In 1987, the U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett said that Chicago’s public schools are the worst in the nation. “If it’s not the last, I don’t know who is… There can’t be very more cities that are worse. Chicago is pretty much it.” (Ap, 1987) Before these critical remarks, and to this date there have been real consequences around misinformed assumptions of certain Chicago neighborhoods. As experienced through socially exclusionary and economically-driven policy, throughout the south and west sides of Chicago, negative and deficit oriented assumptions become attached to local community members, youth, and their families. The increased adoption of such policies propagates a dominant narrative that the problem with certain Chicago neighborhoods must be due to the kids, parents, and families who live in poverty. By claiming Chicago public schools as the worst district in the nation, the conditions were set to usher in corporate funding and investment to be directed through the discretion of local elected officials—largely perceived as the problem-solvers and not the ones who were culpable or seen as the cause of the problem.
Who owns the problems of persistent low student performance, poverty, lack of upward mobility, or high-paying jobs? And to what extent has this conversation been happening not just recently in the past decade, but also since the 1960s? The academic research on the Humboldt Park neighborhood spans the past 60 years. Broadly, I categorize the literature into two main buckets: Puerto Rican settlement to the west side of Chicago and other cultural influences (Guglielmo, 2004; Krysan & Bader, 2009; Perez, 2004; Ramos-Zayas, 2001; Seligman, 2005; Toro-Morn, 1995), and race, resistance, and change in Chicago’s Puerto Rican community (Elwood, 2006; Fernandez, 2014; Krysan & Bader, 2009; Laviera, 2006; Rodriguez, 2005; Wilson, Beck, & Bailey, 2009). In my final essay, I aim to piece together a story about how Puerto Rican history, through the struggle for problem ownership, intersects with recent school closures in the Humboldt Park community. To what extent does the literature represent the continuation for the struggle over problem ownership as well as control cover the narratives of change in Humboldt Park?
Below is a video media sample of how differing social realities on a single neighborhood can draw out a spectrum of opinions and perspectives between community members:
- “We Speak Chicagoese”
- Vlog Capturing Local Spaces
- “This is Humboldt Park”
- “My Hood: Humboldt Park”
- Puerto Rican Parade
- American Lutheran Church
- Boricua Man
Works Cited
Ap. (1987, November 8). Schools in Chicago Are Called the Worst By Education Chief. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/1987/11/08/us/schools-in-chicago-are-called-the-worst-by-education-chief.html
Elwood, S. (2006). Beyond Cooptation or Resistance: Urban Spatial Politics, Community Organizations, and GIS-Based Spatial Narratives. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 96(2), 323–341.
Fernandez, D. (2014). MéridaRúa, A Grounded Identidad: Making New Lives in Chicago’s Puerto Rican Neighborhoods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, £32.50). Pp. 224. isbn978 0 1997 6026 8. Journal of American Studies, 48(2). https://doi.org/10.1017/S002187581400053X
Guglielmo, T. A. (2004). Encountering the Color Line in the Everyday: Italians in Interwar Chicago. Journal of American Ethnic History, 23(4), 45–77.
Krysan, M., & Bader, M. D. M. (2009). Racial Blind Spots: Black-White-Latino Differences in Community Knowledge. Social Problems, 56(4), 677–701. https://doi.org/10.1525/sp.2009.56.4.677
Laviera, J. T. (2006). THE SPARK. Afro-Hispanic Review, 25(2), 191–209.
Perez, G. (2004). The Near Northwest Side Story : Migration, Displacement, and Puerto Rican Families (1). Berkeley, US: University of California Press. Retrieved from http://site.ebrary.com/lib/alltitles/docDetail.action?docID=10068581
Ramos-Zayas, A. Y. (2001). Racialìzing The “Invisible” Race: Latino Constructions Of “White Culture” And Whiteness In Chicago. Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development, 30(4), 341–380.
Rodriguez, L. (2005). The End of the Line: California Gangs and the Promise of Street Peace. Social Justice, 32(3 (101)), 12–23.
Seligman, A. I. (2005). Block by block: neighborhoods and public policy on Chicago’s West Side. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Toro-Morn, M. I. (1995). Gender, Class, Family, and Migration: Puerto Rican Women in Chicago. Gender and Society, 9(6), 712–726.
Wilson, D., Beck, D., & Bailey, A. (2009). Neoliberal-Parasitic Economies and Space Building: Chicago’s Southwest Side. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 99(3), 604–626.
Hoods, Schools, and People 