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Summary
Summary
Residential motels have long been places of last resort for many vulnerable Americans--released prisoners, people with disabilities or mental illness, struggling addicts, the recently homeless, and the working poor. Cast aside by their families and mainstream society, they survive in squalid, unsafe, and demeaning circumstances that few of us can imagine.
For a year, the sociologist Christopher P. Dum lived in the Boardwalk Motel to better understand its residents and the varied paths that brought them there. He witnessed moments of violence and conflict, as well as those of care and compassion. As told through the voices and experiences of motel residents, Exiled in America paints a portrait of a vibrant community whose members forged identities in response to overwhelming stigma and created meaningful lives despite crushing economic instability.
In addition to chronicling daily life at the Boardwalk, Dum follows local neighborhood efforts to shut the establishment down, leading to a wider analysis of legislative attempts to sanitize shared social space. He also suggests meaningful policy changes to address the societal failures that lead to the need for motels such as the Boardwalk. The story of the Boardwalk, and the many motels like it, will concern anyone who cares about the lives of America's most vulnerable citizens.
Author Notes
Christopher P. Dum is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Kent State University. He is a contributor to Justice Quarterly and Children and Youth Services Review .
Reviews (2)
Kirkus Review
Dum (Sociology/Kent State Univ.) debuts with an ethnographic study of a year in the life of a residential motel.In this revealing, rigorously academic work, the author tells the stories of social refugeesmarginalized people including the mentally ill, disabled individuals, addicts, and registered sex offendersliving in the Boardwalk Motel, a squalid two-story building located in pseudonymous Dutchland, an affluent white suburban community. Some townspeople call Boardwalk the pedophile motel. For residents, arriving from prisons, shelters, and the back seats of cars, it is a location of last resort for poor individuals in search of affordable housing. With great courage and empathy, Dum rented a room, hung out in this dumping ground for those deemed socially unacceptable, and befriended many residents, observing their daily struggles to survive in a culture centered on substance abuse. He takes pains to describe the stigma and stereotype facing residents; local critics ultimately succeeded in sanitizing, or closing, the motel over code violations. The stigma of the motel was so blinding that they were unable to see residents as human beings, writes Dum. By giving voice to the residents, the author allows readers to understand their humanity and their surprisingly vibrant culture, with its many moments of sharing, caring, and community. Dum describes the motels underground economy, the sometimes strained relations between residents, and how some individuals created unique identities: one man, working on scrap metal in his room, considered himself an entrepreneur; a couple referred to their room as a studio apartment. The author places the painful experiences of these residents in the larger societal context: rising rates of incarceration, foreclosures, evictions, and homelessness have in recent years turned many nonchain motels into shelters for the marginalized. Dums scholarly apparatus is on full display, which will please specialists but should not deter general readers. His exceptional view of whats happening to the weakest among us deserves a place on the same shelf with Matthew Desmonds groundbreaking book Evicted (2016). Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Choice Review
Sociologist Dum's ethnography describes people who live in the Boardwalk Motel, a residential motel that he terms "last-ditch housing for the socially and financially marginalized." To experience life at the motel from the residents' perspectives, Dum (Kent State Univ.) rented a room at the Boardwalk Motel and lived among his research subjects for a year. Although the book contains thorough histories of the motel and hotel industries, as well as analyses of the social forces that can cause individuals to become marginalized, Dum seems to have become personally involved with his subjects, one of the pitfalls of ethnographic research. He provided them with alcohol, cigarettes, and rides in his car; lent them money; and took some of the residents to where he worked and attended school. Seemingly forgetting that his subjects were in the motel because they were convicted criminals, Dum refers to them as social refugees and victims of an unfair society. He spends way too much time detailing the residents' daily lives and irrelevant conversations--another indication that he forgot his role as a researcher. He insists that he took great care to hide his informants' identities by changing their names and the name of the motel, but subtle information abounds about the city in which they are located. Summing Up: Recommended. All undergraduate libraries. --Carol Apt, South Carolina State University
Table of Contents
| Preface | p. xi |
| Acknowledgments | p. xvii |
| Introduction | p. 1 |
| 1 Biography of a Residential Motel | p. 33 |
| 2 Pathways to Motel Life | p. 60 |
| 3 Managing Stigma and Identity | p. 98 |
| 4 Community, Conflict, and Fragility | p. 127 |
| 5 Interactions with the Community | p. 166 |
| Conclusion: Policy Failure in the Age of Social Sanitization | p. 185 |
| Appendix 1 List of Participants | p. 225 |
| Appendix 2 A Reflection on Method | p. 231 |
| Notes | p. 239 |
| Bibliography | p. 271 |
| Index | p. 283 |