Tales of Two Americas Read online

  What is required to make it in America often requires leaving home—and grappling with a new place. In her barbed and lovely essay on Chicago, Sandra Cisneros remembers how the city that raised her also trained her to leave it in order to survive, to become herself. A far greater threat to personhood lurks in wait for the women in Roxane Gay’s short story. Raised by an abusive out-of-work drunk, married to husbands who don’t pull their weight, they sense their time to escape is running out. Claire Vaye Watkins remembers the many houses and trailers she grew up in across the West, and how she and her sister kept eyes on each other as their mother spiraled close to giving up.

  I hope there is a bandwidth of care that still exists in America. One where people don’t give a hand just because it suits them, but because it is the right thing to do—it is how we all get by. Annie Dillard recommends this to writers on days when they wonder what they are for. Whitney Terrell practiced this generosity with a next-door neighbor and realized what a complicated network of expectations he was entering. In her essay, Ann Patchett recalls a priest in Nashville who lived by this credo, and all the good work he did. And in Portland, Oregon, today, Karen Russell describes a city with a homeless problem so large, an epidemic of generosity among all its citizens might be the only way out.

  It might sound trite—the notion that the solution to our problems in America lies between us, not above us, and not in the governments that have let us down. Perhaps, but all one has to do is get stuck overnight at an airport, as Julia Alvarez did on her way home to Vermont one night, to realize that the thin boundaries between people can easily be broken down by one shared experience. Alvarez watches as people of all colors and backgrounds help one another find places to sleep, blankets to wrap themselves in, food to eat. In America today we have come to view inequality as a problem that afflicts only the needy. What a mistake. For it is in sharing that we can alleviate a situation that pains us all.

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  I do have one memory of Sacramento that came to mind not long after I left behind the man looking for the Meals on Wheels truck. Christmas 1986. In those years my father worked as director of a family service nonprofit that created drug and alcohol recovery programs, Meals on Wheels trucks for seniors, counseling for families who could not afford it otherwise. That year he decided it was a good idea to take us around south Sacramento giving out toys and turkeys to families who could not afford them. And so we piled into our station wagon with a trunk full of food and presents.

  I was used to knocking on doors back then—I had a paper route, and every month I had to ride a few miles around my suburban neighborhood chasing down the $8.50 it cost for home delivery of the Sacramento Bee. Most people paid, no one ever invited me in, and a few people dodged me. That latter group made me wonder, Who doesn’t pay an eleven-year-old who has been riding to your doorstep at five-thirty every morning? And there were different sorts of houses, like the ones we visited that Christmas. The screen doors open even in winter. The dogs did not look particularly friendly. But the people were. That holiday as we drove from house to house we were invited in, welcomed, hugged, and even when people felt uncomfortable—one teenager our age ran off crying—we shared a few words. My father stood in living rooms and asked where people were from.

  My parents never told me what this trip was supposed to mean. It was clear. Arriving back at our home felt surreal—there was no cosmological reason why my brothers and I were allowed to grow up there rather than in one of the homes we just left. Improbability demands stories. Each one of us in America could have grown up someone else had the universe’s mysterious finger touched a different key. Later in life, when both of my brothers were briefly homeless at separate times, I discovered how even with comfortable upbringings the ladder of society can slip from right beneath you. Back then I didn’t have the stories I needed to know this was possible—I just had this one trip. I was lucky.

  DEATH BY GENTRIFICATION:THE KILLING OF ALEX NIETO AND THE SAVAGING OF SAN FRANCISCO

  Rebecca Solnit

  ON WHAT WOULD have been his thirtieth birthday, Alejandro Nieto’s parents left a packed courtroom in San Francisco shortly before pictures from their son’s autopsy were shown to a jury. The photographs showed what happens when fourteen bullets rip through a person’s head and body. Refugio and Elvira Nieto spent much of the rest of the day sitting on a bench in the windowless hall of the federal building where their civil lawsuit for their son’s wrongful death was being heard.

  Alex Nieto was twenty-eight years old when he was killed in the neighborhood where he had spent his whole life. He died in a barrage of bullets fired at him by four San Francisco policemen. There are a few things about his death that everyone agrees on: he was in a hilltop park eating a burrito and tortilla chips, wearing the Taser he owned for his job as a licensed security guard at a nightclub, when someone called 911 on him a little after seven p.m. on the evening of March 21, 2014. The police officers who arrived a few minutes later claim that Nieto defiantly pointed the Taser at them, and that they mistook its red laser light for the laser sights of a gun, and shot him in self-defense. However, the stories of the four officers contradict one another’s and some of the evidence.

  On the road that curves around the green hilltop of Bernal Heights Park is an unofficial memorial to Nieto. People walking dogs or running or taking a stroll stop to read the banner, which is pinned by stones to the slope of the hill and surrounded by fresh and artificial flowers. Alex’s father, Refugio, still visits the memorial at least once a day, walking up from his small apartment on the south side of Bernal Hill. Alex Nieto had been visiting the hilltop since he was a child: that evening his parents, joined by friends and supporters, went up there in the dark to bring a birthday cake to the memorial.

  Refugio and Elvira Nieto are dignified, modest people, straight-backed but careworn, who speak eloquently in Spanish and hardly at all in English. They had known each other as poor children in a little town in the state of Guanajuato in central Mexico and emigrated separately to the Bay Area in the 1970s. There, they met again and married in 1984. They have lived in the same building on the south slope of Bernal Hill ever since. She worked for decades as a housekeeper in San Francisco’s downtown hotels and is now retired. He had worked on the side, but mostly stayed at home as the principal caregiver of Alex and his younger brother, Hector.

  In the courtroom, Hector, handsome, somber, with glossy black hair pulled back neatly, sat with his parents most days, not far from the three white and one Asian policemen who killed his brother. That there was a trial at all was a triumph. The city had withheld from family and supporters the full autopsy report and the names of the officers who shot Nieto, and it was months before the key witness overcame his fear of the police to come forward.

  Nieto died because a series of white men saw him as a menacing intruder in the place he had spent his whole life. Some of them thought he was possibly a gang member because he was wearing a red jacket. Many Latino boys and men in San Francisco avoid wearing red and blue because they are the colors of two gangs, the Norteños and Sureños—but the colors of San Francisco’s football team, the 49ers, are red and gold. Wearing a 49ers jacket in San Francisco is as ordinary as wearing a Saints jersey in New Orleans. That evening, Nieto, who had thick black eyebrows and a closely cropped goatee, was wearing a new-looking 49ers jacket, a black 49ers cap, a white T-shirt, black trousers, and carried the Taser in a holster on his belt, under his jacket. (A Taser shoots out wires that deliver an electrical shock, briefly paralyzing its target; it is shaped roughly like a gun, but more bulbous; Nieto’s had bright yellow markings over much of its surface and a fifteen-foot range.)

  Nieto had first been licensed by the state as a security guard in 2007 and had worked in that field since. He had never been arrested and had no police record, an achievement in a neighborhood where Latino kids can get picked up just for hanging out in public. He was a Buddhist: a Latino son of
immigrants who practiced Buddhism is the kind of hybrid San Francisco used to be good at. As a teen he had worked as a youth counselor for almost five years at the Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center; he was gregarious and community spirited, a participant in political campaigns, street fairs, and community events.

  He had graduated from community college with a focus on criminal justice, and hoped to help young people as a probation officer. He had an internship with the city’s juvenile probation department not long before his death, according to former city probation officer Carlos Gonzalez, who became a friend. Gonzalez said Nieto knew how criminal justice worked in the city. No one has ever provided a convincing motive for why he would point a gun-shaped object at the police when he understood that it would probably be a fatal act.

  Like a rape victim, the dead young man underwent character assassination as irrelevant but unflattering things were dredged up about his past and publicized. Immediately after his death, the police and coroner’s office dug into his medical records and found that he’d had a mental health crisis years before. They blew that up into a story that he was mentally ill and made that an explanation for what happened. It ran like this: Why did they shoot Nieto? Because he pointed his Taser at them and they thought it was a gun. Why did he point his Taser at them? Because he was mentally ill. Why should we believe he was mentally ill? Because he pointed his Taser at them. It’s a circular logic that leads somewhere only if your trust in the San Francisco Police Department is great.

  Nieto carried a Taser for his guard job at the El Toro Night Club, whose owner, Jorge del Rio, speaks of him as a calm and peaceful person he liked, trusted, admired, and still cares about: “He was very calm, a very calm guy. So I was very surprised to hear that they claim that he pulled a Taser on the police. Never have seen him react aggressively to anyone. He was the guy who would want to help others. I just can’t believe they’re saying this about him.” He told me how peaceful Nieto was, how brilliant at defusing potentially volatile situations, drawing drunk men out of the rowdy dance club with a Spanish-speaking clientele to tell them on the street “tonight’s not your night” and send them home feeling liked and respected.

  From the beginning the police were hoping that Alex Nieto’s mental health records would somehow exonerate them. The justification that he was mentally ill got around, and it got some traction in local publications committed to justifying the police. But it was ruled inadmissible evidence by the judge in the civil suit brought by his parents, Refugio and Elvira Nieto. The medical records said that three years earlier Alex Nieto had some sort of breakdown and was treated for it. Various terms were thrown around—psychosis, paranoid schizophrenia—but the entire file was from 2011 and there seemed to be no major precedents or subsequent episodes of note. The theory that mental illness is relevant presumes not only that he was mentally ill on March 21, 2014, but that mental illness caused him to point a Taser at the police. If you don’t believe he pointed a Taser at the police, then mental illness doesn’t supply any clues to what happened. Did he? The only outside witness to the shooting says he did not.

  Here’s the backstory as I heard it from a family friend: Devastated by a breakup, Alex got very dramatic about it one day, burned some love letters, and was otherwise over the top in the tiny apartment the four Nietos shared. His exasperated family called a city hotline for help in de-escalating, but instead got escalation: Nieto was seized and institutionalized against his will. The official record described burning the letters as burning a book or trying to burn down the house—something might have gotten lost in translation from Spanish. That was in early 2011; there was another incident later that year. In 2012, 2013, and until his death in 2014 there appear to have been no problems. There is no reason to believe that, even if what transpired in 2011 should be classified as mental illness, he suddenly relapsed on the evening of his death, after years of being exceptionally calm in the chaos of his nightclub job. And shortly before his encounter with the police, he exercised restraint in a confrontation with an aggressor.

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  On the evening of March 21, 2014, Evan Snow, a thirtysomething “user experience design professional,” according to his LinkedIn profile, who had moved to the neighborhood about six months earlier (and who has since departed for a more suburban location), took his young Siberian husky for a walk on Bernal Hill. As Snow was leaving the park, Nieto was coming up one of the little dirt trails that leads to the park’s ring road, eating chips. In a deposition prior to the trial, Snow said that with his knowledge of the attire of gang members, he “put Nieto in that category of people that I would not mess around with.”

  His dog put Nieto in the category of people carrying food, and went after him. Snow never seemed to recognize that his out-of-control dog was the aggressor: “So Luna was, I think, looking to move around the benches or behind me to run up happily to get a chip from Mr. Nieto. Mr. Nieto became further—what’s the right word?—distressed, moving very quickly and rapidly left to right, trying to keep his chips away from Luna. He ran down to these benches and jumped up on the benches, my dog following. She was at that point vocalizing, barking, or kind of howling.” The dog had Nieto cornered on the bench while its inattentive owner was forty feet away—in his deposition for the case, under oath, his exact words were that he was distracted by a female “jogger’s butt.” Snow said, “I can imagine that somebody would—could assume the dog was being aggressive at that point.” The dog did not come when he called, but kept barking.

  Nieto, Snow says, then pulled back his jacket and took his Taser out, briefly pointing at the distant dog owner before he pointed it at the dog baying at his feet. The two men yelled at each other, and Snow apparently used a racial slur, but would not later give the precise word. As he left the park, he texted a friend about the incident. His text, according to his testimony, said, “in another state, like Florida, I would have been justified in shooting Mr. Nieto that night”—a reference to that state’s infamous “stand your ground” law, which removes the obligation to retreat before using force in self-defense. In other words, he apparently wished he could have done what George Zimmerman did to Trayvon Martin: execute him without consequences.

  Soon after, a couple out walking their dogs passed by Nieto. Tim Isgitt, a recent arrival in the area, is the communications director of a nonprofit organization founded by tech billionaires. He now lives in suburban Marin County, as does his husband, Justin Fritz, a self-described “e-mail marketing manager” who had lived in San Francisco about a year. In a picture one of them posted on social media, they are chestnut-haired, clean-cut white men posing with their dogs, a springer spaniel and an old bulldog. They were walking those dogs when they passed Nieto at a distance.

  Fritz did not notice anything unusual but Isgitt saw Nieto moving “nervously” and putting his hand on the Taser in its holster. Snow was gone, so Isgitt had no idea that Nieto had just had an ugly altercation and had reason to be disturbed. Isgitt began telling people he encountered to avoid the area. (One witness who did see Nieto shortly after Isgitt and Fritz, longtime Bernal Heights resident Robin Bullard, who was walking his own dog in the park, testified that there was nothing alarming about him. “He was just sitting there,” Bullard said.)

  At the trial, Fritz testified that he had not seen anything alarming about Nieto. He said that he called 911 because Isgitt urged him to. At about 7:11 p.m. he began talking to the 911 dispatcher, telling her that there was a man with a black handgun. What race, asked the dispatcher, “Black, Hispanic?” “Hispanic,” replied Fritz. Later, the dispatcher asked him if the man in question was doing “anything violent,” and Fritz answered, “Just pacing, it looks like he might be eating chips or sunflowers, but he’s resting a hand kind of on the gun.” Alex Nieto had about five more minutes to live.

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  San Francisco, like all cities, has been a place where when newcomers arrive in a trickle, they integrate and con
tribute to the ongoing transformation of a place that is not static in demographics and industries. When they arrive in a flood, as they have during economic booms since the nineteenth-century gold rush, including the dot-com surge of the late 1990s and the current tech tsunami, they scour out what was there before. By 2012 the incursion of tech workers had gone from steady stream to deluge, and more and more people and institutions—bookstores, churches, social services, nonprofits of all kinds, gay and lesbian bars, small businesses with deep roots in the neighborhoods—began to be evicted. So did seniors, including many in their nineties, schoolteachers, working-class families, the disabled, and pretty much anyone who was a tenant whose home could be milked for more money.

  San Francisco had been a place where some people came out of idealism or stayed to realize an ideal: to work for social justice or teach the disabled, to write poetry or practice alternative medicine—to be part of something larger than themselves that was not a corporation, to live for something more than money. That was becoming less and less possible as rent and sale prices for homes spiraled upward. What the old-timers were afraid of losing, many of the newcomers seemed unable to recognize. The tech culture seemed in small and large ways to be a culture of disconnection and withdrawal.

  And it was very white, male, and young, which is why I started to call my hometown “Fratistan.” As of 2014, Google’s Silicon Valley employees, for example, were 2 percent black, 3 percent Latino, and 70 percent male. The Google bus—the private luxury shuttles—made it convenient for these employees who worked in the South Bay to live in San Francisco, as did shuttles for Facebook, Apple, Yahoo!, and other big corporations. Airbnb, headquartered in San Francisco, became the engine that devoured long-term housing stock in rural and urban places around the world, turning it into space for transients. Uber, also based here, set about undermining taxi companies that paid a living wage. Another tech company housed here, Twitter, became the most efficient way to deliver rape and death threats to outspoken feminists. San Francisco, once a utopia in the eyes of many, became the nerve center of a new dystopia.