S1 E1 Welcome to Mumbai & Houston Transcript

Laurel   08:41

One of the first people I interviewed was Maria Gloria Borsa, a veteran AP Italian teacher in Houston, who devotes her time to helping others in any way that she can, both in and out of the classroom. In our conversation, Maria Gloria described to me about how Houstonians responded to a past crisis, Hurricane Harvey.

Maria Gloria  09:04

When the hurricane was over, we started rebuilding. I remember going into volunteer at the George R. Brown Center and being turned down, because they said we have too many people. We don't need any more people because a city like Houston, if there is an emergency, everybody does their part. Everybody gets together. This is a wonderful city for this.

Laurel   09:35

There is so much that I love about my city, about Houston. And one of those things is the fact that in general, in times of crisis, we come together, and we help one another. And this time of crisis comes up a lot in terms of hurricanes, and in particular, flooding, even without a hurricane, happens a lot just because of how the city is structured. And people come together. I mean, even businesses who would have no other, you know incentive, they come forward they offer their stores as shelters for people who have lost their homes. Hurricane Harvey in particular was a hurricane that occurred in 2017. And to me, it, it really demonstrated the way that we have the capacity to come together as a city in the wake of horrible devastation.

Laurel   10:44

But there's also a lot that is problematic about Houston too. First of all, I just want to take a moment to acknowledge that I'm currently sitting on, living on Indigenous land here in Houston. And for thousands of years, it has been the traditional Land of the Karankawa, the Atakapa Ishak, the Sana, and the Akokisa. And I think a lot of times I reflect on my personal education experiences in Houston, we neglect to acknowledge how colonization is not just a historical fact, but is an ongoing reality in which Indigenous people continue to struggle for justice. So I know when we were talking about conceptualizing this podcast, we were thinking about it in terms of our hometowns. Right? And so that's something that I've had to reflect on a lot. What does it mean, for this to be my hometown when it's located on Indigenous land and I'm a settler.

Laurel   12:00

My friend and former coworker, Arquette Burton, an incredible high school science teacher with a sincere love for others, offered some great insight on how Houston is socially structured.

Arquette  12:13

Like, if you look at society, like the whole thing of the white flight and all that that happened, a lot of whites separated themselves. So they created their own bubble. So, unfortunately, a lot of people who don't see their white privilege are those people who created their own bubble out in the suburbs, away from the city away from different cultures, cultures, and like different people that are a part of different economic statuses, because everyone who was who separated themselves are all a part of the same socioeconomic status, so they wouldn't see it because we're all same color. We're in the same tax bracket. We all make around the same amount. We all have two and a half children and a dog and a cat, you know, like, all of us are pretty much the same. But then when you go to unfortunately, the other side of town where everyone is not cut from the same cloth, they all look a little bit different. And you have a mixture of different cultures and a mixture of different races all together, that's when you can see the whole, the white privilege and the differences amongst everyone. But when you separate yourself all from everyone, no, you can't see it. So for people who don't see it or who don't understand it it's because they grew up in a bubble. You know? And unfortunately, when they have that bubble popped, and for someone to be like, wait a minute, what? Yeah, you know, it takes a while because their entire life they grew up in that bubble. So it's like, it takes a minute.

Laurel   13:54

So be honest with me. What do you think of when you think of Texas?

Gauravi   14:01

Um, I guess I think of like cowboy hats and steak, and you know, just like just the manly Texan man and like cowboy ranches, I guess I don't know. I mean, these are all like, terribly stereotypical things. But I, I know, it doesn't actually be like that. But, you know, that's the first visual that comes to my mind.

Laurel   14:26

That is not just something you think that's something that a lot of people think of when they think of Texas. And I mean, that's not to say that we don't have those elements here. But Houston in particular, is actually an incredibly diverse city. As of a report that I read from last year, there's no single majority in terms of race or ethnicity. And so it's an incredibly diverse place. However, a caveat to that, it is still a very much segregated place. So you can see that really clearly, we'll put the link on our website to these great maps that you can see, so clearly the racial segregation that still persists in Houston and also how it intersects so clearly with income. And it's almost it's one of those things where it's it's shocking when you see it so clearly because you wish it weren't true. But then at the same time, it's not shocking because you you know, you read about it, but then just visually seeing it and and that segregation leads to distance and that distance leads to lack of understanding, leads to fundamental ideological rifts, and it also leads to really tangible impacts in communities and in schools in particular.

Laurel   15:59

My friend former coworker Jeremy Williams spoke to these impacts and how race and income intersect with education.

Jeremy  16:08

So when we saw talk about like, education, people trying to make education, something that's not political, that's impossible. That's impossible to do in a country that was built, literally, to oppress a certain group of people, um, and elevate another. Education is actually one of the most powerful tools that they've actually used to do that. When we think about the way funds are allocated based on property taxes, property taxes are determined based on neighborhoods, which is determined based on wealth, in most wealth in the country's earned by, the most wealth in the country is owned by white men in particular and most of that wealth, a lot of that wealth was accumulated as a result of slavery and genocide of African American in Native people. So, you know, you can't separate those two things.

Laurel   17:17

Now, one of the main sources of inequity that we talk about a lot here is the connection that there is between property taxes, which is based on property values, and then funding for schools. When I was speaking with Jeremy, something that he mentioned that I think was really powerful was the fact that we can't consider education separate from politics. Education has been designed in a very specifically political way and trying to treat it as a political. It ends up as an act of erasure of the very real lived experiences of marginalized people. And it denies us the opportunity to make any effort to change that.

Gauravi   18:10

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's that rings true outside of the context of Houston or the United States as well. Right. Education has was such a big deal in colonization in certain countries, education systems are continuously disenfranchised. Education is inherently political. It's so tied into how you're shaping and building a national identity. And who gets access to what scripts.

Gauravi   18:55

It's very hard to describe Bombay, besides, it's alive. This whole city is just teeming with so much life all the time. So we do have so there are some similarities with Houston. But fundamentally, I think the main thing that I would think of as a difference is that the split or the segregation is it is enacted again in quite a different way. So you're in Bombay, we have a really big mix of demographics, classes, castes, religions, and it's one of the, I think it would probably be, the most diverse city in India. Even though it's a diverse city and you see that diversity out on the street every single day, so we don't have we do of course, like every city has like slightly richer slightly border areas and that kind of like you do see that difference, but in comparison to like most cities I've seen everywhere, it's much more mixed. It's much more in your face here. And you do see that you do sort of see the stark contrast though like very very wealthy people and very very poor people living very different lives, but in such close proximity to one another and yes, I mean I'm a person with a lot of privilege in the context of Bombay. So, you know, my, my experience with the city is skewed, I also have to acknowledge that because of language barriers and even the perspective of the people I've been able to interview is always going to be slightly skewed. It's a certain kind of Mumbaikar. And I feel like that's, that's very important for me to keep in mind and for like whoever's listening to keep in mind as well.

Laurel   20:42

I spoke with a variety of people from Houston about their experiences when the pandemic first hit.

Maria Gloria  20:49

On March 12, we were at school, and we knew that COVID was going on we knew that schools were thinking about closing, I'm Italian, so I knew what was going on in Italy. And I was aware of the situation. I was aware that we were going to face an emergency. But we did not have yet received, like, official information about what was really the issue. The rodeo had just shut down. And I had started in the previous 10 days to have my students disinfect all the desks because I was really aware that we were in classrooms sharing way too much that we were supposed to, you know. They closed the rodeo down, but we were in classrooms with sometimes 34, 40 people, and we were still there. So going home, we received the news that schools were going to be closed, and at the beginning it was fine because we were going to have Spring Break the week after. Then all of a sudden, the days of the spring break were finishing and, and we, and we didn't know exactly what to do, because the school was closed. So everybody started panicking.

Katie  22:21

It was very hectic. And I remember we came back from spring break, and we were there for about a week. And on that same week, we got back on a Friday. They told us that, hey, you have like two days to basically like, move out or just leave. Because we're going to stop like having food at the cafeteria like no one's going to be here. Everything's getting transferred online. And that was very hectic because it was just one random weekend to move out and everyone's parents are freaking out like, well, this is really sudden um, just to go online so fast and just like have everything questionable like, well, what's going on? Um, but it was just it was just really hectic the way that it just got put on us like that. So

Laurel   23:15

Yeah, that sounds like really rushed. Seems like hectic is a perfect word for that.

Katie  23:20

Yeah, I didn't actually get to move my stuff out of my dorm until May.

Vincent  23:27

When at first, when everything started. Well, we were still in school, you know, and it was the rumors, I was going around and they were going to stop school that that things are gonna fall apart. And at that time, I, uh, I started playing baseball. I signed up to play baseball. And I made the team like my first try, and I was pretty proud of that. And we had that that day, the last day when we had school and we had our final game was a last, was the day, like hours later they said, okay, school is canceled for like, for a week, two weeks. And I was like, oh, probably we're gonna go back. But also it was my senior year. So I was pretty, pretty kind of, like, bummed about it. And I was like okay, so I hope we go back and then we get our full graduation we get our full, like, prom our, like, the big events that like seniors look up or look forward to. But then unfortunately, like the they said, oh, we're still have to be in quarantine, we still have to be in quarantine and you can't get out your houses.

Laurel   24:40

So something that was really consistent in my conversations with people about how the beginning of the pandemic felt for them, was that they felt like everything was really hectic, you know, there was in consistencies in messaging. The uncertainty about whether businesses and schools were going to be open or they're going to be closed. You know, there was a lot that was just changing constantly. And that level of uncertainty was really Earth shaking for a lot of people resulted in a lot of anxiety.

Gauravi   25:24

Yeah, I think that uncertainty was definitely paralleled in Mumbai as well. So schools shut down as I can hear, but I was wondering if along with it's crazy, Katie was saying that they have two days to leave. That's mind boggling to me because how do you if you're leaving a, you know, how do students do that? But what I was wondering, like, aside from schools were other things shutting down, like businesses shutting down? Vincent mentioned that there was a quarantine. So how did that work? Were you quarantined?

Laurel   26:02

So the decisions that were being made in terms of lockdowns, or stay at home orders, and all of these kinds of things were heavily politicized. They still are. And we'll go into that more in a future episode. But essentially, we never had a true lockdown. The most that we've had is that schools were, you know, shut in March. And everyone really expected though, that they would come back, you know, it would just be brief. That happens a lot in Houston, actually, because of the flooding that I was mentioning before. We're not a desert. People think Texas is a desert everywhere we're not. And so we're used to those kind of periodic interruptions. But this wasn't just going to be that simple, short interruption, and it was that realization that I think was really what caused a lot of anxiety for people. And missing out on things that you thought you were going to get to do particularly for those graduating seniors and then even just opportunities that now you've worked so hard to be able to to have and it's just taken away from you from with something that was out of your control. It just creates a lot of feelings of helplessness, I think.

Gauravi   27:24

So there is some precedent in Houston for stuff shutting down. So when they shut down for hurricanes, are they planned shutdowns, because you know, the hurricane is coming? Or are they like, oops, it's really rainy, we can go out today?

Laurel   27:39

So we're really used to hurri...rain, right, and it really depends on what the forecast looks like. But then also, I don't know Houstonians, kind of have this like attitude almost have like, this happens so much that we're just going to see how bad it actually becomes. Then we'll make a decision. And so usually it's administration looking at, okay, what's the flooding situation looking like, right? Is it going to be safe for kids to come to school and teachers and everyone to come to school or not. And it can be a fly by night decision, I've been waiting at my phone before, like, just at like, 3 a.m. just trying to like, see if we finally get an update, just refreshing my email, you know. It can, it can really be those kind of last minute decisions. So that's not entirely unusual. But the idea of having to pack up all your things, because you know that it's going to be at least a certain amount of time, having to deal with the fact that a hurricane, you know, comes and goes, but we don't know how long it's going to take for this to go. And I think that's what makes it a lot more anxiety inducing.

Gauravi   28:55

I think that's such a good, that's so similar to Bombay. Well so Bombay is also associated with lots of flooding. We're a coastal city. We find every single monsoon that's like I say, we're used to it. But it's generally unplanned for us because rains are, I think, a lot more variable than hurricanes. So there's very little so if it's been raining a lot the day before and you know, it's gonna rain again the next day, then it's like, okay, no school tomorrow, no office tomorrow, but I cannot tell you the number of times it's been raining and I've been at the place I'm supposed to be, school or work or whatever it is, and then they shut you down and then you have to find your way home. And the city runs on public transport pretty much. So all of that gets waterlogged that train lines get waterlogged and trains stop. So we're used to that kind of, stoppage sort of to like daily life. But yeah, the unprecedented menace and for Memorial, I'll talk about silence. I think that that was unprecedented. Even when we have monsoons there's bustle people around the street helping each other. This was this was weird.

Laurel   30:11

Yeah, for Houston. I mean, we ended up having a shelter in place order, you know, but even with that, there's not a whole lot of enforcement. So I mean, the streets were more bare than usual. Maybe, you know, people weren't commuting to work as much as they would have been otherwise, but it wasn't completely bare like I've seen other places in the world. There were definitely still people going around and of course the essential workers are still required to show up. And, and so in that way, it didn't come to quite the same complete standstill. Also, I just want to not minimize the impact of hurricanes like I know I said they come and they go. Obviously, the aftermath stays, right, and there are still people rebuilding from Hurricane Harvey in 2017, but, but it's also something where after it goes, then you can start rebuilding, right? Whereas this is something that's gone on for so long and you don't know when or how you're going to be able to even start rebuilding.

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Gauravi   31:17

You don't know what you're dealing with. I mean, it's I completely not to minimize floods in Bombay, either, because people are made homeless by floods every year, and it's property loss and money. And every single year, you know, roads have to be repaved and maintained if they're not done that well. All that kind of stuff. It just definitely floods like crazy. But it just, this was just so different, right? This was just something else altogether, even though we're all used to natural disasters and those kind of things to a certain extent, this was something else.

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