The American Dream for some isn't the reality that they live in. For some, it's still a dream. Others were woken up from the dream by the harsh circumstances of socioeconomic reality. And for others, the American Dream is a nightmare. The people about whom we speak are the disenfranchised people living below the poverty line, scraping by and hanging onto whatever life throws at them.
In 2011, Joakim Eskildsen decided to capture those less fortunate that live in the USA. He successfully reveals the shocking reality of people that live not in the land of the free, but in the land of economic turmoil. And it doesn't affect only a few unlucky individuals, but whole communities. He has worked in collaboration with writer Natasia del Tora, who has helped to bring the stories of these people out into the forefront.
Over time, the collection amounted into a book project which he called American Realities, juxtaposing it to the illusory concept of the American Dream. In it, he gives in-depth details and stories of the people that have to live in poor man's shoes. Here are the 65 stories that may not be comfortable, but they're as real as they can get.
More info: Instagram | joakimeskildsen.com | americanrealities.org
#1 Quintavius Scott
Five-year-old Quintavius Scott stands in his great-grandmother’s bedroom. She often looks after him when he gets out of Head Start, a federally funded pre-school program for poor children. An only child of divorced parents, he lives with his mom, who lost her telemarketing job when the company relocated. She now works at a fast-food fried chicken restaurant while going to school. His dad Quinton works at a car parts store, where he makes $8.25 an hour but is also going to school for his General Education Diploma so that he can get a higher-paying job. He’s proud of Quintavius’ excellent grades and wants him to complete his education, so “he doesn’t fall onto the same path” as his dad. But he worries about his son growing up in Athens and facing racial discrimination, especially by police. “My son could be at the wrong place at the wrong time. He could be killed and nobody would care. A lot of good kids get killed and nobody does anything,” says Quinton.
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#2 Dj & Eli Stockstill
3-year-old Eli Stockstill and his brother DJ often stay on their grandparents' shrimp boat that sits in a lot out of the water for maintenance. Darla and Todd Rooks, longtime Louisiana fishermen, moved into the 40-square-foot cabin of their boat after the BP oil spill, because they were not sure they would be able to continue paying their lease. Before the BP oil spill, they used to make a good living, eating healthy food from the sea. Now, fresh seafood has been replaced by canned food, and they have developed a host of health problems, from muscle spasms to skin rashes and memory loss. Even the puddles in which the boys used to play seem dangerous to Darla, who fears the water is contaminated. The Rooks long to go back to their old ways. “I do not want to be the face of poverty,” Darla says. “I do not want to live on food stamps—I just want to fish.”
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#3 Grass Family
Mary Grass sits with her husband Shannon and three children, Spirit, Mystic and Decimus at their home in Thunder Butte, South Dakota, a remote community on the Cheyenne River Sioux Indian Reservation. A military veteran and a skilled medical technician, she had applied for several jobs but wasn’t having any luck finding work. She was also taking an online course to get a Bachelor’s degree in Science and Health Administration, hoping that would increase her chances. Her husband was able to find a temporary job in the nearest town, Eagle Butte, 40 miles away, but transportation costs were eating up most of their income. With a lack of jobs, lack of housing, and long distances of up to 90 miles between communities, opportunities on the reservation are limited. They were relying on government assistance, including WIC, Medicaid, and food stamps to make ends meet, though Mary said their pantry was often bare towards the end of the month. Despite their economic hardships, Mary and her husband are trying to create a better life for their children by emphasizing the importance of education and the values and culture of the Lakota people, their Native American tribe. Her eldest daughter, Spirit, who speaks Lakota and dances at local powwows, hopes to get a basketball scholarship to the University of Southern California. The family would not be able to afford tuition otherwise.
UPDATE: After more than a year of being unemployed and struggling, things are finally starting to turn around for Mary and her family. A new hospital in Eagle Butte opened up job opportunities on the reservation. Mary is working there as a lab technician making $18.69 an hour. She also finished her bachelor’s degree. Her husband still hasn’t been able to find work, but he stays home and watches the kids. She says they no longer rely on food stamps, but they still use Medicaid and WIC for her youngest son.
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#4 Terry Fitzpatrick
Terry Fitzpatrick lives in a tent in the woods next to a shopping plaza. Rather than being homeless, he considers himself more of a “city camper” and says his situation is temporary. Terry, who is sober, chose to remove himself from other homeless people to stay away from alcohol and keep his peace. Since his mother died, he says he is trying to get his life in order so that he can move forward.
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#5 Elizabeth & Aleena
Aleena Arnesen and her cousin Elizabeth live on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana. Aleena's father is a commercial fisherman, bringing in the freshly caught shrimp Aleena would often eat for dinner. Since the BP oil spill in 2010, the fishermen are catching half of what they used to, and Aleena's mother Kindra is scared to feed the children seafood. “The federal government says it is fine,” she says, “yet my husband is catching fish with black goo on them.” Kindra, who was one of the clean-up workers after the BP oil spill, thinks the government has procrastinated passing legislation to prevent another spill from happening. The spill has raised concerns over environmental safety and health, and ruined the livelihood of many families. The Arnesens have put their home up for sale and are thinking of moving to a fishing community in North Carolina.
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#6 Rodney Woods And Joe Berry
New Orleans natives and cousins Rodney Woods and Joe Berry sometimes walk ten miles to a temp agency to look for work. Rodney, who resides in a two-room shotgun-style home with his wife and four of his six children, used to own a grocery store in the Ninth Ward before it was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Joe, on the other hand, worked at a printing shop before Katrina, but moved to Texas after the storm. He has not been able to find a job since he returned. He sometimes sleeps on Rodney’s porch or under a bridge, saying he lives “pillar to post.” His dream is to be a rapper.
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#7 At The Poverello House
Pop music blares from loud speakers while people are waiting in line for a free meal at the Poverello House: a non-profit organization that has been serving the hungry and homeless since 1973. Billions of dollars cut from the state’s health and social services budget are expected to have drastic effects on fragile groups like the elderly and the disabled, who are increasingly living on the streets and relying on food pantries. “You can go to the Salvation Army; the Catholic Charities... you’ve got a whole rotation. That’s how the seniors in this town get by," said a 61-year-old veteran who lives in a van next to Poverello.
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#8 Ruby Ann Smith
Ruby Ann Smith lives under the North Avenue Bridge where it crosses the North Oconee River in Athens, Georgia. She shares the space with other homeless people who have made an outdoor encampment. A prostitute and a drug addict, Ruby Ann has been beaten, shot, and sexually assaulted. “I am so lucky I am still alive,” says Smith, half smiling, half crying, “I should have been dead ten times by now.”
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#9 Eric Ramirez
Eric Ramirez lives in a dusty trailer park for migrant farm workers in Firebaugh, California, where he shares a narrow trailer with his two siblings and his grandparents. According to the U.S. Census, 36 percent of children in Fresno County, where Firebaugh is located, are poor, and 43 percent of children in Firebaugh live below the poverty line. The area is one of the most fertile in the country and the Ramirez family work in the fields picking fruits and vegetables. Still, Eric has to walk more than two miles with his grandmother to a community center where they wait in line for hours to receive free food.
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#10 Clark Iron Hawk, 46 Years Old
Clark attends the powwow hoping to make a little extra money in the dance competition. He wears a beaded costume his wife made him by hand. Aside from occasional work as a day laborer, it’s one of the only ways to make money for people like him who live far outside of Eagle Butte. Hawk says the shortage of jobs makes life on the reservation difficult. Hawk knows hardship—his 16-year-old son died a few years ago from seizures. Epilepsy is a common problem on the reservation. He says dancing in the powwows gives him a sense of pride and spiritual focus.
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#11 Jennifer Rhoden
Native Floridian Jennifer Rhoden, age 27, is living under the bridge with her boyfriend and army reservist Donald Monroe, who is from St. Louis. They’ve been homeless since June. He came to New Orleans and was soon put in jail for 5 months for collecting scrap metal. “I wasn't doing anything wrong. It was trash.” He had to plea or sit in jail for 9 months for trespassing, which he says is “unheard of.” Jennifer worked at a fast-food restaurant in Florida but has not had any luck landing a job in New Orleans, where she hopes to become a chef. They are trying to get help through a non-profit organization, but say it’s hard unless they are addicts or have mental disorders. “If you are healthy and don't have an addiction, they figure you should have a job,” says Donald. “But what if something happens, what are you supposed to do? All my jobs are manual work.” Donald broke his finger in a fight and is waiting for it to heal to try and find work as an auto mechanic. Meanwhile, they say bathing, finding a place to go to the bathroom, and finding food are daily struggles. “It’s the land of opportunity if you have it in front of you to begin with if your mom and dad had opportunities. You don’t have anything in front of you and just go out and get an opportunity handed to you. It doesn’t happen like that,” said Jennifer. Once you are in poverty, she says it’s extremely hard to get out.
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#12 Mike Shaving And Mike Jewett
Mike Shaving and Mike Jewett have just participated in a traditional sweat lodge ceremony, a purification ritual in which they pray to the Native American gods and chant inside a dark, steaming-hot teepee. The ritual was illegal in the United States until 1978, but for Shaving, who works for a program that helps low-income families on the reservation in South Dakota, the practice has helped overcome an alcohol addiction. Jewett, who is self-employed and suffering from debilitating back pain, says the ceremony helps him stay mentally focused. “If you concentrate on your prayer, you do not feel anything,” he says. “You think with your heart, not with your mind.”
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#13 Adel White Dog & Her Children
Adel White Dog's grandchildren sleep in front of the burnt trailer as the family waits for help to arrive.The remains of Adel White Dog’s trailer, which burned down earlier that day due to an electrical fire that destroyed most of their belongings, except a family photo album Ramona, Adel’s daughter, found in the rubble. Adel, a dishwasher who supported her family on a minimum-wage salary at a local restaurant, lived in the trailer with her two daughters and grandchildren. Adel says even though it was condemned and the windows were all boarded up, “That’s what I owned. That’s the only thing I owned, the only thing I could call home.” It’s not the first time this has happened to her. A few years ago, Adel lived in another trailer that caught fire, killing two of her grandchildren. This time, luckily, no one was hurt. One of her daughters, seventeen-year-old Ramona Three Legs, was at a pregnancy check-up when the fire broke out. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) donates condemned trailers to Native Americans in an attempt to solve the housing shortage on the reservation. Since the latest incident, the Tribal Housing Authority has relocated Adel’s family to another FEMA trailer.
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#14 Edward “Juicy” Jackson III
Edward “Juicy” Jackson III, a trombone player in a second-line brass band, has lived his whole life in the Ninth Ward. He’s a member of the To Be Continued Brass Band. He says he and his classmates formed the band to avoid getting into drugs and violence. They started at Carver Senior High School in New Orleans, where they borrowed instruments from Carver’s band director. Some of the instruments were taped together. TBC has become a popular presence in the French Quarter. They also play in second-line parades at funerals of members of their community. He says he plays a lot at jazz funerals because so many young black men are killed, including his best friend and fellow bandmate. He hopes that playing an instrument will be a way out for him. “I’ve seen a lot and been through a lot and I know I have to get myself if not outta New Orleans, then outta this ‘hood in order to be successful and do what I have to do,” says Jackson. “As long as I am here, nothing is going to happen for me, there’s nothing here.” His band has toured with hip-hop band The Roots.
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#15 Lawanda Leary & Reginald
Lawanda Leary and her son Reginald live in a massive housing complex for low-income families. Leary, an unemployed single mom, is planning to join the military as a way to get benefits and in order to offer financial stability to her son, even if it means going into a war zone and being away from her son.
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#16 Manila Chipps & Three Children
Mateo Chipps, 5, rides his bike after a rainstorm in Cherry Creek, a remote community about an hour’s drive from Eagle Butte. It’s a good place for children to grow up, says Manila Chipps, Mateo’s mother, because they can play, ride bikes and learn about the Lakota culture. Though she also sees the endless problems that come with deep poverty. Jobs, access to health care, and educational opportunities are limited. Her older son Malik almost died of an asthma attack because there are no medical facilities near to where they live. “Sure, it’s our homeland,” she says, “it’s the people’s, passed down generations to generations. It’s our own nation. But we’re struggling, and we’re in the United States of America. Struggling.” She herself had no trouble finding a job when the family lived out of state, but cannot find regular work on the reservation. Still, she says she tries to lead by example, buying basic necessities for neighbors with the extra income she earns from selling “Indian tacos” that she makes at home. She said despite hardships, she and her children have a purpose on the reservation–to help other Native Americans.
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#17 Ruthann Yellow Earring
Ruthann Yellow Earring lives in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Eagle Butte. Kids call it “The Dark side” due to lack of street lights, fights, drunks loitering in the streets, and domestic abuse.
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#18 Selear Smith And Her 9-Year Old Son Shamuar
Selear Smith and her 9-year-old son Shamuar live in New Orleans East, which never fully recovered after Katrina. “It’s a ghost town now,” she says. Selear is a single mom. She works part-time at Lowes and has no health insurance. Her family was rescued on the rooftop of a hotel during Katrina. They lost their home. To make matters worse, her father died in a boating accident on Father’s Day last year. Her mother is depressed. Her brother is mentally disabled. Her son is bi-polar and on heavy medication. (He shut himself in the closet while we were visiting and was crying. He said he wanted to see his father, who Selear describes as a “deadbeat.”) Talking about her situation, Selear says “It feels like we are in a hole that is closing in on us.”
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#19 Darlene Rosas
Darlene Rosas lives on her own without any running water and barely any heat in a condemned trailer that is situated half a mile off the road. The grassy hill around it is littered with broken lawnmowers, used mattresses, and rusty automobiles. With the nearest town 40 minutes away, Rosas has to rely on neighbors for food and water when her old Chevrolet breaks down. She receives a disability check of about $800 a month that she uses to support her unemployed son and her daughter who suffers from kidney failure. Rosas says that living on the reservation is a Catch-22. “If you have a job, you lose benefits. If you live on welfare, you become a victim of the system.”
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#20 Name Unknown
This homeless man lived in his tent on F Street before the encampment was razed by the city.
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#21 Martha Andalon
Martha Andalon, a volunteer at a community center in Firebaugh, California, helps distribute bags of free food, enough for 200 families. She knows first-hand the hardships people are facing; she and her farmworker husband are currently unemployed and struggling to feed their four children. Andalon is learning English and computer skills in hopes of landing a job. Volunteering at the community center guarantees her a free bag of food. Others, however, start arriving at 5 am to ensure they’ll get a bag, containing a whole chicken, canned goods, boxed mac and cheese, potatoes, and other staples. Men in cowboy hats, mothers, grandmothers, and small children stand in a line that stretches out into the parking lot. The wait can be several hours long; latecomers sometimes leave empty-handed.
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#22 Dakeia Johnson & Her Daughter Jes-Zahre
Dakeia Johnson and her daughter Jes-Zahre live with Dakeia’s mother in the Upper Ninth Ward in New Orleans. During Hurricane Katrina, a helicopter rescued the family off the roof of their floating home. Through “sweat labor,” they purchased a new house from an organization, but fear the home has toxic drywall like other homes built in the community. Dakeia earned a college degree in biology, but can barely make ends meet working as a substitute teacher. She says she takes anti-depressants to cope with her financial stress and grief after her brother was shot and killed by gunfire last year.
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#23 JJ Creppel
JJ Creppel lives in Buras, Louisiana. A shrimp fisherman whose livelihood was destroyed by Katrina, he lives in a trailer with his girlfriend. He doesn’t have enough food to eat so he kills chickens in his yard for food. He says he has been a hard worker his whole life, but is about to give up. He is unable to catch what he used to and his health is deteriorating.
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#24 Lesley Perez & Her Brothers
Lesley Perez, a 24-year-old kindergarten teacher, lives in a small two-bedroom apartment with her parents and her three younger brothers in the South Bronx. Though sharing a room with three others is a big adjustment for her after living on her own, she decided to move back into her childhood home to pay off her $32,000 college loan and $12,000 credit card debt she racked up on books, food, and transportation while in school. No stranger to hard work, she holds three jobs to climb out of debt and contribute to the family household. Perez, who is Puerto Rican, says employers are always surprised to learn she is from the South Bronx. She says her old friends from the neighborhood all either have children, have joined gangs, or sell drugs. “When I see them or I bump into them, they consider me as a white individual. And it’s not because of race. It’s because of education and class.” Though she comes from a humble background, her parents instilled in her that education is the way out of poverty. “To continue learning, that’s the only escape.” She just finished her first year of graduate school and hopes to land a job as a teacher, which offers benefits. No one in her family, except for her father, has health coverage.
Andrew, Charles, and Lesley Perez share a bedroom with another brother in their parents' small two-bedroom home in the South Bronx.
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#25 Ruthann Yellow Earring
Ruthann Yellow Earring lives in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Eagle Butte. Kids call it “The Dark Side” due to lack of street lights, fights, drunks loitering in the streets, and domestic abuse.
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#26 Gary Taylor & His Kids
Gary Taylor, 47, plays with his kids outside their home in Fresno. More than a year ago, he lost his job at the customer service center of a food bank and has had trouble finding work since. He supports his fiancée, Latoya Lowe, and three kids, aged six, five, and three, with the six hundred dollars he gets from public assistance, though he says the money does not cover all of his bills. “I’ll do any job to provide for my family,” Taylor says. “But if I don’t find anything, that means I’m on the street.” However, he worries that employers will pass him over for someone younger.
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#27 T.J. Shelton
T.J. Shelton has been a hard-working citizen his entire life, but he had to stop working when he became blind. Born in Atlanta in 1935, he joined the Air Force at age 17, where he learned how to break down and reassemble a rifle. He became a crack shot, earning his first stripe on the target range and was put in charge of ammunition. He served in Korea with the 94th motor squadron for three years. When he returned to the States, T.J. held different jobs at the same time, at General Motors and as a busboy at a hotel. His strong work ethic gained him a promotion to engineer. He moved on to the Imperial Hotel and then to the Atlanta airport, where he worked as a radar technician. He came to Athens in the 1970s, where he met and married a teacher. He lives in her parents’ home still today. He wishes he could raise chickens, but a local anti-livestock ordinance prohibits citizens from raising their own food. “Things have changed around here,” he says. “I’ve got land for a chicken and the dogs in the neighborhood cause more problems than chickens.” In the late nineties, T.J. worked at Sears and developed glaucoma. He tried to get corrective eye surgery for his condition, but was instead blinded by the surgeon’s poorly calibrated laser. Unable to work, T.J. refuses all government assistance except his Army disability, saying, “I ain’t worried about not being able to see. God has blessed me. You gotta be strong. You gotta do what you gotta do.”
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#28 Whitehill Family
Danielsville, Georgia, a small town just north of Athens. Though the Whitehill family had received an eviction notice two months earlier and were planning to move into another house on that same day, the sheriff came by to let them know their time was up. Several workers tossed all of their clothes, toys, furniture, and framed photographs into a soaking heap in the front yard. In this picture, they were collecting their remaining things. The sheriff told them they had to oversee four to six evictions like this one every day. With one in 300 housing units subject to a notice or repossession, Georgia has the nation’s highest rate of foreclosures, triggered by the burst of the real estate bubble and the subprime mortgage crisis that started in 2007.
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#29 Nick Houston
Nick Houston, age 19, grew up with a single mom and nine other siblings. He lives in a neighborhood kids call “The Dark Side,” because none of the street lights work. He says life on the reservation has “too much drama, too much drinking, and fighting.” Last year, he graduated from the local high school, where he says the teachers are a joke. “They pass you to get you out of their hair,” he said. Like many kids on the reservation, he played basketball as a way out and received a basketball scholarship at United Tribes, a 2-year college program in Bismarck, ND, where he is currently an undergraduate. He said his experience at college has shown him a different way of life, “People around here (on the reservation) are just mean, probably because of the way they see their parents act.” One day, he hopes to get a hospital job and have a family. “My dream is to get off this reservation and be happy,” he says.
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#30 Brent & Sophie Nagao With Their Son
Small farmers like Brent and Sophie Nagao have been hit hard by the recession and unfavorable agricultural policies. They have owned a small fruit farm in Selma, California for the last four decades. The economic downturn has made the industry unprofitable, raising the price of fuel and equipment. Harsh immigration laws have also made it difficult for the Nagaos and other small farmers to find laborers, many of whom have fled for fear of deportation. Still, the Nagaos say the farm is “in their blood” and refuse to leave the land, like many of their neighbors have done. Their son Evan will be the family’s fourth-generation farm owner, but they all have outside jobs to try and make ends meet.
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#31 Diane & James Kinley
James Kinley and his wife Diane live in a small but impeccably kept trailer home. After 37 years of working at a local industry, James started having heart problems that eventually forced him to get a pacemaker and quit his job. His longtime insurance company did not honor his claim for disability and is forcing him to pay back the money he received when he left his job. Now that he's turned 65, he finally qualifies for the government’s health insurance for the elderly. The Kinleys have taught their children how to produce their own food through gardening and cultivating honeybees. Their do-it-yourself attitude has helped them get by in tough times. They fear that if Diane’s health were also to decline, rising medical bills would make it impossible for them to keep their home.
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#32 Ramona Three Legs
Seventeen-year-old Ramona Three Legs was at a pregnancy check-up when a fire broke out due to a poorly-installed electrical system, and her family’s trailer burnt down. The trailer, though condemned and with windows all boarded up, was everything the family owned. Except for a family photo album Kate found in the rubble, the family’s belongings have been destroyed. Kate lived here with her mother, her sister, and her two children. It is not the first time this has happened to Kate’s family. A few years earlier, her sister lost two children in a similar trailer fire. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) sells condemned trailers to Native Americans in an attempt to solve the housing shortage on the reservation. Since the latest incident, the Tribal Housing Authority has relocated Adell's family to another FEMA trailer.
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#33 Kelly Mitchell
Kelly Mitchell waiting for free food handed out by a group of volunteers on weekends under the Claiborne Avenue Bridge in New Orleans.
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#34 Francisca Sanchez
Francisca Sanchez, age 42, was born and raised in Michoacan, Mexico before moving to California. Her husband, a field laborer, works in a faraway town. He rarely comes home and does not send much money. Francisca used to rely on WIC to buy milk and food for her children, but now that they’ve grown past the age limit of five, she finds other ways to scrape by, like collecting and recycling cans to buy necessities like soap. Her volunteer work at her children’s school has won her several awards, which she hangs proudly on her wall. She says her main focus is to provide a better future to her children.
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#35 Shoeshine
Shoeshine, a 54-year-old homeless man in Fresno, California, graduated from college with a degree in recreation. He worked for the L.A. City Recs and Parks, but soon found himself in prison with a twenty-one-and-a-half-year sentence. After he finished his term, his criminal background made it difficult to find a job, and Shoeshine turned to cocaine. 15 days later, “I caught myself and said I didn’t want to go back down this road.” He entered a Salvation Army rehabilitation center, where he worked hard to pay his room and board and therapy costs. However, when he pulled a hernia, the center discharged him, leaving Shoeshine on the street. Realizing he was not a good panhandler—“I’m kind of sensitive to what people think or what they say”—he decided to pick up his old trade, which was shining shoes and cleaning tennis shoes. He now has 45 clients and is contemplating working on a shoe-stand. He calls Fresno “the jungle” and lives in a tent on the outskirts of a homeless shelter. And while he says “I’m crazy as fuck… come on man—how would you feel living down here in the tent?” he keeps going “full steam ahead.” “I’ve gotta keep moving forward.”
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#36 Axel Coletti
Axel Coletti, a 24-year-old from Peru, has worked as a waiter and bartender, but is currently unemployed. Having recently graduated from college with a degree in forensic psychology, he is trying to find a job as a social worker, but says employers don’t call him back. Axel lives with his mother in the low-income housing project where he grew up. He said many of his childhood friends got involved in gangs, “mostly Crips.” He was tempted to join, “but I knew that nothing good would come from it.” On the whole, he says violence in the neighborhood has gone down since the 1990s, but he has noticed a recent spike in shootings. He says crime and poverty in the South Bronx are linked because of a lack of education. “There are bad influences, there are weapons, there are drugs," says Coletti. “That’s the unfortunate reality in poor neighborhoods in the United States. There are mixtures of these bad factors.”
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#37 High Bear
Unemployed and living on government assistance, Robby High Bear said "the elders" are the keepers of Native American history. "You have to talk to the elders," he said.
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#38 Spirit Grass
Spirit Grass, age 13, dreams of playing basketball one day at the University of Southern California, which could potentially be her ticket off the Indian reservation where she and her family scrape by on $3,500 a year.
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#39 Marco Belloso & Pedro Miranda, And Their Mailboxes
Marco Belloso, a 31-year-old from El Salvador, who lives with four other farm laborers. Belloso works in the field nine hours a day, seven days a week, picking tomatoes and onions and clearing weeds, leaving his hands calloused and cracked like dry earth. He does it to be able to send his wife and children in El Salvador a portion of his minimum-wage earnings to buy shoes and other necessities, but he often feels depressed. “I’m so far away,” said Belloso. "Being here is practically like being in prison, only going from the house to work and back home again.” His housemate Pedro Miranda, who also works in the field, just received news that two of his brothers were shot and killed at a coffee shop back home. Because of his financial and immigrant status, he wasn’t able to return and bury his brothers and still owes $1500 out of the $6000 he has paid to the coyote that brought him to the United States. Meanwhile, his wife and kids are in El Salvador. Both Pedro and Marco dream of going back to be with their families.
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#40 Javier Hernandez & Albino Lopez
Javier Hernandez and Albino Lopez have been working as farm laborers in California’s Central Valley since they emigrated from Mexico forty years ago. It’s a grueling routine, but one they’ve grown used to: A truck picks them up at 5 am and transports them to fields where they pick fruits, vegetables, and cotton for eight hours a day with few breaks. Heat strokes are common, but they have little access to proper health care. At the end of their shift, they return to overcrowded trailers with other migrant workers. When they can, they send a portion of their minimum wage earnings to their families back in Mexico. The day this picture was taken, the labor contractor, for the second day in a row, sent them home from the fields with no explanation and no pay. They said they can’t afford not to work, as they sat outside playing checkers with stones. When the farming season ends in the winter, they’ll head to Alaska to work in the fisheries, as they do every year.
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#41 Neyis And Tommy Camilo. Ages 14
Dominican brother and sister on the street.
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#42 Miguel Miranda With Sons David And Juan
Miguel Miranda (with sons David and Juan), a 37-year-old migrant farm worker who also works part-time in a Mexican restaurant as a cook, is no stranger to hard work. He often works 7 days a week, earning minimum wage to help support his wife and two small children. However, he has stopped working temporarily because his wife is in the hospital battling cancer. “I have to be the mother and the father right now.” Miranda rents a small room from his father-in-law, but he says the relationship is tense and he doesn’t have any other family members that he can rely on for emotional support. His children have become withdrawn at school and Miranda feels pressure to return to work.
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#43 Yolanda Rodriguez
Yolanda Rodriguez lived in one of the tents lining F Street, part of a sprawling shantytown in Fresno, where homelessness is a chronic problem. She was pregnant at the time of this photograph.
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#44 Jenice Grinstead
Jenice Grinstead, age 58, picks fruit from the citrus trees in her backyard to give to her neighbors. She says her faith and helping others is the way she gets by in tough times. A single mom, she was laid off from her accounting job where she worked for more than a decade and earned $28 an hour. She is now in danger of losing her house and has taken in a boarder to make ends meet. She fears the direction in which the country is headed. “The true American dream is, was, religious freedom. We came here to be able to come together to be able to worship God, to be able to raise our families, to be the best that we can be at what we were doing. And they were hard-working; that’s the backbone of this country… we’ve lost the American dream and it’s been replaced with plastic, with a false sense of security and a credit card.”
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#45 James Koester
James Koester works as the warehouse manager at Catholic Charities. He is in charge of all of the food that is received and sorted for donations to families in need. He says he has seen the number of families coming to pick up free food increase in recent years. He knows first-hand the challenges many of these families are facing.
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#46 Tonya Mohammed
Tonya Mohammed, a young single mom in a women’s shelter, works full-time as a health home attendant. She says she loves her job, but only makes $200 a week. Her husband left her after he got his green card and doesn’t want to pay child support. She doesn't receive help from her family, either. “I’m very strong, I don’t let nothing get me down, and if I do fall, I get right back up and movin’. So, I have to. I have a 2-year-old; she needs me,” says Mohammed. She has gone through a lot; she was raped at an early age, became a heavy drug user, and had a short stint as a prostitute. This is the fifth domestic violence shelter where she has stayed; however, she says she has finally turned her life around. Her dream now is to become financially stable. She wants to complete her GED so she can go to medical school and become a doctor.
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#47 Children At The Trailer Park
Children in a trailer park full of undocumented migrant workers in Athens, Georgia. Latino immigration has been on the rise in recent decades here, attracting an estimated 440,000 immigrants to occupy jobs in agriculture, construction, carpeting, and poultry processing. However, the passage of a new strict anti-immigration law, similar to the one passed in Arizona, has instilled fear in many Latino communities throughout the state. Getting caught without a driver’s license could mean fines of $675, about two weeks’ pay. Under the law, immigrants can also be detained and deported if they don’t have documentation and a record. Their children, many of whom are US citizens, stay behind. A local activist who works closely with the community says many immigrant youths are being legally orphaned by the US government. Since reuniting families across borders becomes a complicated legal procedure, the state gives many children up for adoption. According to a report from the Applied Research Center, up to 5,100 children of parents who have been detained or deported are living in foster care. The harsh law has forced immigrants to go deeper undercover, rather than returning to the violence and economic hardships in their native countries. Georgia’s farmers have also felt the sting of the policy. They lost $140 million in unpicked crops in 2011 because farm workers are scared to show up. The state has lost millions more in other industries. Still, proponents of the anti-immigrant bill say this is what must be done to stop the “invasion” by illegal workers.
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#48 John Moon
John Moon lives a frugal life. A pot of black beans boiling on the stove fog up his plastic-covered windows. His room is now empty, though his walls were once covered from floor to ceiling with his colorful collages and art creations. This 64-year-old son of a sharecropper says he sold his work to simplify his life and pursue spiritual matters. A folk artist and a writer, Moon left school after sixth grade until he went back to get his General Education Diploma decades later. In addition to his visual art, he’s written and self-published several books, which are now housed at the University of Georgia’s Rare Books and Manuscript Library. Despite local recognition, he never made money from his art. He scrapes by on social security income, food stamps, and help from one of his sisters when he falls short on the bills. “I was raised to live low-income, so I’m okay,” he says. “God is taking care of me, so I am in good hands.” Despite living below the poverty line, he says he feels like he has had a successful career.
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#49 Denise Roberts
On a quiet street in suburban Modesto, California, an American flag hangs from the ranch-style house where Denise Roberts grew up and where she now lives again with her retired parents. With a college education and a paralegal degree, the 38-year-old unemployed single mother never imagined she and her daughter would have to move back in with her parents. But a sluggish economy, a weak labor market, and a severe drought affecting agriculture—the leading industry in California’s Central Valley—have made it difficult for Roberts to find a job in the last two years. “I think you have the fantasy that you graduate, you have a degree, and that someone is going to hire you,” said Roberts. “I lived that fantasy… and I got a rude awakening.” This is the first time in her life she has ever had trouble finding work, though has continued volunteering for no pay in the meantime. She’s applied for jobs at department stores, doctor’s offices. “Anywhere I could get my foot in the door.” But she hasn’t had much luck. She has considered flipping burgers are McDonald’s, but doubts they would hire her because of her age. Choking back tears, she says that if it weren’t for her parents, she and her daughter would probably be living on the street. “I’m one of the luckier ones,” she says. Her father Kenneth Carr said it’s hard watching his daughter struggle and he wishes the government would do more to create jobs, for instance, through things like public works projects. “Between the drought and the unemployment that we are going through now, this is the closest thing we’ll see in our lifetime to a Depression," says Carr. “It’s really a mess right now.”
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#50 Gloria Almanzar, A Former Actress From The Dominican Republic,76, Waits In Line At The Food Pantry
A steady stream of people, some first-timers, wait for hours outside a church facility to pick up free groceries offered by The Muslim Women’s Initiative for Research and Development. This non-profit organization serves more than 10,000 people through its food pantries. Executive Director Nurah Ama’tullah says she has seen the hunger need rise by 70 percent in the Bronx, heavily populated by new immigrants and low-income families. Around 40 percent of children don’t know where their next meal will come from. Another problem is the availability of fresh food. Still, despite the growing need for emergency food, federal funds for food distribution have been cut in an attempt to balance the nation’s budget. Her organization almost shut down last year because there wasn’t enough money to pay for the staff.
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#51 Construction Workers Daniel Johnson, Mo Perkins, And Alexis Asencio On A Lunch Break
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#52 Kelly Kinley
After her first son's birth, the economy tanked, and Kelly Kinley, 38, found herself without a job and relying on her husband’s income as an automobile fabrication worker. To boost the household finances, Kelly started picking up aluminum cans for recycling when she would take her son on daily strolls. Her hobby expanded into searching for metal and scrap wood from dumpsters at construction sites. Recycling has become a way of life for her. “Finding things that we need that we can use is better than going to the store and buying it,” she says. But over the past few years, this material has gotten tougher for Kelly to find because builders and other businesses have started recycling their own metals.
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#53 Jasmine And Derrick Amoateng
Jasmine Amoateng and Derrick Amoateng, a pair of first-generation siblings from Ghana, sit in a Hispanic bakery in the South Bronx, New York. Historically a stopping point for immigrants, the area, which has a large number of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Mexicans, the area has recently seen an influx of West Africans seeking political or economic refuge. Some 32,600 immigrants from West African countries such as Ghana, Nigeria, and Mali live in the Bronx—more than in any other borough, according to the most recent American Community Survey. The 2010 Census estimates 70,000 people born in all parts of Africa live in the borough, a five-fold increase from 1990. Community leaders believe the number could surpass 100,000 if their American-born children and those in the country illegally were counted.
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#54 Mendota
On the side of the road of Mendota, a small farming town in California’s Central Valley, more than half of the population lives below the poverty line and unemployment tops 40 percent. Known as the “Cantaloupe Capital of the World,” it has gotten more attention lately for the severe drought that has all but shut down the agricultural production on which most of the town’s 10,000 residents depend. Adding to the town’s troubles, strict environmental regulations have cut the amount of irrigated water local farms can receive from the state of California. The water shortages along with years of political bickering and neglect haven’t hurt everyone in the region’s $20 billion crop industry, but it has had a noticeable effect on the mostly Hispanic migrant laborers, who are out of work and increasingly lining up at food distribution sites, or leaving town to find opportunities elsewhere.
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#55 Luis Sanchez
A 29-year-old who has been homeless since his teens.
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#56 Ogbodo & Felicia
Felicia sits with her daughter Ermaline Ogbodo in their Fresno home after attending a Sunday church service. Felicia lost her job as a social worker with foster children and has been living on unemployment benefits since January 2011. She filed for bankruptcy to wipe out her credit card debt, an experience she calls “humbling,” and has been considering moving in with her ex-husband or a roommate to save on bills. Before losing her job, Ogbodo had a decent yearly salary of $45,000, but is now running out of money. In addition to downsizing, she plans on selling her furniture and other items she has in storage. State budget cuts have forced Fresno County to downsize group homes or shut down programs for foster children, making it more difficult for Ogbodo to find a job. After obtaining a master's degree in social work, she never imagined she would be in this situation. Her daughter Ermaline, a top student, was accepted into college on a scholarship, but worries over her mom’s financial situation.
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#57 Brandon Leonard, & His Partner Angela Flowers
Brandon Leonard, a 42-year-old employment coordinator, and his partner Angela Flowers, age 53, wait in line for free food.
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#58 Tiffany Williams
Walking through the streets of the South Bronx, the photographer interviewed several residents.
Tiffany Williams window shops in the Bronx, but says she can't afford to buy anything.
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#59 The Old Wooden Houses Lining Waddell Street
Some, more than a century old, were once home to middle-class African-Americans who worked at the nearby University of Georgia, where many neighborhood women cleaned and washed clothes for students. Although the streets weren’t paved until the 1960s and workers only made $2 to $3 a week, it was an upwardly mobile place, where residents, some of the sons and daughters of freed slaves, were able to make small payments and eventually buy their own property. Big families lived in small houses, and there was a push towards education. In recent decades, this once healthy neighborhood has fallen into disrepair, homes have been neglected or abandoned as jobs in the local manufacturing industry have dried up, and the university has replaced on-campus blue-collar staff positions with cheaper student labor.
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#60 Eagle Butte Main Road
With a population of around 1300 people, it’s the biggest town on the Cheyenne River Indian reservation in South Dakota. Because recreational activities here are limited, there is no movie theater and no bowling alley, many youths hang out at the gas station, which contains a convenience store and two fast-food restaurants, Taco John’s and Dairy Queen. It’s one of the only places to socialize and grab a bite to eat. Eagle Butte is the only place to buy groceries and one of the only places where you can land a job. People who live in remote communities drive up to 90 miles to see if they can find work with the main employers—the tribal government and Indian Health Services. It’s difficult for Native Americans to move closer to town because there is a shortage of housing and almost 48 percent of the population lives below the poverty line.
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#61 A Homeless Man Carries Lumber
The man carries lumber to the encampment under the North Avenue Bridge, where they sleep on the ground or old mattresses and burn wood to keep warm when the temperature drops below freezing. Many of the people who live under the bridge have jobs, but don’t earn enough to put a proper roof over their heads. With the economic downturn and overflowing homeless shelters, the number of people living in tents, cars, and under bridges in Athens has tripled since 2006, according to the Athens-Clarke Human and Economic Development Department.
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#62 Madai Nunez & Amy
Madai Nunez and her 8-year-old neighbor Amy live in a migrant worker motel in downtown Fresno, California. During the day, Amy and her friends play in the parking lot where Madai Nunez is keeping an eye on the children while their parents work in the fields for $8 an hour. At night, the mood at the motel changes when the men, after a long day of physical labor, start drinking to unwind. Fights are common, and at times, prostitutes come knocking on doors looking for business, sometimes with their babies in tow.
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#63 Marla And Darren Sumner
Marla and Darren Sumner earned professional degrees, he as an architect and she as an interior designer, and made a good living until they were laid off in 2008. Since then, they’ve had trouble finding work. Marla has even applied for a job as a cashier at a home-improvement specialty store and was rejected because she was “over-qualified.” They’ve been collecting unemployment to make ends meet and watching pennies by conserving gas and shopping at low-end chain stores. They dropped their cable service and use internet at the local library. “It’s a paradigm shift,” said Marla. “I think that we lost blue-collar jobs. We are losing professional jobs now. And I think we’ve really sold out our country.” To improve what she sees as a failing American society, Marla believes the government needs to increase the minimum wage and strengthen the safety net by providing universal health care. “We are all deserving of humane basic consideration,” she says. On the upside, the recession has forced people to do more with less, which she says is good for the environment. “I think it’s stimulating for people to think, ‘Do I really need to drive, do I really need to make that trip?'”
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#64 Gabriel Hernandez
Business is down at an auto mechanic shop where Gabriel Hernandez works.
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