Landscapes of Care

Front matter

Landscapes of Care £

Wee : IMMIGRATION

a ) HEALTH oy ae N RURAL MERI RICA L r

CHAPTER FIVE On Hope and Indeterminacy 115 Acknowledgments 127 Notes 131 Bibliography 147 Index 169

Illustrations

FIGURES 0.1 Crabs 2 0.2 Mobile clinic 7

1.1 Cumulative growth in the foreign-born population, new- and traditional-destination states, 1960-2019 27

1.2 Loading Stringbeans for Packinghouse near Cambridge: 1937 30 2.1 Billboard advertising poultry processing jobs 51

2.2 Watermelon harvest 58

2.3 Women picking crab 65

3.1 Clinic waiting room 78

3.2 Handwashing instructions in Haitian Kreyol 86

4.1 Medical provider using a nebulizer during a mobile health clinic visit 95

4.2 Charity thrift store 106

5.1 American and Mexican flags displayed in front of a commercial crab processing plant 118

5.2 Local community organization sign 124

MAP

0.1 Maryland’s Eastern Shore 4

TABLE

1.1 Number and share of foreign born in new- and traditional-destination states, 1960-2019 27

Preface

Writing Immigration: Love, Loss, and Longing

Iaman immigrant, a refugee forced to leave the only home I had ever known at the tender age of seven. My parents fled war-torn Sri Lanka in 1983 after my mother issued an ultimatum to my father: we leave together as a family, or she would go alone with her two young daughters. Weeks after the deadly riots in July 1983 — commonly referred to as Black July,’ the anti-Tamil pogrom that resulted in the death of potentially 3,000 Tamils and sparked the twenty-five-year civil war—the four of us met my mother’s relatives in the United States. We narrowly escaped, carrying only two small suitcases and the clothes on our backs.

Although I was young when we left Sri Lanka, I have clear memories that remain. In my small village neighborhood, I remember an army checkpoint at the end of the main road. My friends and I used to play and ride our bikes down that road. We had to cross the checkpoint to get to stores, schools, and other homes. I remember being told by my parents how to behave near the checkpoint: walk straight and slow, do not make sudden movements, and if confronted by any uniformed officer, answer all questions and obey orders no matter what. This wariness became part of my muscle memory. Forty years later, my body still automatically tenses up around uniformed police and military.”

In the United States, I followed the Sri Lankan Civil War through stories from relatives, family friends, and the media. I heard accounts of forced disappearances, torture, and rape. I saw pictures of dead bodies, shelled homes, and flattened villages. My reactions to these stories and photographs have always been dissociative, mainly because I do not feel an intimate connection to a place that I have never been able to return to and do not have close family members who remain. I also felt alienated and traumatized by the harmful, enduring equations between Sri Lankan Tamils and death, violence, and terrorism.

At the same time, I have never felt like I belong in my adopted home, either. Growing up poor and Brown in America is not easy. I continue to experience challenges related to racism, discrimination, and being treated differently, even though the circumstances of my life have shifted drastically xi since my arrival. These feelings of not belonging either here or there, rootlessness, and always longing for a home that no longer exists—and perhaps, in some ways, never existed—have been with me since I was a child. But there are also moments of celebration, hope, and resoluteness, of finding community and engaging in the radical politics of being and caring, despite the challenges.

These are the perspectives I rarely see in academic books on immigration. Yet this is the intimate familiarity from which I am able to write. I am a Sri Lankan Tamil immigrant scholar from a working-class background in the United States and the first in my family to attend college. Still, others see me as what Leisy Abrego calls “out-of-place” among scholars of immigration in anthropology.’ As a first-generation immigrant, I was expected to work on South Asia or South Asian diaspora issues. I never once witnessed my white colleagues subjected to the same expectations of working in their own communities. Instead, they were encouraged to work on issues affecting minoritized and vulnerable people, often in faraway or “exotic” locales. Even when I had opportunities to work on projects that focused on the experiences and perspectives of poor South Asian immigrants living in New York City, research advisers constantly questioned my ability to conduct rigorous, objective, “unbiased” research among “my own.” Others’ discouragement and my incapacity to reckon with my own historical trauma of coloniality, war, and terror made me hesitant to work with Sri Lankan Tamil communities, especially in the realm of health and well-being.

AS A GRADUATE STUDENT IN PUBLIC HEALTH, I learned of the discrimination toward Haitians while working on a longitudinal study of those living with HIV. I spent time listening to Haitian immigrants’ narratives of life in Haiti and the United States. I realized how much we had in common as we shared memories of extraordinary yet routine political violence back home and exchanged stories of personal experiences of economic insecurity and racism. Through the research encounter, we co-performed pain and suffering, seeing the unseen and hearing the unspoken, moving perhaps toward what Naisargi Dave calls “the subject of intimacy and away from the self and its protective skin.” These modes of witnessing and accompaniment engendered an unwavering commitment to a moral praxis rooted in solidarity, empathy, and understanding.’

I continued to work with Haitian immigrants as a PhD student, exploring the biopolitics of HIV prevention policies and programs and their effect on the health and well-being of transnational communities. Unfortunately, xil PREFACE a military coup prevented me from continuing my dissertation fieldwork in Haiti. Asa result, I constantly worried about the safety and welfare of friends, colleagues, and interlocutors while pivoting my research to focus on Haitian communities in South Florida. During this time, white colleagues openly remarked that my U.S.-based fieldwork was “easy” and “uncomplicated” compared to theirs in more “global” settings without reflecting how such assumptions are pervasive within anthropology, a discipline rooted in imperialism and white supremacy.

As I began to publish the findings from my dissertation, I felt increasingly disillusioned with the academic inclination to focus exclusively on immigrant vulnerability and suffering and, in the case of Haitians, Black death and deficiency. A reviewer for my first book, for instance, rejected it based on a lack of “thick ethnographic description” about stigma, suffering, and blame, claiming that many Haitian interlocutors could not be considered immigrants at all without these signifiers. In working alongside others, I had witnessed and lived otherwise—in joy and despair, resistance and fear, care and abandonment. Such moments of being do not easily render themselves observable to those whose paradigm focuses on violence, pain, and silence. Even now, colleagues rarely view my work with Haitians as fitting within the pervasive narratives that dominate the anthropology of immigration. Truth be told, I have never been comfortable making it suitable for the consumption of mainly white scholarly audiences.

In a 2020 interview published in The Cut, writer Alexander Chee shared what he wished he had known about writing and the kind of advice he would give to young writers and those starting out.° “I have always asked my students to focus on the stories only they can tell,” he states. “By which I mean, to watch for the vision that opens to them. To write what they never see in books. And I think that is still the advice. It still works now.” I know that in writing about immigration and health, I am also telling my story and those of others like me, and in the process, Iam decentering the whiteness that dominates the scholarship on immigration and rural studies.

LANDSCAPES OF CARE is an ethnography of how care becomes conceptualized and enacted in rural settings among immigrants and nonimmigrant residents. Set in the rural and politically conservative region of the Eastern Shore of Maryland, this book explores the dynamic relations between immigration, health, and rural precarity. The nearly six years of ethnographic fieldwork that inform the book began in 2013, approximately three years after the U.S. government enacted the Affordable Care Act (ACA). As a result, I trace the

Writing Immigration xiii aftermath of the U.S. health care system’s most significant regulatory overhaul and expansion of coverage since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. I also document the repercussions of Donald Trump’s presidential election and his administration’s sweeping changes to federal immigration policy. Such changes include heightened immigration enforcement and deportation, reduction of refugee and asylee admissions, and expansion of the “public charge” rule to limit green card and temporary visa applications.

The book’s narrative revolves around how care unfolds amid precarity specific to immigration and rural life. I find precarity a helpful concept for thinking through the intimacy of the daily struggles of living and how life is continuously being made and unmade on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. As I use it here, precarity signifies the enduring vulnerability and uncertainty stemming from various racialized economic and social forces. Yet precarity does not signal presumed conditions about the nature of rural life or what it is like to be an immigrant. Instead, it is a point of engagement of accompanying others in their provisional and haphazard trajectories of making a livable life and how rural living practices unfold.

Such orientation centers on immigrants’ and rural providers’ shared conditions of uncertainty and disposability, how they come to embody such anxieties, and how suffering and agency transpire amid chronic insecurity. More importantly, it is a sensibility that is attentive to how immigrants do not experience these struggles alone in isolation but through their emergent relations with others and various care networks. I argue that this mutual dependency and care is what makes living possible under challenging times. Precarity allows us to ask what it means to understand living and peoples’ lives as fields of intensities and durations rather than raw material for exploitation.

In light of the rapid increase in rural immigration and the difficulties commonly associated with rural areas, I explore how precarity relates to immigration and rural life, its manifestation as physical and emotional distress, and how it is mediated through social relations and community cooperation. An orientation to precarity shifts the framing of health and health care from spatially and temporally bound systems to a field of relations. Instead of focusing on health care systems, I attend to the complex formations that constitute what I call a “landscape of care” on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The notion of landscape better incorporates the irregular, informal, and improvised reality of immigrants’ care experiences in rural regions and many other places worldwide struggling with global migration and health governance challenges.

XIV PREFACE

Finally, a theoretical and methodological orientation toward precarity allows for the broad diversity of immigrant voices and experiences living and working in rural landscapes. Often, scholarship on immigration tends to focus on particular immigrant groups, which has led to two related outcomes: exceptionalism of each group’s experiences as unique or rendering all immigrant experiences the same through the framework of legality. My formative work on immigration and health illustrated how racialization— the ongoing (re)creation of new definitions, groupings, and associations between racial hierarchies and the categories they comprise— engendered Haitian and Black immigrants’ social, cultural, and political marginalization.’ Racialization is an undeniable dimension of immigrant experiences in the United States and shapes individual and community relations, health and well-being, and the politics of care. This book, in turn, focuses on the spatial, temporal, and racial logics that affect immigrant experiences in rural regions.

FIELDWORK

Although this book draws on the work I have done with Haitian and Latinx immigrant communities in rural and urban settings throughout the United States since 2000, research in rural Maryland for the book began in 2013. This ethnography moves back and forth between community health facilities, service organizations, homes, work sites, and immigrant enclaves (e.g., migrant camps, temporary housing, apartment complexes) to detail daily life and social interactions between immigrants and care providers on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Traditional ethnographic methods, including participant observation and individual, in-depth interviews, were used to conduct research that grounds this book.

Many immigrants who come to this region find work in agriculture, poultry, and seafood processing. Latinx and Haitian immigrants make up the vast majority of those working and living in the area. Some come directly from Latin America and the Caribbean, particularly Mexico, Central America, and Haiti; many others migrate from other parts of the East Coast. The Eastern Shore is considered a new receiving destination, a place without high concentrations of immigrant communities.’ Those on temporary work visas and migrant farmworkers from Florida and other parts of the United States arrive in late spring and early summer and stay through the growing season. Migrant Mexican women who work in crab processing also follow the same seasonal employment pattern. Others, like those working in the poultry processing

Writing Immigration xv plants, have settled here more permanently, fashioning a life for themselves and their loved ones.

Health and social services providers are integral to the social integration of these immigrant communities. Providers featured in this book range from nurse practitioners to outreach coordinators to translators. Many providers consider themselves long-term residents of the area; a handful, however, are immigrants themselves, who settled in the region with their families. Spending time in institutions that deliver health care and social services and with providers who care for immigrants helped clarify how local policies and institutional practices affect the health care experiences of immigrants. In addition, navigating care landscapes with immigrant interlocutors helped ground my perspectives on how immigrants understand care and access essential social services in their communities. Engaging in these interactions, I witnessed firsthand how providers and institutions interacted with immigrant clients and perceived their care needs and how immigrants and nonimmigrants alike enacted and performed care work.

Initial contact and fruitful conversations with researchers and community organizers led to entry into social service organizations and health clinics and eventually into people’s homes and community life. Informal discussions and formal interviews with interlocutors brought about additional recommendations from colleagues, neighbors, friends, and family members interested in telling their perspectives and stories of the landscape of care on the Eastern Shore. Interviews were conducted in English, Spanish, and Haitian Kreyol and digitally recorded with permission for transcription, translation, and analysis.

Formal interviews and informal discussions with local researchers, academics, health and social service providers, and immigrants helped solidify analysis presented in Landscapes of Care. Twenty-four care providers and sixty-two immigrants participated in formal ethnographic interviews. Providers came from a broad range of service sectors, including health care (20 percent), social services (20 percent), legal services (15 percent), employment outreach (30 percent), and educational services (15 percent). Immigrant participants were mainly women (79 percent) and included those who identified as Hispanic/Latino/Mexican/Central American (n = 37) and Haitian or Black (n= 25).

Very little information exists on these communities on the Eastern Shore besides official census counts and large-scale surveys; therefore, it was essential to collect primary demographic data during the formal interview sessions. Health and social service providers also provided information about xvi PREFACE their immigrant clients and their pressing needs. They spoke at length about their daily experiences of providing care for immigrants against the backdrop of immigration restrictions and health care policy changes. Finally, immigrant interlocutors detailed their journeys to the Eastern Shore, daily life, community relations, perceptions of health and well-being, and availability, quality, and use of health care services.

CONTRIBUTIONS

Initially, I was interested in documenting the rise in immigration from Mexico, Central America, and Haiti to the area. When I set out to review the gray (unpublished) literature about immigration to this rural, isolated region of Maryland, I found little to no information on the topic. In talking with local researchers, academics, medical and social service providers, and immigrants, I heard about the challenges experienced by immigrants and nonimmigrant residents within rural health care systems. In spending time with my interlocutors, I witnessed the effects of cost-containment and profit-driven measures that had been ongoing since the 1990s.” Even though my research initially focused on immigration, the challenges of rural health care became a frequent topic of conversation in my field site. For many, immigration experiences could not be decoupled from issues of rural health care provision and delivery.

Providers, administrators, and local experts emphasized that increased immigration intensified issues related to health precarity in rural regions already struggling with provider shortage, high rates of uninsured populations, and limited public resources. Immigrants also noted that working and living in an isolated rural area made it difficult to obtain care and access resources. The people I worked with insisted that immigration-related issues— such as the politics of belonging, citizenship, and deservingness—were vital to understanding rural health provision and delivery. Interlocutors’ demands, in many ways, rendered visible the limits of scholarly understanding of immigrant health, even my own. These exchanges and analyses, particularly interlocutors’ insistence on immigration and rural health’s shared conditions of precarity, guide the book’s primary interventions.

Landscapes of Care interrogates the statistical and demographic portraits of immigration, often the only data available in rural spaces. As a result, it provides a more grounded understanding of the lives of individuals and communities than what has been available thus far (i.e., data captured through survey-oriented health and immigration research). This book addresses the

Writing Immigration xvii complex relations between political concepts of rights, racial capitalist formations of value, and moral assessments of health-related deservingness. It also documents the epidemiological and lived implications of immigrant health.

The book’s primary intervention is to move our understanding of immigration and health beyond the singular focus on legality and criminality and to consider the impact of race and racialization, gender, space/place, and time on immigrants and migrants’ experiences of seeking, receiving, and fashioning care. Landscapes of Care examines rural precarity and the place-based, temporal, and racialized dimensions of immigrant health that remain overlooked and underestimated. Namely, it considers rural and immigrant precarity and racial inequalities as familiar, ordinary manifestations of health and health care. There are real-world implications for these insights, as immigration, legal, and racial equity advocates seek ways to move policy and public dialogues on migration and health beyond narrow public health interventions and protectionist policies. This book, therefore, is written to promote critical reflection, political mobilization, and social change.

Landscapes of Care also addresses critical theoretical concerns within the social sciences and public health regarding structural drivers of immigrant health — specifically, the role of immigration and health policy developments in shaping and influencing the complex care pathways for vulnerable populations. Here, this book envisions public policy as one of several theoretical explanations for immigrant structural vulnerability and place-based and racial inequalities in health. Rather than overlook the material effects of health care and immigration reform and the ideologies that make them seem practical, the book attends to the spatial, temporal, and racial articulations of policies as they unfold “on the ground” and shape immigrants’ decisions for seeking care.!°

Immigration scholarship has shown that immigrant integration and exclusion occur across organizational domains, including education and work. Yet health and health care have not been binding sites of analysis.” This book documents how local contexts of reception, organizational culture, and provider attitudes and behaviors are critical to how immigrants experience the U.S. health care system, particularly those racialized as Black or with precarious legal status. Focusing on health (and rural health in particular) as an analytical domain advances what we know about immigrant and minority health more broadly. Moreover, it expands understanding of the processes and consequences of exclusion that immigration scholars want to examine globally. This book deepens theoretical debates within the scholarship on xviii PREFACE immigration, specifically how health care’s organizational practices affect immigrants’ sense of belonging and feelings of marginalization.

Further, Landscapes of Care advances our understanding of public policy’s social and cultural dimensions, particularly individual perceptions and behaviors and community relations. This book analyzes how care providers’ perceptions and behaviors intersect with organizational practices and national policies to produce specific, local care contexts. In doing so, it provides an ethnographic context about how recent policy developments in health care and immigration become translated across organizational and community levels. Such an endeavor is urgent at a time of great uncertainty about the future of various individuals with precarious legal status in the United States and how federal policy mandates may come into conflict with state and local commitments regarding health care, racial equity, and immigrant rights.

Recent changes to the U.S. political landscape indicate that the future of health care and immigration reform is unclear. A vital aim of this book is to attend to questions of who deserves care and the role of the state and organizations in providing health care that inevitably affects all aspects of life for immigrants, their families, and larger communities. By bringing attention to the spatial, temporal, and racial logics of structural conditions, organizational processes, and individual and community perspectives that unfold in rural settings like Maryland’s Eastern Shore, this book illustrates how some proposals to cut public spending on health will have a long-term negative impact on entire communities, nonimmigrants and immigrants alike.

Writing Immigration xix

Landscapes of Care

Introduction The Land That Time Forgot

Summer in Maryland means one thing: blue crabs. Every summer, residents and visitors flock to Maryland’s coast to get their fill of blue crabs. Famous for its sweet, tender meat, the blue crab is an essential part of the region's culinary heritage. There are few things more enjoyable to Marylanders than sitting with family and friends, tearing into a bushel of blue crabs coated with the local seasoning, Old Bay, and washing it down with ice-cold Natty Bohs (see figure 0.1). Eating blue crabs in the traditional manner is not for the faint of heart or for those who prefer eating with utensils and white tablecloths. In restaurants and homes, people pile steamed and seasoned blue crabs in the middle of a table covered in paper. Then, using small mallets, knives, and bare hands, diners break open the hard shells and extract the juicy meat inside. It is a messy experience, one that is quintessentially Maryland.

The Latin word for blue crabs is Callinectes sapidus, meaning “beautiful swimmer.” Blue crabs get their name from their sapphire-colored claws and are one of the most iconic species in the Chesapeake Bay. In Maryland, hard shells are steamed rather than boiled, a common practice along the East Coast and Louisiana. Marylanders insist that steaming gives crabmeat its moistness, and the flavor is best appreciated by cracking and eating steamed hard shells or feasting on soft shells.! However, suppose you would instead not go through the hassle of picking crab. In that case, it is easy to buy fresh crabmeat by the pound at local grocery stores or enjoy them steamed or sautéed, as Maryland crab cakes or crab imperial, or in crab soup or crab dip at any area restaurant.

In Maryland and elsewhere, eating blue crab is a communal activity and is meant to be enjoyed with family, friends, or large groups. As a result, people often experience picking crab as a pleasurable experience and social exercise. Even those who purchase fresh crabmeat at the grocery store or a restaurant rarely consider how it was processed or who picked and cleaned it. Many people forget or overlook how crab picking is a livelihood for many, mainly poor, women. For generations, African American women from Maryland’s rural, maritime communities did the grueling job of picking crab for crab houses on the Eastern Shore. Today, fewer than ten crab houses are left, and the workforce is exclusively female migrant workers from Mexico.

FIGURE 0.1 Crabs by Jason Garber is used under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

Like many other places around the world, Maryland's rural Eastern Shore has come to rely heavily on the labor of noncitizen immigrants. Yet policymakers and the general public often regard their presence as illegitimate, threatening, and a drain on national and local resources, ignoring how their “illegality” and “foreignness” often place them in positions of considerable social risk. In recent years, the national spotlight on border walls, immigration bans, the inhumane treatment of undocumented immigrants at detention centers, and the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on immigrant farmworkers and meat processors has raised some public awareness of the plight of immigrant workers. But immigration remains an increasingly polarized issue among rural Marylanders and Americans more broadly. In Maryland, for instance, comprehensive news coverage of increasing visa caps for migrant workers, COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, and crab shortages have left many concerned about the fate of the crab industry.” Politicians and influential business owners have appealed to the federal government to increase the number of visas the country provides to female Mexican migrants, arguing that the H-2B temporary worker program is vital to the Eastern Shore's iconic seafood economy. These discussions on the dire need to increase immigrant labor occur in some of Maryland's most politically conservative areas, where there is strong support for federal and local anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies.

SINCE 1990, THERE HAS BEEN a Steep rise in immigration to the United States. The increases are highest in rural America.’ Some rural counties are experiencing growth rates of over 1,000 percent in their immigrant population, who have filled essential roles in the labor force and mitigated the growing decline of rural populations.* Yet, despite their valuable contributions to rural communities, immigrants are not necessarily treated well or openly welcomed by local residents. Often, advocates, experts, and policymakers discuss the fate of immigrants in static, oppositional terms— whether society will embrace and integrate them or reject and push them out. In rural Maryland (and perhaps much of rural America), where demographic shifts have been sudden and drastic, the lives of immigrants and rural community relations are highly complex and tenuous and challenge existing either/or assumptions about immigrant integration and exclusion.

Large demographic studies help us recognize the impact of policies on people’s migration trajectories. Yet they tell us very little about how diverse structural dynamics shape rural communities’ reactions to this burgeoning wave of newcomers, especially in regions without large immigrant enclaves. Survey-based work can also overlook important details related to the everyday life of immigrants and the politics of belonging. Landscapes of Care fills a necessary gap in the literature on immigration by attending to policies, organizational processes, and community relations ethnographically. More specifically, the book details the spatial, temporal, and racial dynamics operating at the nexus of immigration and rural health on Maryland’s Eastern Shore—a relatively isolated and rural area composed of nine counties east of the Chesapeake Bay (see map 0.1). Jobs and resources are challenging to come by, and the region’s physical remoteness often requires residents to travel long distances to work or obtain care. In addition, many of the available jobs are strenuous and dangerous—farming, fishing, commercial food processing and production, and logging. Work in these industries places people at risk for injury or illness. Landscapes of Care examines how the daily functioning of racial capitalism and white supremacy shapes the shared conditions of precarity among immigrants and rural residents. It attends to how precarity engenders physical suffering and emotional anxiety and generates powerful forms of sociality, mutual obligation, and rural vitality.” Understanding immigrant and rural precarity together render

BALTIMORE

Salisbury WICOMICO

MAP 0.1 Maryland’ Eastern Shore.

visible how people in rural contexts care for each other despite social discrimination, economic precarity, and an often hostile political climate. Such discussions of rural immigration focused on belonging, deservingness, and scarcity are integral to broader national and global debates on migration and health.

A Day with Elizabeth I was nervous and excited to spend the day with Elizabeth, a nurse practitioner who runs the local mobile health unit. Her mobile team was the only one of its kind and offered care to those living in the furthest, most remote corners of the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Elizabeth and her team worked for a local federally qualified health center (FQHC), a community-based health care provider that receives funds from the U.S. government to provide primary care services in underserved areas. They operated the mobile health unit from June to August— the peak season for migrant workers in agriculture and seafood processing. I knew accompanying Elizabeth was a rare opportunity, and I felt grateful that she generously invited me on a trip to the local crab processing plants.

Iagreed to meet the mobile health unit staff at the local Walmart parking lot outside Cambridge’s town center so that I could accompany them to their appointments that day. Cambridge sits on the Choptank River, a major tributary of the Chesapeake Bay on the Eastern Shore of Maryland about ninety miles southeast of Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital. Its waterfront, small-town feel makes it a popular destination for nature lovers, recreation enthusiasts, and history buffs alike. Initially inhabited by the Nanticoke people, English colonists violently colonized the area that would become Cambridge, Maryland, in 1684. Soon, Cambridge became a hub for the local slave trade. Harriet Tubman was born into slavery just a few miles away and escaped in 1849 with her two brothers.‘ In the following years, Tubman returned to Cambridge to help free as many as sixty to seventy other enslaved people, including those who fled the auction block on the steps of the same Cambridge courthouse I was passing by. Years later, Cambridge became an unlikely epicenter of the nation’s civil rights movement, led by activist Gloria Richardson, head of the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee.’ Her iconic photo, where she fiercely pushed aside a National Guardsman’s bayonet with her sidelong glance at a local demonstration on July 21, 1963, sits in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Today, Cambridge prides itself on charm, history, and natural beauty. I shivered, thinking about how the courthouse was still in use today.