CHAPTER 3 Working to Live Well

Mixed Messages about Consumption

My claim that there are conflicting discourses about consumer spending in the United States may seem surprising. “The American dream” is commonly imagined as the opportunity to live at least a comfortable, middle-class life and perhaps to achieve great wealth. For example, the sample sentence provided by the Merriam-Webster dictionary to illustrate the meaning of “the American dream” is, “With good jobs, a nice house, two children, and plenty of money, they believed they were living the American dream.”¹⁰

Many commentators have proposed that concern with material acquisition was developed early and to an unusual extent in the United States. Alexis de Tocqueville contrasted Americans’ desires for “the comforts of life” with the indifference to physical comforts that he believed was common in Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: “In [European] nations where an aristocracy dominates society, the people finally get used to their poverty just as the rich do to their opulence. The latter are not preoccupied with physical comfort, enjoying it without trouble; the former do not think about it at all because they despair of getting it and because they do not know enough about it to want it.”¹¹ By contrast, in a society like the United States where the middle class has predominated,¹² concern with such comforts becomes a common preoccupation, according to Tocqueville: “But when […] education and freedom spread, the poor conceive an eager desire to acquire comfort, and the rich think of the danger of losing it.… They are therefore continually engaged in pursuing or striving to retain these precious, incomplete, and fugitive delights.… The passion for physical comfort is essentially a middle-class affair; it grows and spreads with that class and becomes preponderant with it.”¹³

Writing in the late-nineteenth century, the economist Thorstein Veblen agreed with Tocqueville that class boundaries were permeable in modern societies. In contrast to Tocqueville, however, Veblen emphasized the aspirational influence of upper-class lifestyles on the middle class.¹⁴ Rejecting a view of humans as driven to maximize economic utilities, Veblen focused instead on status seeking through “conspicuous consumption”:

In modern civilized communities the lines of demarcation between social classes have grown vague and transient, and wherever this happens the norm of reputability imposed by the upper class extends its coercive influence with but slight hindrance down through the social structure to the lowest strata. The result is that the members of each stratum accept as their ideal of decency the scheme of life in vogue in the next higher stratum, and bend their energies to live up to that ideal. On pain of forfeiting their good name and their self-respect in case of failure, they must conform to the accepted code, at least in appearance.

The basis on which good repute in any highly organized industrial community ultimately rests is pecuniary strength; and the means of showing pecuniary strength, and so of gaining or retaining a good name, are leisure and a conspicuous consumption of goods.¹⁵

Veblen saw the need to show outward signs of wealth as especially great in urban, mobile environments where people did not know much about their neighbors other than what they could infer from their houses, furnishings, dress, ornaments, and leisure pursuits.¹⁶

If Veblen is right, then consumption ideals in the twenty-first-century United States would be influenced by the huge gulf in incomes and discretionary spending that has opened both between the rich and the upper-middle class, and between the upper-middle class and everyone else. From 1947 through 1979, US incomes grew at the same rate at all income levels. However, from 1979 to 2016, the average after-tax income of the top 1 percent of US families increased by 226 percent versus only 47 percent for the middle 60 percent.¹⁷ Writing in a Veblenesque vein, Juliet Schor suggests that “to compensate for the growing chasm between their lifestyles and those of the rich and famous, these upper-middles also began conspicuously acquiring … luxury symbols,” even if that meant, for example, “leasing luxury vehicles they often couldn’t afford.”¹⁸ The examples set by the upper-middles then affected norms for what constituted appropriate consumption for everyone else and changed the types of products available for consumption (larger houses, more expensive appliances). “Upward comparison” also occurred as families with one earner observed neighboring families with two earners. Taking inflation into account, the average American’s spending increased by at least 30 percent and by as much as 70 percent between 1979 and 1995.¹⁹

The importance of consumer spending is hardly limited to the United States, as social theorist Zygmunt Bauman notes in describing a global shift from producer societies to consumer societies. For Bauman, the difference between a producer society and a consumer society lies in which role is socially most important. He argues that during the industrial period, being a good worker was what mattered; in the present, late-modern period, what matters is being a good consumer. Good consumers must never remain satisfied with what they have. They must be ready to spend to get something new, better, or at least different.²⁰ An important corollary of the shift to a consumer society is that poverty is interpreted differently. Being poor in a producer society is equated with the shameful status of not working. By contrast, being poor in a consumer society is shameful because one cannot spend. It means becoming “a flawed consumer.”²¹

Bauman’s distinction between productivist values and consumerist values helps us understand Carl Matthews. He did not work seventy hours a week because he lived to work; he worked that hard to earn money to spend. His understanding of his class identity rested on being a certain kind of consumer. In Bauman’s terms, the shame Carl felt about his old car and clothes while he was unemployed could be perfectly summed up by saying that Carl saw himself as a “flawed consumer.”

However, Bauman’s typology is too sweeping. As I showed in the last chapter, productivist values are still strong in the United States. Many of my participants valued being a good worker beyond the income they earned. Furthermore, having a productivist work ethic and having consumer desires are not mutually exclusive. It is possible to take pride in your work and believe in working hard and, at the same time, to enjoy spending the money you earn. American mythology celebrates those who work hard and become wealthy through their own efforts. Riches are considered the just reward for hard work. That cultural model joins prosperity and consumption to hard work.

Yet, although there are strong consumption pressures, there are also forces pushing the other way. It is too simple to say that Americans’ values are materialistic and that their vision of a good life requires conspicuous consumption. In the United States there are also widespread critiques of excessive consumption.²² It is perhaps unsurprising that a society with strong consumption pressures would generate counter-discourses critiquing excessive consumption. Critiques of material excess condemn this spending as immoral, imprudent, unhealthy, unsustainable, and ineffective in promoting happiness.

The first criticism is that materialistic priorities and excessive consumption are morally suspect. In this cultural model, materialistic excess is blamed in part on the bad example set by the dissolute lives of rich celebrities. Both in my interviews for this book and in my earlier research, my participants excoriated celebrities for self-indulgent spending when they could be giving away more of their wealth. Parents were blamed, as well, for “spoiling” their children by handing them money and toys, as the participants compared the extravagant present with an imagined simpler, more wholesome past. Other analysts have seen in Americans’ concerns about the immorality of excessive consumption the survival of the Puritan suspicion of self-indulgence.²³ I would also point to long-standing populist critiques of the rich. In American popular culture, the rich are often portrayed as immoral villains who prey on the moral middle class.

That second criticism of excessive materialism—that it is imprudent to spent more than one can afford—was widespread during the Great Recession. Although many in the public blamed that recession on the greed of commercial lenders and Wall Street investment bankers, a conflicting narrative blamed consumers for taking on excessive debt. In one famous example, the CNBC reporter Rick Santelli criticized the Obama administration for proposing to help homeowners facing foreclosure, accusing it of “promoting bad behavior” among “losers.”²⁴ Although Carl Mathews and others of my participants who were facing foreclosure on their homes did not see themselves as “losers,” many criticized their own previous spending habits after their unemployment made it impossible for them to carry their debt load.

An alternative critique of excessive consumption sees it not as a moral failing but as a disease. As Anne Meneley’s overview of recent scholarship on the anthropology of consumption points out, “Excessive consumerism … is increasingly medicalized.”²⁵ Although “compulsive shopping disorder” (or “compulsive buying disorder”) has not been listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, it is considered by many therapists to be an addiction or possible variety of obsessive-compulsive disorder.²⁶

Another late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century critique is that excessive material consumption is unsustainable, both because of the resources required to produce the products consumed and the waste that accumulates when unwanted products are discarded.²⁷ Concerns about sustainability and the environment contributed to the countercultural ethos of the late 1960s; at present in the United States, young adults’ concern about the environmental and human costs of cheap clothing has helped popularize buying used clothing instead of new clothes.²⁸

Finally, there is a long-standing conventional discourse advising that material consumption is ineffective: having more money and more “toys” will not provide the happiness that consumers desire. Founding father Benjamin Franklin is reported to have said, “Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. There is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of its filling a vacuum, it makes one. If it satisfies one want, it doubles and trebles that want another way.”²⁹ Or, as the popular saying goes, “Money can’t buy happiness.”

Several of these arguments are offered by the organization New Dream (formerly the Center for a New American Dream). Its mission statement begins, “We envision a world in which the values that enhance well-being—relationships, service to others, spending time in nature, community building, and personal growth—are the primary drivers of societal behavior, resulting in reduced consumption and a healthier planet.” That center asks Americans to “join us in challenging the idea that our worth or happiness is represented by what we buy.”³⁰

If all these pro- and anti-consumerist pressures in the United States were not already confusing enough, they are further complicated by different spiritual and religious outlooks, especially in Christian theology. On the one hand, Christian religious and spiritual values are often contrasted with materialistic values. The New Testament is full of verses like “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven” (Matthew 6:19–20) and “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils” (Timothy 6:10). However, for preachers of the Christian movement known as “the prosperity gospel,” the pursuit of wealth and enjoyment of what it brings are entirely consistent with the teachings of Jesus.

As Kate Bowler’s history explains, the Christian prosperity movement began with the preaching of Pentecostal ministers in the mid-twentieth century that good health and great wealth were the rightful due of those who had strong faith. The movement exploded in the late 1970s,³¹ the same period when incomes began to climb more steeply for the top 1 percent of Americans than for everyone else. Much as in the Calvinism of seventeenth-century Europe, material success is an outward sign of piety for prosperity ministers. Unlike the early Calvinists, however, the prosperity gospel says there is nothing wrong with enjoying one’s wealth. The prosperity gospel has been particularly empowering in Black churches.³² According to the African American prosperity preacher T. D. Jakes, the message that one can have a life of abundance is preferable to traditional Christianity, which was “taught ‘by slave masters to pacify their slaves.’ ”³³ As Carl Mathews put it, “If you’re blessed to have it, enjoy it.”

This theology is fine when you are blessed with wealth, and it can motivate striving for economic gains. What is confusing for devout Christians like Carl Mathews who were unemployed for many months or years is why God chose to withhold financial blessings for them at that time, even though they tried hard to find another job and their faith was unchanged. It is a variant of the perennial problem: Why does a loving God permit suffering?

A similar tension outside Christian theology exists among followers of differing New Age spiritual philosophies. Some New Age spiritual leaders stress the unimportance of material possessions; others believe that both material and spiritual abundance can be attained by harnessing the power of thought. As Rhonda Byrne explains in her bestselling book, The Secret, “Thoughts are magnetic, and thoughts have a frequency. As you think, those thoughts are sent out into the Universe, and they magnetically attract all like things that are on the same frequency.” This is the law of attraction. The tricky part of the method is that if you are thinking about lack, that will be attracted to you as well: “When you need money, it is a powerful feeling within you, and so of course through the law of attraction you will continue to attract needing money.”³⁴ It is very important not to feel lack because your negative thoughts will block good things from coming to you. For example, if your goals are to purchase certain material items, do not entertain doubts about whether you can afford them: “As you see your dream car drive past, say, ‘I can afford that.’ As you see clothes you love, as you think about a great vacation, say, ‘I can afford that.’ As you do this you will begin to shift yourself and you will begin to feel better about money.” Giving away money for charitable purposes is recommended too—not on the grounds of what it does for others but because it makes you feel rich and will attract more money into your life.³⁵

New Age beliefs and Christianity are not the only religious or spiritual belief systems in the United States, but they are widespread, as I found from hearing these ideas expressed by many of my participants.

In sum, there are powerful consumption pressures in contemporary US society alongside widespread critiques of problematic consumption. One way of integrating these messages is by idealizing appropriate consumption, consumption that is neither too much nor too little for a happy life.

White Picket Fences and More: Aspirations for the Good Life

When I gave my participants paper and markers and asked them to write or draw their idea of a good life, one item was mentioned or drawn more than any other: a house.³⁶ Everyone, of course, needs some dwelling place, but in the United States from the 1950s on, the ideal dwelling place has been commonly imagined in the way my participants did: as a single-family home. Typically, my participants drew a car as well.³⁷

Celeste Rue drew God in the form of a sun, a home with curtains on the windows and a piano inside, a yard with flowers, and a smiling family made up of a husband, wife, and three children, each holding one or more dollar signs (figure 3.1). “Everybody should have some money,” she commented. Jake Taylor wrote, “The good life is a hot summer day, playing in the front-yard sprinklers with my friends and family while drinking a few beers and relaxing in the sun.” A yard where one can relax is part of the cultural model of a single-family home. For Mary Brown, a good life is “a house, a car, my family. And then being able to also help people in the community.” Ichabod Jones drew a home with cars in the driveway for himself and his wife near homes for his grown children and granddaughter. Fred Hernandez drew a family and a house surrounded by a picket fence. Many participants depicted their home in a beautiful natural setting. Theresa Allen drew a cozy house with a red front door and a view of the mountains (figure 3.2). Maria Carrera did the same.

What strikes me about these images and my participants’ discussions of them is that their ideas of a good life were neither entirely material nor entirely immaterial: they were a mix. A home and a car often went with smiling faces, children, or pets. A home could be where one enjoyed nature. In some of the anticonsumerist public discourse, as that from the New Dream center, material consumption (“what we buy”) is opposed to “relationships, service to others, spending time in nature, community building, and personal growth.” For most of my participants, however, these goals are intertwined.³⁸ A comfortable home is the foundation for a happy family. It is where one socializes with friends, as Jake Taylor imagines (“playing in the front-yard sprinklers with my friends and family while drinking a few beers and relaxing in the sun”) and where one can relax and enjoy nature. One can want those things and still care about contributing to their community and society, as Mary Brown does.

That mix of material and immaterial desires is typical in definitions of the “American dream,” such as the one in the Merriam-Webster dictionary: “a happy way of living” that is best illustrated by having a family, a home, and prosperity. In the crowd-sourced Urban Dictionary, one definition of the American dream is “to marry that perfect someone, move into the classical suburban house, with a front yard, a garage & driveway, a white picket fence. You have a dog, a cat, and several kids. On weekends and summers you barbeque in your yard while your kids play on a tire swing and build a tree fort.”³⁹ The author of this definition further states that this is “an image originally created in the late 1950s and 1960s,” adding that it is “innocent by nature but commonly deplored by those who cannot achieve it or don’t agree with capitalism.”⁴⁰ Despite recognizing the contested cultural standing of these desires, this contributor still sees them as “innocent by nature.”

That Urban Dictionary definition I quoted of the American dream home includes having a yard with “a white picket fence.” A white picket fence is what William Gamson and Andre Modigliani call a “condensing symbol”; that is, “a deft metaphor, catchphrase, or other symbolic device” that sums up a cultural model.⁴¹ A house surrounded by a white picket fence is a recurrent trope in descriptions of the American dream one might hear or read, and it was invoked by some of my participants as well. Jake Taylor said, “Pure happiness” for him is “having a wife and kids, little picket fence, all that stuff.” Anastasia Tang explained, “You just want to live the American dream; you want to have the house and a picket fence and maybe the dog and have your car, and that’s it.”

Why a yard with a white picket fence?

Yards with white picket fences are not actually all that common these days. I suspect that is the point. The house with a white picket fence nostalgically evokes the post–World War II era. The cover illustration of Jim Cullen’s book, The American Dream, shows a 1950s-style image of a father coming home to his wife and young son outside a small, 1.5-story home on a yard surrounded by a white picket fence (figure 3.3) That image harkens back to a period when the typical American house was smaller than it is today. In 1950 the most common new American home was 1,000 square feet. In 2020 the median new home was more than double that size at 2,333 square feet on a lot too large to easily enclose with a white picket fence.⁴² Perhaps the white picket fence persists in descriptions of the American dream precisely because it represents the imagined simplicity of an earlier period. For many people, the white picket fence version of American dreams represents “innocent,” appropriate consumption as the setting for a happy (traditional nuclear) family.⁴³ As Jake Taylor put it, “Don’t spend money on stuff you don’t need. […] I think back to like the ‘forties and ‘fifties [1940s and 1950s] and stuff; we had a really simple outlook on life. Like the American dream kind of thing and everything. And that’s like the complete opposite of material kind of wants and needs.”

Unlike Carl, who reveled in the pleasures of making his home “a palace” and of luxurious vacations, many of my participants contrasted what they took to be their own right-sized, white-picket-fence consumer desires with others’ excessive spending. For example, Jim Wade, who had worked in the parts departments of auto dealerships, said, “I believe in modesty.” He explained that if he could afford a home, he would want only a three-bedroom house, not a five-bedroom one; his preferred car was a Ford Focus, not a Mercedes, BMW, or Porsche. He recounted a discussion with some other job seekers at the employment resource center. One man was saying he wished he could have a Porsche, but Jim said he found agreement among others there that a Ford Focus was more practical. Theresa Allen, who had been a waitress, said the “haves” in society “put a lot of emphasis on things, to me, that aren’t that important. A lot, a lot of money, jewelry, cars, trips.” She saw them as driving Jaguars, whereas she preferred a Ford Focus or Toyota Highlander. Theresa criticized the values of those who flaunted their possessions: “I don’t think they think about what’s really important.”

Of course, cultural models of modest, appropriate spending depend on one’s social reference group and on the norms of a historical moment. A Toyota Highlander is a midsize SUV, and Theresa recognized it was “extravagant, but I would keep that for ten or fifteen years,” so she saw it as a good value over the long term. It was certainly less extravagant than a Jaguar. Someone who bought a house in 1950, when the average American home was 1,000 square feet, might consider Jim Wade’s ideal three-bedroom home to be excessive if Jim was imagining the 2,400 square foot home that was the average size at the time we spoke.⁴⁴ An upper-middle-class family’s 3,500 square foot home would be unexceptional in a neighborhood of similar homes, although it would stand out as a risible “McMansion” if plunked down somewhere else.

I noticed that my participants tended to set the bar for excessive consumption above the level at which they lived at present or hoped to live in the future. A standard of living up to their own accustomed or desired level seemed reasonable; above that was just showing off and so was subject to all the critiques of excessive materialism—it is immoral, imprudent, unhealthy, unsustainable, and ineffective in producing happiness—that are conventional US discourses. Jake Taylor, in his twenties, was living with his father, who earned about $55,000 a year. Jake said, “You don’t need all kinds of stupid electronics and iPods and a whole bunch of computers, big screen TV’s, huge stereo systems, nice cars that are all luxurious.” Charles Toppes, who had earned between $150,000 and $200,000 as a factory manager, may have owned such consumer electronics, but he said he and his wife would make fun of other people who “own a big motorhome and they’re pulling a trailer with Ski-doos on it.” Charles and his wife liked recreational vehicles too, but they just rented them for a week rather than try to own “all those toys.” Phoenix Rises, a teacher married to a former broadcast engineer, at one time enjoyed an annual household income of more than $500,000. She used to drive a Mercedes, but she was critical of those who “view the world through being in a Maybach Rolls Royce and all these gold chains and diamonds and gold on your teeth, all this ridiculousness.”

As Juliet Schor has noted, “Surveys show that people are more likely to attribute materialism to others than to themselves.”⁴⁵ The same goes for me, and possibly for you, the reader of this book. Academics, in particular, need to consider that our own ideas about excessive consumption are likely to be shaped by what Meneley insightfully describes as “a new prestigious piety of conspicuous nonconsumption, an aesthetic asceticism desirable to those who can afford … high-quality, durable goods such as sleek marble countertops and hardwood floors, adorned only by distinctive objects.”⁴⁶ Of course, this is hardly “nonconsumption”: it is merely a different style of consumption, a different way of achieving distinction.⁴⁷

Not everyone described their consumption desires as modest. For example, when I asked ReNé McKnight to depict a good life, she first replied, “What America told us—the white picket fence, puppy.” But when I asked if that was really what she wanted, she laughed and said no: she actually wanted multiple homes in different parts of the country and several successful businesses. Paula Jackson’s image of a good life included a New York City penthouse. Elizabeth Montgomery’s idea of a good life included “make enough money to be able to do the things I deem important.” She explained what she meant by “enough money”: “It may be a million versus someone else wants ten million.” Some, like Paula and Elizabeth, had grown accustomed to high household incomes. Others, like ReNé, fervently hoped for such prosperity in the future. A few enjoyed dreaming of possible wealth and the fun it could bring, without investing their hopes in these dreams. As one immigrant day laborer put it when imagining a good life of a house with a pool and traveling around the world, “Dreaming is for free.”

Others would fantasize about being a wealthy celebrity, but then describe celebrities’ unsuccessful marriages, substance abuse problems, and other indications that wealth and fame were no guarantee of happiness and could loosen the moral restraints needed for a good life. For example, when “Ann Lopez” was choosing a pseudonym for this study, she decided to take the name of someone she wanted to be like: “Who would I like to be? Jennifer Lopez? She’s so beautiful. She’s got beauty and money. Of course, that doesn’t always bring happiness, as you can see. She has not been happy with all the different husbands she’s had.” When Jim Wade imagined a good life, he told me, “I dreamed about John Wayne today. I would not like a life like him.” Celebrities have to deal with paparazzi, “and you know what happened to him smoking and drinking; he killed himself off.” The pattern was the same in both cases: expressing a fantasy of being a wealthy celebrity and then disavowing that wish while explaining why lots of money and fame do not add up to a good life.

For most of my participants, the white-picket fence version of a good life is freighted with moral approval, unlike a wealthy lifestyle, which may be desired but repudiated. Despite all the variation in my participants’ specific consumer desires, they could draw on widespread American discourses that criticized excessive consumerism—however “excessive” was defined on their sliding scale. Those discourses condemning excessive consumerism were especially meaningful when my participants were forced to curtail their consumption.

Meanings of Curtailed Consumption

Widespread home ownership no longer looks so innocent. In the housing bubble of 2000–7, which particularly affected California and a few other states, house prices rose rapidly because more and more people felt they had to buy before prices rose even higher. Everyone figured that home values would continue to rise, so buyers could always sell at a profit. Predatory lenders took advantage of the desire for home ownership, enticing low-income buyers with affordable teaser mortgage rates that jumped after a year or two to unaffordable levels. In turn, the commercial lenders were goaded by financiers who sold bundles of these bad mortgages. When homeowners could not pay their mortgages, the resulting foreclosures and consequent steep decline in home values led to a precipitous drop in consumer spending that triggered the Great Recession, which led to many of my participants losing their jobs.⁴⁸

During the Great Recession, family incomes of long-term unemployed workers across the country fell 40 percent or more.⁴⁹ Like other Americans dealing with long-term unemployment at that time, my participants were hard hit. Before they lost their jobs, most of my participants had a household income above the regional median, which was a little over $52,000 at that time (figure 3.4).⁵⁰ After they lost their jobs, their household income fell drastically, with a median decline of $42,500, according to my estimates.⁵¹ Some of the wealthiest participants saw their income decline by more than $100,000 (figure 3.5).

Income losses of that magnitude drastically limited their consumption. Wealthier participants usually had savings and other assets, but some had to downsize to smaller homes and less expensive cars. Many middle-income participants had to start drawing from a retirement account if they had one, limiting their future life prospects to meet their pressing present needs. As I explain in the next chapter, many could no longer afford to pay rent or a mortgage, and they had to move in with a relative. Everyone curtailed travel and sought less expensive forms of entertainment. Even a modest middle-class version of the American dream was out of the reach of most.

The long-term unemployed lost access to credit, as well as income. In 2010 nearly one in ten of the unemployed declared personal bankruptcy, immediately giving them a very low credit score and making it difficult for them to borrow.⁵² Right in line with national statistics, among my participants 9.5 percent had filed for bankruptcy. Before the recession, homeowners had another way of obtaining credit, which was to borrow money secured by the equity in their homes. However, with the bursting of the housing bubble, home prices plummeted, and many owed more than their homes were then worth, which meant they could not obtain a home equity loan. With little to no income and unable to borrow money, it was difficult for them to fulfill their consumption desires without emptying their savings. The only other option was to slash their spending. How did they feel about that?

A few of my participants seemed genuinely uninterested in spending money beyond the minimum they needed to sustain themselves. Their ideas of a good life did not center on their level or style of consumption. For example, after Ginger Thi became sick, she lost her administrative assistant job in the Bay area and became unable to pay her rent. Her friends paid to put her belongings in storage, but Ginger felt uncomfortable about accepting their help with the ongoing storage fees. She decided, “It’s just stuff,” and gave up her storage locker key. She said that for years afterward she grieved for some of her things that she lost—her books, music, pictures, a pair of Calvin Klein suede pumps she could have used for job interviews—so she was not indifferent to their loss, but she still let them go. Ginger drove back to Los Angeles, where she had been raised and where most of her friends lived. When I first met her, she was living in a homeless shelter, but soon afterward she moved to a subsidized apartment building. Ginger obtained a part-time job that paid a pittance, working for the homelessness agency that had helped her. The rest of her time she was busy with spiritual and political activities. She identified as middle class because her family was educated and she was well read and knowledgeable. Ginger was one of the happiest of the people I spoke with. Neither her class identity nor her life satisfaction rested on her minimal consumption.

For Kham Sy Phouphan, an unemployed machine operator and a Buddhist from Laos, all things of this world, including material possessions, are transitory. No possessions belong to you: they are all part of nature. The things you own are no more yours than the scenery you fly over in an airplane. Even “your body not belong to you.” He declared, “I don’t worry nothing in here. It’s car or house, whatever. […] I have money or not, I’m not worried.” His contentment was contagious. I felt very relaxed as we chatted at the picnic table in his carport under a sign that read “Save Water. Drink Beer.”

This apparent indifference regarding discretionary spending was not limited to those with lower incomes. For example, Caroline James had earned more than $250,000 a year as a senior vice president of HR for an entertainment company. In our first two lengthy interviews, she did not mention any spending that she had greatly missed during the year and a half she had been unemployed, beyond her desires to travel a little more or have more money to go out to eat. When I asked her to draw her image of a good life, she drew a raft floating on the water with a little barrel representing the resources she needed to stay afloat, a door for other people to come and go, and a sun representing a “life force” or “inspiration.”

I say “apparent indifference regarding discretionary spending” because it is difficult to know for sure what my participants really thought about having to spend less, as I found out near the end of my second interview with Auguste Salander. Auguste had been a dancer and a personal trainer, done desktop publishing, sold vacuum cleaners, and delivered pizza. When we met, he had been fired from the pizza delivery job for having too many traffic accidents, and he was living with his sister. His sister was trying to get him interested in becoming a medical assistant. Auguste said he understood her motivation: “The idea is to be self-supporting, and to have a good life, and all that sort of stuff,” but “I am not at all interested.” His passion was to start a business that would combine his interests in movement and art. He was also deeply knowledgeable and concerned about national politics. From our first three hours of conversation over two meetings, I would have categorized him as not caring about money. That changed when I asked him to describe what was a good life for him. Among other things, he wrote, “Known as artist, unlimited wealth, prosperity, successful business, travel.” So much for my assumption that he did not care about money.⁵³

The best evidence of my participants’ priorities are the choices they made. Ginger Thi’s choices demonstrate a relatively low level of concern about her standard of living, and a handful of other participants seemed to share her outlook, based on their life choices. However, they were outliers.

Among the rest, I found that the mixed messages about consumption in the United States provided ways for some of my participants to see a good side to their reduced consumption. Others tried to see a good side but remained conflicted. Then there were some for whom there was no silver lining about reduced consumption. That was especially true for my formerly wealthy participants whose identities and social relationships depended on a high standard of living they could no longer afford. Surprisingly, several of the formerly well-off were like Carl Mathews in being fearful of tumbling down to the lowest economic rungs in society and becoming homeless. For immigrants, there were additional complications created by multiple frames of reference, as I explain later in this chapter.

The Fears and Shame of the Formerly Wealthy

If Theresa Allen, whose household income had formerly been between $80,000 and $120,000, could feel shame at having to rent instead of owning a home, it is understandable that those who previously had much higher incomes would feel an even greater threat to their identities and everything they had worked for when long-term unemployment drastically curtailed their consumption.

Phoenix Rises was in severe distress when we first met. She had been a special education teacher; her husband had been a highly paid broadcast engineer. At one time their annual household income had been more than $500,000, and they had owned a nearly 5,000-square-foot home in the hillsides: “Big house, decks, beautiful view of the Rose Bowl and all this stuff, big, huge gourmet kitchen, you know, that stuff.” In the mid-1990s, Phoenix’s husband suffered a traumatic brain injury on the job, and he had to stop working and go on Social Security disability. Phoenix took on consulting jobs to earn more money, but then she too suffered a workplace injury and was unable to teach for more than two years. By the time she had recovered, the Great Recession was underway, and she could not find a job. For a long time, they relied on their savings: “So I’m paying the mortgage out of my savings; I’m paying car notes out of my savings.” By the time they realized they could no longer pay for their house and cars, more than half their savings were gone and they had to move to a small apartment. Phoenix took odd jobs to help pay the bills, but in 2011 she estimated their income as only $25,000 for the year, and she had just under $4,000 left in her bank account. She was highly anxious and had symptoms of clinical depression.

Phoenix tried to look on this setback as a life lesson that would make her a better person: “Sometimes it’s a gratifying feeling to be humbled. Life is humbling me. Yes, I’ve had the Mercedes, the Louis Vuitton, the Rodeo Drive, yeah. But now I get to know what it’s like to eat those soups that are ten for a dollar with way too much salt and stuff like that. I get to know what the 99 cent store is all about.” She said it had helped her empathize with the poor: “I won’t go back to that person that I was. I was arrogant, I felt that I worked hard, ‘I got mine, you can get yours.’ I looked at people that were struggling, like, ‘I don’t know why, all you got to do is get out here and make it happen.’ That’s not me anymore.”

Still, as much as Phoenix tried to find something positive in the life lessons learned from economic adversity, she had not changed how she thought of herself and her place in society. When I asked her to draw groups in society and where she placed herself in those groups, she wrote, “Haves vs. Have nots.” She was frightened of crime from the “have nots” because “their thinking skills are not our thinking skills. Our thinking skills are more grounded from more of a have place.” She also talked a lot about “winning” versus “losing”: “I may be down but I’m not out of the game. I’m going to win. […] If it’s a game of win or lose, if I give up, then I automatically lose.”

Phoenix struggled to hang on to her identity as a “have” and a “winner” in the face of judgments she read into looks and comments from her former friends. She felt that, in urban California, especially, “We don’t want to be associated with those of our friends that have lost their jobs and lost their homes and that are having hard times. It’s like we’re the plague.” She said, “I found in bad times you will really find out who your friends are: slim and none. The first thing that they’re going to think of is, ‘Oh, they’re going to ask me for money.’ ”

The most painful consequence of Phoenix’s economic straits was her younger daughter’s anger and contempt. When Phoenix and her husband had to move to a small apartment, they did not have room for their college-aged daughter, so her boyfriend’s parents offered to let her stay with them. Through tears, Phoenix recollected, “Then, to have her call us losers, she hated us: ‘Why did I have to have you as my parents? I counted on you all my life, and now I can’t count on you’ was probably the worst thing that I’ve ever had to endure.” Phoenix kept herself going by expecting that “I will in the end not only survive, but I’m going to win big.” That is why she chose her pseudonym; she wanted to be the phoenix that rose from the ashes.

The other thing that kept Phoenix going was her spiritual practice. She is a follower of Soka Gakkai Buddhism. In mainstream Buddhism one strives for nonattachment to worldly desires, an outlook exemplified by my Laotian American participant Kham Sy Phouphan. However, just as there are different sects of Christianity, so are there different sects of Buddhism. The Soka Gakkai movement developed from Japanese Nichiren Buddhism, which emphasizes obtaining proof of the teaching’s power by chanting and seeing the results in the here- and-now. In that respect, this form of Buddhism has many parallels to the Christian prosperity gospel.⁵⁵ In the words of Soka Gakkai International’s president, Daisaku Ikeda, “Those who have experienced great suffering must win in life and become happy. If you’re always losing and miserable, then you are not practicing Nichiren Buddhism correctly. You are not following the true path in life.”⁵⁶ As Phoenix explained it, “Buddhism is win or lose.” The key was to discipline her thoughts: “I will lose if I don’t stay in control of my mind. I have to master my mind every single day.” Although Phoenix did not refer to the New Age law of attraction, some of her beliefs were similar. For example, she had considered replenishing her nearly depleted bank account by selling some of her expensive handbags and watches, but a friend scolded her for her bad attitude, saying “ ‘Where is your faith? Where is your head right now, that you think that you’re not gonna win? You’re accepting defeat again.’ ” Phoenix realized her friend was right and that it was necessary to keep those symbols of wealth to bolster her certitude that she would win.

Phoenix had experienced a steep class descent and had come to rest, for a while, in a stable, if much lower, income bracket. She and her husband had an apartment, even if it was small, and they had food, even if it was minimal. Others who formerly had the highest incomes worried they would fall even farther and find themselves on the streets.

Paula Jackson, whom we met earlier mourning the Mercedes and large home she used to have, at one time enjoyed an annual household income of more than $500,000, like Phoenix Rises. Then her husband lost his executive position and had to take less well-paying jobs. In 2011 their household income was at the national median, in the $40,000—$65,000 range. It enabled them to live in a comfortable ranch house, but when I asked Paula about her fears for the future, she said, “I’m afraid of being broke. Not having a home. That’s really scary.” Elizabeth Montgomery, whose household income had also been more than $500,000 a year, likewise spoke of her fear of falling into poverty due to long-term unemployment. Stephen Smith, a former upper-level corporate manager, lost his income and stock options when he was forced out due to his company’s plunge in sales following the 2008 financial crisis. Yet, he and his wife, who then retired from her own high-level corporate job, still had a substantial retirement fund and a large home, and they could afford to spend thousands of dollars renovating their home while he was out of work. He said that nonetheless his wife “is very fearful”:

She’s horrendously fearful that she will be like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. [Putting on his wife’s voice], “I will be a poor destitute individual after having aspired for such greatness and worked my tail off for years and years and years. […] I will end up with nothing at the end of the day. Sitting on the side of a road having somebody care for me as they push me along in a wheelchair next to a drainage culvert because I have no house. I have no money left. No insurance. And I’ll be dead shortly after that.”

This may not have been an accurate representation of her views; Stephen might have exaggerated his wife’s concerns to make fun of them. Still, she was clearly worried about falling into extreme poverty. We also saw the same fears expressed by Carl Mathews, who at one time had an annual household income of more than $200,000 but was very shaken by the sight of a man eating out of the trashcan near a Jack in a Box fast food restaurant. What was so upsetting for Carl was the thought that “I’m one step from that. That could be me eating out of that same trashcan having those same people look at me.” In short, I kept hearing fears of destitution from those who seemed the least likely to fall into it. This is a mystery. Why were some of my formerly well-off participants so anxious?

My first thought was that these fears revealed the underbelly of the American economic system. As I explain in the next chapter, there is a woeful shortage of affordable housing throughout the country. As a result, homelessness is all too common in the United States, especially in southern California. In 2018, Los Angeles County had the second highest number of homeless people in the country.⁵⁷

Still, anxiety about homelessness and other forms of extreme poverty did not loom so large for all my participants. To be sure, not all the highest-income earners expressed such fears, nor were these fears limited to the formerly wealthy; yet they were disproportionately common among those who formerly had annual household incomes of $200,000 or more. Forty percent of my participants from that upper bracket expressed fears of complete destitution, compared to just 11 percent of the rest.⁵⁸ I found it surprising that those who voiced the greatest fears of extreme poverty and homelessness were not only the people at the lower rungs who were realistically in the most danger of experiencing them but also included those who had earned the highest incomes.⁵⁹

When I met Carl for our follow-up interview, he thought it was just obvious that someone who had lived in luxury would hate to become poor. At that point he was no longer so afraid for himself because he was staying with his parents, and he could joke about it. He laughed throughout the following comments:

When you’re poor, it’s easier to accept a better lifestyle. I don’t think a poor person out there wouldn’t mind saying, “Pass the Grey Poupon.” […] It’s easy to adapt from being on the streets to a home with warm water and air conditioning and heat, and the lights, and a nice bed instead of a concrete sidewalk to sleep on. Who couldn’t adapt to that? Now, take that same person who was rich, all their life … let the bottom fall out. It’s hard to adapt the other way, huh? You went from a Sleep Number to a sidewalk. You know what I’m saying? You don’t understand why your world is changing.

That seems just like common sense, but why would not someone who had been accustomed to a middle-class life also have trouble adjusting to living on a sidewalk? I know I would. Why should someone who had been wealthy be especially fearful of this fate? There are several possible explanations.

The fears of some of the formerly well-off may have been realistic because (as Theresa Allen suspected) they were living a lifestyle they could not afford. Phoenix Rises and her husband kept trying to maintain their lifestyle for ten years after he became disabled. Even when Paula Jackson’s husband was earning more than $500,000, her Mercedes and BMW had been leased. Carl Mathews and his wife had to declare bankruptcy after he had been out of work for less than a year, which suggests that he had not put much aside in savings. However, fear of destitution did not seem realistic for Stephen Smith and his wife, who had considerable assets to cushion their loss of income.

Another part of the explanation seems to be how important a high income had been for my wealthy participants’ sense of self and how hard many of them had worked to achieve that status. Tocqueville observed the same pattern in nineteenth-century America: “The poor conceive an eager desire to acquire comfort, and the rich think of the danger of losing it.” He proposed that the possibility of a rapid change of fortunes in the United States at that time made the rich anxious: “Most of these rich men were once poor: they have felt the spur of need; they had long striven against hostile fate, and now that they had won their victory, the passions that accompanied the struggle survived. They seemed drunk on the petty delights it had taken forty years to gain.”⁶⁰

Tocqueville’s insightful description fits Carl Mathews, Elizabeth Montgomery, and Stephen Smith’s wife, all of whom grew up poor and had a strong drive to escape from poverty. Elizabeth was one of six children in a poor Midwestern family that had to abandon their farm and move to town. Carl’s parents had steady jobs, but money was tight. I did not interview Stephen’s wife, but he said that being poor while she was growing up made the thought of moving down the class ladder unbearable.

Their desire to maintain what they had was not just about enjoyment of those possessions but also an attempt to maintain their social status and previous patterns of socializing. Phoenix lost friends when her economic difficulties became uncomfortably obvious. Paula used to treat her friends to spa days, restaurant meals, and parties at her house. That changed when her husband lost his executive job. Now, “since I don’t have my social status—I used to always have nice little get-togethers and parties at the house, wine parties and so on. Since I stopped having those, I don’t have any friends.” Carl Mathews had the same observation. Perhaps the loss of supportive relationships contributed to the fears of some of the formerly wealthy that there would be no one they could turn to in need.

Recalling the man eating from the trashcan at the Jack in the Box restaurant, Carl said, “That could be me eating out of that same trashcan having those same people look at me.” What bothered him was not just that he would have no other source of food but also that he would be seen by others eating from a trashcan. That is why he could not bear the thought of being homeless where people knew him. The anticipated shame of having fallen so low would make someone who had been wealthy especially anxious, whether their fears were realistic or not.

Finally, I was struck by Phoenix’s depiction of society without a middle class—only the haves and the have-nots, the winners and the losers. Her dichotomous image of society was not shared by all those who had been well-off, but if Stephen’s wife, for example, thought of the US class structure in the same way, it would explain why she saw no viable socioeconomic status between a household income of more than $250,000 and living by a drainage culvert.⁶¹

Immigrants’ American Dreams

Another group who had worked to live well were immigrants to the United States. Although some came to the United States as political refugees or for other reasons, many left their homelands because they were drawn by the image of the United States as a land of opportunity where anyone could work hard and achieve a comfortable life. If they migrated for economic mobility, how did they feel when their unemployment or underemployment imperiled their achieving their American dreams?

First, one might ask whether immigrants tend to return to their native country when they face severe economic challenges. Many do. There was considerable return migration even during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the period that shaped the mythology of grateful immigrants sailing into the New York City harbor past the Statue of Liberty to make a better life for themselves in the United States. Alejandro Portes and Rubén Rumbaut estimate that during that period up to half of southern Italians returned home or migrated back and forth depending on labor demands in the United States and in their home region.⁶² Estimates of return migration following the Great Recession in the United States vary considerably, but some research found there were more return migrants than new entrants from 2009 to 2014.⁶³

My research was limited to those currently living in the United States, so I do not know the perspectives of those who chose to return. All my immigrant participants had lived in the United States for at least twenty years, and most had children who had only known life there, making it difficult for them to uproot themselves and return to their country of origin. How do those who remained in the United States feel about long-term unemployment or underemployment? We might expect two possible reactions.

The first possible reaction is that, however difficult things are now, immigrants would feel that they are still better off than they would have been if they had stayed in their country of origin. Migrants have what researchers call a dual frame of reference. As they think about how well-off they are, they are comparing themselves with other people both in their new and old country.⁶⁴ This complicates feelings about whether they are getting ahead. Comparing themselves to those better off in the new host country could cause feelings of relative deprivation, but if they think they would be worse off had they remained in their native country, they could still feel they improved their fortunes. In those situations, we would expect them to feel satisfied with their life choices and hopeful about the future. Another reference group consists of other immigrants in the new host country. If an unemployed immigrant feels they are still better off than other immigrants—especially, other immigrants of the same ethnicity—they may not mind their economic straits as much.⁶⁵

However, another reasonable supposition is just the opposite. Some researchers propose that, throughout the world, international migrants are likely to be much more strongly motivated to get ahead economically than compatriots who do not migrate.⁶⁶ They further propose that even if immigrants were not especially motivated to live well when they migrated, after experiencing discrimination in the receiving society and the difficulties of adapting, migrants then come to place greater weight on material rewards than on intangible satisfactions such as a sense of belonging.⁶⁷ Alternatively, getting ahead economically and being able to afford the same kinds of commodities as others in their new community can bring a greater sense of belonging.⁶⁸ For example, Fred Hernandez said that when he arrived in southern California from Tijuana, Mexico, at age eight, he was teased by the second-generation Latino students who made fun of him for his accented English, for playing barefoot outdoors to preserve his shoes for school, and for his unfashionable clothes. As we talked about why, when he was a truck driver in his twenties, he bought a big house with a pool and a driveway wide enough to park a recreational vehicle, he said his desire “to be accepted” was part of the explanation. If a better life in material terms has heightened importance for most migrants for any of these reasons, then we might expect them to be especially frustrated by economic setbacks.

I found examples of both reactions—of being glad they immigrated, despite their unemployment, and of second-guessing that decision—as well as some reactions that did not fit either pattern. There was no single shared interpretation of their economic difficulties among my sixteen first-generation immigrant participants.

Jorge Paiz, who came from Guatemala, exemplified the first reaction of being glad he immigrated despite his current unemployment. He was the middle of seven children. His mother was a nurse and his father a sometime carpenter. Jorge says he came to the United States as a teenager against his parents’ wishes “because of the poverty.” Jorge never attended college, which he regrets, but he was eager to begin working. He arrived without papers but was able to obtain a green card through the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act. He met and married Isela, who joined us for the interviews to help translate, and they had three children. Isela is a clerk in a local school district. The factory where Jorge found his first job moved to Mexico, but Jorge was immediately hired by a construction company. The work was new to him, but he is a hard worker and a quick study. He got yearly raises; in 2011 he and Isela had a combined income in the $65,000–$80,000 range, which was above the median income for Latinos in California (combining immigrants with nonimmigrants).⁶⁹ He and Isela bought a house in the working-class city of Pomona, and he became a US citizen. However, in early 2012 the construction company decided to hire outside contractors who could do the work more cheaply, and Jorge and many other long-term workers were laid off. When we met, Jorge had been out of work for five months, which was distressing because being a worker is so important to him. Isela was not paid by the school district when schools are closed during the summer, so it was hard to pay their mortgage and car note. Jorge would not find a full-time job until a year later. Still, he was glad he immigrated. He said he is “really grateful to United States” because “it’s like a window that was opened for a lot of us.”

By contrast, Anastasia Tang had started to question her decision to immigrate to the United States. Anastasia’s material circumstances were considerably better than Jorge’s, but she was unhappier about them. Anastasia came from what she describes as a middle-class family in southeast Asia. Her father was a horse trainer who privately traded stocks on the side. He never went to college, so it was important to him that Anastasia do so; he sold some property to pay for his daughter’s college education in California. Anastasia received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees and for many years was an HR manager at a midsize manufacturing company. Her husband was an accounting manager; together they had an income of $180,000 in 2011. Still, they did not own their own home. With their incomes, I suspect they could have easily afforded a home like Jorge and Isela had in Pomona, but Anastasia had set her sights on buying in the upscale community of Irvine in Orange County because of its excellent public schools. As of this writing, the average home value in Irvine is just over a million dollars, double the average home value in Pomona.⁷⁰ After Anastasia had two children and began prioritizing family time over after-hours company events, she was fired. At that time, her husband was on family leave; when his leave ended, he decided he did not want to return to work. All the burden of supporting their household fell on Anastasia, and for three years she was only able to obtain temporary contract jobs.

In both the first wave of interviews in 2012 and when I talked to her again in 2014, Anastasia was feeling sad and stressed. She had not been able to achieve her own goals, and she felt she had let down her parents, as I explain further in the next chapter. In the twenty years since Anastasia first came to the United States, the GDP per capita in her home country had doubled.⁷¹ The money she and her husband had saved was unremarkable compared to what many others back home had. Her husband thought that the fact that they were both immigrants (he is from India) gave them options; they could move back to one of their home countries if they desired. But Anastasia did not feel good about returning home with nothing to show for it: “When people leave their country, sacrifice their family life, their childhood, everything to come here for a better life. Then I go back, I feel I’m going back empty-handed. What did I accomplish?” She has a 401(k) with $300,000–$400,000, but “frankly more people have money like that in [her country] in their savings.” She felt that now the grass is “just as green on both sides”—that is, in both her country of origin and the United States—and that she could not return as a success unless she had a million dollars. Nor did she feel she had achieved what others had in the United States. She said, “My hopes and dreams were to just have whatever you guys [US Americans] have.” As she explained, “You just want to live the American dream; you want to have the house and a picket fence and maybe the dog and have your car, and that’s it. I always wanted to just settle down and be stable. That’s what I pictured here. Just American dream; everybody dreams of that.” Whether Anastasia compared herself to peers who stayed in her home country, to return-migrant success stories, or to other managers and professionals in the United States, she came up short.⁷² Furthermore, after living in the United States for twenty years, Anastasia no longer felt at home in her home country: “Home is where your heart is, right? Where you feel the most comfortable. Now I’m feeling uncomfortable everywhere.”

Alfredo Reyes was unhappy with his family’s decision to immigrate to the United States when he was twenty; as soon as they arrived in the United States, he wanted to return to El Salvador. Even though he became a skilled baker earning about $1,000 a week, he was never able to afford a home in Los Angeles, where his family settled, because housing is extraordinarily expensive there. He had to go into debt to buy a new truck. When Claudia C. asked Alfredo whether the United States is still a land of opportunity, he said no. He felt immigrants had always been exploited. As Alfredo’s example shows, comparisons of material advantage are not based on income alone ($1,000 a week in the United States versus maybe $125 a week in El Salvador).⁷³ A higher income means little if your living expenses are greater, and if you cannot obtain the kind of life you expect or want without incurring tremendous debt.

As mentioned, the immigrant participants’ reactions to the material setbacks created by long-term unemployment were not limited to the possibilities of feeling they were better or worse off. Comparison of lifeways is tricky when one goes from farming one’s own land to selling one’s labor. Luis Segura grew up on a farm in Michoacán, Mexico. When Claudia C. asked him why he migrated, he said it was to earn more money and help his family. After he came to the United States, he worked for landscaping companies, earning, at the most, nine or ten dollars an hour. He was satisfied with that and, when necessary, moved to different cities to find work; yet after returning to Los Angeles in 2010 in the middle of the recession, all he could obtain were occasional jobs as a day laborer. He and his long-time partner had broken up, and he was living with four other men in quarters with only one bedroom. His green card had been revoked for a DUI arrest many years earlier, so he was not eligible for food stamps even if he had been willing to apply for them. As I explain in the next chapter, many immigrants we talked to did not obtain food stamps even if they qualified for them. When he needed food, Luis and his friend Feliciano, who participated in the interviews with Luis, asked local restaurant managers for a meal. Despite these difficult circumstances, Luis said that even when times were hard in the United States, he could earn more money than in his rural area of Mexico.

Yet, he struck a different note when Claudia C. commented, “You were telling me that in Mexico, you were in agriculture with your dad and your family. And times in Mexico were hard when you were growing up.” Luis responded that at least food had not been a problem then: “Well it’s always been hard in Mexico,” but by “planting their corn, their beans, lentils, there is a way to eat. You have your cow to drink milk and all that.” When Luis compared incomes, the United States was much better, but when he compared the availability of food, living on a farm in Mexico was preferable. When Claudia C. asked Luis to picture a good life, he thought of cows grazing.

Another complication is that many immigrants care not only about living well for themselves but also about improving living conditions for their family of origin. Luis Segura was proud that he was able to send money to his parents in Mexico and that they used those remittances to fix the family home: “Above all, I fixed the house […] I would send money and they fixed it up and we got into a better state.” His consumption desires were more for his family of origin than for himself. He may not be living well, but their circumstances improved because of his decision to come to the United States.⁷⁴ He said he had been born poor, and if he died poor, that was okay. By contrast, a large part of Anastasia Tang’s frustration stemmed from the fact that her family had sacrificed to send her to the United States, but she was unable to repay them because their material circumstances were now better than hers.

To be sure, not all my immigrant participants had come to the United States to achieve upward economic mobility. Alfredo Reyes and Kham Sy Phouphan were political refugees, not economic migrants. Alfredo’s family came to the United States in 1980 to escape the civil war in El Salvador. His family had some relatives in the military and others among the FMLN guerillas, so they faced threats from both sides. Kham Sy Phouphan left Laos after the communist Pathet Lao took power in the mid-1970s. Another two of my immigrant participants were women who had not planned to leave their home countries but had fallen in love with a man from the United States.

I earlier described the anti-materialist discourses that helped many of my participants cope with the disappointments of material setbacks. Those discourses could be helpful for immigrants as well. For example, some expressed the conventional discourse that money cannot buy happiness:

MIGUEL VARGAS (unemployed operations manager, immigrant from Mexico): I’ve seen people that, they have money, and they’re considered high class, but they’re not enjoying their life.

MARIA CARRERA (unemployed quality assurance supervisor, immigrant from Ecuador): I think that also there is people who have money, but they don’t have health, or they are not happy. [Goes on to talk about the singer Whitney Houston, who had died shortly before that interview.]

One discourse that I heard from two immigrants, but from none of my native-born participants, is that the poor may not have money but they have God’s favor. In one part of the interview, we asked for reactions to several statements, including “Poverty can be a blessing.” Few of my participants, native born or immigrant, agreed. Some were mystified by it: How could poverty possibly be a blessing? However, Luis Segura and his friend Feliciano Salas, both immigrants from Mexico currently working as day laborers, endorsed it. Feliciano said that God “loves the poor more than the rich. He protects you more, takes care of you more.” Luis chimed in, “We’re going to heaven, and the rich go to hell.”⁷⁵ For them, at least, belief in an ultimate reward in the afterlife helped them deal with their current economic struggles.

Another option available to some immigrants disappointed by their economic setbacks was to blame their family. Often the decision to immigrate is a family, not an individual, decision. Alfredo Reyes said he had never agreed with his family’s decision to move to the United States to escape the civil war in El Salvador. Lucy Guerrero, who came to the United States in the early 1990s after she met and married a US citizen, and her younger sister, La dama de abril, had different stories about why La dama de abril migrated to the United States. Lucy and La dama de abril grew up in Colombia. Their father abandoned the family when they were young, and their mother struggled to support them. Then La dama married and moved to Venezuela. This was in the 1980s, before Hugo Chavez came to power. There she began an exciting and fulfilling life as a cosmetologist at a salon with celebrity clients. Lucy moved to the United States, only to find out that her husband had deceived her about his economic circumstances. He did not have a good job, and his credit rating was ruined from his first marriage. Lucy and her husband were living on charity from their church when she became pregnant, and La dama de abril, who by this time was divorced, and their mother joined Lucy in the United States. The move did not work out well for La dama de abril, who came on a tourist visa and up to 2012 had not been able to regularize her status. Salons in the United States did not recognize her certifications from Venezuela, and La dama lacked both the English competence and the money to get her license. She had studied acting in Venezuela and landed parts in soap operas in the United States, but she could not continue without documentation. She ended up doing what so many Latina immigrants without green cards do—working as a housekeeper and nanny—but even those jobs were scarce during the recession.⁷⁶

At the time of her interview, La dama de abril was miserable that she had not achieved any of her goals. Her frustration, along with Lucy’s guilt about what had happened to her sister, probably explain their divergent explanations for why La dama had come to the United States. According to La dama, “I had a really good life, but my sister decided to come with her husband to [the United States]. […] We are a really small family; then my sister wanted me to come here, too.” Lucy, who was interviewed separately, remembered that differently. She claimed that she did not know why her sister came to the United States because “I didn’t want [her] to come.” However, Lucy admitted that she did not warn her sister about what her life was really like because La dama would not have believed her: “I thought, if I tell her not to come, she will say I am selfish, because the United States, wow! Right? […] One thinks that in the United States, dollars grow in trees.” Claudia C. responded, “Everybody was headed to a paradise that didn’t exist.” Lucy agreed, “To a paradise that didn’t exist.”

Many Dreams Hiding in One

In chapter 2 I argued that a productivist (“Protestant”) work ethic is made up of two distinctly different ethics: a living-to-work ethic and a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic. These ethics motivated different groups of workers, although someone could switch their orientation from one ethic to the other.

Working to live well is different from either of those work ethics. It did not motivate everyone; some of my participants seemed largely indifferent to the form or level of their consumption so long as their basic needs were met. Most of the rest, however, were in general agreement on the essence of “living well”: they worked, in part, to pay for a single-family home, at least one car, and money left over to spend as they wished. These desiderata for a happy life are captured by standard descriptions of “the American dream.” It is materialistic, but the material things are only part of a larger cultural model that usually includes happiness with a life partner, children, or pets.

I also found widely shared (although not uniform) agreement that consumption should not be excessive. This is the “white picket fence” version of the American dream. “Not excessive” means that one should strive for the size of house, vehicle price range, and type of leisure pursuits that are currently typical among the speaker’s peers. Anything beyond what the speaker considers normal spending may be censured as immoral, imprudent, unhealthy, unsustainable, or ineffective because it leads to less happiness, not more. These critical discourses are as American as materialistic images of the American dream: they are the counter-discourses evoked by economic striving among observers alarmed by what they see as its nightmarish side. To be sure, some of those criticisms are less established than others. Only one participant, a young woman in her twenties, raised the relatively new unsustainability critique. All the other criticisms of excessive consumption, however, were common to the point of being clichés, like the saying “Money can’t buy happiness.”

Still, the same conventional anti-materialist discourses had different meanings for my participants. Some found genuine comfort in a shift in their priorities based on the idea that money cannot buy happiness. Others were annoyed by such platitudes, which contradicted their experience that life was less pleasurable without any discretionary income or—as we see in the next chapter—even enough for their basic needs. Still others ambivalently flip-flopped between wanting to live well and telling themselves those things should not matter.

Some of my participants desired a life of luxury or wealth, not just a modest middle-class life. Their ambitions certainly have been encouraged in contemporary American culture, with reinforcement in recent years from some New Age writers and Christian prosperity gospel preachers. Yet, in the end, what struck me most were not categorically different images of a good life but rather that they can be ordered along a sliding scale. Although there was broad agreement that it is justifiable to want “normal” forms of consumption, “normal” covers a wide range once you get into the details. One person’s “modest” consumption looks like an ostentatious display to someone else. Anastasia Tang described her American dream as what “everybody dreams of”: “You just want to live the American dream; you want to have the house and a picket fence and maybe the dog and have your car, and that’s it.” However, only a few of my participants aspired to own a million-dollar home.⁷⁷ The same formulations could cover a wide range of consumer desires. We talk of “the American dream,” as if there is just one. But the American dream is fantasized and lived in different ways.