hilos

part of creating a city that thrives and allows people to grow with it, means having resources available for all those who need them and want to use them. one really big obstacle that undermines our potentials and hapiness as people is violence. violence, discrimination, stereotypes, all these things and more keep us from exploring what we want and from creating ourselves into who we want to be.

i’m writing about domestic violence because i just came from a march to end domestic violence. it was held from pilsen to little village and it was very empowering to see people come together and demand that violence stop. that all humans deserve respect and derserve not to fear anyone; not their parents, not their partners, not cops, not anyone. 

the people who came and organized the march have been working on this issue in a variety of ways. they have done a lot of work not only towards this march but doing grassroots organizing and all kinds of things wich include art works and all that stuff. this is really amazing work. the question is how i can support and how i can get more involved. there are too many issues that i want to work on and there is just no time, and even if there was there are too many things that i don’t even think it would be productive.

how do we get involved? are calls to representatives enough? do we go out and protest? do we organize? how do we organize? what if we are working two jobs and have kids? i mean there are so many ways in which people are kept from organizing… or that limit our participation in what we want to do.

i have to figure this out.     

one way in which diversity presents itself is through culture. we bring the traditions of our cultures with us and with it the artwork and the ways of doing and viewing it. art can be used in resistance, not only through providig alternative reading of what art is but also purposefully creating it to question social norms and other things taken to be natural or innate somehow.

figuring out a way to do this efectively is hard.

 art can be used to bring the communities together like through a series of workshops with different art forms like music, poetry, breakdancing etc. Art can also be used to bring up a variety of points like look, our culture is beautiful, or look at how different stereotypes contribute to our own oppression etc. this can help create unity in a community through interaction and relating to one another. 

i am very intrigued by the idea and practice of street theatre, and some day soon i hope to perform it, becasue it brings theatre to the people on the street. you don’t have to pay to get in and you don’t have to sit or just watch. there can be interaction and tension as well humor and a political point that is driven across.

i mention this becasue recently i saw a video with a group of people dressed up as clowns who go and stand with the minutemen (in physical space not becasue they share ideas) and protest with them in a way that shows, or atempts to show,  the absurdity of the minutemen. They say thing like we wanna be clowns like you, and ask for people’s papers in terms of the galaxy, among other things. This type of action is intersting because it drives a point across in a kind of fun way (though i’m not sure how fun it is for those being made fun of). i am also not super sure about the effectiveness of the tactic, but it’s an interesting idea to think about as a way to defend a community, in this case the undocumented community, in a not so confrontational way.

street theatre is a way to politicize a public space. one that is fun and not destructive. in terms of changing and bringing up issues in a city it can be employed very effectively. we have to keep exploring other ways to bring up our issues and creating areas where we can talk about them to actually do something about them. slowly reclaiming where we live and in the process helping others to do the same.   

a couple of the comments that caught my attentions when looking through the blogs that people in class had created were the ones made by fernando galvez. in particular the one were he comments on immigration and education.

it’s interesting that he mentions that there is a bit more of an incentive for immigrants to want to attain a higher level education and do well in school. i thought  it was interesting because when i hear talk about the DREAM act it is sometimes in the context of how hardworking immigrant are etc. which i think is true of all people no matter what category they are put into. the thing is, immigrants have a harder time accessing the education system in general because of language barriers, and economic status. plus not to mention if you’re undocumented the resources available to pay for school are small and not well known. it’s harder to get in, so when you do, why would you waste it?

the blog is mostly made up of writing. and he pretty much answers the questions posted in class. i like how he comments on discussions we have had in class, reflecting upon cities through his life. i do that a lot too.

when talking in class one of the things that was commented upon was how public space was not really taken care of by the public. In a lot of public spaces there is litering and all sorts of things going on that people might not do in their homes.

Personally, i think this comes from  a sense of non-responsabity and non-ownership of these so called public spaces. For example, parks are suppose to be public but they close at a certain time and the cops come kick you out if you try to stay over night. i mean you always hear the argument about how that is for the safety of the public etc etc, but really , this ‘unsafety’ occurs because there are no safe places for people to do what it is that they want to do or to stay at night (affordable clean and safe), so they go to the park. i think this perception also come from us thinking that people who don’t have a parmament place to stay are somehow dangerous and to be avoided. yea, some people steal but that may be becasue they have no access to good jobs that pay a living wage. it’s not that people are inherently bad, but that our circumstances sometimes force us to do certain things. But back  to public spaces . . .

part of the impediment to seeing a public property as really belonging to a community, besides those restrictions, are the sometimes lacking of sense of being a community. A sense that working together we can set up our own services and demand that what we need is given to us.

This requires organization and solidarity, which we are begining to see, and have been occuring, with activies like the little village arts fest and organizations like the little village environmental justice organization, the little village development corporation, colective arte y realidad, ura  and the collaboration between all these organizations. i put these examples up becasue these are the ones i know of in my community, which interestingly is not know as little village in maps and stuff (it’s something lawndale but i forgot what at the moment, that info is on the lvejo website).

it is through this colective ownership that we should control our resources and how we will begin to realize our own power as people.     

the site chicago imagebase …..

the pictures by Bob Thall about the city of chicago were very compelling because they show the buildings but within each frame a central part of the pictures are these objects of construction, like fences, boards of wood, cranes etc. The objects portray a sense of a person having been there. they are not there any more but maybe someday the people who created these objects and worked them will come back.

The land usage map for north lawndale was interesting because there seem to be a lot more multi-housing units than land used for education. The ratio of colors did not seem to fit. that seems to agree with the comments that there are not enough well equipted educational facilities in lawndale or little village, since they are super close to each other. There were maps of the loop like this one  but they are from the 30s and 40s. It would be interesting to compare those to a map of land usage now and see what has changed.

it was interesting to see some pictures from a long time ago of streets i now frequent. They do look different, and the people look dated. the cars are also different models. the aerial views were interesting because they were of particular places, but they were not that surprising. there were a lot of links that i tried but did not seem to want to open so i kept going.

something i’ve wondering is that in the documents we have been reading at school all list neighborhoods but i have not seen the name Little Village in any of them. it’s weird becasue i see lawndale, logan square, albany park…etc. but not little village. maybe it’s a categorization thing but it is kind of depressing to not be taken  into account.

i think i’ll take pictures at the little village arts fest coming up on oct 12-14. we really have to take ownership of our neighborhoods.         

the photos on the website by terry evens provide a picture of the chicago areas that are hard to come by. They are areal views of places that people just walking by chicago would not have access to. There are pictures of industrial areas, water treatment plants, parks rivers etc. there are pictures of the housing projects that are being demolished or depopulated to make room for mixed income housing. there are pictures of backyards in different areas of chicago  and a lot of lakefront pictures. there are quarrys and open areas despite how the city has grown. Sometimes the pictures come with information which provides a context for some of  them. that was interesting, like finding out that many places use to be landfills and are now parks, and some golf courses as well; or that there is this one prarie built over a facility to do research in physics. But through these areal views the details of each place are missed. The architecture or the individual interactions that are taking place between all living species and the space itself are left behind, or in this case on the ground.

The Picturing chicago website provides the details of the spaces. there are a lot of neighborhood pictures, with houses and storefronts, people and advertisements, objects etc. This project documents all different parts of chicago and really lets you see the the place up close.  The advertising one was very interesting becasue they are sigsn that can be seen from the street, there are the ones like ads on the street an ones on buildings, but more interesting were the ones wrtitten by people to communicate something to someone who is most likely a stranger. Like the sign on a chair that said “don’t never park . . .” There is another sign that is written by hand and says please don’t litter thank you, and has hearts drawn on it. these are the signs that called my attention even more. there are so many ways to convey things, depending on the letters and words used and the manner in which these are illustrated, along with any supplemental drawings or marks. There were not that many of these pictures but just to see how people were communicating and maybe ask why they wrote things certain ways would be interesting.

The other part that i found very interesting were the pictures with people working. like taxi car drivers, construction workers and street vendors. the vendors were interesting because the pictures i looked up were from pilsen. that’s not the only place were there are street vendors, so i wonder about that. the street musicians pictures are part of what makes the streets so diverse. The pictures were of a group of young black men with drums made out of buckets. some people actually have licenses to play in the street and other just do it. i mean  the street is public. . . . i think. and if it is not it should be, i mean we all use it. but this topic i’ll discuss later. something the website put up as work that i would have never noticed is baseball players. i guess they are working . . .

i thought that website was good for detail but there is the lack of analysis, which the website said was currently going on, since the pictures are taken ove time from 2000 to 2004, and 2005. But it is an awesome database to see the city up close. But only the public aspects. i have not finnished exploring the whole website but it would be interesting to see the stuff people put up in abandoned buildings.  

that is more what i would take pictures of. the things people leave behind or how they try to leave their impressions or some sort of message. like writing on walls and putting names on benches and stuff. But also things that appear to have been dropped or abandoned along the streets of chicago. Like all the toys i run into while walking down my neighborhood. i wanna photograph that stuff.        

sometime towards the bening of the year i was with a friend watching the news. at one point the newscaster was talking about a murder or homicide or something where someone had gotten killed. we turned to each other as she remarked how the first death of this kind in the year had happened in La Villita. or maybe she just said it happened here and we said, great, first homicide just has to have happened here. great (sarcasticly).

we joked about it for a whie. before another custumer came to buy a cigar, or some chips.

watching the news always makes it seem like certain neighborhoods are dangerous. or that certain people are dangerous (ie strangers and usually people of color). When you look at the media there is a very narrow definition for everything. beauty, youth, normalcy. all very boring and restrictive.

the discussion we had in class about what makes a neighborhood attractive makes sense. You want somewhere with a dynamic immigrant population, with diversity. With local shops, not just big box stores; with a good public transportation system, cheap housing (relatively speaking because what is cheap for some, other people might not be able to afford). And the other element was having an edginess of sorts, like soft drugs.

so on the subjetc of drugs. If you watch the news the people who use and sell certain drugs are villified. I say certain drugs because it is totally fine to sell alcohol and nicotine (filled with tar and other chemicals). but the point is that those who get villified are the people who belong to the target groups. Like having a charge be more for a drug in a form that is less pure (sometimes more dangerous, but more cheap) than for the drug in its pure form (more expensive). who can afford the more expensive drug? people with more money, who tend to be caucasian (not true for all people but on a systems level yes). so who gets caught and charged more are the people who have less money and are the target groups (meaning those who are denied access to resources on many if not all levels of power).

cities profit from this inequality but everyone gets shortchanged. i say cities profit because jails mean more jobs, a contract for construction companies, if it’s a private prison then that company profits too. it is a lucrative buisiness. but the city gets hurt because it limits a lot of people in a lot of ways. by not giving people better access to education, to health care, to affordable transportation…people have to be more focused on making more money to make ends meet and there is barely any time to reflect about what is going on and organize to change things. the potential of the people living there is curtailed and contained. that is not good for anyone, except those that benefit from the status quo. and even they get pushed into narrow definitions of self and all that stuff.

we really need to get rid of stereotypes to function better as a society. i mean we need a lot of things and this is one we do at the same time.               

as far as i can tell cities don’t spring up on their own. Building may seem to rise up out of nowhere and streets torn up and rebuilt. But all these things are driven by human power and effort. machines don’t yet drive themselves. People are the ones who make these changes. people drive and repair buses and trains. People mix and pack the soaps we wash with, cut and pick the vegetables we eat and makes the components of the machines we operate. People are central to the growth of our cities and to our economy. This may all seem really obvious but the thing is, people get put into categories and some are given more value than others.

but all people are indespensible really. from the people who pick up the garbage to those that operate to those that make the instruments of the people that operate etc. Yea some jobs have more skills than others but they are just as crucial to how we currently operate in society. Yet we take some jobs for granted and pay less than a living wage. i agrue that this keeps people down because we don’t allow them to develop their potentials. we attach hierachies to jobs. So if you’re a doctor you are looked upon with more prestiege and some sort of awe. and yea doctors do a lot and are really important but we rely on each other to get the jobs done, from nurses to the people that bring the supplies to those that fix the heating. With out them our operations would not be as efficient. my point being we can not continue to devalue jobs that we need.

maybe there is some way to re arrange job structures so that we get to rotate jobs and be able to see how we operate as a society. even though there would still be jobs that require more preparation the people who do them are not worth more than any other person. ideally these rotaional jobs would pay well enough and people would have access to as many resources as possible so we can shape ourselves and learn how to work cooperatively.        

a couple of days ago i heard the news about a town where business had fallen so much that many shops and restaurants had to close. There is an article in the new york times that covers this story.

as i was reading the story i was struck by the mayor (well, past mayor) saying the the ‘legitimate’ businesses had stayed and the other businesses were the ones that ‘were supporting the illegal inmigrants”  (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/26/nyregion/26riverside.html is the link to the article)

i think the slowing down of the economy proves what an integral part of each community immigrants are. Now the town had to remove the laws. i don’t think you can deny how important immigration is, the problem some people have is when people come into the country with out the permission of the u.s. government. 

but the thing is, hurting any person results in hurting the population as a whole. The measure in the town was not even enforced but people still left. i probably would have left too, i mean is it really worth living somewhere were there are so many resources cut off from you? on the other hand no place is perfect and maybe i would rather stay and fight to gain access to those resources abd be like you can’t exclude me. ha.

i wanna highlight the importance of fighting for our rights as people. no matter what religion, race, ethnicity, gender, sex, sexual orientation, class, age or migratory status we have.  it really makes no sense to have open borders to product and capital and close them to people, specially when there are policies in place that make it really hard for people to develop themselves.

point of this short note is, by hurting one we hurt all, yes, an injury to one is an injury to all. and also immigrant, of every kind, are super important to the vitality and economy of a city, like the developments in new jersey have proven.

i remember earlie this year freaking out about all the anti-immigrat laws being passed or looked at in a variety of places like carpentersville and waukegan. now we have an example to say look at what these types of legislation did. the immigrant rights movement has a long way to go but we have to keep going and defending everyone’s rights to create citites were human potential is not wasted on dead end jobs that you can’t pay everything you need with, so you need another one. As communities we need to take control of our resources. so let’s start.