Getting by in America

Small-time businesses in the American south

Survival is relative: to be poor in Somalia is different from being poor in the ninth ward of New Orleans, Hackney or suburban Dallas. But difficulty anywhere is something to be survived and this year I met people whose attitudes and places offer testimony to that spirit.

Cricket, a feisty woman in her late sixties, sells bait to sportsmen headed for the swamps, as well as antiques on Ebay, from a roadside cabinet of wonders on US 190 in Krotz Springs, Louisiana. She told me that she was called Cricket as a child but only began to sell them as bait after her divorce.

Then there is the man who drives down to New Orleans from Mississippi with truckloads of watermelons he picks himself. On hot summer days he parks his trailer in the shade of a tree marked by a hand-painted fleur-de-lis, the emblem of his beloved New Orleans Saints football team.

Martin Sanchez, who came to Riverside, California, from Mexico, runs Tio’s Tacos, a successful restaurant next to the bus station. When the city fathers would not let him expand his place into a house on the corner he built a homage to his roots, including a chapel made from beer bottles, cement and found objects. Sanchez claims to have not thrown anything away for more than 17 years. Isaac Bartelle owns a liquor store at the edge of the low country near Hemingway, South Carolina. He also rents houses or trailers, I don’t know which, but streams of folk come into his place to buy gin or pay rent. Everyone there is a survivor.

Jim Dow is an American photographer based in Boston. He is currently working on a book about the private clubs of New York City and a project comparing taco trucks and ‘carritos’ [food carts] in the US, Mexico, Argentina and Uruguay. www.clarkgallery.com

To comment on this article, please email magazineletters@ft.com

.........................................

A new beginning, Introduction by Simon Kuper

Reconstruction: after Japan’s earthquake by Toshiki Senoue

Opening up Tunisia by Davide Monteleone

Rescuing England’s forests by John Davies

Beating cancer by Antoine Doyen

Italian flooding by Massimo Vitali

Rebuilding looted London by Simon Roberts

New lives in South Sudan by Laura Pannack

Saving Middleport pottery by Michael Collins

Norway’s resilience by Marcus Bleasdale