and conferring rewards on more cooperative kids was cruel, but also not remarkable in the eighties.
As I felt from the beginning, the unusually cloying geography of Bergenfield seemed somehow implicated in the suicide pact. The landscape appeared even more circumscribed because of the “burnouts’” lack of legitimate space in the town: they were too old for the [roller skating] Rink, and the Building [an abandoned warehouse taken over by the teens] was available for criminal trespass only. Outcast, socially and spatially, for years the “burnouts” had been chased from corner to parking lot, and finally, to the garage bays of Foster Village. They were nomads, refugees in the town of their birth. There was no place for them. They felt unloved, unwanted, devalued, disregarded, and discarded.
But this little town, not even two miles long from north to south, was just a dot on a much larger map. It wasn’t the whole world. Hip adults I know, friends who grew up feeling like outcasts in their hometown, were very sympathetic to the plight of the “burnouts.” Yet even they often held out one last question, sometimes contemptuously: Why didn’t they just leave? As if the four kids had failed even as outcasts. My friends found this confusing: No matter how worthless the people who make the rules say you are, you don’t have to play their game. You can always walk and not look back, they would argue. People who feel abject and weird in their hometown simply move away.
But that has always been a class privilege. The townies are the poor kids, the wounded street warriors who stay behind. And besides, escape was easier for everyone 20 years ago. American society had safety nets then that don’t exist now—it’s just not the same anymore.
During the eighties, dead-end kids—kids with personal problems and unspectacular talents living in punitive or indifferent towns with a sense of futility about life—became more common. There were lots of kids with bad lives. They didn’t all commit suicide. But I believe that in another decade, Tommy Rizzo, Cheryl Burress, Tommy Olton, and Lisa Burress would not have “done it.” They might have had more choices, or choices that really meant something to them. Teenage suicide won’t go away until kids’ bad lives do. Until there are other ways of moving out of bad lives, suicide will remain attractive.
Notes
1. As I promised the kids I met hanging out on the streets of Bergen County and on Long Island, “No names, no pictures.” Names such as “Joe,” “Eddie,” and “Doreen” are fictitious, changed to protect their privacy.
Reading 3 An Intersection Of Biography And History: My Intellectual Journey
Mary Romero
This selection by Mary Romero is another example of C. Wright Mills’s sociological imagination. Romero is a professor in the School of Justice and Social Inquiry at Arizona State University, where she teaches sociology and Chicano studies. In this excerpt, Romero explains how biography and history influenced her investigation of domestic service work done by Chicanas. In particular, she describes her research process, which involved reinterpreting her own and others’ domestic service experiences within the larger work history of Mexican Americans and the devaluation of housework. Thus, this selection is from the introduction to Romero’s 1992 book, Maid in the U.S.A., a study of domestic work and the social interactions between domestics and their employers.
When I was growing up many of the women whom I knew worked cleaning other people’s houses. Domestic service was part of my taken-for-granted reality. Later, when I had my own place, I considered housework something you did before company came over. My first thought that domestic service and housework might be a serious research interest came as a result of a chance encounter with live-in domestics along the U.S.–Mexican border. Before beginning a teaching position at the University of Texas at El Paso, I stayed with a colleague while apartment hunting. My colleague had a live-in domestic to assist with housecleaning and cooking. Asking around, I learned that live-in maids were common in El Paso, even among apartment and condominium dwellers. The hiring of maids from Mexico was so common that locals referred to Monday as the border patrol’s day off because the agents ignored the women crossing the border to return to their employers’ homes after their weekend off. The practice of hiring undocumented Mexican women as domestics, many of whom were no older than 15, seemed strange to me. It was this strangeness that raised the topic of domestic service as a question and made problematic what had previously been taken for granted.
Source: Copyright © 1992 From “Maid in the U.S.A” by Mary Romero. Reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis Group, LLC, a division of Informa plc.
I must admit that I was shocked at my colleague’s treatment of the 16-year-old domestic whom I will call Juanita. Only recently hired, Juanita was still adjusting to her new environment. She was extremely shy, and her timidity was made even worse by constant flirting from her employer. As far as I could see, every attempt Juanita made to converse was met with teasing so that the conversation could never evolve into a serious discussion. Her employer’s sexist, paternalistic banter effectively silenced the domestic, kept her constantly on guard, and made it impossible for her to feel comfortable at work. For instance, when she informed the employer of a leaky faucet, he shot her a look of disdain, making it clear that she was overstepping her boundaries. I observed other encounters that clearly served to remind Juanita of her subservient place in her employer’s home.
Although Juanita was of the same age as my colleague’s oldest daughter and but a few years older than his two sons, she was treated differently from the other teenagers in the house. She was expected to share her bedroom with the ironing board, sewing machine, and other spare-room types of objects.1 More importantly, she was assumed to have different wants and needs. I witnessed the following revealing exchange. Juanita was poor. She had not brought toiletries with her from Mexico. Since she had not yet been paid, she had to depend on her employer for necessities. Yet instead of offering her a small advance in her pay so she could purchase the items herself and giving her a ride to the nearby supermarket to select her own toiletries, the employer handled Juanita’s request for toothbrush, toothpaste, shampoo, soap, and the like in the following manner. In the presence of all the family and the houseguest, he made a list of the things she needed. Much teasing and joking accompanied the encounter. The employer shopped for her and purchased only generic brand items, which were a far cry from the brand-name products that filled the bathroom of his 16-year-old daughter. Juanita looked at the toothpaste, shampoo, and soap with confusion; she may never have seen generic products before, but she obviously knew that a distinction had been made.
One evening I walked into the kitchen as the employer’s young sons were shouting orders at Juanita. They pointed to the dirty dishes on the table and pans in the sink and yelled: WASH! CLEAN! Juanita stood frozen next to the kitchen door, angry and humiliated. Aware of possible repercussions for Juanita if I reprimanded my colleague’s sons, I responded awkwardly by reallocating chores to everyone present. I announced that I would wash the dishes and the boys would clear the table. Juanita washed and dried dishes alongside me, and together we finished cleaning the kitchen. My colleague returned from his meeting to find us in the kitchen washing the last pan. The look on his face was more than enough to tell me that he was shocked to find his houseguest—and future colleague—washing dishes with the maid. His embarrassment at my behavior confirmed my suspicion that I had violated the normative expectations of class behavior within the home. He attempted to break the tension with a flirtatious and sexist remark to Juanita which served to excuse her from the kitchen and from any further discussion.
The conversation that followed revealed how my colleague chose to interpret my behavior. Immediately after Juanita’s departure from the kitchen, he initiated a discussion about “Chicano radicals” and the Chicano movement. Although he was a foreign-born Latino, he expressed sympathy for la causa. Recalling the one Chicano graduate student he had known to obtain a Ph.D. in
