"...most Chicagoans live in neighborhoods no more diverse than Ireland, Nigeria or Mexico."

"Chicago's greatest monument to segregation is a 12-foot-tall berm that carries the Burlington Northern Railroad through the Southwest Side. It separates Lawndale, a once-Jewish neighborhood that "turned" in the 1950s, from Little Village, an old Eastern European neighborhood that is now Hispanic. The Poles and Ukrainians established the tracks as a racial barrier, especially after Lawndale went up in flames following Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. The custom has persisted with the new residents: South of the tracks, it's 97 percent Hispanic; on the other side of the tracks, it's 89 percent black."

(I work basically nestled into that thing.)

Scenes from the Neighborhood, Part 1

Today I was called "beautiful lady" by a couple of guys standing on a corner. My coworker, who knew them (who, indeed, knows everyone in the neighborhood), told them off.
Him: Beautiful lady?!? She probably gets that all the time.
Me: (nervous laughter)
Them: (helpfully) We'll have something else for the next time we see you.
Me: I liked Beautiful Lady...

They built a Trader Joe's on Roosevelt, but that area isn't labelled

Where I live and where I work are both featured here, occupying predictably different positions.

I don't understand Chicago well enough yet to understand the geographic arbitrariness of some of this map, but I do know that as I drive to work the grocery stores disappear and the liquor stores and fast food joints take over. One of the things the center where I work does really well is snack time. Twice a week a full dinner is served at the after-school youth program, and the rest of the time the kids get a relatively healthy snack. Some of the kids get two snacks, since the school-age program which ends at 5:30 provides one as well, and at least five of the kids in the classroom where I spend most of my time stick around for the youth program as well.

I like to trash talk Wal Mart, but if they were to open a branch in North Lawndale I would have to grudgingly say something nice about them.

Roosevelt intersects with California as a boarded-up warehouse.  There’s a pothole you have to avoid, and then you’re running down south next to the park. At 19^th Street you take a right. After a few blocks, you pull up in front of one of three branches of the community center where I am working.

            

The Center was named after one of the victims of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. When I showed up on Monday for orientation (which consisted mostly of six square blocks of forms, occasionally livened up by the seriously friendly staff members in charge of making sure I understood what I was signing) I was handed a brief article by Angela Davis. Davis writes, 

…it occurred to me that the way the memory of that episode persists in popular imagination is deeply problematic. What bothers me most is that their names have been virtually erased: They are inevitably referred to as ‘the four Black girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing.’ Another traumatic moment occurred in 1964 when James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were killed in Mississippi. A decade earlier, Emmett Till was found at the bottom of the Tallahatchie River. These boys, whose lives were also consumed by racist fury, still have names in our historical memory. Carole, Denise, Addie Mae, and Cynthia do not.

             

Part of my work will be an oral history project. This week I talked with Michelle, the teacher I will be working with most closely, about how we might go about it. She was very excited when I mentioned the possibility of such a project, especially when I floated the idea of one focused on the Center, which is celebrating its 35^th anniversary this year.

            

 I’m at the Center in a very vague capacity as a “School Age and Youth Literacy Specialist.” I perch in various locations around the building and do my thing. On Tuesday, “my thing” consisted of helping to inventory and organize roughly ten million books provided to teachers through a grant. Wednesday, my thing was a different thing: hanging out in classrooms and getting to know the kids I’ll eventually be working with. Thursday was more meetings and lesson planning and getting to know more about the Center as a whole. Today: more kids, ice cream, games, and teaching approximately sixteen teenage and preteen girls how to fold fortunetellers, which they called cootie catchers. Next week and into the foreseeable future, the real thing: theater and creative writing and oral history oh my!

             

We’ll see what the kids like best—I’m guessing theater, and I’m trying to plan accordingly—but I’m going to try very hard not to lose sight of history. It’s the reason any of us are doing what we’re doing right now.

             

For now, I’m looking forward to the Labor Day weekend, as I have been throughout this first (exhausting, confusing, awesome) week. I’m not sure that what I’m doing this year will be something I want to pursue for the rest of my life, but I’m trying to make everything I do meaningful, from lesson planning to helping clean the floor after snack time. The feeling of being a part of history (however minute) helps.