Now in its seventh decade, Slab City is a longstanding but chronically impermanent settlement built on Camp Dunlap, a decommissioned World War II training camp. It is an informal community of squatters, snowbirds, homeless residents, veterans, and artists like Austin, all making their homes in this unhomely desert environment wedged between an active gunnery range and the Imperial Valley’s industrial agriculture.

Leftover from the military camp, the basic elements of a town are here: roads, reservoirs, sewers, slabs, and foundations. After the camp was disbanded in 1946, the eponymous concrete slabs were left behind when the wooden buildings moved to Niland, the nearest town, four miles away. The slabs that remain today are cracked and partially covered with sand, and the camp’s original roads are pocked with holes and rutted with tank tracks. The million-gallon cisterns are empty; manholes have been filled in and their covers salvaged long ago. This residual infrastructure provides a backdrop to understand how people make homes in extreme places and how the things people make stand up to time, other people, and dust storms.

Off the grid, living in what is often called the “last free place,” Slab City’s residents measure the durability of their freedom in what they build. In structures like houses of wooden pallets.

I met Austin on one of my trips to Slab City with the Irish photographer Donovan Wylie. We wanted to understand the architecture of this place and its residents’ struggles with adaptation and resistance. When the weather alert came through, a year after my most recent visit, I didn’t know exactly how the storm would affect Austin’s pallet structure, and I wasn’t sure which version of pallet architecture would sift the wall of dust, or even if its architect was still there.

Wearing sandals made from two-by-four blocks of wood, Austin first approached us with a clipboard to ask if we’d like to see the three-level A-frame he was building. He walked us through the ground level where couches and chairs filled a shady living area on the ground. Further up, he had a workshop dedicated to hacking the proprietary charging systems of cordless tools. Magazines of AAA batteries sprayed out of the opened handles of drills and saws, waiting for their solar panel charge. Up above, a communal sleeping loft looked out through pallet frames toward the Algodones Dunes and the invisible Mexican border to the south, and westward toward Salvation Mountain and the Salton Sea’s dusty veil. Between slats to the east, we could see plumes of smoke rising from ordnance that had been dropped on the bombing range.

Slab City is here because it is a so-called Section 36. In America’s westward expansion, the National Land Ordinance of 1785 and subsequent land acts, including California’s 1853 survey, overlaid the land with a grid and divided each township into 36 sections. In this system, every township had two square-mile plots—Section 16 and Section 36—reserved for public education. Many have been sold by states to help fund schools, but this particular Section 36 has lingered as a small piece of public land, a forgotten square of desert atop East Mesa along the Imperial Valley’s ancient shoreline.

In the early 1940s, the Navy saw strategic advantages in the plot’s remoteness and its similarities to North Africa’s war theater. And so the U.S. military paid California $3,810 to install Camp Dunlap, the only revenue the state has ever received from this piece of land.

When the military moved out, migrant farmworkers harvesting creosote moved in, and Slab City’s informal settlement began. Despite pressures from developers and state officials concerned with liability, this Section 36 persists as a residual piece of Manifest Destiny where public land hosts private aspirations, rights meet hardship, and makeshift dreams ride the desert sea like concrete slabs on sand.

On Austin’s clipboard were sketches that carried more than just plans for shelter. These designs harbored visions and hopes. They delineated the fugitive aspirations of an artist, a resident of Slab City, a member of a wider community founded on an ethic of reuse. Residency on the slabs can be as fleeting and vulnerable as the materials at hand: cardboard, palm fronds, shade cloth, and pallets are themselves transient. And when I returned less than five months later to visit Austin, his original pallet structure was gone, and another had risen across the road.

If the previous project was the house of an idealist, a DIY hacker, an improviser, then this new one was the refuge of an ascetic, a hermit, a master geometer. If the first had been an exercise in communal living cast within a builder’s yard and its organized riot of materials, this second structure was a remote outpost, its peaked arch of pallets recalling the praying hands of Jerome, isolated in an austere sand and gravel lot. The frame of this inverted V rose twenty feet into the desert sky, pushing the modules of soft wood to their material limits so that the middle two pallets of each side sagged a little under their own weight, as if weary from traversing borders, supporting goods, and delivering things in the 21st century’s global supply lines.

A pallet A-frame structure, the predominant building style in Slab City. Photograph by Donovan Wylie.

Now, this frame (is it a pointed version of St. Louis’s arch and a smaller gateway to this vestige of American frontier?) rises over a box formed by 28 other pallets, making room for its resident and, at the same time, presenting another experiment in living that tests the limits of “free,” within what public land and available materials might offer.

Where do you go in a dust storm when the last free place is already your refuge of last resort? How do you avoid exposure in a place that is already fully exposed? Build what you will, with the materials you have. Each of Austin’s pallet structures embodies the independence of building up and tearing down at will. But in something like a dust storm, this self-determination reaches its limit, and freedom becomes as porous as a pallet’s slats.

Slab City’s residents have been displaced from elsewhere. (Austin came from the city he’s named for.) Some arrived here by choice, but many others came here, seeking to escape forces beyond their control—whether economic, societal, or political. And the dust storm itself is a function of environmental degradation that began with the gridding of a continent, and continued with projects to irrigate the valley, triggering the calamity that formed the Salton Sea, which now issues toxic dust from its retreating shores.

Despite its remoteness and insularity, the last free place can’t escape these legacies. (In fact, it may be at their epicenter, just as it straddles the San Andreas Fault.) In some ways, Slabbers follow in the footsteps of the soldiers who trained here because they too are training to live in the desert. And before the first slabs were poured, the Navy set up a field lab to test the casting of concrete in extreme temperatures, nearly 120 degrees in that summer of 1941. Residents of Slab City now test the idea of freedom in a laboratory of their own making.

No reports followed this particular storm, but any snowbirds who lingered on the Slabs for the summer season would have recognized blizzard conditions as yellow clouds of sand and dust blotted out the sun, lowered temperatures, and reduced visibility to a few feet. Drifts of sand likely pressed into Austin’s second pallet structure, as dust layered onto cans of food, chairs, tables, tools, and sketchpads, leaving a gray coating on every surface as if it had been there for hundreds of years. Slabbers who had cars or trailers would have retreated into their sealed interiors, while others like Austin would rely on a pallet’s imperfect windbreak to avoid sandblasting that can last for hours.

The wall of dust will be followed by other storms, just as plans to close Slab City will be proposed and then postponed, and somehow this place will endure. Freedom may not be free, but when it manifests itself in the solidity—even if makeshift—of this architecture, like Austin’s pallet structures, hidden identities become apparent. Each resident brings their own admixture of need and desire and curates an equally aggregated version of ‘last free place.’

Out here on the slabs.

The post Is Slab City, California the Last Free Place in America? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Ethnic enclaves are commonplace in the United States, but this announcement felt like an epic diplomatic triumph against all odds, because it put the name “Saigon” back on the map. Several months after the city fell to the communist North Vietnamese Army in April 1975, Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City, after the communist revolutionary leader. In Westminster, surrounded by flags no longer flown in Vietnam, most of the 400 Vietnamese-American attendees, well aware of the external intervention necessary to preserve their exiled collective memory, were elated to finally see their former capital city’s name on a road sign. “Only in America is Saigon being resurrected,” said local politician Van Tran.

It was perhaps only in a place like Westminster, a town of less than 100,000 located just minutes from Disneyland, that “Little Saigon” could become a reality and sustain itself well into the post-Cold War era, with its culture and memorials dedicated to a conflict that most Americans would rather forget.

Tran’s statement, while true, would have been unthinkable 15 years prior, before refugees transformed the 9000 block of Bolsa Avenue from a mostly white, semi-rural strip into the unofficial capital of the Vietnamese diaspora. Just as importantly, in American culture at large the very idea of “Vietnam” had been consigned to the Dark Age of American history, so that refugees had to be careful celebrating even benign occasions like the Tet lunar new year on U.S. soil. Little Saigon’s social history speaks volumes about the complex bonds and activism at the local level in Orange County that were needed to build and maintain an ethnic enclave synonymous with exile politics.

But by 1988, with the blessing of the governor, Vietnamese Americans were suddenly in a position to transform a local celebration into a symbolic statement suggesting that maybe they really had won the Vietnam War. Or at least its aftermath. These nominal losers of the war itself had learned to affirm a tragic past by rewriting it. In their own way, they were simply becoming American.

We normally don’t associate exile politics with becoming American, thinking of refugees as sojourners rather than settlers. But the history of the Cold War made the fusion of exile and American identity totally feasible and virtually inevitable.

This fusion resulted from a decision by the United States—starting with the 1948 Displaced Persons Act—to defy the international community by defining refugees in such a narrow way that 90 percent of those admitted during the Cold War hailed from communist republics. In their classic book Calculated Kindness, Gil Loescher and John Scanlan argued that such a strict admission policy was politically designed to highlight global disapproval of the Soviet way of life. It also had an impact domestically. Since the vast majority of refugees from Soviet Bloc countries were adamantly anti-communist themselves, they were free to write their own pre-Cold War national histories onto their new American lives.

Ukrainians, the single-largest beneficiary of the 1948 Displaced Persons Act, befriended Columbia University history professor Clarence Manning, who wrote nine books on their pre-Soviet culture. It took only eight Hungarian Americans to successfully petition the Denver city council in 1963 to dedicate a park to those who perished in the short-lived revolution of 1956. Because of the politics of Cold War migration, it did not take long for Florida’s Cuban population to become ideologically homogeneous. That the United States operated anti-communist media like Radio Martí that employed some Cuban refugees made it clear that there was no contradiction between being an exile and becoming American.

By the time the Vietnamese refugees arrived in mass in 1975, a pattern was established whereby entire ethnic enclaves functioned as transnational opposition parties to America’s communist adversaries. Because Cold War tensions poisoned most attempts to establish formal diplomatic ties with many communist states, refugee communities could often proudly and publicly espouse their claim to the lost homeland with near impunity, protected not only by the First Amendment, but also the unofficial blessing of Uncle Sam.

Thus, these Cold War traditions led to generations of Vietnamese in the refugee diaspora standing at attention to a flag, an anthem, and other symbols no longer associated with an existing nation-state. They could be assured that hardly any Vietnamese or Americans would point out the contradiction.

For a nascent neoconservative movement in the United States, regime change replaced détente as the foreign policy objective. During his 1976 bid for the presidency, neoconservative upstart Ronald Reagan audaciously met in Florida with exile leaders from Panama and Cuba hoping to plot another invasion of the Bay of Pigs. Though he failed to win his party’s nomination that year, Reagan’s hardline rhetoric pressured the incumbent Gerald R. Ford administration to jettison any plans to normalize diplomatic relations with the Hanoi government.

After the Cold War ended, exile politics shifted—and were reinvigorated—by a new threat: Globalization was transforming Little Saigon into Little Ho Chi Minh City. The refugees still had numbers in their favor, especially with the influx in the 1990s of more than 100,000 former political prisoners from Vietnam. But they had to contend with a post-Cold War world in which Vietnam had become America’s newest trading partner. In liberal-leaning Seattle and Boston, Vietnamese political prisoners longing to enjoy in exile the cherished cultural symbols and practices banned in their home country were met with disappointment.

The shift in politics became clear in 1995 when Westminster attempted to erect a Vietnamese-American Veterans Memorial. It was Westminster city councilman Tony Lam, famous for being the first American elected official of Vietnamese descent, who proposed building a special statue to honor the sacrifice of both American and South Vietnamese soldiers during the war. Internal divisions among Vietnamese people in the city stalled the project. Then the Anglo population was reluctant to get behind a project that placed Vietnamese soldiers—whom most Americans collectively remember as inadequate allies at best—on an equal footing with the U.S. military.

This was not a new objection. Six years before the monument was proposed, Westminster city councilman Frank Frye convinced the city to reject a parade honoring South Vietnamese soldiers, whereupon he proceeded to lecture the refugee organizers by telling them, “It is my opinion that you’re American, and you’d better be American. If you want to be South Vietnamese, go back to South Vietnam.”

Ironically, Frye’s reputation for such politically incorrect statements gave the new plans for the memorial a boost when, as Mayor of Westminster in 1996, he embraced the project and began convincing white conservatives that it was a good idea. When a protest against a shop owner who displayed a photograph of communist hero Ho Chi Minh energized the Vietnamese community, it became the impetus for a series of concerts to raise the $1 million for the project.

But the momentum for the monument inspired its own backlash. Despite the benefits that Vietnamese businesses provided to Westminster, the majority-white city council, as epitomized by member Margie Rice, had grown weary of exile politics. “I feel like (the Vietnamese) are taking over our city, plain and simple,” Rice said. “I would think that after 20 years or so of being here and being given the freedoms that they want, they would calm down. By God, how long can you go on fighting this war?”

But once the Hanoi government demanded that the city erect a statue featuring American and North Vietnamese (i.e. communist) soldiers shaking hands in the spirit of reconciliation, the city council dropped its objections. Whatever problems that conservatives whites had with rewriting the past to portray South Vietnamese as equal partners with the United States were trivial compared to a much more radical rewriting of the past depicting Americans soldiers and communists seeing eye to eye.

On July 13, 1999, with more than 100 citizens present, the city council voted unanimously to approve the refugee version of the war memorial, which was finally unveiled in April 2003. Social worker and music industry insider Nam Loc Nguyen, who mobilized the community to raise the required funds, considered that effort his proudest accomplishment as a Vietnamese American. As he told me in an interview, “There were 400 Vietnam War memorials, but none of them talked about the Vietnamese soldier. So my dream was to build a memorial for them. All I want is to bring their soul here, so I can look at the memorial and see my friend. And a wife can come pray for her husband.”

And this was but one expression of how refugee identity was not a refusal to assimilate, but rather another way of becoming American. In this case, a refugee American.

The post How the Cold War Fused Exile and American Identity appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Mariachi music and the Potomac River don’t often find themselves in the same sentence, but Mexico turned 200 overnight, so an exception had to be made. Mariachi music did indeed waft over the Potomac, emanating from the Grito celebration on the esplanade of the Kennedy Center. Ozomatli played, fireworks ensued, naturally, and thousands of melancholic Mexicans toasted 200 years of independence from the old empire in the capital of the empire many of them feel replaced it.

Ok, I am projecting when I assert the crowd was melancholic. There were some boisterous “Viva Mexico” cries, some laughter, some tequila. But two emotions ruled my evening, neither of them particularly light.

First, to the extent that Mexico is besieged by violence bred by the drug trade, this bicentennial feels like a birthday for an elderly and ailing relative. We might have been carrying on in Washington, but security concerns tempered public festivities in many Mexican cities.

How different this felt from that other North American bicentennial 34 years ago, when Americans – despite a post-Vietnam/costly-oil/disastrous-fashion malaise – exhaled triumphantly. One of the distinguishing hallmarks of Americans is that looking back invariably inspires us to look forward with replenished optimism. When Mexicans look back, we don’t often return, not even to the present. The past is sticky and unresolved – all-consuming. If Manifest Destiny remains the mindset north of the Rio Grande, Manifest Fatalism pervades to the south.

Notice the confusing proliferation of “we” in the above paragraphs, which brings me to my second roadblock to a joyous bicentennial: that familiar feeling of exile.

Having two homes is in many ways a blessing. But much of my life has also involved swapping one form of exile for another. Don’t be fooled by the map: my two homes are far, far, apart, and very difficult to bridge. We remain, as Alan Riding’s book title aptly put it a quarter-century ago, “Distant Neighbors.”

I remember that other American bicentennial, the so-called Spirit of ’76. I can picture myself – so suave at 10 with my braces, helmet haircut and tan leisure suit – strolling down Fifth Avenue with an expansive “This ain’t Chihuahua” grin. Or, to be more precise, make that a “¡This ain’t Chihuahua, cabrón!” grin.

Thanks to my gringa mother’s conviction that this – of all years – was the time for her kids to get to know their other country, we’d made our first foray from Chihuahua to the East Coast, inhaling Boston, New York and Washington the way (sorry but I’m still going with “we”) Americans do Europe. It was in the Big Apple that I felt oddly at home, and announced to the world – or to mom, at least – “This where I am going to live when I grow up.”

I wasn’t raised to hyphenate, or synthesize my Mexicanidad with my Americanness. I mastered both separately, undiluted, teeing up a choice. (Actually, Mexican law teed up the choice for me, since it barred dual nationality past the age of 18.) I always ate fiery, dousing spice with lime whenever possible not only because it is the Mexican way, but because I was so spooked by those descriptions of scurvy in “Mutiny on the Bounty.” I spoke with a norteño accent renowned throughout the Spanish-speaking world as the tenor of Pancho Villa’s Dorados. It’s that hyper-Mexican accent that makes people elsewhere in the world expect you to start a revolution, or at least sing a corrido about your horse.

I was also the güero obsessed with learning U.S. history, literature and politics. I was the kid in class who had no one to talk to about Holden Caulfield because no one else had read the book, or about how Americans could venerate someone like Robert E. Lee, who’d apparently managed to kill far more gringos than any Mexican general ever had. I couldn’t wait to go off to Exeter, Yale, and The New York Times, unaware that I’d only be swapping one exile for another.

But Los Angeles disturbs my ruminations about here versus there, about these distinctive, self-contained spaces separated by a fixed line running through my consciousness, as it does on the map. Los Angeles straddles my two worlds.

My three-year stint there had a sepia-tinted, surreal quality. My L.A. was a bit of a dreamscape, like the creations of Ellen Page’s character in “Inception,” the “dream architect” empowered to take certain liberties in designing a dream’s backdrop. You don’t have to have seen the movie to know what I am talking about – the way that dreams have of condensing things across time and spatial planes. Suddenly your spouse makes an appearance in your sixth-grade class, or your childhood house is across the street from your workplace.

My L.A. was like that. I was working downtown alongside such icons of American journalism as John Carroll and Mike Kinsley. But I could cross Broadway and moments later find myself in the Central Market, counting the number of Toluca and Cruz Azul caps, savoring the arid sweetness of a crumbling polvorón, grumbling to myself that U.S. sanitary laws seem to limit just how flavorful tacos al pastor can be.

Some of my colleagues who’d moved from the East Coast felt like expats in California, but for me Los Angeles offered the promise of hyphenation without dilution – an end to exile. If nothing else, I was surrounded by many others struggling to accommodate two worlds. At my first meeting with Antonio Villaraigosa, he told me he was scrambling to learn Spanish, which he’d not been encouraged to master as a kid.   It is a recent reckoning for all of us, with the notion that we can aspire to be both Mexican and American, without falling into some crack in between.

One of my fondest L.A. recollections was the glorious afternoon I took a visiting Moroccan journalist to El Gallo Giro in Huntington Park, a 24-hour temple to my Mexicanidad: a place offering tortas; tacos; a panaderia with those round metal trays and tongs to pick out your conchas and polvorones; and even a remittances window, all under the same roof.

Sitting outside, enjoying his first real tacos, Ahmed laughingly blurted out: “I can’t tell if I am in Mexico or in the U.S.!” Which to me, rather faintly, sounded a lot like, “¡This ain’t exile, cabrón!”

Andrés Martinez, the editorial page editor of the Los Angeles Times from 2004 to 2007, is an associate editor of Zócalo and the director of the Schwartz Fellows Program at the New America Foundation.

*Photo courtesy chotda.

The post Bridging Mexican and American in Los Angeles appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.