hilos

before this assignment i had never gone into the census website and been managebly able to look for information. that locations/street address tool is pretty awesome because it lets you look at each particular section of a place, not just some area that was canvassed, but actual streets. It is a concrete place.

i’m part of the census tract that goes from 22nd to 26th stree and from sacramento to california (with a section cut out of this otherwise rectagle at marshall and 24th). What is really awsome about having a physical place that i can walk through it (and have been living through it since i’ve been living here for like 13 years now), is that the changes that take place are reddily observable.

so, on my census tract…

i live in little village, a predominatly latino (mostly mexican) community. some of the things i found interesting are that even in this small portion of land the white people are more towards the north side and the people of color everywhere else.

the majority of households are made up of families, which can be observed when i walk down the streets and see the families just sitting at their door steps while the kids run and play around on the sidewalk.  about a third of the houses are rented, so one quarter of the population owns. that is not a lot of people (189 units out of 772). this makes me worry because as pilsen (very close to little village) is becoming more and more expensive and gentrified, so are we.

i have already begun to see some condos spring up. a lot of our working class population can’t afford higher rents, specially when the majority of the population has kids to look after(over one half of the population has kids). over 50 percent of the population 25 and over got to high school and under. That is a very low number, and it puts us at a great disadvantage because of the emphasis placed on education when getting a job that pays enough for people to live on and has some benefits (though coming across a job that has both is hard enough as it is).  The level of school education limits us not becasue people are not smart but becasue of the way our society is designed to give preferences to people with high school and university degrees.  A man working full time has a median income of 20 861 a year and a womyn has one of 18 194 a year. This speaks to gender inequality, but my point here is that it’s not a very high income community. How can we afford to buy our houses and go to expensive schools, or just higher education institutions, if people are not making that much money?

in terms of the jobs people work, about 40 percent are in production, transportation and something called ‘material moving occupations’. About 22 percent are in the service industry. No one works at home. i though that was interesting because i always hear of how more and more people are working at home, well, clearly not with the types of jobs the people on my census tract have available to them. we don’t have that luxury. and with the low incomes neither parent has the luxury to stay at home with their kids if they so chose.    

something i found surprising is that i thought there would be a lot more immigrants on my tract but about half of the people living here were born in the U.S. (E.E.U.U.). that made me feel kind of lonley. but there are a lot of younger kids here and people have been coming to this country since a long time ago and they had kids born here. so it makes sense that it evens out.    

over half the people (55 percent) had been living where they are since 1995. so while there was some sense of just passing through for maybe some people the majority seem to have settled (lest they now be driven out by higher pricing which i’ve seen rise while i have lived here).

but still we carry our traditions with us. like having the carritos with fruta and aguas and chicharrones on the corners. there is also a higher language retention for latinos then the other people who speak other languages at home. Out of the 70 percent that speak a language other than english in their house, 69 percent speak spanish and .6 speak indo-european languages. out of the spanish speakers 48 percent speak english less than well and out of the indo-european language speakers .4 speak english less than well. that makes sense since there are more people around who speak the language. i like that. in high school i did not have a group of friends who spoke spanish and that sucked because there are thing that don’t really work when they are translated.

it’s fun to weave languages back and forth, using different expressions and words that have different connotations in each language. jumping from one to the other dejando que se salpiquen y teniendo jente que entiende lo que estas diciendo. this is a small area in a big context. we’re not isolated. had the census tract gone over 26th street on california it would have looked very different, since cook county jail stands as a monument to injustice and oppession that our communities face.