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| Proximity to downtown makes Pilsen attractive to all |
BUT
WHAT OF the situation where upgrade means creating improvements meant to
attract newcomers, without any interest in improving life quality for the
existing residents.
That
seems to be the situation taking place in Pilsen, the long-time immigrant
neighborhood whose character has evolved so much throughout the years and is
undergoing yet another round of change.
Pilsen
carries the name of a village now in the Czech Republic. Sure enough, it was
once a Czech enclave in Chicago. It has been home to many ethnic groups as they
first enter the United States. Since the 1960s, the neighborhood language has
been Spanish – it has been a Mexican enclave.
But
the DNA Info website reported on a University of Illinois at Chicago study of
the neighborhood demographics – the Mexicans are moving out; being displaced
not by other immigrants but by many white people.
THE
NEIGHBORHOOD, ACCORDING to the study, is still majority Mexican-American in its
composition; nearly 29,000, compared to about 4,300 white people. But that
white figure is about 22 percent higher than it was in the year 2000.
While
the number of families with children living in the neighborhood is down by 41
percent. Which brings about a drastic change in the neighborhood’s character.
Pilsen
has the potential to become the kind of place where a young professional type
of person lives for a few years (to gain some sort of Chicago street-cred, so
to speak) before moving off to a suburb once they have their own kids.
And
for those people whose lives depend upon being within a Spanish-speaking
enclave (because their comfort level in English is lacking), they are the ones
who could find themselves with minimal options for moving forward.
THAT’S
ACTUALLY THE sad part. As a third-generation Mexican-American (albeit one with
no ties to Pilsen nor its bordering community of Little Village), I’d like to
think the reason Mexicans are moving out is because we’ve progressed beyond the
ethnic enclave.
But as one who sees my own home neighborhood of South Chicago turn into a place for people with few other options, I know it’s not true.
I
also know that the talk in recent years of turning the one-time U.S. Steel
South Works plant into an upscale community of its own scared many South
Chicago residents for the same reasons being expressed in Pilsen – the idea
that this project was meant to chase out the existing residents.
I
actually get why outsiders would be interested in Pilsen. It is fairly close in
to downtown Chicago and has direct contact with the Loop through the ‘el.’
Someone living in Pilsen would have easy access to a downtown job, or to other
places throughout Chicago through mass transit.
IT
MAKES ME wonder if Pilsen is destined someday to become like Lincoln Park –
which once upon a time ago was a Puerto Rican enclave, until developers saw
that lakefront site and figured other people would benefit from it more.
Just
as I’m sure some people probably think a place like Pilsen with good mass
transit is being wasted on people who never want to leave the neighborhood.
The
key to this situation is to comprehend that there are people already in the
places where other people would like to live – if only they can get rid of what’s
already there. The most drastic case of this may be the modern-day
Cabrini-Green – whose near North location was always seen as wasted on the
public housing that was built there back in the 1940s.
Now,
many of those former public housing residents are scattered throughout the
Chicago South Side and suburbs – where they are disrupting the decades-old
routines of those communities. Which could easily happen with the Mexican
ethnics whom the whites would love to move out of Pilsen – if things are not
handled properly!
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