Strangers in Their Own Land: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

Hochschild sits in the living room of 77-year-old Harold Areno, “a gentle Cajun pipefitter” who takes her through his old photo albums. He finds a photo of himself standing beside the Bayou d’Inde with his parents and nine siblings in 1950. He remembers how his mother used to pull fish straight out of the bayou and he shows Hochschild more photos of the family amidst the bayou’s bald cypress trees and lush moss.

Now, all the bayou’s trees and most of its animals are dead. Harold and Annette live just downstream from the spot where Lee Sherman dumped PPG’s toxic waste and just across the Bayou d’Inde from the place where three generations of Harold’s ancestors cultivated the land, ate the bayou’s wildlife, and even drank its water from time to time. The Arenos were Cajuns—descendants of French settlers that the British expelled from Canada in 1765—and few of them finished school because speaking French was discouraged there.

The Arenos’ son Derwin stops by with fried chicken from Popeyes. He cannot remember a time before the bayou was dangerously polluted; now, he has learned to “smell whether the water and air are good or bad” anywhere he goes. Together, the family catalogues all the animals that have died out from the pollution: bullfrogs, fish, turtles, cows, chickens, goats, sheep, and even hogs (which Harold notes “can stand almost everything”). Hochschild compares the Arenos’ land to “the scene of a slow-motion crime” and she sees “both resignation and defiance” in their stories.

Not only did most of the bayou’s animals die, but nearly everyone in the Areno family also developed cancer. Harold lists 11 cancer cases in his immediate family—he and Annette were the only ones to survive. Hochschild is “at a loss for words.” The family debates what, if anything, is safe to eat from the bayou. Harold refuses to eat anything that lives there, but Derwin trusts his instincts and eats anything that looks, smells, and tastes normal. Annette takes issue with her son’s fearlessness and agrees with her husband that nothing from the bayou is safe to eat. But Harold adds that, at the least, “he’d eat the safe part of the fish”—not the fat and the “dark part,” where the toxins are more concentrated.

Harold explains that the bayou is still getting worse—the Army Corps of Engineers dredged the toxic sludge from the bottom and dumped it on the riverbanks. Seeing that the government had failed the Arenos in this regard, Hochschild them whether they want stricter pollution regulations, and Harold says yes. He and Annette recognize that most Republican candidates “stand for big business” rather than families like theirs, but they still vote Republican because of their Christian faith.

The Arenos’ primary guidance in life has come from faith: “politics hadn’t helped, they felt, and the Bible surely had.” Based on “faith and family values,” they even voted for Louisiana’s Republican governor Bobby Jindal, who accused President Obama of “holding our economy hostage” with environmental protection standards and who cut $1.6 billion from education and social services to give tax breaks to oil companies.

Still, the Arenos vote Republican in order “to place themselves in spiritually-guided hands.” Trust is central to politics for them, especially since the government had so often broken their trust in the past. They feel forced to choose between trustworthy Republicans who will ignore the environment and suspicious Democrats who promise to save it. While “no one they voted for thought [climate change] was real,” the Arenos decided by studying the Bible that global warming “was, indeed, a man-made disaster-in-waiting that called for strong countermeasures.”

Derwin Areno notes that warning signs on the bayou have been taken down and he suggests that the oil industry’s advertising is “trying to make us forget.” Hochschild argues that the Arenos “remembered against” a “larger institutional forgetting” that prevented them from leaving the area, even if they had wanted to. She recalls the etymology behind the word “nostalgia”—the longing to return to a faraway home. The Arenos, conversely, “live at home in an environment no longer there.”

Hochschild also met other “rememberers,” like the nameless Forest Service worker who set up plaques memorializing long-lost cypress forests and activist Paul Ringo, who worked for the nonprofit Riverkeepers and brought crowds to pray for the polluted Sabine river. But most people in southwest Louisiana want the economic progress that oil promises and find it hard to trust secular, liberal outsiders from the government who claim to be saving their environment. Many petrochemical workers see a forced choice between their jobs that pollute and the “magnificent wilderness” they love.

News media reinforces the “basic feeling around town” that nostalgia is a barrier to economic progress. Hochschild sees this as a kind of structural amnesia, a term coined by anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard when he noted that the Sudanese Nuer would forget their female ancestors because they were a patriarchal society. Similarly, in Louisiana, powerful institutions—the government, the media and the oil industry—work together to incentivize systematic collective forgetting of pollution.

Harold suggests that the government tends to “overregulate the bottom because it’s harder to regulate the top”; the government does not merely help people forget past rules violations, but it also enforces those rules unevenly. Oil companies get off easy, but “the little guy” gets punished.

But the Arenos believe that God “remembers how it was” before the pollution and understands what they have endured. They think that the “End Times” are approaching fast—Derwin suggests that God’s cleansing fire is probably the bayou’s best chance of getting cleaned up. While Derwin’s parents hope that humankind will act first, “they’ve already waited long enough and nearly despair of politics.”

On her way out, Hochschild asks the Arenos about a lawsuit they have filed against 22 polluting companies. They have no news about the lawsuit, but it is their only chance at getting enough money to move. Their lawyer suggests that the companies and government are working together to “string these lawsuits out for so long that plaintiffs die before money is due,” and Hochschild is “astonished to learn” that one of the Arenos’ co-plaintiffs is none other than Lee Sherman. As Harold walks Hochschild back to her car, he tells her that “the most important thing” is to think “long-term” and focus on getting into Heaven.