White Trash

Race and Class in America

Annalee Newitz, Matt Wray, Annalee Newitz, Matt Wray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135204488
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

This collection is devoted to exploring stereotypes about the social conditions of poor whites in the United States and comparing these stereotypes with the social reality.

Part I

Defining and Defying Stereotypes

Sunset Trailer Park

Allan Bérubé with

Florence Bérubé

“I cried,” my mother tells me, “when we first drove into that trailer park and I saw where we were going to live.” Recently, in long-distance phone calls, my mother—Florence Bérubé—and I have been digging up memories, piecing together our own personal and family histories. Trailer parks come up a lot.

During the year when I was born—1946—the booming, postwar “trailer coach” industry actively promoted house trailers in magazine ads like this one from the Saturday Evening Post:

Trailer Coaches Relieve Small-Home Shortage throughout the House-Hungry Nation

Reports from towns and cities all over the United States show that modern, comfortable trailer coaches—economical and efficient beyond even the dreams of a few years ago—are playing a major part in easing the need for small-family dwellings. Returning veterans (as students or workers), newlyweds, and all others who are not ready for—or can’t locate—permanent housing, find in the modern trailer coach a completely furnished (and amazingly comfortable) home that offers the privacy and efficiency of an apartment coupled with the mobility of an automobile.

When I was seven, my parents, with two young children in tow, moved us all into a house trailer, hoping to find the comfort, privacy, and efficiency that the “trailer coach” industry had promised. But real life, as we soon discovered, did not imitate the worlds we learned to desire from magazine ads.

Dad discovered “Sunset Trailer Park” on his own and rented a space for us there before Mom was able to see it. On our moving day in January 1954, we all climbed into our ’48 Chevy and followed a rented truck as it slowly pulled our house trailer from the “Sunnyside Trailer Park” in Shelton, Connecticut, where we lived for a few months, into New York State and across Manhattan, over the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey, through the garbage incinerator landscape and stinky air of Secaucus—not a good sign—then finally into the Sunset Trailer Park in Bayonne.

A blue-collar town surrounded by Jersey City, Elizabeth and Staten Island, Bayonne was known for its oil refineries, tanker piers and Navy yard. It was a small, stable, predominantly Catholic city of working-class and military families, mostly white with a small population of African Americans. When we moved there, Bayonne was already the butt of jokes about “armpits” of the industrial Northeast. Even the characters on the TV sitcom The Honeymooners, living in their blue-collar world in Brooklyn, could get an easy laugh by referring to Bayonne. “Ralph,” Alice Kramden says to her husband in one episode, “you losing a pound is like Bayonne losing a mosquito.” My mom was from Brooklyn, too. A Bayonne trailer park was not where she wanted to live or raise her children.

Along with so many other white working-class families living in fifties trailer parks, my parents believed that they were just passing through. They were headed toward a Better Homes and Gardens suburban world that would be theirs if they worked hard enough. We moved to Bayonne to be closer to Manhattan, where Dad was employed as a cameraman for NBC. He and his fellow TV crewmen enjoyed the security of unionized, wage-labor jobs in this newly expanding media industry. But they didn’t get the income that people imagined went with the status of TV jobs. Dad had to work overtime nights and on weekends to make ends meet. His dream was to own his own house and start his own business, then put us kids through school so we would be better off and not have to struggle so much to get by. My parents were using the cheapness of trailer park life as a steppingstone toward making that dream real.

As Dad’s job and commuting took over his life, the trailer park took over ours. We lived in our trailer from the summer of 1953 through December 1957, most of my grade school years. And so I grew up a trailer park kid.

Sunset Trailer Park seemed to be on the edge of everything. Bayonne itself is a kind of land’s end. It’s a peninsula that ends at New York Bay, Kill Van Kull and Newark Bay—polluted bodies of water that all drain into the Atlantic Ocean. You reached our trailer park by going west to the very end of 24th Street, then past the last house into a driveway where the trailer lots began. If you followed the driveway to its end, you’d stop right at the waterfront. The last trailer lots were built on top of a seawall secured by pilings. Standing there and looking out over Newark Bay, you’d see tugboats hauling barges over the oil-slicked water, oil tankers and freighters carrying their cargoes, and planes (no jets yet) flying in and out of Newark Airport. On hot summer nights the steady din of planes, boats, trucks and freight trains filled the air. So did the fumes they exhaled, which, when mixed with the incinerator smoke and oil refinery gasses, formed a foul atmospheric concoction that became world-famous for its unforgettable stench.

The ground at the seawall could barely be called solid earth. The owner of the trailer park occasionally bought an old barge, then hired a tugboat to haul it right up to the park’s outer edge, sank it with dump-truck loads of landfill, paved it over with asphalt, painted white lines on it and voila!—several new trailer lots were available for rent. Sometimes the ground beneath these new lots would sink, so the trailers would have to be moved away until the sinkholes were filled in. Trailers parked on lots built over rotten barges along the waterfront—this was life on a geographic edge.

It was life on a social edge, too—a borderland where respectable and “trashy” got confused.

“Did you ever experience other people looking down on us because we lived in a trailer park?” I ask my mom.

“Never,” she tells me.

“But who were your friends?”

“They all lived in the trailer park.”

“What about the neighbors who lived in houses up the street?”

“Oh, they didn’t like us at all,” she says. “They thought people who lived in trailers were all low-life and trash. They didn’t really associate with us.”

In the 1950s, trailer parks were crossroads where the paths of poor, working-class and lower-middle-class white migrants intersected as we temporarily occupied the same racially segregated space—a kind of residential parking lot—on our way somewhere else. Class tensions—often hidden—structured our daily lives as we tried to position ourselves as far as we could from the bottom. White working-class families who owned or lived in houses could raise their own class standing within whiteness by showing how they were better off than the white residents of trailer parks. We often responded to them by displaying our own respectability and distancing ourselves from those trailer park residents who were more “lower-class” than we were. If we failed and fell to the bottom, we were in danger of also losing, in the eyes of other white people, our own claims to the racial privileges that came with being accepted as white Americans.

In our attempt to scramble “up” into the middle class, we had at our disposal two conflicting stereotypes of trailer park life that in the 1950s circulated through popular culture. The respectable stereotype portrayed residents of house trailers as white World War II veterans, many of them attending college on GI loans, who lived with their young families near campuses during the postwar housing shortage. In the following decades, this image expanded to include the predominantly white retirement communities located in Florida and the Southwest. In these places, trailers were renamed “mobile” or “manufactured” homes. When parked together, they formed private worlds where white newlyweds, nuclear families and retirees lived in clean, safe, managed communities. You can catch a glimpse of this world in the 1954 Hollywood film The Long, Long Trailer, in which Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz spend their slapstick honeymoon hauling a house trailer cross country and end up in a respectable trailer park. (The fact that Arnaz is Cuban-American doesn’t seriously disrupt the whiteness of their Technicolor world—he’s assimilated as a generically “Spanish” entertainer, an ethnic individual who has no connection with his Cuban American family or community).

A conflicting stereotype portrayed trailer parks as trashy slums for white transients—single men drifting from job to job, mothers on welfare, children with no adult supervision. Their inhabitants supposedly engaged in prostitution and extramarital sex, drank a lot, used drugs, and were the perpetrators or victims of domestic violence. With this image in mind, cities and suburbs passed zoning laws restricting trailer parks to the “other side of the tracks” or banned them altogether. In the fifties, you could see this “white trash” image in B-movies and on the covers of pulp magazines and paperback books. The front cover of one “trash” paperback, “Trailer Park Woman,” proclaims that it’s “A bold, savage novel of life and love in the trailer camps on the edge of town.” The back cover, subtitled “Temptation Wheels,” explains why trailers are the theme of this book.

Today nearly one couple in ten lives in a mobile home—one of those trailers you see bunched up in cozy camps near every sizable town. Some critics argue that in such surroundings love tends to become casual. Feverish affairs take place virtually right out in the open. Social codes take strange and shocking twists … ‘Trailer Tramp’ was what they called Ann Mitchell—for she symbolized the twisted morality of the trailer camps … this book shocks not by its portrayal of her degradation—rather, by boldly bringing to light the conditions typical of trailer life.

This image has been kept alive as parody in John Waters’ independent films, as reality in Hollywood films such as Lethal Weapon, The Client and My Own Private Idaho, and as retro-fifties camp in contemporary postcards, posters, t-shirts and refrigerator magnets.

I imagine that some fifties trailer parks did fit this trashy stereotype. But Sunset Trailer Park in Bayonne was respectable—at least to those of us who lived there. Within that respectability, however, we had our own social hierarchy. Even today, trying to position ourselves into it is difficult. “You can’t say we were rich,” as my mom tries to explain, “but you can’t say we were at the bottom, either.” What confused things even more were the many standards by which our ranking could be measured—trailer size and model, lot size and location, how you kept up your yard, type of car, jobs and occupations, income, number of kids, whether mothers worked as homemakers or outside the home for wages. Establishing where you were on the trailer park’s social ladder depended on where you were standing and which direction you were looking at any given time.

To some outsiders, our trailer park did seem low-class. Our neighbors up the street looked down on us because they lived in two-or three-family houses with yards in front and back. Our trailers were small, as were our lots, some right on the stinky bay. The people in houses were stable; we were transients. And they used to complain that we didn’t pay property taxes on our trailers, but still sent our kids to their public schools.

On our side, we identified as “homeowners” too (if you ignored the fact that we rented our lots) while some people up the street were renters. We did pay taxes, if only through our rent checks. And we shared with them our assumed privileges of whiteness—theirs mostly Italian, Irish, and Polish Catholic, ours a more varied mix that included Protestants. The trailer park owner didn’t rent to Black families, so we were granted the additional status of having our whiteness protected on his private property.

The owner did rent to one Chinese American family, the Wongs (not their real name), who ran a Chinese restaurant. Like Desi Arnaz, the presence of only one Chinese family didn’t seriously disrupt the dominant whiteness of our trailer park. They became our close friends as we discovered that we were almost parallel families—both had the same number of children and Mrs. Wong and my mother shared the same first name. But there were significant differences. Mom tells me that the Wongs had no trouble as Asian-Americans in the trailer park, only when they went out to buy a house. “You don’t realize how discriminatory they are in this area,” Mrs. Wong told my mother one day over tea. “The real estate agents find a place for us, but the sellers back out when they see who we are.” Our trailer park may have been one of the few places that accepted them in Bayonne. They fit in with us because they, unlike a poorer family might have been, were considered “respectable.” With their large trailer and their own small business, they represented to my father the success he himself hoped to achieve someday.

While outsiders looked down on us as trailer park transients, we had our own internal social divisions. As residents we did share the same laundry room, recreation hall, address and sandbox. But the owner segregated us into two sections of his property: Left courtyard for families with children, right courtyard for adults, mostly newlyweds or retired couples. In the middle were a few extra spaces where tourists parked their vacation trailers overnight. Kids were not allowed to play in the adult section. It had bigger lots and was surrounded by a fence, so it had an exclusive air about it.

The family section was wilder, noisier and more crowded because every trailer had kids. It was hard to keep track of us, especially during summer vacation. Without having to draw on those who lived in the houses, we organized large group games—like Red Rover and bicycle circus shows—on the common asphalt driveway. Our activities even lured some kids away from the houses into the trailer park, tempting them to defy their parents’ disdain for us.

We defended ourselves from outsiders’ stereotypes of us as low-life and weird by increasing our own investment in respectability. Trashy white people lived somewhere else—probably in other trailer parks. We could criticize and look down on them, yet without them we would have been the white people on the bottom. “Respectable” meant identifying not with them, but with people just like us or better than us, especially families who owned real houses in the suburbs.

My mom still portrays our lives in Bayonne as solidly middle-class. I’m intrigued by how she constructed that identity out of a trailer park enclave confined to the polluted waterfront area of an industrial blue-collar town.

“Who were your friends?” I ask her.

“We chose them from the people we felt the most comfortable with,” she explains. These were couples in which the woman was usually a homemaker and the man was an accountant, serviceman or salesman—all lower-middle-class, if categ...