Parallel Logan Square

The August 10th issue of the Chicago Reader was all about Logan Square and as expected it was mostly focused on the White/yuppie experience of the neighborhood. I took it as it is, since I don't have expectations for this paper which mostly talks about bars, boutiques, TIFS, to talk about issues that are relevant to a working-class Latina like myself.

But I was very happy to see that someone, Jesse Mumm (a person I have met and seen at different events), wrote a letter expressing his disappointment that the Reader had glossed over, ignored, or made kitsch, the Latino presence in Logan Square. Here is his letter in its entirety:

August 24, 2007

A Piñata Can’t Speak for the Community

I was delighted to see the Reader take on Logan Square in the August 10 issue. I grew up in Logan, attended Darwin School, and have lived, worked, and done research on the near northwest side most of my adult life. There are a million details I wish had been included, but journalists deserve their chance to offer their take on a neighborhood that no one should expect to be summarized in a few articles. I have a lot of personal respect for both Harold Henderson and Ben Joravsky, and all three articles do a good job with other angles on Logan, including the architecture, recent elections, and the early settlement history. But a very crucial piece of the present was treated with cavalier disregard, and its implications are disturbing given the threat gentrification presents to the area.

Logan Square is a Latino community. When I lived on Sawyer and then Washtenaw in the 70s and 80s I was often the only Irish-American kid on the block. My school pictures from Darwin include a few other white kids, mostly Polish, a few black kids, one or two Middle Easterners, among a majority of Latinos. That majority is declining due to gentrification, but only by a few percentage points, as recent immigration is bringing new Latinos to Logan Square at the same time. In the Henderson piece [“It Started With a Farm”], the last three generations of a majority Latin-American neighborhood deserve more than an addendum at the end of a list of immigrant groups here: “now Latinos.” In fact nowhere in the opening blurb or subsequent three articles does the phrase “Puerto Rican” ever appear, although at its inception this Latino community was majority Puerto Rican, and adjacent to the historic heart of Puerto Rican Chicago in Humboldt Park. The funny-looking piñata on the cover represents the Mexican community here as kitsch, and very little in the articles lets them speak as people. Why a single Cuban former resident now in Miami got the only extensive interview about the current Latino community and its history boggles my mind in a neighborhood with so many outspoken Latino leaders and residents still there. Relying on this expatriate meant mistakes as well: Los 4 Caminos was not there in 1972, and the “Cubans on the east” of Kimball were a fraction of the Puerto Rican and Mexican presence. Joravsky [“End of an Era”] does not actually explain much promised in his subtitle about “how Logan Square got out from under powerful alderman Richard Mell.” There is a much more interesting story behind all this, of long-standing battles between the emergent progressive Puerto Rican leadership and Mell’s decreasing ability to buy off Latinos, who forced him in the late 90s to negotiate. Instead white “independents” become the protagonists of the community in his narrative, rather than a privileged minority largely arguing over issues that revolve mostly around low-income Latinos.

What was missed in all this? Not only has Logan Square been majority Latino for many generations, but it is the only neighborhood in Chicago that has been a strong port of entry for all of its major Latino groups, including Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Cubans, and Central Americans. I had close friends and neighbors from all those places. The future of this country has a lot to do with whether Latinos over time decide to form a cultural and political whole, and Chicago provides a fascinating window into this experiment in action in Logan Square. Unfortunately that gets missed when we are looking more for amenities and curiosities than people. Part of the new backlash against people who are angry and frustrated about the displacement of longtime residents is contained in the gloss of “diversity” that strategically wipes Latinos from the picture. Often newcomers find the preceding white European immigrants and the new eclectic eating spots more interesting than the legacies of families, events, moments, and organizations that Latinos represent in Logan—let alone their present reality. Many well-intentioned white progressives never find their way into Latino social circles here and largely live in a “parallel Logan,” shopping at different stores, finding other white hipsters in cafes, and sampling Latino culture mostly as late-night tacos. The articles got many things right, but they mostly missed the Latino community, who remain 65 percent of the people of Logan Square. That omission would be pretty unconscionable in Chinatown or Devon or Paseo Boricua, but gets a pass here because the real-estate boosters have done their work and sold us an image in which most of the neighbors cannot find themselves—except as backdrop. We are reading an imbalanced landscape, through the eyes of gentrification. The real one is much more interesting.

Jesse Mumm

Anthropologist

So finally a little bit of truth and funny too. I think I'll start using the term "parallel Logan" myself.
But of course, in the next issue, there had to be a right-winger using a very hackneyed argument. Here's his letter:

Speaking of Displaced Communities

The first thing I noticed about Jesse Mumm’s extensive letter to the Reader [“A Piñata Can’t Speak for the Community,” August 24] about the lack of coverage of the resident Latino community in Logan Square [The Logan Square Issue, August 10] was that his signature contains the title “anthropologist.” I find it humorous that Mr. Mumm states indignation about the frustration of longtime Latino residents being displaced in the name of gentrification disguised as diversity. I always thought anthropologists that were worth their weight looked at the entire historical record. Had Mr. Mumm did that, he would have found that the Latinos actually displaced an established core of Scandinavian and eastern European families in the late 1960s and early 1970s. So the term longtime Latino residents somehow hits a sour note with me.

In addition, the Cuban influence in Logan Square in the early 70s was perhaps more significant than that of any other Latino group. Cubans represented a large cross section of hardworking people in blue- and white-collar jobs and many who owned their own businesses early in that transformation. There were even some notorious incidents. That there were halfway houses in Logan Square for Marielito boat people taken in by the benevolent President Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s is an established fact. Back in the 1950s, Polish Constitution Day was a huge event in Humboldt Park drawing thousands of Polish locals. Flash cut to the 1970s and it became a Cinco de Mayo celebration. That Logan Square has gone full circle in over just a handful of generations seems lost on the anthropologist named Jesse Mumm.

Mike Koskiewicz

Portage Park

I want to write a letter to this Mike, but his uninspired arguments make me just want to give up!

Wait- did this idiot just call Reagan "benevolent" ?!?! WTF?!
FTP

Against Love?

Against Love A Polemic by Laura Kipnis is a funny, true, and kind of depressing book I just read. Its one of those books that after you've read it, changes your philosophy on life forever, whether you wanted to change it or not.

I found this book randomly at my local library while searching for anything to read. You see, while I've always been an avid reader, this summer has turned me into a book-junkie. I need to be reading something at every moment or I panic that boredom or ignorance will set it.

Kipnis pretty much broke down any idealized notions I had left of romantic relationships ( and I had managed to hold on to a few). She uses many different schools of thought to discuss love; my favorite being a pseudo-Marxist one in which she describes how in our capitalistic culture, even our closest relationships are ruled by the work ethic. If your relationship is doing well, you aren't working hard enough! But how can you work towards something that's supposed to be fluid, authentic, and just lived, not worked at?

She also suggests that marriage (or long-term, committed monogamous relationships) is unrealistic, unfulfilling and ultimately a bankrupt venture. Well, she's not the first person to think or say so, but the way she says it is compelling in is deep cynicism and clarity. She goes on to say that those that cheat on spouses are actually subversives because they are railing against a system that is oppressive and doesn't work. I had never heard that before, and although I don't completely agree, again, the humor and passion that she brings to her arguments make them more novel and interesting.

This book's value is that it questions institutions and relations that we all take for granted. In this day and age, everything is questioned except for the model of coupledom. Its hard to look through sentimentality to face serious questions like how can we design our lives and homes in ways that are at once realistic and based in respect for everyone invloved?

Sacco and Vanzetti must not die

80 years ago (on August 22nd), Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. Their names reside in the very reaches of my memory of politicization. The Allen Ginsburg line (in the poem America) "Sacco and Vanzetti must not die" so plaintively yet so tragically recited, became part of me before I truly new what revolution meant.

Now many years later, I got to hear this Democracy Now broadcast that explains who these two men were, why they remain important figures today, and what they say about the era they lived in.

I was pleasantly surprised to hear Amy Goodman (the host) and Bruce Watson, the writer of Sacco and Vanzetti he Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind give an immigrant and working-class context to these radical activists. They were hard-working immigrants that like many of us and our ancestors, came full of hope for a better future and instead faced racism, urban ghettos, unequal schooling, subsistence wages, and xenophobic scapegoating from the 'native born.' As Vanzetti said while in prison, immigrants and working-class people lived “not in America, but under America.”

Although the trial that they received was unjust (the judge was obviously racist and anti-leftist as he hated Italian immigrants and anarchists), it was the first time that an international movement united to fight against the death penalty and judicial injustice and still serves as a model today. In the end, Sacco and Vanzetti were put in electric chairs and killed by the state.

Unfortunately, we still have the cruel and unjust system of state murder. As I write this, I do not know if Kenneth Foster, who the state of Texas acknowledges did not kill anyone or assist in any way (he was in the vicinity of a murder, which makes him a criminal under the 'Law of Parties'), has been killed. His death sentence is today.

80 years ago and not much has changed. The barbarity of the death penalty still exists and is used as a state tool to kill Blacks, Latinos, the poor, and those who fight against the system.
And immigrants are still used as scapegoats, only now the enemy is Mexicans, not Italians.

In this poverty and blatant disregard for our basic human rights- it is time for a new militancy to grow among us, the people that know what its like to work and receive oppression as our pay.

Class *does* Matter

I just finished reading Bell Hooks' book Where We Stand: Class Matters and I simply adored it. I thought it was going to be another one of those non-fiction political science books full of dry statistics and too-broad analyisis, but instead I found the opposite.

It was a very personal narrative; almost like a memoir. Hooks takes the first couple of chapters to talk about her own class/race/gender background, and only after that does she start to talk about wider issues such as consumerism, post-feminism, the persistence of racism, and the invisibility of class in our current culture. Even then, she weaves her own life experiences into the topics which made the book's messages more effective and engaging.

Reading this book was bibliotherapy for me as it did me well to read about a perspective not so often found in any kind of media. Hooks talks about class in a way that I felt as if I were talking to a friend. It felt almost as if she was listening to my stories as well. I don't believe I've read (heard, seen) anywhere else, a person talk about being the first to go to a college and not having money to pay it, not having enough to eat or pay rent; that being in college was the most alienating experience, yet feeling more at home there ('in the world of ideas') than anywhere else.

That passing the grade of academia moves you into a different spot, but not really separates you from daily poverty or racism. I have a master's degree from a prestigious university and I am as poor as ever. Yet people believe that with my education, I am now of a different class. I don't feel like it. Am I in some sort of class limbo?

Hooks talks about the fact that poor/working class people that transition to middle-class and beyond are never really separated from poverty or racism because they usually have family and friends that still face those issues. I feel this describes me too, as a citizen with extensive education, not only do I not have anything to fall back on, but I am reminded daily of the injustices that undocumented immigrants, and the working poor face because they are my family and friends. Although it is a hard existence, it keeps me connected to the strruggle for justice and human rights.

I loved this book because it spoke so many of the things that I never knew how to express and I was surprised to hear, lived in others hearts and minds, not just my own. The only things that was lacking was her that she espoused a binary Black-White thoght. On one hand, it is frustrating to always listen to the story of America as either a Black or White experience, when Latinos have been part of the culture since this country's inception (and even before). But on the other hand, she is Black woman who came of age in the Jim Crow South and is just re-telling her life and thoughts the way that she understands them.

And in reality, it just means that us Latinos need to speak up and become as strong a voice for our communities as she is for hers.

I wonder if I should be a writer...