“The police come around here all the time.”
Encampments in Guadalupe River Park, as viewed from Coleman Avenue. Summer 2021.
Excerpts from fieldnotes written on July 6, 2021 and August 13, 2021 by Matthew Clair.
July 6, 2021: Driving through Guadalupe River Park, which is adjacent to the Hall of Justice in San Jose, CA
It's 8:35 am, and I’m driving down W Taylor Street. There’s a person bundled up in a coat and sleeping bag lying across a bench at a bus stop. The person has trash bags full of belongings piled next to them. I turn right onto Spring Street and make my way past the park, where several unhoused people live in tents, tarps, plywood panels/boards, and other structures to protect them from the elements. It’s cloudy. The clouds are a mixture of light and dark gray. On the east coast, these kinds of clouds would be a sure bet of rain, but here, in San Jose, it’s just a typical cloudy summer morning that will almost certainly give way to a bright, unforgiving sun in a couple hours or less.
As I continue to drive down Spring Street, I move slowly, behind a white pickup truck. The truck is moving slowly, perhaps, to avoid the many potholes along the road. But I don’t mind driving slowly. It allows me to get a better look at the park and the encampments. I notice a woman up on the left side of the street, near Asbury Street, where the RVs are parked. She’s wearing a white t-shirt, jeans, and has her curly hair pinned up in a ponytail. She’s sorting through a large blue trash bin, which is overflowing. Cardboard, broken chairs, and other items are scattered all around the trash bin. Up on the right at the corner of Spring Street and W Hedding Street, I notice a bunch of plywood panels stacked up and fastened together next to a tree. It looks like someone is building a makeshift house out of the wood. There’s no roof or windows, just a bunch of plywood/wood board fastened together to make four, misaligned walls.
[…]
Encampments in Guadalupe River Park, as viewed from West Hedding Street. Summer 2021.
August 13, 2021: Walking through Guadalupe River Park
I leave the garage at 10:10am, and I am planning to drive to the encampments to flyer and get a sense of what life is like there. I park on the street in front of some building called “Ruff Food Pick-Up,” which is across from the disability insurance building on Ruff Drive, just off West Hedding Street. I fold 24 flyers, double mask, and get out of the car and walk to the encampments. As I cross the street to walk on the other side of West Hedding Street that lines the park, a man without shoes on makes crosses my path to go to the other side of the street.
I walk to Spring Street and get a close up view of the structure that someone is building that has two stories and several logs/tree trunks cut up in front of it. I take some pictures. I think I see a man inside, but cannot be sure. I leave a flyer on a grocery cart full of various supplies and covered in black trashbags. I walk down Spring Street and flyer a few cars on either side of the road. I flyer an RV on the left side of the road. As I walk up the sidewalk, there are two women—one who appears to be a trans black woman with pink hair and one who appears to be a cis white woman. I say hi and tell them about the study. I hand them flyers and they thank me. A plane flies overhead. The plane is so loud that I can’t hear some of the things one of the women says to me. I ask her to repeat it and respond to her.
I lose count of the number of planes that fly overhead while I’m walking in the encampments. They seem to come every minute. They are very close and low as they make their way to landing at the airport, and I can see why this is designated as a crash zone/site.
Up the street, I see two tables set up, and a white truck that says “We Hope” on the outside of it (I think the organization is called WeHOPE and is located in Palo Alto, after some googling). There are two people—an Asian man and an Asian woman—wearing hats that read “Live Freely” on them. I say hi. They are volunteers helping to get people in the area vaccinated and giving them bags of items if they get vaccinated today. There’s a white man with leather-y tan skin who approaches the table while I’m there. He says he’s already been vaccinated and wonders if he can get one of the bags. They explain that eh can only get a bag if he’s vaccinated today. There’s a weirdness and difficult to this because it could incentivize people in the area to lie, to say that they have not been vaccinated (even if they have) and then get another shot in order to obtain the items in the bag, which they likely need. But still, I think the people here are doing important work, and I tell them so. I also tell them about my study, handing each of them a flyer, telling them that I’m a professor at Stanford trying to understand the community around the courthouse—not just the people who live in the community but also the people who work in it, like them. They are very nice and take the flyer. Then, a white man rolls up, dressed in a button-up shirt and wearing a blue mask. He’s a physician and is very nice. We chat for a good 5 minutes about the encampments, about housing issues in the Bay Area, […redacted] and about how he’s been learning about this area and the people who live here. I share a flyer with him. He tells me his name, and he actually has a name tag –as do the other two people; I caught that the Asian man’s name tag said [redacted]—but I don’t quite catch the doctor’s name. I think it was something like Dr. [redacted]. Anyway, I also hand him a flyer.
I then keep moving. I walk down the sidewalk. A man pulls a rusty wagon full of items past me. He has a black dog with him with a beautiful fur coat. The dog looks healthy, much healthier than the man.
I turn right and walk up Asbury Street, where there are several RVs/campers and cars parked on either side of the road. I’d guess there were about 6-7 on either side of the street, plus many more in the park itself. As I walk up the road, a white woman in a BMW drives aggressively past me, as if she has zero concern if she hits me while she’s driving through. I can see how carelessly people are treated who walk on these streets.
I flyer some RVs, and then on the left side of the street, I walk past a woman in a white minivan. She has her head down and is in her phone. I double back and say, “Sorry” for missing her and not handing her a flyer. She says, “Oh, thank you.” She ends up being such a lovely and interesting person to talk to. She has dark brown hair that is tied back in a small bun, her skin is brown from the sun. I couldn’t tell if she was Latinx or white or something else. In features and in skin tone, she looked a little bit like [redacted]. She was wearing pink flip flops and a t-shirt. When I approached her, she put her phone down and unfurled the flyer and started a conversation with me. I told her a bit about the study, and she said: “The courthouse? I don’t know much about it.” I asked her about the jail or the police. She said, “Oh yes, the police come around here all the time.” She didn’t say more, though—like whether the police came around to harass them, surveil them, maybe even help them. She just remarked that they are a constant presence around the encampments. Interestingly, as we talked for a good 15 minutes there in the street (and her sitting in her car), a white truck with two men in it drove down Asbury Street twice (almost as if they were circling). The truck had either “County of Santa Clara” or “City of San Jose” on it—I can’t remember which. It was clearly a government vehicle, but not the police. It didn’t arouse any of her suspicion, either way.
We continued talking. She told me about how she hears that they will be clearing out the homes and moving people away from the park soon. She says that she heard that one section will be cleared out as early as October. I asked her where she would go. She said that there’s this place called “Safe Park” where she could go out in “Almaden.” She seemed OK with, and maybe even excited about, this potential move. She said that they have people out there who help with housing and they have social workers too who help you get off your feet and get a job. She mentioned that one reason she thinks they (the authorities) are clearing out this area is because of the fires. She said that people are causing fires every day. She pointed over into the park, placing blame on some of her neighbors. She mentioned there are as many as “five fires a day.”
She also drew boundaries between herself and some of the other residents of the encampment. She said she was just in the RV “over there” helping her neighbor and her neighbor’s RV is “messy.” “I don’t know how she even has room to sleep in there,” she remarked with a laugh. She started mentioning the RVs because she said that she thought she might want one, but that they can get messy, and that she has all she needs in her minivan. I come to learn that she has a partner—an older man who looks to be Latinx and who comes up while we’re talking a bit later. It's just the two of them, living in a minivan and making it work somehow. She said she has clothes and gets all the food she needs from people who come through and provide food.
[…]
I continue up the street and take a left on Walnut Street. There’s a black man, with a cane, sitting in his car. He seems to be snoozing or just resting. I approach him and hand him a flyer and tell him about the study. He says he’ll take a look, and thanks me.
On the right is the community garden. I walk all around the community garden and notice that it is gated on all four sides. There’s not clear entrance into it. And there are signs in the garden that say “Smile you’re on camera.” I find it off-putting. It’s clear the “community” garden is not serving this community that it’s immediately adjacent to. If I couldn’t find my way into it, I doubt the people who live in the encampments here have much success. I’m curious what community they’re serving, and when they open the gates and to whom. Perhaps they have special hours—though, I don’t see any hours posted anywhere. There are just two people inside the community garden at this moment—a white man and a white woman. They look like they work there or maybe even own it. I can’t tell. But even as I walk around and peer in, at no point do they say hi or offer to help me.
I walk up Coleman Avenue to the gas station and 7-Eleven. On the right side of the street, the whole expanse of park is encampments. There’s an active grill bbq-ing some nice-smelling food within the encampments. The 7-Eleven is playing classical music that is actually quite relaxing. As I flyer a couple of cars parked inside the park behind the gas station, I can hear the music. I wonder if people who live here like it or can’t stand it.
I walk up West Hedding back to my car. I notice more planes flying ahead. I also notice a tent next to a “No trespassing” sign in the park. How ironic. I can just peer into the tent enough to see that there’s a man in there, legs crossed, completing a crossword puzzle.
An airplane flying over the encampments in Guadalupe River Park, as viewed from West Hedding Street. Summer 2021.
