if you’re taking something, putting it in your body, you should know what’s in it, chemically.”

Kyle Noland* is a resident of Humboldt County who has taken up this same task of saving the industry’s lucrativeness. With a handful of growers, Noland, a cultivator himself, has created an awareness campaign he hopes will connect consumer understanding of grower practices in order to better reflect ecological awareness. Noland sticks mostly to business. As a 46-year-old married man with a 15-year-old daughter, he has a responsibility to provide a steady income for his family.

“I feel we need far more unbiased and up-front education out there to somehow have a positive impact on this uncontrolled industry,” Noland said. “In short, most folks [growers] are over-watering and over-feeding plants without much thought of where the resources are coming from to grow their crop, or where the potential pollution is going.”

When actually analyzed, some of the products commonly understood by growers to be organic often reflect a large carbon footprint and unhealthy choice.

“There are growers who are trying to make a case for toxic amounts of heavy metals like mercury and cadmium in soil additives,” Dixon said. “How that may actually affect the product that patients are buying and smoking will be interesting to see.”

Illustration by Louise Leong.

Defining what constitutes as an organic product has been a large debate among growers, Mare said. But he ensured “growing anything under synthetic sunlight is not healthy — it’s using huge energy consumption for profit.”

“Bio-mimicry, looking to nature for a more efficient design, gives us ideas for growing more sustainable,” said Robert Sutherland, a Northern California environmental activist and blogger. “Production efficiency is how we get to professionalism.”

When asked what they actually understood about the science of medical marijuana, out of a handful of smokers most couldn’t answer basic questions beyond the potency of “indoor or outdoor.”

The lack of producer awareness for unsustainable practices, Noland said, isn’t just laziness but consumer ignorance of the unhealthy practices they buy into with every purchase.

The scope of these sustainable practices is immense, which may be daunting to buyers. The issue of water consumption is but one serious example of many malpractices, including soil usages, resource localities, environmental pollution, pesticide/herbicide exposure, and commercialization.

“The consumer doesn’t understand the immensity of the industry, the variation in product as well as production,” Noland said. “This is where we hope to enlighten people, because healthy choices will shift the producer’s ideas about how to grow their stuff more consciously.”

With the use of actual hard-hitting facts, said Dixon, SC Laboratories director of client relations, the scientific aspects of the reconsideration may be the game changer for patients.

“Ultimately, indoor cannabis production is unsustainable because of the use of fossil fuels,” Dixon said. “And with scientific research, we’ve found outdoor cannabis to have two distinctly unique terpenes which may actually justify the medical benefits of outdoor-grown products.”

Terpenes are what you smell in every plant. A combination of many terpenes gives a distinct flavoring and potency to each variety of cannabis. The significance of the two new terpenes being discovered in marijuana grown outdoors may very well confirm the health impacts the drug has on patients.

But until little-known facts like these are widely disseminated among consumers, the indoor market will continue to thrive, Dixon said.

Mare, a socially active community member, has seen his fair share of new generations come into Humboldt County and stressed the lack of concern “diesel dopers” had for environmental protection. Mare said newer generations are less concerned about production of clean pot than generating large revenues, something he thinks is unfortunate for the quality of cannabis production.

“This is where it gets interesting,” said Robert Lott, a transport-certified middleman between producers in Northern California and Santa Cruz dispensaries. “We [middlemen] do the networking, the driving, but we don’t sell anything but the product. It’s not really a concern for us because it’s not our fight.”

“Sometimes buyers want to know the background of the stuff they’re getting,” he continued, “but it’s pretty basic stuff: indoor, outdoor, hereditary strains, markup prices. But they don’t care about how the plants were grown. It’s kind of too bad.”

When asked about the lack of consideration from middlemen, former grower Mare said, “A lot of these people are in it for the simple outcome: money. Kids today just want the bottom line, the straight shoot. Middlemen especially. Some think it’s a full-time job.”

The lack of consideration by large sellers won’t change until the demand for organic production is formally made by consumers, Dixon said. In a separate interview Mare agreed; middlemen or dispensaries “don’t get paid to preach.”

Julian Palms*, a 32-year-old medical marijuana grower, has been growing indoors for more than three years. He finds interest in growing organic product, but admits it is not easy.

“I have tried to avoid it, but I use plant health regulators (PHRs) to keep up the steady growth,” Palms said. “It’s like any immune system. If it gets sick or weak you can boost the health by adding some chemical or biological agents to the food. With antibiotics, you’re boosting defense by usually strengthening white blood cells. These PHRs boost energy and bloom.”

Though Palms is concerned about his impact, he admits many growers don’t care about ecological damage because of the profit turnaround.

“To a lot of my friends there isn’t any problem with running a 100 kW generator for 12 hours a day,” Palms said. “They still make bank on their cycles, so who can blame them?”

The argument is being justified by all sides, whether it’s indoor grower or local distributor. The reaction, whether concerned or not, depends on the consumer.

“Clubs don’t care, the drivers [middlemen] don’t care, and the buyers don’t care, but if they knew the amount of energy going into this stuff and the pollution coming out of it, and the unethical means [i.e. spraying plants with pesticides] by which people are producing this medicinal drug, it might change their minds,” Noland said. “You really have to consider who’s buying your product. Our personal market isn’t uneducated yuppies. They are usually conscious consumers that understand the value in sustainable products. But this concern isn’t reflective of most.”

This lack of concern was significant to Mare as well when he grew marijuana.

“Hopefully people start to get it,” Mare said. “The campaign is hard to get moving because there isn’t an advertising business for pot yet. But the facts are already there — they just have to be used properly.”

Illustration by Louise Leong.

The campaign is amassing a database from respected individuals in the local community and from institutions of objective, rather than subjective, standing. But numbers are just numbers for Noland, the campaign leader, as he argues in order to make an impact, “you have to make things relative.”

Both consumer and commercial retail suppliers see this as reasonable. Local dispensaries see little salience in mudslinging against indoor marijuana, but do like the idea of putting science into their sales.

Humboldt grower Noland’s campaign work incorporates these databases of grower practices into digestible facts and pamphlets in order to get consumer attention.

One of the headings on a campaign flier reads “70 Gallons of Diesel Fuel = 1 Pound Indoor Pot”; a product statistic generated by Evan Mills, long-time energy analyst and staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California. Mills has done extensive work on the energy consumption involved with medical marijuana production.

“From the perspective of individual consumers, a single cannabis cigarette represents two pounds of CO2 emissions, an amount equal to running a 100-watt light bulb for 17 hours assuming average U.S. electricity emissions (or 30 hours on California’s cleaner grid),” Mills said.

Studies like these, done in a professional environment, have given concrete support to the fight against energy-consuming marijuana production, and with the combination of health problems presented by toxic additives, it may give campaigners what they need to change consumers choices from indoor to outdoor.

“Facts like that hit hard, man,” Mare said as he rolled a cigarette for himself. “If every time someone lit one up, they thought about — what, 17 light bulb hours? They would probably start to think about their buys, right? That’s why I think the indoor market is so damn powerful. It’s not natural, it’s not organic — it’s ‘pollution pot,’ but the buyers don’t really know that, and that ignorance is actually keeping prices up.”

But today, even with new scientific education about environmental impact awareness, will there be time to save this export market before the economic collapse? The three counties’ economies rely heavily on the production of cannabis and the steady generation of revenue, but with industrial production becoming more prevalent, profit-per-pound will drop.

It is hard for any person to forecast the market, but there is still joking and comedic speculation among community members. The future of Humboldt County is not, however, solely dependent on the success of the cannabis market, said Noland.

“In my opinion, I feel that it is important that we [Humboldt County] as a community try to diversify our economies and not only hold onto the marijuana monoculture mindset to follow this so called ‘Napa model,’” Noland said.

The Napa Model reflects the industry in the county southeast of Mendocino County, which grows solely wine products. Instead, he argues, through farming specializations, small communities can diversify their agricultural practices and limit the requirement of imported goods through sustainable alternatives such as livestock, energy collectives or large scale community gardens.

By choosing more sustainable alternatives, growers avoid direct negative feedback loops. These alternatives include importing products, growing cannabis and producing pollution.

Sustainable practices, according to Keenan and Mare, allow for a redirection of outcomes, serving more environmental benefit, in balance with crop profit.

Sutherland reiterated the slim market that existed for sustainability.

Illustration by Louise Leong.

“Don’t get me wrong. I know there are some people out there that do store water for their crop [lowering impact on streams during summertime droughts], but they are an extremely small, small minority,” Sutherland said.

Compared to the sheer mass of production, Sutherland doesn’t think small action is enough.

“I learned from the drug task force in Eureka that last year 168,300 pot plants were confiscated, [and] when I asked what percentage of total production in the county they thought that amount represented, they answered 1 percent,” Sutherland said. “That means that last year there were an estimated 16,830,000 marijuana plants planted in Humboldt County, both indoor and outdoor.”

The numbers were shocking to hear, Sutherland said.

“Keep in mind, Humboldt’s production is in rivalry with Mendocino County, with Trinity County in close proximity to these numbers as well. And although population in Humboldt County hasn’t grown much in the last 20 years, the amount of water consumption is vast in comparison. Shifting cultivation outdoors virtually eliminates energy use (aside from transport), although

when mismanaged, the practice imposes their own environmental impacts.”

Dixon however is hopeful for a reconsideration of the market.

“If we’re just dosing our products with toxic chemicals,” he said, “how different are we from the pharmaceutical industry?”

The campaign will slowly continue, trying to bring consumer and producer closer together. Bringing light to the benefit that organically grown products can offer.

Michael Pollan, a renowned critic of the agricultural industry, champions the power of the consumer in any industry. The viral campaign “Vote with your Fork,” produced in the New York Times, shows that with every healthy choice made, the industry will adapt to serve the buyer. Cannabis activists like Mare have asked patients to “Vote with your Joints” in order to accomplish this same transition.

Noland continues to work on agendas for upcoming cannabis conferences.

“In short, this is a very complicated situation we are facing here in our community and we can only speculate on the future,” Noland said. “For the sake of the environment, the industry must change.”

*Names have been changed.

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at Inside the Industry: The Costs of Marijuana

Forrest Robinson, a humanities professor at UCSC, said American studies “was dumped by its faculty.” Photo by Toby Silverman.

Michael Cowan sits with the American studies founding documents in McHenry Library. Photo by Toby Silverman.

“American studies was dead in the water before anybody knew it.”

UC Santa Cruz humanities professor Forrest Robinson made this assertion, his voice heightening in pitch as he reached the end of the sentence. He was recalling what it was like when the American studies faculty’s decision to dissolve their own department and suspend admission into the major was made public last September.

“For several years, we have sustained our major with fewer permanent faculty than is desirable,” department chair Eric Porter wrote in an email sent to all American studies majors and proposed majors around that time. “It has become clear to us that we cannot permanently sustain a high-quality major on current faculty resources. We have therefore concluded that the best way to support the teaching and research in our scholarly areas and to ensure our own professional development as faculty is to seek homes in other campus departments.”

Porter and others involved in the decision stressed the point that everyone who was already declared or proposed as an American studies major, as well as many first-years who could get in under the wire, would be able to carry out their education as planned. But no new majors after the class of 2014 would be admitted, and the future after that point remained decidedly unclear.

In public meetings held in the weeks after the email was sent, and in the rest of the academic year, it remained uncertain what the department’s status was, whether it would ever come back and why exactly the faculty voted to end their own department. Monica Deebs, a UCSC alumna who was in her final year as an American studies major at the time, remembers confused students “attacking” Eric Porter with questions.

“This meeting [after the announcement of suspension] was packed,” Deebs said. “Everyone showed up — American studies majors, non-American studies majors, faculty. The tone was very much like, ‘What’s happening? Why is this happening?’”

American studies’ confusing end came in the wake of community studies being cut a year earlier, yet the student and faculty responses differed greatly between the two cuts. Both Robinson and Deebs believe the reason there was no public protesting from American studies students was because they took the faculty’s lead in accepting the department’s end as a foregone conclusion, an inevitability.

“I’ve spoken to a lot of students who are very confused,” Robinson said. “There’s a feeling of bafflement, of ‘How can this happen? Why wasn’t more being done to protect the program? Why didn’t I know about this? Why weren’t there meetings [before the decision was made]?’ And the answers were not forthcoming. It was pretty much stated as a fact. So maybe people were baffled into a kind of acquiescence.”

The American studies faculty’s vote to dissolve the major begs a few questions.

Is the department’s end really all about the budget? If not, what else played a role? Does the major stand a chance of resurrection, and if so, what would that look like? What does this mean for the future of interdisciplinary education at UC Santa Cruz? What can the rest of the campus stand to learn from the story of American studies? And what role does the possibility of a critical race and ethnic studies program play in all this?

These questions were brought to various past and present faculty members involved in some way with the department. Although there was some overlap in their answers, the faculty had varying viewpoints.

For Robinson, losing the major on campus is particularly troubling, given the wide range of opportunities and creativity it allows students.

“There is nothing at all like American studies now that American studies is gone,” Robinson said. “You design your own programs. It is the study of the United States in any way that you can make coherent. In a way, you get to shape your own education.”

Or as Michael Cowan, UCSC’s American studies department founder and professor emeritus, put it, the major allows students to “pursue a whole range of interests, and at the same time, focus on things they are particularly interested in.”

For Cowan, 2005 marked the “beginning of the end” for American studies at UCSC.

Cowan founded the major, which was officially proposed in 1977 and approved in 1979, although students had been pursuing independent majors called “American studies” for years already by that time.

He described starting the independent major out of Merrill College in 1970 and watching it grow, of spending the 1975-76 school year at Yale to learn more and eventually develop a core course for the major, and of the exciting early days with a limited faculty.

“It was a rather ambitious project, and when you have only a few faculty you can’t do everything,” Cowan said. “So we agreed that some of the most critical things were to see if we could agree on some of the big questions we wanted to ask.”

Cowan said he sought to tackle issues of citizenry and society in a way political science and sociology could not. For him, the American studies major was to serve as a nexus, linking a cascade of social, historical and political issues in fashions otherwise ignored by their respective departments.

“That was our goal,” Cowan said, “and we felt that the faculty had to remain dedicated to talking to each other, not just go off and teach their own courses, but also modeling civil discourse, often with sensitive materials, because that’s what we hoped the students would be doing.”

For a long time, that was how the department worked, graduating around 2000 majors to date. There has always been a small amount of faculty within the department, but because American studies is interdisciplinary, the department could rely on outside faculty to both teach American studies courses and make classes in their own departments available to American studies students.

“What always struck me,” Cowan said, “was how successful the major was with such a small number of courses that we ourselves could control.”

After the undergraduate department was established, Cowan and the rest of the faculty set their sights on a graduate program. There was some support and interest from the humanities division, and in 2003, prominent American studies scholars George Lipsitz and Tricia Rose came to UCSC, adding fuel to that fire.

“We were this close,” said Cowan, holding his index finger and thumb less than an inch apart.

For department chair Eric Porter, obtaining a graduate program and holding onto faculty members was a matter of life or death for the major. The small faculty model had been successful up to a point, but a growing campus with limited resources posed danger to smaller departments.

“The previous dean of humanities had basically sent this message that the division can’t really support as many departments as it has, and certainly can’t rebuild them to the state that they wanted to be at,” Porter said. “We had this sense that if we had 10 faculty, and were moving towards a graduate program, then we’d be in pretty good shape.”

But an issue with spousal hiring — the school refused to hire new professors’ spouses despite their qualifications and chose to continue the usual faculty search  — prompted the new additions to quickly leave in 2005, and, as Porter remembers it, “then it became clear that the support was not going to be forthcoming.”

Porter calls the lack of a graduate program a catch-22 for the department. He acknowledges it made American studies less influential and valued, but also that there was some resistance from other departments who depended on TAships with American studies to fund their own graduate students. The departures of Tricia Rose and George Lipsitz fit into a “pattern of inconsistent support” within the humanities.

As current humanities dean William Ladusaw sees it, the desire within American studies for a graduate program came more out of necessity than over-ambition. The University of California requires its professors to engage in both graduate and undergraduate education, and for American studies professors, that can be difficult. The decision to disband the department came after the realization that, as Ladusaw put it, “The only way they were going to be fully integrated into graduate education was to move to other departments.”

The failure to start a graduate program was both a symptom and a cause of American studies’ decline at UCSC. Michael Cowan and other professors within the department soon retired or transferred to other departments, making it difficult to sustain the major. Adding to the difficulty were financial limits that made crossover teaching and courseloads less feasible.

“On campus, we have a lot of people who do American studies, and who are active in the American studies organizations, some of whom are really well-known,” said professor Kim Lau, who recently moved from American studies to the literature department. “But they have so many things going on in their own department that they can’t just come teach for us in the way that they need, and the budget exacerbates that problem because departments can’t just loan one of their professors out to teach one of our courses, or to even teach an elective that’s cross-listed. It’s not because they don’t want to, but because of administrative structure and budget constraints.”

Dean of humanities William Ladusaw made the point that this lack of availability was not fair to the students, and cited as proof a survey conducted by SUA last year to determine how difficult it was for students to get into the classes they need. It turned out majoring in something that requires interdisciplinarity can leave students somewhat lost when enrolling for classes.

“If you don’t organize it well, then the people who are not part of the major that is the same name of the department can feel like stepchildren,” he said. “What the class survey showed is that the two majors in humanities that were having the most trouble getting the courses that they needed were feminist studies and American studies, and those are the two majors who use very frequently courses in social sciences, where the courses are very impacted.”

The dean added that general growing pains for the university didn’t help matters.

“Right now, with the number of faculty we had in the mid-nineties, we’re trying to teach twice as many undergraduate students and five times as many graduate students,” he said. “I’ve been here since 1984, and we never really did feel lavish, but the faculty is shrinking in size, and therefore there are lots of things people do want to do, but they have to make choices, and that’s forced on it by the budget.”

The American studies department’s budgetary problems and absence of extra-departmental support has disconcerting resemblance to several other UCSC departments. Community studies was the first to go in 2009, and there are other departments both within humanities and elsewhere facing similar problems. History of consciousness faculty have a mirror image crisis right now — because it is only a graduate program, they are having trouble finding ways to involve themselves in undergraduate education, according to both Eric Porter and Ladusaw. Environmental toxicology, a department within the sciences division that draws on chemistry, biology, and environmental studies, is suffering from a limited faculty. And critical race and ethnic studies — the much buzzed-about potential major — will inevitably need to be interdisciplinary in order to give its area of study justice. But how, when American studies failed, will these programs flourish?

For some UCSC faculty, it all comes down to a matter of semantics.

American studies didn’t start out as a department — it started out as an inter-disciplinary program. The difference between an interdisciplinary academic program and a department is a department houses faculty who must teach that department’s courses, while a program is an academic pathway students can take that involves classes from various departments. Classical studies is an example of one such program — there are no courses or professors designated under classical studies, but students can major in it by taking courses from the literature, history and language departments.

For humanities dean Ladusaw, this is an absolutely crucial distinction.

“A department doesn’t have as much to do with what the program is as it does with the mechanics of building a faculty and making money flow through the system,” he said. “If you’re a department, then you have all of the responsibility of running academic programs, and also a lot of other activities having to do with both faculty assessment and budgetary distribution.”

From Ladusaw’s perspective, it was being a department that killed American studies, and that could pose danger to other fields.

“We’ve got interdisciplinarity all over the place, but creating new little departments is not a smart thing to do,” he said. “That’s one of the things American studies showed. When I first came here, there was no American studies program, but they, from their departments, formed an interdisciplinary program. Later, they got the bright idea of creating a department instead of just having a program. If we knew then what we know now,” he concluded with a chuckle.

Ladusaw says he could see American studies and other departments being brought back to life as academic programs, though proper planning would be important to ensure students could still get into the classes they needed.

“In getting rid of the department, we don’t have to get rid of the program,” he said. “Part of the trouble is that when faculty were moving into these other departments, they felt that they were unable to promise, in perpetuity, that they would be able to teach the courses that they needed to teach in order to keep the American studies major going.”

But department chair Eric Porter doesn’t quite see the feasibility of existing that way, though he said he’s considered it.

“There was actually a quite long conversation that went on [before the decision was made to dissolve the department]” he said. “What were our options? Should American studies become a program in another department? Or we could merge with another department. Then there was also this idea of reconstituting as an interdepartmental program, and there’s some versions of that in the division, like Jewish studies and classical studies, but we’re significantly bigger than them, so it’s still unclear how that would happen.”

Literature professor Susan Gillman sees blurring the lines between departments and even between divisions (such as humanities and engineering) as a possible bright future for UCSC.

“Santa Cruz, for all its interdisciplinarity, has a very fixed set of divisional structures which make it harder to talk across them,” said Gillman, who is also a faculty member affiliated with American studies. “There is this horrible cliché, ‘let no budget crisis go to waste.’ That’s the idea — you can think the unthinkable much more easily.”

This is how Gillman envisions critical race and ethnic studies working, which brings up a whole new issue. One of the biggest arguments thrown around for keeping American studies has always been that it offers a path for students to pursue ethnic studies. If American studies is eventually brought back, it’s unclear how the two would coexist.

What role ethnic studies plays in American studies has long been a point of contention both on campus and on a national level.

Today, humanities professor Robinson teaches classes that he says are intended for American studies students, but his business card identifies him as a “humanities professor.” He made this switch a few years ago, after realizing that the American studies department at UCSC was going in a direction — towards more ethnic studies — that he didn’t agree with.

“I always thought of American studies as the study of the United States in all its dimensions,” Robinson said, “with attention to race, class and gender, but certainly not exclusively. I never thought of American studies as an ethnic studies program. I see them as entirely different.”

Michael Cowan, too, pointed out that American studies is not solely about the issue of race, but rather that race plays a role in American studies. He also speculated that Executive Vice Chancellor Alison Galloway’s motivation for supporting an ethnic studies major as a replacement for American studies, rather than building on American studies’ own long-standing successful focus on cultural diversity, might be in part that she believed it would “solve some political problems.” But Gillman pointed out American studies’ approach to race at UCSC was not always fulfilling to all professors on campus.

“We wanted to be more global, and it was difficult to do that in the way the program was set up,” she said. “One of the courses was called ‘The African-American Experience.’ Experience was singular, as though it were all homogeneous. That model of ethnicity came to be questioned. American studies had long had an uneasy relationship with ethnic studies.”

If American studies makes a comeback and ethnic studies is born on this campus, then what roles would they play with each other? UC Berkeley has both an American studies program and an ethnic studies program, while the University of Southern California combines the two into one.

It remains unclear what could happen at UCSC. Despite Ladusaw’s insistence the American studies major will return in one way or another, others are unconvinced. Professor Robinson expressed doubt, and Porter said American studies coming back might be “an impossibility at this point,” though he said he is optimistic for critical race and ethnic studies.

But for the next three years, American studies remains, though it is being phased out. After the class of 2014 graduates, an entire area of study will, at least for a while, be leaving with them. A lot of reasons have been given as to why, but still some questions remains. One from Cowan, the man who made this major possible, feels particularly relevant.

“Once the horses were out of the barn, once the faculty had left, it was virtually impossible to pull them back together,” he said. “To switch metaphors, my sense is they wanted to avoid remaining on what they saw as a sinking ship. The question is whether, at some key moments, if there had been the right leadership at several campus levels or more conversations, especially with students … that might have changed.”

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at Mapping the Loss of a Major

Illustration by Christine Hipp.

At a meeting this past October, UC Santa Cruz Chancellor George Blumenthal told student media that UCSC was more of a “state-augmented” school, as UC students are now paying as much for their UC education as the state is.

Some take issue with the UC’s tuition hike strategy; an “Occupy Education” march is planned for Nov. 16 at UCSF to protest further fee hikes. At the heart of this debate is a question over what the UC really is — can it still call itself a public university with students footing so much of the bill?

Regardless of how one feels about education in California, the UC system is slowly losing the state support that brought about its inception. The UC Board of Regents — Richard Blum, specifically — said at a planning session in September that negotiating with Sacramento for more support is “a waste of our time.” In the 2009-10 academic year, the UC received 13 percent of its operating budget from the state and 12 percent from student fees. The latter is rising to be on par with state expenditure.

With this in mind, those involved in the day-to-day administration of the UC system are looking for benefactors outside of the governor’s office in Sacramento. At the September planning session, Blum said he thinks the UC system should be negotiating with those “who actually can write a check — Chevron, Apple, Cisco and Google — all those companies sitting on money they don’t know what to do with.”

Some students at UCSC feel apprehensive about the regents’ decision to petition the private sector.

“While I think it is good the regents are finally looking at alternate forms of revenue and finally doing something to address the lack of funding from Sacramento, I think we need to take a closer, critical look at what exactly they intend to do,” said SUA external vice chair Nelson Cortez. “Privatization of the university is not acceptable and won’t be tolerated by students. This is why students must be involved with the process and this is why the regents must be transparent with their actions.”

With California hobbled by the financial crisis crippling the nation as a whole, the UC regents have made it clear to the public that they feel other options like private sector funding have to be explored if the UC system is to survive and retain its essential character as an accessible institution.

“It’s frustrating that, though last year was great in terms of lobbying in Sacramento to bring the issue forward, at the end of the day higher education cuts were devastating,” Blumenthal said. “We have to do better, or we have to find alternatives.”

Looking at the UC now, the system already receives sizable amounts of private funding. The question arises, then: If the UC receives private aid already, and students are paying record highs for tuition — just over $12,000 a year currently — where can the UC system turn to solve its budget issues?

Private Investment in the UC

The UC system as a whole received $1.35 billion from the private sector for the 2009-10 fiscal year. For some perspective, the operating costs for the UC system tend to be around $20 billion per year, with state funding, student tuition and a variety of other sources filling in the rest of that funding gap.

With the exception of the 2007-08 fiscal year, in which the UC received over $1.6 billion, the amount donated to the university by the private sector remains fairly constant. Most philanthropic endeavors tend to be targeted at specific UCs.

“When it comes to private philanthropy, most of that funding is given to the UC [in question] directly,” said Dianne Klein, media specialist for the University of California Office of the President. “Right now, though, we’re placing a greater emphasis on giving to the university [system] as a whole.”

A large amount of private sector funding goes to the UCs that have medical centers, like UCLA. For those UCs, donations to their medical centers can account for almost half of all private sector aid they receive.

Personal connections to the UC have some impact on where donations go, according to Klein.

“If somebody was treated at one of our medical centers and they feel really grateful, then they’d donate specifically to that medical center,” Klein said.

Still, private funding for the UC system goes to a variety of departments, from arts endowments to engineering research funds and faculty positions. The fields this money is allocated to are still restricted, however. Only about 2 percent of private funds given to UC are allowed to be spent at the university’s discretion.

“We’re hoping to raise more for scholarships,” said Klein, unknowingly echoing Chancellor Blumenthal’s sentiment that he would “prefer undesignated [funds], but from a student perspective, having lots of money in scholarships is a good thing.”

Illustration by Christine Hipp.

Private Aid at UCSC

At UC Santa Cruz, private investment has made its presence felt in numerous ways. Jack Baskin Engineering itself is a cornerstone of philanthropic support at UCSC.

“Jack Baskin is a large supporter of the university, but he’s not an alum,” said Shayna Kent, alumni outreach coordinator at UCSC. “He met the chancellor and they had a connection. Some people just have general passions.”

Baskin, who has donated about $7 million to the engineering school at UCSC since 1983, helped launch the computer engineering program. Of that $7 million, $5 million was donated in 1997 to found the Jack Baskin School of Engineering.

Internships represent another convergence of private sector interests and public education.

“Internships provide students an opportunity to learn on-the-job skills while providing employers the opportunity to get to know a potential employee,” said Barbara Silverthorne, director of the Career Center at UCSC. “I welcome collaboration with the private sector with the goal of placing students in professional internships and jobs in their field of interest.”

Silverthorne said engaging employers with the UC system is increasingly important to fostering increased cooperation between the private sector and the UC.

“Due to the competitive job market, the Career Center is working harder than ever to engage a variety of private and public sector employers with on-campus recruitment activities,” Silverthorne said. “The Chancellor’s Undergraduate Internship Program (CUIP) is an example of an internship program which is made possible through matching funds provided through non-state and non-tuition sources.”

More recently, programs and focuses like Jewish studies and Sikh and Punjabi studies have been made possible and expanded by the work of philanthropic groups and foundations.

“Because of private investment and donations, Jewish studies has been able to add courses to the curriculum that would have otherwise not been offered through the normal course of the year,” said Stephanie Sawyer, an undergraduate program coordinator in the history department at UCSC, citing the addition of a course on modern Jewish history in Latin America, taught by Paula Daccarett.

Though hardly unique in the type of aid it receives, the Jewish studies program at UCSC is notable for how much it has expanded with the aid of private investment.

The Jewish studies program at UC Santa Cruz has been assisted by a variety of private sources, including the establishment of the Helen Diller Family Endowment and the Neufeld-Levin Holocaust Endowed Chair, as well as grants from private foundations and gifts from individual donors, according to Nathaniel Deutsch, co-director of the Center for Jewish Studies at UCSC.

“Without this support, our program would be smaller and we would not be able to meet the large student demand for our courses,” Deutsch said.

Sikh and Punjabi studies consists of an endowed faculty position and is paid for by the Sarbjit Singh Aurora fund, an external source of aid.

“It’s a good fit here,” said William Ladusaw, dean of humanities at UCSC. “Universities have always depended upon private philanthropy to enhance their programs and undertake new initiatives.”

Ladusaw remains less optimistic about the possibility of private aid supplanting state support, but hopes the plight of the UC system has raised awareness of the need for such aid.

“In my experience, relatively few people are motivated to make donations simply to replace lost state funds,” Ladusaw said. “But the financial crisis for state universities has certainly raised the visibility of the need  for scholarships and fellowships that can help address concerns about access and affordability.”

Outreach

The case of Sikh and Punjabi studies notwithstanding, the UC system isn’t always approached with windfall offers of financial assistance. Some outreach to potential investors is often needed.

“The UC system as a whole regularly promotes the value of the 10-campus system to the state of California,” said Lynne Stoops, executive director of strategic philanthropy and foundation relations at UCSC. “This is intended to help tell the UC story to state legislators, whose support the university badly needs. But it also has the effect of helping tell the UC story to the general public.”

Stoops said the failure of the state to provide adequately for the UC system increases the need for these outreach efforts.

“Given the state’s declining commitment to California’s highly regarded system of public higher education, those communication efforts are increasingly vital,” Stoops said. “In these difficult times, their generosity is critical to maintaining student access to UCSC. Support from individuals and foundations is absolutely essential if we are going to maintain the quality of the campus and student access to that quality.”

Ultimately, the goal of outreach programs at the UC is to prove long-term value to the private sector.

“In contributing to the campus they are also making a contribution to the long-term social and economic health of this state by providing educational opportunities to its citizens,” Stoops said.

Alumni outreach coordinator Shayna Kent also believes it’s important to educate people on the value of higher education.

“It’s not just fundraising — you have to educate people on why it’s important to give back,” she said. “It’s about educating people about the impact of philanthropy.”

Illustration by Christine Hipp.

Looking Forward

Statistically, it’s difficult to say whether the UC system counts as a private institution. Though state aid has declined sharply, it still exists and funds large aspects of the UC. Still, it might be time for students to have a look at where the private sector has had a hand in shaping their university experience. The UC is a constantly changing system, and more changes are surely on the way.

“Students here are really philanthropic,” Kent said. “[Philanthropy efforts are] going to Haiti, to Second Harvest. But there’s no one out there selling cupcakes for scholarships.”

Some say cupcakes are unlikely to save the UC, even with the best intentions behind them. SUA representative Nelson Cortez said counting on the private sector, whether in the form of a bake sale or a corporate endowment, is not a solution.

“The private sector can play a pivotal role in the UC, and has in the past,” Cortez said. “But relying solely on the private sector to fund the UC is unrealistic and will only lead to a private UC.”

The educational and professional fate of untold numbers of UC students may be decided beginning Nov. 16. UC regents will meet then to begin discussion of an 8–16 percent tuition increase every year for the next four years, contingent on state aid. If Sacramento fails to deliver to the UC, student tuition could reach over $22,000 by 2016. As a result, whether the private sector should, or even can, save the UC is a question that might need answering sooner rather than later.

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at UC: Public or Private?

Illustration by Jamie Morton.

It was a conversation with his father that brought the recession home for Scott Leiserson.

“My dad is a very futuristic person in his planning, and he thought for a while he would be writing a check for my college,” Leiserson said. “Eventually, the financial crisis hit. And he owns a manufacturing business … He lost half his business in one quarter of time, and another half in the second quarter, making it a three-quarter loss.”

The financial crisis of 2007-08 and the subsequent recession caused Leiserson to take out Federal Direct Unsubsidized Loans through UC Santa Cruz’s Financial Aid and Scholarship Office. Leiserson has been a student at UCSC for two years now, and he currently owes $71,820.

“It’s scary,” he said. “When all this happened my dad said, ‘We just can’t pay for your college right now, you’re taking all the loans.’ I’ve been getting these statements each quarter … and this number is a lot.”

At a projected $1 trillion nationwide, student loan debt is not going away any time soon. For many the burden is staggering: Student debt is increasing at an estimated rate of $2,853.88 per second, according to The Project on Student Debt, a non-profit group that is part of the Institute for College Access & Success. After adjusting for inflation, the College Board reports that students are borrowing twice what they did a decade ago.

In late October, President Obama introduced changes in student loan legislation, and recently there has been a surge of stories calling the loans situation a “bubble,” akin to the financial crisis of 2007-08. While pundits and politicians alike are taking notice and speaking out about the loan situation, many students remain concerned about whether there are any solutions in sight.

Jason Green finished his degree at UC Santa Cruz in January of 2011. He explained how crushing the debt of student loans can become.

“I got my degree in biology and I’m $80,000 in debt right now,” he said. “With my degree, if I could get a decent job it wouldn’t be so bad, but the job market is so fucked right now too that I’m just so screwed.”

He said since his family was neither impoverished nor incredibly wealthy, he was put in a difficult situation.

“Combined, my parents make about $120,000, so we couldn’t get any financial aid,” he said. “But it wasn’t enough to pay for college either, so I had to take out loans and try to get scholarships and grants. After my first year I lost my grandparents, and I didn’t have the GPA anymore to get scholarships and grants, so I had to start taking out loans.”

Graduates today face the highest unemployment rate in recent history. In 2009, recent graduate unemployment rate was at 8.7 percent, 1.2 percent beneath the national average. In 2010, the recent graduate rate grew to 9.1 percent, while the national average fell to 9.4 percent. Defaults are up as well: The number of students defaulting on their loans is growing fast, with a 2010 default rate at 8.8 percent, in comparison with 7 percent in 2009.

Dan Rola works the front desk of UCSC’s Financial Aid and Scholarship Office. He said it can be very difficult for students to take on the burden of paying for their education without familial support, the same support weakened by the recession.

“With the credit crunch a lot of families are experiencing, we’re finding students are having trouble getting parent loans. When their parents are denied parent loans, they can reapply with cosigners to still get the federal loans,” he said. “But in a lot of cases parents don’t have that option. So the student is left to find private loans elsewhere. Often they’re left trying to foot the bill, whether it’s a portion of their tuition or housing.”

Graduate Jason Green said at first he was fortunate, as he was able to receive federal loans. However, due to extenuating circumstances, funding his education through private loans was his only option.

“After my grandparents passed and my grades fell, I couldn’t get them anymore,” he said. “I started using Wells Fargo and I used them to get through school.”

Green is among a small minority at UCSC who are left with little choice other than private loans. Only 2.1 percent of UCSC students used private loans during the 2009-10 academic year, according to data from the Financial Aid and Scholarship Office. The rest are federal, with the average student debt upon graduation pegged at $17,546.

As these statistics follow only students who began and finished their undergraduate education at UCSC, the numbers leave out the roughly 2,700 transfer, re-entry and re-admittance UCSC students that make up a significant portion of the campus.

The “Bubble,” and Rethinking Capitalism

In its simplest definition, a speculative bubble is when buyers purchase an asset consistently over a period of time. They envision it rising in value, and as more people purchase the asset, its price rises. Eventually buyers outnumber sellers, and finding nobody to sell to, panic ensues among investors and prices plummet — the bubble “pops.”

In 2007-08, a bubble in mortgage-backed securities brought the United States into a recession. After low-interest rates introduced by the Federal Reserve, investors looked toward housing to invest in high-profit Credit Default Obligations (CDOs). CDOs often held subprime mortgages, loan arrangements for borrowers with a poor credit history and typically with high interest rates. Just like home mortgages, student loans are securitized, and are packaged and sold by investment banks in CDOs.

Like housing, often student loans are made without research into one’s credit or income and are by definition subprime. However, unlike home mortgages, it is nearly impossible for a student to declare bankruptcy and default on his or her debt, much less walk away like many homeowners did.

The Bruce Initiative on Rethinking Capitalism, a project within UCSC’s social sciences, endeavors to look at finance and capitalism through new perspectives, after the events of the 2007-08 financial crisis brought the United States economy to a halt. Professor Robert Meister helped form the program, and said the UC’s ability to continually raise tuition despite future job markets will further increase student debt.

“One needs to understand that in this society, people don’t think of debt as a tax they pay to the financial industry, because they think they’ve already gotten something — their tuition,” he said. “The whole industry exists because well over 90 percent of students cannot finance 100 percent of their costs, and can live on credit besides. Because they can simply add their credit card payments to their student debt … If you view the university as a public institution and you view tuition as a tax, this is the only public agency that can raise taxes and increase the number of payers at the same time.”

Tuition and fees for public four-year institutions across the country have risen 8.3 percent higher since last year, according to a report by College Board. The University of California has increased student fees to record levels, about 18 percent over the course of last year and 30 percent the year before that.

Meister has been a prominent dissident against UC fee hikes. He wrote a series of articles entitled “They Pledged Your Tuition,” in which he described how the UC’s power over tuition was used as collateral for construction bonds. As a leading member of the Rethinking Capitalism Project, he made a suggestion: Instead of the UC regents constantly raising tuition, the University of California could provide a free education for anyone who agreed to a 3 percent income tax for a preset number of years.

Illustration by Jamie Morton.

Working Toward the End of Debt

Nicole Gamache is a former re-entry graduate who transferred from Golden West College in Huntington Beach to UC Berkeley.

“In two years, I acquired $26,000 of student loan debt,” she said, over the phone because she does not have much time between a full-time job and raising her 12-year-old son. “I actually kind of consider myself to be lucky, because I did find a job. It took nine months after I graduated to find one.”

Gamache graduated with a degree in anthropology in 2010 and now lives in Albany, near UC Berkeley, so her son can remain in the same school district. She wants to continue studying anthropology, but can’t, because of her debt to the UC regents — in this case in the form of a hold placed on her account because she couldn’t pay her bills.

“What’s frustrating is I have my B.A., but I can’t get my transcripts and go to grad school because of the amount of money I owe,” she said. “There’s a limit to how much you can take out in a year, so I ended up owing, in addition to the student loans, almost $9,000 to the UC itself.”

Since 2010, Gamache has paid $400 altogether. After her six-month grace period she was able to defer her payments because she was unemployed. Now that she’s working, she’s receiving bills she can’t pay for. While she was able to lower her payments from $300 a month to $50, between housing, food and the expense of raising a child, she says she still can’t pay.

Professor Meister of the Rethinking Capitalism Project said students’ defaulting can be profitable for the loan industry.

“There’s a sense they are more profitable if they perform worse, because they aren’t riskier if they perform worse, they’re just more profitable,” he said. “On the other side, you might have a student with $28,000 in debt … such a student will on average face penalties and collection fees that are added onto your principal — $30,000 collection fees right off the bat. And your default doesn’t put you in a position as a credit card default might, to lower your principal and negotiate. It’s the case that people will often pay, through the miracle of compound interest, something like $130,000 or $140,000 in total.”

Illustration by Jamie Morton.

The Obama Administration’s Response

President Obama’s plans, introduced Oct. 26, include debt consolidation and a lowering of the income percentage that determines payments. Debt consolidation, a new system proposed by the president, would allow students to combine all of their student loans into one monthly payment. This would also help students by providing a lower interest rate if rates had changed. Before, students could have as many as five or six different bills each month. The plans also lower the monthly payments from 15 percent of one’s income to 10 percent, and will forgive any remaining debt after 20 years instead of 25.

UCSC graduate Green said lowering payments would not be valuable to him. He would rather pay his debt faster.

“I don’t want to pay for 20 years,” he said. “While I know that would help a lot of other people, I intend to try to go to grad school or med school in the next two years. That means I’m going to have to take out more money or find another way to take care of it … just pay off the old loan with the new loan.”

Meister questions the amount of help students could actually get from the new legislation.

“In order to qualify, you have to be up-to-date and have not missed a payment,” he said. “And how many people would be in a position where they couldn’t pay it off for 20 years and wouldn’t have missed a payment?”

Part of the problem of calling the current student loans situation a “bubble” is that bubbles are very difficult to predict until they have popped. Patrick Register, associate director of the Financial Aid and Scholarship Office, said he doesn’t see how it could be possible to predict the future of student loan debt.

“There have just been so many variables in the last five years … It’s complicated,” he said. “When I look at our averages, they are not climbing as rapidly as they could be in other states. Part of that is because we have a fairly significant low-income student population, and that student population qualifies for grants — federal, state and institutional. And if the grants come close to keeping up with the increases in tuition, we’re going to be OK.”

Green offered several pieces of advice from the outside, having seen the job market with his own eyes.

“Find experience on campus right now … One of my exes has a double major in anthropology and literature, and she’s working at Trader Joe’s right now,” he said. “Go do something you want to do, right now, because experience matters way, way more than your degree for some reason.”

As a recent graduate, Green just started making payments on his loan debt in October, after his six-month grace period. He has to pay $770 a month with money from work he finds on and off at a temp agency.

“Look early, look now [for work], look two weeks ago — it’s something you should be doing constantly,” he said. “For the last three weeks or so I’ve been employed, then they laid me off for three days, and then they found me a new day job. I’ve worked the last four days and now I’m unemployed again.”

Current UCSC student Leiserson was able to get a job doing property maintenance on a ranch near campus, and he says he’s very excited about it. However, he’s still apprehensive about paying off his loans.

“I’m not sure how long I’ll be working there, but it’s just nice to have another source of income other than the school,” he said. “Especially coming into Christmas time and Thanksgiving — it’s the longest time since the next financial aid.”

By the end of this year, he will owe $91,306.

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at A Ticking Time Bomb

Illustrations by Louise Leong.

Updated 11/4/2011 at 5:50pm

Like any new parent, Ryan Haley hadn’t the slightest clue on how to change a diaper when his daughter Emily was born four years ago. Like any new parent, he had to learn how to get down to his daughter’s eye level when talking to her. And like any new parent, Haley was sleep-deprived every night after waking up multiple times to attend to her cries.

However, when Haley was late to pick up Emily one day from preschool, Emily came home with a note attached to her shirt that threatened contact with Child Protective Services if he was ever late again. The emergency contacts Emily’s school kept on file were never even notified. It was clear to the Haley and his wife Paula Blair they weren’t being treated like any other new parents.

Haley and Blair are Special Olympics athletes from Butte County, Calif. Haley is diagnosed with dyslexia and learning disabilities that keep his reading at a second-grade level and Blair has a speech disability that makes pronouncing longer words difficult. Though the couple have faced some hardships, they consider themselves lucky. Not only do they have a healthy, beautiful four-year-old, but they have custody of her, unlike many parents who have been deemed inadequate caretakers and lost custody of their children.

During the past century, the number of families headed by a parent with an intellectual and/or developmental disability has increased substantially, according to the Research and Training Center of Community Living of the University of Minnesota.

Two national surveys and NHIS report more than 8 million families include at least one parent who has a disability, in the United States alone.

The lack of programs representing these parents renders them an invisible population. Only 51 percent of parents with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities are currently living with their children, according to the most recent updates in the 1994-1995 National Health Interview Survey – Disability Supplement (NHIS-D). Other studies estimate 40 to 60 percent of parents with developmental disabilities have had their children removed from their care at some point in time.

While there are various organizations dedicated to children and individuals with developmental disabilities, resources for parents with developmental disabilities are substantially fewer, to the point that they must rely on the support of family or friends to raise their children and reduce the risk of losing their parental rights. Many families without this support often face Child Protective Services (CPS) intervention.

Lesa Nitcy Hope, director of community services at All About Developmental Disabilities (AADD), has spent 25 years advocating for the rights of developmentally disabled people.

“In many ways this challenge mirrors the challenges faced by other marginalized groups historically,” Nitcy Hope said in an email. “The challenge in family courts is that those in power hold their biases and negative stereotypes as ‘common sense’ even when there is no evidence of abuse or neglect. And unfortunately they have the power to make devastating, life-changing decisions for parents and children.”

While there has been no stated criteria for why a developmentally disabled parent may have his or her parental rights terminated, according to a 2006 briefing from the County of Santa Cruz to the Board of Supervisors, an update has been made for what is prioritized in deciding whether to place a child in foster care.

“The new statute now stresses that the child’s health and safety shall be the paramount concern in determining what is reasonable, and consistent with the plan for timely, permanent placement of a child,” according to the briefing.

LETTING GO

“Getting here has not been easy,” said Dave Spicer in an email. “As the parent of an autism-spectrum kid, I had to let go of all the ideas I had about how things would work out. I had to become willing to do whatever it took — to go to any length. In my case, this meant letting go of raising my own child.”

Spicer is diagnosed with high-functioning autism and is a writer and speaker for autism. His 26-year-old son Andrew has the same diagnosis. Due to various factors, Spicer decided the best decision for his son was therapeutic foster care in 1995.

“That was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life,” Spicer said. “If someone had told me at the time how well that would work out, I wouldn’t have dared believe them. The process is not pretty or gentle.”

Dave feels a structured home setting and effective advocacy has been the right path for Andrew. Andrew has been living with the same extended family for 16 years. He is part of Buncombe County’s Progressive Education Program and is taking several college courses. While Dave lives in North Carolina and Andrew lives in Maine, they keep in touch through email and see each other once a year.

WALKING ON EGGSHELLS

Although Haley and Blair currently have custody of their daughter Emily, they are not fully at ease. Every day holds the possibility that may result in losing their only daughter. The family has been spontaneously visited by CPS, called in by anonymous callers. Though the couple say there is no evidence or reason to have CPS take custody of Emily, Blair is still haunted by the possibility.

“It’s just scary because you don’t know what’s going to happen,” Blair said. “Are you going to get your child back? Can you turn yourself around and get the support again? It goes through my mind a lot. I don’t know if there will be a knock on the door one day and it’ll be CPS.”

Nitcy Hope said the concept of IQ in family court — in terms of terminating parental rights —is often utilized.

“IQ is not a predictor of a person’s ability to parent,” Nitcy Hope said. “IQ tests were established to determine how people would function academically, yet IQ tests and other psychological evaluations that focus on disability are used as evidence to terminate parental rights. Parents with DD [developmental disabilities] can do everything right and still lose their kids.”

Though the family has received support from community members and friends, in the presence of strangers in public, Haley and Blair feel pressured to meet a certain standard of behavior to continue their lives with their daughter in peace.

“When our child cries in the stores, I have to just let her sit there and cry instead of picking her up and putting her on her butt outside because then we’ll get called on,” Blair said. “We don’t let her get away with anything, but I want people to see that we’re not hurting her.”

It upsets the couple when they receive anonymous feedback from strangers in the form of CPS calls.

“If people have a problem with me and how I treat my daughter, then talk to me or get out of my business,” Blair said. “If you’re going to treat a person with a disability that way and talk about them behind their back, instead of calling CPS why not offer help?”

Cheryl Theis is an education advocate at the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund as well as a mother of five children, two of them with special needs.

“Parents who have particular developmental disabilities are so inherently seen as less capable, so one of the things we run up against is that the child is having problems at school and the parents are in a custody dispute, so it becomes the thing that the other side uses,” Theis said. “People are less likely to be labeled and treated because they are afraid of exactly that. There are a tremendous amount of roadblocks.”

COMMUNITY SUPPORT

While Haley and Blair have found a community at the Special Olympics, many developmentally disabled parents who don’t belong to a specialized community don’t receive adequate support in terms of parenting.

Della Jackson is a 45-year-old single mother of two children, ages 4 and 16, from St. Louis, MO. who is diagnosed with mild mental retardation. Since 1994, Jackson has been supported by the Families Learning Together program of the St. Louis Arc, a non-profit United Way agency that provides support and services to developmentally disabled adults, parents and children. However, while pregnant with her first child, she had nowhere to go. Before hearing about Families Learning Together, Jackson lived in a group home that ultimately gave her a choice to either get an abortion or be kicked out.

“They wanted me to get rid of my child, so I left,” Jackson said. “I didn’t feel it was right to do. I never believed in abortion.”

Jackson explained how her parenting classes at Families Learning Together have played a large role in her life as a parent.

“All I had was the parenting class,” Jackson said. “I didn’t really have steady support. But I think I’ve done really well.”

Nitcy Hope, All About Developmental Disabilities (AADD) director of community services, stresses the challenges of parenting for any individual, regardless of disability.

“If we are honest, everyone needs support in parenting,” Nitcy Hope said. “I have a Ph.D and when I had my children, I was supported by older, wiser women who helped me learn about parenting. We should not pathologize needing support or consider it a deficit if we need people to help us along.”

The lack of established programs for parents with developmental disabilities leaves many parents feeling isolated and alone, regardless of family and friend support.

“Parents that are disabled need a program,” said Haley, who has dyslexia. “If there was a program that would help parents with disabilities who have kids and provide a place to bring them together — like a big conference that talks about what it is like to be a parent — we want to know how they do it and talk about our disabilities.”

THE ‘QUIRKY’ PARENTS OF THE NEXT GENERATION

The Coryell Autism Center near downtown Santa Cruz is a specially designed non-public school for young people with autism between the ages 14 and 22. The school is geared toward training individuals at the transition age before adulthood to ready them for the world outside with vocational placement, professionalism training and independent living. The school currently enrolls two students with severe autism and has custom-designed curriculum based on the students’ specific needs.

Kristyne Jolly, the educational director for the Coryell Autism Center, explained her hopes and observations for what could possibly be the next generation of developmentally disabled parents.

“There are still attitudes out there that anyone who is different in any way is not a functioning member of society. It’s really frustrating,” Jolly said. “They’re craving affection and they’re craving touch. We think about that, and as they’re coming into this age they want that, and it’s so difficult to teach them how and to teach others not to take advantage of them.”

While autism is just one of many developmental disabilities, it is composed of a very wide spectrum in terms of how severe or high functioning it can be in individuals.

“Many of them are functioning enough to understand relationships,” Jolly said. “I know many that I think will grow up and have families. I always hope that they get to have as meaningful life as we have [and] as much as my own son.”

While Jolly is concerned with developmentally disabled individuals having the ability to make decisions for themselves and others, she said there are those who are capable of having families.

“Quirky people do grow up and have families, and some of them do have children with autism and you’re going to start seeing trends with families,” Jolly said. “There is a high genetic component and often times you’ll see these families and they’re super smart, and they’re kind of quirky, and you’ll say ‘OK, I see it.’ In a family, you make up for what someone is lacking in. But because of that, you can expect them to go above and beyond in many other ways.”

However, Jolly stressed that model healthy relationships for children with developmental disabilities aren’t always available, even among parents without developmental disabilities.

“With the stress on the families with children with autism, there’s a high divorce rate,” Jolly said. “[The children] don’t get too see what it looks like to be affectionate with someone that is a romantic partner. They didn’t grow up in a nuclear family, so I worry that they can’t understand that beyond what’s in the movies.”

As the capability of developmentally disabled individuals to parent continues to be discussed, the ultimate question remains: What makes a good parent?

“Love, consistency, helping your child learn skills so that they can survive in society [is what matters, as well as] making sure they go to school and showing an interest in their activities and interests,” said AADD director of community services Nitcy Hope.

While Andrew Spicer, a high functioning autistic adult whose father is also autistic, said if he does ever choose to have a family, he would most likely adopt, he has an idea of what makes a good parent.

“The main thing that makes a person a great parent is being able to be there when the child needs them,” Andrew Spicer said.

Jolly defines a parent as a child’s first teacher and stresses the importance of perspective.

“Understanding another person’s perspective [is different] than your own and being able to switch and step out and being able to say, ‘Could I have done that better?’” Jolly said. “It’s this constant moment-to-moment reflection of the choices you make for your little person. Being reflective and at the same time being able to ask for help, that’s what makes you a good parent, knowing your weaknesses. It takes a community to raise a person, too.”

FROM A CHILD’S EYES

Photo courtesy of Dave Spicer.

While developmentally disabled parents often have children who do not show any signs of developmental disability, in many cases the child has similar genetic traits to the parent. Nearly 30 percent of children whose mothers had intellectual disabilities only or both intellectual and developmental disabilities had intellectual and/or developmental disabilities themselves, according to a data brief from the Research and Training Center on Community Living of the University of Minnesota.

Andrew Spicer recalls his childhood with his father Dave before his placement in therapeutic foster care at eight years old.

“I didn’t really think of my father as different from other parents, because I didn’t really pay attention to other families’ interactions,” Andrew said. “I guess I thought of the time I spent with my father as normal.”

While developmental disabilities often are a strong genetic trait, Haley and Blair — who are dyslexic and autistic respectively — say their daughter Emily has yet to show signs of a developmental disability.

“When Paula was pregnant, they were concerned because maybe Paula’s genes and my genes would affect Emily,” Haley said. “But when she started growing up and nothing was really different with her, everyone just said things like, ‘You have a wonderful daughter. She looks like you guys.’”

CONCERNS FOR THE FUTURE

While Emily is not in school yet, the couple is thinking ahead for when Emily will be learning more advanced concepts that may or may not require them to seek assistance, raising the question: Are they worried?

“With her, not really,” Blair said. “The more I learn how to pronounce words, and with her learning, it’ll be fine. We have family and friends who’ll explain it to me and I’ll explain it to her. She’s got two aunts and an uncle who are teachers, so I’m not really concerned at all.”

Haley, however prepared, does have some concerns.

“I have that worry that when she goes to school that she has reading problems or math problems that I didn’t get the education to understand in order to help,” Haley said. “When she does go to high school and has homework that I don’t understand because I had it explained to me when I was in high school, I won’t have that particular knowledge to give to her when she grows up.”

In the face of ignorance, Della Jackson encourages Daniel, her oldest child, to rise above.

“Other than the parenting class, a lot of people criticize,” she said. “They don’t know what you’re going through. They look at you funny and snicker behind your back because of the way you look. It bothered me growing up, and it used to bother my son, but I just tell him, ‘You don’t say anything back.’”

Similar to Jackson, Haley and Blair have confidence their open-minded daughter will be able to help her friends to be accepting when she starts school.

“I’m hoping Emily will know when they see us and don’t understand, hopefully she’ll let them know, ‘Hey, I have parents that are disabled. They may be different on the outside but on the inside, they’re just like your parents,’” Haley said.

While Haley and Blair may have challenges ahead of them, it is clear their individual lives with their child are just as conceivably stressful and uncompromisingly hopeful as any other parents’. As the phone interview comes to an end, Haley mutters, “Hold on a minute, I want to do something,” and holds the famous Emily to the phone. The confident girl jabbers into the speaker in a voice free of even the slightest hint of apprehension, a voice that exudes only confidence in the many joys and adventures in store for her in the coming years.

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at An Invisible Population

Illustration by Jamie Morton.

Making your food. Laying out your clothes. Sifting through your mail.

These intimate household tasks are being done for you by someone who you think is a stranger.

This is what Alzheimer’s can be like.

Alzheimer’s disease is a neurodegenerative brain disease that usually starts in late middle or old age. It progressively worsens, causing memory loss, impaired cognitive skills, disorientation, personality and mood change. It is the most common form of dementia, affecting as many as 5.1 million Americans.

This past June, my 87-year-old grandmother Daphne fell and broke her hip. But for our family, having her in hospital rehab for a few weeks, and then rehabbing at home, was not that simple.

Up until that point, she was the primary caretaker for my 94-year-old grandfather Gustave, who has Alzheimer’s disease. She was responsible for feeding him, bathing him and running the household for them both with assistance only a few hours twice a week from their caretaker Andreya, and from my mom and me when we could. Not to mention that they live alone in a second-story apartment, and Daphne has Alzheimer’s as well.

Luckily, my grandmother is a lot less cognitively impaired at this stage of the disease than my grandfather, but her accident served as a big wake-up call to us that things weren’t going to get any easier for them.

Talking to my mom on the phone, it became immediately clear how much the overnight care was going to cost while Daphne was away in the rehab hospital (because my grandfather can’t be left alone with his poor short term memory), and when she was reacclimatizing to the apartment. So I switched up my summer school schedule and went home to care-take.

My family’s situation is not uncommon.

“Every day for the next 19 years, 11,000 Americans are turning 65,” said Eric Hall, president and CEO of the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America (AFA). “One in eight [people] over the age of 65 [have Alzheimer’s], and 50 percent over the age of 85 [have it].”

Unlike most diseases, Alzheimer’s does not have a specific monetary “benefit” through Medicare, meaning there is not a defined amount of aid individuals can receive for treatment. The national average cost of care for an individual with Alzheimer’s is between $18,000–$30,000 a year.

Exacerbating the problem is the fact that, like my grandparents, fewer and fewer Americans have a retirement fund. According to the Employment Benefit Research Institute’s 2010 survey, 54 percent of Americans have less than $25,000 set aside for retirement, and 27 percent have less than $1,000 saved.

“Not only does [Alzheimer’s] devastate a family because a family is struggling to try to pay for the care, but additionally, the country experiences billions of dollars of lost revenue in employee absences because of caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s,” Hall said. “So the disease impacts the family, it impacts the community and it impacts the nation as a whole.”

Piecing Together Care

Gustave naps in his favorite chair where he spends most afternoons watching traffic out the window. Photo by Arianna Vinion.

My grandparents are spirited bohemians. Daphne was an actress with the Michael Chekhov Theater in England and ended up stuck in America during WWII. My grandfather was born a Brooklyn Jew, became involved in photography, enlisted, photographed Hiroshima, became a race car driver, went to Hollywood, changed his name and became a writer. They traveled the world, had famous friends, did exciting things and managed to stay in love to this day. What they forgot to do was set aside a retirement fund.

In the absence of funding for a private around-the-clock caregiver, families like my own have to take it upon themselves to scrape together a viable alternative. We manage by juggling benefits from a number of sources: a rent subsidy from Section 8 housing, doctor visits and medicine almost entirely paid for by Medicare and the Writers Guild insurance (the remainder is out of pocket). The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) pays a pension, and Gustave’s Alzheimer’s medication, specialist caregiving and the rest of what they live on is Social Security and a small pension from the Writers Guild. All of this pieces together what Daphne fondly calls the “patchwork quilt of care.”

Before Daphne’s fall, they only needed 8-10 hours a week total from their caregiver and cleaning lady. This we could pay for out of the pensions. Now that Daphne is strong again, their care is about 14-18 hours a week, but at the height it was 24-7 for two and a half months.

During these months, my mom and I became caregivers and we hired more private caregivers to take on shifts — even their beloved cleaning lady took on the caregiving.

Elder care varies in cost depending on the level of care required. The average cost of a home health aide, which is a licensed practitioner trained in medical care, is $48,048 per year in California, according to the Genworth 2011 Cost of Care survey. In comparison, a private room in a nursing home costs an average of $91,250 annually. Additionally, the necessary health expenses can vary from 166 percent to 393 percent of the average annual income of America’s elderly, according to The New York Times.

Right now we can not afford to put both of them in assisted living, and if we wait too long we may not be able to. Many nursing homes will not take patients with Alzheimer’s because the transition to unfamiliar surroundings is too disorienting. My grandparents would be safer elsewhere, but we can not afford to move them both now.

But if they run completely out of money, they will go on Medical (California’s Medicaid), or VA benefits, which will pay for them to live in a skilled nursing facility. While this would keep them off the streets, it is more of a hospital setting, and my family has decided we do not want them to live in that atmosphere.

Medicare, which can pay for feeding tubes, abdominal/gall bladder surgery, joint replacements, and glycemic control for Type 2 diabetes (found in one in four people over 65), does not typically pay for long-term care in a nursing home for old people with dementia, or for home aides.

Aside from lacking benefits, Alzheimer’s also lacks a prominent spot in the public eye. AFA CEO and president Hall says that Alzheimer’s has a stigma among the American public.

“It’s because there’s no cure — it’s really that simple,” Hall said. “AIDS used to be a death sentence, but now that there’s a cocktail mixture of treatment, you can live for a very long time and still be diagnosed with AIDS. This disease doesn’t have that, and people are terrified because of that. Here in America you get sick, you get a prescription, you get better, and that doesn’t work with this.”

Although I couldn’t help Gustave with his Alzheimer’s, getting Daphne back to full mobility on her hip and taking care of them until then was certainly an option. My caregiving responsibilities, though they varied, included sleeping over to help them in the night, fixing meals, tidying the house, taking notes on their condition, administering medication, cleaning the commode, helping Daphne dress and bathe, and hiding Gustave’s dirty clothes when he got out of the shower so he wouldn’t put them on again.

When Gustave walked into the bedroom and saw new clothes neatly laid out, he accepted that they were for him. One of the things I am most thankful for is Gustave’s humor.

“He is atypical in that he kept his humor,” said their caregiver, Andreya von Waldenfels-Marks. “So he lightens up everything with very witty remarks. That is pretty rare.”

For many suffering from the disease, Alzheimer’s can change their moods and personalities in difficult ways.

For example, I walked into the bedroom to tell Gustave it was time for lunch. “Here is your stick,” I said, offering him his cane. “Why?” he said, looking up at me with momentarily wide, uncertain eyes. “Because it’s helpful,” I said. “Well, I use it because it looks important,” he said, and we laugh. It’s moments like this when I feel close to him. I know he doesn’t know who I am, or what’s going on, or why I am asking him to get up — but I can see that this doesn’t matter, because he trusts me. He trusts me because he can feel that I love him.

Utilizing Youths

“If there’s one disease that really needs champions right now, it’s Alzheimer’s disease. And it needs to come from the youth. It really does,” said Hall, president and CEO of Alzheimer’s Foundation of America. “The caregivers who are caring for people with this disease simply don’t have the time. They are engaged 24-7, caring for their loved one with the disease. It’s really left up to the rest of us who understand it and have experienced it to raise a voice and unify our intentions and try to change legislation and provide more resources.”

“College-age students are among the nation’s 42 million adults aged 18 and older who are caring for adults with limitations in daily activities, including people with Alzheimer’s disease,” according to an AARP survey.

Results of an AFA survey found that 59 percent of those adult caregivers aged 18 to 21 are very involved or somewhat involved in caring for a person with Alzheimer’s disease. Among them, about one-third assist with doctors’ appointments and about two-thirds entertain their loved ones.”

Recently the AFA have been working on providing a venue for college-aged individuals to come together around Alzheimer’s. “On Campus,” an off-shoot of AFA Teen (which provides popular resources, such as free counseling, comprehensive information and ways to get organized) aims to start club branches at colleges all over the country. The clubs would provide students with resources and information while also organizing events, providing volunteer opportunities and raising awareness.

Elizabeth Owens, On Campus advisory board member and founder of her campus’s chapter at the University of South Carolina, seeks to raise awareness and create a caretakers’ community for those afflicted with Alzheimer’s. Although University of South Carolina’s On Campus chapter is in its infancy, the club already has 30 members, with a lot of support from Owens’ sorority Phi Mu and the biomedical sciences department, and a good deal of campus, local and national press.

Owens has already been contacted by numerous students at other colleges all over the United States asking how they can start their own AFA On Campus chapters. “It’s really exciting because that’s kind of the goal of it, to spread it throughout the whole country,” Owens said.

One such student who is trying to start another On Campus branch is Megan Parsons, a first-year Harvard student and AFA On Campus advisory board member. While some members are personally connected with the disease, others — like Parsons — are more interested in the legal, philanthropic or advocacy elements the disease presents.

“Advancements in medical technology are going to increase the average life expectancy, and because of this,  neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s are going to become more prominent as time goes on,” Parsons said. “But we also have incredible efforts on the parts of individuals and policy makers and researchers that are really propelling scientific interest forward. Ultimately I believe we are going to be making great strides with Alzheimer’s disease in the coming years.”

For Owens, the connection is personal. Her grandfather lived about five minutes away, so while she was in high school, Owens was able to help out around his house, drive to doctor’s appointments, and assist in taking him down the stairs, which he could no longer do.

While she was happy to help out, she was troubled by the lack of options.

“It seemed totally unfair that that was the dilemma we were put in and we had to, not that we had to keep him at home, but that it was safer for him to be somewhere else and we didn’t have that option,” Owens said. “It all came down to finances and it just seemed totally outrageous that that’s how it had to happen.”

“I felt a little guilty [because] when I moved away was when he passed away,” Owens said. “[On Campus] kind of helped me focus my grief about it.”

Love Medicine

Gustave and Daphne Sit down to lunch together. After decades of lunches together, they still find things to joke about. Photo by Arianna Vinion.

Feelings of guilt are very common among college students who leave their loved ones with Alzheimer’s and caregiving families to attend college. I myself had a profound sense of guilt regarding my grandparents. When I was at city college, I would go over there for a couple hours a week and visit with them. But every week I was too busy to go, every time I came back from UCSC and only saw them once, it made me feel awful.

Staying with them all summer, I felt I was doing my part, but as fall loomed, guilt started to set in again. But every time I mentioned school to Daphne, her face lit up. She loves that I am going to college, something she never got to do.

When I call them every week she is happy to hear about my classes, the newspaper, and how I promise I am coming home for Thanksgiving. It helps assuage my guilt.

But what I think is the most valuable part of caregiving is the things you learn.

“Old people used to get on my nerves, I don’t know how to say it in a better way,” said University of South Carolina On Campus founder Owens. “I had an attitude that they can be aggravating. When I had more experience with helping him out, seeing that he suffered from a disease, that he wasn’t just being an aggravating elderly man, gave me more sympathy for the situation and I was more willing to go over there and spend time with him, talk to him, even though he was telling me the same thing over and over again.”

You learn patience.

Especially while you have circular conversations or answer the same question for the fifth time in 30 minutes.  At times it can be frustrating. I’ll admit that when Gustave and I used to have the circular “what are you studying/planning on doing with your life” conversation, I would give him different answers every time to see his reactions and keep things fresh. It wasn’t really lying — I wanted to be a lot of things.

It teaches you compassion.

Every time I had to reexplain to Gustave that Daphne was in the hospital rehab for her hip, I made sure to assure him she was recovering and tell him how helpful he had been when she fell and how much she loved him and missed him. It was important to be tender with him about each one of these facts because if not properly explained, he sometimes thought that she had left him or he had not done the right thing or that she was very ill. She is his life — for me to let him think those things for a moment would have been the most careless act.

My grandparents’ oldest caretaker, Andreya von Waldenfels-Marks, said the most important part of caregiving is “having an open, loving heart.”

“Having very little ego — [ego] just gets in the way,” von Waldenfels-Marks said. “You have to selflessly serve.”

With Alzheimer’s, letting go of the ego can be tough. I had been caregiving for my grandfather for about a week and a half when I realized while looking through a photo album with him that he not only did not know my name, but also didn’t know I was ever born. Here I was caregiving for someone I loved, and he had no idea who I was. But the value isn’t in the name recognition. It is in the trust and love they send back to you.

It teaches you about beauty. I would shower my grandmother, a great beauty. I would massage her feet and rinse her back. You learn that as we age, we don’t become less beautiful, but rather more precious. Our bodies become a testament to the tremendous lives we have led.

You learn about how to really and selflessly love. Thanks is what I have learned. While I caretook for my grandparents, I had this piece in mind. It was a way for me to try to mentally structure the overwhelming experience I was having.

I can talk now about altruistic life lessons learned, but the truth is that while it’s happening, it’s really difficult. It’s sad to see people you love say they feel like they have “overstayed their welcome in the world.” It’s not fun to clean up bodily fluids. It’s not cathartic to “sleep” with the lights on and a baby monitor on full blast so you can get up 6-8 times a night to adjust pillows and help others to the toilet.

So when I thought about this article I thought about how I would write what I wish I had, a guide to make things less difficult. I would talk to experts, I would reflect, I would solve.

But right now, love is the only possible treatment. Every source I interviewed said it, and it’s taken me until now to accept it.

It’s doing the little things.

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at Remembering to Care

Illustration by Louise Leong.

When I was six or seven years old, I would spend my Saturday afternoons at the local Korean Baptist Church. A pink textbook opened in front of me, oversized hangul lightly sketched on sheets of paper. I kept my eyes turned downward behind a veil of straight brown hair as I avoided speaking. My face would become red and hot with embarrassment, as the guttural sounds got caught in my throat and I fumbled over words — the syllables swirled around in my mouth, only to be spit out awkwardly, a jumble of sounds always a little off.

Korean school was a short-lived experience — I hated going because even though I wasn’t sure what it was, I knew I was different. I looked different. I was shy and out of place. I hated my limited Korean and I hated feeling like an outsider. I spent more afternoons hiding in the secret places of a little garden than talking to my peers.

I am — like 4.2 million Americans — multiracial. My mother is Native American and white; my father, Korean and white. If my parents had followed the life paths their families had in mind, I would not be here. A product of teen parents, I stumbled through life and grew up with them. And when they came into the picture, my two younger brothers joined our little family.

Among American children, the multiracial population has increased almost 50 percent to 4.2 million people since 2000, according to The New York Times. The 2000 census report was the first time that Americans had the option to select more than one race — and reports flooded in, indicating the number of mixed race people in the United States.

Reports from the 2000 census data determined that 2.4 percent of the U.S. population identifies with two or more races and California is second in the country for largest percentage of multiethnic populations, beat out only by Hawaii. According to the 2010 census, 2.9 percent of the population identified as two or more races, and the numbers are likely to continue to increase. As a result, federal groups like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission have added a “two or more races” category to their documents in response to the growing numbers of multiracial individuals.

But growing up in a mixed race family has meant knowing there is something different about our mismatched family and negotiating what this has meant. I had to determine what exactly being multiracial encompassed and what it meant to exist simultaneously in two very different cultures.

With the rising number of people who identify as multiracial, conflicts concerning self-identity, social and legal issues, as well as community relations are appearing within private and public lives.

The Numbers on a Growing Population

Recently, The New York Times has run a series of articles and multimedia projects on multiracial people and the growing number of self-identified multiethnic people in the United States. The Times even incorporated a family tree application where users could upload a family history, detailing how different ethnic and cultural lines met and mingled. Sifting through family histories, the migration of people, communities and cultures becomes clear — borders, continents and oceans have been crossed, culminating in the history of everyday families.

The rise in multiracial couples is a sign of the continuous growth of mixed ethnic families. Since 2008, 1 in 7 couples are comprised of individuals of different races, according to The New York Times.

As the number of people of mixed ethnicities rises, people are left wondering how they can collate numbers and information when there are multiple variables at play.

UC Santa Cruz faculty member and vice provost of academic affairs Herbie Lee sees both sides of the coin — as a biracial person, Lee sees the irrational side of asking someone to “check one box,” but as a mathematician, he understands the huge numerical challenge that now sits in front of those collecting this kind of data.

“It’s so much easier to deal with the data if you force people to just pick one,” Lee said. “If you add up people from all the boxes, it equals more than 100 percent … How do you analyze this data? It’s not just an efficiency question, it’s a question of, ‘What do you do with it?’ And we don’t really know.”

However, Lee said that to ask someone to pick only one ethnic identity is essentially asking someone to pick “between their mother and their father.” Reevaluating the way we collect this kind of information and see race, even from a statistical viewpoint, is something that “society is going to have to figure out how to deal with,” Lee said.

But what does this mean for young adults as they sift through the changing racial dynamics? If we can’t be calculated, and if our current data is unable to truly capture what American society looks like right now, does it mean race becomes irrelevant? Or does it mean race becomes a point of identity crisis?

Changing the Conversation on Race

Students met this past Monday night at MESH, a student organization for students who identify with two or more races. Photo by Prescott Watson.

Arranged casually around an oval table under bright fluorescent lights, between laughter and the occasional crackle of aluminum snack bags, students engage in a conversation on race, being multiethnic and the multicultural experience. It’s a weighty topic, but these students have experienced what it means to be undefined in a nation that obsesses over labels. They’re all members — or curious first-time attendees — of MESH, UCSC’s Mixed Ethnicities Student Headquarters.

MESH is entering its 11th year at UCSC, and while shifts in leadership have forced the group to reorganize, they maintain solid footing.

“When I first came to college, I never thought too much about my race or my ethnic background,” said Samantha Alemania, MESH co-chair and a fourth-year Mexican-Filipina student. But when Alemania wanted to get involved in a student organization, she had trouble finding a place she really fit in.

“A lot of the ethnic groups are monoracial … and I couldn’t pick one,” she said. “I mean, how are you supposed to pick between your families?”

Shannon Caimol, a Mexican-Filipina student, explains that she has had similar experiences.

“You always feel like you have to pick,” Caimol said. “Some of my family members will ask me, ‘Do you feel like you’re more Mexican or more Filipino?’ [But] I don’t — I’m half. It’s weird being asked to pick. I don’t choose. I don’t want to feel like I’m only one, because I’m not.”

Being asked to label and redefine yourself seems to be a shared experience among multiethnic individuals.

“People would force identities onto me and assume things,” said Robert Bisquera Jr., third-year Stevenson student and co-chair of MESH. “I would say, ‘I’m Mexican,’ and people would say, ‘You don’t look Mexican. Do you speak Spanish?’ No, but I’m Mexican. Culturally, that’s how I was brought up and that’s how I identify.”

Bisquera, who calls himself “Mexipino” in reference to his Mexican-Filipino makeup, says there are times where he has felt like he has had to prove himself and reassert his place among certain groups.

“[It’s] always knowing in the back of your mind that you’re not fully one thing or the other,” Bisquera said.

UCSC student Stephanie Chin, who is Chinese-Nicaraguan-Mexican, has experienced the kind of isolation that can come with being multiracial.

“Even now that I’m in college, I thought we would all be educated and open to new experiences, but it still seems as if people cling to their race as a comfort zone, one that is not really available to me,” Chin said in an email to City on a Hill Press.

In her experiences, Chin explains it oftentimes feels like a “dis-ownership” of race when people tell her she is not “Asian” or “Latin” because she doesn’t fulfill certain expectations. As much as we claim to be post-race, Chin said, many people still end up segregated by race.

Now when people ask Chin about her racial and cultural makeup, she turns it around on them and instead pushes them to re-evaluate their question.

“I started just asking people, ‘Why is it important?’” she said. “‘What is it going to help you understand?’”

Searching for an Identity

Illustration by Louise Leong.

For many individuals, cultural exploration is intimately tied to understanding what it means to be multiracial. Atheena Haniff-Martinez, a Pakistani-Mexican American student at UCSC, said it wasn’t until coming to college she really began to appreciate her background — her childhood home was culturally “pretty neutral.”

“I kind of ignored my ethnicity,” Haniff-Martinez said. “Growing up we did not really celebrate or embrace cultures from Mexico and Pakistan.”

But being part of El Centro — UCSC’s Chicano Latino Resource Center — has given Haniff-Martinez a community and a connection to her culture. Now, she says she would like to become more involved with the Indian Student Organization on campus to learn more about her “other half.” Being multiracial for her has become about cultural experience.

“As I get older, I want to learn more about the two cultures that I am,” Haniff-Martinez said. “I feel it is hard to embrace both cultures. I feel sometimes that I have to choose what race I am when I am in a Latino setting or an East Indian setting.”

Nonetheless, culture itself can be interpreted in different ways as young adults, like Ryan Mark-Griffin, move easily between being Chinese and being American.

Mark-Griffin, who is a native of Michigan and former UCSC student, had an experience unique compared to a multiracial Californian: He was one of the only Asian-American students in his school.

While Mark-Griffin said he doesn’t want to portray Michigan or the Midwest as a racist area, he did emphasize that it wasn’t nearly as diverse as California. But as a result of the differences in culture between California and Michigan, Mark-Griffin has seen the way people’s perceptions can change with communities.

“In Michigan, most people identify me as Asian, but here in California, I’m a white guy,” Mark-Griffin said.

However, Mark-Griffin, though aware of the ugly side of race relations, said he has found it easy to move in between cultures and create a place for himself that balances both halves of himself. He explains that straddling two cultures, for him, has been enriching and something he has enjoyed.

As Griffin shares anecdotes about his family and his personal experiences, he speaks comfortably, smiling at the parallels in our experiences and the experiences of other multiracial individuals.

“At our Thanksgiving dinner? Mashed potatoes, sticky rice. Dumplings, fried rice. Turkey, wonton soup, jook,” Mark-Griffin said. “My family is America in a nutshell.”

The Look of Being Mixed

There are mornings when I stand over my bathroom sink sleepy-eyed, peering into the mirror, dissecting the face looking back at me. It’s not for the sake of vanity but because sometimes I’m not really sure what I look like — with a mess of brown hair that I’ve lightened with dyes and fair skin freckled from too much sunshine, I’m often mistaken for white. And I am, but I also identify as Korean-American and Native American.

Culturally, I’m far from white or “mono-ethnic” — whatever that means. Physically, I’m multiracial. But my face? My face seems to be just racially ambiguous enough — people often can’t pinpoint my race by looking at me.

People do a double-take when I tell them what I am, because my features don’t fit into a preconceived idea of what I should look like.

While there is freedom in being able to say, “Yes, I’m beyond labels,” there is something oddly isolating about being the mixed race girl in a room full of people who can solidly say, “I am ____.” It’s a paradox: I am at once liberated and constricted by my inability to be categorized.

Like Bisquera, I’ve been left needing to “prove” my race to people — and I’ve had people look me in the eye and tell me I’m bluffing when I tell them what I am, solely because they can’t “see” my ethnicities etched on my face.

When talking with a member of MESH, his solution to addressing race was to disregard it — that it didn’t exist if we didn’t let it — but that’s too utopian. Race exists. Categories exist. And in this case when you don’t fit into one box, when you’re not easy to define or label or stereotype, you can’t help but become hyper-aware of race.

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at Mixed But Not Divided

Illustration by Jamie Morton.

Bettina Aptheker, a UCSC feminist studies professor, answers questions regarding abortion legislation during her officer hours. She emphasized the need for providing adequate reproductive health care services for women. Photo by Toby Silverman.

“There is a great debate about when life begins,” Bettina Aptheker said.

Known by thousands for her retired Introduction to Feminist Studies course, UC Santa Cruz’s feminist studies professor Bettina Aptheker is a long-standing proponent of reproductive rights.

“A doctor will tell you life begins when the fetus is viable, when it can survive outside the womb,” Aptheker continued.

Although the time comes at a slightly different time for each child, the Supreme Court’s 1973 landmark decision Roe v. Wade declares women have the right to terminate their pregnancies until the fetus is viable. According to the Guttmacher Institute, an organization that conducts sexual and reproductive health research, a fetus becomes viable around 27 weeks.

In 1973, Roe v. Wade defined “viable” as being “potentially able to live outside the mother’s womb, albeit with artificial aid,” while noting it “is usually placed at about seven months (28 weeks) but may occur earlier, even at 24 weeks.”

Many anti-abortion advocates maintain that life begins at conception, the moment a sperm fertilizes an egg. A physician might say the same thing.

The Association of Pro-Life Physicians is an organization based in Zanesville, Ohio that provides a listing of physicians who will neither perform abortions nor refer them.

“Life begins at fertilization, when a sperm unites with an oocyte,” according to the association’s website. “In time, we will re-stigmatize the abortionists in our communities and lives will be saved.”

In the past decade, more restrictions on abortion laws have been reappearing on state ballots: mandatory counseling sessions and wait periods; 20-week limits on time to get an abortion; and parental letters of consent for minors.

“Trigger laws” in place in several states, including Louisiana and Mississippi, would outlaw abortion automatically if Roe v. Wade were overturned. Some states, like California and New York, have enacted “trigger laws” that would preserve women’s right to abortion.

Republican leaders across the country are pushing to reduce the amount of time women are eligible for abortion to 20 weeks or less. In the last decade, over 350 laws have been passed making abortion services less accessible and more invasive.

In 2010, Nebraska passed the first law to prohibit women from getting abortions 20 weeks after conception. Several states have followed suit since then, including Kansas, where Gov. Sam Brownback signed a law disallowing abortion 21 weeks after conception.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, 16 states have laws in effect prohibiting “partial-birth” abortion. The term, generally used in political discourse, refers to a method of late-term abortion that ends a pregnancy and results in the death and intact removal of a fetus, medically known as intact dilation and extraction (IDX). The term is not recognized by the American Medical Association or the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Only four of these laws apply exclusively to post-viability abortions.

On May 9, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 3, the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act,” in a 251-175 vote. More than its name suggests, if passed in the Senate this coming year the act would cease federal funding to federally subsidize insurance plans that include abortion services.

Among those who would be affected by the proposed policy are women on Medicaid, women in federal prisons, and women serving in the armed forces. Their insurance plans would need to be reshaped to exclude abortion services.

Planned Parenthood, a nationwide health service organization, provides comprehensive health care services to millions of people. In 2009, Planned Parenthood received $363.2 million in grants and contracts from the state and federal government.

Lupe Rodriguez, Mar Monte Planned Parenthood public affairs director, said H.R. 3 misinforms the public regarding where funding for abortions currently comes from.

“One of the misleading aspects of the law is it implies there is currently government funding for abortion services,” Rodriguez said. “There isn’t.”

In California, Planned Parenthood funding would not be affected by H.R. 3. However, many patients with federally subsidized health care plans and low-income families that may not have health insurance altogether would feel its impact.

Additionally, anti-preventative health care bills have been proposed federally, and in several states. These bills seek to slash the Title X funding Planned Parenthood and other health care providers depend on across the country. Title X, the Public Health Service Act, is the only Federal grant program dedicated solely to providing individuals with comprehensive family planning and related preventive health services, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The Hyde Amendment passed in 1976 restricts government funding for abortions. H.R. 3 takes the Hyde Amendment a step further by disallowing the funding of abortion coverage except in cases of rape, incest or when the mother’s life is in immediate danger.

UCSC Professor Aptheker pointed out what she perceived to be the historical hypocrisy of refusing to fund self-selected abortions in light of the U.S.’s history of sterilizing Native American women.

“Under the Hyde Amendment, no tax funds are allocated to abortion,” Aptheker said. “The government has, however, used funds for sterilization. In the 1970s, Native American women were sterilized by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The federal government funded that, but not abortion.”

To be covered for abortion services under H.R. 3, women would need to purchase a separate insurance plan for it. In the last decade, unintended pregnancy increased by 29 percent among poor women while decreasing 20 percent among higher-income women, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

The majority of women who get abortions already have children, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

Emily Steiner, a recent UCSC graduate, discusses the possible negative effects of the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act” (H.R. 3). Steiner says the bill forces impoverished women into a tight spot and might lead them to take dangerous measures to abort their pregnancy outside of a hospital. Photo by Nick Paris.

UCSC graduate Emily Steiner found an internship last year with the Walnut Avenue Women’s Center through the feminist studies department. She counseled women in a weekly group for women with or expecting children. She also completed a major in sociology.

“H.R. 3 targets women who are impoverished and minority groups,” Steiner said. “It could also make it harder for girls who are scared to go to their parents because they don’t have insurance and can’t afford it.”

On the outset, poor women and women of color would be most impacted by the bill. Medicaid health care is reserved for the poorest people in the country. To qualify, a woman must have an income below the “very low” eligibility ceiling set by her state. Nationally, the average qualifying salary is $11,160 per year for a family of three.

Women in their twenties account for more than half of all abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute. As affordable options to terminate pregnancy dwindle, many women seek unsafe abortions.

“These policies are forcing women to seek illegal abortions, which can be very dangerous and exorbitantly expensive,” Aptheker said.

If H.R. 3 passes the Senate vote, it could severely limit the access women have to abortion services by raising the cost to unaffordable levels.

While the government does not directly fund abortions, it funds some insurance plans that include abortion services. Republicans in the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to prohibit the federal government from funding these services.

“We have a very conservative House now,” said Louis La Fortune, a Free Radio Santa Cruz DJ. “Congress has continually attacked abortion rights since Roe v. Wade.”

La Fortune hosts a political show at a secret location in Santa Cruz. Every wall in the broadcast studio covered in graffiti and art, La Fortune’s humanitarian-centered program flows through the airwaves and aims to liberate.

Self-determination is an issue that has been at the heart of the abortion debate for decades.

“[Congress] wants to take away a person’s control over their own life,” La Fortune said. “It’s tragic that they’re going after women.”

Satirical newspaper The Onion reported on May 18 that Planned Parenthood opened a 900,000 square foot abortion facility in Topeka, Kansas. The “abortionplex” story was a jab at the assumptions behind HR 3 and similar policies.

The services listed include valet parking and a food court. The outrageous headline “Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Dollar Abortionplex” appeared all over Facebook with disgusted reactions to the article, which was thought by many to be factual.

“My heart and soul weeps for these deceived people,” said one posting responding to The Onion’s article.

The Tumblr site “Literally Unbelievable” documented outbursts of rage against Planned Parenthood and the “abortionplex.”

“Some anti-choice people don’t want to hear the real facts,” UCSC Health Center pharmacist Diane Lamotte said.

Lamotte said reactions to The Onion article may represent the tendency for some in opposition to abortion to misinterpret or ignore the truth about what Planned Parenthood does.

“I love The Onion,” Lamotte said. “And I love that they take on the absurd and point it out for what it is. One Arizona Congressman said over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does is abortions, when it’s really in the 3 percent area.”

Ninety-seven percent of services Planned Parenthood offers are preventative health care. Lupe Rodriguez, director of public affairs at Planned Parenthood Mar Monte, said the popular perception of their organization is skewed.

“It’s not very widely known that we provide general health care,” Rodriguez said. “Our focus is on comprehensive services.”

Illustration by Jamie Morton.

Pro-life activists like projects manager Corrina Gurra of the Pro-Life Action League are set on preserving the fetus by supporting legislation that restricts abortion.

“We’re going to stand behind laws that we think will save lives,” Gurra said.

The League, based in Chicago, Illinois is one of thousands of organizations dedicated to teaching Americans about the graphic details of abortion procedures.

“We are an activist organization,” Gurra said. “Tomorrow we have what we call a ‘Face the Truth’ and going out to the suburbs and in the busy streets. We go out twice a month to show pictures of aborted fetuses.”

While the Pro-Life Action League is not directly involved in policy-making, there are several organizations that lobby for restricting abortion rights. The National Right To Life Political Action Committee is the largest of them.

Rodriguez said Planned Parenthood has been responding to political attacks by activating supporters and encouraging them to speak out against restrictive policies.

“We are helping Planned Parenthood affiliates in other states,” Rodriguez said. “Our volunteers call constituents in other states and ask them to contact their legislators.”

Women are being arrested across the country under the suspicion of causing or attempting to cause their own abortions. Jennie McCormack, a 32-year-old mother of three from eastern Idaho, stands accused of performing a self-induced pill abortion after the 20-week limit. She was arrested and could face up to 5 years in prison and a $5,000 fine, according to Reuters.

Younger women have tried to end their pregnancies on their own rather than confront their parents about it. Steiner said she had friends in high school who attempted to end their pregnancies.

“When I was in high school, I had friends that were too scared to get an abortion and tried to terminate on their own,” Steiner said. “One abused alcohol during her pregnancy; one hit herself against the back of her sofa.”

In California, voters have repeatedly struck down a parental notification letter requiring women under the age of 18 to obtain permission from their parents before getting abortions.

“California has not been nearly as affected by these draconian laws as other states,” Lamotte said. “But I have been involved in three campaigns against parental notification letters in the past two decades.”

Anti-abortion advocates assert that young women need guidance from their parents to make informed decisions about their pregnancies. However, advocates like Lamotte question the ethic and effectiveness of the proposed law.

“We can’t legislate family dynamics,” Lamotte said. “Some families are very dysfunctional and it would be terrible for young women to seek consent. They could be thrown out or hurt.”

Lamotte said the proposed law is problematic because it makes the assumption that young women have a safe enough home environment to disclose their sexual histories and personal decisions in.

Lupe Rodriguez of Planned Parenthood shares the same opinion as Lamotte.

“Young women are often in fear of telling parents what they need,” Rodriguez said. “The people who would be most affected by this kind of bill are those in danger by it. It’s a small, but very important percentage of youth.”

Professor Aptheker said anti-abortion laws arise out of religious fanaticism and are detrimental to women’s health.

“There has been a backlash against the women’s liberation movement, and all it encompasses,” Aptheker said. “The political motivation behind these laws are very anti-women. They come from an unfortunate ignorance about social realities.”

For Santa Cruz DJ La Fortune, there is hope after these tumultuous years of restrictive policy.

“It’s got to get worse before it gets better,” La Fortune said. “I’m glad to see organized opposition and there is some pushback, which is great. But every day we lose more of our civil rights to legislation.”

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at Reproductive Rights Restricted Across the Country

Mac Layne’s day isn’t complete without a roundhouse kick in his face.

“One of the main reasons I do it is that it makes me feel more alive every time I do,” Layne says. Grappling the nerves with determination, the UCSC fourth-year awaits the moment to demonstrate his ability.

“Add that to the fact that I feel so energized – it’s like a drug,” he says.

In Santa Cruz lies a haven for those like Layne who can’t live without the addictive thrill of narrowly avoiding a foot smashed in their face. While it’s not an underground fight-club-turned-crime-syndicate led by a charismatic schizophrenic, the rapid pace of the sport of Capoeira provides a support system to help Mac and like-minded individuals continue to do what they love, on and off campus.

“Everything you learn you apply it to certain parts of your life. In the Roda [circle in which Capoeira is played], you have to be smooth, but you also have to be objective. That’s something I’ve thought about a lot, definitely something I’m expecting to apply soon,” Layne said, referring to his upcoming graduation from UCSC and his hopes in applying this philosophy to his post-graduation life.

A group of Capoeira students in Mestre Papiba’s class display their hard-earned cords.

The Santa Cruz chapter of Raizes do Brasil, an international organization founded in New York City that has worked to help spread Capoeira around the world, held their 17th annual Batizado in Santa Cruz on May 14th. Directly translating into “baptism,” a Batizado is an event held for all the members of a Capoeira community to celebrate the arrival of new members and the graduation of deserving ones.

Sitting on the floor in line with five others of his experience level — all relatively new members — Layne maneuvers his way towards the inner circle, awaiting his turn in the Roda, which is surrounded by Capoeiristas and musicians. A woman sings in Portuguese behind him. Her long, brown hair and the large Brazilian flag behind her complement the wooden floor, striking shades of earthy brown, green and gray to the plainly walled room. Musicians clump together on one side, hitting berimbaus and other percussion instruments with fervor while singing in Portuguese. Capoeiristas rotate between playing music, sparring and simply being an energetic part of the Roda. They all sing.

At the center, two players spin and kick circles in the air, each one narrowly dodging the other’s line of fire. Driven by the mounting music, the kicks become faster, making each dodge narrower and narrower. Even the audience is sucked into the powerful energy, or Axe as the Portuguese say; clap clap clap, clap clap clap, clapping their hands in rhythm with the music. Beats in groups of three resound throughout the community room in Santa Cruz’s Louden Nelson community center. Amid all the energy, Layne hopes to prove himself in the Roda against a master of the art — no easy task — and earn a higher place in the Capoeira order.

From the edge of the Roda, Layne rises and walks slowly towards the center to face his opponent. Crouching together to prepare their minds for the acuteness they will need, they shake hands respectfully, waiting for the musicians to signal them in. Five quick snaps of the berimbau — Layne dives sideways and kicks out with his right leg, missing his target by an inch. The crowd claps gleefully around them, celebrating the kind of physical freedom that Capoeira brings.

So what is Capoeira?

“Capoeira is a game — part of the art is to be able to show the movement,” said Capoeira instructor Colin Maher. “We don’t have to shove [the opponent’s] head or get your dirty feet all over his clothes to show that you got him — he knows.”

Maher teaches Capoeira at UCSC on Saturdays and Mondays, and one of the things he emphasizes about the sport is its playful and celebratory nature.

Though never quite at center stage in western pop culture, Capoeira has found a home in California in the last few decades, planting roots in cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Santa Cruz. While Capoeira is traditionally taught as a viable option for self-defense, some of the new lure of Capoeira stems from the sport’s spirituality, both musically and communally.

Video games and movies have provided some limited yet visible examples of the martial art as a combat technique, steering the focus away from spirituality and more towards the fluid fighting style itself. Martial arts movies like “Only the Strong” (1993) and “The Protector” (2006) brought Capoeira’s viability as a fighting technique to Hollywood.

Perhaps most dear to fans of the video game Tekken, playable character Eddie Gordo specializes in Capoeira, challenging some of the most daring gamers to master his slippery style.

In addition, Capoeira has found its way into the Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) arena. Andre Gusmao used elements of Capoeira to win many high-stakes fights in his professional career as a UFC fighter. While they bring media attention, these kinds of representations are often criticized for characterizing Capoeira as an aggression-sport and missing the deeper philosophy behind it.

Head of the Santa Cruz chapter of Raizes do Brasil, lead instructor Mestre Papiba noted that while Capoeira remains somewhat under the radar of the public, it has become increasingly popular with college. UCSC is a large contributor to the Santa Cruz community, and to his student base.

“The media promotes so many options to kids that endorse American culture at a young age,” he said. “Teenagers tend to endorse pop culture, and Capoeira is definitely not part of that pop culture. When people go to college they’re not really happy with what pop culture offers. Capoeira is complete, [it has] dance, music, action, [and] fun. It’s very fulfilling.”

“I think fundamentally this kind of culture is African,” Maher said.

Though known to have originated in Brazil, Capoeira is widely accepted as having its roots in Afro-Brazilian slave culture, particularly of the Yoruba tribe. As a way of resisting capture and containment, slaves and ex-slaves adopted a martial art that could be disguised as a dance and encouraged avoidance over offensive resistance.

Capoeira has since evolved from the days of the early freedom fighters, and today it is a widely practiced martial art.

“There’s Capoeira everywhere nowadays,” said Brian Cavalo de Faria of the Miami Capoeira Project in a promotional video addressing the popularity of Capoeira. “I know of at least one Capoeira group in every country — it’s something of a phenomenon … a few decades [ago] that was unheard of.”

Many still take up the sport as a form of self-defense, but some begin their training to access the spirituality and community that Capoeira can bring, especially in the United States.

“The reason I believe that Capoeira is getting really popular in the U.S. is the culture,” de Faria said. “The [Brazilian] culture is something that Americans love and is something that really draws a lot of non-Brazilians to the art.”

Like many activities with African roots, Capoeira utilizes percussion instruments to energize participants. Aside from momentous chants and energetic phrases in Portuguese, Brazilian drums, Berimbaus and bells are the mechanisms that fuel the Roda.

“The music drives the game,” said Maher of the indispensability of music to a game of Capoeira. “Not only does it give it the energy and the style, it drives it on and controls it. A Capoeirista has to be able to play music as well as dance. They have to do it all.”

Tagged out of the center of the Roda by another eager to play, Layne takes up a drum and begins to hit it to the beat of the music, demonstrating the need for this kind of fluency in different aspects of Capoeira. During the Batizado, students are tested on their ability to perform in all aspects of Capoeira in order to receive a promotion in rank, not just combat ability like many other forms of self-defense.

“I was baptized today,” said UCSC second-year Nick Larry, walking out of the Roda after sparring with one of his teachers. Larry started training Capoeira at the beginning of the year and is planning to continue as long as he attends UCSC.

“I was excited, and once I got out I was just happy,” Larry said. “I felt inducted in a sense, like it was my rite of passage.” As this is his first Batizado, Larry has just been promoted to the level of student, becoming one of the few to tackle the challenge of understanding the multi-faceted game of Capoeira and receiving a new cord to symbolize his growth in the sport. There are five ranks in total, symbolized by the many different schools in terms of belt color — student, graduate, formed, professor, and master. One is promoted based on his or her talent, but also by the level of dedication shown to the community through teaching and building a student base of one’s own.

UCSC sophomore Nick Larry proudly displays his new cord, signaling a promotion in the ranking system used by Capoeiristas. The cord reflects the growth in the sport he has shown during the Batizado, or Baptism, at the Louden Nelson Community Center in Santa Cruz, on May 14.

“A lot of students expect the [promotion] to happen,” Papiba said. Papiba has been training in Capoeira for 25 years and teaching at the Santa Cruz chapter of Raizes do Brasil for 17 of them. The Batizado means something a little different for him.

“For me it’s the moment that we all get to come together and really be a family,” he said. “We talk a lot about philosophy — it’s a week of learning.”

Papiba has been teaching classes every day for the past week to help his students prepare for the event. With more than 10 schools coming together to participate in the annual Batizado, the days leading up to it are spent in training and preparation, fundraisers and workshops to enhance the experience.

“Some say it looks like dance-fighting, [but] its actually pretty dangerous,” said Amber Michaelson of the Capoeira club on campus. The club has shrunk considerably since its beginnings a few years back. Originally focused solely on the physical practice of Capoeira, it has since expanded to include a class on the fundamentals of Capoeira music. Michaelson is a current UCSC fourth-year and has been training Capoeira for four years, including a brief stint in Chile, which she now describes as her life.

“It’s a family — it’s exercise, there’s a lifestyle and a community when you do it,” she said.

Perhaps none would understand that better than Papiba himself — and after 25 years of practice, he seems to have settled into life inside the Roda as well as he has life outside of it.

“I feel a little more relaxed,” he said. “It becomes more of a spiritual experience now — I let the flow of Capoeira guide me. A lot of Capoeira is instincts. Naturally it becomes a lifestyle.”

Capoeiristas gather in a Roda, or circle where they get together to make music and play Capoeira.

In the 17 years he has taught at his school, Papiba has noticed the rising maturity of his students. Though the community has remained relatively the same size in number since the foundation of the school 17 years ago, he sees a noticeable growth in the core strength of the Santa Cruz community.

“You learn to let the rhythm come in and guide you,” said Trigo, who prefers to be called by her Brazilian name, and is Papiba’s first student. “You begin to think as you grow older that you have to learn to use your mind as well as your body — [it] really is a way of life.” Trigo has been to every Batizado in the last 17 years, and in that time she has seen herself grow in many ways through her training in Capoeira.

“I’m a coach for competitive soccer and also teach Capoeira to kids,” she said. “All of that comes from the confidence I get doing Capoeira.”

Throughout the day, many were promoted, some graduated, and a few received a dry baptism, the only moisture to touch their bodies being the few drops of sweat still clinging to their skin from the exertion. Near the back wall of the room, UCSC fourth-year Layne exits the Roda, walking forward with a new cord wrapped around his waist despite suffering a swift take-down from one of the masters present.

“Oh, you saw that, huh?” asks Layne, his laughing eyes showing no disappointment, only satisfaction. “It was fine — you just have to get back up and smile. You have to have a good attitude — you gotta have that playfulness. Just get back in there.”

Between two pairs of flying feet, two spinning forces of furious Axé, Layne dives back into the fray, just as he and his fellow Capoeiristas have plenty of times before, and will many times again.

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at A Friendly Game of Fighting

“I’m probably going to roll my ankle today,” laughs a man wearing sweatpants and a track jacket. He is obviously enthused about the prospect, and so is everyone around him.

The crowd is mixed — teenagers who look like they’ll be back in their high school classes the next day stretch alongside men with stubble and women in North Face jackets. Beginners warm up next to seasoned veterans. Everyone is jubilant, and they show their enthusiasm by leaping from parking bulkhead to parking bulkhead.

After a few minutes of creatively using small concrete barriers to stretch and get ready, the crowd — hailing from Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco, Sacramento and of course Santa Cruz — looks around for a leader to show them what to do next. Calls of “Where’s Nico?” begin to replace the staccato rapport of sneakers on pavement.

Artem Chelovechkov vaults over a wall, preparing himself for impact.

Nico Moe, a recent UC Santa Cruz graduate, doesn’t disappoint, bounding down the Oakes steps only seconds after his name is called. Laughing and wearing a lemon-yellow T-shirt that reads “parkour connections,” Nico shepherds the crowd through Oakes and up the string of stairs that lead to the College Eight plaza.

Although most students complain their way up these steps, these people are different — they run up the concrete stairs on their hands and knees or vault over the handrails just for the challenge. These people are parkour artists, or traceurs, and they see the structure of the UCSC campus differently.

Parkour, simply put, is the physical discipline of moving from one point to another with the most efficient movements possible. The challenge is that things tend to be in the way. Though it’s difficult to pin down when parkour started, most agree that it was popularized immensely in the ‘80s and ‘90s by David Belle in France. The institutionalization of parkour is on the rise, with gyms popping up around the state and organized groups gaining prominence. Some practitioners think that swapping out concrete walls and rusty handrails for trampolines and gym mats can only help the sport, while others swear by the sport’s urban roots.

These meet-ups, known as parkour “jams,” take place once a month at varying locales and draw parkour clubs from around the Bay Area and Central Coast. Events like these are representative of the explosive growth of organized parkour, and parkour websites like Worldwide Jam and Planet Parkour act as congregating points for a sport that is truly global in its appeal. Parkour Planet, for example, uses Google Maps to help isolated parkour artists find one another and practice together.

Michelle Huffman, a representative for the Santa Cruz Sports Central Gymnastics Learning Center, thinks parkour is on its way to becoming a more recognized sport and acknowledges the usefulness of parkour gyms in that process.

“They [parkour artists] must develop a system of rules and skills that can be used internationally — their own language, if you will, just like any sport,” she said. “It has been a while since we have been able to watch a fledgling sport emerge, like the amazing rise of snowboarding. I’m really enjoying watching the process.”

As far as the Santa Cruz “jam” goes, the rules are fairly loose: More experienced parkour artists attempt difficult moves, and others take the initiative to try to copy them. It’s a little bit like the basketball game Horse, but with no penalties.

Tiphanie Gardner, seemingly frozen in time, leaps across two metal railings.

Though gyms may be useful for beginner parkour artists, perhaps part of the appeal of parkour lies in its “everyman” aesthetic — there’s no special gear required, and you don’t have to be a member of any special club to participate. Few things are easier on the wallet than a concrete wall and some enthusiasm.

“There’s no specific clothing. It’s all up to you,” said fourth-year Reno Nims, one of the founding members of the Santa Cruz Parkour Team.

Nims, who started the team about two years ago with UCSC graduate Moe, said there’s something about parkour that appeals to a wide variety of people.

“A lot of the time, it’s people who have this childish ambition to just play,” Nims said. “People are walking to classes, going to work. They don’t see the world around them as this place to play — they’ve grown up. The world around me is a playground. Santa Cruz is really good for that. There are a lot of people who are children at heart, and it’s really good for them [to do parkour].”

Though onlookers might be confused as they watch parkour artists haphazardly navigate urban landscapes, practitioners say there is a great deal of skill and training involved.

“Parkour is very much like a martial art — it’s about 30 percent physical and 70 percent mental. Parkour isn’t just about being able to do cool moves and jump over stuff. It’s about the mindset you have when doing it, about keeping the flow and moving efficiently with as little wasted energy as possible,” said Jacob Pernell, fourth-year student and Santa Cruz Parkour Team member.

Pernell said parkour is as much a state of mind as a sport.

“It’s about encountering challenges, obstacles and fears, and then being strong in yourself so that you can work through and conquer these things,” he said. “There’s definitely a huge philosophy behind the art of parkour, and this philosophy can be applied to every other aspect of life.”

Parkour is not a simple sport — there are multiple sub-categories within the sport, with parkour and “free-running” often being mistaken for the same thing. The nebulous history of how exactly parkour originated doesn’t help, either. However, some practitioners say the distinction between the two is unnecessary.

“There’s the internet definition that parkour is efficiency, and free-running is ‘tricking’ (showing off elaborate acrobatic moves), but I like the definition that the founders have gone out with recently — that there is no difference,” Nims said. “In each of them, the goal is to have complete mastery over your body’s motion. We’re all trying to do the same thing. We’re all after the same goal.”

Though a YouTube search for parkour tends to bring up images of European teenagers navigating the burned-out husks of Soviet bloc apartments with wild abandon, the sport is definitely evolving to fit more regimented practices. The UCSC campus is perfectly suited for cooperative creative movement and the members of the Santa Cruz Parkour Team know it.

Artem Chelovechkov, a member of the Santa Cruz Parkour Team, said there are definite benefits to training with others.

“The main reason to train with others is the creativity that comes out of it and you can help motivate each other,” he said. “Parkour is about self-improvement and growth, and working with others makes it an efficient and fun kind of self-discovery. Working in a group can help you measure your own improvement and learn from others, see the grey walls, rails, trees and stairs in a new way.”

Though there may be more structure to the group today, with organized groups coming from miles away to participate in monthly “jams,” Nims’ experience with parkour was less regimented.

“Most of my friends had done [parkour] for a while — they also loved this [video] game, Mirror’s Edge,” Nims said. “I got sick one day and decided to play it. I got this sense of freedom from it, and I thought, ‘My friends do this. I want to do this in real life.’”

The representation of parkour-like activities in popular media is on the rise. In Electronic Arts’ Mirror’s Edge (released in late 2008), players control a character who is forced to navigate a dystopian urban landscape using only her acrobatic skills while evading police state forces. Reality shows like G4’s American Ninja Warrior, which is currently filming in Los Angeles, also bring this once-obscure sport to the forefront in popular youth culture.

This increased visibility may also have something to do with the growth of gyms that offer parkour classes and clubs that meet regularly to train, like the Santa Cruz Parkour Team. Vargas Academy in Scotts Valley now offers parkour classes for all ages, with videos on their site showing children ricocheting off foam-padded parkour bulkheads. Gone are the days when a search for “parkour” on YouTube only brought up grainy handheld-camera shots of urban decay and European teenagers.

Tempest Freerunning Academy, another parkour gym in Los Angeles, released a video of its Mario-themed practice area — complete with ball pit and brick-patterned foam blocks — set to a dubstep soundtrack, snagging almost 3 million views on YouTube from the time of publication.

In Santa Cruz, parkour has become much more organized than when Nims and Moe founded the team two years ago.

“I’ve actually started teaching a gym class in Santa Cruz,” Nims said. “I don’t want to be elitist, but I think the best way to learn is to be outside. Training solely in the gym, you get this sense of comfort, that you’re indestructible. Training in the gym and outside, you’ll see progress.”

Nims’ opinion of gym training is mixed.

“Out here, you can’t change anything. Out here, you need to adapt to the environment. In a gym, you’re creating your own challenges and moving stuff around,” he said. “It’s not a worse way to train, but it’s a different reality. If you want to use parkour usefully in a world where you can’t change the facts, you need to adapt to the reality of, ‘I can’t move that wall.’”

Despite the growth of organized parkour facilities, Nims said the future of parkour lies in a personalized blend of organized group training and solo experimentation.

“It’s all very individual,” he said. “People I teach can do moves that took a year to learn in just a lesson or two. I would suggest that people find a community that they can train with, but match that with their personal training. You want to learn your own style and what your body is capable of.”

Michelle Huffman of Santa Cruz Sports Central Gymnastics Learning Center said she looks forward to watching parkour grow as a sport, but people engaging in parkour aren’t necessarily competitive.

“I look at their practice the same way anyone would ‘practice’ the things they love to do,” Huffman said. “People ‘practice’ chess, poker, weight lifting, reading, riding bicycles, et cetera, for the pure enjoyment of the activity. Others train to compete.”

The Santa Cruz Sports Central Gymnastics Learning Center is where Nims currently teaches parkour, and is also where the UCSC gymnastics team trains. Huffman thinks training in a group environment is helpful for developing parkour skills.

“There is support and usually a grounding energy when engaging in an activity with a group as opposed to simply being ‘on your own,’” Huffman said. “As with any physical activity, there has to be a respect for the danger involved. Practice allows for the body and mind to develop that understanding of movement and its limits. When you practice with others — especially regularly — the collective reasoning power brings in new ideas for ‘old’ problems and can offer the ‘voice of reason’ if someone is not quite ready for a new skill.”

In the College Eight plaza, Moe tries to be that voice of reason, jokingly admonishing the gathered crowd for not warming up properly.

“I know no one likes to run, so we’ll do some non-running warm-ups,” Moe shouts from a crab-walking position. Laughter rises from the crowd. They had already been running and vaulting for close to 20 minutes, and Moe’s call to stretch comes off as a little after-the-fact.

Photo by Morgan Grana.

As members of the collected parkour teams do jumping push-ups down the College Eight steps and ramps, an older parkour artist who introduced himself briefly as James coaches a younger boy in proper warm-up form. After a few minutes of this, the boy gets distracted and asks if he can look at James’ iPhone.

“We’re watching reality — it’s cooler,” James replies.

People passing by seem to agree.

“Everyone who sees you is jealous of you,” yells a bearded passerby.

The parkour team laughs, shrugs and nods — none of them seem inclined to disagree.

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at Leaping into the Mainstream

The petite girl clad in tight-fitting black is the same height as the dumpster she’s climbing into. Luckily, half the dumpster’s lid is already lifted back, so she doesn’t have to worry about drawing attention with the clatter of swinging back the heavy hatch top.

With both hands expertly placed along the dumpster’s rim, she lowers herself into the abyss of the five-foot-tall metal receptacle. She emerges with a backpack full of loaves of bread. She raises herself out the same way she climbed in — with a jump. The dumpster dive is a success.

With limited budgets, students are forced to satisfy their stomachs with alternative methods to the routine trip to the grocery store. Starving students aren’t just a myth. For many students at UC Santa Cruz and colleges across the country, struggling with hunger is a day-to-day reality.

Third-year literature major Roy Lopez occasionally turns to dumpster diving when his funds are low.

“It’s like survival of the fittest,” Lopez said. “But instead of having good traits to survive, if you have money, you can survive.”

Santa Cruz locals wait outside the Salvation Army on Laurel Street. The Salvation Army Food Pantry provides free bread and pastries Monday through Friday. Photo by Molly Solomon.

According to CNN Money, rising food prices led 44 million people to poverty since last June. Between January 2010 and January 2011, bread rose 4 cents per pound, ground beef rose 16 cents per pound, cheddar cheese rose 42 cents and coffee rose 61 cents.

In addition, those who can’t afford to eat healthily may face long- and short-term physical impediments. According to the Skidmore College website, poor nutrition can cause people to feel lethargic and depressed and can lead to diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, osteoporosis and iron deficiency anemia in the future.

Food and housing are accounted for in the Undergraduate Student Cost of Attendance/Standard Budget every year, according to UCSC’s Financial Aid and Scholarship Office.

Based on the 2010–2011 survey results and a standardized methodology for all UC campuses, UCSC assumes a student living off-campus will spend $10,437 on food and housing this school year. In nine months, a student is expected to spend $1,159.67 on food and housing per month.

In comparison, Lopez spends around $790 on food and housing per month. Rent is $490 a month, and he budgets for about $50 worth of food a week. But sometimes he breaks his budget.

“I end up spending more just because I get hungrier than I thought I would,” Lopez said.

UCSC financial aid director Ann Draper said in her experience, students do not usually seek advice from the financial aid office about affording food. More often, she said, students say they struggle with finding a job.

While financial aid covers Lopez’s tuition, he’s financially independent and pays for rent and food when he has the money.

He cuts costs and minimizes his bills by opting not to own a phone or car.

Lopez earns cash by selling cans and small used technological devices he finds. His trusty tool is Craigslist, where he sells the items and finds temporary jobs performing unskilled labor.

Over a span of five to seven hours on campus, Lopez gathers about $10 worth of cans, which fills two huge trash bags. After exchanging them for money, he can eat.

“From there, I usually go to Burger King or Taco Bell or McDonald’s, because those are the cheapest places,” Lopez said. “I usually get the value meal. I’ll get that three times a day, breakfast, lunch and dinner, if need be.”

Lopez said he realizes fast food is not the most nutritious or cost-efficient way to eat, so he cooks when he has the provisions.

“What I’ve been doing recently is stealing groceries from Trader Joe’s,” he said. “I’m hoping [the food will] last me a little over a week because I got mostly ingredients … I can make more things, instead of eat one thing and then it’ll be gone. Knowing how to cook for yourself really cuts down on the amount of money you spend on food.”

Lopez said stealing isn’t his first choice, but he resorts to it when free food providers are not easily accessible.

“You have to steal because you need food at certain times of the day, and the free options aren’t always available,” Lopez said. “There are only certain times of day the church can give you things.”

Lopez’s food supplier of choice is the Salvation Army on Laurel Street.

For seven years, the Salvation Army’s Food Pantry has provided free bread and pastries Monday through Friday. Once a month, families and individuals are allowed one bag of non-perishable items like canned tuna and macaroni and cheese.

“Nothing is left by the end of the day,” said Denise Acosta, social services director for the Laurel Street Salvation Army.

She noticed students come and go with the school year.

“We do have a lot of students, but no more than homeless people,” Acosta said.

On campus, Lopez utilizes the dining halls even though he doesn’t have a meal plan. He stands outside and asks students going in if they can guest-swipe him in.

Occasionally Lopez will try to get swiped himself by pretending to have a meal plan.

“It’s easier when it’s a student [swiping you in],” Lopez said.

Scott Berlin, director of Dining and Hospitality Services at UCSC, said the dining halls try to control the number of students sneaking in.

“Someone’s going to pay for that eventually,” Berlin said. “For us, that someone is someone on a meal plan.”

Berlin said dining halls cannot donate leftover food because, according to health laws, it’s illegal to reuse food that sits out and is self-served.

In any case, the dining halls do not have any leftovers to give away.

“We’re very efficient, and that helps keep the meal plans at a lower cost because we don’t waste,” Berlin said.

Third-year transfer Shiree Rezendes said she also struggles to get enough to eat. She, too, resorts to asking random students for guest swipes into the dining halls.

“I hate it. I do feel like a beggar then,” said Rezendes, a full-time student who holds two jobs, as a yoga instructor and a server at a restaurant.

Lopez and Rezendes both said they eventually get swiped in.

Besides food, Rezendes also has to pay for car insurance, bike maintenance and leisure activities with no financial assistance. She currently lives with someone who owns a trailer, but is in the process of looking for a place to live.

“I’ve been independent since I moved to Santa Cruz,” Rezendes said. “My grandma gives me money when she can. I’m going to be asking her for a loan for this quarter’s tuition.”

Since she works 20–25 hours a week combined from her two paid jobs, she is a possible candidate for California’s food stamp program, recently renamed CalFresh.

According to the magazine Washington Monthly, 1,500 college students are receiving food stamps in Sacramento County, where two years ago only 700 were.

“While CalFresh is [food stamp’s] new name, the program has existed for 40 years and helps single people, seniors, students and families with little or no income to buy food,” according to a CalFresh statement provided by Debora Friedman, CalFresh outreach for the County of Santa Cruz Human Services Department.

Third-year Pearl Cruz* started using food stamps when she qualified for the program six months into her pregnancy with her now three year-old daughter.

“I had no money,” Cruz said. “I remember going for a week on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches … I obviously needed help.”

According to the California Food Policy Advocates, 28,871 people are eligible for food stamps in Santa Cruz County, but 65 percent don’t receive them.

Most local stores and farmer’s markets accept the CalFresh debit card.

“Now it’s like a credit card,” Cruz said. “The only people who’ll know [it’s a CalFresh card] are the people on food stamps themselves. Otherwise, people think it’s a debit card.”

Cruz remembers using food stamps with her stepmom when they were more like coupons that were ripped out of a booklet and stamped.

“That was embarrassing,” Cruz said. “Extremely embarrassing.”

According to a CalFresh fact sheet, college students are eligible for CalFresh if they work more than 20 hours per week, are approved for state or federally funded work study, are responsible for a child under six years old, or are a full-time enrolled single parent and responsible for a child under 12 years old. They also must be between the ages of 18–49 and enrolled half- or full-time.

Illustration by Muriel Gordon.

Friedman said financial aid does not disqualify a student from receiving the program’s services.

“You could be on a federal or state work-study program as a part of your financial aid and that could make you qualify,” Friedman said. “We work with the financial aid offices at both UCSC and Cabrillo to make sure they make those referrals for students, even [those] on financial aid.”

However, Cruz and her family are running into problems. Her husband attends Cabrillo College and is not on work-study because the college does not offer it. As a result, he does not qualify for food stamps under this guideline.

“They told me the only way he’d qualify for food stamps is if he’s on work-study,” Cruz said. “If you don’t have work-study, you’re screwed.”

Now Cruz, who is employed through work-study, supports her daughter and husband and has another child on the way.

Family Student Housing (FSH) offers a couple of resources Cruz, a FSH resident, takes advantage of.

FSH day care provides free breakfast, lunch and two snacks, and Cruz said she is thankful her daughter is fed healthy food.

“Meals [there] are very nutritiously proportioned,” Cruz said.

FSH hosts a Second Harvest Food Bank food pantry that provides free food to the community. Every first and third Wednesday of the month, the food pantry, located in FSH, provides produce, protein, bread, cereals and other food to those who show up.

Before the doors open at 4 p.m., a line already trails along the side of the small FSH Affiliates building and sprawls out to the parking lot. The crowd of about 40 is made up of pierced young adults, babies in strollers and elderly men and women dressed for the weather in rain jackets.

“Some are in line for 45 minutes,” said Conne Lester, assistant director of Family Services.

According to Lester, at this Westside location every distribution serves an average of 80 people.

Cruz said the food the pantry provides can be challenging to cook with.

“Not that I’m ungrateful, but a lot of the time there are things you can’t make meals out of,” Cruz said.

Although the food pantry provides items like fruit, onions and carrots, Cruz wishes they had more meat.

“It’s harder for the kids,” Cruz said. “They don’t want to eat only rice and beans or potatoes.”

Lester, who was a single mother in FSH herself at one time, said the food pantry does not advertise, and families and individuals know about the distribution by word of mouth.

“They’re kind of referred to us from various groups that know when they’re the most needy,” Lester said.

The food pantry primarily serves students in FSH, and Lester said they do not have the resources to accommodate many more people.

“We’re kind of at capacity at this point, so it would be difficult for us to take many more new people on,” she said. “Just in terms of the food that we pay … compared to if we bought it somewhere else. Also in terms in size of the space, we’re running out of room.”

The food pantry relies on FSH residential assistants, staff and some volunteers from the community to help set up and distribute the food.

Other universities recognize and cater to the issue of food inaccessibility among students. UCLA has a Food Closet that offers donated food and toiletries to students at no cost.

UCLA fifth-year student Abdallah Jadallah helped start UCLA’s Food Closet in January 2009.

“I’d see students eating only once a day or eating only at Taco Bell,” Jadallah said. “Sometimes we focus a lot on helping the community, but we forget about our own students.”

Because of networking and media attention, the Food Closet gets lots of canned goods, donations from hotels and even some catered food.

Jadallah said the students who frequent the Food Closet are not only getting fed, but are eating healthier too.

Even though there are organizations and resources on and off college campuses that support students’ food accessibility, food security is still an issue.

Cruz is currently running out of food stamps for the month, and has to space out the food she does have. She has to wait five more days to get the next month’s food stamps.

“It’s hard,” Cruz said. “Do we put gas in the car? Do we have to borrow money from someone? You don’t know how much you’re actually going to be spending until it happens.”

*Name has been changed

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at The Very Hungry Student

Valerie Luu doesn’t work at a desk. Underneath a forest of skyscrapers, between the lamp posts and fire hydrants of San Francisco, Luu and others cook and serve food on the city’s streets.

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in sociology from UC Santa Cruz, Luu wanted to be her own boss, and didn’t want to go to graduate school immediately, so she decided to head to one of the world’s biggest bustling centers of diversity — San Francisco.

“I do dishes from my childhood,” she said. “So basically, I recreate dishes that I enjoyed growing up with.”

Luu runs a small pop-up restaurant — a temporary eating facility that “pops” up in a neighborhood ­— called Little Knock. On an April night she is grilling up street food with Katie Kwan, owner of pop-up Kitchen Sidecar, in their joint venture, Rice Paper Scissors (RPS). They are serving up pâté bánh mì buns, sweet sticky rice and tapioca drinks outside of Amoeba Music on Haight Street, in a collaborative event with Cambodian-pop group Dengue Fever. After the band finished their set, Luu and Kwan rushed to meet the after-show crowd outside with woks, grills and red stools. Amid all the food, people and music, Luu’s at home.

Start-up entrepreneurs like Luu are flocking to cities across the United States to try their hand at building small businesses in an industry that has relatively little start-up costs and is fueled by Facebook and Twitter. With a hope and a tweet, vendors like Luu and Kwan head into the city with trucks, tables and grills to make a living.

Phil Carter, a UCSC alumnus eating at Amoeba, said street food is easy to like.

“It’s something different, and it’s quick and its easy,” he said. “It supports people in the community. People like that and want that.”

Now more than ever, pop-up restaurants and food trucks are thriving. Many cater events, have a strategic route and serve unique, gourmet food. These hometown businesses, whether in a truck or behind a table, are a good example of the alternative food revolution that is occurring in the Bay Area, as well as several other major U.S. cities.

And for good reason. In 2007, the Food and Agriculture Organization, an agency of the United Nations, estimated that roughly 2.5 billion people eat street food every day worldwide. One in four people had visited a food truck in the previous six months, a 50 percent jump from the year before, according to an American Express Market Briefing report in July 2010. The New York Times recently wrote an article about the San Francisco Underground Market, a monthly event in which pop-ups collaborate together, and highlights this ever-growing trend.

Besides the struggles of running a small business, street food vendors face other big challenges. Food trucks and pop-ups must carry all the cooking supplies they need with them. As they are mobile businesses, they have to strategize their locations, how often they tweet, and when to collaborate.

“It’s difficult,” Luu said. “It’s made me become a perfectionist, because you need to be on your shit, and you need to know where everything is and what needs to happen before you do it.”

While Luu and Kwan collaborate for RPS, and other pop-ups work side-by-side at the San Francisco Underground Market, food trucks are also finding that it’s helpful to come together.

Many in the food truck community gathered for round two of SJ Eats: A Movable Feast on May 7, a San Jose convention-festival of 20 food trucks, live music and, according to its Facebook page, over 1,600 foodies.

An entire street in San Pedro Square was closed for the event, with trucks lining the sidewalk. It was advertised almost entirely through its online presence on Facebook.

Former UCSC student Valerie Luu serves up some sweet sticky rice at her Vietnamese street food “pop-up” restaurant, “Rice Paper Scissors.” Luu co-runs the business with Katie Kwan in San Francisco. Photo by Sal Ingram.

Ryan Sebastian, owner of ice cream food truck Treatbot, helped organize the event and said most meals street vendors cook are ready to eat, have small portions and are very niche.

“Generally food trucks are small and limited, so you end up making one special thing that’s really good, and people follow you anywhere for it,” he said.

Amir Hosseini, owner of Curry Up Now, an Indian food truck also present at the event, said being online isn’t necessary, but definitely helps.

“We started off pushing Facebook and Twitter to reach out to our fan base,” he said. “We’re in a mobile industry, so our customers need to know where we are.”

He said being online helps, if only because it’s free.

“We’re on Twitter and Facebook, and we don’t spend money on advertising, because every time we post something it’s viewed 5,000 times,” he said. “Definitely most of our traffic comes from Twitter.”

Hosseini explained that at the same time, however, it’s usually one’s dish that makes one successful.

“It’s all about your product,” he said. “With food trucks at an event like this, you’ll get a lot of people who are actually foodies, who will wait in line for an hour to get good food, who are going to try a lot of different things.”

Despite the growing popularity of street food, pop-up restaurants are technically illegal. Unlike food trucks, most pop-ups do not have a business license or health permit.

Sec. 184.81 of the San Francisco Municipal Code states mobile food facilities may not operate without a permit from the health department and fire marshal. Like restaurants, food trucks and pop-ups both need to pass numerous health inspections to run legally. They are highly regulated by the city in which they operate, and to be legal they must pay over $1,000 in fees.

Cabana Dave’s Gulf Coast Catering, a Caribbean-Cajun style catering company based out of the East Bay, opened its first food truck several weeks ago. Owner and head chef David Victor said it has been fun so far.

Photo by Sal Ingram.

“It’s new and exciting,” he said. “You know, everybody’s gotta eat, and it’s cool to be able to talk and interact with your customer.”

He added that he is afraid for pop-up restaurants.

“Us food trucks, we have to pass health regulations, get business permits, rent out our spaces, and pop-ups don’t,” he said. “Someday they’re going to end up hurting someone.”

Many customers don’t see the risk, however. Luu said she thinks street food is the safest food there is.

“It’s very rare to see your food being made in front of you and to look your cook in the eye ­— even at a restaurant you don’t really get that,” she said.

Andrew Strader, Environmental Health Services inspector of Santa Cruz County, said these risks are present but easily minimized.

“The risks associated with street food are the same as those at home,” he said. “These guys are trying to set a working kitchen up, and they have a couple hours to [do it], so they’re hustling. It kind of just depends on the individuals and how much food safety training they have, and how much emphasis that they put on that.”

While they are subject to the same legal and health regulations as any other restaurant, Luu said fines and punishments are scarce.

“I feel fortunate to live in a city where these things happen,” she said. “The city in a way kind of allows it to happen — they’re not cracking down — and customers are supportive and want it. There is a lot of underground food going down in the city, so not everyone has a permit. Not everyone is working out of a commercial kitchen. There is a precedent set that it’s OK for now, or OK until someone gets sick.”

The New York Times article reported the The San Francisco Underground Market helps pop-ups get around these regulations, since it is a club.

“The underground market seeks to encourage food entrepreneurship by helping young vendors avoid roughly $1,000 a year in fees — including those for health permits and liability insurance — required by legitimate farmer’s markets,” Patricia Leigh Brown writes in the Times story. “Here, where the food rave — call it a crave — was born, the market organizers sidestep city health inspections by operating as a private club, requiring that participants become ‘members’ and sign a disclaimer noting that food might not be prepared in a space that has been inspected.”

While street food in the Bay Area is booming, Santa Cruz has seen very little. Apart from a few Spanish ice cream carts and hot dog stands, not much exists.

Gary Willett, of Gary’s Old Fashioned Snappy Dogs, is one of the few street food vendors in Santa Cruz. He will have been at the corner of Younglove Avenue and Mission Street for five years selling hot dogs and sausages come Sept. 19. He said part of the lack of street food in Santa Cruz has to do with the city’s zoning laws.

The SJ Eats Food Festival brought over 1,600 "foodies". Photo by Michael Mott.

“The cities have all different laws,” Willett said. “In Santa Cruz you have to be on industrial or residential property [to sell food on the street], whereas in San Jose you can be almost anywhere.”

Food trucks that follow the proper legislation do exist in Santa Cruz, and pop-ups can exist if they are in some sort of community event, like a farmer’s market, Strader said.

“The problem with setting up anywhere is when you set up just anywhere there’s no consideration for traffic, [or] whether they are blocking access,” Strader said.

Street food is nothing new, though. It’s a cultural phenomenon, one that has its roots in city slums, taco trucks, familiar hotdog carts in New York, and for Luu, in rural Vietnam.

“I get a lot of recipes from my grandmother, and in Vietnam it’s just a way of life,” she said. “It’s about learning about my culture in a way that’s interesting to me, it’s a way [that] I can really delve into it and speak about it.”

Monica Wong, one of the owners of Bay Area Vietnamese food truck Little Green Cyclo, said her business relates to Asia as well.

“Street food is popular in Asia,” she said. “But here we’re highly regulated, [so] it’s on a much cleaner, organic level.”

Andrew Thai, one of the volunteers at SJ Eats and a third-year at San Jose State, said there isn’t a stigma associated with street food, that anyone can jump in.

“In a restaurant you have your own table and you don’t know the person next to you. There’s a boundary there,” he said. “But on the street, everyone’s everyone and there’s nothing stopping you to talk with that person who got the same ice cream as you. It’s great to have that community.”

Hot dog vendor Willett said street food is popular because a restaurant setting isn’t necessary — there are other aspects that are more important to the dining experience.

“Cleanliness and quality food,” he said. “You can sell quality food anywhere, that’s my consensus.”

Photos by Sal Ingram.

Last Saturday, Kwan and Luu got together to hold their third Rice Paper Scissors together in the Mission District. They borrowed a rickshaw from another café as a prop, as the theme was food originally cooked in central Vietnam. They served shrimp chips, sesame jellyfish salad, and a total of 25 fried quail, which customers had to reserve beforehand online. The quail were stuffed with Chinese sausage and bacon sticky rice, and sold out.

“It went really well,” Luu said. “It was hectic! We had about 300 people come through.”

Luu believes street food has room to grow in San Francisco, and the future is bright.

“New people are getting into food every day, just trying it, trying to start their own business,” Luu said. “This trust between consumer and producer is just growing.”

Treatbot ice cream truck owner Ryan Sebastian said it can be scary running a small street food business, but other vendors are there for one another.

“There is a lot of overhead, a lot of uncertainty,” he said. “A truck could break down on you — that’s happened before. But it’s a very positive culture right now in San Jose. It’s a small, tight-knit community where everyone knows each other.”

Above all, street food vendors, whether serving food off a card table or a food truck counter, have a community.

“That’s probably the biggest reason why I do it — I love so many people,” Luu said. “I love interacting with people, and for once I feel like I’m in a community with people that want to be industrious, that want to be creative [and] make good food — we’re all doing it together,” she said.

“It doesn’t feel like a competition, it feels like a community.”

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at Street Savor

In a small classroom hidden at the end of the hall on the first floor of UC Santa Cruz’s social sciences building, six students and their instructor struggle to say,“I like the weather today”in Yiddish. It sounds simple, but several students have already stumbled over the treacherous, paradoxical grammar.

After a few false starts, one student finally gets it right, eliciting cheers and applause from her classmates. Wielding a shard of yellow chalk in one hand and an enormous eraser in the other, Jonathan Levitow — UC Santa Cruz’s only Yiddish language instructor — holds his arms out wide and grins sheepishly, as if to apologize for the small triumph enjoyed by his class.

“Yiddish is too difficult to be learned by human beings!” Levitow said.

Illustration by Louise Leong.

Yet humans — at least Jewish humans — continue to learn it, as they have for the last thousand years. Originally the language of Jews in Eastern and Central Europe, Yiddish spread across the globe on the tongues of Jewish immigrants, arriving in the United States in the 19th century as the spoken and written language of tens of thousands of Jews on the East Coast.

Following World War II, however, the Yiddish-speaking population of Europe was decimated. The adoption of Hebrew as the national language of the state of Israel dealt Yiddish a second deadly blow by denying it a homeland. In the United States, Jewish immigrants often neglected to teach their children Yiddish in an attempt to expedite assimilation, wiping out a pool of potential Yiddish-speakers in the course of a single generation.

Today, there is a popular misconception that because of all this, Yiddish is a dead language. While this statement is far from true, it is also not quite a lie.

Crippled by genocide and decades of bad luck, Yiddish survives in sizable pockets of speakers — mostly ultra-Orthodox communities of Jews and enclaves of aging native speakers in New York — but lacks the cohesion or popularity needed to regain its stature as a daily language used by Jews at home and in public.

In 1970, the U.S. Census found almost 1.6 million Jews who spoke Yiddish as a home language. By 1980, that number had dropped to 315,953. In 1990, it fell again to 213,054. Between 2000 and 2007, the number of Yiddish speakers in America fell to 158,991 — almost a 90 percent drop between 1970 and 2007.

Despite its wounds, Yiddish continues to thrive in some circles. More than a dozen Yiddish programs have sprouted up in American universities in the last 20 years, according to a 2010 study by Dr. Zachary Berger entitled, “The Popular Language That Few Bother to Learn.” In the midst of budget cuts and slashed language programs, Yiddish has managed to take root at UCSC with only a handful of students and educators.

Openly passionate about the language and the program, a small pocket of students and teachers are making a stand to preserve the cultural and linguistic heritage of a language they have come to love.

Introductory Yiddish was first offered at UCSC as a course in the Jewish studies program in spring 2010. Thirty students enrolled in the class — about six times the number of students enrolled at the Yiddish program at Stanford, which is also taught by Jonathan Levitow.

Bruce Thompson, lecturer for the history and literature departments, classifies the upcoming generation’s interest in Yiddish as part of a cycle. Photo by Prescott Watson.

Bruce Thompson, a lecturer for the history and literature departments at UCSC, said one reason for the popularity of Yiddish is the renewed interest many young Jewish students have had in reclaiming their cultural heritage.

“It’s a characteristic swing of the pendulum: The second generation wants to lose it, and the fourth generation wants to get it back,” Thompson said. “There’s a recognition that there was a rich Jewish culture in Eastern Europe as well as a rich literature, and it did so much to shape modern Jewish secular culture and identity.”

Rachel Starr-Glass, a third-year Jewish studies major, said her family was originally from Eastern Europe. A major reason she decided to take Yiddish was so she would be able to explore her own cultural connections to the language.

“There’s so much Yiddish literature out there, and I feel like if I could have direct access to that, the whole world opens up,” Starr-Glass said. “There’s a whole Yiddish culture, and I want to be able to directly access that. My grandma speaks a little, and my brother. It’s in the family.”

Professor Murray Baumgarten, co-founder of the Jewish studies program at UCSC, said knowledge of Yiddish also allows students to access thousands of texts accumulated over the centuries that would have been lost to the ages if not translated into Yiddish.

“One of the things that marks Yiddish is the numerous number of texts of world importance that were translated into Yiddish,” Baumgarten said. “I mean, political science, economics, literature — there was a great sense that Yiddish wanted to be connected to the larger world of Western culture.”

Students realize the double entendre in a joke in Professor Jonathan Levitow’s Yiddish class. Photo by Prescott Watson.

At UCSC, finding financial support outside the classroom has been integral for not only the preservation of the Yiddish language course but also the Jewish studies program that runs it. Founded in 2000, the Jewish studies program was given its start by donations from the Helen Diller Family Foundation, which allowed the program to establish a major, run independently of university funding, and hire faculty members like Yiddish lecturer Levitow.

Despite a rich literary tradition, some Yiddish scholars worry that even as the number of programs devoted to teaching Yiddish culture and literature at the university level increases, the actual number of speakers learning Yiddish outside of Hassidic or Charedi communities is dropping at an alarming rate.

A 2006 study by the Modern Language Association found 969 students enrolled at four-year colleges and graduate programs learning Yiddish. In 2009 (the most recent year available), that number dropped to 336. Although this drop is partly due to the drastic class reductions in one rabbinical academy and one state school, it still represents an enormous blow to the national Yiddish-speaking community.

Michael Wex, Yiddish scholar and New York Times best-selling author of “Born to Kvetch,” a humorous linguistic and sociological history of Yiddish and Jewish culture, said the plight of Yiddish is best reflected in the Jewish community’s sudden interest in preserving Yiddish.

“There’s a very positive attitude towards Yiddish these days, and has been for a couple decades now — and that worries me,” Wex said. “When Yiddish was healthy and flourishing, everyone was ashamed of it and trying to hide it. Now it’s not very healthy and it’s become our legacy.”

Wex said symptoms of Yiddish’s poor health are evident in the popularity of Yiddish phrase books that promise to teach readers exotic food words, cute endearments and juicy curses. Wex said these books promote a superficial knowledge of Yiddish that at best scratches the surface of Jewish culture, and at worst misinforms the reader.

“The interesting thing about Yiddish is that the number of people who know the difference between ‘fuck on’ and ‘fuck off’ is tiny and diminishing,” Wex said. “I’m not a prig, but the Yiddish is wrong — a book that tells you how to ‘fuck on’ is absolutely useless.”

One of the most basic problems obstructing Yiddish education is the lack of certified teachers. Berger cites the Yiddish Teacher’s Seminar in New York — which was closed in 1987 — as one of the last institutions to offer graduate students serious education as Yiddish instructors. Wex mentioned the article as he addressed pressing issues facing Yiddish advocates.

“Who is teaching the spoken language in universities? How many of these people are native speakers?” Wex asked. “It’s a big problem because you’ve got some relatively capable people who are trying to immerse themselves in the language, but it gets harder and harder because there are fewer places to go.”

Jesse Kirchner, a visiting assistant professor of linguistics at UCSC, studied Yiddish throughout his graduate career. In discussing what might endanger a language like Yiddish, Kirchner drew parallels between Yiddish and other extinct or endangered languages.

“What has caused those languages to become extremely endangered are things that were done to break the connection between one generation and the next,” Kirchner said. “As long as something like that doesn’t happen, Yiddish can endure indefinitely.”

However, given that this generational break has already occurred with Yiddish, Kirchner could not predict whether it would survive as a spoken language.

“It’s safe right now because there’s a generation of speakers learning it,” Kirchner said. “But to project out further than that, the future is very much in question for all the other languages in the world — and that would include Yiddish.”

Although Levitow did not agree with the idea that Yiddish is a dying language, he did say that Yiddish culture has been made increasingly irrelevant in modern Jewish communities, especially with the adoption of Hebrew as the official spoken language of Israel and, consequently, the global Jewish community.

“To me it seems kind of obvious — the whole center of Jewish life changed,” Levitow said. “When I was a kid, if you went into the synagogue, people spoke Yiddish. Now, you have to make an effort to go out and learn it. It takes hard work.”

Starr-Glass’ glowing opinion of the class and Reb Yankel (the Yiddish title for Levitow in class) was echoed by her classmate Ian Flanagan, a fourth-year history major.

“If there was one person [in the class] he’d still teach it,” Flanagan said. “He teaches the class — he doesn’t let the book teach the class. He’s so passionate about the course, but not overbearing.”

Flanagan said he has frequently encountered people who do not understand that Yiddish is still a spoken language with vital communities around the world.

“A lot of people will ask, ‘Why are you taking Yiddish? Nobody speaks Yiddish,”’ Flannagan said. “But [Levitow] brought in Yiddish newspapers from New York, so it is prevalent in certain areas, in New York and European countries. If people understand that it’s still in use, it will come back.”

Levitow’s normally cheery face clouded over as he addressed the notion that Yiddish had been left behind in the modern age.

Illustration by Louise Leong.

“Here in California, you really get the sense that Yiddish is of another time,” Levitow said. “But in fact, it’s not true. There are a lot of people who still speak Yiddish — they make an effort to keep it going in their families. New York is a center, also Toronto, and Chicago and L.A. All places where people speak Yiddish day-to-day.”

The absence of an iconic, permanent Yiddish-speaking community is something author Wex believes is permanently stunting the growth of Yiddish.

“One of the big problems [with] teaching Yiddish is it’s very difficult to get any outside-the-class support,” Wex said. “You can’t say, ‘Well here’s a program where you can go to Yiddish Land during the summer.’ It’s not the fault of anybody teaching Yiddish — it just doesn’t exist.”

Levitow said UCSC’s program is exceptionally lucky to receive private funding, because more than almost anything else, steady cash flow is the necessary ingredient for building a stable Yiddish-speaking community.

“The problem really is, in a nutshell, money,” Levitow said. “If you’re running a synagogue, an adult education program, you’re constantly trying to save every dollar you can. So do you hire somebody to teach Yiddish if there are only three students? What we really need are a few more millionaires who could fund Yiddish educational foundations that were stable and could count on funding.”

The Koret Foundation — one of the main donors supporting the program — gave the Jewish studies program a three-year grant to run a Yiddish course. But even private funding cannot guarantee a program’s survival. Last year, as the Yiddish program was just starting up, UCSC’s Hindi/Urdu program lost its own private funding and was forced to close down.

In response to an email query, Koret Foundation communications officer Kirsten Mickelwait said she could not divulge grant information nor speculate on future support for the program. She did say UCSC’s program is the only one Koret funds specifically for Yiddish education.

For students like Starr-Glass, the uncertain future of the Yiddish program and Yiddish itself has had no effect on her enthusiasm to learn the language — in a large part thanks to Levitow’s class and teaching style.

“I love it, I really do,” Starr-Glass said. “His way of teaching is really natural, it’s conversation, and he’s funny — we’re laughing 75 percent of the class. There’s definitely a lot of grammar, the structure of sentences. But the majority of the time we learn by conversation and a lot practice reading and writing.”

For Michael Wex, learning practical conversation skills and grammar is the only efficient way to bring Yiddish back as a language of daily use.

“I think it’s important for the textbook to teach you unremarkable day-to-day expressions,” Wex said. “When the plumber comes, you have to be able to tell him what’s clogged. If you can’t do that, you’re not fluent.”

Lecturer Thompson said there are a number of practical reasons to continue teaching Yiddish, but for the best reason, one should just ask the students studying it.

“Ask any of our students who are taking Yiddish about his or her experience,” Thompson said. “I bet you that the first response before the student says a word is a smile — a broad smile. With all due respect to all the other languages that are offered at UCSC, you don’t get that same smile — but you get it with someone who’s learning Yiddish.”

Asked to elaborate on what students might gain from learning Yiddish, Thompson hesitated, picking his words with care.

“I suppose it’s not only a feeling of accomplishment,” Thompson said. “But there’s also a special feeling of satisfaction that you’re keeping alive something that nearly died. It’s quite a wonderful thing that college students are really doing this.”

Fourth-year student Flanagan said it’s frustrating to see the low enrollment in Levitow’s class, which he blames on the recent arrival of the program and its virtual invisibility on course registers.

“Nobody knows it’s being offered. Once I found out and I took it, I became the biggest cheerleader for it,” Flanagan said. “We have pride in what we’re learning because nobody else is studying it. It’s something unique to me and I want to see more people speaking it.”

Photo by Prescott Watson.

Starr-Glass said that although she is not sure how far she will take her Yiddish education, she would be interested in taking another Yiddish class if it were offered. But it was difficult to imagine learning enough Yiddish to make it the home language of her family, she said.

“I’m not really sure about that — it would be hard. I think I would have to move to a Yiddish-speaking community to do that,” Starr-Glass said. “When I have a family, I want Yiddish to be familiar to them. I don’t know if me speaking alone to them would be enough, but I want to pass it on to them.”

Wex said that in the ideal world, Yiddish would be taught not as a class, but as the language of instruction in an entire university.

“No single teacher, no matter how intelligent or gifted can [possibly] cover it all,” Yiddish scholar Wex said. “There’s never one professor for a whole area. This is what you need in Yiddish, the idea of a university, one that covers liberal arts, and social science, that really does run in Yiddish.”

Wex also noted that despite efforts to make Yiddish a secular language, the religious component is too vital to the vocabulary and structure of the language to be excluded from study. Wex said without knowledge of the forms and rituals that defined Yiddish as a sacred language used by Jews for a millennia, a student could not achieve more than partial understanding of the language.

“I don’t think you can make this stuff work [by saying]… ‘Here are some dirty jokes, here are some insults you can sling at people,”’ Wex said. “You end up with a culture where all you can do is curse.”

By the end of Levitow’s two-hour class, nobody had uttered a curse, but the students had reviewed a quiz and covered several complicated grammatical constructions. Class was concluded with the reading of two jokes from the textbooks. By the end of the first joke, class was over, but nobody wanted to leave until the second joke was finished.

Line by line, the second joke is read through until the last student read the final sentence, sounding out the Yiddish words before translating them into English. It takes a second for everyone to put together the translated joke, leading to a collective groan at the punch line. But Levitow beamed and bobbed uncontrollably on the balls of his feet, unable to hide his delight.

“I saw the light go on in your eyes!” Levitow said. “It was very exciting!”

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at Searching for Yiddish Land

Updated 5/18/2011 at 11:34pm

Nestled on the outskirts of Seattle in the middle of an industrial center, along an unimpressive stretch of road, sits a cedar longhouse. If you didn’t know about it and if you don’t notice the panels of wood that peek through the trees, you may not even see it. It’s out of place among the yards of metal and lumber, but behind a set of double doors, a culture relegated to the “unidentifiable” thrives.

Rumbling inside this simple structure, traditions persist in defiance of a tumultuous history. Feet patter against wooden floors as the sounds of drums and throaty voices ricochet off the walls of the large, windowless ceremonial hall. Some afternoons, the smell of cooking oil and dough comes from a nearby kitchen, laughter and rowdy conversation flooding in along with it.

Leading into a main room, black and white photographs hang on white walls and hand-woven baskets and traditional jewelry sit on display — available for purchase, of course. But the proceeds will not be going to line some tribal chair’s pockets. Instead, the money will go to the legal fees the tribe must pay in order to apply for federal recognition.

Federal recognition fosters a “government-to-government relationship” between American Indian and Alaska Native tribes and the U.S. federal government. Currently, there are 565 federally recognized tribes throughout the United States and approximately 1.9 million registered tribal members, according to the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Less than half of self-identified American Indians are registered with a federally recognized tribe, according to the BIA’s 2005 American Indian Population and Labor report.

As of now there are only three ways a tribe can receive federal recognition: by an act of Congress, by a decision of the federal court system, or by proving a tribe can meet the requirements of the Federal Acknowledgment Process regulations 25 CFR Part 83.

The 25 CFR Part 83 regulation has seven specific details a tribe must meet in order to gain federal recognition — most pointedly, proof of continuity in existence and continued “political influence or authority over its members.”

A notoriously expensive legal procedure, raising funds to cover the costs of lawyers, researchers and academics working on a tribe’s recognition case is half the battle. And it’s a battle the Duwamish tribe has been fighting since 2001 after federal recognition was rescinded by the BIA when it was decided that the tribe had not shown historical continuity — a point of contention for those involved. Currently, the Duwamish tribe is working to appeal the previous decision.

In their defense, the Duwamish look to the Point Elliott Treaty of 1855, which details the rights and reservation the tribe was entitled to in exchange for land the city of Seattle now sits on. The treaty was never fulfilled by the government.

But the story of the Duwamish is nothing new. Tribes throughout the country have struggled to maintain and prove their existence — and continued survival — in order to obtain federal recognition.

There is one anomaly in the case of the Duwamish: They have a central meeting place, a cultural center where they can carry out endangered traditions. The Duwamish tribe raised funds and purchased land in order to build the longhouse that has become central to the community.

But recognition issues are more than casinos and land, bigger than flashing lights and rolls of cash. Federally unrecognized tribes do not have access to the same economic or educational benefits federally recognized tribes do, they do not have the same authority over their cultural artifacts or land, nor do they hold the same political weight.

They are tiny fish among small fish in an even smaller pond.

Arguing Against Academics

In December of last year, President Barack Obama backed the United Nations’ Declaration on Indigenous Rights and spoke on his support of Native Americans at the Tribal Conference held in Washington, D.C. The Declaration was an official recognition of Indigenous sovereignty, and prior to December 2010 the U.S. government had not officially supported it, according to a Reuters article.

But while the president’s willingness to open up a constructive dialogue with Native people is a step in the right direction, American Indians are still faced with high rates of poverty, crime, illness and suicide.

“They made a big show of it and that was beautiful, and yes, there were a hundred tribes there meeting at the White House but not one of them was a federally unrecognized tribe,” Valentin “Val” Lopez, the Amah Mutsun tribal chair, said. “And the unrecognized tribe has never been reached out to by the government.”

In Santa Cruz, the Amah Mutsun — a sub-group of the band of Ohlone people native to the region — are federally unrecognized. Less than an hour away, in San Jose, the Muwekma Ohlone tribe — like its sister tribe, Amah Mutsun, and Duwamish in Washington State — is embroiled in a struggle to receive federal recognition. The Muwekma Ohlone and the Amah Mutsun are subgroups of the Costanoan band of Indians. The Costanoan is a collection of tribes within the cenral coast.

Lopez explained the tribal history that led up to the Amah Mutsun’s current situation and their fight for federal recognition.

The relationship that existed between Catholic missionaries and the Amah Mutsun was misrepresented in a survey of California Native Americans carried out in the early 20th century, Lopez said. The Amah Mutsun were considered absolved as a separate group and absorbed into the growing Latino population. Lopez asserts that historical documents from the Catholic Church as well as previous government censuses challenge the survey.

“It’s a goddamn lie,” Lopez said, his voice quivering with rising frustration. “Our people have suffered greatly because of that.”

What stands between the Amah Mutsun and federal recognition now is a lack of money and tribal politics that pit recognized and unrecognized tribes against one another.

“We’re just second-class Natives,” Lopez said. “There’s that psychological impact: You’re not Indian, because you’re not recognized, and that’s how many communities look at us.”

UC Santa Cruz associate professor of American studies Renya Ramirez said that unrecognized tribes may be faced with individuals who do not believe they truly are American Indians.

“Unfortunately, within Native communities, there is an idea of a ‘real Indian,”’ Ramirez said. “It’s ironic that being recognized by the federal government affects the way people see Natives.”

Lopez said that it was “unfortunate” that the government separated recognized and unrecognized tribes, and that this categorization is detrimental to all Native communities.

Due to their lack of recognition, tribes are denied programs that federally recognized tribes would benefit from. This includes money for higher education, healthcare services, childcare services and cultural restoration and continuance. In addition, tribes like the Amah Mutsun do not have cultural centers or meeting places where tribal members can gather as a community.

Lopez said that without access to resources it becomes difficult to keep Native communities together as a result of financial instability and a lack of opportunity.

Federally recognized tribes have access to job training, social services, natural resources management and housing projects, among other social, educational and economic development programs. Tribes without federal recognition do not, and must provide for their communities without assistance.

“We had a guarantee from the government of tribal sovereignty regarding our religious practices, regarding the way we live,” Lopez said. “Without federal recognition, we have none of that. And that to us is a total injustice.”

Illustration by Rachel Edelstein.

But what is in place now — and the tribes that are left chronicling their histories and proving their legitimacy — is the result of past government and academic practices.

Alan Leventhal, an anthropologist from San Jose State University, explains that Alfred L. Kroeber’s “Handbook of the Indians of California,” published in 1925, determined that the Ohlone people, “for all practical purposes, were extinct.” Kroeber was a father of modern anthropology and reputed professor at UC Berkeley, and his work, Leventhal said, has contributed to the misrepresentation of Ohlone people and their history.

When Leventhal was introduced to Rosemary Cambra 30 years ago, the tribal chairwoman of the Muwekma Ohlone, he said he was unfamiliar with California Indians and sought out Kroeber’s text.

“[Rosemary and I] went to the library and I pulled out Kroeber’s book and said, ‘The Costanoan group is extinct for all practical purposes. You must be from some other tribe.’ And she looked at me and said she begged to differ with me and Dr. Kroeber,” Leventhal said. “I was at an impasse. I could have said, ‘I don’t have time for this. Kroeber said you were extinct.’ Or I could apply my research techniques and try and obtain a database that would help the tribe.”

In his research and as he met members of the Ohlone tribe, Leventhal said he began to see the overlap in the stories of the Native community and documents gathered by linguists and anthropologists. The stories of the Muwekma were corroborated with the work of past academics.

Kroeber later retracted his claim that the Costanoan band of Indians was extinct, Leventhal said.

Leventhal further explains that in addition to Kroeber’s errors, Lafayette Dorrington, a Sacramento Superintendent, in 1927 argued against tribal nations’ need for land and, ultimately, federal recognition and assistance.

“Dorrington terminated 135 tribes with a strike of a pen,” Leventhal said. “Some of these things don’t show up in the history books.”

Leventhal said that there is a disconnect between popular perception of Natives and interest in indigenous affairs.

“If Indians do not talk about walking in harmony with Mother Earth, then dominant society decides they don’t want to recognize these people,” Leventhal said. “If they don’t make necklaces, if they don’t wear feathers, if they don’t dance, then [it’s perceived] that they’re not real Indians

Amy Lonetree, associate professor of American studies at UCSC, said that present-day American Indian issues are the residual effects of a history of intolerance.

“For many of these communities, why they are not recognized is because of ongoing colonialism,” Lonetree said. “The great irony is that Native Americans were told there was no place for them as indigenous people, yet everything about who they were as tribal people was being taken from them by scholars and budding anthropologists and hoarded.”

Lonetree describes the Pacific Northwestern Tribal Canoe Journey — in which federally unrecognized tribes like Duwamish, Snohomish and Chinook Nations participate — as an example of reclamation of identity and a way for Native communities to band together in spite of political factions.

“The U.S. government may have their criteria for who is Native, but we know who our native relatives are,” Lonetree said. “And they are indigenous and we recognize that, and we honor that.”

Michael Evans, the Snohomish tribal chair and a proponent of cultural education, has worked with youth from the Duwamish and Snohomish tribes promoting canoe culture as a way to overlook tribal lines.

“The canoe culture … brings people together and starts to unify the community, and that’s what’s really needed,” Evans said. “There are lot of little tribes, but they’re so fractured that they haven’t banded together enough to push some big legislation.”

For people like Lonetree and Evans, the continuation of Native culture in defiance of whether a tribe is recognized or unrecognized is a sign of resilience.

“I feel strongly that culture and self-identity need to be perpetuated, and even though we are not federally recognized, we can still be Natives and First People,” Evans said. “And that needs to be preserved. There is a lot of cultural heritage, self-pride.”

Anthropologist Jon Daehnke has worked extensively with the Chinook nation and is familiar with the difficulties that tribes face when they no longer have a political voice.

Daehnke said he has heard from members of the Chinook nation that they are faced with an internal, emotional conflict.

“We were told we shouldn’t be Indian, but now the government is telling us we aren’t Indian,” Daehnke recalls being told by one member of the Chinook nation.

“This isn’t just about casinos, it isn’t about funding, it’s about identity,” Daehnke continued. “All of these legacies of colonialism don’t stop. It’s not settled. These legacies are still there, and they have real effects on people’s everyday lives.”

Lopez has seen the emotional effects a lack of federal recognition has had on his own family, and the issue is much deeper than money or land rights.

“One of my goals was to get us recognized before [my mother] passed. I failed to do that. She was born a recognized Indian and died an unrecognized Indian, and that right there is really painful,” Lopez said. “There’s a hell of a lot of historic trauma when you cannot have self-esteem, honor and respect for being an Indian.”

The Politics of Ownership

Illustration by Rachel Edelstein.

The fight for recognition comes hand in hand with a fight for claim over ancestral remains and funerary objects.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), passed in 1990, requires that all institutions that receive federal funding — including museums and universities — catalogue the human remains and specified cultural objects that have been excavated and collected. The institution housing the remains is required to consult with Native American tribes, and if the tribe files a request for the return of the remains and cultural artifacts, the institution must comply.

For federally unrecognized tribes, however, NAGPRA falls short. Under the law, publicly funded institutions are not required legally to return any remains or artifacts to a federally unrecognized tribe.

Federally unrecognized tribes are left relying on the goodwill of universities and museums that can voluntarily return objects and consult Native tribes. While the UC system currently consults Native American tribes on NAGPRA compliance issues, the relationship between the UC and federally unrecognized tribes is ambiguous.

Archaeologist and UCSC professor Judith Habicht-Mauche serves on behalf of UCSC as an advisor on NAGPRA to the UC Office of the President (UCOP), but refused to speak specifically on work the board handles. Only UCs in possession of artifacts that fall under NAGPRA law serve on the board.

“For security reasons, I don’t want to speak about the physical remains we possess,” Habicht-Mauche said.

Habicht-Mauche did confirm that UCSC was in possession of ancestral remains and artifacts. She did not detail where they were stored, what they specifically were, or how many remains the university was in possession of. However, under NAGPRA, the inventories documenting the artifacts in question are published.

As far as Habicht-Mauche knows from her work with the NAGPRA advisory group, a federally unrecognized tribe has not received remains or artifacts from the UC. However, with recent changes to NAGPRA, federally unrecognized tribes may stand a better chance at obtaining ancestral remains and funerary objects.

“The new rules have loosened requirements to some degree, but even under the new law, NAGPRA does not favor federally unrecognized tribes,” Habicht-Mauche said.

Even though the university refuses to speak in detail on items falling under NAGPRA, that does not satisfy tribes that do not have the right to rebury the remains of their ancestors now relegated to museum and university research facilities.

“The problem that the Amah Mutsun has is with any destructive testing done to the bodies, because it’s against our religious beliefs,” Lopez said. “We still have our strong religious beliefs and the spirit can only pass to the other side when it is whole and complete. Whenever you do destructive testing … that means in the end that spirit can never be at peace.”

Lopez also said that the university was “not as open and transparent” as it could be.

Daehnke explains that when contextualizing the issue of repatriation, the moral dilemma becomes apparent.

“The ability of cultures to make decisions about their deceased ancestors, that’s a pretty basic human right,” Daehnke said. “There’s roughly 80 percent of the known sets of human remains are still on museum shelves.”

Education as an Antidote

Tribal issues and the topics pertinent to indigenous communities do not often make the headlines. Recognition issues and repatriation concerns are not necessarily high-profile, and often fall under the radar of those unaffiliated with Native groups.

But amongst American Indian students, organizations and faculty at UCSC, there is a hunger for awareness. It is a swirling torrent, picking up speed and growing in size, that not only wants to see diversity in education, but also the inclusion of an American Indian and indigenous studies program.

Rebeca Figueroa, a participant in the UC Inner-campus Visitor Program, is a second-year anthropology and Native American studies major from UC Davis. Her last two quarters at UCSC have brought her to the American Indian Resource Center (AIRC), where she has collaborated with director Carolyn Dunn to bring a Native American studies program to the school.

“Even though I identify as a Chicana, a lot of the issues we discuss within [Native American studies] relate to me,” Figueroa said. “We understand the issues that Native people are still fighting today, so I felt really close to that. Everyone has a different story, but there is always common ground.”

Currently, Figueroa is seeking outside funding for an American Indian studies program, and hopes to model the program’s evolution after the Jewish studies program. She argues that the importance of Native American studies is because of the bridge between past and present, and how it has shaped indigenous communities today.

“We have to know that these people are still here, that it’s nothing of the past,” Figueroa said. “You go to a reservation and they still don’t have running water, and then you come here and all these people have the luxury that they’re lacking. Why are we here enjoying ourselves when there are people who were here before us that don’t have those rights?”

Figueroa also addressed the issue of federally unrecognized tribes and understanding the status of Native Americans as a topic in need of discussion.

“No one should have the power to say you’re not indigenous enough,” Figueroa said.

Dunn, the director of the AIRC, said that indigenous studies would be the first step to addressing issues relevant to American Indian individuals, but it would also initiate cross-disciplinary conversations.

“With environmental studies, there is indigenous knowledge that has direct scientific exploration or explanation that we could be looking at,” Dunn said. “Looking at indigenous studies or American Indian studies, it’s a very holistic way, and it can cross boundaries into other academic disciplines.”

Indigenous studies is, for students like Figueroa, the next step in addressing the need for greater conversation on American Indian concerns, as well as increasing the presence of Native culture and knowledge on the campus.

“I find it interesting how [UCSC] claims to be very diverse, but it’s not very diverse at all,” Figueroa said. “The conference rooms are named after [indigenous people], and it’s funny that we can name things after people but you don’t see them here.”

But even while indigenous studies may be the first step to changing the perception and situation of American Indians, for now, federally unrecognized communities exist in political limbo.

“It’s recognition that your ancestors went through these struggles and in spite of that they’re still here, we’re still here,” said Mike Evans, tribal chair of the Snohomish and a cultural mentor to many Duwamish youth. “It’s about your history and having others recognize your history, your culture. It’s something you hold dearly, and I’d hate to see that go away.”

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at Forgotten But Not Gone

There is a gray cat with a pop tart for a body on the computer screen.

Its pixilated body is flying through animated space, leaving a rainbow trail in its wake. A grating but catchy tune plays over and over.

“Nyan, nyan nyan nyan, nyan nyan nyan nyan, nyan nyan.”

“The appeal is that it’s just nonsense,” said Joel Johnston, a sophomore broadcasting major at San Francisco State University. “There are some people who like the song.”

This is Nyan Cat, a recent example of an Internet meme, which is an image, video, or saying that spreads virally over the World Wide Web.

The word “meme” first appeared in Richard Dawkins’ 1976 book “The Selfish Gene.” Dawkins defined a meme as being any sort of idea that spreads from person to person within a culture and catches fire. It played on the notion of a gene, as both genes and memes multiply with human-to-human contact.

As UC Santa Cruz computer science professor Gerald Moulds put it, “Every idea that manages to self-replicate is a meme.”

Internet memes are much the same thing. They spread from website to website, from community to community, from user to user across the Web, mutating and bonding together, and taking on different meanings along the way.

Moulds says he has “been plugged in to the Internet before most people knew there was an Internet.” He was online during the days of purely text-based message boards, called USENET newsgroups, where he says he experienced his first meme: a message board with the address “Alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork.” The name references the Swedish Chef, a character on the Muppets.

“That was the first really well-known, completely whimsical thing [on the Internet],” Moulds said.

As often happens with memes, the message board spurred imitators and variations, such as “Alt.wesley.crusher.must.die.die.die,” this time poking fun at Star Trek: The Next Generation.

This was happening in the mid-1980s, but most of the memes Moulds can remember are from the last decade. Today, the Internet is much more sophisticated, though memes operate mostly the same way: an absurd or relatable concept takes form, usually in an image, and is released onto the Web, where just about anything can happen. They can remain in obscurity, or they can take over an entire section of the Internet — at least for a couple of days.

The last huge medium to take hold before the Internet was television, which brought mass culture into the home in a way it had never been before. The “Idiot Box” had the potential to be a voice for and of the people, but commercial interests outweighed realistic representations and varying viewpoints.

It’s widely acknowledged that the Internet is in some ways replacing television, and thus memes are poised to rival television as a form of mass entertainment. The popular meme database website Know Your Meme currently has 5,525 memes catalogued total, and that doesn’t count all the variations that come about within each meme.

Compare that to the 70-something channels that come with most cable packages for television. Some would say that you can’t look at TV shows and viral Internet images the same way, but what it all boils down to is the influence of ideas, and in numbers, memes have a lot more ideas, and a growing influence. Johnston spoke about the inevitability of encountering memes in today’s world.

“It eventually just happens,” he said. “If you’re on the Internet, you’re eventually just going to get exposed to memes. My mom isn’t really into the Internet — she just uses it for email, but even she knows about some of them.”

The Internet currently has less corporate control than other mediums. Because of this, memes are a form of entertainment that is actual popular culture in the purest terms: a culture of the people. They imitate TV’s instant-gratification format, but project a voice that is really from the masses, for the masses. Advertisers are constantly trying to produce an inauthentic copy of this, and many criticize meme culture for its anonymous, anything-goes approach. But the populist entertainment ventures on — for better or worse.

“Friday,” that infamous Rebecca Black music video, was inescapable for two weeks in March of this year, and even surpassed Lady Gaga’s single “Born This Way” in hits on YouTube. The song was originally produced and promoted by label Ark Music Factory, but what made the fervor so intense was the work of millions of people on their computers, posting links wherever they could.

And it wasn’t just the video itself that caught on. Different memes dissecting and analyzing small parts of the video, and comparing it to other parts of popular culture, were all over different sites.

One popular image had two panels: in the first, Rebecca Black is smiling, with a caption that reads “Which seat should I take?” a line from the popular song. In the next, the character Gretchen from the popular teen movie “Mean Girls” grimaces, and the caption is a line from the movie: “You can’t sit with us!”

There were hundreds more like it, and thousands of other memes take the Internet by storm every single day. It is a mass medium that, thanks to the omniscience of the Internet, is constantly evolving, an ever changing and growing set of inside jokes and references upon references upon references.

By taking apart Rebecca Black’s cheesy, generic pop song, the masses used humor to reject the disintegration of the music industry. Memes aren’t important because they make stars out of 13-year-old girls — they’re important because they allow the public to speak, and to decide what’s valuable. They are, in a way, a re-appropriation of American popular culture.

And this re-appropriation has concrete results. On April Fool’s Day of 2008, YouTube linked all featured videos on its front page to the music video for Rick Astley’s 1987 song “Never Gonna Give You Up,” copying a popular practice from Internet pranksters known as “Rickrolling.” The song shot to number 77 on Amazon’s online store.

The meme site ICanHazCheezburger, which bought Know Your Meme in March for an undisclosed seven-figure amount, receives around 2000 submissions a day alone. The site focuses on LOLCats, a type of meme that takes humorous images of cats and imposes absurd text laden with purposefully poor spelling and grammar.

For much of the 2000s and still today, LOLCats were and are inescapable. Their signature “I can haz [insert thing here]?” has become an acceptable way to request something, and people are expected to know what is being referenced. Emily Huh, editor-in-chief of ICanHazCheezburger, explained why she thinks certain memes take off so much.

“It has to have some entertainment value, whether it’s funny or whether it’s so horrible that it is funny,” she said. “Like Rebecca Black. It was so horrible that you just had to laugh at it. You don’t necessarily have to relate to it, but just understand it.”

San Francisco State student Johnston, who can spend an hour or two going through different memes in one sitting, echoes Huh’s opinion.

“I think the absurd nature of a lot of [memes] definitely make them entertaining because you just can’t really expect them,” Johnston said. “They’re all very accessible. A lot of people can see them and understand them, and a lot of people can use them in their own way.”

“People come to our sites because they get to connect and share with people what they have made or seen,” Huh said. “People get a few minutes of fame. They get really excited when they make a submission and it gets to the home page.”

An example of a relatable meme is Rage Comics, four-panel comics that always end the same way: with a stick-figure man looking upwards, his face contorted, mouth agape, with the text “FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU.” The situations leading up to the almost-expletive are always everyday annoyances — the sort of things that happen to everyone at some point, but that are so mundane that most people never talk about them, like being too lazy to tie your shoelaces and then tripping over them.

The “fffuuu” guy is one of a cast of characters in the meme-verse. Also present are Forever Alone and the Troll, different unattractive faces that have their own comics and followings.

These memes, like many others, originated on 4chan, an anything-goes message board site which grants users complete anonymity. Wade Hastings, a student at Cabrillo College, has been using the site for about five years now. He first looked at it after he repeated a joke he had heard someone else tell, only to be told that the joke originated on 4chan.

“I read that thread [rage comics] when it first happened,” said Hastings. “It was just some guy, he made a four-panel comic, and it ended with the ‘fffuuu’ guy.”

4chan is known for having no boundaries or limits for what is acceptable to post. That means a lot of awful stuff, like child pornography and extremely racist, sexist, and homophobic posts, pop up. This is the price that is paid for a democratic, populist form of entertainment — all democracies depend on free speech.

“I do think the anonymity of the Internet has inspired creativity without traditional boundaries, and much of what’s been created seems like a response to the those traditional boundaries,” said UCSC professor Moulds in an email. “Some of what is created is small-minded or mean, and maybe much of it wouldn’t be out there if every creation were clearly linked to its author. But it would also chill free expression immensely if people thought that every off-color joke or juvenile Photoshop could be tied to their real names forever.”

And alongside the offensive material, memes that later take hold of the entire Internet start on 4chan. For Hastings, the limitless atmosphere is key for creativity free from judgment.

“It’s almost completely anonymous, which is a huge helper, because people aren’t afraid to post a word,” he said.

After a meme pops up on 4chan, it takes a while to spread to other sites, like Reddit, a more policed message board, and Tumblr, a popular micro-blogging site. Once there, in the mainstream, the memes can blend together with each other to create a sort of pop cultural society and language. Christopher Price, editorial director of Tumblr, spoke about this phenomenon.

“I think that the graphical Internet memes are almost like hieroglyphics [because] you couldn’t express that sentiment any simpler than that,” Price said. “And so it’s just a guy saying ‘fuuuuuck,’ you know, that’s a pretty clear, basic sentiment. We all get that. We all have been there before.”

Price also talked about a recent trend on Tumblr, which has been to essentially tell stories using different memes to express emotions. In a world that is becoming more and more wired, things like body language and facial expressions are being replaced by animated images called Graphics Interchange Formats, or GIFs.

“They have their GIF folder on their computer, and they pick the best animated GIF from Harry Potter or something to express how they feel. And that’s rather an amazing way to communicate. It’s bizarre,” he said. “There are so many references, so there’s really a lot to be communicated there, but the person doesn’t necessarily do any of the communicating.”

Because memes are a form of entertainment that is easily manipulated and created by anyone, the potential for cross-sectional references are infinite. GIFs depicting the movie “Inception” and the show “RuPaul’s Drag Race” can be placed right next to each other, creating a completely new hybrid. In yet another Rebecca Black meme, 50 Cent and Elmo can ride in the same car, both of them laughing at the tween singer. It’s a pop culture junkie’s dream come true.

But entertainment isn’t the only world memes can comment on. Almost immediately after Osama Bin Laden’s death was announced, images were circulating with the text “America! Fuck Yeah!” and pictures of Bin Laden made to look like the lead character in “Black Swan” saying “I was perfect” also made the rounds. The nation wanted to celebrate the death of a man widely regarded as evil, and they turned to GIFs and Photoshop to do so.

But there are still drawbacks. Because memes rely on catchphrases and single images, patience for anything longer is running low. A UCSF study released in April showed that extreme multitasking associated with the Internet can limit the brain’s attention span.

“There’s very much simplicity, and short is important. And sometimes I get a little scared about that,” UCSC professor Moulds said.

He tells a story of receiving an email with a link to a video, and after seeing how long it is, thinking to himself, “A minute and a half, that’s forever!”

But perhaps more threatening than length is the possibility of being monetized. Viral marketing tries to synthesize the organic way memes can spread, creating ads with the goal of having amused Internet users doing the publicity for them.

“I think it doesn’t become a meme, usually, for money,” Moulds said. “In terms of the memes becoming popular, that seems to happen purely by accident. There are attempts to replicate that, of course. ‘Snakes on a Plane’ was introduced as viral marketing.”

Movies like “Snakes on a Plane” and “Cloverfield” are famous for viral marketing campaigns, as are brands like Skittles and Burger King.

Wade Hastings remembers seeing a supposed feud between Lady Gaga and Weird Al played out on the pages of Reddit surrounding Al covering one of Gaga’s songs. He suspects it was really all viral marketing.

“All of a sudden, these two people had huge bursts of publicity. Hundreds of thousands of people saw that on the front page of Reddit,” he said. “It’s viral PR firms. I don’t mean to sound paranoid, but it’s kind of like mind control in a way. It’s manipulation.”

But despite these worries, Christopher Price from Tumblr has an optimistic outlook for the future of memes.

“I think there will always be an element of Wild West, anything-goes, because it’s just the nature of the Internet,” he said. “It’s a platform that encourages you to use it and create your own stuff for it. There are always going to be these people in their basements making really weird stuff that nobody understands. And I think that’s great, because it’s that weird stuff that gets refined and refined and refined, and then it somehow makes sense to people.”

For Hastings, memes have nowhere to go but up. He waved his hands around and opened his eyes wide as he spoke about their future.

“I think it’s going to be like the next Beatles. I mean, that’s kind of a weird reference, but the Beatles were huge,” he said. “Meme culture is going to explode. I’m really excited. Ten years from now there’s going to be an Internet culture class at prestigious universities.”

Maybe that will happen someday. But for now, memes are still in their own world, what San Francisco State student Johnston calls the “subconscious” of the people. And maybe the people don’t want to turn over their own mass medium to the established media just yet. Maybe they want to keep memes weird.

After all, that pop tart cat is still on the screen, reblogged on Tumblr by Topherchris, also know as Christopher Price, a day after we spoke. And the caption underneath is as follows:

“I almost attempted to describe Nyan Cat to a reporter yesterday, but decided against it because I didn’t want to sound batshit crazy.”

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at A Medium for the Masses

Situated on a coastal bluff overlooking the majestic Pacific Ocean, the industrial landscape of the Diablo Canyon Power Plant forms a sharp contrast with the natural beauty of its surroundings. Lush rolling hills with scattered trees level out to the flat concrete surface of the plant’s compound. Two large dome structures which house the plant’s nuclear reactors tower over the rest of the complex like sentries standing guard over California’s central coast. The juxtaposition of natural beauty with the concrete of the plant’s structures is simultaneously wondrous and confounding — one could not imagine a more beautiful site for a nuclear power plant, nor a worse eyesore on this gorgeous coastal stretch just north of Avila Beach.

Diablo Canyon’s secluded location also keeps it largely isolated from the public psyche. While tensions have existed for years between the plant and environmental activists of the San Luis Obispo area, many in California are not even aware of the plant’s existence. Despite being one of only two currently operating nuclear power plants in the state of California, Diablo Canyon has enjoyed minimal exposure in mainstream media for the past 20 years.

However, all that changed when the 8.9 earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Japan led to the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

Almost instantly, media attention was focused on Diablo Canyon in San Luis Obispo, and the San Onofre nuclear power plant in San Clemente because of their similarities to the Fukushima Daiichi plant. All three are located on the coast along earthquake fault lines, and in the aftermath of the world’s worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl in 1986, many are becoming concerned about the safety of nuclear power plants in areas of high seismic risk.

Diablo Canyon has received a disproportionately larger percentage of this media attention because Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), the plant’s operator, is currently applying for an extension on the operator’s licenses for its two nuclear reactors until the years 2024 and 2045, respectively.

This has raised concerns about the Nuclear Regulator Commission’s (NRC) ability to serve as an effective watchdog for the nuclear industry. The NRC has so far failed to heed Rep. Lois Capps (D-San Luis Obispo) and Sen. Sam Blakeslee’s (R-San Luis Obispo) request that they halt processing of PG&E’s application until 3D seismic studies can be conducted on the Shoreline Fault discovered in 2008 by U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) scientist Jeanne Hardebeck. Little is known about the Shoreline Fault other than that it is much closer to the reactor than the larger Hosgri Fault located five kilometers offshore. The NRC maintains that ongoing safety oversight is adequate to consider any seismic issues that arise from the results of the study, but many contend the NRC is ignoring the significance of the Fukushima disaster by proceeding with business as usual.

Jane Swanson, spokesperson for the San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace, the legal intervener between the San Luis Obispo community and the NRC, says the events at Fukushima warrant a departure from the status quo.

“If not now, when are we going to decide nuclear power is not worth the risk?” Swanson said. “PG&E says the probability of a bad deal happening at Diablo is so low you don’t need to worry about it. The NRC says that too. Guess what they were saying at Fukushima seven weeks ago?”

Shoreline Uncertainties

Illustration by Rachel Edelstein.

Diablo Canyon is marred by a troubling history of downplaying seismic hazards. PG&E initially denied the existence of a fault line near Diablo Canyon while applying for a construction permit in the mid-1960s, but the Hosgri Fault was discovered in 1969 after the construction was approved.

Then, in 1976, the NRC adopted figures from a seismic study conducted by the USGS that stated Diablo Canyon’s current design would not withstand the largest possible earthquake generated by the Hosgri Fault. PG&E protested, but eventually retrofitted their structures to withstand these new thresholds.

In 2006, the California legislature directed PG&E to conduct 3D seismic studies to address uncertainty about seismic hazards offshore from Diablo Canyon. PG&E denied this uncertainty, but in 2008 USGS seismologist Jeanne Hardebeck discovered the Shoreline Fault while working in collaboration with PG&E’s own long-term seismic study team. While the exact location of the Shoreline Fault is still undetermined, estimates place it less than a mile from the reactor.

PG&E spokesman Paul Flake said Diablo Canyon remains committed to seismic safety.

“PG&E has always been focused on safety, and at Diablo Canyon, seismic safety has always been priority number one,” Flake said. “That’s why we are continuing to conduct seismic studies, including 3D studies, to make sure that we have all the data that we need to keep the plant and our community safe.”

The Shoreline Fault is smaller than the Hosgri Fault, and projections made by PG&E seismologists place the greatest earthquake it is capable of producing at a magnitude of 6.5. By comparison, the Hosgri Fault is rated to produce a magnitude 7.5 earthquake.

Sen. Blakeslee, who grew up in the Central Coast area and holds a Ph.D. in earthquake studies from UC Santa Barbara, calls the seismic studies conducted by PG&E “woefully inadequate.” He authored the 2006 bill that called for PG&E to conduct offshore 3D studies prior to the discovery of the Shoreline Fault. He explains that while the Shoreline Fault is capable of producing a smaller earthquake than the Hosgri Fault, it is actually ground acceleration that matters for seismic safety.

“You might think of it in terms of ‘how loud is a thunder clap?’” Sen. Blakeslee said. “It’s due in part to how close you are to the lightning. You may have a magnitude 7.0 earthquake, but if you are 100 miles away versus two miles away, you will experience a dramatically different ground acceleration.”

Sen. Blakeslee says the Shoreline Fault is now understood to be the more threatening of the two.

“Because this newly discovered Shoreline Fault is closer to the facility than the Hosgri … it has the potential to create greater strong motion [for Diablo Canyon] even though it may produce a smaller earthquake,” Sen. Blakeslee said.

The 8.9 earthquake that Japan experienced on March 10 was four times greater than the 8.6 projected by Japanese seismologists. USGS seismologist Hardebeck said the reason projections indicated such a smaller earthquake was Japanese seismologists did not believe multiple segments of the fault line would rupture at the same time. Hardebeck said a much larger earthquake than is projected could occur at the Diablo Canyon site if a rupture starting on either the Shoreline or Hosgri Faults spread to the other.

“It seems entirely plausible that an earthquake could start along one of these faults [and] jump to the other and create a much larger earthquake,” she said.

PG&E said that the real issue for the Fukushima Daiichi plant was not the earthquake, but the tsunami that followed.

“A lot of people are understandably concerned because of what happened in Japan,” Flake said. “But there are major differences between Diablo and Fukushima. Diablo Canyon is located on a bluff 80 feet above sea level. The Fukushima plant is located less than 30 feet above sea level. I think not too many people are aware that the Fukushima plant was able to withstand the earthquake. What caused the problems for their cooling system was the tsunami, because it knocked out their emergency generators.”

Flake said that the threat of a wave large enough to knock out power to Diablo’s generators is very slim.

“At Diablo Canyon, both the power plant as well as our back-up generators are at about 80 feet above sea level, so they are very high.”

Sen. Blakeslee said, however, that the potential for increased ground motion as well as the possibility that an earthquake could jump from one fault to the next creates considerable concern.

“Such an earthquake would not only be larger than forecast, but much closer to the facility, which is really a deadly combination,” Sen. Blakeslee said.

“A Bad Idea”

Tensions have existed between Diablo Canyon and the residents of San Luis Obispo County since the mid 1960s, when PG&E announced it would begin construction of a nuclear power plant at the Diablo Canyon site. Between the early 1970s and mid 1980s, thousands were arrested for civil disobedience protesting the development and licensing of the Diablo Canyon plant.

The San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace was one of the first organized groups to take on the plant. Recognizing a need for legal opposition to Diablo Canyon, Mothers For Peace has been the legal intervener between the NRC and the residents of San Luis Obispo since 1973.

“When we first read that PG&E was going to build a nuclear power plant, we didn’t know what that was,” spokesperson Swanson said. “After we learned that there was no solution to nuclear waste and that the utility wasn’t responsible for it because the federal government agreed to take it off their hands, it didn’t take us too many Mothers for Peace meetings to decide [Diablo Canyon] was a bad idea.”

Since the Fukushima disaster, support for The Mothers For Peace has grown due to concerns about Diablo Canyon’s location along two fault lines, the Hosgri and Shoreline Faults, the latter of which very little is known. Swanson says that the day after the disaster in Japan, the group received many requests for more information about getting involved.

“As soon as the horror of Fukushima began to hit the news, the Mothers for Peace website and my personal email and phone were just flooded with people saying things like this: ‘I’ve watched you Mothers For Peace for years and I always thought you were a bunch of crazy ladies but now I see you’re right. How can I help?’ Literally thousands like that,” Swanson said, her eyes growing wide.

With so many people asking what they could do, The Mothers For Peace decided a public display of concern was in order. On April 16, approximately 300 people showed up at the Avila Beach Pier to call for a halt in the licensing process for all nuclear power plants under review by the NRC, and the decommission of Diablo Canyon.

“People came to us looking for leadership [and] in response, we organized the April 16 rally,” Swanson said.

Calling for a direct decommission of the plant is something that The Mothers for Peace has not done in years, Swanson said. However, the disaster in Japan has reignited their desire to see the plant closed down for good. Taking the microphone at the rally, Swanson led the protesters in an impassioned chant of “Shut it down! Shut it down!”

Swanson said this kind of public statement was a new experience.

“I am a retired fifth grade teacher,” she said, her face flushing. “I’ve never spoken that way in my life, but I am mad!”

Business As Usual

Because of safety concerns about the Shoreline fault, Sen. Blakeslee and Rep. Capps have been requesting the NRC halt its processing of PG&E’s license renewal application until offshore 3D seismic studies can be completed.

Congresswoman Capps’ press secretary Ashley Schapitl pointed out that Diablo Canyon’s current licenses won’t expire for over 10 years, while 3D studies will be completed within five.

“San Onofre nuclear power plant’s license expires sooner than Diablo Canyon’s and they haven’t even applied for re-licensing yet,” Schapitl said. “In [Congresswoman Capps’] view there is certainly enough time to pause the process until these studies are completed.”

The NRC contends that this is unnecessary.

“Seismic issues are not considered as a part of the license review process,” said NRC spokesperson Victor Dricks. “Seismic issues are looked at constantly as a condition of PG&E’s operating license … seismic concerns are too important to wait until license renewal.”

In response to public concern, PG&E sent a letter to the NRC on April 10 requesting that final decision be withheld on their license application until 3D seismic studies can be completed.

“PG&E heard the concerns of our community about what happened in Japan, and we are trying to be responsible in these times,” Flake said. “So far we haven’t received a response. I don’t know how they will respond, but that is our request.”

Dricks said the NRC currently has no intention of halting its review of Diablo Canyon. He maintains that any pressing seismic threats uncovered by the study can be taken care of by the existing safety procedures.

“If necessary, the plant would be required to make changes to ensure it could continue to operate safely,” Dricks said.

Katcho Achadjian, California assemblyman for San Luis Obispo, supports the NRC’s decision not to halt the re-licensing process.

“Moving forward [with re-licensing] doesn’t stop the 3D studies,” Assemblyman Achadjian said. “If the license is approved and the results of the study are not in [PG&E’s] favor, it will be dealt with.”

Despite expressing concerns about the plant’s safety, Assemblyman Achadjian said he is confident the NRC will protect the interests of the public.

“You’ve got to have faith in the higher authority,” Achadjian said.

Sen. Blakeslee does not share this faith in the NRC. On the contrary, he feels the NRC has proven time and time again they are willing to put the interests of the nuclear industry before the safety of the American public.

“I’ve become increasingly concerned the NRC is more interested in keeping reactors running than keeping the public safe,” Sen. Blakeslee said.

He also criticized the policy of the NRC to accept results from studies performed by the utility itself.

“When a regulator relies almost exclusively on information from the regulated entity it makes it difficult for the regulator to get independent, objective analysis, and that is what is needed on safety issues of this importance,” he said.

The Mothers for Peace are similarly dissatisfied with the actions of the NRC. Swanson said the NRC is not doing enough to learn from the Fukushima disaster and instead moving forward with re-licensing nuclear power plants across the nation before information from Japan can be collected and studied.

“We’re not asking for this out of the blue,” she said. “The NRC itself in 1979 self-proclaimed after Three Mile Island that they wouldn’t process any licenses for 18 months until they learned what the hey happened there.”

A Moral Obligation

Jane Swanson, spokesperson for the San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace, helped organize the rally at Avila Beach Pier. Photo by Morgan Grana.

Sitting on a bench after the April 16 rally on the Avila Beach Pier, Swanson is looking tired. The sun has been shining over San Luis Obispo, and she wipes a thin layer of perspiration off her forehead before continuing.

“Look at this grey hair,” she says, holding out a lock for inspection. “I started this work when I was in my 20s. Now I have [eight] grandchildren. I didn’t know it would take over my life, but it has.”

Some might say Swanson is fighting a losing battle. Despite the public concern surrounding seismic safety at Diablo Canyon, the NRC has made it clear they have no intention of delaying the re-licensing process. Instead, all statements made by the NRC in relation to Diablo Canyon confirm her accusations that they are conducting “business as usual.” The NRC has said many times they are confident in the ability of their oversight programs to protect against any currently unknown safety issues related to the Shoreline Fault.

The executive director for NRC operations said phase one of the agency’s post-Fukushima investigation into the nation’s 104 nuclear power plants has not identified “anything that requires immediate action,” in a statement made on April 28 at the agency’s headquarters in Rockville, Maryland.

Despite all this, Swanson refuses to give up.

“I’ve had people ask me, ‘If you don’t like Diablo so much why don’t you move away?” Swanson says, her face hardening as though preparing to take on an unseen foe.

“Because we are the only ones doing this work,” she continues. “If we move away, then PG&E and the NRC can do whatever they want. Without a legal intervener there would be no one to hold them accountable to federal law. It would be immoral to leave.”

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at Shaking up the Nuclear Debate

Phone calls, emails and protests were the name of the game.

This was the reaction locally and nationwide when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed shutting down all 14 state parks in Santa Cruz County and upwards of 220 of the 278 existing state parks in California. Locals of Santa Cruz and those affected across the state mounted a massive campaign to save state parks and won. Instead of following through with his proposed plan, however, the former governor cut hours and maintenance at state parks to appease his public.

Fast-forward to 2011, where the victory of two years ago is overshadowed by the ever-growing deficit in California. Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget, released in January of this year, reflects his need to spend less in order to shore up the entire state of California’s economy. What this means for the California State Park System is a cut of $22 million over the next two years — an 18 percent cutback of the overall general fund for state parks. The system expects closures of some parks at least, a huge loss for the advocates of 2009.

This funding crisis was not made any easier when last year, Proposition 21, which would have attached an $18 fee to all license registrations to be used to balance the budget for California’s state parks, failed to pass in the November 2010 elections. That money would have replaced the entire state’s budget allocated to the state park system, which could have been used elsewhere in the governor’s proposed budget, according to Roy Stearns, deputy director of communications for California state parks.

With the proposed cut taken into account, the state park system will have lost a total of 37 percent of its general fund since the 2007–2008 fiscal year budget. This has amounted to a staggering loss for the single largest destination in California — the state park system — which has a total of 75 million visitors yearly, almost outdoing Disneyland’s location in California 5-1.

Natural Bridges State Beach is just one of the 278 state parks in California at risk of future budget cuts. To prepare, many state parks are looking for other sources of funding to keep them open. Photo by Kyan Mahzouf.

Despite the advocacy efforts of organizations like Friends of Santa Cruz State Parks and the Santa Cruz State Park Foundation, gaps in funding have left the California and Santa Cruz State Park Systems with the difficult task of choosing what parks to keep open, cut availability to, or close completely. The California State Park System is not currently disclosing their estimates for how many state parks would close under the governor’s budget, but closures of any state parks, which are expected, will take a toll on local economies and preservation efforts.

Local non-profit Friends of Santa Cruz State Parks was at the forefront of the fight against Governor Schwarzenegger’s 2009 budget proposal. Executive director Bonny Hawley said now her organization tries to help fund local parks the state can no longer pay for.

“We’ve had to really try to fill in where we can,” Hawley said.

Even with help from Friends of Santa Cruz State Parks, which, according to their website, has provided $10 million in funding to Santa Cruz educational programs, visitors centers and exhibits over the past 30 years, some Santa Cruz state parks still have trouble staying open. Hawley’s office is located next door to the Santa Cruz Mission State Historic Park, which only remains open on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. They used to be open full-time.

Restrooms have also been partially closed in most of the local state parks and seasonal campgrounds remain closed for months longer than usual. Public accessibility has been cut dramatically, according to Hawley.

“The park used to be open a lot more to the public,” Hawley said.

Stearns said, Proposition 21 “would have fixed everything.”

Mision State Historic Park and Natural Bridges State Beach are two local examples of the many California state parks that are in danger of facing budget cuts. Photo by Kyan Mahzouf.

In Santa Cruz County, the proposition passed overwhelmingly by a 68.4 percent to 31.6 percent vote, but it failed across the state by a 57.3 percent to 42.7 percent vote.

“My personal opinion … is that people didn’t want to pass a vehicle license fee,” Stearns said. “That doesn’t mean they didn’t like parks, it means they didn’t like a vehicle license fee.”

But according to Hawley, there was a deeper issue that affected the vote.

“I think it had a lot more to do with trust in government,” Hawley said. “I think there were people who really didn’t believe that the money would go to state parks, that somehow the governor or the legislature would find a way to put the money into the general fund for other purposes, even though it was very well drafted and that wouldn’t have happened. I think people were suspicious, and the tough economy didn’t help.”

With the looming threat of closures, UC Santa Cruz environmental studies lecturer Brian Dowd-Uribe said his class, Environmental Interpretation, would be critically affected. Almost half of his students currently intern at state parks.

“Without these internships it would be hard for my class to succeed,” Dowd-Uribe said in an email. “The internship allows students to immediately put into practice concepts explored in the class. There just wouldn’t be enough internships elsewhere to make up this gap.”

To decide which state parks are going to close due to the governor’s budget, a team of the California State Park System’s experienced supervisors and managers have put together a comprehensive plan that is currently being reviewed by

Gov. Brown.

According to Stearns, deputy director of communications for California state parks, this team of supervisors and managers traveled to Sacramento earlier this year and spent weeks refining the methodology behind the proposed budget cuts.

“You have to balance so that what you leave open still serves the greatest number in the public,” Stearns said. “Not an easy choice.”

Stearns said that “a significant number” of parks would close if the proposed budget is not adjusted, which he is skeptical about since tax extensions did not make it onto this June’s ballot.

The team of supervisors and managers looked at the cost savings they had to make, and ran the numbers on how much a park makes in revenue, or how much the system saves by closing it. Other factors the team considered were specific state parks’ significance, visitation, existing partnerships and infrastructure. The information regarding which parks will close cannot be disclosed until the plan is released to the public in mid-May.

Dave Keck, landscape architect and project manager for the Big Basin General Plan, a long-term plan that is currently being drafted for Big Basin State Park, said that with the budget cuts and the wounded state of the park system, his team is trying to look at how they can obtain other funding through partnerships. He said he wanted “methods that we can achieve objectives for keeping parks open and still accommodating visitors.”

On March 26, Keck helped facilitate a meeting in which members of the public were open to comment on several different plan proposals.

“[Funding] is always the first question,” Keck said. “When you throw out ideas and want people’s feedback, the first question is always, ‘Well, where is the state going to get the money to do all this?’”

Instead of looking to the state for funding, Keck said that a lot of the funding Big Basin receives comes from bonds, which have funded improvements and updates for the park, its headquarters and its visitor’s center. Hopefully, Keck said, future bond partnerships will help implement the current General Plan. Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST) and Sempervirens Fund are two of the park’s current bond partners, which helped secure the territory of Little Basin acquired early this year.

What this means for Big Basin is their facilities have not been hit as hard as those that have difficulty securing funding through private bonds. Campers and rangers at Big Basin see little difference in the way the park has been run in the past.

Securing funding is exactly what the Big Basin General Plan does in effect, Keck said.

“[The Big Basin General Plan] is used as a tool to solicit funds, if anything, by others who have an interest in making the park better,” Keck said.

Natural Bridges State Beach is just one of the 278 state parks in California at risk of future budget cuts. To prepare, many state parks are looking for other sources of funding to keep them open. Photo by Kyan Mahzouf.

Realistically, Keck said, funding from either the state or private bonds and partnerships may not ever be available, but “when and if” it is, the General Plan also provides a framework for where to apply that money.

“I’ve worked on plans 30 years ago that still have things in them that have never been implemented,” Keck said. “This is not a master plan for development. Think of it more as a 20-year plan. It projects that far ahead.”

Keck expects that the draft of the General Plan will be finished by the end of the year, and open for public comment. By this time next year, Keck projects the plan will go to the State Park Commission for approval.

The Big Basin General Plan’s current alternative combines infrastructure development with preservation in order to keep revenue coming into Big Basin State Park, but also preserve the old-growth forest, Keck said.

“We’re trying to make improvements where we can, and reinforce the protection and preservation of the more significant natural and cultural resources, and things like the wilderness experience,” Keck said.

But Keck said this doesn’t come without anxiety from the public, who are concerned about the impact generating more activity will have on certain state park areas.

Mammoth Redwoods fill the Santa Cruz mountains and are an integral part of many state parks. Among these are the Henry Cowell, Wilder Ranch, and Big Basin State Parks. Photo by Kyan Mahzouf.

Development is a major threat to state parks in their current fund-deprived state, according to Sen. Lois Wolk (D-Davis).

It is the main reason why Sen.Wolk drafted SB580, a bill currently making its way through the Senate that would protect state parks from unwanted development.

Sen. Wolk said there is no clear, existing policy regarding development in and of California State Parks. SB580 is the “commonsense protection” that state parks need, according to the SB580 Fact Sheet, authored by Sen. Wolk and Sen. Christine Kehoe (D-San Diego).

Some of the major development threats in California include a proposed toll-road through San Onofre State Beach, a power-line through Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, and the building of a mega-dairy in Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park.

A similar Senate bill was passed in 2009 called SB679, also authored by Wolk, but was vetoed by Gov. Schwarzenegger when it reached his desk. Supervisor Mark Stone of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors said he hopes the reformed bill will pass this time.

The Santa Cruz Board of Supervisors, at the urging of supervisor Neal Coonerty, endorsed SB580 on April 5. Supervisor Stone of the fifth district, which includes Ben Lomond, Scotts Valley and parts of Boulder Creek, said endorsing the bill was a “no-brainer” for the board, and that the proposal moved straight to a vote with no discussion.

In a press release, supervisor Coonerty said, “SB580 ensures that our parks have a high bar for their protection … and these places belong to every resident of the state.”

SB580 is also sponsored by the California State Parks Foundation, and supported by organizations including the California League of Park Associations and the Central Coast Natural History Association.

Supervisor Stone said the concern is developers will prey on parks that have closed due to the budget cuts, and that generating revenue might become more important than preservation if the budget crisis gets worse.

Redwood at Big Basin State Park. Photo by Kyan Mahzouf.

“What we’re concerned about is that notion may come up and there might be pressure to just sell [the parks] to get some revenue, or allow developers to get in there and do things that we would later regret,” Stone said. “It’s to avoid temptation. If we can’t come back to them when times are better, that will be a real tragedy.”

Stone said he thinks the bill will hold on to the “status-quo” of park and that “developing state parks, which are meant to be natural” would be something the state park system would regret, and expressly the type of thing the bill would safeguard against.

Andy Schiffrin, analyst for supervisor Coonerty, said in an email, “As California continues to develop, preserving some of our natural assets both for their environmental values as well as for the enjoyment of our citizens, is of critical importance.”

But for Schiffrin, funding of the state parks and whether some will remain open or be closed is not the reason that SB580 is important.

“Certainly money is an important issue,” Schiffrin said. “However, some projects would be proposed in state parks irrespective of the financial realities.”

Hawley of Friends of Santa Cruz State Parks said that SB580 would be advanced regardless of the budget.

“[Regarding funding], I think [the bill] would still be important because as populations increase and development pressures increase, it’s important that there is that kind of protection in place for state parks,” Hawley said.

Dowd-Uribe said he also hopes state parks are protected because of the learning opportunities that state parks provide to students.

“Literally hundreds of K–12 classes visit state parks over the course of the year in Santa Cruz County alone,” Dowd-Uribe said. “These visits are often … the only chance students get to directly learn about the environment. State parks play a key role in the environmental education of our youth. Park closures would end these critically important programs.”

Sunset at Natural Bridges State Park. Photo by Kyan Mazouf.

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at California State Parks Face Dire Decisions

“It is our duty to fight for our people. It is our duty to win. We must love and protect each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

Three times over, the hundreds of admitted UC Santa Cruz students, led onstage by alumna Eden Jequinto, echoed these words of Assata Shakur — a Black Panther fugitive and African-American rights activist — in unified chant.

The high school seniors, a mix of Latinos, African-Americans and Asian-Americans/Pacific Islanders, each had similar stories to tell: mothers who worked multiple jobs at late hours, bad neighborhoods on the wrong side of town, growing up among thugs and gangsters. Many, if not all in attendance, would be the first in their family to even consider going to college.

Jequinto is no exception. Growing up in La Puente, Calif., Jequinto said she experienced a lot of hardship as a gay Filipino woman. She watched her drunken father turn on her mother, members of her family succumb to alcohol-induced dementia and die, and at the age of eight, she began drinking. Throughout high school, Jequinto said she hated herself for being homophobic but also gay. She said the people like herself and those in the audience that evening were not victims, but survivors.

High school Seniors from troubled areas and low-resource homes are brought to UCSC to convince them to advance their education. Photo by Nick Paris.

“Remember your reason to be here,” Jequinto said. “Is it your mom who works two [or] three jobs, coming home exhausted at night to your five brothers and sisters? Is it that one teacher who finally gave a shit about you and treated you like a human being? Is it your sister, your pops? Whatever it may be, remember it, and remember the thousands of your black and brown brothers and sisters who could not be here tonight with you.”

What followed next was a proud and defiant roar — a symbolic reflection of the adversity with diversity on UC campuses — thundering and rolling its way out of the College Nine and Ten multipurpose room into the cool night air.

Across the entire UC system, various programs, initiatives and organizations are in place to encourage and support first-generation college-bound students with low-resource and low-income backgrounds to strive for higher education. Programs like the Blue and Gold Opportunity Plan, which assists low-income students with college expenses, and Educational Opportunity Programs (EOP), which connect students with a variety of academic and personal support programs, have had measurable success in this regard.

“I myself was the first in my family to go to college,” UCSC Chancellor George Blumenthal said to the crowd. “I also know the incredible pride in seeing my kids off to college. To the students that come here, we are dedicated to your success.”

But a student’s retention is dependent on more than just dollars and tutors. Establishing a sense of community — culturally, ethnically and socially — is just as critical. In this way, broad, systemwide programs can fail to provide the localized, tailored support that students need. The promotion of an ethnically diversified campus student body in a university system that has historically been predominantly white necessitates resource centers for outreach and retention.

“Students of color go to where they see the support,” said Carolyn Dunn, UCSC Ethnic Resource Center director. “A lot of these kids coming out of their communities are put into cultural isolation. But our funding could disappear next year and we’d be facing significant losses. Our budget is really tiny as it is. We won’t know how bad the damage is until we hear from the vice chancellor.”

The prospects of finding funds to support more localized programs have become strained since the $500 million budget cuts were handed down by the state to the UC system. To that end, the role that these localized ethnic resource programs play, invaluable to many, has become increasingly restrained.

Illustration by Matt Boblet.

One such resource center at UCSC is the Engaging Education Student-Initiated Outreach and Retention Center, which connects underprivileged high school students with college counseling, builds communities and establishes cross-cultural networks among UCSC students. In addition, it provides a means for educating students about empowerment, social justice and student activism.

“We look to help provide students the opportunity to come get a university education,” said Engaging Education co-chair Yesenia Ramos. “Our programs help students build connections to help with the transition from high school. Students who come in knowing people are more prone to staying. Our outreach programs target students from all over California — Pasadena, Berkeley, the Bay Area — who may come from families with low incomes, or be the first and only member of their family to go to college.”

Engaging Education, headquartered above the Bicycle Co-op in Quarry Plaza, is a support system designed and led by students, for students. As a way of addressing the low rates of recruitment, retention and graduation from historically underrepresented and under-resourced communities, Engaging Education serves an integral function in promoting a more culturally and ethnically diverse campus community.

Founded in 2003, Engaging Education, in conjunction with the Ethnic Resource Centers and the Ethnic Student Organization Council, sought to create a “safe space” for students of color and the continuation of student outreach. Until then, there had not been an establishment of a student-led organization to address the numerous racially motivated incidents on campus.

UCSC’s clashes between students and the administration over diversification stretches as far back as 1969, when students of color seized control over the first graduation ceremony, saying they were frustrated over being discriminated against and marginalized. Even after Engaging Education was formed, hate crimes, including the drawings of nooses and swastikas in bathrooms across campus, continue to happen.

However, thanks largely to outreach programs like the ones supported by Engaging Education, UCSC is beginning to see a significant increase in African-American, Asian-American/Pacific Islander and Latino undergraduate enrollment.

Of the roughly 3,500 freshmen admitted into UCSC for fall 2011, 3.2 percent were African-American, 30.3 percent Asian-American/Pacific Islander, and 25.5 percent Latino, higher rates than in previous years. In particular, the campus has seen a significant jump in its Latino enrollment — in 2000 by comparison, only 13.8 percent of students admitted were Latino.

Engaging Education’s retention programs have also yielded higher averages than that of the university itself — one such program, the Community Unified Student Network, a peer program designed to help connect and support Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders communally and academically, boasts a 92 percent first-year retention rate, compared to the campus’ 86 percent.

“The program is one of my favorite things about the campus. The enthusiasm shown, the drive of its staff — it’s truly a student program and its really great,” Chancellor Blumenthal said. “Together with the efforts of the university, we’ve made great progress on diversity.”

Engaging Education co-chair Ramos, a fourth-year politics and feminist studies double major, was influenced by Engaging Education’s outreach programs in 2007, which ultimately swayed her into coming to the university.

“I would never have thought about coming here were it not for UCSC’s [outreach] programs,” Ramos said. “None of my cousins went on to higher education, and — being a woman — it has been very hard and very interesting here. These programs are about understanding different cultural needs — not every person and every community is the same. [The programs] are very valuable and needed.”

Ethnic disparities in higher education are not just a problem for the UC system, however. Of the 1,563,069 bachelor’s degrees awarded in 2008 in the United States, 9.8 percent of them went to African-Americans, 7.9 percent to Latinos, and 7 percent to Asian-Americans/Pacific-Islanders, compared to the 71.8 percent awarded to white students, according to the National Center for Education Statistics — a statistic that has only marginally changed over the past 10 years.

Illustration by Matt Boblet.

The state of California in particular has had an ongoing struggle with maintaining a diverse campus community in its post-secondary education institutions. California’s population of over 33.8 million is 44.4 percent white, 34.9 percent Latino, 12.3 percent Asian-American/Pacific Islander, and 6.4 percent African-American, according to the State Department of Finance’s survey. Starkly contrasting that figure was UCSC’s enrolled undergraduate ethnic breakdown in the fall 2009 quarter, during which 48 percent of students were white, 17.3 percent were Latino, 16 percent Asian-American/Pacific Islander, and 2.8 percent African-American.

In 1978, in reaction to the California Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action, then-UC president David Saxon mandated the campuses to reflect or “approximate” the racial and ethnic composition of the state’s graduating high school seniors. Since then, the UC system as a whole has failed to match that standard. The UC’s enrolled undergraduate ethnic breakdown in the fall 2009 quarter was 3.4 percent African-American, 26 percent Asian-American/Pacific Islander, and 15.3 percent Latino.

People of color continue to be underrepresented in higher education, while being overrepresented in the state’s poverty (22 percent of all American Indians in California earn incomes below the federal poverty line), incarceration (29 percent of all prisoners in California prisons are African-American), and high school dropout rates (44 percent of Latinos over the age of 25 have less than a high school diploma).

UCSC second-year Nwadiuto Amajoyi, born in Nigeria and one of five siblings, serves on Engaging Education’s Student-Initiated Outreach (SIO) board of directors. Amajoyi said the UC needs to adopt a new educational paradigm, one with a more interactive space, highlighting the present ethnic disparities at UCSC.

“UCSC is one of the whitest UCs in the system — one of the least diverse, certainly,” Amajoyi said. “When I give tours to incoming students — African-American/black, Latino, whomever — I make a point to alert them of the campus climate. I don’t want them to say things like, ‘I feel like you guys lied to me.’”

Amajoyi said the university has long misconstrued its interpretation of diversity.

“The administration interprets ‘diversity’ as diversity of perspective,” Amajoyi said. “But I would have them consider diversity of ethnicity and race as well. If it did this, diversity of perspective will naturally follow.”

Student regent-designate Alfredo Mireles said that part of the problem is the public’s perception of the UC system. The son of a hardworking mother and formerly undocumented migrant father from Mexico, Mireles said he understands the idea that a university education might appear unfeasible, if only because of its cost.

“The biggest myth about the UC system I’d like to push back is the notion that the universities are only for wealthy, elitist, white males,” Mireles said. “Most other schools are nowhere close to how well we accommodate the underprivileged — we stand head and shoulders above most other public schools.”

Mireles also said he was pleased with the UC’s capacity for providing more aid to more students in need than Ivy League institutions do. In 2004, then–Harvard president Lawrence Summers indicated that three-fourths of the students at Ivy Leagues come from the top income quartile, and only 9 percent from the bottom two quartiles combined. While Ivy Leagues may be able to completely fund their economically disadvantaged students’ education, they accept dramatically fewer students who qualify for such aid, in comparison to the UC.

The percentage of students at Harvard and Princeton who receive Federal Pell Grants is 8.4 percent and 8.5 percent, respectively, and comparably, 38.1 percent of UCLA’s students receive Pell Grant aid, according to the Education Trust. UC Berkeley and UC Davis both provide more student aid in Pell Grants than the entire Ivy League system combined.

Leading the UC’s mission to assist students with low-income backgrounds is the university’s Blue and Gold Opportunity Plan. Approved in 2009, the plan established assistance for undergraduates with financial need and household incomes below the state median of $60,000 — now $80,000 — per year. At minimum, the plan makes up the difference from federal aid to help eligible students completely cover their UC fees. With the threshold set at the state’s median income, this potentially enables half of California’s population to have their systemwide fees covered. This qualifies more than half of California’s Pacific Islander,

African-American, American Indian, and Latino population, according to median household incomes listed in the 2000 Census.

But such successes may prove to be a double-edged sword for outreach and retention efforts like those of Engaging Education. With the $500 million in budget cuts that were handed down to the UC by the state and with more on the horizon, the ability to continue funding these programs grows increasingly difficult. Paulina Raygoza, the organizing director of Engaging Education, said that while its outreach programs may have a secure source of funding, its capacity to conduct outreach to the state youth has become increasingly limited.

“Our state funding is used as a political bargaining chip,” Raygoza said. “At one point we had $81,000 from the state — now we receive less than half of that. It’s a sort of ‘we’ll give you the money if you do this’ kind of thing.”

Presently, a $5 student-approved campus fee helps fund the six UCSC Ethnic Resource Centers as well as the SIO programs — $3 to the resource centers, $1 to CARE Council, and $1 to SIO. The SIO programs, a subset of Engaging Education, attract promised funding from the Chancellor’s office each year, an amount which used to be $2 for every dollar students pay (last year the Chancellor’s funds dropped to $1.75 for every dollar paid).

As one of the campus’s strongest and most effective means of reaching out to the state, Engaging Education’s SIO programs are critical to the continued diversification of the student body. Yet with the economy in the state that it’s in and steeper cuts being handed down by the UC administration, getting high school students to and from their communities to familiarize themselves with the campus becomes increasingly expensive.

“Prices went up this year due to the budget cuts and the economy,” SIO director Amajoyi said. “We need to transport students from all across the state by bus and plane. This year, our plane tickets cost $500 more than last [year].”

Cuts made to the state’s K–12 education have also forced additional responsibilities onto SIO.

“Because of the budget cuts, a lot of the K–12 schools are not doing enough college prep work simply because they are unable to,” Engaging Education director Raygoza said. “What can we do to help fill that role? We have to think about the educational barriers that affect high school youths.”

The university’s cutting of funding to its community studies and American studies majors also is seen by some as indirectly undermining the efforts made by outreach and retention programs. Amajoyi said that cuts like this discourage African-American, Latino and Asian-American enrollment.

“These classes [that get cut] reflect the histories of our communities that would otherwise be told from a Eurocentric perspective,” Amajoyi said. “Think about it: coming out of high school, you might know a little of black history — Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, slavery and a bunch of dead white presidents — but what do you know of Chicano history? Of Asian-Americans’?”

Ethnic Resource Center director Dunn said many of the students she works with major in the studies that get cut.

“We used to see quite a few community studies majors before it was cut,” Dunn said. “Now a significant majority are American studies majors or Latin American and Latino studies majors. We’re concerned with who is next. Feminist studies? LALS?”

To compensate, Engaging Education also allocates funds to teach their own five-unit courses at UC

SC. The student-led courses seek to engage UCSC students in a comfortable setting with histories and stories they may be unfamiliar with.

“The classes themselves are student-run and serve as more of a dialogue space than your standard lecture,” Raygoza said. “Everyone is their own teacher, bringing in their own stories. The class focuses more on our ethnic identities and the struggles and our ability to create change.”

Canvases painted by high school students involved in the Student Initiate Outreach program. The canvases are meant to inspire members of the students’ communities back home. Photos by Nick Paris.

In conjunction with other student staff at Engaging Education, Raygoza said that the five-unit winter and spring quarter class could not replace the absence of two entire departments.

Student regent-designate Mireles said he would do everything he could to support programs like Engaging Education, and is already lobbying for Chancellor Blumenthal to continue his promise to match SIO’s fundraising.

“I think it’s a tragedy that [the American studies and community studies] majors were cut,” Mireles said. “But the decisions made under the budgetary constraints are not about targeting any one group — the entire UC will have to reevaluate every program. It’s really all about the ability to procure external funding. But I see the importance in having Engaging Education

— for these high school kids to see students with similar backgrounds flourishing in college, it makes a world of difference.”

Closing her speech onstage, UCSC alumna Jequinto had the hundreds of admitted UCSC students abuzz with excitement over their futures at the university. Turning away from the crowd, she looked straight down and to the left, where Chancellor Blumenthal sat, and addressed him directly.

“We are ready to fight to maintain funding for programs like this, Chancellor Blumenthal,” Jequinto said. “You’ve got to trust us, you’ve got to let us do our thing, because we know what we’re doing here — I give you my word. Where I stand, there are thousands more like me ready to fight for them.”

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at The Adversity of Diversity

Mandatory 40 percent water rationing. Hotel closures. Water lines shut off when consumption exceeds the limit. Businesses reliant on tourism struggling to make it through the summer months — their most lucrative time.

The City of Santa Cruz Water Department (SCWD) foresees this future if no alternative water source is integrated to forestall what it characterizes as “catasrophic” potential impacts of compounded drought years.

“The consequences of doing nothing are dire. I don’t think people understand how bad it could be,” said SCWD water director Bill Kocher.

The SCWD has spent two decades examining how to mitigate the impact of compounded drought years. After determining roughly 30 various projects to be insufficient or nonviable, SCWD concluded that bringing a desalination plant to Santa Cruz to cover the gap during drought years was the only way to prevent dramatic consequences of critical droughts.

“Desalination is the best alternative,” said public outreach coordinator Melanie Schumacher. “We have been looking at alternatives, but they have to meet the water needs of the community.”

Four-minute showers. City government invests in providing lawn replacement for Santa Cruz homes and equipping them with rain catchment devices. Instruments to support greywater reclamation — the process of recycling wastewater generated from laundry, dishwashing and bathing for landscaping and irrigation usage — become a popular feature in Santa Cruz homes.

Proponents of desalination alternatives envision this future for Santa Cruz — a future where no new water source is needed, due to a capitalization on further conservation measures.

“Money is just a tool, and we could use this tool to conserve and live within our means rather than bringing in the desalination plant,” said Ellen Murtha, co-chair of the Santa Cruz branch of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), which is pro-conservation.

Numerous individuals in the Santa Cruz community are mobilizing against the potential introduction of the plant, saying that such a drastic step to ensure water provision is unnecessary, because conservation and curtailment efforts could be expanded, and the potential unknown ramifications of bringing in such a facility.

“There are some major environmental impacts,” said Rick Longinotti, cofounder of Desalination Alternatives. “It uses a lot of energy … it is a guess as to the impact on the ocean, it is just not clear how much of an impact it will have.”

This has been the bone of contention between the two fronts, as proponents argue that desalination is the only alternative and it is environmentally sound, and opponents argue that conservation efforts have not been capitalized on and the plant would bring negative environmental implications.

This contentious engagement was typified at last week’s debate forum, hosted by the League of Women Voters at the First Congregational Church on April 14, where the opponents and proponents of the desalination plant were able to engage in direct dialogue in front of the people of Santa Cruz for the first time.

The debate forum included two individuals each from the Santa Cruz and Soquel Creek Water District and Santa Cruz Desal Alternatives, representing the opponent and proponent sides to the issue, respectively.

Longinotti, co-founder of Desal Alternatives, and James Bentley, retired city water production manager, represented the opposing side. Mike Rotkin, former mayor and city council member, and Toby Goddard, SCWD water conservation manager, represented the proponents of desalination. More than 100 members of the community attended last Thursday’s meeting to express their investment in the future of Santa Cruz’s water supply.

“It is important for the community to understand the need for desalination,” Schumacher said. “It creates a level of transparency. I think that the agencies are being responsible in the way that they are pursuing the desalination plant and I hope that we are presenting that to the public — that this is not a silver bullet solution [and] we are continuing to evaluate and address concerns about the short and long term water supply.”

Illustration by Louise Leong.

The Logistics of Water Storage

SCWD serves a population of 98,000 people. The city’s source of water consists mainly of the San Lorenzo River, various North Coast diversions, a few wells and Loch Lomond Reservoir. Currently, Santa Cruz’s water supply consists of 95 percent surface water and only 5 percent groundwater, making Santa Cruz particularly susceptible to periods of drought.

Due to low annual runoff, during periods of drought Loch Lomond Lake Reservoir becomes Santa Cruz’s only source of fresh drinking water, which poses a problem — it isn’t enough.

“We can’t bring water from anywhere else,” Kocher said. “When we run out, we run out.”

The city has been grappling with this looming threat for two decades. The Santa Cruz City Council began evaluating alternative new water source options specifically for provision in periods of drought back in 1997.

In order to ensure that Santa Cruz will have the infrastructure to withstand compounded years of drought, SCWD has undertaken the more than two decade-long project of identifying possible new sources of water. After determining new source after new source nonviable, desalination eventually became the only remaining possible new source for water left on the district’s drawing board.

“I’m convinced that we need some kind of additional supply, and as one project after another fell by the wayside, this is what we have left,” said Terry McKinney, SCWD superintendent of water production.

The desalination process involves converting seawater to potable water, or drinking water. Sodium is removed through a process of reverse osmosis, whereby the water is separated into two parts: the freshwater and the high-sodium concentrate, brine.

WILPF co-chair Murtha said that this two-decade-long investment by the city may be more of a motivation for the SCWD pushing forward with the desalination plant than the plant’s necessity.

“A lot of it is this investment they have — it is very hard to slow that down,” Murtha said. “There must be something very exciting about making a plant.”

In 2005, the city of Santa Cruz Integrated Water Plan (IWP) was developed and utilized. The IWP took into account background evaluations on water demand, conservation, curtailment and alternative water supplies, assessed from 1997 up to the plan’s inception. The plan included a background on the status of water demand, consumption and provision, and looked toward new sources of water supply. The IWP recorded the two decade-long process of examining the viability of various potential resources.

“The IWP first of all looked at conservation, then looked at how much more could be curtailed, then came up with supply plans that could make up the difference,” Kocher said.

Before the 1990s, SCWD knew surface water was always going to be the district’s primary source of water. In 1989, Luhdorff & Scalmanini, an environmental consulting firm employed by SCWD, concluded that groundwater sources were scant at best. The firm investigated potential groundwater sources, including wells at both Harvey West Park and Thurber Lane, and assessed that they could yield only 550 acre-feet of water annually, an inadequate amount considering SCWD annual water production hovers around four billion gallons a year.

In the early 1990s, the Brackish Groundwater Wells Project was considered the most viable groundwater option, but residents in the site area were concerned that the pumping could eventually negatively impact their wells. As a result, the city abandoned the project.

Waterman Gap Reservoir, Kings Creek Reservoir, Yellow Bank Creek Reservoir and Loch Lomond enlargement were four surface storage projects on the table, but the city determined these alternatives were not viable due to the fact that an immediate source of water is needed and such projects would be too lengthy an undertaking.

By 1997, only two projects remained on the drawing board: Reclamation/Coast Groundwater Exchange and Desalination.

Reclamation/Coast Groundwater Exchange would have been a two-part construction undertaking. One part of the project would have been a four-to-five million gallon per day wastewater treatment plant, located either on the existing wastewater treatment plant site or another location. Treated water would be delivered to area farmers for irrigation, and the city would have access to farmers’ current groundwater supplies. The second part of the project would therefore involve the wells and associated facilities necessary to extract this groundwater.

This alternative also faced obstacles. In a 2009 letter to SCWD water director Kocher that was cited in the IWP, Jonathan Steinberg of Route 1 Farms said using reclaimed water and turning over his well were not an option.

“Our customers expect the very best, very purest produce — I cannot in good faith give them produce grown in wastewater,” Steinberg wrote. “I also have concerns regarding giving up the autonomy of my water supply … I am in no way shape or form, interested in reclaimed wastewater being used in my farming operation nor am I interested in signing over my well to the city.”

Larry Jacobs, CEO of Jacobs Farm, echoed similar sentiments in a 2002 letter to Kocher, also cited in the IWP. Jacobs said he supports using reclaimed water, just not its use in growing food.

“We are in favor of recycling reclaimed water on golf courses, car washing, commercial landscaping, and home landscaping,” Jacobs said, “but not on plants grown for food, and especially [not] on plants that are eaten uncooked.”

Illustration by Louise Leong.

What Could Be

According to the evaluations of water demand in Santa Cruz listed in the IWP, SCWD said that Santa Cruz’s current demand for water “exceeds the estimated available yield from its existing sources during drought conditions, even with mandatory curtailment requirements.”

The city conducted the Water Curtailment Study (WCS) in 2001, which is cited in the IWP, to better understand how customers would reach usage restrictions and how such actions would impact agriculture, business and resident customers.

The WCS analyzed six levels of water shortage severity, ranging from 10 to 60 percent shortages, and assessed the impacts of necessary curtailment on the three prioritized types of usage, health and safety, business and irrigation.

According to the results of the study, households issued a 40 percent system shortage would have “serious” implications “with important lifestyle changes.” Catastrophic shortages, however, where households would be issued 50 to 60 percent system shortages, would result in residents’ concern for daily water usage reaching “an unparalleled level.” The IWP stated that this level of shortage “would also impose major and burdensome lifestyle changes, some of which could well affect basic health and safety.”

A 50 percent systemwide shortage would result in 30 percent annual revenue shortages, which would be “catastrophic,” with hotel and motel closures. In the business sector during an extreme drought where residents would have to cut water usage by 42 percent, businesses would have to cut usage by 50 percent and irrigation would be eliminated.

“The economy in Santa Cruz that depends on water would shut down, and the tourist industry would all be out of business,” said SCWD water director Kocher.

Chirag Mehda, general manager of the Comfort Inn on Plymouth Street, corroborated the conclusions in the IWP, saying that for his inn, 40 percent rationing would impede business.

“It definitely would affect the business, because customers need to shower and use the pool and spa. They might not stay,” Mehda said. “I would fear that I would go out of business. The economy is already not good, [so] if that happened it would make it worse.”

Desalination

In both operating and constructing the desalination plant, the SCWD has proposed and moved forward with partnering with Soquel Creek Water District (SqCWD). The city will be partnering with Soquel to lessen the fiscal burden of undertaking such a project, and to maximize each entity’s attributes.

“It would be good to have a money partner. We have tried to partner with Soquel to have a way to exchange with each other,” said Terry Tompkins, deputy director/operations manager of Graham Hill Road Treatment Plant. “It would be good to have a partner that has ground water supply, and vice versa.”

According to the IWP figures drafted in June 2003, desalination funded by the city would be a $77 million undertaking. At that point, if responsibility of funding the plant falls on residents, it would be $7.32 per month. If SCWD partners with Soquel Creek, the project would be a $40 million undertaking and cost $3.84 per customer per month. However new estimates place the cost of the desalination plant over $100 million.

For opponents of desalination, these million dollar figures are cause for alarm.

“The potential cost is going to be a burden, not just for us, but for generations to come,” said WILPF co-chair Murtha. “This is a city that does not have a lot of money.”

The construction cost would be split between agencies. Santa Cruz Water Department would pay 59 percent of the construction cost, and Soquel Creek Water District would pay 41 percent. Operational costs would be split 50-50.

Where the funding for the desalination plant will come from is still to be determined. Both SCWD and Soquel Water District are pursuing grants, but the project will likely become a bond measure reliant on rate increases.

“This thing is for the public and will be owned by the public,” Kocher said. “We shouldn’t be doing stuff the public is concerned about if we don’t have good answers. This has to be paid for by the people — if the voters want to put it on the ballot and shoot it down, sometimes they get it right and sometimes they get it wrong. I am advocating for continuing to research ­— it is my duty and job — but it is not my job to convince voters.”

There are four main concerns both agencies must mitigate with desalination — impingement on the intakes, proper disposal of the brine leftover, city population growth and the amount of energy desalination requires.

Kocher said that by managing the intake velocity to compliment the natural velocity of the surrounding waves and utilizing a small screen size, the threat of impingement is all but eliminated.

The treatment process — separating saline water into treated fresh water and a high saline concentrate (brine) though reverse osmosis — requires a significant amount of energy. Where current methods of water production require 2-4 kilowatt hours per thousand gallons of water, desalination requires 12-16 kilowatt hours per thousand gallons.

Even in years of drought, the plant would only be used 180 to 200 days out of the year. Kocher said the infrequency of use alleviates the issue of energy consumption.

The concentrate left over from the process will be sent back to the ocean after being mixed with the treated wastewater, effluent, from the water treatment plant. Currently, Santa Cruz’s effluent is sent back to the ocean. The treated wastewater sent back to the ocean is essentially freshwater, so mixing the effluent with the brine is closer to the natural salinity levels in the ocean.

“The freshwater and brine mixture would actually be an enhancement,” Kocher said. “Everything is a trade, but I think it can be mitigated better in the ocean than in our current usage. This one seems to have the best chance to meet our needs in an environmentally responsible way.”

For some in the Santa Cruz community, despite the SCWD’s statements that the environmental impacts can be successfully mitigated, the integration of a plant that would require triple the energy to produce the same quantity of water and would tamper with the marine sanctuary would be an affront to the values of the community.

“I think [the SCWD] is not giving us enough credit,” Murtha said. “We are a community that really cares about the environment. This desal plant would make us hypocrites. I mean, if I ride my bike to work, I am still contributing to the desal plant.”

Environmental concerns continue to be a sticking point with community members. At the debate forum last week, this sentiment was echoed by the opponents of desalination and audience members alike when cheers erupted after speakers brought up the potential environmental impacts of the desalination plant.

Opponents of desalination have also consistently argued the SCWD has not capitalized on conservation efforts, and this point was not omitted from the debate. The opponents said the city, rather than investing millions into the desalination plant, should allocate those funds to further conservation efforts, among them composting toilets.

Upon the proponents of desalination’s response that such conservation efforts would not come to fruition, audience members shouted simultaneously: “I’ll take one!”

Longinotti pointed out that until the SCWD exhausts all conservation efforts, their assertion that desalination is not “a silver bullet” solution but the only remaining alternative is contradictory.

“If you value desalination as a last resort, please have your spending priorities reflect that,” Longinotti said.

Mike Rotkin, former mayor and city council member, countered that to depend on conservation as a method of water supply insurance is “irresponsible planning.”

“Conservation [alone] cannot do it,” Rotkin said. “Emotionally I am opposed to desalination, but we have reached a point where we don’t have any other alternatives.”

Contributing to skepticism of conservation as a solution is the degree to which Santa Cruzans already conserve. City residents use 66 gallons of water per person per day — compared to the 150 gallons used per person per day statewide — the lowest per capita use in California.

Bentley and Longinotti, representatives in the April 14 debate of those opposed to desalination, commended the district for their efforts to engage with the public and their conservation efforts up to the present. Bentley asserted that despite dissent and skepticism mounting around the desalination plant in particular, he still believes “the city will take care of us.”

Opponents of desalination argued that the environmental implications of the desalination plant outweigh the difficulties that would come from relying on conservation efforts to solve a water shortage crisis.

“Nature has its limits, and we are going to have to live within them,” Longinotti said during the debate forum. “If it is a tradeoff between our needs of today and our grandchildren, then it is no contest.”

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at Critical Time for Water

Live murals, good food and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros fill up the common room, as friends and strangers meet for the Chavez Art Show. This is the Cesar Chavez Co-op, where UC Santa Cruz and Cabrillo College students have been living for nearly 20 years.

Chavez is a housing cooperative in which residents share rent, eat meals together, and are responsible for upkeep of the house. One of the biggest in Santa Cruz, Chavez holds close to 30 members.

Events like Chavez’s Art Show used to be a lot more common, says UCSC third-year Chavez resident, Nick Golden.

Neighbor relations, zoning problems, debt and a fire in 2005 all affected planned events and membership at Chavez. But Golden says that Chavez is making a comeback.

“We’re definitely on the up right now, which is really exciting to see,” he said. “We’re still working out some kinks with getting the house back on track in

The walls of Chavez are regularly updated with artwork. The largest co-op in Santa Cruz, its spaces are canvases for many student artists. Photo by Prescott Watson.

terms of work shifts and making sure people do them, and getting it into a fully functioning co-op, but it’s so much better than it’s been in the past.”

Housing co-ops are nothing new. The first housing cooperatives in the United States popped up in New York City in the late 1800s, initially serving the upper class. Eventually they became widely populated by union workers who didn’t want to live in the slums.

Since then, cooperatives have become a popular option for college students. Housing cooperatives have grown to over a million units across the country, according to the National Cooperative Business Association (NCBA). NCBA is a resource for cooperatives of all types, such as food, credit unions, agricultural, business and housing.

Currently, UC Berkeley has one of the largest network of student co-ops, with 17 houses and 1,300 students in the Berkeley Student Cooperative. Their network is solely focused on students, while most in Santa Cruz are open to anyone, including non-students.

Heidi Lieben piles cover crop in Food Not Lawns’ backyard greenhouse. Photo by Prescott Watson

Morgan Harris of the Food Not Lawns co-op off of Mission Street, said there are a lot of benefits for students living in cooperatives.

“As we move off to college we tend to go through this extremely individualistic and often isolationist kind of phase, so the value of co-ops is that it gives you sort of this family to connect back with,” Harris said. “It may not be as deep as your blood family, of course, but in terms of a place for you to grow and love, you really can get that community and get grounded.”

Chavez and Zami! on Laurel Street are two of the largest co-ops in Santa Cruz. They’re sister houses, meaning they make up an organization called the Santa Cruz Student Housing Cooperative (SCSHC), colliqually known as “Chazam.” They work together on projects, from building chicken coops to writing co-op cookbooks, and they also share a lease with a the North American Students of Cooperation (NASCO).

NASCO, founded in 1968, is an organization that helps educate co-ops across the country. It holds an annual conference, the NASCO Institute, where it tackles common issues with co-ops. Part of the company, NASCO Properties, also holds leases, and is working with Chazam to get its debt paid off and come back to its master lease. This is instead of the individual leases it has now, which provide a little more security for NASCO.

While individual leases give NASCO more financial security, NASCO is committed to helping Chazam get back on their feet, and gain more local control with a master lease,

Illustration by Bela Messex.

Daniel Miller, NASCO’s director of development and property services, said that NASCO is there to help.

“The whole idea behind NASCO Properties is to help the local co-op get the tools they need to run their co-op,” he said in an email. “We try to help them understand the process of starting a new non-profit, doing outreach to find new members in their community and running their co-op legally and responsibly.”

Other cooperatives in Santa Cruz either own their house, or have worked out a situation with their landlord to allow a cooperative to exist. Food Not Lawns is one such co-op.

Ducks quack and chickens cluck behind recent UCSC alumnus Harris, who sits on a wooden bench in the garden behind Food Not Lawns. Holding a cup of tea, Harris said a love of sustainability and farming unites them.

“We are here to learn how to garden and to learn how to live sustainably,” he said. “We’re fortunate, we’re blessed enough to have this space where we can do that, [in which] we can work in and play.”

The front lawn of the house, which sprouts off between Mission and Laurel, was completely dug up a few years ago and replaced with vegetables. In the back garden, greenhouses were installed and rows of lettuce, flowers and other plants grow. Food Not Lawns was founded by a group of UCSC students who had met at Pica, a green sustainability program based out of UCSC’s The Village.

Harris, who has been a member for a year and a half, will be teaching a Free Skool course this year, along with two of his housemates.

Free Skool, a community-driven education system loosely organized by residents of Santa Cruz, is all about free learning for anyone who wants it, by whoever wants to teach it.

“[As a co-op] we are teaching a lot of classes this quarter,” Harris said. “One’s about agroecology, horticulture and backyard composting, and then there are other fun ones that we do.”

Food Not Lawns has between eight and 10 members, and only half are students. Harris said personal history and education are not necessarily relevant to living in a co-op.

“We just want passionate people who want to learn more about this kind of lifestyle,” he said. “They just have to have a willingness to learn and be an open communicator, someone who wants to be part of a community.”

A death in the house, combined with zoning issues and member turnover, has brought down membership at Zami!.

Caity Fares sits on an old couch on the Zami! Patio. As music floats out of the house and holiday lights rest above, Fares remembers how they recovered.

November Skye, a Zami! resident, keeps his eyes on the co-op’s cats in the kitchen. Photo by Prescott Watson.

“After all of the debt was brought to our attention as a serious problem, it was then that we started to come together and form a stronger collective, and you know, hold up the foundation,” she said.

In February, Chavezians and Zami!tes met to discuss the future of Chazam and the current state of their co-ops and their master lease. Flying in from Chicago, Miller from NASCO attended the joint-house meeting, and said NASCO is there to help in a supporting role.

He said that their goal is that within a few months, Chazam will have a plan of action as to what they want to do, and how they want to handle city regulations that limit the number of members they can have.

“NASCO Properties sees what’s happening now as a temporary step to try and help the co-op members get the tools they need to get back on track,” Miller said. “SCSHC has a mission to provide affordable housing to students to make education more accessible to them … NASCO Properties has a mission of helping local cooperatives fulfill their missions.”

City zoning laws limiting tenants create a number of problems for members of Zami!.

“The main issue is parking,” said Zami! resident November Skye. “We have to have a certain number of parking spots per person, and we’re looking into finding spots on the street that we can use.”

Two houses fill the property, along with a mini-barn and five cats. And the front house is sideways — Zami!’s main house once sat where the Louden Nelson Community Center is now.

In years past, most people entered Zami! through the pink and purple gate on the side — to enter through the front meant walking into someone’s bedroom.

Members of the Cesar Chavez Co-op pose for a photo in their dining room. Photo by Prescott Watson.

Now though, that space is a common room. Similar transformations occurred throughout the house after the enforcement of city zoning laws forced residents to turn bedrooms into common spaces.

After necessary structural renovations, city officials saw how residents were living in more rooms then zoned for and forced the co-op to reduce its number of tenants.

“We feel like we kind of kicked ourselves, because the reason we ran into trouble was because we were finally getting our shit together and getting the renovations done,” Skye said.

Skye, who changed his name upon coming to Zami!, says living in a co-op allows people to change — they get to decide who they are.

“Here, you stop having to work off cultural scripts, of ‘this is what people are supposed to want, this is what I’m supposed to do,’ and it lets people live their own lives,” he said.

Once, with members sleeping in tents in the backyard and a family of six in the house, residents of Zami! numbered over 30 people.

It was difficult organizing that many people, let alone the normal challenges of co-ops, said Skye.

Occupants at both Chavez and Zami! devote five hours of “love-shifts” per week, making dinner, cleaning bathrooms, managing membership, etc., and are working toward being a really “progressive space,” Skye said.

“We try to focus on dispersing skills, especially across class and gender boundaries. It’s not OK when all the working-class people are doing dishes and all the middle class people are doing management positions,” he said.

A handwritten scrawl on the wall declares that the house was built in 1887. This kind of history is often the only way members can leave a lasting message in many co-ops, as houses change with every new generation of members.

“Every time we get new members, they ask about who we are and we get to decide that every year,” he said.

Morgan Harris, a resident of Food Not Lawns, holds up a chicken he describes as integral to their gardening cycle. Photo by Prescott Watson.

Co-ops provide a space in which communities can grow. Many co-ops tend to be particularly appealing to students because they are also often affordable.

“It is cheap,” said Breeze Kanikula, a member of the 12 Tribes Jewish Co-op. “And that’s a great thing.”

Low rent costs come at a price, however, said November Skye, third-year resident of the Zami! co-op on Laurel Street.

“Part of why it’s cheap is because you’re doing five hours of maintenance every week,” he said.

Posters of James Dean and classic movies line the living room walls, along with the 12 Tribes’ mission statement, which reads, “[12 Tribes] is a home for anyone interested in living communally while exploring Jewish culture, traditions, and values.”

This means that while most are Jewish, it isn’t a requirement.

“I’m not, and neither are the treasurer and one of the other girls,” Kanikula said. “I do participate in the culture though. I like it, it’s fun. I used to go to Shabbat when I was a kid, with my other Jewish friends.”

Because members often dumpster dive, and bread has a long shelf life, toast has become a symbol of the Cesar Chavez Co-op. Members proudly display this insignia everywhere. Photo by Prescott Watson

Kanikula said that there are certain things that their co-op does differently from others, though, being one of the few religious-based cooperatives in Santa Cruz.

“We do keep the fridge kosher an

d all of our dinner nights kosher,” she said. “We do have different pots and pans for meat and dairy.”

12 Tribes participates in the larger Santa Cruz Jewish community.

“Every Friday we do Shabbat with Hillel and Chabad house,” Kanikula said. “Hillel is a house for Jewish UCSC students, and Chabad is a national organization, where a rabbi lives in the house with his wife. Shabbat is from Friday at sundown to Saturday at sundown, and we’re not supposed to work or use any electricity, just be one with God.”

The culture of co-ops is continuing to thrive in Santa Cruz and has a promising future, as is evident through the creation of the Art Co-op in winter 2010. Their co-op is one of the smallest, with seven members, and was founded by two previous members of the 12 Tribes. According to founding member Sarah Jaffe, the group has aspirations to grow as a co-op.
“We’re trying to have shows a few times a quarter, and we all help each other out [with each others’ art],” she said.
Caity Fares of the Zami! co-op said a that a lot can be learned from living in a co-op, considering that it is a space that enables the integration of many types of people to form a single community.

“It helps you to understand how every person is dynamic and important, how society tells you to be one way, but it’s important to be yourself and learn from others.”

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at Living Together in Santa Cruz

Tyler Wardwell, KZSC’s music director, picks out some of his favorite records. KZSC’s library holds an extensive vinyl collection that is constantly growing. Photo by Molly Solomon.

Reach into your pocket.

It’s likely your hand is now in contact with a music player or audio storage device. Whether it is an MP3 player, a multimedia phone or a flash drive, music is incredibly compact and portable in the 21st century.

However, in the age of digital sound there are still those who opt for the smooth, black disc that has charmed audiophiles for decades — the vinyl record.

While CD sales and digital downloads constitute the majority of music purchases today, vinyl has made its way back from relative obscurity to be the chosen medium of a significant portion of listeners.

National vinyl record sales reached 2.8 million in 2010, more than tripling from the 858,000 sold in 2006, according to Nielsen Soundscan, a sales tracking system that has been tabulating music sales since 1991.

While the company does not track some small music vendors, the sales leap reported by 14,000 participating businesses indicates a changing music culture.

Daniel Munoz, a Ph.D. student in cross-cultural musicology at UC Santa Cruz, is currently doing field work for his dissertation on noise music in Los Angeles.

He said in an email that vinyl has a special connection to the human condition, which makes it attractive.

“To make a vinyl record [is to] put a physical object back in the hands of the consumers,” Munoz said. “It also says tacitly that this music is going to die over the years. It will not live forever, just like we won’t live forever. Vinyl and magnetic tape (cassettes, 8-tracks, etc.) deteriorate over time, while digital technologies don’t.”

In their recent history, vinyl records have been subject to a cycle of popularity that is influenced by new audio technologies and the subcultures that react to them.

Vinyl made a comeback in the 1980s when DJs sampled records to rap over or to combine into a new song. CDs gained popularity in the 1990s, but critics claimed their compressed audio files produced a different, more metallic sound.

Munoz said some youth embraced vinyl records as an alternative to CDs that flooded the music market.

“Some kids rebelled against CD distribution on the grounds that records were cheaper, cooler, sounded better, and that the cover art on vinyl records was superior since there was a larger space for the art,” Munoz said.

Most vinyl records were cheap in the 1990s. Often you could find vinyl records at flea markets or at Goodwill being sold for change. Vinyl record stores were stagnant, and the music world prepared for a digital overload.

The illegal music pirating boom beginning in the late 1990s produced a generation with access to a multitude of MP3s. Many old vinyl singles never made it to MP3 format, and some music buyers scoured newly reemerging record stores and eBay to collect them.

KZSC music director Tyler Wardwell said the unavailability of some recordings in digital format has led UCSC’s radio station to covet vinyl copies accumulated over the years.

“A lot of the material that we have was acquired or sent to the station in the ’70s and ’80s,” he said. “A fair amount of it is hard to find digitally. It wouldn’t make sense for us to get rid of this vinyl because a lot of it isn’t being pressed anymore.”

By 2006, music giant Tower Records filed for bankruptcy and was forced to close its doors after more than 45 years at the forefront of music distribution, though it still maintains an online presence.

The early 2000s saw a rise of British and American indie rock, which has been marketed by labels that press vinyl. Recently, a whole youth culture has sprung from the “indie movement” that has commercialized the novelty of vinyl records.

Munoz said the recent vinyl revival is reminiscent of the youth CD resistance two decades prior.

“Fast-forward to contemporary hipsters pressing vinyl,” Munoz said. “This is much the same phenomenon that started in the 1990s, with a twist of course. Digital technologies that are shared using a computer take the object-hood out of the process of listening to music. In other words, there is no longer a physical object to hold in the hands.”

Nostalgia for a medium that provides a tangible representation of music has enchanted young music buyers. For a sample of commercialized “indie” culture, go to Urban Outfitters on Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz.

You’ll find a small display of vinyl records on the left side of the store. Roughly 125 vinyl records, the vast majority of them still in cellophane, sit in the store.

“Urban” has framed “Pet Sounds” by The Beach Boys and put it on display above the rest, indicating that the aesthetic value of older vinyl record covers fascinates some consumers.

Other artists represented in the store include She & Him, Belle and Sebastian, the MC5 and re-pressings of Michael Jackson, Bob Dylan and Jefferson Airplane albums.

This new generation of record collectors is not generally looking for the authenticity of an original pressing. Most of these albums can be easily found digitally so access isn’t the draw either; it is the novelty of the vinyl record that entices them.

Of course, there is a market for vinyl beyond the trendy “Urban” consumer. It is one that marks up older albums that once lived in the 10-cent bin at De Anza Flea Market in Cupertino, Calif. just over a decade ago. It produces indie rock, metal and pop, among other genres.

Why do Labels Press Vinyl?

New vinyl records are comparable in cost to CDs. Metavinyl Records, a store on Cedar Street, is entirely dedicated to vinyl records. Within its walls, new vinyl is mixed with the old and alphabetized by genre.

On the right when you walk in there is a wall for $1 albums, a new arrivals bin to your left, and a classical bin in the far left corner.

The owner, Jonathan Schneiderman, said he buys vinyl records from over 40 distributors internationally. Some are locally owned in the Bay Area and others are operated overseas.

Similarly, local radio stations receive and purchase albums internationally. Indie rock labels like Matador and Merge press singles and full-length albums on vinyl and send them around the world.

KZSC music director Wardwell said the station frequently receives indie rock vinyl singles.

“We get sent new vinyl from artists and labels,” Wardwell said. “A fair amount of new vinyl is from indie rock artists and they will send us 7 inches with one song on each side.”

While indie labels may be best known for pressing vinyl records, consumer demand has encouraged labels that had seemingly moved on from the medium to return to it. Schneiderman said small labels aren’t the only ones cranking out vinyl.

“Even the major labels are pressing vinyl,” he said. “There’s nothing that’s not available right now.”

Some music lovers note a difference in intentions between small and large labels.

Zachary Watkins, a lecturer in the UCSC music department, teaches History of Electronic Music and lower division studio courses. He writes for Foxy Digitalis, an online music site where he reviews albums. Watkins said money is a great influence on large labels.

“Independent labels are more interested in putting out music than profit,” Watkins said. “Major labels don’t care about music. They care about money.”

Watkins said choosing vinyl gives labels an edge in the music market by setting themselves apart from other mediums.

“Right now there are so many labels out there, and it’s kind of hard to break out of the noise of the output being created,” he said. “Sometimes it takes spending money, meaning putting effort into the design, packaging and creation of the object. Vinyl is the apex of that.”

The quality of new vinyl records is highly regarded. Often pressed at 180 grams, thick, new vinyl plays cleanly.

However, records deteriorate as the stylus, or needle, wears down the grooves that hold information about the sound. Cross-cultural Ph.D. student Munoz described the process in terms of geologic erosion.

“For example, think about the Grand Canyon,” Munoz said. “The grooves in a record are like a canyon, and the needle reads the depths of the canyon, and then that information is outputted to a speaker (or is amplified and outputted to a speaker). But the needle itself erodes the grooves. Thus, records deteriorate over time each time the needle reads the information of the grooves.”

As Munoz points out, new vinyl records cannot stay perfect forever if you play them frequently. Many new record players have USB capability, allowing for transfer of records to digital format.

“The old technology is so prevalent that manufacturers have capitalized on it by making the integration between analog and digital media ever more easy,” Munoz said.

Many labels include MP3 downloads of the vinyl record purchased to increase appeal and provide a similar access to turntables with USB ports.

Metavinyl Records owner Schneiderman said the practice of including an MP3 download code is strategic to appealing to a variety of consumers.

“Labels figure that if you’re going to buy it then you should only just have to buy it once,” he said. “If you buy the record you should get a free digital copy because then there’s really no reason not to buy it.”

Why do we Love to Consume Vinyl?

Labels produce vinyl to meet demand from music buyers. DJs, radio stations and listeners with private collections note many reasons why vinyl is a great option.

Wardwell said vinyl records are an important part of KZSC’s library.

“We maintain a vinyl collection because we play it,” he said. “Music purchases are split between CDs and vinyl. We also get donations, so our vinyl collection is always expanding.”

For Wardwell, the experience of watching a vinyl record spin into music is an enjoyable aspect of the medium.

“I like the physicality of vinyl, and that it’s all done in open space,” he said. “The CD plays behind a plastic shield and you don’t really get to see what’s going on. With vinyl, there’s a human attraction where you lift that tone arm and drop the needle down into the groove, and as the plate spins the disc, the 33 or 45 RPM, you can experience that visual cue of seeing motion become sound.”

Wardwell said the station’s DJs sometimes bring in vinyl records from their “really extensive personal collections” to play on air.

Musicology student Munoz said DJs of live events often prefer vinyl, and have turned the vinyl record into an instrument.

“DJs in the dance music scene (and other genres) still tend to prefer vinyl to spin at live events, especially for scratching and other purposes,” he said. “In this way, vinyl records are more than just a recording medium, but are actually musical instruments.”

Mark Augustine, aka DJ Swift, is co-founder of a music promotion group based in Redwood City called Abide Productions. He DJs at weddings, events, dances and birthday parties.

Augustine emphasized the importance of gauging the audience’s idea of “the classics” in terms of artists and songs. He said he keeps anything considered a classic of its genre.

“As a DJ, I’m always having the audience in mind. I don’t know exactly who I come across, so if it’s a record that I think someone will want to hear in the future I’ll keep it. You have to keep the classics.”

While he does use MP3s often, Augustine said vinyl records are the most respected medium to play among DJs. He said there is nothing like the feeling of a record under your fingers.

“The sound that vinyl has is clean, raspy and gritty,” he said. “Although digital is crisp, vinyl is clean. DJing is my drug. It’s my addiction. And it’s a positive addiction.”

The unanimous complaint about vinyl records is their stationary status. Large and heavy to pack around, vinyl records are meant for in-home listening.

The Future of Vinyl

Illustration by Rachel Edelstein.

Many think vinyl will never go out of style. Augustine said nostalgia and appreciation for predecessors will keep vinyl in people’s collections.

“I think the record will always be around,” he said. “Vinyl will be the classic thing that people have.”

Munoz predicts that vinyl records’ appeal will end sooner or later.

“My personal prediction, which is really more of a gut feeling, is that eventually vinyl records will go out of style,” he said. “Vinyl records are already too big and heavy. Their one sonic advantage, quality — that the sounds are continuous rather than discreet — will eventually fade as MP3s are replaced by smaller files with broader frequency responses.”

Some say they will always want vinyl because it’s the best of its kind. Watkins doesn’t foresee anything getting in the way of vinyl’s popularity.

“Culturally, people respect vinyl as a medium and will always seek vinyl, I think,” he said. “It’s the best analog mass-media that we have.”

Digital recordings have surpassed vinyl in convenience and size. However, the warm vinyl sound is still a priority for many. For some serious audiophiles, the further products get from the physical mechanics of producing sound, the worse music is going to translate on a recording.

Metavinyl Records owner Schneiderman said as long as vinyl is top quality there will be a demand for it.

“Vinyl will always have a cult following,” he said. “Unless a better format comes along and surpasses its quality.”

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at Vinyl Revival

Illustration by Matt Boblet.

“Transmorphers.” “Almighty Thor.” “Sherlock Holmes.”

These could be the titles of some of the biggest films of recent years. Then follows a trio of more suspect titles:

“Megashark vs. Giant Octopus.” “Snakes on a Train.” “Titanic II.”

This is not mainstream Hollywood.

Based out of Burbank, Calif., The Asylum film production and distribution company has been mastering the mockbuster for the past 14 years. David Latt is one of the three founding partners of the company. Prior to his career in Hollywood, Latt worked in the magazine publishing industry. He first met his producing colleague David Rimawi, then a Village Roadshow Pictures Executive, at a film festival in 1991.

“My colleague [Rimawi] had always wanted to produce. I had always wanted to direct,” Latt said. “What we did then is what we do today. We went out, found what stars people wanted and what genre they liked, found out [what] people would pay … and began working.”

Since its origins in 1995, the company has never lost money on a film, and is constantly growing, both in output and popularity, despite constant criticism from film reviewers and mainstream consumers. The Asylum both recognizes and relishes its position as a niche market, and isn’t discouraged by public backlash. While not for everyone, this style of film is recognized by some within the film community as still having merit. In addition, their mockbuster films have become something of a litmus test for Hollywood worthiness.

The mockbuster is a low-budget film that uses a plot similar to that of a currently released blockbuster while exploiting its publicity campaign.

As a result, Columbia Pictures’ “Battle: Los Angeles” becomes “Battle of Los Angeles,” Marvel Studio’s “Thor” becomes “The Amazing Thor,” and Disney’s “High School Musical” becomes “Sunday School Musical.”

Hollywood has been in a downward spiral for some years, and The Asylum perpetuates this with cheap-to-make, cheap-to-buy films. The existence and success of The Asylum begs the question, “Can a company that profits at the expense of others be truly successful?”

Director and star of The Asylum’s “Titanic II,” Shane Van Dyke, who has worked with the company for a number of years, says he has the answer.

“Sometimes people like to watch a movie where they don’t have to think too much,” Van Dyke said. “Get a six-pack of beer, sit down and enjoy a movie that more likely than not will have its fair share of fiery explosions, giant monsters and good-looking women.”

Since its inception, The Asylum has produced over 100 films. A new film is released every four weeks, during which time another film begins production. The studio’s average budget ranges anywhere from $250,000 to $2 million per film. By comparison, the current average Hollywood blockbuster budget is in the ballpark of $60 million, while production length runs between six months to more than a year.

Latt is unapologetic about the low budget and rapid output of The Asylum.

“We run our company on cash flow,” Latt said. “If we don’t make money that week, people don’t get paid.”

But they do get paid. The Asylum reports an annual revenue of around $5 million. As the films are so cheap to make, and as demand is high, all films make a profit.

While The Asylum’s films are made on lower budgets than those of other companies, size of production is growing. Latt said that while the company primarily films in Burbank, it has shot all over the world.

“South Africa, Israel, Istanbul, Iowa,” Latt said. “We’ve shot in Belize three times. If the story calls for it, we believe we should go there.”

Illustration by Matt Boblet.

Long an inside joke to lovers of so-bad-it’s-good cinema, The Asylum found a modicum of mainstream recognition with the European cinematic release of “Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus” in 2009. The film only grossed roughly $700 at the box office, but made back the rest of its $250,000 budget and more in DVD sales, rentals and downloads. Netflix views were 70 percent higher for that title than others The Asylum has released.

Noteworthy scenes include whale suicide en masse, the giant octopus venting its frustrations on a Japanese oil rig, a character who changes from American to Australian and back again, and a whole lot of submarine shaking. However, the most notorious scene involves the mega shark eating a full-sized passenger plane in mid-flight. This literal example of jumping the shark has received over a million views on YouTube.

Reviews ranged from the amused to the bemused. Kim Newman of Empire Magazine, Britain’s premier film journal, referred to the film as being “daft, plain daft. With a few daft but spectacular stunts.”

Film website Rotten Tomatoes was even less kind, stating that “with shoddy FX, acting and directing, this isn’t so bad it’s good. It’s just so bad it’s terrible.”

UC Santa Cruz film lecturer Suzanne Scott commented on the popularity and purpose of these films in an email.

She discussed the fact that horror and science fiction films generally echo the sociopolitical climate of their time. In the case of The Asylum, Scott said their films seem to be less interested in offering a sociopolitical critique than they are in critiquing the overabundance of computer-generated imagery (special effects) in Hollywood. Instead, the fun of watching these films is in reveling in low production values and campy appeal.

Scott said they “cater to ironic, postmodern modes of spectatorship, and celebrate the artifice and spectacle of Hollywood’s output.”

All the actors and producers interviewed agreed that they enjoyed making these particular films not despite the cheesy aspect, but because of it.

“I’m a big fan of the horror genre,” Van Dyke said. “At the time I first met with The Asylum, they were doing mostly horror films … I contacted producer David Latt, and it turned out our families had worked together in the past. My involvement with the company grew from there. At the end of the day, you’re making movies, which is what I love.”

Van Dyke had no issue working within the constraints of The Asylum — meaning quick shoots at low budgets.

“Working with small budgets pushes you to get creative and learn from your experiences,” he said.

Unlike other studios, The Asylum is also notable for offering rapid on-the-job promotions. Jude Gerard Prest began his career with them as a bit-part on cowboy film “Six Guns” before being promoted to a key role after “another actor didn’t turn up on set,” and is now one of the company’s producers.

Van Dyke got to direct “Titanic II” simply because he asked.

Mary E. Brown, who has worked with the company on six films, has held a different position on each film. She is currently acting as line-producer.

Wes Pannell, the head of DVD sales and acquisitions at Santa Cruz’s Streetlight Records, has past dealings with the company’s distribution branch. Pannell has a self-described aversion to the company’s films.

“[Mega Shark] is part of what’s popular right now. It’ll go away in a few months. Some other crazy animal-type movie will take its place,” Pannell said in an email. “Since we’re a small record store we’ve got to order a limited number of B-movies [because] most of them do not sell well.”

Prest had a different perspective.

“If you embrace the cheesiness going in, they are a lot of fun,” Prest said. “If you go in with a ‘well, that’s ridiculous’ attitude, then you’re not going to like a lot of the things they do.”

Illustration by Matt Boblet.

Other than low-budget monster mash-ups, most of The Asylum’s success has been through the “mockbuster” sub-genre.

“We don’t do a lot of them anymore,” producing partner Latt said. “[But] if a film is going to generate a lot of attention or interest in the public, we are interested in riding that wave.”

Latt was quick to point out that The Asylum is not copying the big studios, just trying to take advantage of current interests.

“[We make] films that are similar to others thematically and content-wise,” Latt said.

Latt has no qualms with what his studio does, saying, “It is nothing other studios don’t do. We’re just a little more audacious and obnoxious about it.”

As an example, the producer recalled the release of the film “The Da Vinci Code” five years ago.

“Every other channel was doing a documentary on the ‘real Da Vinci Code,’” Latt said. “Everyone sees a blockbuster and sees a way to take advantage. It’s no different from what we do.”

Warner Brothers released “Sherlock Holmes” in Dec. 2009. The Asylum released its “Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes” in Jan. 2010. The former had a budget of $90 million. The latter, like all Asylum films, had a budget in the region of $250,000 to $2 million.

Both films involve Holmes attempting to prevent a terrorist attack on London, but where Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law were chasing down dastardly criminals, The Asylum’s take included robots, dinosaurs and dragons. With release dates so close together, it might be easy to confuse the two titles. The difference becomes clear when reviews for the two are compared.

William Thomas of Empire Magazine described one as “a fun, action-packed reintroduction to Conan Doyle’s classic characters.” By comparison, Randy Yasenchak of Elder-Geek.com said, “I can recommend this movie for anyone who loves watching bad movies while drunk (or otherwise) with friends to laugh at.”

Despite these types of similarities, The Asylum rarely gets into legal difficulties concerning its films.

“At this point we are a brand, and people who release bigger films seem to know this,” Latt said. “If we don’t do a mockbuster of their film, [the bigger studios] feel they must be doing something wrong.”

Executive producer Latt shed some light on how The Asylum addresses legal issues.

“The short answer is that we always get the angry letter from the studio [that The Asylum is currently parodying], but we’re not really crossing any lines, we’re not doing anything illegal. We’re not stealing from their pot of money,” Latt said. “The studios appear to recognize this. We’ve never been through any civil action, because there simply is not anything actionable about what we do.”

In most cases this mentality holds true. In 2008, however, Fox Studios released its remake of the 1951 classic, “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” The Asylum, following its usual strategy, released “The Day the Earth Stopped” three days before the Fox release.

Fox sent The Asylum a lengthy cease-and-desist letter, in addition to attempting to get the low-budget rival film removed from the shelves. Fox was unsuccessful. The Asylum’s film can still be purchased from online retailers.

According to the official press release issued through Yahoo! News, Fox was particularly enraged by the fact that The Asylum took advantage of its multi-million dollar advertising campaign. Fox has also argued that as it owns the rights to the original film, The Asylum was plagiarizing.

Neither studio was available to comment on this particular issue.

Illustration by Matt Boblet.

Legal issues aside, the growing success of The Asylum — in the cult market, at least — does raise questions about the state of Hollywood.

“In some sense, [The Asylum shows] that we haven’t yet moved beyond the A/B movie paradigm of the classical Hollywood studio system,” film lecturer Scott wrote, “except in this case, instead of a double feature … The Asylum simply creates a B-movie for television out of whatever ‘A’/big budget movie is currently in theaters. There isn’t economic space for the production of B-films in Hollywood today. The emphasis is on tent pole films and franchises.”

Wes Pannell of Streetlight Records said in an email, “Hollywood sucks right now. They’re desperate for any cheap way to make a movie, be it through rehashing a title they already own the rights to, or making a straight-to-DVD title.”

So if it is just functioning like all other Hollywood studios, why does The Asylum not see more mainstream success? Because it does not need to, according to Asylum line producer Brown.

“The Asylum has its own market,” Brown said. “It has its audience that looks for specific material. We have a fan base of the types of projects that The Asylum is about. They have a huge following, not just nationally, but internationally.”

The ultimate test for The Asylum is time. Other cheaply made films have gained a strong cult following over the years. Perhaps the ultimate example is Tommy Wiseau’s “The Room.” Despite being regarded by critics as one of the worst films ever made, “The Room” still sells out in theaters across America. This happened recently when Santa Cruz’s Del Mar Theatre chose the film for its weekly midnight movie, on the weekend of Feb. 18th–19th.

A story told by actor Prest suggests that The Asylum’s move towards the cult may have already begun.

“It was the gift that kept on giving,” Prest said, discussing the 2010 film “Mega Piranha.” The monster film, which premiered on the SyFy Channel in April of last year, became the most viewed original movie of 2010, with approximately 2.2 million viewers.

“After that, it played at midnight at Comic-Con. There was a line around the block,” Prest said. “It’s since played at a number of other festivals and become a cult hit, both online and on the SyFy Channel.”

Perhaps one day it will be showing alongside “The Room” at the Del Mar in downtown Santa Cruz. Asylum critics like Pannell, however, do not agree.

“Cult does not mean schlock, which is what The Asylums folks make,” Pannell said. “What makes something a cult classic? The cult does.”

Film lecturer Scott took a similar approach to the issue.

“Can [something] truly be ‘cult’ if it is self-consciously designed to appeal to a ‘cult’ demographic … When we think of classic cult properties … there is a distinct pattern,” Scott wrote. “Each of the films was released to minimal (or non-existent) commercial success, and built up a small, devoted fan base over time. Now we have networks like SyFy that design their programming around ‘cult’ demographics. If anything, the success of the films being churned out by The Asylum would seem to indicate that cult is the new mass.”

Whatever the future holds for The Asylum, it can be sure that it will continue rapidly making films. Asylum actor and director Van Dyke, for one, feels it is time they be recognized for this.

“Asylum films should be credited for the work they do, on the budget they do it, and in the time they do it.”

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at The Maddening World of The Asylum

Illustration by Kristian Talley.

Illustration by Kristian Talley.

“I’m going to fall asleep. I’m going to fall asleep.”

After walking once around the car, after smacking myself, after singing at the top of my lungs, after silence, I wake up speeding past bands of metal and green.

I crashed into a shrub-covered fence right before reaching the E. Brokaw Rd. exit on I 880. My car was totaled. It was 2:36 a.m.

When the police came, I felt relief and panic.

“Have you been drinking tonight?” the officer asked.

I looked down at my red flower-patterned pajama bottoms and shook my head. No, I hadn’t been drinking, but I might as well have.

After only sleeping two and a half hours during a span of three and a half days, I somehow managed to make myself feel invincible.

“Normal people would have gone insane by now,” I had boasted to others.

Research papers and finals were my foremost concerns. I spent the majority of the school term having a social life, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me from getting A’s in my courses. I functioned under the “work hard — party harder” ethic, like so many of my peers.

With this ethic, I found myself bawling by the side of the road on the other side of the fence. Mascara-stained tears poured down my cheek, as the officer gave me back my driver’s license.

“Happy birthday,” he said.

I Am Not Alone

“Your experience is not unique,” said Elizabeth Hyde, nurse practitioner and patient care coordinator at the UC Santa Cruz Health Center.

She gives me an empathetic smile and continues to explain how common the issue of sleep deprivation is on campus, as well as across the entire country. Despite health repercussions ranging from altered mood and cognitive impairment to an increased likelihood of high blood pressure and diabetes, irregular sleep is becoming increasingly common in the United States, according to a poll by the National Sleep Foundation (NSF).

The poll found that people averaged 6.9 hours of sleep per night, dropping an average of two hours since the 1800s. Among those with an increased participation in this trend are young adults. In another study, NSF reported that 63 percent of college students do not sleep enough.

“The [National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has] been very alarmed by sleep deprivation,” Hyde said. “I just had somebody in the office the other day that fell asleep on their way back from Tahoe. Four kids in the car — dove into a snow bank.”

NHTSA estimates that tiredness or sleep deprivation causes 100,000 accidents, 40,000 injuries and 1,500 deaths in the United States every year. As steep car insurance prices reflect, young people under 25 are more likely to be involved in sleep-related accidents.

Drivers awake for 17 to 19 hours drive worse than drivers with a blood alcohol level of .05 percent, according to research conducted in New Zealand and Australia and published in the British journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

Cognitive impairments, often the cause of collisions, are only some of the more immediate effects of sleep deprivation. Insufficient sleep has direct connections to a person’s health in the long-term.

“The data is just really clear that somewhere around eight hours of sleep is really necessary for good health,” Hyde said, “and some people can get by on a little less, but you can’t maintain the same health benefits.”

Looking out from her busy Health Center office filled with files and paperwork, Hyde said students often frequent the center with sleep issues.

“I would say pretty much everybody here works regularly with people who are having trouble [with sleep deprivation],” Hyde said.

Though the college scene often motivates students’ decision to reduce their sleeping, the ability to sleep is often out of their control.

“Some people are choosing not to sleep, and some people can’t sleep,” Hyde said.

Photo by Kristian Talley.

I Choose Not To Sleep

Prior to my accident, I often boasted of my ability to limit my sleep “effectively” and without repercussions — or so I thought.

“People think they’re wasting time when they sleep,” Hyde said. “I think that’s a little bit of it, especially as the semester closes and you think of all the things you’d like to get done.”

Last minute frenzies to soak in the maximum amount of information, commonly known as “all-nighters,” inadvertently produce the opposite effect.

A study led by Dr. Matthew Walker of the Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center found that memory improved by 20 to 30 percent with proper rest.

“You need to get a good night of sleep after you’ve learned something,” Walker said in HealthBeat, a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services production. “If you don’t get that good night’s sleep, if you pull the all-nighter … both of them cause catastrophic deficits in terms of memory.”

However, a lower test score is more desirable than no test score at all. In the same National Sleep Foundation study on college students, 15 percent of those polled admitted to falling asleep in class.

Hyde acknowledges that often people reduce their sleep to get their work done.

“I wish that nobody ever had to pull an all-nighter,” Hyde said. “I just don’t think you get the performance you imagine you’re going to get. People think, ‘I can be productive all night long,’ but you just really can’t.”

Though many can relate to having the occasional sleep-deprived night, others go on with little rest over long periods of time.

Carlisa Moffett is attending her last year at Cal State San Marcos. With a workload of over 60 hours a week, including 15 units of courses, ministry training, a full-time job as a McDonald’s manager and a part-time job as a stocker at the Camp Pendleton base commissary, Moffett is left with very little time to sleep on a regular basis.

“On most nights, I’m getting three or four hours [of sleep],” Moffett said with a bright smile accompanied by tired eyes. “To me, when I say, ‘Oh, I get to sleep five hours tonight,’ that’s good sleep.”

With tuition increases and credit card debt, Moffett chose to get her second job with flexible hours at the commissary to be more financially secure.

To save money on a $296 semester parking permit and gas, Moffett has stopped driving her car, for which she continues to make payments. Instead she rides the Sprinter, a North San Diego County commuter train.

“It doesn’t really help me with sleep because you have to get up earlier to catch the Sprinter, as opposed to driving,” Moffett said. “I’ll doze off in the Sprinter every now and then. I’ve been catching the Sprinter to school to save the money, because it’s only $116 for the whole semester.”

Moffett continues to sacrifice sleep, though she has felt the adverse effects. Since she is finishing her last year, Moffett’s courses have become more lecture-oriented. These lectures keep her confined to her seat for an uncomfortable amount of time.

“They’re things that I’m interested in, but I cannot sit through them,” Moffett said. “I am honestly nodding, and I can’t sit straight, and I’m fidgety. Because I know I’m so tired, it doesn’t matter what I’m doing. As soon as I sit down and my body feels like it’s resting, I start to fall asleep.”

Walking down a fluorescent hall of the Psychiatric Services wing, MaryJan Murphy, Ph.D., training director and acting co-director of counseling and psychological services at UCSC, says other students have similar issues.

“It’s more difficult to concentrate and to study,” Murphy said. “Feeling overwhelmed and tired and not having enough energy to sort of do the tasks that you would normally do — being burnt out a little bit — those [effects] are really common.”

Moffett’s head-nodding has extended from the classroom and into her social life.

“On Valentine’s Day, I went out on a date to the movies,” Moffett says with a playful laugh. “All I could tell the guy is ‘If I fall asleep, please don’t think that you’re boring, but if I sit in here, I’m going to fall asleep. It’s dark, and I’m going to get comfortable.’ I totally just fell asleep on him.”

She also fears becoming part of the 100,000-a-year car accident statistic.

“Now I’m scared to drive,” Moffett said. “I’m always saying, ‘Somebody drive with me. I don’t care if I have to go out of my way to come get you.’ I don’t want to drive long-distance by myself because I feel my eyes getting heavy. It’s when my body’s at rest and I want to be awake that I wish I would have been able to get more sleep.”

Despite choosing to sacrifice her sleep, Moffett does not suggest this approach for everyone. She said that she forgoes rest in hopes of making a difference in a child’s life with her career.

“If you’re going to sacrifice sleep, make sure that whatever it is that you’re doing is worth it,” Moffett said. “It’s not healthy, first of all. Don’t jeopardize your health for a pipe dream or for something you know you’re not going to complete. It’s unnecessary. I wouldn’t tell people, ‘Girl, you don’t need to sleep. Go get a job.’”

Illustration by Kristian Talley.

I Can’t Sleep

Though I’ve put my “all-nighter” days behind me, I still fail at maintaining a regular sleeping schedule. As a self-proclaimed day and night person, I sneak in an average of six to seven hours of sleep a night. On Thursday nights, when bars don’t have a cover fee, sleeping gets closer to four hours.

With the amount of sleep I’m getting, bars aren’t even necessary.

In 2003, University of Pennsylvania researchers published a study in which subjects slept under six hours a night for two weeks. At the end of the study, the volunteer’s performance was as impaired as those who were awake for 48 hours straight. This is more than double the amount of sleepless hours the New Zealand and Australian researchers found to be the equivalent of intoxication.

Apparently, I am drunk all of the time.

According to a study on 6,000 women by James McClain of the National Cancer Institute, I am at a higher risk of cancer, as are other sleep-deprived women.

And if I manage to live every day like I do Thursday nights, a study led by James E. Gangwisch, Ph.D. of Columbia University says I am more likely to die at a younger age than my non-sleep-deprived peers.

Though health is a serious concern, people having similar difficulties with sleeping don’t exactly choose to be at risk.

With experience in stress-related factors of sleep deprivation, Murphy also understands some of the reasoning behind sleep deprivation.

“People react differently to stress,” Murphy said. “I think [there’s] the anxiety about doing well in school and anxiety about, ‘Do I have enough money?’ It’s so expensive now to go to school. And [there’s] anxiety about maybe, ‘I have to help my family.’ All that can also cause some people to have sleep problems.”

Murphy also pointed to some challenges young adults face when entering college.

“I do think it’s hard as a college student,” Murphy said. “You’re in different kinds of living environment, and those living environments might not be the same that you’re used to, so there are different kinds of noises. You’re living with people who have different cycles than you. How do you adapt to that kind of thing?”

‘Growing up’ brings with it several opportunities to set off a person’s sleeping cycle. Spencer Martin, a student at American River College in Elk Grove, has struggled with sleep since his days in high school.

“There are the eight-hour days, nine-hour days, and there are the three-hour days, so probably that’s just about five [hours of sleep on average],” Martin said.

Martin would often find himself awake until 5 a.m., staring into the glare of Facebook.

“I can only fall asleep when I’m completely exhausted,” Martin said. “It’s been a long road of self-induced insomnia. I’ve purposefully gotten very little sleep, whether it be school work or just shenanigans, that now my body is in tune with my lack of sleep.”

Casey Goldman, fourth-year at UCSC, has dealt with sleeping problems since childhood. Like Martin, his body does not feel the need for sleep until dawn. Though he falls asleep at around 6 or 7 a.m. and naturally wakes up at around 2 p.m., he has given up on trying to match his own sleeping patterns to those deemed “normal” by others.

“The way I cope with sleep deprivation now is that I don’t try to force myself to go to sleep,” Goldman said. “I let it take its course, and I try as best as I can to move my schedule and my life around when my body wants to sleep.”

For those who have difficulty falling asleep, most literature on sleep health shows that it is best not to stay in bed awake for long periods of time, suggesting activities that make people feel tired instead.

For a wide spectrum of reasons, many young adults have similar difficulties with sleep.

There is a disproportionate number of adolescents and young adults (approximately 7 to 16 percent) with Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome (DSPS), according to the Stanford Center for Sleep Sciences and Medicine (SCSSM). SCSSM defines this syndrome as “a disorder in which the timing of sleep and the peak period of alertness are delayed several hours relative to societal clock.”

DSPS is caused by a shift in a person’s circadian rhythm, which leads to feeling tired at later times. Though it is a common sleeping pattern among youth, it is still not understood why this shift happens.

“We know that typically, in the teenage years, people stay up later at night and get up later in the morning,” Hyde said. “But our society isn’t set up that way. So you just stay up late and still have to get up early.”

Adhering to society’s sleep schedule can be especially difficult for those with sleep disorders. But sometimes a lack of sleep is a result of a conscious choice.

“It’s hard to tell the difference between people who can’t sleep and the people who are bored and stay up all night,” Martin said. “It might just be the same thing, but I think a lot of people our age stay up pretty late at night … because if you can keep yourself busy with pretty much anything now, there’s no point in going to sleep right when the sun goes down.”

Whether a person chooses to decrease the amount they sleep or not, reduced hours of sleep have the same effect on everyone.

“There are still times when I get three hours of sleep and feel like a zombie for the rest of the day,” Martin said.

With sleepless nights that kept Martin feeling like the living dead, he started to think of leading a different lifestyle.

“Sometimes what happens with college students is that they start worrying, ‘Oh my gosh! I’m not getting enough sleep. Oh, that’s a problem,’ and it starts to get really big,” Murphy said. “If you don’t get the sleep you need, you might be a little bit tired the next day, but you’ll still probably be able to do what you need to do, and hopefully you’ll make it up the next day. It sometimes sets its own worry off for college students.”

Though Goldman gets the full amount of suggested sleep, adjusting his schedule has been difficult.

“The rest of the world operates on a different clock,” Goldman said. “For most everybody, the day starts when I’m just getting ready to go to bed. If I wake up at 2 p.m., there are very few hours I have left to get to the bank, get to school, get through all this stuff and get to the library before it all closes down.”

Because Goldman has seen general performance improvement in using his new approach to sleep, he continues to maintain this schedule. However, Goldman does not encourage his method for those having problems sleeping.

“I’ve been able to just get by, which is good enough for me right now,” Goldman said. “For people that have issues with sleep deprivation, it makes life very difficult for them. I would hope that they would see a doctor if they can and they try whatever they can in order to get sleep.”

For those losing sleep over losing sleep, Hyde said that many of these changes are natural.

“Developmentally, it’s normal to stay up late,” Hyde said. “I don’t know that it’s necessarily college life. I think it’s part of coming of age, figuring out ‘Am I a day person? Am I a night person? Do I need seven hours? Do I need nine hours? Am I terribly susceptible to noise? Can I sleep anywhere?’ [It’s about] just discovering yourself.”

How to Avoid Sleep Deprivation - Click to Open

I Will Sleep

Though the “dangers” of sleep deprivation may be overwhelming, there isn’t much of a reason to worry. Before developing into anything serious, most negative effects can be reversed with a solution that is not very surprising — more sleep.

Determined to change my sleeping habits, I picked up a few tips from Martin, Goldman and a couple of handouts that Murphy and Hyde printed out for me.

Though Goldman’s hours are far from the average person’s sleeping period, he said he has been able to regulate his sleep with a suggestion his Los Angeles doctor gave him.

“The best piece of advice, though, is staying out in the sun for about an hour during the middle of the day, if possible,” Goldman said. “[My doctor] says the time-frame is really good to help your body start to regulate, to understand that it is noon when it is noon. I fall asleep right around 6 a.m.-ish. That certainly isn’t a usual time for someone to fall asleep, but it is pretty much constant, and it’s much better than it being so erratic.”

With the winter rain clouds parting from Santa Cruz, this technique should be useful to me.

Since beginning his change in lifestyle, Martin has noticed improvement, as well.

“Recently, I’ve just been sick of being tired all the time,” Martin said. “I’m a lot more active now and getting better sleep, so I guess the cure to my situation, at least, was just doing more stuff during the day, exercise more, eat healthier. It’s happened slowly, but I feel a lot better now than I did when I drank a bunch of caffeine during the day and stayed up all night and got very little sleep.”

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at Losing Sleep over Losing Sleep

Illustration by Muriel Gordon.

T-shirts and sweaters made by Alta Gracia sit on a display at the Bay Tree Bookstore. UCSC is one of over 350 universities that carry apparel made by Alta Gracia, a factory that produces university apparel and pays its workers a living wage. Photo by Prescott Watson.

“A year ago, in January, I had to leave my house. The distance made me and my husband separate. To be able to work I had to stay in another town from Monday through Friday evening. My kids were dispersed. Only one was living with me,” Maritza Vargas* said, speaking in her native language of Spanish. “The money I earned was so little that it only sufficed for us to eat.”

As the only breadwinner in her family and a mother of five, Vargas had struggled to make ends meet. But her life changed for the better, she said, thanks to Alta Gracia.

“Before, we had three people to a bed. Not anymore,” Vargas said. “My kids are all with me with their own spaces. I rejoined my husband and now we live in a big house and are very comfortable. My kids are able to have an education now. This is an achievement. What happiness.”

Vargas is one of 140 workers at the Dominican Republic’s Alta Gracia clothing manufacturer — the first and only factory in the world that supplies living-wage, union-made university logo apparel.

Alta Gracia apparel has been sold at UC Santa Cruz’s Bay Tree Bookstore since November of last year.

Alta Gracia is one of 30 subsidiary factories of Knights Apparel. The leading apparel supplier distributes to 350 universities in the United States. Knights Apparel Co. started in 2000 and is located in South Carolina.

The company’s union contract with Alta Gracia workers started in February last year, at the same time the factory re-opened.

Previously the factory that is now Alta Gracia was under Korean-owned BJ&B, which made apparel for Nike and Reebok. After being pressured by United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) to let the workers have a union, the sweatshop factory closed in 2007, moving its labor to countries where workers are paid lower wages.

When it reopened, Alta Gracia established a new business model of paying workers living wages. It is yet to be seen whether or not this model will continue to expand and attract other companies, but Knights Apparel has already made a positive impact in the lives and community of citizens in the Dominican Republic.

Joana Leonido, second-year environmental studies major at UCSC and member of USAS was one of seven students from across the nation to visit Alta Gracia and live with union president Maritza Vargas for a week. Leonido described Vargas’ new house. Although her residence would be considered meager in the United States, to Vargas, her modest home is an improvement from her previous residence.

“The first floor is a furniture store,” Leonido said. “To go to Maritza’s house, you have to go up some narrow stairs, and the second floor is where the kitchen is at and all the rooms. Above that, there is another kitchen and on the outside is an office area, but it’s mainly a balcony with a small room and a straw shack. Because of the living wage they were able to afford that.”

Photo courtesy Joana Leonido.

Setting a Living Wage

The factory, located in the poverty-stricken town of Villa Altagracia, is not only the main source of employment for its residents, but pays a living wage 3.4 times the minimum wage in the Dominican Republic (DR). The Dominican Republic’s minimum wage is 85 cents, while Alta Gracia pays a living wage of $2.83 an hour.

Employees work Monday through Thursday, nine and a half hours a day. On Fridays they work six hours.

The idea to start a model factory was both for business and personal reasons, Knights Apparel CEO Joe Bozich said in an e-mail.

From a business perspective, Bozich said that current studies suggest that consumer demand for cause-related product is increasing and therefore investing in an experimental model was a good idea.

“The challenge we had to address was how to create a viable business model … that would enable us to pay our workers a living wage and respect their rights and dignity,” Bozich said. “We can do this because we are willing to take a smaller profit on each garment.”

Bozich was also influenced by personal difficulties in his life, as his diagnosis of multiple sclerosis a decade ago also served as inspiration for him.

“A series of events in my personal life led me to reflect on how fortunate I have been,” Bozich said. “It made me think about people going through the same tribulations I went through, but who did not have the resources to get the help I was able to.”

With both causes in mind, Knights Apparel adopted the living wage analysis set by the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC).

The WRC is an independent organization created by the USAS. The USAS has more than 250 chapters across the United States and Canada. The WRC monitors labor rights of workers who sew apparel sold in the United States.

The analysis studies families’ basic needs ranging from food to health care and transportation.

Outside the United States, many developing countries spend 50 percent of income on food. While average income spent on food in the United States is 4.5 percent, in the Dominican Republic it is 38 percent.

Progress in developing countries is something that has pushed Knights Apparel to take the lead in starting Alta Gracia.

“So our cause is freedom from poverty through job creation, living wages, and education,” Bozich said, “and we decided to start this cause related product in the DR because we wanted to test the theory that people will support a cause related apparel brand.”

Alta Gracia is only one of the many factories Knights Apparel owns, and is the only one to adhere to these standards.

Bozich did not comment directly as to the reasoning behind Knights decision not to start the model factory in the United States, considering the 9 percent unemployment rate.

“We decided to locate our factory abroad because most of the clothing worn in the U.S. is made overseas,” Bozich said.

Bozich said that the goal of Alta Gracia has both the worker and consumer in mind.

“We felt that it was important that we price the product so that we were not asking the consumer to pay a higher price than other brands,” Bozich said, “even though we are paying over 340 percent higher wages then we are required to pay.”

Even though many Knights Apparel factories, like many garment industries, remain in sweatshop conditions, Bozich did not address whether this model can start spreading among the rest of Knights Apparel’s factories but pointed to the fact that this factory is still an experiment.

“We hope that Alta Gracia is successful enough that we can open up additional factories in many other countries,” Bozich said. “But the project is less than one year old and ultimately its success and growth will be determined by consumer demand and support of a brand like this.”

Illustration by Muriel Gordon.

Educating the Consumer

Industrial countries such as the United States are able to outsource due to trade agreements with a majority of developing countries.

The Dominican Republic entered in a free trade agreement with the United States in 2007, under the Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR). This agreement between the United States and seven countries in Latin America has eliminated trade barriers and tariffs.

Andrew Schrank, professor of political science and sociology at the University of New Mexico, specializes in Latin American political economy. He has published articles about the Dominican Republic labor policies and ministry as well as its foreign relations and agreements such as CAFTA.

Schrank said that part of the reason Alta Gracia was possible was because in the past two decades enforcement agencies in the Dominican Republic have tripled and are now run by degree-earning professionals. Many of these agencies help those who cannot afford to pay for a lawyer when trying to file a complaint.

“For all of its problems, the Dominican Republic is kind of exceptional,” Schrank said. “Over the past 20 years, domestic and international pressures really have improved their industrial and labor relations system.”

However, Schrank said that this is “not revolutionary change” for this model, given that Alta Gracia is only one small factory.

“It’s too easy for Nike, or [any other factories] to shift production to places where cost is even lower,” Schrank said.

In this sense, the Alta Gracia living-wage model becomes the exception by going beyond complying only with labor laws.

UCSC community studies professor Mary Beth Pudup points out that most factory owners compete on the basis of price and Alta Gracia is part of a competitive advantage goal.

“They’re making clothing to be sold in elite universities where the wages they’re paying are part of the marketing appeal,” Pudup said. “For this to be a global movement, it requires educating consumers, and that’s a pretty big hill to climb.”

Courtesy of Joana Leonido.

Defying Sweatshop Conditions

Sweatshop conditions foster problems such as illegal child labor, human trafficking and immigration issues, as well as physical and societal problems that extend to disintegration of families.

Alta Gracia worker Maritza Vargas, who worked previously under BJ&B, said she worked in sweatshop conditions for 18 years.

“We suffered physical and verbal maltreatment,” Vargas said. “Sometimes the supervisors would close the doors and no one was able to go out until we finished certain orders. On one occasion, a worker in desperation to leave threw herself over a fence.”

In desperation to find jobs after BJ&B closed the factory, some workers from Villa Altagracia fell victim to human traffickers who promised them jobs. Maritza Vargas said she knows two women who were tricked into believing they would be working in an in-home care facility taking care of the elderly or children in countries like Spain. In reality, the two women were raped multiple times, after being sold in Istanbul.

“[The women] were left locked in a room,” Vargas said. “It had a computer and luckily they were able to reach people who had my contact. Then we contacted the Dominican Republic embassy in Istanbul until the police were able to find them.”

Vargas said that both workers had to have psychological help when they were found and brought back to the Dominican Republic.

“They would not come out of their house,” Vargas said. “But little by little, with help, they started adapting again.”

In having enough income to provide for their families’ basic needs, workers no longer have to leave Villa Altagracia for alternative jobs. This decreases the possibility of being trafficked, Pudup said.

“Anything that improves the working conditions and the chances for better lives at the grassroots level throughout the world, and even this country, will help undermine the economic basis for human trafficking,” Pudup said.

Theresa Haas, director of communications for the WRC said that Alta Gracia apparel is the only apparel officially endorsed by the WRC. The endorsement is part of the tag attached to the apparel.

The WRC representative in the Dominican Republic is a Brown University graduate who lives in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic’s capital, and visits the factory once every two weeks.

“Part of the visits includes review of payroll records to ensure that the living wage is being paid at the rate that it should be,” Haas said.

Prior to the opening of the factory or any type of hiring, each worker goes through basic health training and training about how to file a complaint.

Additionally, before and after the start of the factory, Alta Gracia was reviewed by Maquiladora Health and Safety Support Network (MHSSN) — a volunteer organization of health and safety professionals that ensure safe working conditions. One of the published articles posted under the MHSSN webpage states that Knights Apparel has been active in addressing hazardous issues brought up by MHSSN.

The WRC also works on a complaint basis in terms of addressing any type of worker allegation.

“We conduct an investigation to verify the complaint and we communicate with the brand, with the factory, with workers, and worker representatives, and we develop corrective action plan,” Haas said. “We also publish reports of all of our investigations.”

Exceptional working conditions in Alta Gracia include not having a hired supervisor. Knights Apparel chief operating officer (COO) Donnie Hodge said that the only manager there oversees through an operational standpoint.

UCSC student Joana Leonido described the manager’s work.

“The manager maintains that they meet the quota for the day,” Leonido said. “He takes care of orders, money, he works with payroll and makes sure everything goes smoothly. He mostly addresses anything by the union leaders who are the ones working with all the workers.”

With the working conditions the factory workers are given, trust can be built without implementing hierarchy, Hodge said.

“When I first went to the Dominican Republic to establish this factory … I said, ‘Every party involved in this has to be willing to be good to the project ahead of their individual needs,’” Hodge said. “There is no reason I should have to be paying supervisors to tell people to do their jobs. Working together you must ensure that the product coming out of the factory is a great product. We have a shared responsibility — all of us. It is not manager over worker.”

Illustration by Muriel Gordon.

Universities Buying into the Model

Loud Bachata music plays over air fans rumbling in the background as the 140 workers sew apparel, cut textile, apply logo design and pack product.

“The workers know one another,” Leonido said. “They have a sense of community.”

Leonido described the working area as she showed pictures of the different work stations. At the cutting of textile area, workers use metal gloves as a safety precaution to the sharp blades of the cutting machine.

In one of the pictures, a group of workers work specifically with one apparel style. The factory has a very high ceiling where bright white lights hang. Plastic-wrapped product boxes are stacked up on the sides of the factory.

The Alta Gracia factory is the only inhabited building of 12 buildings located in the free trade zone of Villa Altagracia. Zona Franca is written on one of the street signs, signaling the border of the free zone on one of Leonido’s pictures.

While some workers take motorbikes to work, many walk 20 to 30 minutes, a distance Leonido compared to walking from Oakes College to Stevenson at UCSC.

Leonido was able to visit many of the workers’ houses as she traveled through the dirt roads. She noticed some of the village’s infrastructure.

“The sewer system is outside on the side of the road … [and] kids play in that,” Leonido said.

Many of the houses Leonido visited were on top of hills. She described some of the new materials affordable to many of Alta Gracia workers.

“Because of the living wage, they have cement floors,” Leonido said. “Before, they had dirt floors. Some people bought outhouses. They were so happy with that. They were proud.”

Joana Leonido’s first-hand experience inspired her to spread awareness in support of fair labor through this brand and hopes to establish a USAS chapter at UCSC.

Leading an unofficial meeting in January, Leonido said that many people do not realize the extent of the problems.

“This is an issue that a lot of people overlook because we don’t see the people,” Leonido said. “We forget about the struggles in developing countries. As students who are lucky to get an education at this university, it is important for us to [spread awareness] because in knowing that people out there struggle, we as students have leverage to change that.”

In effect, one of the group’s immediate goals is to increase demand for Alta Gracia apparel at UCSC’s bookstore. The unofficial group’s actions have been classroom presentations and tabling at Quarry Plaza.

“After presenting to the Student Union Assembly, a resolution passed through University of California Student Association to officially support living wage apparel,” Leonido said.

Two years before the factory opened in February last year, Knights Apparel CEO Joe Bozich, and COO Donnie Hodge spoke periodically with many bookstore managers in order to see if they would support this brand. Bay Tree Bookstore executive director and member of the UC Code of Conduct Committee Bob McCampbell said many were excited with this idea.

Hodge said that in providing university apparel, they try to be in compliance with students’ concerns.

“We are very active in social compliance,” Hodge said. “It is specifically addressing the need identified by students in the university campuses — that they would like to have a brand that defines this living wage.”

Bay Tree Bookstore, like the rest of the UC bookstores — except for Berkeley, which is under Follet Company — is an independent bookstore, meaning it buys directly from Alta Gracia. Barnes & Noble and Follet act as the middlemen, buying from Alta Gracia.

McCampbell said that of the Alta Gracia apparel bought in November last year, only 33 percent has been sold.

McCampbell said that some of the reasons for why Alta Gracia’s apparel does not sell as well as other brands even though it is similarly priced lies behind its lack of variety in products and better logo design.

“They’re not flying out the door,” McCampbell said. “It is not a full-blown operation [and the factory] is still requesting a higher minimal order than we’re accustomed to.”

Regardless, McCampbell said that the bookstore will continue pushing this apparel and will continue to support the brand. He is currently waiting to see the new designs even though the factory has not yet hired a sales representative, who would be in charge of presenting the physical material to its suppliers.

UCSC’s second order will be of $25,000.

Courtesy of Joana Leonido.

The Viability of the Alta Gracia Model

In order for the model to have a “demonstration effect,” activists need to show how market and labor strategies can work efficiently and simultaneously, UCSC community studies professor Mary Beth Pudup said.

“Genius is to combine the shock in labor politics, improve working conditions, benefits and pay with a market that is willing to absorb this cause,” Pudup said. “What would be terrific is if paying living wages becomes a competitive advantage.”

Schrank, professor at the University of New Mexico, credits the country’s “tremendous stretch” in labor enforcement.

“The Alta Gracia factory is part of that … in a symbolic way,” Schrank said.

For Schrank, a real and expansive change needs to start with the enforcement and fortification of the government’s labor policies in any country.

“The real game changer is getting the labor ministry to change labor laws, rather than fighting plant to plant battle,” Schrank said. “A better bet is putting your energy into trying to force these countries to comply with international obligations.”

Because Alta Gracia is the only unionized and living-wage factory and endorsed through the WRC, it also draws light to the hundreds of factories worldwide still under minimum wage or sweatshop conditions.

Joana Leonido says that this may create confusion for consumers in choosing to support Alta Gracia.

“That’s one argument against Knights Apparel because it isn’t all sweatshop-free like many other companies, but at the same time it is the only one that started this model,” Leonido said. “If we support Alta Gracia, it is going to be a model for other companies to create living wage factories.”

Universities across the nation are working in similar efforts to keep this living-wage factory running. “Will College Loyalty Embrace ‘Living Wage’ Sweatshirts?” is the title of Georgetown University’s professor John M. Kline’s research report published in August of last year. The report, which examines Alta Gracia, exposes the possibility for other apparel factories’ momentum to turn to Alta Gracia’s example and change the way they address human rights and labor.

“The approach goes above and beyond the labor standards required by most university licensing codes, marking a path toward a more humane and sustainable way out of poverty for apparel workers,” Kline said in the article’s abstract. “If enough consumers care, corporations could be challenged to engage in a ‘race to the top’ to brand products based on good workplace conditions rather than an association with famous celebrities.”

Leonido acknowledges the high unemployment rate in the United States, but said the Knights Apparel model has the potential to spread.

“I feel that [Knights Apparel] is stepping up to other companies in saying that living wage in a developing country can work,” Leonido said. “But I do feel that if that succeeds, Knights needs to bring this model back to the U.S., because we need it here.”

*Maritza Vargas’ quotes have been translated by the writer.

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at An Exceptional Model

Illustration by Bela Messex.

From top to bottom: The Many Faces of Aaron Vanek: saloon owner in a Deadwood LARP, F. Scott Fitzgerald during a Speakeasy poker game LARP and the Bloody Baron, house ghost of Slytherin at a Hogwarts LARP. Photos courtesy Aaron Vanek.

John Behnken is 47 years old. He works for IBM as a security architect, was a chef after graduating from the Culinary Institute of America and has a family of four. He lives most days as an average Joe, but other days he is John the wizard, John the combat fighter or John the game master.

“My own desire to role-play came from my early childhood experiences, from playing ‘superhero’ with my friends as a grade-schooler to playing Dungeons & Dragons in high school,” Behnken said. “From there I developed a fascination with all forms of ‘adventure’ stories, both fiction and semi-historical: Robin Hood, King Arthur and the stories of the Plantagenet kings of 12th-century England.”

Behnken now runs a LARP game in Massachusetts, called Prophecy.

LARP stands for “live-action role-play,” and is a game, or — as some argue, a form of art — that is comparable to an extremely immersive form of improvisational interactive theater. The spectrum of types varies from episodical five- to six-hour LARPing games to ones that last for years and participants return to the same background story with their same characters. Sometimes games involve a few participants, but often they have hundreds.

Around the world, there are hundreds of thousands of people involved in LARPing, yet most “regulars” don’t have a clue what the word means. Among people who do recognize the word, LARPing is often considered the ultimate geeky pastime.

Some dub the game the ultimate form of escapism. Either way, it’s role-play, and everyone has some way of finding an alternative for reality. LARPing is just a more fantastical one.

At UC Santa Cruz, the closest activity to LARPing is the internationally recognized game Belegarth. In this sport, students focuses on the battling aspect of the game.

LARP designer and creator Aaron Vanek, a UCLA graduate, said there are three main features to look for to identifying a LARP experience. First, there is a lack of audience, because the people involved participate and no one watches. Second, LARPers act out everything instead of narrating actions, like in Dungeons & Dragons. Third, there is what he calls identifying the “bubble.” The bubble is the boundary that expresses the end of the real world and the start of the world in which the player is role-playing.

“The boundaries are flexible, but they have to be decided before the game starts,” Vanek said. “We could say this room is a spaceship, and everything in it can be role-played, from the people in the room to the chairs. Outside of this room, however, the real world remains.”

So where does the appeal to be in this “room-turned-spaceship,” or in a forest reenacting a medieval combat, come from?

When the players really get involved and become part of the story, things happen, John Behnken said.

“The anachronisms disappear,” Behnken said. “The perceived ‘silliness’ of what you’re doing also falls by the wayside. You fight for your ‘life’ — or at least the life of your character.”

Origins of Obsession

With its extremely wide spectrum of varieties and types, the history of LARPing is complex. Vanek said that role-playing has been around since the beginning of time.

“Role-playing, or play pretend, has been around since humans crawled out of the trees,” Vanek said. “It’s an ancient art form that probably began in shamanistic tribal rituals where someone would put on the skin of an animal and pretend to be hunted by the tribe.”

Rick McCoy is the president of LARP Alliance, a southern California–based group that brings together LARPers by developing resources for players. McCoy said that in order to be identified as a LARPer, mechanics and rules must be involved.

“LARPing has always had a system of mechanics,” McCoy said. “It always has the inclusion of ‘I am still a character, this is a fictional setting, and this is not me.’”

Either way, putting the focus on role-playing aside, modern day LARPing has an intricate history.

In 1976, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, both game designers, created Dungeons & Dragons, a role-playing game that is tabletop-based like board games. Gygax was largely inspired by “Little Wars,” a simulation-type war game that incorporated miniature armor, created in the early 20th century by author H.G. Wells. Arneson and Gygax took this concept and added fantasy elements and complex story lines to it.

Participants embody characters instead of military formations, and go on adventures in a previously set fantasy world.

Each game has a game master, or dungeon master, who not only creates this imaginary world but also acts as problem solver in it. Dungeons & Dragons was the first fantasy-based game to become popular, luring in nerdy high school students all over the country.

In 1981, Larry Niven and Steven Barnes, both authors, wrote the fantasy novel “Dream Park,” describing a theme park setting with highly futuristic elements.

“Imagine Disneyland combined with Star Trek’s holographic technology,” McCoy said. “What you saw visually was like the real deal.”

In “Dream Park,” the International Fantasy Gaming Society (IFGS) is a worldwide organization of fantasy gamers. Niven and Barnes took the tabletop phenomenon of Dungeons & Dragons and practically predicted what could happen if players were to make the role-playing live action.

The novel’s IFGS was recognized by real-life fantasy gamers, and later that year a real-life IFGS was established into a team of adventurers — Think “Lord of the Rings” — with a common goal. This is what could be called the first official LARP society.

Many Dungeons & Dragons fans were excited by this and delved into the LARPing world.

“Tabletop role-playing was very cool, especially when it was good tabletop gaming, led by a game master who really took the time to craft adventures with realism and rich characters,” Behnken said. “The sad part was that it all needed to stay in my mind and on the table. I found LARP, which, as it turned out, became the culmination of everything I was looking for. I could create a character, live and breathe it.”

Third-year Sam Sanders participates on campus in the foam weapon combat game of Belegarth. Photo by Kyan Mahzouf.

Playing Pretend

LARPing takes on infinite realizations. From live combat games to mystical adventures, from embodying medieval villages to a LARP based on a futuristic idea, like “The Matrix.” The list is never-ending, but all have one thing in common: role-play that is active, or live action.

So where does the desire come from to develop a character that is so far outside of yourself? After all, even children play games like cops and robbers and have tea parties with stuffed animals.

UC Santa Cruz sociology professor Craig Reinarman explained the attraction of acting out of character.

“It allows you to behave in ways which you wouldn’t ordinarily allow yourself to behave,” Reinarman said. “People find a certain exhilaration and freedom in that. I suspect that one could get the same kinds of pleasure out of LARPing.”

Some LARPers see the game as not only a hobby but as a form of escapism. Rick McCoy, for example, said that as a child he read books constantly.

“You know, that was my escape,” McCoy said. “Then I found role-playing games when I was 10, and it was the ultimate escapism, the ultimate way of getting out of reality.”

Instead of escape, the game can also be seen as a form of control, of building a character up from the ground in whichever way the player desires.

“I think it’s a way of controlling your own person, controlling your own destiny despite what life has thrown at you,” Andrew “Sieglatan” Hodnet said.

Hodnet is the organizer of a Belegarth group on campus, a live combat–based game that is less intense in terms of role-playing.

“A lot of these people want to be in a setting where by the merits of their own strength and the merits of their own bravado they are the leader of their own little hill,” Hodnet said.

Although control and escape may be two reasons behind LARPing, players can also learn from role-playing.

Brandon Boucher, also known the “lightning bolt man,” made a LARPing video on YouTube that skyrocketed to popularity. Boucher is now featured on “TOSH.0,” a U.S. television series in which host Daniel Tosh provides sarcastic commentary on popular culture.

Boucher said that LARPing is an enriching experience, as it can be both physically challenging and an emotional work-out.

“I’m a very gray person — I don’t see the world in black and white,” Boucher said. “Yet I have played characters where there is black and white, there is right and wrong, there is justice and injustice. You don’t really escape problems because there’s a whole realm of problems to deal with in the LARPing realm. It’s a much more magnificent existence, I guess. Everything happens on a grander scale.”

On a grander scale, role-playing is also a learning experience. In sociology and psychology, as Craig Reinarman explained, role-playing can be a kind of exercise to understand more about what the world looks like from the point of view of another person.

“This comes from a particular tradition in sociology that is called symbolic interactions,” Reinarman said. “It’s a certain way of conceptualizing the self: learning who you are largely through watching the responses of other people.

Aaron Vanek, LARP designer of many long- and short-term events, said that role-playing has been around as long as humanity has existed, and that it is hard-wired into our brains. He makes the comparison to ancient holidays such as the Roman Saturnalia, when, for a day, masters and slaves would switch roles.

“There’s so much to gain by experiencing life when you’re not quite yourself,” Vanek said. “A lot you can learn about others, a lot you can learn about yourself.”

What sometimes can be mistaken as truly immersing oneself in a role can also be seen as taking a role too far. This is exactly why a LARP environment is a controlled one, with boundaries, McCoy said. Part of the art of LARPing is to be able to identify these boundaries.

“Role-playing mastery revolves around the fact that you know that this is a game,” McCoy said. “That you as a role-player work with what the story is about so that you can push it. This is important.”

Illustration by Matt Boblet.

LARP as Art

The amount of preparation that goes into a LARP, especially a long-running game, is immense. The best LARP designers take their craft seriously. Writing the story, the backbone for a LARP and preparing the locations, props and costumes can take months. John Behnken, who runs Prophecy, describes the complexities of setting up a serious game.

“Before every game — we run four to five games a year — we collectively write at least a novel or two’s worth of text in support of the coming game,” Behnken said. “All of which is overseen by our IFOC [the iron fist of continuity], whose job it is to make sure that everything fits the overall continuity of the story.”

This extent of preparation can be comparable to endless rehearsing for plays or dance performances. A big difference is obviously the lack of audience, and the extreme involvement of all who are a part of the game.

“It’s interesting to think about LARPing being the ultimate aesthetic principal of acting,” Hodnet said. “That you’re not doing it for social redeem, you’re doing it just for the aestheticism of acting.”

The reason why LARPing may be recognized as a geek game rather than a powerful medium of expression could be the fact that it is such an internal experience. There are no spectators, there are no observers and there is no one to take an outsider’s perspective, except for maybe a journalist or two trying to do their readers a service by explaining what LARPing is all about.

Aaron Vanek explains that a big reason why LARPing may not get recognition as a serious art form is the lack of fixed form. Each improvisational “play” is performed once only, therefore creating a difficult means of analysis and critical examination. Vanek, however fully believes in LARPing as an art form, and called it “the use of skill and imagination to create an aesthetic experience.”

Some, such as Brandon “lighting bolt man” Boucher, believe that LARPing will never become mainstream, that it is so far outside normal that it will not reach that point. But LARP is making huge strides in the community at large.

Vanek predicts that LARPing is on its way to recognition and in the future will be portrayed as a viable hobby and art form, rather than a gathering of turbo geeks.

“It’s a tall order, as I could be dead wrong — LARP might just be the bastard child of performance art,” Vanek said. “Role-playing games and improvisational theater — it might never be any more popular than it is now, and LARP will quietly go the way of the hula-hoop. But I don’t think so.”

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at Planet LARP

UC San Diego fourth-year Jasmine Phillips is one of many black students who have expressed indignation, and she is one of thousands of students — of all racial backgrounds — outraged by the string of hate crimes that occurred at several UC campuses last year.

“We as black students are continuously attacked and made disposable on UC campuses,” Phillips said.

Standing at a podium in a UCLA ballroom, the sociology gave a campaign speech at the African Black Coalition (ABC) conference held at UCLA earlier this year. While running for ABC president, Phillips addressed race relations at her school and how to prevent hate crimes.

After the UC hate crimes in 2010, UC campus community members and people across California voiced their dismay. Students at UC San Diego, UCLA and UC Davis held demonstrations to protest the UCSD “Compton Cookout” and anti-Semitic, racist and homophobic graffiti. The administrations of all of the affected schools denounced racism, sexism and prejudice, and opened investigations.

“As always, the remedy for bad speech is good speech,” UC president Mark Yudof said in a statement about the events at UCSD. “For that reason, we call on all members of the UC community — students, faculty, and staff — to affirm and defend the values of the University of California. We are speaking out and ask that you do the same whenever, wherever, and however you confront the behavior that violates the principles and values of this university.”

Hate crimes continued at UC campuses this year. Students have organized several moves to action. Leaders of the ABC have plans to improve the UC campus racial climate. However, there is still a long way to go before satisfactory conditions are reached, according to a 2010 university-wide report on race relations.

“Because we are physically and emotionally drained, protests can’t be our only form of action,” Phillips said about the UCSD student reactions to the hate crimes.

Some ABC members plan to lobby administration at their UCs to create measures that would improve the campus racial climates.

Illustration by Bela Messex.

The Controversy

Last February, the most publicized UC hate crime occurred at UC San Diego when a group of students decided to hold a party called the “Compton Cookout” satirizing Black History Month. Students were asked to dress in baggy clothes, eat fried chicken, drink Kool-Aid and act “ghetto.” Less than a week later, racial slurs, including the n-word, were used on a student-run program called Koala TV. A week after that, a noose was found hanging from the top of one of the school’s libraries.

The same month, students found profanity and derogatory slurs spray-painted all over the entrance to UC Davis’ Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Center. In March, spray-painted swastikas were found on multiple surfaces of the UC Davis campus, including the social sciences and humanities building.

A column questioning the purpose and relevance of Black History Month ran in the UC Irvine school newspaper last February.

That same month at UC Santa Cruz, a group of students were investigated for drawing nooses along with the name Diego Lynch on various locations of the campus, including bathroom stalls. The students in question said that they meant no harm by the drawings and were simply putting a play on words with Lynch’s last name.

“[The Diego Lynch drawing] started several years ago,” said Mitchell Landry*, one of the students who drew the nooses. “It started out as a play on his name, because he’s a buddy. It was just a joke. It was never intended to have any racial connotations.”

The student whose name was featured in the drawings does not take the incidences as lightly.

“Even though [the Diego Lynch drawings] were stupid and inconsequential, it does not mean they weren’t offensive,” fourth-year Diego Lynch said. “I wasn’t stopping them … but I should have.”

The students behind the “Compton Cookout,” as well as the student who hung the noose in a library, were all suspended. After using the offensive expletives on air, UCSD student program Koala TV was taken off the air. However, the author of the UC Irvine newspaper column and the students who drew the “Diego Lynch” nooses were not punished.

The Stats

Three years ago the UC’s Advisory Council on Campus Climate, Culture and Inclusion compiled a report including surveys analyzing the diversity on UC campuses.

The September 2010 edition of the UC Diversity Annual Accountability Sub-Report contains the results of this endeavor.

One graph in the report shows the results of a survey that asked students at UC campuses to agree or disagree with the statement “Students of my race are respected on this campus.”

The data showed that African-American males and females agreed with this statement the least, with a little over 60 percent of students. Chicano/Latino students agreed slightly less than 80 percent of the time. Asian-American and white students agreed the most, with about 90 percent and 95 percent, respectively.

The next graph shows the results of a survey that focuses on African-American student responses to the statement by UC campuses. African-American students at UC Santa Barbara and UC Santa Cruz agreed with the statement the least, with slightly less than 50 percent.

In response to the statement “My race is respected on this campus,” UCSC student body chair Tiffany Loftin said, “Hell no. Why? Because we are black, and racism is still alive. There have been certain events that prove that black people aren’t respected on this campus. There was a racist event at Stevenson [very recently].”

On Jan. 26, someone wrote “F— n——” on a Stevenson college men’s bathroom stall. In response, someone crossed out the n-word and replaced it with “white power” so the graffiti read “F— white power.”

African-American students at UC Riverside had the highest agreement rate, with slightly less than 80 percent of the population agreeing with the statement.

UC Riverside has the highest African-American enrollment of all the UCs as of 2009, according to a chart titled Undergraduate Enrollment by Race/Ethnicity by Campuses. African-American enrollment at UC Riverside is about 10 percent. Every other campus had percentages hovering just above 0 percent. UCSC had an enrollment rate of about 2 percent. UCSD had the lowest African-American enrollment percentage, with about 1 percent.

Felicia McGinty, UCSC vice chancellor of student affairs, is well-aware that African-Americans are a minority on campus, but she said that this minority does not face disrespect.

“Students have not reported to me that they feel disrespected,” McGinty said. “They have reported that they feel isolated. There aren’t many African-American students on campus. They have challenges inherent in being 2.6 percent of the population. It’s harder for them to build a community.”

The Backlash

As a residential assistant (RA) at the Rosa Parks African American Theme House (R.PAATH) of Stevenson College, Shawneshia Hoover, says she has experienced many challenges in her position. The R.PAATH was created last year in reaction to the slew of UC hate crimes.

The R.PAATH housing focuses on multiculturalism and is open to anyone who is interested in African-American culture and history. It is the second African-American themed house to be created at any UC, following UC Berkeley’s Ida L. Jackson house.

“When it comes to some students who don’t know anything about it, they see it as segregation,” Hoover said. “I find myself having to explain the importance of R.PAATH, because so many people don’t understand why black people have their own themed house. The house is not exclusively for blacks being that it only houses seven black residents, including me.”

Executive director of retention Pablo Reguerin said that R.PAATH was created in order to promote tolerance on campus. In light of the racial hate crimes at several campuses, UCSC SUA chair Loftin held a discussion with students asking, “What things could be done to make UCSC a healthier climate for African-Americans?” Themed housing was just one of the ideas the discussion produced.

“Outreach programs, student retention, and the R.PAATH were some of the goals on the list of things produced by this conversation,” Pablo Reguerin said.

Reguerin is also the director of the  Educational Opportunities Program (EOP) office at UCSC.

“The R.PAATH was created 100 percent in response to student demands,” he said. “It is inhabited by people who want to be there.”

Reguerin was one of the administrators heavily involved with the realization of R.PAATH.

“The vision of R.PAATH has been lived out,” Reguerin said. “We were really lucky to get very talented RAs who are not afraid to tackle issues of race and discuss them.”

However, not everyone is as optimistic about the accomplishment. Fourth-year Falyn Davis, a black student at UCSC, has doubts about the motives of the creation of R.PAATH.

“The purpose for the campus’s support of [the R.PAATH] had nothing to do with black students, but instead with making [the administrators] look good in a time when students of color are under attack,” Davis said.

McGinty acknowledges that steps need to be taken to improve the campus climate.

“I want everyone to feel welcome and supported on this campus and to know that their presence matters,” McGinty said. “[Their presence] enriches the campus community. We need to work together to build a campus climate that allows everyone to feel welcome, supported and respected.”

Hoover has made two videos on YouTube addressing the ignorance she and her friends have encountered since she became an RA at R.PAATH. In them they talk about educating two white students who ignorantly labeled them with common stereotypes of black people while attempting to make friends with them.

“These issues are so prevalent at our school, UCSC,” Hoover said. “All [one of the students] sees is ‘The Boondocks’ when he watches TV. All he sees is hip-hop when he watches TV. He sees black people associated with those cultures, and so therefore he believes that clearly must be an outlet to get along with all African-American people.”

“We are not ‘them,’ and we are not ‘they,’” one of Hoover’s friends said in the video. “We are individuals.”

The ABC Conference 2011

The eighth annual UC ABC conference of the UCs was held at UCLA and spanned the weekend of Feb. 11 through 13 this year.

Student delegates like Jasmine Phillips met with volunteers to look at possible solutions to issues that arise for minorities on college campuses.

“I’ve e-mailed UC president Mark Yudof, as well as other administrators about the lack of respect African-American students receive on the UCSD campus,” Phillips said.

“Loving each other is a form of resistance because society tells us not to love ourselves,” she said in her campaign speech.

Phillips won the presidency.

During the conference, a UC Davis representative read out the goals of the ABC. One of those goals is to institutionalize diversity programs such as African-American studies UC-wide. These programs would provide students with an important lesson in history that is focused on in a way that the average U.S. history class is not.

The ABC conference also offered UC students a variety of workshops to attend. One of these workshops was called “The Burden of the Black Student: Teaching Moments.” It was held by UCLA third-year Tierra Moore.

In the workshop, Moore taught the students about “microaggressions,” small injustices that add up over time, and how to deal with them.

“During my friend’s first year at UCLA, someone on an elevator said, ‘Oh my God, can I touch you? I’ve never touched a black person before,’” Moore said as an example of a microaggression. “Even though it’s not super awful — she didn’t hang a noose or anything — it was a small thing, but it still made an impact. The idea is that those little things add up, and they create someone’s experience [at a university].”

At the workshop, Moore told a personal anecdote about one of her experiences with microaggression at UCLA. In her political sociology course, Moore said, her teacher showed a clip from the movie “Bulworth,” which depicted black people with negative stereotypes.

Moore was one of the four black students in the class who took offense to the clip.

“I was offended by the fact that the teacher didn’t give any premise to the clip,” Moore said. “It was as if he were presenting it as if it is the truth.”

Another microaggression she experienced also occurred in the classroom. In one of her sections, a classmate made a comment about issues affecting Africa.

Moore said a student claimed that the reason why Africa has problems is because the people there do not listen to their police force. She then said that African-Americans tried to rebel against police enforcement in Los Angeles in the ’90s, but the Los Angeles Police Department and the SWAT team shut them down.

The student’s argument was that black people are inherently unruly and need the police to control them, Moore said.

“I waited for her to be corrected by the TA, who was an older Ph.D student, but she just said, ‘Yes, you have a really good point,’ and moved on to the next person,” Moore said. “I was so stunned, I didn’t know what to do.”

After Moore was done speaking, the students in the workshop got into groups of four and discussed microaggressions that they had experienced. One student told their group about how UC Irvine served chicken and waffles “in honor of” Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Another student told the group about how her roommate joked about how she must like fried chicken. Both are stereotypically African-American dishes.

At the end of the workshop, students suggested immediate confrontation to combat microaggression. The idea is for students to speak up and tell the offending person their objections to the microaggression on the spot.

The statement from Yudof regarding the UC hate crimes at UCSD last year encouraged students and others to “remedy bad speech with good speech.” He suggested they counter the ignorance, racism and hatred by speaking out when needed.

As Moore and the students in her workshop concluded, the best way to deal with the unsavory situations that arise from hate is to confront them head-on and let their voices be heard.

“That is the burden of the black student,” Moore said at the end of the workshop. “A lot of the time black students have to be more equipped to handle things like microaggressions and having to teach [people].”

In response to the e-mail with the n-word and other racist events, the UCSD administration is taking steps to improve the racial climate on campus. Campus officials are developing a class to teach tolerance and working on ways to increase retention of black students.

Cultural Intelligence is a two-credit Stevenson course that was offered for the first time this quarter at UCSC. Led by Diversity and Inclusion program coordinator Donnae Smith, the class trains students to give diversity and inclusion workshops. Based on their performance in the class, some students will be chosen to be part of the Diversity Facilitator team, which will begin leading diversity workshops next quarter.

UCSC’s campus diversity officers are holding discussions with students about the classroom and campus racial climate, according to an e-mail recently sent to students. They are planning to meet with student organizations and are “working to promote an inclusive environment on campus.”

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at UC Hate Crimes: Where Are We Now?

Illustration by Louise Leong.

Illustration by Louise Leong.

When it comes to protesting in Santa Cruz, James Christianson knows that things just aren’t what they used to be.

Christianson wears the ’60s revolution well with his grizzled complexion, wild grown-out hair and colorful vintage style. As a Santa Cruz resident for over four decades and an American studies lecturer at UCSC, he has witnessed political activism at its peak, and he now watches students struggle to get their voices heard.

“There’s different little groups that are doing wonderful work as far as activism’s concerned, but they’re kind of isolated,” Christianson said. “It’s not a massive organization with many people, a movement. There’s a general apathy that you see throughout the country.”

Santa Cruz’s tie-dyed footsteps of the town’s so-called defining era, the ’60s and ’70s, have been washed away with new-wave rallying.

Activism has evolved from the hippie-esque, with campus support becoming harder and harder to win over.

While the Vietnam War and the education crisis are completely separate issues, each demands a movement to achieve change.

In 1970, students burned draft-cards at the Quarry Plaza, the same place where some students now stroll past rallies against fee hikes. Today, classes are canceled in community and American studies due to budget cuts, but in 1970 spring quarter classes were canceled or reorganized to focus on Vietnam War issues.

“What we’re talking about is numbers,” Christianson said. “To be able to marshal lots of people to come together on these kinds of issues … To get a large representative of the student population to be out there … to put their ass on the line and make a righteous hue and cry about injustice, about bullshit, about corruption.”

Last year on March 4, an organized strike against the education crisis attracted enough protesters to shut down three UCSC entrances. Sustaining this passion is the strike committee’s toughest challenge.

“Once Kerr Hall, and then what?” said fourth-year Leo Ritz-Barr, a politics major and strike organizer. “How do you get bigger than Kerr Hall? We shut down the campus for a day. Then what? What is the most effective message?”

Since the occupation of Kerr Hall and the March 4 protests, students and workers have gone from large-scale action to the incremental approach of rallies in hopes of spreading awareness about UC issues. The campus demonstrations of the 2009-10 school year were, if anything, large in student numbers. But this year’s informative rallies suffer from low student turnout. Student apathy is a threat event organizers face year-round, with the main question being: Why don’t students show up?

Christianson attributes UCSC’s smaller rallies to issues that are harder to pinpoint. He spent the ’60s and ’70s in California, when the counter-cultural aspect of Santa Cruz drove change.

“You get the [turnout] numbers ‘back in the day’ because things were more clearly defined,” Christianson said. “The Vietnam war was much more clear. [It was about] civil rights. The black movement. The women’s movement. Free speech movements. Students for a democratic society. Things were more compellingly defined. [Now], there’s a malaise and abstractness about it.”

The activism that Christianson refers to such as the women’s movement brought on 700 signatures in 1972 from students petitioning to form a women’s studies program at UCSC. In 1981, the only instructor teaching Native American studies was dismissed, and 600 people marched to the chancellor’s office in response, insisting their demands be met in five days. Today, despite activist efforts, a similar humanities major, American studies, has been suspended.

Today, rallies that are large in numbers usually happen during March protest week, petering out during the remainder of the year.

American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) interns like Victoria Salgado try to lessen this apathy by organizing the efforts of students and workers. Salgado is a second-year sociology, Latino studies and art major whose job is to spread awareness of union issues to students and engage them in sustaining UCSC’s student-worker front.

“It’s true — it’s like you build it up for one day and then you just disperse,” Salgado said. “So how can you keep that flow of things? I can’t really explain it to you, because I myself don’t know how to do that.”

Some UCSC workers have also noticed the lack of campus presence at rallies.

Nicholas Gutierrez is a dining hall worker at College 9. He became active in the worker’s union seven years ago. He participates in fighting for student-worker rights, but he says often five to 10 workers show up at rallies and event organization meetings.

“… There’s a huge, huge percentage of students that don’t support, or they just turn the other way or they just don’t care,” Gutierrez said. “And I’ve always wondered why, because when student fees go up, it affects everyone.”

On Oct. 7, 2010, 200 demonstrators appeared at the bookstore. In November 2009, about 150 students occupied Kerr Hall overnight. In March 2010, students shut down the campus starting at 6 a.m. Students and workers continue to spread awareness, but turnout has changed along with the tactics.

Ritz-Barr said low turnout forces organizers to try new strategies like “occasionally running through a classroom.”

“One of the most effective ways of getting people out is disrupting large lecture halls,” he said. “You’ve got 500 kids sitting in a GE that they don’t want to be in, and you give them an option to go do something cool.”

Noah Miska is a student active in organizing rally events. He organized the March 1, 2011 event, in which around 500 students spelled out “Free education” with their bodies in an attempt to direct people toward calmer, less agitated discussions about campus issues.

“You can’t get very far by just pointing out what’s wrong, by protesting,” Miska said. “I think you need to lead by example and try to create the world that you want to see, which is exactly what I’m trying to do on March 1 with the small discussion groups that will be happening.”

Miska’s approach coincides with that of the smaller rallies organized earlier this year. These events may not be bold enough to shut down campus entrances like March 4 of last year, but their goal is to continue to create an effective dialogue about issues like fee hikes and major cuts.

“It’s important to always say what you think is right and it can be really powerful with a group of people, but at the same time … the louder you shout, the easier you are to ignore,” Miska said. “People pay more attention to someone whispering carefully chosen words than shouting everything. Shouting has a place, but shouting isn’t great for constructive dialogue, which is exactly what we need right now.”

Rally strategies have varied from dressing up as zombies to puppets and pie-eating skits. Small rallies assist strike organizers in diversifying their efforts, student apathy is still a concern.

“[Some workers] just don’t care,” Salgado said. “Again, it’s like students — they’re just very individualistic. It’s, like, screw the rest — I only care about me.”

But Salgado added that campus activism has worked when students and workers formed a united front.

“I know that a lot of the protests that have happened in the past have had effects … [like] the new contract for AFSCME workers, and the workers won,” Salgado said. “They won that contract because of the protesting. And if you speak to the workers, they will say that themselves too, that it was the students that helped them out. So it definitely does work. It’s just a matter of getting it organized.”

Last year, Salgado was not active in protests or rallies. Now she tries to convince inactive students that there is a reason to get up and do something.

“Last year it was just me in my apartment with my roommates just there, hanging out,” she said. “And I remember all of the chaos with the rallies, and I was very pessimistic. Like, what’s the point? Because honestly, it’s very difficult to actually make change, like with one rally.”

After getting over her pessimism, Salgado decided to join the rally efforts, persuading students to let go of the apathy that she once had.

“Towards the end of last year I was really frustrated with doing nothing,” Salgado said. “I kind of realized you can complain, and you can sit and not do anything about it, but you might as well channel your energy into something. So, that’s what I’m trying to do right now. Some people can say I’m not really doing anything, or what I’m doing isn’t going to amount to anything, but at least I’m trying.”

Now, Salgado faces the challenge of speaking to students who do not usually get involved in activism.

“It’s easy to get involvement with people who are active in the community but it’s really difficult to get [involvement] with regular students,” she said. “It’s difficult to even talk to them about it and get them interested in everything, because they just kind of shrug it off.”

A larger student effort is not the only problem. More UCSC workers are needed at rally events, and organizing them can be even more challenging than organizing students.

“Sometimes we have rallies on location, and there’s not a big turnout, and people kind of wait until it really counts and then they show up,” he said. “I tell them we should show up at every rally because I’ve noticed that there’s 3-to-1, sometimes 4-to-1 students versus workers, and that doesn’t look good, because the university sees that.”

Gutierrez said workers often have children or parents to take care of after work, and dining hall workers can’t leave the busy lunch shift for noon rallies. He said, many are nervous about speaking in front of crowds or do not speak English fluently.

Ultimately, Gutierrez says workers just need to put in the effort.

“Even when we come to these meetings, it’s the same group of five to 10 workers always coming to this meeting,” he said. “This is why I say it’s that laziness thing we need to work out. I think for us, that’s our biggest problem: getting people off their butt.”

Psychology associate professor Regina Langhout said that the way issues are presented today makes it challenging for students to become involved. Langhout is a member of the Faculty Organizing Group (FOG), which opposes the privatization of public higher education.

“I don’t think students are apathetic,” she said. “Instead, they are pulled in many directions, including having work and family responsibilities. Many people — including students — feel overwhelmed. When we re-frame the issue, the possible solutions change.”

Ritz-Barr reluctantly described the strategy of this past year’s rallies as “cautious”. After the diplomas of some students accused of participating in the Kerr Hall occupation were withheld and other students were fined, the threat of authorities lingers.

Lack of student support can also take the passion out of activism. Ritz-Barr, a fourth-year strike organizer, paraphrased letters from students who did not support the protests of last year.

“My day was interrupted by the students marching through the center of the intersection, and it took me three hours to get to class,” Ritz-Barr read. “They should be punished to the fullest extent of the student conduct and be kicked out of school.”

Christianson, a UCSC lecturer, relayed how the need for students that go out on limb for a cause, or “adventurists,” as Fitz-Barr calls them, is the main issue.

“There’s plenty to be outraged about. At least as much as they had back [in the ’60s and ’70s],” Christianson said. “It’s just how do you stir up, organize, drive people to commit, and then sustain it? Not just for a one day kind of gesture, because the people in power are willing to let you have that. Because they’re patronizing they think the students are children. ‘Let them have their day. They’ll be back in class tomorrow.’ And sure enough, they’re right.”

---- (C) 2011 City on a Hill Press. All Rights Reserved. View online at Rallies and Protests Face the Hurdle of Apathy