| "Telling Me Different " is a multi-sited ethnography addressing the efforts of deterritorialized young people to survive and search out new sites in which to settle. Unlike traditional ethnography, defined by writings on culture, this fugitive ethnography focuses on an economically disenfranchised class of young people---homeless and runaway youth, migrant and migrating youth, sex and gender refugees. Like a series of snapshots of young people in motion, this study documents the creativity and struggles of young people who have crossed county, state, and national borders to arrive in San Francisco. Drawing from the anthropology of work and the disciplines of urban, legal, political, and medical anthropology, this ethnography utilizes both traditional and innovative methods. Participant observation, oral history, group and individual interviews are combined with an analysis of creative works---writings from a Labor Memoir Project, photos taken in a "Shooting Back" project, and material objects left behind in a drop-in center/day shelter. The work is divided into three sections. The first investigates the relationship between trauma, memory, and movement in the lives of individual youth. The second illustrates gatekeeping mechanisms in the social services, punitive treatment by police, and a legal code which constructs youth on their own as criminalized subjects, status offenders. It also offers accounts of squatting---youth efforts to take over public and private property for shelter. The third section addresses youth vigilance and protest---documenting two successful housing struggles, one stopping the closure of a group home in the Mission District and another securing transitional housing for queer youth and their allies in the Castro District over NIMBYst (Not-In-My-Backyard) objections. Addressing underground and above ground economies, this research demonstrates, in visceral terms, the necessity for a living wage and an immediate decriminalization of youth on their own. It is a documentation of their expulsion and rejection by adult caregivers, neighborhood residents with legal claims on property, and even by the social service agencies attempting to help them. It also testifies to their fight for respect, survival and living space in a landscape where people interpret their very occupation of space as an adverse possession. |
