About
Trailer Park America: Reimagining Working-Class Communities 2024, Rutgers University Press
"Hormel makes us see and feel what it is like to have no access - or only precarious access - to a home, to clean water, to sanitation and to other basic necessities. But first, she draws on a range of Indigenous scholars to describe the shameful reality of a nation whose wealth has been built on the dispossession and genocide of Indigenous peoples... We hear about the violence of settler colonial and capitalist establishment of private property out of the land, so restricting access to basic goods, like land, housing and water, to those who can pay. We learn about the women, families living with disability and substance abuse that are the first to suffer from unliveable low wages and who are therefore without the means to access the privatized goods, not least housing, necessary to life."
-- Elaine Coburn
editor of More Will Sing Their Way to Freedom: Indigenous Resistance and Resurgence
Media Coverage
Vandal Theory Podcast, "Trailer park transitions," Season 8, Episode 4 (Fall 2024).
"Priced Out: Fear and resistance in Washington mobile home parks," article interview for Cascade PBS documentary aired November 18, 2024.
​
"As housing crisis deepens, local author explores how trailer parks might be ‘last affordable option’” by Lauren Paterson (11/9/2023). Northwest Public Broadcasting.
​
“Nowhere to go: Facing steep rent increases, mobile home residents are organizing,” by Lauren Paterson (4/20/2023). Northwest Public Broadcasting.
​
New Books Network (podcast) with Leontina Hormel, “Trailer Park America: Reimagining Working-Class Communities” (Rutgers UP, 2023).
​​​
Excerpts
"We residents lived in a void of nothingness. But a few months later, we lost our community, and the community lost a steppingstone for individuals, for a step up in life. We endured abandonment and death. But we mattered, and we tried to make the best of what we had."
-- Dawn Tachell
from the "Foreword"
[A]bout two-thirds of the private homeowners in Syringa were women at the time the water crisis took place. Denise, a single mother, for example lamented that she had finally fully paid off her trailer, thanks to running her own taxi service, to only lose it and her business with park closure. Thus, the loss of Syringa was a disaster hitting women who had figured out a way to afford housing as they juggled paid work and the reproductive work at home, often involving looking after neighbors as well as relatives in the family. The perspective of social reproduction provides us a valuable lens for understanding the dysfunctional effects of a society structured around the illusion that our economic lives are somehow separated from our home lives and that our health and happiness can be purchased instead of grown or socially cultivated.
from the chapter "Trailer Park Politics"