Community can be defined as a social group “whose members reside in a specific locality, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage.” Yet can community itself be a “castaway”? What could it mean for the community, let alone its residents, to be an outcast — an entity discarded, unwanted?
Consider the tracts of temporary trailers scattered throughout New Orleans by the Federal Emergency Management Agency following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, which killed more than 1,800 people and caused at least $100 billion in damage in 2005. Officially designated “parks,” the FEMA clusters once housed 2,000 and more than 5,000 people.
Years after Katrina, the parks still ranged from five to 80 trailers and, due to delays in post-hurricane cleanup and spiking rental prices in restored apartments, accommodated those who had been displaced far longer than originally planned. In the meantime, they served as de facto neighborhoods, even if they didn’t resemble the places where residents lived before the mighty storm. At the Diamond Park trailer site in Plaquemines Parish an hour south of New Orleans, for example, NPR’s Kathy Lohr reported that a chain-link fence extended out from a permanent gate staffed by armed guards. The fence surrounded the park, which otherwise was spread end-to-end with gravel, broken only by the trailers.
If these parks qualify as community — and they may have been the only semblance of community the residents had left, for they worked hard to rebuild the playground and construct a community center — were they, like the displaced neighbors themselves, castaways? FEMA’s intention, after all, was to close the parks sooner rather than later.
Or consider the city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, established in 1942 as part of the Manhattan Project. Seven crossroads villages were seized through a “declaration of taking” by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, clearing the way for the vast infrastructure of what is now Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Yet from 1942 to 1945, the population of the secret city grew from 3,000 to 75,000. Homes, “sometimes loosely defined,” according to the lab’s own historical records, popped up at a rate of one every 30 minutes.
The intention, a friendly guide told me when I visited Oak Ridge just after I began working for the U.S. Department of Energy in 1991, was that the homes built by the Atomic Energy Commission would be temporary. Fifty years after they were built, however, the square, flat-top houses that I saw remained in their original clusters, well-used and decidedly neighborhoodish. Though they had since been upgraded — wiring and water lines retrofitted, porches added and rebuilt, asbestos removed or at least buffered — the low-ceiling structures were designed for interim use. They reminded me of the small “portables” common on school campuses, some built of timber framing, resting atop concrete blocks and clad in green or gray stained plywood, with rectangular windows running the length of one or two sides, while others were built of concrete block on concrete slabs, painted white or light gray, their only distinguishing features small porches and evenly spaced if not undersized windows.
Though the black oaks of Oak Ridge provided a scenic vista, and low-cut grass and tidy flower beds framed the single-story buildings, I couldn’t get over the unintentional longevity of these hurried houses. Why keep them around? Why not build something more comfortable, more lasting?
Or what about the modern-day American suburb? Much maligned in the last three and a half decades by cultural critics such as James Howard Kunstler, whose 1993 book “The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape” quickly became both bible and manifesto in urban planning and smart-growth circles, subdivisions built since the end of World War II are predominantly segregated in their layout. Single-family homes, usually with garages in front, go here; perhaps there’s a school nearby, the land donated by the developer. Stores and restaurants over there. Office complexes, charmingly referred to as office parks if enough grass and distance separate the buildings, over yonder. And industrial areas separated from everything, ever creeping beyond dark railroad tracks. The result is well known: equity across ages and income levels is lost because an automobile is necessary to move between the suburb’s many factions, and mass transit options are few and far between. Logically, wide roads must be built to facilitate those cars, a resource-intensive system almost mandating single-source polluters.
But given the sheer number of those auto-oriented places across the United States, is it possible that suburbs are castaways, too? Indeed, are our suburban neighborhoods — rapidly built for economy over durability, like so much else in our consumer-driven society — designed to be throwaway altogether, their castaway fate inevitable? If so, what does that say about the millions of people who call suburbia home, particularly in a post-pandemic world where it’s easier than ever to work remotely, completely isolating ourselves, inadvertently or intentionally?
I first visited El Tiradito on a mild evening in spring 2007 — not to pay homage to a sinner or light a votive candle, but to gather among friends for the Yaqui deer dance, which would last all night. That the shrine should be our meeting place before driving to the small Pascua Yaqui ceremonial site wedged beneath Interstate 10 in South Tucson was fortuitous, if not ironic. El Tiradito is a dusty half-lot lined on one side by rabbit-eared prickly pear and native velvet mesquite, and on the other by La Pilita Museum, which before its closure in 2015 shared the neighborhood’s history. Located in the oldest Mexican American barrio in Arizona, not far from a park and elementary school and nestled among dense, colorful homes, the shrine is dedicated to a man’s burning love, a love worth dying for. The hard work of barrio neighbors saved the shrine from the interstate. On the other hand, the Yaqui site — dedicated to a verdant mix of native beliefs and Catholic ritual no less steeped in love and spiritual ascension — was also dust-rinsed, though it just barely escaped the freeway. While residents in central Tucson fought for El Tiradito’s protection, members of the Yaqui tribe, which was not recognized by the federal government until 1978, had little say in how the highway cut across their community. The government’s shunning echoed the tribe’s history, which alternated between savage persecution and painful neglect. When it came to the freeway, the Yaquis’ was a castaway community.
Yet anyone who has attended a Yaqui Lenten ceremony like the deer dance knows that the neighborhood is rich in knowledge of place and neighbor. From the moment I arrived at the wide lot off 39th Street and 10th Avenue, I felt a sense of community that had little to do with the ill-repaired houses on adjacent streets or minimal block structures of the site itself. Though a gritty urbanism pervaded the broader area, and trucks roared by on the freeway two stories above us, the ceremonial site held an aura of focus — on the ceremonies and people and, through the deer dance itself, on the native Sonoran Desert landscape suppressed but still breathing around us.
On the surface, the deer dance is less about community than about song — the deer singer chanting against the beat of drums as the deer dancer and his ritual clowns, the pakhokam, dance. Combined, the song and dance weave the performers and onlookers into a trance meant to bridge this world with sea ania, the parallel flower world that mirrors the wild desert. In this respect, however, the dance is entirely about community, for it is “through song that experience with other living things in the wilderness world is made intelligible and accessible to the human community,” write Larry Evers and Felipe S. Molina in “Yaqui Deer Songs: Maso Bwikam.” “Deer songs continue in Yaqui communities as a very real vehicle for communication with the larger natural community in which Yaquis live.”
Even in this urban South Tucson location, with its lack of natural landscape, here and there a velvet mesquite or sweet acacia shades a dirt courtyard, desert marigolds grow from beneath the concrete’s edge, and a mockingbird sings through the night. Residents of the Yaqui community remain a part of the natural world — the Sonoran Desert wilderness that for the tribe originally stems from the Río Yaqui watershed of southern Sonora. Despite the impoverished buildings and the rush of nearby cars, I could see that theirs is a community not of castaways, but rather a community of consciousness and spiritual bounty and a deep sense of place. Theirs is not a castaway community, government neglect and prejudice be damned. Rather, theirs is a flowering wilderness, revisited and retained.
Community succeeds when people join together to consecrate place — making it essential, enduring. “The sacred is not in heaven or far away,” Yaqui-Mexican American poet Alma Luz Villanueva reminds us. “It is all around us.” Community is, after all, what we make it, and the making itself is the sacred.
Excerpted from Satellite: Essays on Fatherhood and Home, Near and Far, by Simmons Buntin. Reprinted with permission from Trinity University Press.
