Place, History, and Food Apartheid: Reframing How Low-Income Black Mothers Make Ends Meet

Food Access and Availability

Other research centers on food access, specifically proximity to stores. This work has popularized the concept of food deserts (Cummins and Macintyre 2002; Beaulac et al. 2009), which connects food insecurity to difficulty accessing retail food outlets (Dutko et al. 2012). Recent scholarship addressing the relationship between place and food insecurity points to a more nuanced relationship between residence in a food desert and food insecurity, as compared to other predictors (Livings et al. 2023). This research suggests that it is not just proximity to food that matters, but how structural inequalities are infused into places (Janda et al. 2022; O’Connell 2012). That food-insecure households are often located farther from larger grocery stores with more diverse food options, and closer to convenience stores with limited selection, can be understood as a consequence of those structural factors (Thomas 2010).

Well-intentioned discourses framing food insecurity as driven by food deserts fail to address the fundamental causes of food inequalities (Bowen et al. 2021; Sadler et al. 2016). Further, when the problem is framed as an availability issue, proposed policy solutions tend toward interventions that “invite supply-side, corporate food retail development” (Zurawski 2023, 288), implying that expanding retail options will fix problems that emerge from poverty and racism (Kolb 2021). An overreliance on the food desert framing reinforces neoliberal approaches that locate problems in broken neighborhoods and propose market solutions to deep structural problems (Shannon 2014).

Food Insecurity as a Consequence of Structural Racism

Critical scholarship highlights the need to move away from overemphasizing individual risk factors and narrow geographic approaches, and instead focus on the underlying roots behind the unequal patterning of food insecurity (Odoms-Young et al. 2023). This means connecting how residential segregation—particularly as institutionalized through redlining—has constructed lasting barriers to food access for communities of color (Shaker et al. 2023; Linde et al. 2023). In White-majority neighborhoods, food pantries are more plentiful and stock foods typically consumed by White households, whereas Black and Latino/a communities face greater access barriers, and often the food offered is neither wanted nor culturally appropriate (Marriott et al. 2002; Fern et al. 2023, 229). It means paying attention to racial inequalities baked into the transit system that make commuting to quality grocery stores difficult or impossible for many low-income people of color (see also Onyejiaka 2024; Reft et al. 2023). Programs aimed at tackling urban hunger may unwittingly contribute to this by failing to connect racial discrimination and food insecurity (Edin, Shaefer, and Nelson 2023; Kolavalli 2019).

Situating food insecurity within a historical framework highlights how the patterns that structure inequality tend to recur over time. Households headed by people who are Native American, Latino/a, Black, LGBT+, or disabled have higher rates of food insecurity, underscoring how fundamental inequalities—rooted in histories of dispossession, segregation, and systematic exclusion—shape food access (Bowen et al. 2021; Jernigan et al. 2017; Coleman-Jensen 2020; Huang et al. 2010). That Indigenous peoples experience food insecurity at twice the rate of White households (Jernigan et al. 2017) starkly illustrates how these structural injustices continue to manifest in food access disparities.

In this study, we draw on the conceptual framework of “food apartheid,” introduced by food sovereignty activist Karen Washington (Brones 2018), which centers structural racism and highlights the historical, civil, and intentional political processes that have produced food inequalities. Food apartheid is conceptualized as the “unnatural, systemic aspects of uneven food distribution, access, and consumption in a racist economic system” (Mayorga et al. 2022, 241). Examining food insecurity through the lens of food apartheid shifts analyses away from individual decision-making toward the structures in which decisions are made. Contrasting the popular food desert framing, food apartheid stresses the deliberate construction of the unequal food landscapes that low-income people of color must survive, shifting attention from individual behaviors to societal and government responsibility (de Souza 2023). Integral to the conceptualization of food apartheid is its persistence, as processes of disinvestment, segregation, land access, and unequal opportunities that structure contemporary food inequalities reflect similar conditions across recent and extended history (Joyner et al. 2022). This recalls “historical racial regimes” (Baker 2022) that help explain enduring Black poverty.

We also engage the framework of racial capitalism (see also Robinson 1983; Bhattacharyya 2018) which foregrounds the interwoven processes of racialized exploitation and the unequal accumulation of capital, and situates racial inequalities in general, and food inequalities in particular, in this context. Treating food access as mapping multigenerational processes of resource allocation spotlights how disinvestment in communities of color represents a series of choices by governments, corporations, and individuals (Travis 2019; Mayorga et al. 2022). Rather than viewing racial disparities in food access and food security as a depoliticized inequality, a racial capitalism hermeneutic reveals these to be unsurprising results of historic and ongoing processes of racialized resource extraction and exploitation. Food apartheid in this framework underscores the relational nature of deprivation, where some communities are systematically resourced while others are deliberately denied. Ongoing disinvestment perpetuates, normalizes, and shores up food inequalities through seemingly neutral market logics. Approaching food inequalities via racial capitalism highlights how division is manifested in and perpetuated by differentiated resource access, while centering agency in navigating or reinforcing inequalities.

Disinvestment is a mechanism through which the state, corporations, and public entities determine how to allocate resources to certain spaces and withhold resources from others, inflected by racist logics (Mayorga et al. 2022). Disinvestment is reflected in the unequal provision of infrastructure and public services, and the uneven development that sustains racial segregation (Korver-Glenn 2021). As affluent White neighborhoods accumulate resources, low-income Black neighborhoods are systematically deprived of assets, opportunities, and support. Centering disinvestment reveals disadvantage as intentionally constructed and concentrated rather than coincidental.

Thinking through food insecurity as a relational process requires reflecting not just on who is affected, but how impacted groups respond. Focusing on the deep structural roots of food insecurity does not necessitate sidelining communities’ agency to mobilize against this issue. Just as historic processes undergird the persistence of food insecurity in certain places, strategies to resist food insecurity, such as community gardens and urban farms, have developed to have a stronger presence in Black and high-poverty neighborhoods (White 2011). These efforts can be complicated, as evidenced by the phenomenon of White non-residents moving into low-income Black communities to transform neglected land into spaces for food production (see also Cornelissen 2022). Taken together, the struggle to manage, survive, and end food inequalities constitutes an embodied process. For these reasons, we conducted interviews with those most intimately affected by food insecurity to glean their key insights. We situate these findings in the framework of food apartheid under racial capitalism.

We work to engage and extend scholarship that historicizes the processes by which urban disadvantage became localized and intensified in communities of color, advancing the study of racialized urban inequality through a critical lens (Vargas 2022; Dantzler 2021; Korver-Glenn 2021). Policy interventions that lack a critical perspective may fail to consider particular community- and place-based conditions and relations that reproduce food inequalities. Following the logic of Black feminist research epistemologies (Patterson et al. 2016; Nadar 2019; James 2021), we argue that interventions might improve by taking a more critical approach and centering the people most impacted by the racialized construction of food, urban, and economic inequalities.

Texas

Since its inception, Texas has embraced an ethos of small government, with low taxes, limited regulation, economic growth, and independence from federal oversight (Jillson 2015). Although Texas has always offered low benefit levels relative to other states, after PRWORA took effect in 1996, the state used its increased discretion to pursue an especially austere path around welfare delivery. In the three decades since welfare reform, the number of poor families in Texas receiving TANF has declined dramatically, while the rates of poverty and deep poverty have risen, all while Texas has the second-highest gross domestic product in the US (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities 2021). Roughly 14 percent of Texans are poor, and 16 percent of families experience food insecurity, compared to the national averages of 11 percent and 13.5 percent, respectively (Rabbitt et al. 2023; Feeding America, n.d.). Among Black Texans, these rates are elevated, with 20 percent in poverty and 28 percent food insecure (Feeding America, n.d.). In 2021, only 4 percent of Texas’ TANF budget went to basic assistance for families in poverty, ranking last among all states (Shrivastava and Thompson 2022). In contrast, 40 percent of TANF money went to the child welfare system, which has historically operated punitively for families of color (Fong 2020; Fong and McCarthy 2026).

Texas consistently ranks among states offering the lowest levels of cash assistance. For example, the maximum monthly income a single mother of two children can earn and still be eligible for TANF is $188 (Health and Human Services 2025). For the 4 percent of Texas families that receive TANF (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities 2021), the average benefit level comes out to only 15.8 percent of the federal poverty line. Texas ranks fortieth among all states in TANF-to-poverty ratio, the proportion of families in poverty who receive cash assistance (Azevedo-McCaffrey and Aguas 2024). Low-income Black families with children bear the brunt of these policies, as nearly a quarter of Black children live in Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Texas, states that spend the least on poverty reduction, serve the fewest poor families, and offer the most meager benefits (Ife 2020).

It is particularly challenging to secure welfare benefits in Texas in the post-welfare reform era, as Texas is among the states that implement additional discretionary eligibility restrictions for welfare and SNAP receipt, such as asset limits. To be eligible for TANF, a family in Texas can have no more than $1,000 in assets (excluding homeownership); for SNAP, the limit is $5,000. TANF applicants in Texas must report their vehicle’s value. Any estimated equity greater than $15,000 for the first vehicle and $4,660 for a second vehicle is counted toward the asset limit, lowering the chances that a family would qualify for benefits (Ratcliffe et al. 2026). In a driving-centric city like Houston (Davis and Baxandall 2013), these limits are especially onerous. Texas is one of seven states that impose a lifetime ban on TANF for drug-related felony convictions (Thompson and Burnside 2022). In 2015, Texas extended SNAP eligibility to people with completed sentences; however, further felony charges can result in a lifetime ban. Welfare in Texas is extremely difficult to get, easy to lose, and not nearly enough to make ends meet.

Houston

Houston, dubbed by sociologist Joe Feagin (1988) as “The Free Enterprise City,” has always been a business-first city that, like Texas, privileges entrepreneurship and commercial success combined with minimal regulatory oversight. Located in Harris County, Houston is the nation’s fourth largest city, and it features high levels of income inequality patterned by race, and the spatial concentration of poverty within Black and Latino/a neighborhoods in Houston has intensified over time at a rate that outpaces national trends (O’Connell and Howell 2016). In Harris County, 20 percent of Black residents live in neighborhoods with a poverty rate greater than 30 percent (Understanding Houston 2021). Although the practice of writing racially restrictive covenants into property deeds was prohibited after the Fair Housing Act of 1968 was passed, residential segregation persists in Houston. One way this happens is through local deed restrictions or restrictive covenants—clauses added to property deeds that are designed to “preserve the residential character” of a neighborhood (City of Houston 2024) by excluding or limiting certain housing types and new developments (Rumbach et al. 2022). While explicit restrictive racial covenants are prohibited, deed restrictions have been effective in allowing neighborhoods with high homeownership rates, which are largely White and affluent, to remain as such (Welsh 2018). Further, organized community resistance to placing low-income housing in racially diverse and higher-income neighborhoods has scuttled multiple efforts at integration (Henneberger 2017). Houston remains one of the most segregated cities in the US (Ponton 2024).

Transportation infrastructure in Houston can be understood through the lens of extraction and exclusion. The earliest railroads in the city were constructed to facilitate the cotton trade, with the steamboat connecting Houston to nearby Galveston operated by Houston merchants who themselves owned enslaved people and profited from the trade (Muir 1960). Through the twentieth century, Houston benefited economically from the oil industry and enthusiastically embraced automobiles, a trend that continued as multiple efforts to expand public transportation in the city failed, while highway development boomed (Shelton 2014). Highway construction in Houston, alongside other infrastructural projects like railroad tracks and waterways, has produced spatial barriers that reinforce experiences of racial and ethnic residential segregation (Roberto and Korver-Glenn 2017). This reflects the dual logic of dispossession and accumulation, as these projects represent an asset to some, such as car users moving between desirable areas of the city while skipping over others, but they also restrict possibilities for other neighborhoods. Although this dynamic is particularly acute in Houston, examples abound across US cities (Reft et al. 2023). As one former Houston transit board member summarized, “racism is embedded in nearly every planning decision” as transportation politics operate to “enable and implement racism” (Spieler 2020).

While public transportation has improved for residents in areas served by the Metro Light Rail system established in 2004, those who rely on the bus system face daily transportation challenges. Houston’s extreme heat and lack of sidewalks also make navigating the city on foot dangerous, if not impossible, especially with children in tow. Thus, commuting to grocery stores can be “nearly impossible” for residents of Houston’s lower-income and Black neighborhoods (Onyejiaka 2024, 75). Most respondents in our study lacked personal cars, a barrier to accessing pandemic food distributions when schools closed (Fern et al. 2023).

Houston has an elevated poverty rate compared to the state average (figure 2), with 25 percent of all children and 32.6 percent of Black children living in poverty per 2019 figures (Understanding Houston 2021). Rates in Texas were much higher than the national poverty rate of 10.5 percent in the same year, underscoring the concentration of disadvantage in the state (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2021). An estimated 724,750 Houstonians, 16 percent of the greater Houston area, are food insecure (Ojeda 2020). While 10 percent of White people in Harris County are food insecure, food insecurity among Black people is three times higher at 31 percent; similarly, across Texas, food insecurity among White people is 10 percent, while food insecurity among Black people is 28 percent (Feeding America, n.d.).

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Figure 2.

Low-Income and Food-Insecure Areas in Houston

Source: USDA ERS Food Access Research Atlas 2019.

Note: Low-income census tracts in Houston where a significant share of residents live more than one mile from the nearest supermarket.

Sunnyside

Sunnyside is one of Houston’s oldest Black communities, founded during the Jim Crow era. It is one of the city’s most impoverished neighborhoods, with over half of children experiencing poverty and a median household income of $27,954, far below the city median of $52,338 (City of Houston 2021). Poorly resourced schools, widespread health concerns, and high rates of crime and criminalization are persistent challenges for residents (Moore et al. 2019). Despite originating as a segregated neighborhood for homeowners, outmigration and decades of disinvestment have left vacant lots and a proliferation of apartment units (Harden 2017).

Although Houston has no official zoning policies, historic decisions about the allocation of resources have reflected the influence of a cadre of “nearly all White and male elected officials, professional planners, and private developers” who held “immense power” during the city’s development (Shelton 2014, ix). Between the 1920s and 1970s, officials chose to site all five of the city-owned municipal landfills in Black communities, including Sunnyside (Bullard 1993, 458). Simultaneously, while supportive infrastructure, such as sidewalks and proper drainage, was withheld, Sunnyside became a “dumping ground” for a range of undesirable services, such as salvage yards, motor repair, and recycling facilities, with the cumulative effect of driving down property values and emitting pollutants (Bullard 1993, 460). The community’s history of neglect and mistreatment by the government (Ponton 2024) is emblematic of processes in southern cities where the implementation of racial-economic boundaries has persisted despite the legal prohibition of segregation (Shelton 2014). In Houston, this reflects the concerted efforts of oil, lumber, and cotton traders, alongside bankers and real estate developers (Shelton 2014).

The harmful effects of segregation are reflected in Sunnyside’s poor infrastructure (Korver-Glenn 2021), ranging from inadequate flood prevention measures to a lack of paved sidewalks and insufficient public transport. Schools are under-resourced, and only 10 percent of adults have a bachelor’s degree or higher compared to 32 percent in Houston (City of Houston 2020). Life expectancy in Sunnyside is nine years shorter than the Houston average (City of Houston 2020). Sunnyside also has many assets and strengths, including a strong network of churches, civic clubs, and community leaders (Hughes 2019). Its motto is “Sunnyside Pride,” and despite numerous disadvantages, residents resist blanket negative characterizations, which focus on Sunnyside’s deficits without acknowledging its history (Smith 2020).

Data Collection

We designed this study to explore the parenting, food, and health experiences of mothers living in Sunnyside, a historically Black low-income Houston community. We took a purposive, nonrandom approach to sampling. We recruited women caring for at least one child aged nine or younger who were based in Sunnyside using several methods: four respondents were referred to our study by a family nurse practitioner, eight were recruited via Facebook advertising, five were referred by other study participants, and twenty-seven contacted our research team after seeing a flyer in the neighborhood. We advertised the project as an interview study on how mothers living in Sunnyside manage to feed their families on a limited budget, including where to shop for groceries, how to save money on food, and how to navigate various forms of food assistance. We set our inclusion criteria at four times the federal poverty level (FPL), as food insecurity frequently impacts households well above this point (Gundersen et al. 2011). The first and third authors conducted interviews from April 2020 to June 2021. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, all interviews were carried out remotely via video chat (n = 41) and telephone (n = 3). Interviews were semi-structured and focused on the daily work of managing household food and economic resources, family life, and parenting (see online appendix).¹ In this paper, we attend to respondents’ reflections on their experiences in Sunnyside over time, rather than the specific COVID-19 context, which we explore more directly in other work (see Fern et al. 2023). We integrated the United States Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service (USDA/ERS) 6-Item Food Security Survey Module alongside questions addressing respondents’ health experiences, and a structured module to collect sociodemographic information. Interviews lasted an average of one hour. Respondents received $40. The study was approved by Rice University’s Institutional Review Board.

Data Analysis

Data collection and analysis were conducted simultaneously, with coding starting shortly after interviews (Small 2009). Authors open-coded verbatim transcripts independently to produce a list of initial codes. Authors then discussed and developed a common list of eighty-four codes, which were used to iteratively code and recode transcripts, following Nicole M. Deterding and Mary C. Waters’ (2021) “flexible coding” framework. Our codebook captures household and family dynamics; hardship at the personal and neighborhood level; food preparation, acquisition, and management; health experiences, descriptions of care; and engagement with social support. We coded interviews separately and met routinely to align our interpretation of the codebook and applied codes. We produced code reports using Atlas.ti to better understand feeding, cooking, shopping, food resource management, and shared experiences among our respondents. We produced case counts concerning formal and informal support use, household characteristics, and the relative prevalence of food insecurity. Throughout, we wrote memos to trace and interpret emergent themes (Emerson et al. 2011). Authors developed a shared familiarity with participants’ stories through this joint coding, memoing, and discussion practice. Findings include verbatim quotations from respondents to illustrate our key themes, using pseudonyms.

Respondent Characteristics

Of our total sample of forty-four, eight women were grandmothers and thirty-six were mothers (table 1). Respondents were on average forty-one years old and caring for four children. Sixty-eight percent were receiving SNAP and two reported receiving TANF. Respondents had a median income at 59 percent of the federal poverty line, indicative of the depth of poverty both among our interviewees and across the neighborhood. The median household income was $20,000. We did not screen for single mothers; however, our sample includes only ten married respondents. Roughly two-thirds of respondents were assessed as food insecure using the USDA/ERS 6-Item Food Security Survey Module, with one-third reporting very low food security. However, there were several cases where respondents described experiencing food insecurity and hunger but did not self-report being food insecure when we used the closed-ended module. Therefore, we suspect that the module undercounts actual experiences of food insecurity. The ten married mothers’ median income was roughly double that of the rest of our sample ($36,500 versus $18,000), although they were only slightly above the federal poverty line (married median = 103 percent; single median = 51 percent). Among married respondents five were food insecure and five were food secure, with two experiencing severe food insecurity. Table 1 details respondent characteristics.

Finding Food in a “Food Desert”

The most obvious impediment to maintaining food security is not having enough money to buy enough quality food. But accessing quality food involves more than money. Sunnyside mothers stressed the lack of options, as the single grocery store, Fiesta, is overpriced and undesirable. Terri explained, “I can’t deal with it, you go into Fiesta and you have two bags and it’s $50 for two bags of items, that makes no sense to me, so that’s why, the only store they have over here is that durn Fiesta and it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s horrible, it’s extremely high, it’s extremely busy, it’s just, it’s, it’s a disaster.”

She continued, “And they do it on purpose, they put the Fiestas in the ‘hood and they put it to areas where they know the people, you know, get food stamps and all of that and then they jack the prices up on the food.” Here, Terri offers a critique that mirrors scholarship revealing the intentional differential siting of grocery stores in affluent neighborhoods versus low-income areas (Kolb 2021, Deener 2017). Sharon put it simply, “Fiesta’s a grocery store that no longer needs to exist.” Aside from Fiesta, there are numerous dollar stores in the area and a few small convenience stores, which were useful but overpriced.

To maximize their food dollars, mothers traveled to multiple grocery stores outside of Sunnyside to find the best deals on groceries. That often meant going to one store for meat, another for produce, and a third for shelf-stable items. With only two bus lines from Sunnyside and no light rail, a full day of shopping was often required, according to Houston’s METRO route information. Mothers like Anita traveled to more affluent, predominantly White areas that had “real grocery store[s].” Several mothers specified the Pearland suburb as their preferred destination, even though it took forty-five minutes during drive time and no public transportation routes served the area. Pearland is a majority-White suburb with a median household income roughly four times that of Sunnyside.

Latonya termed Sunnyside a “food desert.” She used to shop at an HEB store not far from Sunnyside, but it closed years ago. She said, “And so once that closed, that forced me to go all the way to Pearland.” Kiesha also preferred Pearland, saying, “The grocery stores that are typically over here in Sunnyside, they are overpriced. And the produce isn’t always great. … So it’s like in this … in our community, they’re not taking care of the foods that is already inside the stores. Or they’re expired … so I want better quality for my family, so I go where I think there is better quality.”

Sharon explained that Sunnyside was a “food desert … we don’t have a lot of options in Sunnyside, so we go out to Pearland to, um, go get groceries.” She continued, “If I could be quite honest, the presentation of those stores [in Sunnyside] are poor. It’s not very inviting. The environment where the stores sit is very dangerous for kids, because high crime and things of that nature. So I just refuse to go to those stores, and I’ll go to Pearland.”

For Sandra and Monique, Pearland was an attractive destination due to concerns about safety in Sunnyside, where violent crime occurs at a rate over four times that of the city as a whole. Monique recounted a 2021 incident where a car rammed into the store (KHOU11 2021), saying, “The violence, it’s always something goin’ on [around Fiesta].” In Pearland, she felt safer: “I just feel like I’m more protected, I’m safer out there, I could do my shoppin’ and not have to always look over my shoulder.” But Monique lamented this dynamic, saying, “And I hate that because, you know, Fiesta is roughly seven minutes away from [a large low-income apartment complex], and [a small corner store] is like right down the street from me, but I choose to go twenty minutes away, not just for the value but for the safety.”

While groceries in other neighborhoods were cheaper, taking long trips incurred other costs, including gas. When asked what her top three worries were, Belinda said, “I guess transportation, gas wise.” While many people in Sunnyside don’t have reliable access to their own vehicle, for some the problem wasn’t that they didn’t have a car; rather, they could not keep up with car payments, eventually having to sell or face repossession. Staggering bill payments was a common strategy to keep enough cash for food available (Heflin et al. 2011), and mothers reported that their car note was often the first they would let lapse if they did not have enough money for food.

Car insurance was another bill that mothers described foregoing, as Michelle explained, “Once the rent was paid, lights paid, water … gas … we really didn’t have anything hardly. And I had to neglect getting insurance for my car because we just couldn’t afford it.” Driving without insurance presented another set of risks. Although Michelle stressed that, “I … pretty much I’m not gonna be you know too dangerously goin’ … drivin’ crazy and anything. I’m just goin’ right here and back,” driving without insurance could result in a ticket or worse in the case of an accident. Given the overpolicing and surveillance in neighborhoods like Sunnyside (Braga et al. 2019), the risks of being stopped by law enforcement are elevated. For those without access to a reliable car, the next best option was getting a ride; however, this exchange was sometimes contingent on mothers paying for the gas.

If these options were unavailable, mothers took public transportation. But due to the limited public transportation serving Sunnyside, this meant taking multiple buses. With children in tow, these trips were lengthy and stressful. When asked what would help her manage food, Sharon said, “Shit, it’s just really about transportation. You can ask anybody that when it boils down to it, it’s about transportation.” Describing her “bus catching days” when she didn’t have access to a car, Quiana explained, “I dunno, kids are a bit much and like mine, they, they like, they do a lot, you know, like so I think by the end of the trip, like I be, be more angry than anything from yellin.’” Anyone who has shopped with children on a budget can relate—the cognitive load required to maximize savings, and Quiana’s frustration, is palpable.

Taking a Wider View: From Food Desert to Food Apartheid

The challenges we describe that made accessing affordable grocery stores taxing and at times impossible are often framed in the literature as individual issues or choices. For example, the choice to forego car payments results in repossession, and the choice to let insurance lapse renders one’s vehicle unusable. However, we argue that this approach misses the forest for the trees. We instead draw attention to the broader racialized spatial structures in which these [constrained] choices are made (O’Connell 2021). In what follows, we place mothers’ narratives in a broader context, tracing how historical and contemporary processes in Sunnyside make food apartheid a useful way to understand the conditions mothers encounter in Sunnyside. This framing is explicitly relational, highlighting inequalities between people’s food experiences in different places, even within the same city.

Sunnyside is not unique among historically Black neighborhoods. Rather, we can trace patterns of dispossession and economic disinvestment across six Houston neighborhoods that share a marginalized position relative to other Houston areas (Longoria and Rogers 2008)—reflecting the logics of racial capitalism that recur across cities (Dantzler 2021). Forming a horseshoe shape around the city center, these areas were developed when racial segregation was legally enforced and Ku Klux Klan activity was rampant (Steptoe 2016). Sunnyside and similar neighborhoods offered a refuge from racial violence in Houston during and after the Jim Crow era (Ponton 2024), and became what some have termed self-contained communities, with thriving Black-owned businesses, including two grocery stores (Longoria and Rogers 2015). As historian Tyiana Steptoe (2016) explains, “Black Houstonians strove to create autonomous neighborhoods in order to forge a spatial—and psychological—distance between themselves and the White power structure” (23). Over time, that distance calcified into isolation. As suburban development expanded, property developers avoided these areas and White affluent Houstonians moved further out to suburbs including Pearland. Sunnyside was then leapfrogged again when efforts began to redevelop the city center (Longoria and Rogers 2008, 19). The result is that Sunnyside can feel isolated from the city despite being a fifteen-minute drive from downtown.

One salient feature of the chronic disinvestment in Sunnyside that impacts food provision is its disconnection from public transportation infrastructure. Transport authorities have designated Sunnyside and other majority Black Houston neighborhoods as the least serviced areas for transportation across the city (Goodwin et al. 2014, 11). Taking the bus to the grocery store with children in tow is burdensome enough. But taking two or three buses—lugging bags full of groceries while wading through sweltering Texas heat and humidity—is grueling. Of the three METRO light rail lines, none service Sunnyside. This is a consequence of long-term economic disinvestment under racial capitalism, in which a historically Black neighborhood—designated through redlining as undesirable because of its Black population—is systematically neglected and therefore continues to be seen over time as a “bad” site for investment (Mayorga et al. 2022). The choice to exclude Sunnyside from transit routes then becomes logical, since it becomes harder to make the case that Sunnyside is a desirable destination. Instead, the image most portrayed in local media is that of a crime-ridden and undesirable “ghetto,” with headlines emphasizing violence and danger (ABC13 2016; Stanton 2013).

Preparing Food in Inadequate Housing

Once they had groceries, mothers were experts in stretching them to last. One common set of strategies was to buy groceries in bulk, prepare meals from scratch, and freeze leftovers so they could be eaten across multiple days. But even for those who were able to procure groceries in a cost-effective way, given the aforementioned challenges, the next steps of food storage and preparation presented additional hurdles, often due to inadequate housing and kitchen conditions.

Chief among these challenges was not having enough space to store groceries, especially in bulk. When we interviewed Quiana, she was taking care of her three children and her younger brother. She showed her kitchen and said what would help her most was space, both in the kitchen and specifically the freezer. She explained, “Like my refrigerator too small, like we can’t have no ice.” Because of that, when Quiana’s friend offered to bring her frozen food from a pantry, she responded, “I be like, ‘No, don’t call me with the stuff … it won’t fit in the freezer.’” Like Quiana, many mothers lived in low-income housing, where kitchen spaces are notoriously small and minimally equipped. Belinda remarked that her refrigerator was so small that it could not hold her groceries, so she had to tape it closed.

Space was tighter for families who were doubled up, or sharing living space with extended family members or friends. Doubling up is common nationwide, with Black families more likely to temporarily live with other kin than White families (Harvey et al. 2021). Mothers framed the decision to take in others in need as a given, as Della explained. Her brother-in-law moved into her house after losing his job, and it strained her family’s already slim food resources. But as she put it, “We adjusted, you know … to the food, to the space. We’re like we’re in this together … we’re a family.” This sentiment, and doubling up, were common among our interviewees (Harvey 2026, this issue) and exacerbated challenges around food provision (Bowen et al. 2019). Although it was helpful to have extra hands, it meant more mouths to feed, more groceries, and more space to store them.

Further, it is common for only some household members to be included on a household’s SNAP case. In part, this is because each person’s income is included in the household’s eligibility determination, such that additional income lowers the household benefit amount. However, it is also a function of residential instability. When a family unexpectedly takes in a recently evicted relative, provides a short-term home for someone released from jail, or offers temporary shelter for a neighbor’s child in need, they may not report the change in household structure. Even if they do, the slow pace of welfare bureaucracy (Seefeldt 2017) means that, in any month, mothers might be receiving benefit amounts that did not match the actual number of meals for which they were responsible. Monique received SNAP for herself and her eleven-year-old, but she was temporarily living with her boyfriend and his mother. Monique also prepared meals for her adult children. Her benefits weren’t enough, “I’m on food stamps now, so with me bein’ on food stamps, um, I could only feed who’s on my case, so I can’t go and buy groceries for the whole house and then, you know, feed everybody on my food stamps ‘cause it only covers enough for two people, so with that bein’ said, I can’t just go buy an abundance of groceries and just feed e’erbody off of it.” Still, the national average food stamp benefit per person per meal is $2.07 per meal, so even those receiving full benefits struggled (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities 2025). As Kathryn Edin and colleagues (2013) show, many families exhaust their SNAP benefits days or weeks before their benefits renew.

When asked what would make it easier to feed their families, many responded that more storage space, especially a deep freezer, would help. Alicia described going to a Houston Food Bank food distribution site where they distributed large frozen pizzas. She laughed as she recounted, “I didn’t know what to do with the pizza, because it couldn’t fit in my fridge.” In contrast, Sharon, one of ten food secure mothers, showed us her deep freezer and a chicken defrosting in her sink. She explained that the additional freezer let her save by purchasing a whole chicken rather than buying the parts separately. Sharon was renting a house and had a good relationship with her landlord; however, for mothers living in some subsidized apartments, deep freezers and second refrigerators were prohibited. As Belinda explained, this was because utilities were included in the rent and freezers incur extra costs. While she noted that some tenants would hide their freezers under a tablecloth when management inspected, for her, the risk of eviction was too high: “In low-income [apartments] they’ll put you out for that.”

Although subsidized housing through the Housing Choice Voucher Program and project-based Section 8 housing are federal programs, local housing authorities and the property managers who rent subsidized units have discretion in administering these benefits (McCarty et al. 2014). For example, even though federal guidelines do not include a credit check, property managers or landlords renting units to tenants with subsidies may choose to add that requirement. They can also enforce more stringent eligibility requirements around drug use and crime (Aussenberg et al. 2016). Or, in this case, they can choose to prohibit appliances that would add to the cost of utilities. The result is that a tenant in one housing complex in Sunnyside might encounter a different set of rules and different enforcement mechanisms than someone who lives across the street in a different complex. Further, apartment complexes often contain some units whose rents are subsidized through project-based Section 8 and others that are funded through tax credit programs (for example, the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit), meaning that different oversight mechanisms apply. As Heather K. Way and Carol E. Fraser (2018) note, this complexity is mirrored in Houston’s patchwork system of regulatory bodies governing housing issues, which contributes to lax oversight and long-term maintenance problems in apartment complexes in Sunnyside.

In low-income housing that did not include utilities in the rental subsidy, mothers faced different choices and constraints. One strategy mothers used to meet their food needs was to prioritize certain bills. A common refrain was that rent, utilities, and gas had to be paid, but other monthly bills like internet, phone, and TV service were optional. Candace explained her rationale for prioritizing bills for items that could be repossessed or services that could be disconnected, “If you couldn’t come get it, and you couldn’t come pick it up, it didn’t get paid … if they can’t come get it and they can’t turn it off, that’s the ones you don’t pay.” But regularly keeping up with these key bills wasn’t always possible, and the consequences for food provision could be severe. Quiana described a time when her baby’s father was in jail, leaving her without monetary support. Her younger brother was living with her, and although she was working at a restaurant where she could eat some meals, she wasn’t able to pay the gas bill, leaving her without a working stove or oven. She explained, “It’s not that we didn’t have food, it’s that we had a limited way of cookin’ food … we had lights and water, but we didn’t have gas, so it was like cookin’ in this one … electric skillet thingie.” Lori, another respondent, said her neighbor had the same experience, making it difficult for her to use items from food pantries that needed to be cooked, “She can’t heat it or something like that because she also doesn’t have gas or heat, you know, in her house.” These examples highlight how multiple competing demands for resources that may appear unrelated to food, such as utility bills, end up shaping food provision.

Taking a Wider View: Housing Inequalities Writ Large

The preceding section illustrates how housing conditions constrain mothers’ ability to store and prepare foods in a cost-effective way. We now place mothers’ individual experiences in the wider context of housing in Houston. First, we note that the primary option for low-income families in Sunnyside is subsidized apartment housing, much of which is in disrepair (Way and Fraser 2018). There are nine project-based Section 8 developments in Sunnyside (Texas Low Income Housing Information Service 2017), and despite the neighborhood representing only a fraction of the population of Houston, Sunnyside also has the third highest concentration of Section 8 voucher holders. This clustering of what is often substandard subsidized housing is not limited to Sunnyside. Researchers found that apartments in poor physical condition and those with high crime are concentrated in Black and Latino/a neighborhoods in Houston (Way and Fraser 2018). Only 4 percent of Section 8 voucher holders live in areas designated as “high opportunity,” meaning they have quality schools, high levels of employment, and transportation infrastructure (Elliott and Blakinger 2016). One reason this pattern persists is that as of 2015, Texas law explicitly protects landlords who refuse to rent to voucher holders because they are voucher holders. As Edgar Walters and Neena Satija (2018) note, this legislation “essentially legalized a long-standing practice among landlords that blocked voucher-holders, who are overwhelmingly Black and Latino/a, from moving to better neighborhoods.” Another factor inhibiting voucher-holders from moving to the highest opportunity areas is that rents in these areas exceed the Housing Choice Voucher Program’s limit for maximum rent, set at 40 percent of the average fair market unit rent for a metro area (Houston Housing Authority 2025). Edgar Walters and Neena Satija (2018), writing for the Texas Tribune, reported that most families with vouchers who are able to find a home to rent end up living in high-poverty areas, and 90 percent of this group are Black.

Although housing advocacy groups in Houston have long fought for the dispersal of subsidized housing into lower poverty neighborhoods, they have met with powerful resistance. In 1982, the Houston Housing Authority (HHA) approved the development of two low-income housing complexes in Westbury, which at the time was an 89 percent White neighborhood (Shelton 2014); however, after community pushback the plan was scrapped. More recently, in 2016, developers proposed to build a mixed-income housing complex in the Galleria area, an affluent, majority-White neighborhood. Then-mayor Sylvester Turner rejected the proposal and was then found by US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to be in violation of the Civil Rights Act because the decision stemmed from “racially motivated opposition” from existing Galleria residents (Henneberger 2017). HUD officials argued that the city “block[ed] and deter[red] affordable housing proposals in integrated neighborhoods,” adding that the project would have been the city’s first subsidized development in a low-poverty, low-crime neighborhood with high-quality schools and employment opportunities (US Department of Housing and Urban Development 2017). The HUD report noted that 91 percent of the proposed developments considered by the Houston City Council for housing tax credits were located in areas that are majority occupied by people of color (US Department of Housing and Urban Development 2017).

Exacerbating the issue is that there are simply far fewer low-income housing units available in Houston than there are families seeking subsidized housing. This pattern obtains across major US cities; however, in Houston it is especially acute: among the fifty largest metropolitan areas, Houston has the third fewest affordable and available housing units for those with extremely low incomes, with only 16 units available for every 100 renters (National Low Income Housing Coalition 2024a). The waiting list for public housing contains tens of thousands of names and for years at a time, it remains closed so no new applicants can join. It was closed from 2012 to 2016, opening for a two-week period in which 68,831 people applied, but only 30,000 people were added. It was opened again for one month in January 2023, when an additional 30,000 joined the waiting list (Houston Housing Authority 2023). The Section 8 waiting list remains closed at the time of this writing.

One consequence of the housing dynamic in Houston is that low-income renters, many of whom have been on the waitlist for subsidized housing for years, end up renting units in market rate low-income housing that is not administered through the HHA. Landlords offer below-market rent without the eligibility restrictions required by HUD, which makes them attractive—and attainable—for those locked out of the public housing system. Per HUD rules, an eviction from subsidized housing bars a tenant from being eligible for public housing benefits for five years. In addition, people with certain criminal convictions are barred from subsidized housing altogether (Aussenberg et al. 2016). However, these apartment complexes are among the worst in Houston in terms of upkeep and crime. In 2015, one such complex in Sunnyside was finally shuttered by the city after months of tenants’ complaints of open sewage and no electricity. Another apartment in Sunnyside was the site of 284 major crime reports, “an average of one major crime every 1.3 days” (Way and Fraser 2018, iii).

By widening our lens, we see that the housing hardships mothers in our study experienced—hardships that made food provision a constant challenge—are symptomatic of structural forces that go far beyond the home. Mothers like those in our study have limited options for where to live, and few resources to resist when their housing conditions are inadequate. Although landlords should be incentivized to keep tenants in subsidized units because it means guaranteed rent payments, given the demand for low-income housing in Houston, they may instead leverage that dynamic to avoid maintenance costs and quash tenant resistance. The fear of eviction is powerful, and mothers in Sunnyside know the consequences for their families. Prior research has shown that this fear informs mothers’ decisions around when to report housing problems, including broken kitchen appliances (Hughes 2021).

Intergenerational Poverty and Resistance

For many of the mothers we interviewed, poverty is an intergenerational experience. This point came up frequently, particularly in cases where respondents’ mothers and grandmothers remained active participants in the collective labor of food provision. The ethos of sharing resources, strategies, and knowledge horizontally—with friends and neighbors—was salient among mothers in Sunnyside (Hill et al. 2024). And mothers credited their (mostly women) elders with teaching them how to provide food in the context of extremely limited resources, highlighting the importance of multigenerational ties. Acknowledging that multiple generations have had to develop strategies to meet their families’ food needs under place-based constraints is critical. After delineating how mothers draw on their own family histories to make ends meet in the present day, we engage the racial capitalism framework to connect these experiences to the ways that Sunnyside has been shaped over time, paying attention to its founding as a segregated community during the Jim Crow era.

Ethic of Reciprocity

A key strategy mothers used when they worried about running out of food was drawing on support from family, friends, and neighbors. Quiana turned to friends and family when she couldn’t cook in her own apartment because of the unpaid gas bill, which had led to her gas being shut off. Her children’s fathers helped out when they could, but typically only enough to cover a meal, saying, “I can call they daddy, uh, my two-year-old and my eight-year-old daddy and if I tell them that they don’t have no food or whatever, he’ll send, he’ll send enough to make a meal.” Quiana also had a close relationship with two of her children’s fathers’ partners, including one who shared groceries, commenting, “She always givin’ me food too, she be callin’ me talkin’ ‘bout, she picked up food from the pantry.” Cora, who lives with her daughter and granddaughter, said she would turn to “my daughters, and brothers and sisters. … If I got to the point where I needed groceries, I would go to them and they would come to my aid.” Similarly, Danielle noted, “if a friend or family member says okay, I bought a little extra from the store and so forth,” that’s one way she could make it through the month.

Beyond sharing groceries, mothers cooked meals with others to pool resources. Tonya recounted a time that she drove to a food bank, explaining that she had “put my last $10 in my car to make it over there,” and was dismayed that it had closed. Her friend devised a plan, saying “[She] took it upon herself to cook that day and said every Tuesday we could eat at her house.” After securing employment, Tonya hosted her friend and their kids every Saturday. Critically, they cooked enough for leftovers, “It’s like a guaranteed meal for at least two days out of the week, we don’t have to worry about it, and she tries to cook enough to send us home with leftovers for like the next day, so the next day we’ll have enough to eat for that Tuesday and that Wednesday.”

The extensive resource pooling mothers describe is a well-documented phenomenon among low-income Black families (Edin et al. 2013, Hill et al. 2024, Stack 1974). Many respondents described sharing food even when they had very little for themselves. They worried about accepting help from network ties that they knew were experiencing hardship (Harvey 2026, this issue). Nicole was pregnant, noting that her doctor said she needed to “feed for two.” Although she needed help keeping groceries stocked, she hesitated to ask her mother, who had eight children, “So it’s like I don’t want that much pressure on my mom.” Kiesha lives with her mother and has close family nearby. She explained the depth of her food needs, saying, “I was in the hospital maybe three weeks. And that was the um … I was happy to be in the hospital because I was able to order food at least five times out of the day. And I knew that if I came home, I wouldn’t have that.” But when asked if she would share her issues with hunger with anyone, she said, “[I]f I go to my grandma’s house and I say we’re not have no food, she’s goin’ to her deep freezer … she’s pulling out something. Okay. But … but it’s more so out of consideration, because we know my grandma might not have much. So why would we go take from her house and … and bring it here? Even though we are family, we have to still be mindful of that.”

Michelle similarly worried about other family members and sacrificed her own food needs to take care of theirs. Describing a recent rough patch, she explained, “It was kinda hard makin’ you know meals last. So sometimes [my husband and I] … we wouldn’t have like breakfast or we wouldn’t do lunch. We would have a good dinner. But that was about it.” Michelle’s daughter and grandchildren moved in with her and her husband, which helped them pool resources more efficiently. They share her daughter’s food stamps and split the bills. But even with extra help, they couldn’t always pay the bills. As Michelle put it, “I have a good little support system,” but that system was strained. Whitney experiences food insecurity and often goes without food so her children have enough to eat. She regularly shares food with her nearby relatives and neighbors, who in turn help her when she needs it. As she explained, “If I need something,’ I can call them, if they need some, I would, they could call me, it’s just vice versa, that’s how my circle, my support circle works.” Whitney noted that it could be hard to ask for help, but continued, “Sometimes you gotta put your pride aside and go [get help]. … It takes a village to raise a child.” In the context of neighborhood poverty, mothers’ network ties are unsurprisingly experiencing financial hardship and even hunger. Critically, these hardships often went back generations.

Heritages of Hardship and Resilience

Although we asked mothers where they learned how to manage food, respondents organically brought up observing how their mothers and grandmothers worked to make ends meet. Dawn grew up with eight siblings, and her father was gone for long periods in the military. As she put it, “He really wasn’t there for us. [My mother] raised us—and when she was raising us, we lived on food stamps and welfare, which wasn’t nothing.” She described observing her mother make do, “I would sit in the kitchen with her— literally sit in the kitchen and watch how she would make things work. Like, um, we know we couldn’t have the—the good cereal, but we would have corn—you know, corn flakes. She improvised … watching her and how she sacrificed food for us and made sure we eat.”

Kendra made similar sacrifices for her children when she had limited food, which happened regularly. She described running out of food as “the normal thing for a woman with kids or a family. … You get short, or you … your … your well runs dry.” When that happens, “I just improvise. Try to make a way. Because I’m not gonna send my kids to sleep hungry. That’s somethin’ I’m not gonna do. If I don’t do something else, I’m not gonna do that. They’re gonna eat, regardless if I eat. I could be hungry.” In addition to going hungry, Kendra turned to her mother. She explained, “With me havin’ like so many children, financially she supports me. Sometimes when she gets good deals, she helps, you know. Or if you know like uh food’s low and she knows a certain area that gives help, she’ll tell me.”

Kendra and her mother frame the struggles they experience around food as a “normal” part of what it means to be a mother: “That’s a motherly instinct. That’s somethin’ you willing to do. It doesn’t … it doesn’t affect you because that’s somethin’ I would be willin’ to do. … What does it matter if I’m full or not?” Kendra also linked her capacity to provide and sacrifice to her racial heritage: “Some people have survival skills, some people don’t. You gotta hope you’re “some people.” Like I don’t know if uh…if actually as an African American we have the natural instinct, or uh … or survival skills, or it’s somethin’ that comes off easy to us. Like sometimes I don’t even know I had it, or I could make a way with what I had. But I make ways.”

Whitney felt similarly about her community’s resilience: “We still po’ but we know how to survive, you know, through different changes in the world, we have always been.” Jordan explained, “As women, particularly Black women, we don’t have time to cry. We got to get up and get it. You know, and we are the strongest race of them all, because we have—we have things we got to do. … We can’t—we can’t afford to sit back and cry and what not.” Jordan continued, reflecting, “I was reared around a lot of strong women and didn’t realize it.” Mothers’ interpretation of their struggles and resilience in racialized terms is critical to their self-understanding and also underscores the utility of racial capitalism as an analytic lens.

Danielle learned how to “make a way” from her mother, and she passed this on to her nieces. She said, “we were brought up to always have food in the house … keep food in the house,” explaining that “whether it may be something you want or you don’t want, there is food here.” Danielle stressed the intergenerational transmission of this relationship to food and explained, “that’s how I was taught, and that’s how we teach.” Likewise, Nicole credited her mother’s example with helping her survive: “I mean all my life, I always see my mom—every time we didn’t have—she always made it … made it happen, even if we didn’t have it. So I actually got that from my mom.” Women in various family roles passed on practices. For Krista, it was her aunt who “used to cook enough to feed an army.” She reflected, “Then I became a mother, and I started takin’ care of my own kids. But you know, I learned from them.” The struggle stretched over generations, and the learned practices of navigating it are likewise intergenerational.

Taking a Longer View—Disadvantage and Resistance Over Time

Mothers’ strategies to resist food insecurity over generations should be viewed within the longer context of Sunnyside as a place whose contemporary conditions are inflected by the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow policies, and ongoing disinvestment (Mayorga et al. 2022). We argue that food apartheid in Sunnyside, viewed through the lens of racial capitalism, “is a manifestation as well as an arm of a broader structure of dispossession and devaluation that in the United States stems from chattel slavery” (Mayorga et al. 2022, 241). While the pathways through which racialized oppression operates have morphed over time, the essential parallel between resource accumulation in White communities and disinvestment and extraction in Black neighborhoods predates Sunnyside’s origins. These mechanisms help explain not just Houston’s present, but, if unaddressed and unacknowledged, will continue to structure and delimit its possible futures (Ponton 2024). Recalling and emphasizing the salience of these histories is vital in a political landscape like Texas that has legislated against teaching how past racialized violence and resource extraction perpetuates and concentrates contemporary inequalities (Lopez 2021).

Although Texas is not always considered the Deep South in popular imagination, its history shares much in common with its Southern neighbors, including a reliance on the labor of enslaved people. Houston sits on what scholars have termed a “cultural fault line”: it “straddles the new and the old, the urban and the rural, growth and decline, and the South and the West” (Longoria and Rogers 2015, 25). After the news of emancipation reached Galveston in 1865, there was a massive influx of formerly enslaved people to what is now the Houston metro area (Ponton 2024). Roughly fifty years later, Sunnyside was platted during the Jim Crow era and designated as an area where Black homeowners could live, just outside of the city limits. It was located next to a dump, and as historian David Ponton (2024) notes, this initial siting is telling, as it already marked Sunnyside as both a Black space and a dirty space.

Before annexation in 1956, Sunnyside—like other Black neighborhoods discussed—functioned independently of the city of Houston, organizing its own water system, schools, and fire department. Yet even after annexation, years after Sunnyside residents began paying city taxes, the city refused to provide “sewer, water, drainage, sidewalks, streetlights,” or other services to the community (Texas Low Income Housing Information Service 2017)—a pattern of disinvestment whose effects are felt today as Sunnyside’s poor drainage exacerbates flood conditions. The same exploitation occurred in Settegast, a Black neighborhood in northeast Houston, that was annexed in 1949 but did not receive sewer lines from the city until 1969 (Fisher 1989).

Deliberate interventions by policymakers also withdrew the possibility of housing security itself from the area. Sunnyside was among Black Houston areas designated as “hazardous” by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, such that residents could not obtain federally backed mortgages (Understanding Houston 2021). The effects of redlining included the concentration of poverty in Black neighborhoods and wealth in White neighborhoods, and an intensification of residential segregation. Even Sunnyside residents who could purchase homes have not benefited from the intergenerational transfer of wealth that homeownership produced for owners in predominantly White neighborhoods. Low-income homeowners of color face heightened property taxes and lower property value assessments, resulting in a disproportionate rate of tax delinquency and vulnerability to dispossession (Kahrl 2015. These same historically Black neighborhoods in Houston have the highest concentration of tax delinquent properties, complicating the designation of homes as “owner-occupied” (Longoria and Rogers 2008). Following the same pattern, supermarkets have engaged in “retail redlining,” avoiding development in neighborhoods of color (Reese 2019). When we consider how these interventions constrained Sunnyside residents’ pursuit of stable, prosperous lives, the insufficiency of the food desert framing becomes clear. Far from an ecological inevitability, conditions in Sunnyside reflect historic processes of extraction and unequal resource allocation. In the face of those forces, mothers’ narratives of intergenerational struggle and resilience can be viewed as ongoing acts of resistance.