Fourteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

Why do people without shelter sleep on the streets? Wouldn’t it be more comfortable to move indoors, where beds and services are available? For many decades and for many reasons, people experiencing homelessness choose to provide for themselves and maintain their autonomy, over available shelters. Is this an act of resistance? Is it self-preservation? Or are they simply too addicted, too mentally ill, or too criminal to fit in with the rules of shelter life or mainstream society? This paper explores answers to these questions using hobo jungles as a site for people without shelter from the early 1900s to the present. It uses historical and ethnographic data on a jungle encampment in Santa Barbara, CA and examines three specific time periods: the 1940s – 1950s, the 1980s and the early 2000s, using first-hand accounts from jungle residents. The Santa Barbara jungle offers a unique profile of a makeshift community that endures for at least seven decades in a community known simply as “paradise.” The jungle offers a window through which to explore changes in the meaning and experience of living unsheltered for yesterday’s hoboes and today’s homeless people. The questions driving this inquiry are: What defines the culture and hierarchy of the jungle? How do the people living there understand and explain themselves in relationship to other homeless people and to housed society and how are these explanations received? How does their experience of geographic and social mobility change over time to allow different forms of survival and resistance?