I’ve been living in the Brighton Park community my entire life. I have only moved once (when I was about 18 months). The distance wasn’t much, really. Only about 5 blocks, so the people all around are very similar.
I don’t know much background history about my neighborhood, but from what I’ve heard the first people to live around that area were Polish. This explains why the church a block away from my house has Polish mass (and not only Spanish and English mass). I still see a couple of Polish people, but Hispanic/Latinos are more common. There are also now some Asians that have just moved in. So, the diversity continues to grow.
When I was younger, I didn’t notice the people that lived in my neighborhood (except the cute boys, haha). My parents didn’t like the idea of me running around in the streets. They were afraid of all the gangbangers walking around (yes, sadly there are bad people like them in the world). That meant that I would only see my friends in school. The people never really changed. There were only a couple of kids, like my cousin, that moved. As I went into 7thgrade, I heard about people being involved in gangs and tagging crews, how they were sent to jail, or of their ending…This of course alarmed me. Since then I started to be more careful with how I was with. Yes, the people in the community and their actions do affect (in some way) your life.
That was one change.
But I also started to notice how there were some people who really disliked Latinos. I remember that my mom told me how a woman (who was American and married to a Mexican-American) was told to go to a different church because they didn’t have any mass in Spanish. The woman was denied to be part of that church because she looked Mexican, yet she and her family were Americans.
I’ve heard of how people are treated differently because of their appearance. Yet, most of my community is made up of Latinos. I hope that with the growing diversity of my neighborhood (because new people are still moving in), differences can be pushed away (and all the bad people, too) for it to be a nice place once more. As innocent as I thought it was when I was 6. Because, that’s exactly where I want my neighborhood to go (:
Ah. I can totally relate, as far as the parents worrying about me (still do; I can't really hang out...) and being abruptly introduced to the maniacal, vicious world that is Reality. That bit always makes me sad, because most of the time I believe that the dangerous people are usually stupid (they make poor decisions).
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Jessica, I understand the point you are making. Chicago is a srgregated city with not so many diverse neighborhoods. Stereotypes have become so common these days and everyone thinks it's fine to judge without knowing. Though, sometimes, I understand why these stereotypes are being made. I'm not saying they're ever right, I'm saying that they sometimes become too common, they're normal. For example, as you pointed out. Latino neighborhoods are stereotyped as "bad dangerous places because there's bad kids running around". In most latino neighborhoods that I've been to or herad of, this stereotype is true. Not all of them, but most of them. Since ppeople assume most latino neighborhoods are bad, they all become bad. I think it's a human instinct. However, there are some "not bad" latino neighborhoods that prove the stereotype wrong.
ReplyDeleteJocelyne Chavez