Ostravart

Glimpses of life in indefinite debt

August 13th, 2019

“I can only work cash-in-hand [načerno] for the rest of my life,” Nina* told me as we were sitting in her kitchen drinking black coffee. She was rolling cigarettes from tobacco purchased in half kilogram packages after Ivan had left for his afternoon shift.

Nina was very helpful in advising me where to look for jobs, where to get the fit-for-work certificate and other required paperwork. She herself was unemployed. I sometimes tried to reciprocate by sharing with her some job openings I was aware of, until she matter-of-factly clarified one day that the size of her debts rendered any attempt of formal employment unfeasible. She would end up with less money than she had while being on benefits and occasionally taking cash-in-hand jobs without a contract. She estimated that her debt installments would come to at least half of her monthly wage.

Despite the stigma built around the trope of “excessive” spending by the Roma and their supposed lack of consideration for the future, the pathways to indebted lives that I observed had little to do with culture and a lot to do with the operation of capital. Most people would end up having debts because of various forms of non-payments: failures to pay transport fines; a failure to pay alimony after separation from a partner; non-payment for waste collection or utility bills; non-payment of compulsory health insurance during the times of unemployment.

Danek is a 28 year-old Roma man living in one of the hostels for low-income persons and families in “northern” Ostrava. During one of our conversations in late December 2016, he told me how he incurred significant debt for a failure to pay his health insurance when he was unemployed and the Labour Office removed him from the job-seekers’ register when he failed to show up for an appointment. He was not sure how much he owed.

When a family or an individual incurred unexpected expenses or simply did not get by one month, they had to turn to credit. A solution that was supposed to be temporary has turned permanent and the deceiving advertising of non-bank institutions was a significant factor.

A poster about 1km away from Pěkná Street in an area with a supermarket, a hairdresser, a “Chinese” shop and a pub. The poster advertises consumer credit up to 10,000 CZK (316 GBP) and 0% interest during the first 20 months of repayments. What it fails to say is that annual percentage rate of charge is 24.7%, which means the consumer will pay these charges after the initial 20 months.

Formal debts were cited by a number of my informants as the main reason why it did not make sense for them to seek a job in one of Ostrava’s industrial zones. One day in August, I was chatting to Robert, responsible for a crew of street cleaners employed through the Labour Office. In his early 20s, Robert said that he used to work in a “Korean company” in the industrial zone some years ago. His gross monthly salary of 17,000 CZK (595 GBP) was cut every month by 5,000 to 6,000 CZK (175 to 210 GBP) due to debt claims. So he left the job and started working in street cleaning, being on close to a minimum wage, but incurring lower debt claim payments. [This was due to company’s policy of keeping the debt claims reasonable so that workers do not end up below subsistence level and eventually leave. This policy changed some months after I have left Ostrava].

An unsolicited advertisement received by my colleague at the street cleaning company. The advertisement says: “Are you experiencing unexpected expenses? Get a loan with a 50% discount.”

Hidden fees and rising interest equals excessive debts

Julek had a secondary education and worked for a moderate salary for over a decade. He grew up in an orphanage where he was exposed to the gajo [white] world, especially its cuisine. “I cook gajo food, so many Gypsies like to visit me and taste it.” Shortly after he left the orphanage in the 1990s, he became a victim of fraud. Somebody asked him to put his name under a fast loan application which he did upon an agreement that he will get part of the money. “I may have seen up to 30,000 CZK (1,050 GBP) out the total amount.” His debts have reached about 600,000 CZK (21,016 GBP) because he didn’t pay them back and the interest kept increasing the owed amount. His monthly wage gets cut every month due to repossession payments which render it fairly low. He lives in a dark dilapidated one-bedroom flat in a run-down neighbourhood.

Bible v Bailiffs

Bailiffs visited Nina quite frequently. I asked her how they behaved during those visits. Like “assholes” (hovada), she said curtly. “They shout and threaten us.” One of the first things she stated in this conversation was that the bailiffs are white [gádže]. “They find out the dates when we receive benefits and come.” At one occasion, she would not let them in. The violent behaviour of bailiffs was also mentioned also during my conversation with Julek. He once went with bailiffs to a family in the neighbourhood of …oz. We both knew the family in question – they were Born-again Christians belonging to a group colloquially called ‘Halleluyah’. During the visit of the bailiff accompanied by Julek, the family members presented a Bible and started preaching to them in defence (?). “Good that I went to that visit,” noted Julek, “he [the bailiff] would have been unnecessarily brutal”.

*All given names and names of locations are withdrawn to protect the privacy of people whom I met during my research.
Roma Workers under Czech Racial Capitalism: A Post-Socialist Case Study

August 5th, 2023

This article contributes to the theory of racial capitalism by focusing on racialization of labor in the post-socialist context. Drawing on fieldwork conducted with Roma workers in the city of Ostrava, the Czech Republic, the paper investigates the role of the Czech state in confining Roma to low-paid, precarious and informal work—and how dynamics of racialization figure in this relationship. State policies like job placement programs, I claim, explicitly target Roma workers, channelling them into stigmatized and low paying positions, reproducing racial prejudices and confining them to precarious and often dangerous work. Using the category of “racialized surplus population,” I examine the functionalist relationship between racialization and capitalism in the Czech Republic, which I argue is manifest both economically—enabling capital to rely on racialized workers as a reserve army of labor—and politically, as the exclusion of Roma from the white proletariat mediates class conflict.

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Stigma and segregation: Containing the Roma of Údol, Czech Republic

August 5th, 2023

Barbora Černušáková

Race & Class,

Volume 62, Issue 1

https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396820926916

Abstract

This article analyses the lived experience of a Czech Roma community in Údol, Ostrava. Based on the author’s participant-observation research, it demonstrates how certain neighbourhoods are increasingly targeted by policy measures which range from the denial of benefits to residents of certain areas to large-scale evictions or plans to demolish public housing. Such approaches are becoming a Europe-wide phenomenon. Although proponents of these measures argue the need to ‘protect law and order’, their policies target communities that are racialised as immigrant, Roma or Muslim. In some ways, the social exclusion of the Roma mirrors that of Black people in US ghettos, but there are also significant differences. The author demonstrates how the ‘post-socialist’ reality of Údol has been defined by the outsourcing of the state’s social functions, such as housing, to be carried out by charities and business. This has contributed, in what has now been turned into a racially defined space, to the ongoing reproduction of Údol’s containment of its Roma population, who, nonetheless, in their everyday life strategies have developed reliance on local and community networks that have replaced the state.

In the past few years, there has been increased targeting of the residents of stigmatised neighbourhoods by the authorities in several European countries. Denmark, Italy, the Czech Republic are among those that have adopted policy measures ranging from the denial of benefits to residents of certain areas to large-scale evictions or plans to demolish public housing. Although proponents of these measures argue the need to ‘protect law and order’, their policies target communities that are racialised as immigrant, Roma or Muslim and plainly breach equality legislation. An example that made the news headlines earlier this year was a Danish government plan entitled ‘One Denmark without parallel societies: no ghettos in 2030’, aiming to demolish public housing in ‘immigrant neighbourhoods’. Another tactic is to deny the residents of stigmatised neighbourhoods access to welfare benefits. In 2019, several dozen municipalities in the Czech Republic, including those with significant Roma populations such as Ústí nad Labem, Most, Karviná or Ostrava-South, declared ‘zones’ in which residents would not be eligible for housing allowances. These measures drew on legislation permitting the denial of some benefits in areas characterised by ‘socially undesirable phenomena’, a term used as a proxy for Roma neighbourhoods. Although a group of Czech Senators filed a request for a judicial review at the Constitutional Court in 2017, at the time of writing (March 2020), no decision has been made.

In this article, I present an analysis of the everyday lives of residents of one such racialised neighbourhood in the city of Ostrava, Czech Republic. I am drawing on my eleven-month long ethnographic research, during which I lived in the neighbourhood of Údol and carried out participant observation of experiences of Roma at work, housing, schools and other areas. I complemented the participant observation with formal and informal interviews with my informants who included my Roma colleagues and neighbours but also the employers, job agencies, charity workers and others. During the first three months of my fieldwork, I worked as a street cleaner in a municipal company, where the majority of my colleagues were Roma. Later on, I took short-term work at a recycling line, where there was a mix of Roma and non-Roma workers. Working as a street cleaner, I became acquainted not only with my colleagues but also a group of Roma construction workers who were doing maintenance on one of the main streets that were in my cleaning area. After my contract in the street-cleaning company (Clean) came to an end, I continued to visit my colleagues and the construction workers at their respective work-sites and homes for several months. I also gave English language tutorials to children in three Roma families in Údol. Through my participation and immersion in the world of work of low-income Roma, I established contacts and relationships with several families and social networks. During these encounters, I followed their daily practices and the rhythm of their everyday lives, and discussed the issues they were dealing with. Although my research focused on Údol, many of my informants – both Roma and non-Roma – were residents of other parts of the city. These conversations helped to build an understanding of the stigma associated with Údol.

This article focuses on the spatial aspects of their experience with racialisation and separation from the rest of the city. I aim to contribute to the ongoing debate about the stigma of racialised, declining working-class neighbourhoods in East-Central Europe and their structural differences from other areas of urban relegation, as documented comparatively by sociologists studying urban marginality and stigmatisation.¹ To protect the privacy of my informants as well as other actors involved in my research, all the given names of persons, companies and locations are changed in this text.

Urban marginality in the Czech Republic evolved in the post-socialist context, in which the state was transformed from an actor ensuring the provision of robust welfare and its redistribution to a mechanism ‘facilitating survival and speculative multiplication of capital’.² While unemployment was one of the factors contributing to the emergence of decaying low-income neighbourhoods, the role of the state is what distinguishes Czech forms of urban marginality from other areas similarly affected, documented by sociologists in the US or Europe. In order to facilitate the reproduction of a low-earning proletariat, the state retained its residual welfare function, albeit carried out through intrusive measures (e.g. benefits being made conditional to repeated home visits). The Roma residents of Údol are not experiencing mass unemployment and are not superfluous to the needs of capital; they are integrated into the local labour market and represent cheap labour in construction, recycling or cleaning services, amongst other things. However, they do find themselves confined within low-paid and informal jobs and wage labour itself becomes a ‘vector of life insecurity’.³ The state’s role is to facilitate a supply of cheap labour and it does so by an amalgam of punitive and welfare measures. I observed the operation of these measures through my daily encounters with families in Údol, between February and December 2016.

The principal characters on which this article focuses are Nina and Ivan, a Roma couple in their late forties, who I got to know through my work as a street cleaner. During my visits to their flat, I met some of their other relatives and acquaintances. Another group of my close informants was the extended family of Lucie, a long-term Údol resident in her late fifties. I visited the family, including other relatives living in the area, several times a week; I also occasionally accompanied them to the local authorities; discussed issues such as the costs of living in Údol with them, work opportunities, inter-community relationships, and access to schools and health services. There were numerous other residents that I talked to in depth during my time in Ostrava and whose experiences I have attempted to capture here.

Racism and the containment of Roma within Údol

Although it has a semi-industrial air, Údol is green and leafy in the warmer months, and the housing stock consists of a mix of older brick tenements from the beginning of the twentieth century and some newer concrete blocks. The older houses belonged to the Czech Railways and suffered for years from a lack of investment in repairs. In the 1990s, several of the older residents moved to modern new-builds in other parts of Ostrava and the railways started offering the apartments on a low rent to Roma families.⁴ The houses in the area were affected by severe floods in 1997, which further worsened their condition. Some of them were still undergoing refurbishment in 2016.

The geographical district of Údol involves a larger area that runs from Ostrava’s city centre to a periphery separated from its remotest part by the railway line. My research focused on this part, known in Czech as Zadní Údol (Rear Údol), which includes a network of streets including Pěkná, which dominates the neighbourhood. According to population estimates for the city of Ostrava, the residents of Rear Údol numbered 900, while 2,157 persons had permanent residence in the entire district of Údol.⁵ Overall, a strong social stigma was attached to the district, but it was mainly the remote, rear part that was seen as ‘the Roma neighbourhood’. Despite its proximity to the city centre, not more than a fifteen-minute tram ride away, there was a sense of industrial purpose emphasised by the railway tracks, warehouses, industrial chimneys, empty buildings and unmaintained green areas with well-trodden shortcuts.

For decades, a critical formative element of Údol’s social geography has been racism; the neighbourhood is deeply embedded in the black-and-white landscape of Ostrava associated with the physical and social separation of its racialised populations. Within the first decade after the fall of ‘communism’, Roma found themselves more and more confined within certain areas in which they could live, attend school and work. The separation of Roma and non-Roma in Ostrava is immediately obvious in the housing stock, with racially segregated neighbourhoods such as Údol referred to in policy documents as ‘socially excluded locations’ (sociálně vyloučené lokality).⁶ Even a short visit to these locations reveals the presence of Roma-only schools;⁷ run-down housing and the absence of facilities for children and young adults and services. However, race has not always been the main organising principle in the city. When they talked about the past, my Roma informants would link their former experiences of interracial contact as arising from mixed workplaces, something that has been lost in the course of the massive lay-offs in the 1990s. In addition, Roma have started being banned from certain establishments, which came up frequently during my conversations. I learned about a pub called Canteen (Kantýna), which used to exist in Rear Údol. ‘Back then, the Roma were barred from there but we would let Lucie and her family in. They were . . . different [from other Roma]’, Simona a non-Roma woman told me, while Lucie was sitting next to her smiling, flattered.

Roma have also been designated as ‘unwanted tenants’, which, together with municipal policies concentrating them in specified areas, further cemented their residential segregation. In 2016, low-income Roma in Ostrava were effectively confined to decaying neighbourhoods. The chances for Roma residents of Údol to move out once their socioeconomic situation improved were severely limited by the prevailing racism of the property market. My informants shared with me several stories of how families had attempted to move out from Údol to less segregated areas. What ensued in these cases was a variation of the same scenario. The non-Roma residents would object, sometimes immediately during the visit, sometimes afterwards, petitioning the council against renting a flat to Roma residents.

Marta worked as a cleaner responsible for the offices at Clean; a long-time Údol resident, she is married to one of my street-cleaning colleagues. ‘We went to see a flat on Old Street. The moment we entered the hallway, the neighbours were outside. One of them told us that rents were high in the building . . . By the time we [finished the viewing and] got downstairs, they were all there. Mr . . .sky from the city council who went to the viewing with us, then returned to the house and discussed something with the residents for ten minutes.’ Marta told me about one of her attempts to move from the Pěkná area. She concluded that the best way to find a new place is to look for a location where ‘they have an experience with Roma. If there is none, it’s a dead end . . . you submit an application, they refuse it and refer you to Sandy Street [a remote part of Údol]. It is better to say that you are a Roma.’

A Roma-rights activist, Karel, living in Rear Údol, has been trying to move out for several years, unsuccessfully. On one occasion, he posted on Facebook a text message his wife had received from a private landlord prior to a scheduled viewing. The landlord had bluntly informed her that he was not willing to rent his flat to Roma as he had negative experiences of them. ‘If you are Roma, your visit tomorrow will be completely pointless.’

The only person I knew who managed to move out from Pěkná street was Mirek, another colleague at Clean. Wolfy street, where he moved to, was part of his cleaning area. One day, as he was sweeping the pavements there, he learned that one of the council flats was available. When he went to the viewing, one of the residents recognised him, and Mirek speculated that this might have helped – there was no petition against him and his family moving in. The application process for council flats works like an auction. Prospective tenants have to offer a certain amount (above the set minimum) that they would be able to pay as rent. Mirek offered double what the municipality was asking for and was granted the tenancy. On the day he moved in, he encountered one of the neighbours, a university lecturer. ‘She asked me how many children I’ve got. I said twelve, and all of them musicians. Then I listed all the instruments they play and said that they usually finish practising between 1 and 4am.’ The neighbour, Mirek recalled, said: ‘Ah, that is going to be interesting!’ Mirek then explained that he was joking and had only two daughters as his sons have already grown up.

Through my long-standing involvement in the area, I came to learn that the social construction of a ‘Roma neighbourhood’ in Ostrava had several components. These included its perceived lack of safety; that its social life took particular forms, such as spending time in groups outside the flats; its low quality of housing, and the lack of access to services and shops. When it came to perceptions of safety, I occasionally received warnings and advice to be vigilant. In general, ‘Roma neighbourhoods’ were not deemed desirable housing options for white people. Vital, an entrepreneur from south-eastern Europe warned me during my early days: ‘This is not England!’ (Tohle není Anglie). And a director of the publicly owned company, Clean, called Pěkná street ‘a complete blackness’ (úplná černota) during my job interview.

Sense of abandonment

On the way to the city one morning, I noticed that people took their walk from the tram stop to Pěkná through a shortcut between houses. I followed them on my way back home. Behind a warehouse turned into a gym was a big derelict space, which looked like old garages. A man in his late forties exited a three-storey tenement overlooking the rubble and whistled at me. Later I became a frequent visitor to the house because, as it turned out, Nina and Ivan rented a flat on the second floor. The view from their kitchen window, the space with bricks and pieces of mortar from the derelict garages, remained largely unchanged during the entire duration of my fieldwork. One day in July, I asked them if it was OK to take a photo of it. ‘Just go ahead and photograph it . . . how messy it is. They destroy it and then say it was the Gypsies who demolished it’, Nina exclaimed. The family wanted to move to another house almost the whole time I knew them.⁸ In the summer especially, they complained about the intense smell from the sewage in the basement.

Life in Údol was characterised by a sense of abandonment: by the state not investing in the public housing stock and infrastructure, especially the sewage system; and by capital – available services were limited to three corner shops, two petrol stations and a bar that closed down in summer 2016. Between April and September, an occasional smell of sewage filled the air.

Even in an urban setting such as Ostrava with its already fragmented urban structure,⁹ Údol appeared to be marginal territory. Several of my informants spoke about the changes in the neighbourhood and its population decline. A lot of houses on Pěkná were empty and there was a rumour among the residents about local authority plans to convert the housing stock into warehouses and offices. While population decline has been an overall trend in Ostrava,¹⁰ Údol was shrinking more significantly and its population dropped between 2006 and 2016 by 13 per cent.¹¹ Rumpel, et al. describe this ‘shrinkage’ as a process characterised by population losses and the deterioration of the building stock.¹² Communal facilities and spaces for socialising have been slowly disappearing from the neighbourhood. The park in the middle of Pěkná street, once a centre of community life where people would sit in groups, chatting and watching children playing, was often deserted during the spring and summer of 2016. Residents’ strategies to cope with this decline involved mutual self-help and improvised pastimes and activities. Ivan and his friends occasionally held football-tennis sessions there, fitting a net between two dustbins in an improvised playground. During the week, younger children would go to dance classes in an NGO that had an office on Pěkná. However, there were no facilities for older teenagers and young adults. The only exception was a small makeshift gym that Lucie’s nephew had started in the basement of the tenement house where he lived with his parents. He would use it with his friends and cousins in the afternoons.

In the discussion on formations of advanced marginality, Wacquant and others draw structural distinctions between urban dispossession in Europe and in North America. Whereas the ‘banlieue’ of the former is a result of the decline of working-class neighbourhoods, the ‘ghettos’ of the latter are defined by an ‘all-encompassing spatial confinement’, which produces parallel institutions. Crucially, while the relegation of western European neighbourhoods is based on class, in the US the key factor is race.¹³ Although the experiences of Roma with urban marginality in East-Central Europe do not fit squarely to either of the two categories discussed by Wacquant (‘ghetto’ and ‘banlieue’), they share an important feature with the Black American neighbourhoods: the racial confinement. A high degree of racial homogeneity and impermeable boundaries are further exacerbated by the operation of state and capital.¹⁴

The racialised housing market

All my informants from Údol rented their homes; some were the tenants of council flats, many more rented privately. The council’s policy of selling its flats to private owners, and subletting part of its housing stock to charities has significantly reduced the available housing stock. The council flat contracts were renewed annually or every six months. Mila, my 55-year-old colleague at Clean, has lived in Pěkná Street for a number of years. She moved there from the city centre where her family lost their tenancy after the house-owner transferred the title to her son, who didn’t renew their lease. After that, Mila and her husband moved to a one-bedroom council flat which costs about 7,000 CZK (237 GBP) per month, including bills. Since they both work, their household income is above the set minimum and they are not eligible for housing allowances. They have to apply for renewal of the lease every six months.

One significant factor that has contributed to Údol as a ‘race-making situation’¹⁵ has been the practice of large real-estate agents, the smaller private entrepreneurs who own some housing units, and the charities which took on the work with the poorest renters that was outsourced to them by the municipality. Both the charities and the private housing entrepreneurs were viewed with a mixture of criticism, on the one hand, for making profit on low-income families, and, on the other, acknowledgement for facilitating access to housing in a context where many landlords openly refused to rent to Roma. At the same time, in their acceptance of the structural framework already laid down within which they operated, both the charities and the entrepreneurs were responsible for reproducing the racialised territorialisation of living space in Ostrava. In some cases, they were doing it very directly.

Peter used to work for a charity assisting Roma and non-Roma low-income clients with housing. While he was happy to have an office job, he began to question the nature of it. One day he explained to me that his role was to mark the files of Roma applicants. When he asked his supervisor for the reasons, he was told that such filtering was supposed to benefit the applicants as its ostensible aim was to prevent situations when (non-Roma) neighbours would complain or petition the city council after a new Roma resident had moved in. Peter’s role was to make a note ‘SE’ (socially excluded) next to the names of those who were likely to be Roma. He was not asked to mark the non-Roma applicants, even if they were from socially disadvantaged backgrounds. An Ostrava-based academic and activist working in the field of social work and housing told me that charities, such as the one where Peter worked, operate as property agents for those on welfare. ‘It is not possible to do both: to control the clients and to provide them with support. The charities choose the control . . . they do it because it corresponds with what the owners [of the housing stock] want.’

Marta has observed that since a charity named Mercy (not the one described by Peter) started subletting some of the council flats within its social housing programme,¹⁶ a ‘nadir’ (spodina) has started moving in to Pěkná. ‘[The tenants] are changing all the time.’ Although not all the tenants described by Marta were Roma, they were all poor. The policy of the charity – combining racial and class segregation – was thus contributing to reproduction of a racialised, poor neighbourhood. Frequent changes of low-income tenants in the flats run by the charities were the consequence of extremely short subletting agreements. In the case of Mercy it was only one month, after which the tenants had to request a renewal.

When it comes to the landlord entrepreneurs, both Roma and non-Roma, people in Ostrava and in the media commonly referred to them as poverty businessmen. Monika, Lucie’s daughter, noted that this type of business started to boom after the local authorities dramatically reduced the number of council flats available for rent. Race played the role of social capital for the Roma entrepreneurs. Lucie and Monika shared with me a rather critical account of the activities of Herbert, a Roma man and their distant relative, who owned several flats in Ostrava. According to Monika, he earned money in construction by ‘exploiting Gypsies and homeless people’ whom he paid miserable wages. ‘He does not help even his own family’, concluded Lucie. I have learned about another Roma entrepreneur named Schoman who ‘works with the charities’ and who does not like those who ‘depend on benefits’. After the tragic killing of a Roma man in a restaurant in western Bohemia, Roma leaders in Ostrava (and other locations) organised protests.¹⁷ The speakers included only male Roma – politicians and entrepreneurs – including Albert, one of the most notorious owners of residential (multi-occupancy) hotels in Ostrava. As we were listening to his speech with Lucie, her friend, a 60-year-old man (who looked 80), commented: ‘Well he is talking here [about justice] and I live in his residential hotel (ubytovna) and pay 17,000 CZK [575 GBP].’ He explained that five of them live in a one-bedroom flat.¹⁸ The only way low-income tenants like him can afford to pay such high rent is through welfare benefits that cover housing-related expenses.

The residential enclosure of low-income Roma in Ostrava was maintained through the mechanisms of the housing market. The above examples point to a systemic racial steering by estate agents, charities and housing providers, a phenomenon similar to that documented in the US.¹⁹ The estate agents, aided by charities, channel Roma into depressed neighbourhoods marked by sustained disinvestment, and their operations remain largely unregulated both in terms of the adequacy of the housing they provide and in terms of rents.²⁰ According to estimates by the Czech Agency for Social Inclusion, around 10,000 out of the total 30,000 Roma in Ostrava live in ‘socially excluded’ (and racially segregated) areas and in residential hostels.²¹ As research in the US has shown, in a situation where poverty is already concentrated in a geographical space, any economic downturn further intensifies the spatial concentration of poverty in a given city.²² The effect is confinement of poverty in black neighbourhoods and the reproduction of racialised inequalities. Massey and Denton carried out simulations in which they modelled four cities with different degrees of racial segregation: 0 per cent, 33 per cent, 66.7 per cent and 100 per cent.²³ Starting with the generalised assumption in the US context that the poverty rate of a minority group is twice that of the majority, they looked at how rates of poverty increased as racial segregation intensified, other factors assumed to be constant. When social class, as another factor of segregation is added to the mix together with race, the degree of poverty concentration among blacks doubled from 20 per cent, when no class segregation was assumed, to 40 per cent. The ‘simultaneous occurrence [of racial and class segregation] yields a more marked deterioration in the neighbourhood environment experienced by poor blacks’.²⁴ Although the use of these statistical methods was criticised as over-simplistic and failing to take into account the interaction of poverty and segregation,²⁵ their paper prompts an inquiry on the interaction between race, income and life opportunities within a confined area. In the Czech context, such inquiry is complicated by the absence of statistical data disaggregated by race or ethnicity.²⁶ Drawing on ethnographic data from my research and estimates from the Czech Agency for Social Inclusion²⁷ I attempted to unpack the racialised everyday experiences of my informants and the effects of this segregation on Roma in Údol. Where my analysis, albeit in different context, diverges from those of Massey and Denton is the focus on the causes of racially segregated neighbourhoods. Massey and Denton looked at the impact of racial segregation on black poverty. Their interpretation includes the racial prejudice towards Black Americans of white people who control the government, the financial institutions and the real estate as the key agents of segregation, but it does not extend to the analysis of structures of racial inequality.

Focusing on the structural forces through which the residential segregation of Roma is reproduced, I observed a strong interaction between prejudice and discrimination, and profit-making. The continuing reproduction of ‘Roma neighbourhoods’ in Ostrava is driven by the interest of landlords, property entrepreneurs and the charities that facilitate housing for low-income (Roma) households. Widespread anti-Roma prejudice and racism then becomes monetised and exacerbated by state policies that fail to set racial equality as one of the requirements for social housing.

Community relationships

Despite its decay, Rear Údol was an important reference point for Roma in Ostrava. Many of them lived their entire lives in the neighbourhood; for others it was the first place they lived in when they moved to start a family or for other reasons. The distinctive (albeit visibly disappearing) quality of living in Údol was its openness to communal life and the porous boundaries of individual flats. Relatives and friends would visit each other unannounced, stay for lunches or dinners, drink coffee outside their homes in warmer months, pop to the neighbours when in need of cooking ingredients or food. Where common areas lacked benches, people would bring their own chairs. I would often pop round to Lucie’s house in the summer, chat with the female family members and their neighbours. They encouraged this habit by telling me to simply come by without calling or messaging beforehand. ‘You mean not to do it the gajo (non-Roma) way?’ I asked and they laughed. The issues we discussed during these summer afternoons were their worries about the upcoming school year (the grades, whether or not their children would be put into a Roma-only class); the Romani language (I was trying to learn its basics); the cost of living; family situations and much more.

A category through which I examined some aspects of community relationships in Údol was that of trust. First, trust-related issues (the lack of it, building it, testing it, etc.) marked my everyday interaction as a white (gajo) and white-collar female researcher engaging with Roma blue-collar male and female informants. Initially, there was a lack of trust in me and my motives. Trust played out in a rather more complex and complicated way in my relationship with two of my closest informants. Their family was the first one that I started to visit often, and after several months we grew very close. They would call me ‘a family member’ (cousin), we talked a lot about personal issues and I was free to pop in anytime I felt like it. The flip-side of this relationship was that I was asked lots of questions about who else I spent time with, what sort of things we discussed – while I was asked to refrain from mentioning anything about the family to others. One day I asked about that ‘restriction’ and they explained to me that certain issues, particularly work and work-relations are sensitive due to a lack of solidarity at workplaces. Throughout the fieldwork, I would hear my Roma informants saying that such and such should not be trusted, or that I should be careful who, and who not, to trust. The issue of trust also emerged in the way my informants talked about kinship. Residents of Údol seem to be aware that relatives can only provide temporary respite. In December, I went with a group of housing rights activists to another town, Brno, where residents were resisting forced evictions. A few days later I discussed the issue with Ivan and Nina. I told them people in Brno seemed to be relying on the possibility of moving in with their relatives in case they got evicted. Ivan was sceptical and explained that such an option would only be temporary – one month at maximum. Mirek, one of my better-off informants, stated directly that he would not allow his family members to stay at his place if evicted. ‘They all have several children, it would not be tolerable for us all to squeeze in.’

A particular challenge to the argument of the ‘saliency of kin support among the urban poor’,²⁸ was the sort of situation in which a family member developed a drug addiction. Mila once surprised me with a story about her 19-year-old grandson, Eda who was ‘doing drugs’. Although already a father, Eda acted as a young single man with no ties, according to Mila. He would go out with his pals, come back in a week, and so on. As his behaviour became intolerable, the father of his partner kicked him out from the flat they were sharing. Eda then moved in with his mother, Mila’s daughter, where he continued the same lifestyle: coming and going. He has never worked, was not registered as a job-seeker at the Labour Office and was therefore not receiving any benefits. He has also accumulated debt on health insurance payments.²⁹ I wondered if Mila would offer him a shelter in case he asked for it but she shook her head. ‘Why would I do that? So that he steals my money?’

According to Mila, Eda had started taking drugs at primary school. After his teachers found out about this and reported it to social services, his parents lost custody of their son and Eda was placed in an orphanage. He ran away from there and stayed in various places, including his mother’s house, until he was 18.

These anecdotes correspond with the post-1990s studies of urban poor in the US, which raise the issue of increased distrust between employed and unemployed family members,³⁰ and increased reliance on other forms of support, including ‘disposable ties’ to meet basic needs.³¹ In several of these studies, race comes up as the ‘life experience that has the biggest impact on trust’.³² In her review of the literature on race and trust, Smith relates the ethno-racial differences over generalised trust (with non-whites in the US manifesting lower degrees of trust than whites in multiple studies)³³ to discrimination in employment, housing and the criminal justice system, both historical and contemporary. The other factor that, according to Smith, leads to lower levels of generalised trust is the ‘neighbourhood disorder’ that occurs as a result of concentrations of joblessness and poverty accompanied by ‘social ills and characteristics of disadvantage that not only foreshadow the decline in the community’s social fabric, but also presage a cycle of poverty and social dislocation, a poverty trap’.³⁴

Conclusion

Údol has not always been the dilapidated and racially segregated neighbourhood of today. Those of my informants who remembered the pre-1990s past, would usually draw some conclusions on their lives under ‘communism’. The past was associated with social security, accessibility of stable jobs and legal equality, and to some degree also coercive policies. It was juxtaposed with the present of racial containment, stigma and the decay of their neighbourhood. The everyday life strategies of people in Údol involved reliance on local and community networks that have replaced the state. The ‘post-socialist’ reality of Údol has been defined by the outsourcing of the state’s social functions, such as housing, to be carried out by charities and business. This has led, in what has now been turned into a racially defined space, to the ongoing reproduction of Údol’s containment of its Roma population, with its dilapidation and racial segregation inextricable from the supply of a basic human need – for housing.

***

References

1. Loïc Wacquant, ‘Three pernicious premises in the study of the American ghetto’, International Journal of Urban & Regional Research 21, no. 2 (1997), pp. 341–53; Loïc Wacquant, Urban Outcasts: a comparative sociology of advanced marginality (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008); Toma Slater and Ntsiki Anderson, ‘The reputational ghetto: territorial stigmatisation in St Paul’s, Bristol’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37, no. 4 (2012), pp. 530–46.

2. Using examples from Poland, Staniszkis shows how government politicians in 1990–1993 pushed for the public refinancing of ‘bad debts’ by the Central Bank; and creating ‘a framework leading to indebtedness trap of the state-owned enterprises’ (p. 76). She concludes that capital formation in this early stage of post-socialism involved the individual use of government benefits to gain privileged status for one’s enterprise. In other words: the transfer from state-controlled to privately controlled capital was politically facilitated and was not a result of ‘natural’ processes of liberalization. Jadgwiga Staniszkis, Post-Communism: the emerging enigma (Warsaw: Polish Academy of Sciences, 1999).

3. For further details on the containment of Roma in low-paid and racialised jobs, see: Barbora Černušáková, ‘Roma: the invisible worforce of Ostrava’, Race & Class 58, no. 4 (2017), pp. 98–105.

4. Detlef Baum, Kamila Vondroušová and Iva Tichá. Charakteristika sociálně prostorové segregace ve srovnání dvou měst (Halle – Ostrava) (Ostrava: Ostravská Univerzita, Fakutla Sociálních Studií, 2014), p. 60.

5. In Czech: https://www.socialni-zaclenovani.cz/wp-content/uploads/PA_ke_koncepci_bydleni_SMO.pdf.

6. The action plan for social housing in Ostrava 2019–2022 developed for the city of Ostrava by the Agency for Social Inclusion lists twelve ‘socially excluded locations’. See: https://www.socialni-zaclenovani.cz/wp-content/uploads/Ostrava_TAP_Soci%C3%A1ln%C3%AD-bydlen%C3%AD_ZOR7.pdf.

7. I have documented the racial school segregation in 2015 research for Amnesty International (Must Try Harder, [London: Amnesty International, 2015]).

8. They eventually found another place in Údol to which they moved in autumn 2017.

9. Ondřej Slach, Vojtěch Bosák, Luděk Krtička, Alexandr Nováček and Petr Rumpel, ‘Urban shrinkage and sustainability: assessing the nexus between population density, urban structures and urban sustainability’, Sustainability 11, no. 4142 (2019).

10. Between 2005 and 2015, the population decreased by 5 per cent. Strategic Plan for the City of Ostrava 2017–2023, p. 3. http://fajnova.cz/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SPRM_fajnOVA_indikatory_2018.pdf.

11. Strategic Plan for the City of Ostrava 2017–2023, p. 13.

12. Rumpel Petr, Slach Ondřej, Tichá Iva, Bednář Pavel Urban Shrinkage in Ostrava, Czech Republic, Research report (2010), p. 5

13. Wacquant, ‘Three pernicious premises in the study of the American ghetto’; Loïc Wacquant, ‘A Janus-faced institution of ethnoracial closure: a sociological specification of the ghetto’, in Hans-Christian Petersen, ed., Spaces of the Poor: perspectives of cultural sciences on urban slum areas and their inhabitants (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2013), pp. 15–46, 32–33.

14. Wacquant, ‘A Janus-faced institution of ethnoracial closure’, p. 33.

15. James D., ‘The racial ghetto as a race-making situation: the effects of residential segregation on racial inequalities and racial identity’, Law & Social Inquiry: Journal of the American Bar Foundation 19, no. 2 (1994).

16. Within the programme ‘Prevention of homelessness’, the charity was renting around 150 flats in Ostrava and subletting them to individuals and families at risk of homelessness.

17.http://www.romea.cz/en/news/czech/hundreds-around-czech-republic-honor-memory-of-dead-romani-man-right-wing-extremists-assemble-at-site-of-his-death-riot.

18. One bedroom in the Czech Republic means there is no living room and the living space consists of a kitchen, bathroom and a bedroom. The reason behind the high rent is that the owners of residential hotels charge per capita, so in this case each of the tenants paid 3,400 CZK.

19. Wacquant cites Foley (1973), Berry (1979) and Tobin (1987) in his Urban Outcasts: a comparative sociology of advanced marginality.

20. The practice of one of the major real-estate agents to concentrate low-income Roma residents in specific locations in Moravia-Silesia region was documented among others in a series of articles by a journalist Saša Uhlová. See (in Czech): http://denikreferendum.cz/clanek/24362-bakalovo-dedictvi-na-ostravsku-ghetta-a-sabotaz-zakona-o-socialnim-bydleni.

21. In Czech, p. 9: https://www.socialni-zaclenovani.cz/wp-content/uploads/MPI_Ostrava.pdf.

22. Massey D., Denton N., American Apartheid: segregation and the making of the underclass (Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 126.

23. Massey and Denton American Apartheid, pp. 120–21.

24. Massey and Denton American Apartheid, p. 125.

25. Jargowsky Paul Poverty and Place: ghettos, barrios, and the American city (New York: Russell Sage, 1997).

26. The authorities tend to excuse the absence of a system of collecting racially disaggregated data on their obligation to ‘protect personal data’ but there are also concerns among the Roma community over the risk of abuse of such data. For details see (in Czech), M. Knob, ‘Sběr etnických dat v českém právním prostředí’, Právník 155, no. 5 (2016), pp. 427–45.

27. Reports on Ostrava (in Czech): https://www.socialni-zaclenovani.cz/lokalita/ostrava/.

28. Desmond presented ethnographic evidence from his research in Milwaukee, which questioned the ‘saliency of kin support’ and proposed that it has been in fact replaced by ‘disposable ties’ among strangers who found themselves in a similar situation. Matthew Desmond, ‘Disposable ties and the urban poor’, American Journal of Sociology 117, no. 5 (2012), pp. 1295–335.

29. Those outside employment who are not registered as unemployed with the Labour Office are obliged to pay their own health insurance.

30. Smith Sandra S., Lone Pursuit: distrust and defensive individualism among the Black poor (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007).

31. Desmond, ‘Disposable ties and the urban poor’.

32. Uslaner Eric M., The Moral Foundations of Trust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 91.

33. From the review of literature, Smith distilled three conceptualisations of trust: generalised, particularised and strategic. Sandra S. Smith, ‘Race and trust’, The Annual Review of Sociology 36 (2010), pp. 453–75.

34. Smith, ‘Race and trust’, p. 459.

35.http://www.romea.cz/en/news/world/slovak-police-officer-said-to-have-beaten-five-romani-children-in-krompachy-settlement-and-threatened-to-shoot-them.
Elena

August 5th, 2023

It was April. They came in the early afternoon at their usual hour and ordered four gins, two each, to mark the end of their shift and the beginning of endless idle talk at my kiosk. I poured four generous shots and placed them on the counter. It was quite low, and they had to bend a little to grab them. As they did, I saw up close their rough hands, cracked nails covered in black oily dirt mixed with metal filings. Their old boiler suits were marked with large black stains, torn in places and smelly.

I didn’t mind them. They kept my business running, spending hundreds of crowns on booze every day, and they were chatty. It didn’t matter in this town if you looked and were a drunk, as long as you could strike up a conversation and stand a round. And anyway, who am I to judge. Drinking was a way of forgetting – for a while at least – the dirt and back-breaking speed of construction sites, steelworks or the local landfill where most of them worked for peanuts. The booze, instant coffee and loose cigarettes didn’t cost much, so I always had customers.

“Isn’t it interesting that when a guy screws other women,” said the taller of my customers with a confident voice slightly slurred by alcohol, “he is showy about it, gains respect, but when a woman sleeps with another guy, it makes her a whore?”

He was talking to his friend, but his voice was loud as if trying to reach to a broader audience, a couple of street cleaners who were taking a break nearby the kiosk, and me. He wasn’t bad-looking despite the layer of dirt and the receding hair; his body seemed strong with broad shoulders and long legs. I knew he belonged to a group of geezers who were collecting steel from a nearby industrial landfill. People made fun of them and called them thieves; they were the bottom that we all wanted to avoid, or almost the bottom in any case.

The other man was a bit shorter and had sad eyes. Listening to their conversations daily, I noticed he would get drunk faster and quickly proceed to share one of his unhappy love stories, of which he seemed to have plenty. He struck me as someone who indulged in self-pity, but I barely saw him sober, so maybe it was just the effect of the shots. This time, they were not talking about his love life but about someone else’s, and not so much about love really. He hesitated for a moment as if pondering what makes a woman a “whore”:

“Yeah but she didn’t really sleep with another guy, someone just did it to her.”

“Yeah, disgusting, the whole thing gives me the creeps.”

She was a woman who passed the square with my kiosk several times a day. I felt sorry for her. Not many people knew what her name was except for the dustmen, who referred to her as Elena. The rest just called her she. Hardly older than 30, she walked like a hunchback, hid her short curls underneath an old beret, and carried a faint smile. When she appeared one day wearing plastic bags on her feet, somebody asked her:

“What happened with your shoes?”

“These are my shoes, aren’t they nice?”

We all knew her by sight; she wandered the town in dirty clothes, carrying lots of plastic bags filled with Tetrapaks, empty bottles, containers of different sizes and other crap. When she filled the bags up, she would leave them at random places. Always neatly packed with the items sorted: one bag for plastic bottles, another for glass, aluminium cans and another for paper cups. I once overheard her explaining to one of the dustbin collectors that she was helping them. He didn’t see it that way and later joked about her with his colleagues when they were having coffee at the kiosk.

Women were generally kinder to her. We knew that it might happen to any of us, and anxiously observed her from a distance. Several stories went around the town about how she became homeless. People said that she was quite pretty back in the day, dark-eyed with bouncy black curls, well-built and funny. Even now you could still see some of her beauty behind the torn clothes and dirt. Back in the days she worked in the centre of the town, sweeping the streets and clearing the small dustbins fitted to metal poles or lamp posts in the pedestrian area and a network of neighbouring streets. Then something happened to her. One of the street cleaners told me that she had a bloke and got pregnant. While the baby was still very young, the bloke kicked her out. The street cleaner thought he most probably found someone else. For a few weeks she slept on sofas at various people’s, but nobody wanted her to stay for very long. She started sleeping rough, often on a warm manhole behind the cultural centre a few hundred metres away from my kiosk. The boiler-suit drunks, my regulars, said there were several people sleeping there – the shorter one with sad eyes also used to live there, until he started collecting metal and made enough money to pay for a cheap hostel.

After not very long, the baby was spotted by the social services – or perhaps somebody reported her, as this city is full of snitchers. They took it away from her; the street is not a good place for a baby, after all, and that was more than she could handle – she went completely crazy. Since then she has been living on the streets, talking very little, and if she does talk, it’s without making much sense, collecting rubbish, hands dirty up to her elbows, absent smile on her face. It has been years now. I saw her regularly passing by the kiosk. Once her trousers were completely ripped at the back showing her underwear. She got pitying looks from workers rushing back home after the end of their shifts, and merciless laughter from the good-for nothing youth lazing around the benches on the central square drinking cheap fruit wine from the supermarket.

This was more than two years ago.

But then in spring Elena started showing a belly, which grew bigger with time. Mila, one of the few women among the street cleaners who knew her from the past, examined the belly and noted it was solid. In September she looked due. The pregnancy and imminent labour became the main conversation topic among us, the people of the street. Once a woman from the greengrocers’ came for a chat and we both saw Elena passing by. The greengrocers’ woman got all emotional and started sobbing:

“Did you see that… I just don’t understand… How, how can someone? What now…”

I gave her a shot of rum to settle her down. But I felt the same unease. The sweepers, my drunks, the dustbin collectors, the construction workers fixing the gas pipelines, the fortune-teller from the main square, all continued to speculate on why and who. The men not bothering to disguise their disgust. Although when they came alone, and not in their drinking hordes, they would sometimes tell me they felt sorry for her. Will she really have a child?

She sometimes came to my kiosk to buy cheap lemonade. On her good days, she would tell me:

“I’m going to have a baby you know. But I worry they would take it away from me. I won’t allow that, no, no…!” she’d cry.

But more often than not her grasp of reality was weaker and she tried to order gin.

“You are pregnant; I won’t sell you alcohol now,” I told her, but got only a faint smile in response. And then in October, Elena disappeared.

“It was during Dan’s afternoon shift, he saw her groaning with pain, a small puddle of water underneath her, so he called the ambulance,” the taller of the boiler-suit drunks said and ordered another two rounds.

“She’ll be all right. I wouldn’t want to be that midwife!” he added, grinning as he downed one shot after another.

“Yeah, I bet they had to burn her clothes.”

“It’s not funny, you two sound like idiots. You know well this could happen to any of us – you two especially.” Short old Mila, who was resting her cart near the kiosk while having a short cigarette break, frowned at the drunks. She didn’t wait for their reply, finished her fag and pushed her cart away.

We saw Elena again after a few weeks. They must have cut her hair in the hospital. It was short now and spiky. She wore the same shy smile and layers of plastic bags instead of shoes. She came to the kiosk to buy a cigarette. I picked out a couple of loosies and added a chocolate bar as a present. Wrapped in lawyers of old dark clothes, she slowly took her treats and lingered for a while. I could see that the belly was gone.

“Are you all right? I haven’t seen you for a while.”

She looked past me with her absent-minded smile. “Yes, life is good, life is good.”

The short story was published in The Sociological Review in November 2022: https://thesociologicalreview.org/fiction/elena/
Just a day off

August 5th, 2023

Wearing his white trainers, polo shirt and clean jeans, he enters the waiting room and inhales the smell of disinfectant mixed with the lavender scent-sticks on one of the windows. Half an hour later, his blood starts to flow through a tube into a machine that separates a yellowish liquid from blood cells. The reclining chair is a bit uncomfortable but there is no pain and it only takes twenty minutes. Then the needle is removed, the pressure cuff slides off and he heads towards the table with biscuits and water, a sticking plaster on his left arm. A bag of golden plasma in exchange for thirty euros.

The nurse tells him his plasma looks “very good”, if only there weren’t the occasional traces of THC in the blood tests. Those tests are a bit silly. He tries to stay off spliffs for a day or two, whenever he needs a bit of extra cash—which is to say at least once a month. But every now and then he needs one in the evening to offset the grueling ten hours of work. Sometimes he wished he would be like one of those white guys, creative types, “freelancers during the day, video-artists at night”, who have an odd puff in the gallery basement off the main square. He helped one of them to replace broken tiles on his porch last summer. These guys can hang in the city centre filling the air with exotic smokes and no one cares. He raises suspicion if he downs an energy drink.

At the moment, there aren’t many pleasures in his life. He spends his days with the crew—old Julo, Adrian, Karol and their foreman Vik. They also work weekends, especially if Vik lines up several gigs throughout the whole summer. When they complain, he laughs and calls them “sissies”. Still, he is more a friend than a boss—a good man, they say—although he inhabits a different universe than them. In winter, Vik flies to Bali or the Caribbean—it’s too cold to dig, there is no work and they have to go on the dole. Vik likes whiskey more than beer and that’s what he drinks. They heard he used to do meth back in the day and his brother and wife helped him to get clean. Now he just smokes fags and drinks in the evenings. Only a glass or two after work, he says, and they nod.

This month, they are on the gasworks. They are a small cog in a larger machine, built around public procurement, competitive bidding and subcontracting. It brings them small bits of work that they carry out cheaply against tight deadlines, pushing through ten or twelve-hour shifts. They fill the air with dust from the asphalt layer that they remove, the smell of the drill and the soil they dig out. Once the hard work is done, another crew comes in and fixes or replaces the pipes. Their role is then to close the site and put down a new layer of asphalt. He is tall and slim, but well-built, with strong shoulders and arms. People outside work sometimes ask him if he goes to the gym. “Yeah, I exercise daily with a trolley full of soil,” he laughs. The skin on his hands is callused, no matter how much “working hands cream” he uses. He likes to say that he was trained by the Koreans and their assembly lines for white electronics at the city’s outskirts, his character further solidified by the daily grind at Groundwerk, but no matter how much pressure there is on him from outside, he remains his old self.

When he gets to the site on Monday, old Julo is already there, wearing old work trousers and a dirty T-shirt covered by a high-vis vest with the label GROUNDWERK on the back. The U, N and R are slightly worn out. His curly silver hair is overgrown around his ears, drops of sweat shine on his forehead although it’s still early in the morning. He is a bit drunk but energised. Old Julo is one of the best labourers, and Vik lets him work without commenting on his breath smelling of beer. He usually takes one for breakfast, two for lunch with slices of salami and white bread roll, and several after work. It’s easier to chat to girls if you are an older man. “How are you doing, love?” He smiles at a pedestrian in a polka dot dress and red sandals. “Long day, yeah?” She smiles back and says it’s not too bad and asks him how the shift is going. “Ah, lots of work, love, you know. It’s summertime.” Julo grins back as she gives him a friendly nod and slowly walks away.

They secured the site from the pavement and the main road with a mesh fence. He didn’t put its panels in the concrete stands properly and left one of them somewhat hanging. “Mate, this is quite ridiculous.” Vik pointed to a bent fence panel, cigarette dangling from his lips. “Nah, that’s alright!” he reassured him and started taking tools out of the truck. Vik continued with his foreman duties. “You must wear helmets: it’s health and safety.” None of this really mattered to anyone and they all knew it. The only two things that mattered were: they finish the job on time so that Groundwerk gets paid, and they get their wages. Health and safety was a joke, really. A few guys died on construction jobs for this or other companies. His cousin was one of them—he was doing demolition work when the ceiling collapsed. His name got inscribed on a marble remembrance plaque and his woman is now a widow with two kids.

Some days, he just wants to have a break from it all: sleep in, go and see his daughter, go for a walk and have a smoke. Instead, he downs a cheap energy drink and goes to work after sleeping six or fewer hours. And then there are days he decides to stay in. Because he wants to, not because they allow him to or cancel a shift because they didn’t secure a new gig.

He didn’t go to work two days last week and skipped three this week, and finally felt rested. His wages dropped by 150 euros. Most of it was going to go towards his rent and child support for his daughter. He hoped the old man living in the unit next to him could lend him a couple of hundred; he could also put his phone in the pawnshop and eat at his mom’s and his brother’s the next three weekends. Even then, he would still need at least eighty.

He used to DJ before his daughter was born. There was a club at the edge of the city centre with two floors, the first one for white people, the second for the Roma. Sometimes Roma girls were let in on the first floor, especially if they were good looking. He played R&B and funk, but also house, hip-hop and drum-and-bass. It felt nice to take people up and down a wave, the room full of energy, cigarette smell and sweat. He would put on a good balance of fast and slow mixes and rely on classics like Goodie Mob’s Decisions, Decisions with Reakwon Chef it Up or Katy Perry with Snoop Dog. The audience liked his melodic choices. They kept them moving and interested. It felt good and he looked cool.

One day after a gig, a girl with pink hair wearing platform shoes with a pink furry strap approached him and asked for the way to the train station. He offered to walk her there. As they walked through the park, she put her arms around his back, extended her neck and pulled him to her. Their carefree lovemaking on the bench did not take long but it put him on a trajectory of being a boyfriend and later a father. The first didn’t last, the latter means the world to him.

He doesn’t get to see his daughter very often. Once a week, sometimes less than that. After the split, the daughter stayed with her mother in a small studio in a workers’ hostel with residents who could not afford the deposit for a regular flat. The rent gets covered by housing benefit, but she often struggles to pay for the water bills, an inflated lump sum paid per person in the absence of water meters. Things were supposed to get better for her after she got a new man who ran some business. They didn’t. During one of his visits, he found the new man sitting on the bed, his heavy body leaning against the wall, legs spread out, ordering the mother of his daughter to make them coffee, cursing her in a rough voice when he decided she was taking too long. The room was filled with the smell of the new man’s sweat and cigarettes, the tiny kitchenette counter covered with bread, slices of salami, gherkins and a few packs of instant noodle soup. Dressed in a pink bathrobe with her hair tight back in a greasy ponytail, she was clumsily pouring hot water on a small amount of ground coffee. He noticed that she had lost a lot of weight. She never asked him for money in the presence of the new man, so it caught him by surprise when she did it that one time. He took fifteen out of the thirty euros, handed it to her, adding: “For the little one.” She grabbed the money and gave it to the new man. He let the bitter taste and worry pass. After this encounter, he preferred to pick up his daughter from the main hostel entrance.

His daughter runs towards him, he kneels down and gives her a hug. They head off for a little walk to the playground. She first chooses a swing, and he guards her from a distance, avoiding eye contact with the parents nearby. She seems smaller than the other kids. He knows from her mother that she is one of the shortest in her class and people often guess that she is a few years younger than her age. When she finishes with the swing, she moves towards the climbing frames, discussing something with one of the other little girls, a friend from school perhaps. He sits on a nearby bench, waves at her and stretched his legs. The late August sun is gently setting, and it is soon time to go and grab something to eat. He takes his daughter by her little hand and she waves goodbye to her friend as they walk off. At the kiosk in a nearby park they buy a hot dog and a lemonade and sit down on white plastic chairs to eat the treat. His daughter tells him about the puppy her friend got for her birthday, which would sleep on a little pillow in their flat and needed to be taught not to pee anywhere it liked. She giggles and he smiles. Tomorrow will start with one or two energy drinks, followed by ten hours of graft and an instant noodle soup for dinner, but he didn’t need to think about it now.
The neighbourhood: Arrivals

August 11th, 2019

During my time in Ostrava, I was continuously taking notes of the narratives and imaginaries of the neighbourhood of Údol. They included stories of and about people who live there; but also stories of real estate agents whom I approached when looking for a flat; teachers in the local schools; employers or local activists.

On the way to my morning meeting with a prospective employer, I have noticed that people cut their walk to Pěkná Street* through a shortcut between houses. Behind a warehouse-turned-into-a-gym was a big derelict space with old garages. A group of very young men were breaking or cutting pieces of the old walls using pickaxes. A man exiting a three-storey tenement overlooking the rubble whistled in my direction.

Later I became a frequent visitor to that house during my late morning chats over coffee and cigarettes with a Roma couple, Nina and Ivan, who rented a flat on the second floor. The “garage area” remained derelict until the end of 2016 when I left Ostrava.

I asked Nina if I could take picture of it one morning in the summer. “Yes, record it – show how they abandon it like this [for months] and then people say that the Gypsies destroyed it.”

A view from Nina and Ivan’s kitchen.

Many residents attempted several times to move to a “better”, less segregated area. What ensued was a variation of the same scenario. The non-Roma residents would object, sometimes immediately during the visit, sometimes afterwards petitioning the council against renting a flat to Roma residents.

“We went to see a flat on Old Street. The moment we entered the hallway, the neighbours were outside. One of them told us that rents were high in the building… By the time we [finished the viewing and] got downstairs, they were all there. Mr …sky from the city council who went to the viewing with us, then returned to the house and discussed something with the residents for 10 minutes.”

Marta tells me about one her attempts to move from “Pěkná area”. She concluded that the best way to find a new place is to look for a location where “they have an experience with Roma. If there is none, it’s a dead end (je to zabitý)… you submit an application, they refuse it and refer you to Sandy Street [considered to be “a Roma area”]. It is better to say upfront during your first phone call that you are a Roma… In the past it [racism?] was rather covert; you were able to defend yourself during communism because there was legislation and there was work for everyone.”

Despite lack of any public leisure facilities, the neighbourhood was lively during the summer months – children playing on the side streets, women and men of various ages sitting on chairs in front of houses enjoying the sun. One of the irregular past-time activities was football tennis.

But these activities were slowly disappearing and the number of the residents was shrinking as the local authority was progressively selling the public housing . “I used to know almost everyone on Pěkná Street, it was very lively. I was leafleting in the area for six years.” We were sitting on the corner of their tenement with Sara and several relatives and neighbours. The children were running around, enjoying the last day before the school was about to start.

* All given names of people as well as names of specific streets are withheld to protect the anonymity of the people whom I met during my research.
Music Old and New: Phurikane giľa and neve giľa

May 10th, 2016

Phurikane giľa

We met Vasil at Ostrava’s Absintový klub les where his band, led by the lead violinist Kolman, played tirelessly until the early hours. The wide repertoire covered all the major hits, including Ide poštár ide/ O poštaris avel, traditional Slovak folk songs and a mix of czardases (traditional Hungarian folk dance). During a cigarette break, we congregated with the other smokers in a small room with a strong light and a line of chairs around its walls. Vasil, seated in the corner, sipping beer, surprised me saying that he actually prefers the “new” music to cymbalo music . “But [the cymbalo music] is what I learned and what I do for living.” He plays accordion, violin and sings. So do all his siblings, although not all of them are professional musicians.

“A child starts absorbing music from an early age… Even if the parents aren’t musicians, they would listen to music from a radio or a player and the child learns the songs that way…”

Vasil’s musical education consisted of listening and practicing: he knows all the songs he performs by heart.

“Everybody is musical, but you [many non-Roma] haven’t awaken your musicality.” Jarek, a friend of mine nodded, and Vasil pointed at him: “For example he used to be a DJ…”

Jarek: “I would take these [old] songs and mix them with dance music…”

Vasil: “And it would work perfectly.”

Neve giľa: Rap from Ostrava

Majk Fejk [Mike Fake] is a rap singer from Ostrava. Inspired by a Slovak rapper Mike Spirt, he wanted to use a name that would refer to his role model, hence: Majk Fejk. Coming from a family of musicians (his father is a drum player) he got interested in music after he had given up sports: boxing and karate.

His songs are about growing up in what he calls a ghetto. “You know: bad people, assaults, fights and violence.”

The way how to survive is to avoid those bad people and take control over your own life.

In most of his songs, Majk sings about the experience of the “street”, the life prospects and everyday woes of young people born in Ostrava’s “Roma neighbourhoods”. This video was shot in various locations in Přívoz and the camera gently captures his relationship with the city.
Tattoos: Old and New

May 10th, 2016

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