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Prologue
While Dr. Valeria Santana examined her dissertation prospectus, Gia Lunden sat quietly on the other side of the vast walnut desk. She kept her mind away from any doubts about her project by studying the books and objects that overwhelmed the shelves lining three walls of Dr. Santana’s office. The Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University inhabited a stately old house on the southern edge of the campus. The building had the look of a small-town museum, and there were plenty of artifacts throughout the building to bolster that impression.
Dr. Santana’s specialization was contemporary cultural anthropology, so her interests were less about archeological discoveries or ancient spiritual rituals and more about the things people used now, the ideas they had, the clothes they wore, and the relationships they built in modern society. The objects vying for shelf space with a career’s worth of books were mostly strange, seemingly random bits that had significance to her but could easily be mistaken for trash—but then, that was often the case with ancient relics as well. Anthropologists and archeologists were as interested in the things people discarded as the things they kept close.
Most of the random, often plastic bits and bobs on Dr. Santana’s shelves had been someone else’s small treasure and gifted to her as an honor. Her dissertation, and her work since, focused on American homelessness, and with her gentle, respectful personality, she’d made lasting connections in the unhoused communities she’d studied.
She’d revised that dissertation into a book that had been published by a major commercial publisher. Valeria Santana was one of a comparatively small set of academics who actually got royalty payments for her scholarship, and one of the handful whose royalty payments actually made a difference in her bank account.
Of course, academics were as clubby and jealous as any other professionals, so lots of her colleagues, all of whom were published by academic journals and presses that paid in copies if anything at all, considered commercial success to be indicative of lackluster scholarship. If it was comprehensible to non-scholars, they argued, the scholarship was, ipso facto, degraded. Elitist bullshit, in Gia’s opinion.
Unhoused, Not Unhuman: Deconstructing Homelessness in the United States had paid for Dr. Santana’s Mercedes S-Class and was putting her kids through Ivy-League colleges, but she’d had to fight a pitched battle to get the tenure board to count her commercial successes among her qualifying publications.
It didn’t help that she was a contemporary cultural anthropologist. Academics also tended to value antiquity over modernity and remoteness over accessibility. Dead and isolated cultures were automatically considered worthwhile scholarly pursuits; the cultures people were actually living in right now, however, got a grudging nod by the tweedy types, even as departments actively hired for such positions because students wanted those courses. The strong demand for courses Dr. Santana taught paid for the more esoteric studies of her colleagues.
Gia was still only a student, having passed her orals (with great distinction, thank you very much) and advanced to candidacy, but she’d been around this department as a grad student and teaching assistant for three years, and she had a good handle on the complicated culture of academia. As a contemporary cultural anthropologist herself, she’d experienced that condescension—sometimes benign, sometimes malignant—personally. But she loved the study far too much to be dissuaded. When her passions were engaged, little short of literal calamity could dissuade her.
Unfortunately, her idea for her dissertation did not align obviously with any of the faculty’s specializations. The few contemporary cultural anthropologists here studied things like homelessness, gender and sexuality, immigrant experiences.
Gia wanted to do her dissertation on outlaw culture.
She’d been raised in a motorcycle club, her father and godfather were former presidents of that club, and she knew bikers as well as anybody did. When she was very young, when her father had been its president, the Night Horde MC had been an outlaw club, what bikers called ‘one-percenters,’ a riff on a statement made in 1947 by the American Motorcycle Association in response to the infamous riot in Hollister, California that year: ‘99% of the motorcycling public are law-abiding; there are 1% who are not.’
Gia loved her family dearly. She loved motorcycles. She loved the Horde. But for a long time, she’d resented the fuck out of their outlaw reputation. Though the Horde had been mostly in the ninety-nine percent for almost her whole life, during their outlaw days they’d been part of another infamously violent event: The ‘Shootout in Signal Bend.’ Like Hollister, Signal Bend had become famous for the bloodshed in its streets, and that day had been immortalized in a big Hollywood movie. Hollister had The Wild One, starring Marlon Brando; Signal Bend had the Oscar-winning Signal Bend.
Gia had been trying to recast that indelible image of her home and her family ever since.
Though Northwestern had an excellent and esteemed anthropology department, none of the faculty here specialized in outlaws, and many expressed something akin to disgust at the prospect. But Dr. Santana’s work with homelessness had caused her to brush shoulders with a wide range of people who lived on the margins. Moreover, as a woman of color whose work was often denigrated in jealous hallway whispers while simultaneously being featured in university brochures and annual reports, she encouraged her students to fight to be the scholars they wanted to be and not allow the machine of Academe to grind them down. Obviously, she’d been Gia’s first and best choice (her only, really) for a dissertation director, and thankfully, she’d readily agreed.
However, she’d been frowning silently at Gia’s prospectus now for ages, and Gia’s generally stalwart confidence was beginning to crack.
Unable to keep quiet a second longer, she asked, “Is there a problem?”
Dr. Santana looked up. “With your writing, the way you express and contextualize your ideas? Not at all. But Gia ...” She pushed her glasses up to the top of her head, drawing her thick, dark hair back with them. “This prospectus describes a project with a significantly wider scope than we’ve discussed. I didn’t realize you mean to study outlaw cultures in the Americas. I thought you meant to focus only on the States.”
“I did, at first, and maybe I still will. But while I was preparing the literature review, it became clear to me that examining US outlaw culture without also examining the outlaws with whom they are associated could really hamstring my argument. Those contact zones are important—I mean ... do you think I’m wrong about that?”
Dr. Santana leaned back in her leather chair and sighed heavily. “No, you’re not wrong. But I think if you narrow your scope and adjust your thesis a bit, if you shift the angle of your lens, you can focus only on outlaws in the States without compromising the significance of your project. You don’t need to take big risks here. A dissertation needs to be significant work, but its main job is to show your command of the discipline. It’s first and foremost an assessment of your readiness for the PhD. All you need to do is show that readiness.”
Gia took a beat to try to understand. When she couldn’t figure it out, she asked, “Are you saying I’m not capable of this work?”
“No. You’re among the best students I’ve taught. I’m not concerned with the quality of your work. And I think this could be an exciting project—I think you have a chance to break new ground in the field, if you’ll forgive that awful anthropology pun. But Gia ...”
Again, Dr. Santana paused, and Gia got the impression that her professor was trying to dance around an uncomfortable truth.
Clearing her throat and starting again, Dr. Santana said, “Gia. I feel deeply uncomfortable saying this, so I need you to let me get it all out. I know you like the exercise of the academic back-and-forth, but please just listen until I finish speaking.”
Gia nodded. She also gripped the arms of her chair with both hands, because yes, she did love a lively argument, and she did have trouble reining in her thoughts during a lively argument, when she had a strong counter to her interlocutor’s point.
“You are a young, very attractive woman,” the professor began. “That should absolutely have no bearing whatsoever on your research or academic career, except that your research is this. You are talking about going into places where there is nothing more dangerous to be than a young, very attractive woman. Your family situation likely protects you from trouble here in the US, but in El Salvador? Colombia? Mexico? None of these countries is universally dangerous, but where their cartels and gangs are based? My family is from Juarez—by most metrics, it’s the most dangerous city in the world, and that’s because it’s a major locus for violent outlaw activity. I know what you would risk going into such places, and I’m sitting here wondering if I can in good conscience sign off on research that will put you in real danger.”
Dr. Santana stopped, and it was clear she’d gotten to the end of her point, but for a moment Gia could only stare. Her director was saying she wouldn’t approve her prospectus because of the way Gia looked?
No—well, yes, but no. She was worried that Gia would be raped and murdered in an MS-13 lair.
Okay, that was a potential risk, sure. Such things definitely happened. Terrible things had happened to her own family, and she knew her family had done terrible things. But outlaws were human beings, not animals. Even the most violent gangbanger was still a human being. They were more than their reputations, more than their most violent acts.
A scholar who’d written a book titled Unhoused, not Unhuman should know to look deeper than the surface.
