Analyze

This event was the City Council meeting for the City of Santa Ana on february 15th 2022. The meeting took place in the city of Santa Ana council chambers. This meeting was organized by the city and city council. The purpose of this event was to award community members, pass agenda items, and listen to community concerns.

Council members Phan, Penaloza, Lopez, Barcerra, Hernandez, and Mendoza were all present along with Mayor Sarmiento. It is important to note that during agenda item number 26 Councilmember Phan left the chambers due to a formal complaint filed against her. During public comments on agenda item 26 Council members Hernandez and Penaloza left for unexplained reasons and missed the majority of public comments. Councilmemebr Lopez was not present for MPNA comments and a few oteh republic comments. I think that Councilmembrs Hernandez and Penaloza leaving during public comments on thai matter indicates a lack of interest and support for community members.

The most notable speakers at this event were community members who talked during public comments, city council, and the Mayor.

Many public comments were made on this matter with many written letters sent to the council which were not read during the meeting. The most notable public comments were made by the director of OCEJ, executive director of MPNA, attorney with the environmental law clinic at UCI,

Consensus amongst most commenters was that the city should not be moving forward with the GPU until they conduct better community engagement and address the EIJ in more detail. 

After public comments the mayor started off the council comments by saying he was not prepared to move forward on the city plan. He did however say that he would like to move forward with the general plan by the next meeting. He explained how the council immediately stopped pushing the general plan when they received a letter from the attorney general telling the city they must engage with the community on EIJ concerns. He also pointed to how after this letter the council held hundreds of meetings with EJ groups. After saying these things he said that in all this time there has not been enough movement and at this point the EJ groups are delaying the city plan which has been nearly 7 years in the making. He finished by saying that the EJ groups are hurting the communities that they want to protect and that there will be one more meeting and we are done.

Council-member Bacerra said we need to pass the plan tonight and that two more weeks will not do anything. He said that the EJ groups keep demanding to move the goal post further and are not offering any solutions, all they want is more time.

Council-member Penaloza agreed with Bacerra’s statements and further stressed how the council has held hundreds of meetings. He stated that in all of these meetings all the EJ groups wanted was more time and when given the time they offered no solutions to EIJ.

Council-member Lopez did not want the plan to move forward. She cited lead pollution data sources to show how the city needs to do more in regard to the GPU. She said tha too many of her constituents have concerns over EJ in the city plan so she does not want the GPU to move forward.

Council-member Hernandez did not say a lot other than agreeing that the plan is taking too long and should be moved forward.

Council-member Mendoza agreed with Lopez in saying that the general plan does not cover enough EJ problems and said the plan should not move forward.

After these statements Council-member Penaloza then tried to present a notion to pass the general plan. Bacerra then said he would want to make some amendments first before passing the plan which was done on the spot. Most amendments changed some language in the GPU EJ section. The most notable amendment was the adding of a permanent EJ staffer on the city staff. After these amendments were made Penaloza attempted to pass the notion which failed with a 3-3 vote. Council-members Lopez, Mendoza and Mayor Sarminto voted against the notion. 

The mayor stated the amendments were hastily put on the GPU and that the council needed to wait 30 days before passing the plan. With this the Mayor attempted to pass a notion giving EJ groups 30 days to come up with bullet points on what they wanted passed. This notion also failed with a 3-3 vote. Council-members Hernandez, Bacerra, and Penaloza voted against it.

This resulted in the agenda item to be later discussed at the next town council meeting.

Groups referred to by Councilmembers and the Mayor were Madison Park Neighborhood Association (MPNA), Orange County Environmental Justice (OCEJ), and the University of California, Irvine (UCI). EJ groups such as MPNA and OCEj were mentioned by council members to explain which groups they have worked with. The mayor called out these groups to identify the EJ group that must provide the council with bullet points on their concerns. The mayor also referenced UCI to explain his disappointment in the school and said that he would expect better from the institution.

Meetings with these EJ groups were also mentioned heavily from council members Bacerra, Pendaloza, and Mayor Sarmiento. The point of referencing these meetings was to show council has held hundreds of meetings with EJ groups and still have not been offered any solutions or given any ideas for what the city plan update (CPU) should have in its EJ section.

The concept of environmental justice was the most discussed concept.

Mayor Sarmiento said the city can not engage with all 330,000 citizens in Santa Ana when it comes to EJ concerns. This was in response to community comments saying that the city needed to better engage the city. They said that a poll that reached less than 1% of the population and was not in Spanish was not enough.

The city council meeting showed me which council-members were for or against EJ groups further delaying the plan in order to put in policies that would improve EJ in Santa Ana. It showed how the City Council as a whole is prepared to be done with the process of the GPU. Some council members however are more willing to give EJ groups time to send finishing touches to the council whereas some members want to pass the GPU as soon as possible.

When the first lockdown orders were passed in India and stay-at-home orders in California, many in my family dispersed across nations felt containment for the first time. An old couple had arrived to the US in December last year and could not leave now. I had planned to spend summer in Delhi with my family but that is not going to happen. It is too risky to be mobile. At the same time, our lives under lockdown are dependent on people being productive, at home or beyond. When I think about theorizing place and COVID19, I must take containment seriously. The moment reveals the inadequacy of concepts as containers, making the discursive gaps apparent (Fortun 2012) but leaving us flailing about as we meet each other, fingers-crossed. 

The clearest inadequacy is methodological nationalism (Wimmer & Schiller 2002): even as lockdowns have visibly occured across national borders, the transmission of virus through arteries of transnational industrial capitalism (some of it late, some not) and the privilege of transnational mobility point that as long as these infrastructures remain in place, so will this virus and more such to come. We continue to order things online, and Amazon continues to maintain these infrastructures. Public spaces are gradually opening with questionable safety norms in place. India, like other countries, is rescuing its citizens and bringing them back home, even as it continues to let migrant workers starve. 

There is consensus that things will not be as before, even as transnational mobilities continue to function. With enough PPE, fingers-crossed, everyone will be fine. What does it mean to take containment seriously, at a time when we are opening up? As things will continue to be normalized to our collective surprise and fatigue, this moment should mobilize us to think about different ways of organizing and care. These do not have to be new ways of thinking and doing but those that have blossomed in our lands for some time. 

In my annotation, I offer brief summaries of articles that animate my thinking about theorizing from confinement and that offer ways of doing already present: 

• Epidemics in American Concentration Camps: From the “White Plague” to COVID-19: Japanese Americans have formed the group Tsuru for Solidarity, calling for decarceration from prisons, jails, and detention centers. As these violent confined places become hotspots of infection, residents and descendants of residents of World War II concentration camps located across the US (most famously in Manzanar, California) recall accounts of epidemic management. Not surprisingly, the burden to remain healthy and disease-free was on detainees, which meant aggregating community and family resources when detainees were already deprived of livelihoods. As staffing problems arose during tuberculosis epidemic in 1940s, the hospital management even considered family members to take hospital shifts. 

• By Desperate Measures Relieved?: Public Health, Prisons, and the Politics of Life: Jason Ludwing writes about how notions of accelerating vaccine development for COVID19 through human "challenge trials" reminds him of medical experiments on incarcerated people in the US. Challenge trials depend on a volunteering body to take on the infection, but for people in prisons, the line blurs between a consenting body that volunteers and a coerced body that is sacrificed. He points to the prison-university complex  in collaboration between University of Maryland and Maryland Corrections in typhoid experiments based at Prison Volunteer Research Unit (PVRU) which launched many publications and research careers. The researchers frame those as ethical experiments because the male inmates received better accomodation and pay. Even though incarcerated populations will not be experimented upon during COVID, prison factories have remained open for producing PPE. Ludwig reminds us that this is not because of the moment, but an inevitable consequence of a system that deprives people of their bodies. 

• COVID-19, Biopolitics and Abolitionist Care Beyond Security and Containment: Eva Boodman argues that we must see beyond individual protection against microbes (biodefense) especially when it comes to people confined by coercion. Building from Foucault's biopolitics (make live/let die), Boodman sees this as continuation, not departure from what many groups have known all along: that the state and university is not for them. They know that we will keep getting messages of management and security as care. Boodman has a vision for abolitionist care, arguing that abolitionists over the years have assidously foregrounded racialized and class-ed neglect that COVID exacerbates and called for its end rather than thinking with. Abolitionist vision would mean calling an end for prisons, jails and all forms of carceration and in line with neglect of public health, an end to all for-profit nursing homes and treatment centers. It means to center mutual aid groups that have been working on-ground for a long time, and those that are built anew. It would mean for both to learn from each other. But mutual aid groups will also be careful to not be co-opted (as Black Panther Party's free breakfast program was co-opted by USDA), or serve as justification for further state neglect. Abolitionist care acknowledges that it will have to work temporarily with security apparatuses even as it continues to resist from inside. The end goal is not to settle for a liberal future.

• Beyond Inside/Outside: Imagining Safety During Covid-19: Author mobilizes her experience of leaving domestic abuse to think about living and working in confined domestic spaces. Feminized labor blurs inside/outside boundaries, revealed starkly by COVID. It is fatigued and exhausted but carries on. She says: "My experience of abuse was organized around waiting. Waiting for something bad to happen and then waiting for the bad thing to be over”. She says that the years of abuse live in her body. She was afraid to call for mediation because the police and state have worked to either criminalize or pass judgement on people like her. The work of transformative justice and prison abolition made her ask the question: why must we endure? Even though staying can be strategic, a way of survival, community can be elusive too. She offers the notion of "pod-building": does away with romantic ideas of community predicated upon shared identities and political analysis and pushes us to rely on relationship-building and trust with people we already know: that are reliable, have good boundaries and skills, which do not necessarily mirror our politics. This reconfiguration of care comes as she recognizes the link between intimate partner violence, gender-based violence, and prison-industrial complex that disrupted her healing and now animate her activism. 

• Working During COVID-19: Occupational Hazards and Workers’ Right to a Safe Workplace: A brief history of labor organizing around occupational safety and hazards and the role of ILO. To be recognized as occupational hazard, a worker in the American context must demonstrate that disease was contracted in place of work. For mining industry, the struggle to include silicosis and lung-based infections went on for decades and was successful but still requires heavy bureaucratic lifting. For petrochemical industries, this is even difficult as communities live in contamination, blurring home and work places. Workers in informal economy are even more precarious and face either starvation or contagion. As the ILO called for COVID to be recognized as a workplace hazard, could workers demand better conditions and from whom and how? The authors offer two examples from "occupied" factories, or those controlled by workers' assemblies: Rimaflow from Milan (Italy) and Traful Newen in Neuquen (Argentina). These workplaces implemented safety protocols much earlier than ordered by the state, and allowed older people, people with co-morbidity, and those who have domestic emergencies to stay at home with pay. Rather than decreasing production, these workplaces have seen an increase and created more jobs in a more ethical way.  

More reading: Care not Cages! #COVID19DecarcerateSyllabus

I've found myself returning to thinking about/around/within interstitial spaces of care, particularly within hospital settings, interested in how viral activity unsettles the ideas we have around space and boundaries, both biological and infrastructural. In COVID-19 pathology and response, the inbetween, the interstitial, become sites challenge and possibility. With COVID-19, we see an acknowledgment of once forgotten spaces quite obviously, with hospital atria and hallways being reconfigured into patient care spaces, makeshift morgues established in refrigerated trucks, and hospitals spilling out into neighboring streets and parks. More than ever, we see how hospitals are simultaneously bounded and unbounded--the most stable and unstable sites for care. Along this line of thought, what might thinking through hospitals as heterotopia of crisis and deviation afford?

Foucault outlines six principles for heterotopic spaces

The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible

Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time—which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies. The heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time. This situation shows us that the cemetery is indeed a highly heterotopic place since, for the individual, the cemetery begins with this strange heterochrony, the loss of life, and with this quasi-eternity in which her permanent lot is dissolution and disappearance.

Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable. In general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place. Either the entry is compulsory, as in the case of entering a barracks or a prison, or else the individual has to submit to rites and purifications.

Mishuana Goeman in Mark My Words talks about remapping as a way of rethinking space and temporality, so the future is driving the study of the past and the past is interrogated for the future.

Goeman uses the fiction of Native women to push forth the idea that words don’t only represent reality, arguing that by using narrative “in (re)mapping, we as Native people have the power to rethink the way we engage with territory, with our relationships to one another, and with other Native nations and settler nations” (38–39).

So imagining spatial encounters and relationships is actually a way of mapping alternative relationships

Massey’s understanding of space is the “product of interrelations,” “spheres of possibility,” “and always under construction or a simultaneity of stories-so-far” (6-7), so space is a meeting of histories.

What histories are meeting now? Maybe more importantly, whose histories are meeting? I think this is where scalar analysis can come in to complement Massey’s thinking about space.. to start to tease out a bit these entangled encounter or meeting space, knowing it will never fully be disentangled.

Also, when think about Massey’s line of space as a meeting place, something always in transit, I’m thinking specifically of encounters. And space/place as encounter. And stay at home orders rethink the way many of us are encountering each other, also in certain contexts, especially for those with the privilege of staying at home, change encounters are being lost. The sort of tranistness of space is being lost.