Four of the poorest, most maligned places in America have become beacons of hope—and burgeoning centers of trust, in people and local government—since going broke in the Great Recession. How did they pull themselves up from an especially low point, and what can the rest of the country learn from them?

This was the subject of 2023 Zócalo Book Prize winner Michelle Wilde Anderson’s The Fight to Save the Town: Reimagining Discarded America, which we honored last night as the year’s best nonfiction book exploring community and social connection at the Zócalo Book and Poetry Prize event.

Held at the ASU California Center in downtown Los Angeles, the program, which also streamed live online, began with a virtual reading by this year’s Zócalo Poetry Prize winner, Paige Buffington, of “From 20 Miles Outside of Gallup, Holbrook, Winslow, Farmington, or Albuquerque.” Then, philanthropist Tim Disney—the sponsor of the program and both prizes—took the stage, where he lauded The Fight to Save the Town as “a moving and important document, and a timely one.”

Anderson received $10,000 in prize money and a pre-solved Rubik’s Cube, emblazoned with the Zócalo logo, for winning this year’s book prize. She announced she would be keeping the Rubik’s Cube, but donating all of her winnings to four organizations she wrote about in her book, and to South L.A.’s Community Coalition. “Because if this book moved anybody, that is because, above all, these people moved me,” she said.

During the 13th annual Zócalo Book Prize lecture, Anderson shared stories from the four places she wrote about: Stockton, California, Josephine County, Oregon, Detroit, Michigan, and Lawrence, Massachusetts. Since the 1980s, these towns and cities and others like them—often older, industrial cities with decaying housing and infrastructure, and high levels of environmental contamination—have grown poorer because of disinvestment from state and federal government and poorer tax bases.

“These cities are broke in part because they’re poor, and their people stay poor in part because their governments are broke,” said Anderson. “This is actually the start of a larger, vicious cycle of decline in which the conditions of poverty undermine the basic trust that is needed for human cooperation.”

But in each place, she found examples of how people and institutions are facing this vicious cycle and finding ways to work together to break out of it. In Stockton, that meant addressing the trauma and mental health effects of violence, segregation, and intergenerational poverty. In Josephine County—one of the most anti-government places in America—that meant saving public services by convincing angry, skeptical voters that it’s possible to build cooperation and trust in government. In Detroit, that meant fighting foreclosures and speculators, and putting property back into local hands. And in Lawrence, that meant forming strong, pan-Latino networks to help residents in the 21st-century economy make a living wage.

“All of these efforts add up to social repair,” said Anderson.

Following the lecture, Alberto Retana, president and CEO of South L.A.’s Community Coalition—which, like many of the organizations in Anderson’s book, engages in ground-up, locally focused work—joined her on stage to talk about The Fight to Save the Town’s inspirations, and how to apply some of its lessons to other communities around the country.

Retana noted that Anderson’s book celebrates what democracy is all about: “people fighting to make something beautiful from something broken.” How, he asked Anderson, did she come to this subject and perspective?

She said she chose to write a “people-centered” book because she’s “really concerned that the way we tell stories about poverty is part of the problem.” Our narratives of poor places feature “crooks in the government and bullets flying everywhere and hell holes … Those narratives reinforce faithlessness that things can be better. So they give outsiders an excuse to stop working alongside people on the ground.”

You can see this dynamic in Los Angeles, a city of 40,000 unhoused people, particularly among the white middle class, Retana agreed. But what, he asked Anderson, is the “heart of the heart of the central solution” to tackling poverty and disinvestment?

“Turning government back toward its people,” said Anderson. “We have to invest in people where they live.” But she cautioned that one community cannot write the playbook for other communities. To the extent that, say, Lawrence has a method to teach the rest of America, it would be “showing up and listening,” and forming tight and supportive networks among people and organizations.

Why center the book on these local networks? Federal and state policy cause many of the problems they are tackling, said Retana.

It’s true that the problems are systemic, and we need federal and state policy changes, said Anderson. But upper tiers of government don’t work without this grassroots level—which creates places for outside funding, policies, and philanthropy to land.

Anderson turned the question back on Retana—whose work is local, after all.

The greatest changes in American history, he said, come from localities up—“whether it’s Ferguson in 2013 or Birmingham, Alabama, in the ’60s, or Los Angeles solving the homelessness crisis in the next few years.” He added, “I really love this book because it recenters the conversation where it really needs to happen: in our backyards, on our blocks, in our living rooms.”

After concluding their discussion, Anderson and Retana turned to audience questions, which largely centered around their advice for people and organizations hoping to effect change locally.

In response to one person who wondered what opportunities community-based organizations might be overlooking, Anderson shared a lesson from Stockton. There, a youth development program gathered all the local youth programs staff together one morning a week for orange juice and doughnuts. “It was an incredible moment for the city’s network-building,” she said—not because spectacularly important plans got made in these meetings, but because they helped people and programs get to know one another and coordinate in an environment of scarcity. “I do think there’s a form of casual coordination that we don’t give enough credit to as a component of social change,” she said.

Last night also kicked off Zócalo’s 20th birthday celebration, and before the program wrapped, Zócalo executive director Moira Shourie took the stage to thank Zócalo’s past and present staff, funders, and audiences for their support over the past two decades, through more than 700 public programs and 3,000 published essays. And then, in true Zócalo fashion, everyone came together for cake and more conversation.

The post Where Local People Build Local Change appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Various immigrant groups that supplied the lion’s share of labor in the heyday of the sugar and pineapple plantations came to live alongside one another. Most residents of Hawaii would be defined, elsewhere at least, partly as Asian American, but their place in the islands is so dominant that defining them as “Asian” is almost meaningless to local academics. Instead, they tend to refer to component groups, the descendants of Filipinos, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese immigrants, mostly from long ago. There are also Native Hawaiians and Micronesians, not to mention people from Portugal and elsewhere. And, in many cases, their children grew up together, forging distinctly mixed island identities as they intermarried. Today, 23 percent of people in Hawaii consider themselves to be ethnically mixed—true of only 3 percent of Americans. And unlike on the mainland, being hapa, or mixed, has become a core part of the identity of the islands.

Especially as we move deeper into the Pacific Century, America’s remote ocean outpost embodies many elements of our nation’s diversifying citizenry and of our planet’s increasingly interconnected future: As people struggle to get by, they need to find a way to get along with their global neighbors. This is especially true of Hawaii, but in miniature. And one way Hawaiians have done this is by creating a new, inclusive identity: “local.”

When I moved to Hawaii in 2013, I quickly realized how important high school is here. When two locals meet for the first time, they often ask: What school did you graduate from? They aren’t talking about universities; they are talking about high school, which acts as a sort of proxy for home ground in a state where discussions of race, ethnicity and local identity often take place in coded language to avoid offending. Political candidates actively tout their schools to send signals about their roots, circles of influence, and how many degrees of separation there are between them and the people they speak with. High school anchors the person in a unique place and time in other locals’ minds. Given the small-town nature of Hawaii, it also allows people to visualize a school, a neighborhood, and a way of life. It ultimately signals whether someone is authentically local or not.

This is true even of politicians who graduated from top-ranked schools on the Mainland. Former Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann graduated from Harvard University, but in the islands, he can be seen as a graduate of the elite Iolani private school, a stone’s throw from Waikiki.

When I spoke to Hannemann in 2014 about why this is the case, he said that talking about high school signals something crucial in the islands—“that you’ll never forget your roots.” Speaking of Iolani, he added, “I’m still the same guy.”

In 2015, as part of a special project on race and ethnicity for the Honolulu-based media Civil Beat, I spoke with former Hawaii Gov. Ben Cayetano for a podcast on what it means to be “local” in the islands. Cayetano, who became America’s first Filipino-American state executive in the 1990s, suggested that poor immigrant communities in Honolulu didn’t, for the most part, have the space to carve out “balkanized” ethnic communities, as happened in places like Southern California with East Los Angeles, Koreatown, Little Tokyo, Little Phnom Penh, Little Armenia, and so many others.

In Cayetano’s childhood, Filipinos, Japanese, Koreans, Portuguese, and even a Russian kid came of age on the same streets, attended each others’ birthday parties and religious celebrations, and even spoke the same pidgin English.

In such circumstances, he said, “You are forced to interact,” and learn about each other and yourselves. “And your racial identity sometimes gets a little murky.”

The resulting cultural mix, he said, is what a lot of people who grew up in the islands call “local.”

What constitutes “local” can provoke plenty of debate in the islands, including from Cayetano. And he acknowledged that the concept continues to evolve even now.

The former governor, now in his late 70s, says that being local is no longer just about being from a certain neighborhood, economic or social class. “It is the feeling, you feel local.”

“What’s interesting is that a lot of people come from the mainland and they … almost develop that same feeling because they buy into the local culture. And frankly some of the people who come from the mainland seem to care more about this state than the guys who are born here.”

In his telling, even new arrivals can aspire to something close to “local” status—at least these days. That’s significant given that 46 percent of people who live in the islands—which includes the large U.S. military presence—were born outside of the islands. It also helps to explain a common question directed toward non-locals: How long have you lived here?

Elsewhere, you could be forgiven for believing the questioner is simply making conversation. In Hawaii, such a query can be about something much more significant. Your answer can convey how committed you are—or aren’t—to the islands, whether you are just using Hawaii or have really taken to it, and whether you are connecting with the place. It even allows interlopers to know that they are outsiders, but feel at home in that. On some level, living in the islands for a long period of time can afford a non-local a surprising form of status; a little like the way a decade of sobriety can impress people at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

Time spent in Hawaii is, of course, an imperfect barometer of people’s acclimation. Some people live in the islands for decades and never really get the vibe. Others can rapidly develop an intuitive understanding of their adopted home and find their special place in it. My first-born son started to become local much faster than I expected. Born in Paris, he moved to Hawaii when he was 4 years old. English was his second language and it took him a couple months of living in the islands to speak it fluently, but by the time he was five he began to throw in the occasional term of pidgin and I’d sometimes overhear him playing with his superhero figurines, saying, in a singsong voice: “That’s a really good idea, brah.”

None of this is meant to suggest that Hawaii is, like its aloha-rich tourist propaganda, any sort of real paradise where everyone gets along. It is a complicated place with plenty of major problems, including when it comes to race, ethnicity and class. I’ve spoken with people who have recounted past harassment, bullying and worse in schoolyards, at roadside police stops and beyond, and it is sometimes linked to stereotypes about different ethnic groups.

Hawaii also has more homeless people per capita than any state, and the urban core of the capital offers a striking contrast in fate between the construction of glittering new residential towers and the ubiquitous homeless tent encampments. At its most extreme, the contrast creates a visual background reminiscent of the dystopian near-future Los Angeles in the film Blade Runner. Resentments around race, ethnicity, and wealth disparities in the most expensive state in the country sometimes result in surges of online anger and, less commonly, brawls in the real world.

Hawaii is changing too. In 2016, Honolulu continues to evolve into a new sort of global city—not a worldly megalopolis like New York or London, but a globally-influenced mid-sized city in the middle of the Pacific. Though “localism” still dominates outward identity politics, it’s worth examining where it may be used to skirt over issues of those excluded from the idyllic Hawaii.

With demographic trends suggesting that the U.S. will become a majority-minority nation in the 2040s, the country would do well to try to understand how local identities are fashioned, and how Hawaii is fashioning its own.

The post In the Aloha State, All (Identity) Politics Is Local appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.