Chicago, Upside Down
By LUIS ALBERTO URREA
Naperville, Ill.
CHICAGO is once more hunched against the winter, though this winter feels strange. It's cold, but it's not Chicago cold: we keep tottering back into the 40's and 50's. Rain storms in January in place of snow. As happy as we are to escape a deep freeze, strange things are happening. A mysterious rust-colored powder, for example, sifted out of the sky one night and covered parked cars on the street. Chicago police officials on the late news couldn't explain it. They had other things to worry about, like the peculiar shift in the murder patterns in Chicagoland.
The murder rate in the inner city has dropped. The rate of killings has increased, however, in the suburbs. This is attributed to the movement of poverty. Whereas "white flight" was a pattern in the city for decades, Chicago is reaping the benefits of the sly social engineering that has taken place in areas like the South Loop around the University of Illinois. Upscale communities tied to the university have systematically replaced tenements. Farther south, stalwart symbols of urban decay like the Cabrini Green housing project are giving way to brighter, shinier developments. As one of my students noted, "It's awful white up in here, and I don't mean snow."
Displaced members of blighted urban communities (what is a housing project but a vertical village, after all) have been shuffled off to the west and south. Never to return. Once the barrio and 'hood have established colonies in country-club land, aunties and nephews and homies follow. The center of the city "reclaims" itself, and the untidy wave of need moves elsewhere. Gangs? Drugs? Homelessness? It's Joliet's problem now.
The Chicago Tribune faithfully reports more weirdness. In 2005, 65,000 jobs came into Illinois; unemployment held steady at 5.5 percent. This news seems to be good. Why, then, did 24,500 applicants lay siege to a new Wal-Mart last month, looking for 325 jobs?
Could it be that these job-seekers are the same people rendered invisible until events like Hurricane Katrina force them onto rooftops?
The 24,500 formerly invisible applicants formed the largest job-seeking force in the company's history. Some local politicians suggested that Wal-Mart was faking the numbers. Wal-Mart countered by displaying 22 boxes of applications. A public theater of the absurd rules.
Curiouser, perhaps, is the news that the vast majority of those applicants came from inside city limits — even though local officials kept this new Wal-Mart just outside of Chicago proper, refusing the expected $1 million annual tax revenue for the eternally struggling South Side. Too much competition for local business, they say. Though there should be plenty more competition for jobs in June, when Wal-Mart finally opens its first store in Chicago, this one on the West Side. In that neighborhood, the applicant line will probably look like the hundreds of teenagers waiting to audition for "American Idol."
Perhaps the suburban Wal-Mart will draw crime and murder to it. My police officer friends are still working out the patterns of the homicide migration. Of course, they have their own problems in this healthy economy. Jake, an officer who served in Iraq and is now back on the Chi-town streets, points out that he and his colleagues pay for their own equipment. Just like policemen in Tijuana. And the salaries are tight — tight enough that many younger officers work two or three jobs to make ends meet. Our guardians shovel snow, do yard work and landscape when they're not fielding the effects of the urban mutations that seem, as ever, driven by money.
Well, it's February now. They're saying we'll be back down to five degrees within the week. Maybe things will settle back down. We can hunch our shoulders and feel normal again. Don't count on it.
Luis Alberto Urrea, the author of "The Hummingbird's Daughter," is a professor of English at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
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