Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation

The first essay, authored by Rebecca Solnit, is a piece of investigative journalism that addresses San Francisco police officers’ killing of Alex Nieto in March 2014. Nieto was a 28-year-old Latino whose parents separately came to the Bay Area in the 1970s and met, wed, and raised their family there. He worked as a security guard, practiced Buddhism, was a former youth counselor, helped his parents with translation, and had recently earned a degree at a local community college. Because of his job as a security guard, Nieto carried a taser, which police claimed he pointed at them in a park that Nieto frequented and where he had gone for a walk. Police argued that they mistook the red light of the taser for the light on a gun and thus opened fire. Nieto was struck multiple times and killed.

Solnit argues that racism and the city’s gentrification led to Nieto’s murder. As of 2012, the largely white and male tech industry had overrun the city. This demographic shift squeezed out longstanding city institutions, including churches, non-profits, social services, and LGBTQ+ bars. While rent and housing costs soared, the “old-timers,” who had come to the city to experience a vibrant and diverse community, no longer recognized their home.

On the evening of March 21, 2014, one of these tech industry professionals, Evan Snow, encountered Nieto while walking his dog. The off-leash dog accosted Nieto while Snow remained distracted. Nieto and Snow engaged in a shouting match, with Snow calling Nieto a racial slur. Afterward, a couple walking in the park, Tim Isgitt and Justin Fritz, both tech industry workers, passed Nieto. Isgitt said that he saw Alex Nieto sitting on a bench, behaving strangely, and touching his taser. They were unaware of his previous distressing encounter with Snow. Isgitt and Fritz called 911.

Minutes later the police arrived. Nieto walked around a bend in the park wearing a red San Francisco 49ers jacket, but, because he was Hispanic, officers assumed that the red jacket signified his membership in a gang. They demanded Nieto raise his hands and claimed he then pointed a taser at them. Other eyewitness testimony contradicted this assertion. The police then fired over 20 bullets, striking Nieto multiple times and killing him.

A community rallied around Nieto’s grief-stricken parents and launched a movement to obtain justice for him and the bereaved. San Francisco is not simply torn asunder by class tension between affluent new residents, property owners, and real estate developers, who displace the city’s longtime residents, leaving them defenseless and exposed to innumerable negative conditions. Rather, San Francisco is consumed by “a conflict between two different versions of the city” (11). The mostly white, male-dominated tech industry has disrupted diverse neighborhoods with strong ties and long community histories. Nurses, educators, social workers, and mechanics, for instance, are all being evicted, not just from physical space but from these communities, like the one to which the Nieto family belongs. Alex Nieto is dead because a “series of white men perceived him as more dangerous than he was,” and Solnit notes that “gentrification can be fatal” (12).

The officers who killed Alex Nieto were not found liable in the civil case launched against them. The city is no longer a welcoming haven for diverse groups but is instead an unpleasant and alienating place. The mayor had the homeless forcibly removed from the streets before the Super Bowl, and online distain for the homeless population is rampant. Nevertheless, precarious communities, like the one centered on justice for Nieto, carry on.

Danez Smith’s poem is a bookend to the previous chapter, which addresses white privilege in the Bay Area. This poem is a cry of frustration, and Smith deliberately does not conform to standardized American English grammar as an act of resistance. Americans treat whiteness as the “norm,” while Black and Brown people are dehumanized.

Band-aids only come in the flesh-tone shade of white skin. The cost of rent continuously goes up thanks to gentrification. People of color then have no option but to move. Whites push Black people to act in ways they deem socially acceptable and regard them with distain when they do not conform to white standards. Smith refuses to accept these standards and challenges the notion of America as a place that welcomes all. They write, “i think they’re saying their done with black people/done with immigrants” (19). They conclude that they are “post America” because it is a nation built by white people for other white people. 

Written by Sandra Cisneros, the third piece in Tales of Two Americas is about the author’s difficult relationship with a city where she spent much of her youth, Chicago, Illinois. She grew up there in a poor Mexican family.

Her personal essay opens with the family’s life in dilapidated rental housing. Her family felt deserving of their poverty and never blamed the city’s leadership or exploitative property owners for their poor living conditions. In these neighborhoods, violence and alcohol were constants, while the city neglected to provide basic services like adequate libraries and appropriate sanitation. Yet her father’s pride in their Mexican heritage and the library that was available sustained Cisneros. She cultivated joy in her Chicana identity through the books she read in her youth, like Malcolm X’s autobiography,

A driving trip through the Blue Ridge Mountains at age 22 was an eye-opening experience: “I saw a country house with a swing dangling from a thick branch and a careless bike abandoned on the fenceless lawns. And thought, Kids grow up like this? I never knew” (24). She chose to leave Chicago because she was exhausted “from being on high alert, watching for the tiger in the grass from the corner of the eye” (24-25). Her father questioned why she would leave a place where she had all that she needed, but Cisneros wanted something else. She wanted a place of her own, and in truth, she “was trying not to die” (25). Chicago could never be her home because it did not welcome her. 

Edwidge Danticat’s short story is, like other pieces before it, about loss of community. The protagonist, Elsie, is a Haitian immigrant to the United States who works as a home care nurse. She divorced after her musician and lay-about husband, Blaise, left her for her best friend, another home care aid named Olivia. At the story’s opening, Blaise calls Elsie to tell her that Olivia has been kidnapped while on a trip back to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and that the kidnappers are demanding a hefty ransom.

The story then toggles between Elsie caring for her patient, the elderly Gaspard, and speaking with Blaise on the phone about the unfolding kidnapping saga. Throughout, Elsie reflects on her past relationships with both her former husband and her ex-friend, Olivia. During Elsie’s marriage to Blaise, the three were a kind of trio, going out together and even falling into bed together one night. Readers discover that the story’s title derives from the slang for an excess or third sibling. Olivia was the “dosa” in friendship with Elsie and Blaise. Though Elsie is and has been part of the Haitian diaspora community in the United States, she is left alone in the end.

Eventually, Elsie agrees to give Blaise some of the money needed for Olivia’s ransom, but Blaise he later calls Elsie to tell her that Olivia has been murdered anyway. Elsie grieves the loss of her former friend’s life, her marriage, and the sense of belonging she felt when they were a trio. Later she visits the bar where Blaise used to perform and where she met him. Through her conversation with Dede, the bar’s owner, she finds out that Blaise and Olivia have scammed her and others. There was no kidnapping or murder; Blaise and Olivia are in Haiti, living off the money they swindled. Dede accompanies a deflated and intoxicated Elsie back to her small apartment, at the back of a home she once hoped to own, before her marriage disintegrated. Dede asks Elsie if she would like him to stay; she rejects him but eventually asks him to stay for the night. The story ends on a tone of loneliness and isolation.