INTERNSHIP: what Jorge sees daily

13 July 2009

Conversations in the Car between Pilsen and Little Village (Chicago)

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This what we are seeing, he said. In the city of Chicago, one hundred men are deported each week. These are young, working men with families. The family has a traditional set-up so usually the wife doesn’t work. Small kids. Well, then he is gone and suddenly we have these mothers, these kids becoming homeless. That’s why if you come to our office right now, it is like a daycare center.

What do you do? I asked.

Well, we try to find someone to take them in, maybe someone who used to be in the same situation.

That’s how the community is. We open up our homes. The other day, my wife and I were counting how many people we had had to stay. It’s been thirty-four in the past six years. Some stay for days, some for weeks or months; I think this one guy stayed for years. Yeah, he was in the basement for about a year and a half. That’s just how we are.

We’re used to overcrowding. You know, if a young, undocumented man comes here they afford the rent by living maybe 12, 14 to a house. People aren’t there together, you know, eight are sleeping while eight are working and so on. You see it in the grocery store; you see two skinny guys with the two carts loaded up with beans, tortillas and you think, how can they eat that? Well, they are buying for all the guys.

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Here is something else. We are seeing all these families who are being foreclosed on. You see, if you are an undocumented permanent resident than you can’t get any of the stimulus package money to get loans to keep your house. So we tell them, don’t keep paying your mortgage—don’t try to keep your house as long as possible. If it looks like it is going to happen, it is going to happen. So we tell them, stop paying. If it’s two thousand a month, and you don’t pay for three months than you have six thousand you can put down on an apartment when you loose your house. That’s what we tell them.

Me: Wait. So are there a lot of people like this? Permanent, undocumented residents who have bought houses? How does that work?

That’s the housing boom for you. You could go to the bank and get a loan, granted, they didn’t get good interest rates, they weren’t eligible since they weren’t documented.

Me: Wait, I say. They’d loan to undocumented people? Don’t you need a SS number?

Nope. You need what’s called an IT number, which you can get if you go to any number of places. It’s an Income Tax number and you get it when you register to pay taxes. All you need is your W-2s. So these people would go in with this. They’d get a loan to put down the deposit and then they’d get a loan to help pay for the rest of it. But then they’d have crazy mortgages—like $4,000 a month. But they were so happy, this was America—they had a house. But now, they lose their jobs and they can’t pay the $4,000 anymore.

Me: I get it. So these are the people who arrived after they gave out amnesty in 1986. So they were buying houses in the nineties... oh yeah, right in the middle of the housing bubble.

Exactly, exactly!

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Assignment: The Themes of the Pilsen Mural Tour

Pilsen Mural Tour, June 2009

Life is color. Life is pain and joy, heritage and future. In the neighborhood of Pilsen, all of that is evident. The neighborhood is a testament to reality—to life. Lives happen in the streets and restaurants, churches, schools and little homes. Then, the stories of those lives are splashed on the walls in the form of Pilsen’s famous murals.

As we began our mural tour on a baking summer’s day, I reveled in the humanity around me. Everything that is important to people surfaces in this neighborhood. Children play in the hoses, neighbors and friends grill hotdogs.  Vestiges of home in a predominately Mexican neighborhood are evident. Spanish rolls from people’s tongues, street side vendors peddle exotic fruit and spicy treats. Still, I felt a shadow over all of this color—many of these people are incredibly poor. A giant smelting factory spits toxic chemicals into the air and strange diseases strike those living there. Many of the residents are undereducated, don’t speak English or are illegal—and so the illnesses continue.

Jose, our guide, led us down winding streets to stop us by walls popping with color. The murals were beautiful, thrown on to the walls of tortilla factories and churches, schools and homes. Many of them featured portraits of the community members below; grinning children, wizened grannies, and scolding teachers. The murals celebrated the communities heritage with a  backdrop of the Puerto Rican flag, words in Spanish or portraits of leaders like Cesar Chavez or Rigoberta Menchu. They were playful—coloring in shadows and creating puns with words. They were sad, showing disintegrated families and loneliness. Ultimately, they were filled with the dreams of immigrants—that their children would rise up—that they would one day read, would graduate, would embrace the future.