Bilinguals of the world unite

[shin]

Well if the percentage crept up to 93% Russian, I'd imagine the drug use and crime rate would have skyrocketed to out of control levels. It's probably just a matter of time.

[Galactus]

Shin, you're overreacting, when one says "mexican horde" the shootings and what not are just understood.

[Kensterberg]

I live in a city that is approaching 80% Hispanic -- and the vast majority of that is Mexican (owing perhaps to the fact that we are smack on the border, with a city of something like 2 million right across the bridge). We also have some of the lowest rates of violent crime in the country. According to this statistical survey www.statestats.com/cit07pop.htm#25, El Paso is the third safest large city in the country. (FYI, Chicago isn't included in the proper list b/c they have a different reporting definition of "rape" than does the rest of the country. If you factor rape out of the methodology, Chicago is the 52nd safest city). San Antonio is also amongst the safest metros in the country, and it's also largely Hispanic, and again, this is almost entirely Mexican.

So there is absolutely no correlation between being of Mexican or Hispanic descent and engaging in criminal activity. Interestingly enough, El Paso is also one of the poorest large communities in the country, and one of the youngest in demographics. These two factors would lead us to expect a much higher crime rate than what we actually have. Thus, I think it's obvious that you guys in Chicago are doing something very wrong if you've got such a high violent crime rate among your Mexican community.

My Mexican community is one where I can walk down the streets at night safely, where stranger violence is almost unheard of, where car-jackings make for big news, and where I used to drive downtown with the top of my convertible down at all hours of the day or night. You anglos must be really pissing off your Mexican brothers and sisters if you've got 'em ready to shoot people on your front lawns.

Maybe these Chicago suburbs (or other areas of the US) need to institute some mandatory anger management programs or something. Or put lithium in the water ... something. Because you all scare me.

[rockysigman]

You seem to have done so in your last paragraph, but all the same Ken, I have to ask you to please be clear when you're talking about the Chicago suburbs and not the city proper. Those of us here in the city don't want the reputation of this fine town sullied by the crime-addled suburbs.

My upstairs neighbor is a Mexican guy. Seems nice enough.

[rockysigman]

Although you have piqued my curiosity regarding this rape issue. How many different ways are there to define it? It seems like rape is rape.

[Thorngrub]

Unless she asks for it, of course.

[Kensterberg]

It looks like Chicago actually has a broader definition of rape which includes male-male sodomy, etc. I'm not sure how it skews the results, but the folks who do the study seem to think it's significant enough to leave Chicago out of their rankings.

I had to just use the term "Chicago" earlier in the post b/c that's the term that the study used, rather than "the greater Chicago metro region" or "the City of Chicago proper" or something more specific. Since they generally talk about metro areas rather than specific cities within them, I think that 52nd ranking would be an average for the entire Chicago/suburbs mess. But I'm not sure.

And I'll admit here that I'm biased in a fashion ... I really like being around Mexican culture. I like the way that the people act, how genuine the relationships between men are (there is almost no irony in male relationships, which is dramatically different from what I grew up with in the midwest), all that. And I love the food. Oh lord I love the food ...

[Mary]

One of the things I really miss from SF is the thriving Mexican/Latin American community. I miss the food, the art, the culture, the Day of the Dead parades, the fantastic galleries, the shops full of beauitful crafts and handiwork, shooting pool with mexican dudes (i'm shallow, what can i say - so many hot mexican dudes in the mission!!), even the cadence of spanish ringing out in the air. Pretty much everyone I knew in SF considered the Mission their favorite neighborhood - and it is also known as the Mexican neighborhood, but it's not insular - it's bustling and diverse, with Mexicans and Indians and artists and filmmakers and dykes and bikers and the whole beautiful crazy fucked up quilt of SF life. But the Mexican base gives it a distinctive feel throughout - beatiful Diego Rivera stye murals on all the buildings, lots of working-class bars with a predominantly mexican and latin american clientele, the smells of mexican, guatemalan, nicaraguan, and salvadoran restaurants and markets, the sounds of mexican music wafting out of record stores and garages and apartments - it's a really wonderful place. It's also mostly totally safe. There are a few blocks that can get a bit dubious at night (some hookers on capp, and the notorious block on mission between 16th and 17th where drugs are sold out of residential hotels) but nothing violent or threatening that I've ever encountered. It's the first place I visited when I was back in SF in October and will again be the first place I visit when I return next week.

Ken, I'm interested in El Paso's economic history. Most of the cities with high crime rates and dangerous inner cities are postindustrial cities where the disappearance of manufacturing jobs hit inner cities (usually African-Americans especially) very hard, and then the sturtural-economic problem was compounded by white flight, leaving behind impoverished communities with very few employment opportunities and lots of boarded-up businesses. You say that El Paso is fairly poor, but what's the actual employment rate like? Does El Paso rely on a particular industry for the most part? Are there are a lot of African-Americans? Was there a history of white flight? I know very little about El Paso and I'm intrigued by your comments!

Cheers,
M

[Kensterberg]

In a nutshell: our unemployment rate has been a pretty constant ten percent or so since like the seventies. The only big industries here were copper smelting (dead now, thank god!) and appairal (also dead, as it's all gone to Mexico, China, and India).

One thing that makes El Paso different from many other areas is that we've never really been prosperous. We've always been the redheaded step-child of the state of Texas. The city used to be more Anglo, but in the last twenty years there has been a combination of white flight (primarily to other Texas cities, but a significant number have also fled to California, which is actually closer than Houston!) and Hispanic population growth which has shifted the balance from something like 65-35 Hispanic in the seventies to 70-30 right around 1990 and now it's almost 80-20.

BTW, we have a very small Asian community and a very small (but now growing) African-American community. Most of the African-American population has some association with Ft. Bliss and the military, and a large number of the ones who stay here are in mixed marriages. El Paso's long history of Anglo-Mexican marriages has made this one community where black/white relationships don't get a whole lot of attention.

The overwhelming cultural mood here is Mexican, even the Anglos who (happily) live here at least tacitly embrace Mexican culture, while still maintaining a certain amount of cultural privelege. El Paso didn't elect its first Hispanic mayor until the nineties (we had a woman of Arab descent in the eighties!). There are also well established, though small, Arab and Jewish communities in town, both of which traditionally have economic standing disproportionate to their size. But there is no endemic racism regarding those groups here.

In fact, the most pervasive "racism" one sees here is the Mexican tendancy towards self-deprecation, followed by everyone's tendancy to marginalize the Native American groups here. There has been a bit of anti-Anglo feeling bubbling up in the last decade or so here, but it's really not that bad ... nowhere near the tensions that Omaha or Kansas City have, for example.

On the whole, the culture here is one of the big things I love about living on the border. But the job market sucks, for everyone here.

[RocDoc]

<sub>Rocky:
You seem to have done so in your last paragraph, but all the same Ken, I have to ask you to please be clear when you're talking about the Chicago suburbs and not the city proper. Those of us here in the city don't want the reputation of this fine town sullied by the crime-addled suburbs.

My upstairs neighbor is a Mexican guy. Seems nice enough.</sub>

Yes, one on one, they're usually very nice, sure.

Just don't try to hit on 'their' women in front of them. Unless they know you very well.
I know.

The 'City proper' for ya:

Humboldt Park, Little Village, Rocky.

91st and Commercial...

Take a walk there...after dark, at dusk...and linger especially near the bars.

~

How many of you here are NOT transplants to where you're living now?
Tho you've got a handle on the fact that where you are, 'diversity has never verged on being considered a 'problem'?

Conversely, how many are living within 2-3-4 even 5-6 miles of where you've lived/had a residence all your life?
Has anyone lived in any one location and/or owned a house there for 18 years and seen their neighborhood, by EVERYONE's estimation, go down the fucking tubes while you're still there?

How many live in an industrialized metroplitan region with a population of 6 million (ie a real city) where you can dream to match conditions to what I'm fucking telling you is going on here?
And don't you have the least suspicion that industrialized, vastly overcrowded, geographically removed and dense Chicago is going to have a changed set of 'problems' for a group of Mexican immigrants than say, El Paso, right across the river from 'Home Sweet Home'?


When we moved, my wife checked school profiles in our new locations and for 'fun' these profiles for the grade schools and the high schools in THAT area (where we no longer are...but my office remains) are fucking abysmal re:

- High School grads_{(....and the High School nursery issue - services my taxes pay for are documented independently in the local newspapers, objectively, matter-of-factly...along with numerous infanticides)}

- College grads

In the cellar - so, you're telling me that I should be forced by your far far removed liberal guilt, a guilt which is formed way outside of experiences similar to mine, to place my kid in with group of kids whose documented achievement levels (for whatEVER reason) are so low that their likelihood of realistically aspiring to 'something better' are going to be effectively handicapping large numbers of them? And to freely include mine?

Not to mention that we couldn't go to the playground a half block from our house because often the black kids were being hassled by the Mexican gangbangers...chased one our neighbors kids back to his house then smashed out the front door windows witha crowbar when the kid wouldn't come back out the way they demanded. In broad fucking daylight.

Come fucking ON people! Where the fuck would be YOUR breaking point?
What?

Any thinking parent given these glaring deficiencies, is going to say 'Fuck no'....IF they are able to.

We are able to, thank you very much.

[Mary]

Very interesting, thanks ken. I am very intrigued by the fact that El Paso is a very safe city despite so many demographic indicators of an expected crime problem. What do you think the explanation is for this?? Is it just the fact that it was always relatively poor?? It's quite baffling. People who are interested in urban crime ought to study El Paso!!

[rockysigman]

Hey RocDoc, I was joking. Sort of riffing on suburbanites who so often seperate themselves from what they view as being crime-ridden cities. Sorry if that wasn't obvious enough. Obviously I know that there are some rough areas on the city.

[rockysigman]

Also, you seem to have completely missed the point that everyone here was making re: your racism towards Mexicans.

If your neighborhood was getting violent, then yes, by all means, move your family. That's a fantastic reason to move. Probably the best one there is.

But your initial comment didn't say anything about violence, it just complained about the presence of Mexicans. Then, when you were called on it, you responded as if we were to have assumed Mexicans = violence.

And your inference that my neighbor is only nice one-on-one seems like quite an assumption, since you've never met him. And most people get pretty angry if you hit on their wife or girlfriend. So maybe you shouldn't do that anymore.

[limitdeditionlayla]

I had always meant to ask this, but did you guys ever get the "say something in (whatever language you speak)" request when others find out that you're multilingual?

Just say something offensive, Ryo. Or say "something" in Japanese/English.

[RocDoc]

...and of COURSE you guys won't believe this, but I very much LOVE Mexican and Hispanic culture (include my beloved tango, flamenco, salsero and samba music here, besides the Mariachi orchestras) let alone the food.
I've even had 2 serious past relationships with latinas in my life, one was a woman of Mexican descent, the other of Puerto Rican descent.
The Mexican girl I am still close friends with, as well as with her sister.

But through my close experiences here, I can say that though I love their true culture, mostly I'm sick to death of most types of Mexicans.