Cities
Malletts Bay, Vermont
Brown Ledge Camp, the site of the initial training, is located on Malletts Bay on the shores of Lake Champlain, just north of Burlington, Vermont. It is a beautiful site, with cabins nestled on a rocky outcropping rising up from the lake. In September, the leaves are beginning to change, but the water holds much of the summer heat, so it’s still a great time to swim. The camp facilities include all the equipment necessary for sailing, canoeing, kayaking, windsurfing, waterskiing and wakeboarding. There are also clay tennis courts, an archery range and a large theatre. The camp brims with opportunities for recreation or relaxation in the beautiful natural surroundings, but when you yearn for a little more civilization, it’s only a fifteen-minute ride into the college town of Burlington, with its excellent shopping, restaurants and culture.
Burlington, Vermont
Just a few minutes from the training site at Brown Ledge Camp, Burlington is the largest city in Vermont and the home of the University of Vermont. Burlington is in many ways a charming New England town, but with its large student population and many visitors from throughout the nation, it has developed a strong cultural scene, with many musical and cultural venues as well as excellent restaurants. The city is anchored by Church Street Marketplace, a pedestrian mall at the heart of the city, which fills with shoppers, street performers and people-watchers every weekend.
During the training session, Burlington will be our civilized getaway, but it will also function as a laboratory for beginning to think about how to explore a city and mine its documentary potential. While Burlington is a fun city, it is still a city, and faces many typical urban issues—homelessness, drug addiction, global warming, immigration. Also, as a college town, it draws activists and rabble rousers as well as artists and musicians. All of these elements present great documentary subjects.
El Paso, Texas
El Paso, the 21st largest city in the U.S., is above all a border city. It sits on one side of the Rio Grande with Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, on the other, and 60,000 people walk across the bridges between the cities every day. They cross to visit, to shop, even to go to school; so many students from Juarez go to schools in El Paso everyday that there is a dedicated line just for them at the border crossing. The two cities are economically and culturally intertwined and 80 percent of the population of El Paso identifies itself as Hispanic or Latino. Immigration is quickly becoming one of the defining issues in American politics, and there is no better place to explore it than El Paso, which has plenty of immigrants, both legal and illegal, as well as numerous organizations involved in immigration-oriented activism and social services. Additionally, there are the cultural issues of the border; what better place to explore Mexican influences on rock-n-roll or to observe the preparations for the Day of the Dead festivities.
Juarez offers its own set of issues, and there are many groups based in El Paso who work in Juarez. It was a somewhat small city before the dawn of the maquiladora program, which allowed American factories to ship parts and materials to Mexico, have products assembled there and then ship them back to the U.S. without tariffs or duties on either side. The result was an explosion of low-wage factories that swelled the population of Juarez to 1.6 million and transformed it into the third largest industrial location in North America. This riotous growth came with attendant problems, and those problems have been worsened by the transfer of much low-wage factory work from Mexico to China in recent years. Just as El Paso is a laboratory for studying immigration, Juarez is a laboratory for studying globalization. It has also become notorious for a number of unsolved murders of poor factory women; many believe that the crimes have not been solved because of police or government involvement. This scandal has also made El Paso and Juarez centers in the struggle against sexual violence.
But El Paso is more than a border town. It has its own domestic issues, and in many ways it is both struggling and doing well. It has the third highest poverty rate of any major U.S. city, but it also has the third lowest crime rate of any major U.S. city. The military is a major force in El Paso; Fort Bliss, whose headquarters are in the city limits, is the largest military base in the country and is about to receive an additional eighteen thousand troops when the First Armored Division moves there. Because of its desert topography, Fort Bliss has become a major training area for troops being sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. Also within the city limits is the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo Nation, a Native American Reservation that has occupied the same place since 1680 and has watched the city grow up around it. All these things make for a plethora of documentary possibilities, and all in a climate that is warm, sunny and dry all fall.
For more information on El Paso, Texas:
New Orleans, Louisiana
New Orleans needs no introduction; it is an obvious choice for a program emphasizing community service, documentary production and regional America. Equally famous for its music, its food, its playful atmosphere, and its post-Katrina struggles, it is a city that has always been unique and is now facing unique difficulties. Its creole background gave it an accent, a cuisine and a set of values far different from its Southern neighbors. The streets of New Orleans are visually identified by the intricate ironwork on the balconies and are aurally identified by the live music emanating from every bar. New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz, has always been known for its music, but what stands out about music there is not the extraordinary number of skilled professional musicians, it is the extraordinary number of skilled amateurs. In no other city is music so interwoven into daily life. The jazz funerals, the impromptu parades, the instruments that are passed down from parent to child—all these are marks of New Orleans’ idiosyncratic culture. Mardi Gras is not just a tourist attraction, it is an authentic expression of a, quirky, creative, fun-loving community. While New Orleans has for years been one of the poorest cities in America, it has also been the one where the highest percentage of residents described themselves as happy and where families stayed put for generations.
That is one side of New Orleans—musical, playful, relaxed, creative—and it is a side that makes for fascinating documentary possibilities. But the other side and its stories are equally clear and dramatic, the stories of a city where 80 percent of the houses were flooded, whose population has only now crept up to only half of its pre-Katrina level, a city trying to recreate itself with little money and shockingly little support from the federal government. This is a story of trying to rebuild an education system that was one of the worst in the nation even before its schools were flooded. It is a story of the intersections of race, poverty and governmental neglect. It is a story of how hard it is to rebuild a city from its foundations. New Orleans is in the process of recreating itself, and in doing so revealing how complicated and fragile a city’s structure is. There is nowhere in America more challenging, revelatory, heartbreaking and inspiring than New Orleans.