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2 WAI‘ANAE A Space of Resistance To resist is to retrench in the margins, retrieve what we were and remake ourselves. The past, our stories local and global, the present, our communities, cultures, languages and social practices—all may be spaces of marginalization, but they have also become spaces of resistance and hope. (Smith 1999, 4) Before I moved to the working-class community of Wai‘anae on the leeward coast of O‘ahu in early 1996, I stayed briefly in Honolulu at the University of Hawai‘i. In casual conversations I learned an important distinction about the community I planned to study. Wai‘anae, I was told, was “dangerous,” “rough,” and “really, really local.” A Korean graduate student in biostatistics worried about my safety and wondered what I might learn in a place like Wai‘anae. When I visited a family friend, an elderly drag queen who had once been a performer in Waikīkī, she said Wai‘anae was dangerous and that I should stay put in Honolulu . A taxi driver (who appeared “Asian” to me) asked, “Where are you from? You look like a local girl.” I replied that I was African American, an anthropology graduate student, and in Hawai‘i to do research in Wai‘anae. “You don’t look African American,” the taxi driver said. “You look Hawaiian-Portugee. But, ho, Wai‘anae’s rough, it’s really, really local.” My experience as a community organizer in Central Harlem, New York City, in the mid-to-late 1980s prepared me to interpret these outsider warnings about the difference of Wai‘anae. In Harlem I learned to suspect academic studies that portrayed poor and working-class communities as socially and biologically pathological (Jackson 2001, 4, 190; Mullings 1996, 78, 117, 165). I learned, also, that the popular and media narratives of fear and loathing about poor communities like Harlem emanated mostly from the (sometimes politically 45 motivated) imagination of outsiders (see Reeves and Campbell 1994). NonHarlemites imagined all sorts of crime and mayhem lurking on the streets, although for the most part these fearful outsiders had not been there to see for themselves. But the messages about Harlem as a wild, dangerous place came from within as well. As an organizer, I went door to door through Central Harlem to speak with neighbors about joining forces to improve the conditions of their lives. Many people initially refused to join the community association because they feared their neighbors. People told me, “Everyone around here is on crack.” Although it was never the case that everyone was using crack, the single greatest obstacle to building viable tenants’ associations was tenants being suspicious of their neighbors.1 Central Harlem residents internalized the negative messages that emanated both from within and from without, and they allowed these representations to immobilize and shame them (Bourgois 1995, 264; see also Kardiner and Ovesey 1972; Fanon 1963, 1967). When they joined the community association, however, they learned to see themselves and their neighbors in a new light. As Gaventa (1980, 213, 257) argued about power and powerlessness in an Appalachian mining community: As actions upon perceived limit situations2 were successful, more participation occurred, leading to further action. In a concrete situation an interrelationship begins to be seen between participation and consciousness , so that one becomes necessary for the development of the other in the process of community change. . . . The powerless must be able to explore their grievances openly, with others similarly situated. They must develop their own notions of interests and actions, and themselves as actors. In working collectively, people in Central Harlem began the process of defining themselves. The experience of being a community organizer in Harlem prepared me to better understand the term local from the perspective of Honolulu dwellers. “Local,” I gathered, indicated rural/urban, periphery/metropolitan, and lowerclass /upper-class distinctions. It carried negative connotations suggesting backwardness , provinciality, and poverty. I eventually understood these stories as warnings that I was about to transgress a fortified border in the imaginary landscape of city folks. Indeed, the most memorable warning came from a selfdescribed kama‘āina3 haole woman. She told me that she had once walked her dog, a black standard poodle, on a beach in Wai‘anae. She claimed that a group of “local boys” had hurled insults at her such as, “Haole, go home.” She was not so much afraid for herself, she said, as she was for her dog. Earnestly, she said to me, “[They] eat black...

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