Process Writing

One of the greatest challenges in this class was choosing what to write about for each assignment. And then came the execution, which was even harder. I wanted my personal journalism rewrite to be a Modern Love piece about my Dad, but I felt completely overwhelmed, like I needed a month to just think about our relationship. I wanted to do it right. With all my pieces I had this sort of obsession with doing things justice. Like when I wrote about the gentrification of Pilsen. That neighborhood is so close to my heart that if I didn’t convey all of its sounds and smells and activities the way I experience and idolize them, I would feel like I wronged the place. The same went for writing about my Dad. I couldn’t get that essence of my Dad and me on the page, so I didn’t follow through with it. I thought my Dad deserved better and it was my responsibility to communicate our lives together honestly. The written words had to be as emotional as me speaking about him.

For the first time ever in my writing process, I talked to myself out loud. When I decided to write about my high school boyfriend, I had to talk myself through the relationship. I asked myself who I am now, and who I was back then. I feel as if I grew tremendously as a writer in this class, but as a person, too. That’s not just because I went through an emotional time thinking about my Dad and an ex-boyfriend and realized just how special Pilsen is me; at one point in both of those writing processes, I wanted to crack. I doubted what I could do as a writer. I hit writer’s block every time I started or revised a piece and thought about dropping the class. I guess it’s because I always thought one of my best skills is my writing, and in a time in my life when I’m really questioning my passions, I don’t want to struggle with finding the right words because I thought I had that covered.

This has been a challenging quarter emotionally. I knew I couldn’t let what’s going on in my persona life get in the way of focusing on my subjects, but sometimes it did and sometimes that emotion benefited my writing in cool ways. If I could devote so much time thinking about and analyzing the events of my life, I could reflect that same way about my high school relationship or Pilsen or religion on campus. The way I want my words to appear on the page has changed, too. I’m more intentional about those words now, and what details I will give, and how I paint my characters. I’m aware of my voice. Most importantly, though, I want to be really honest in my writing. I want Pilsen to sound amazing because it is amazing, and I want my Dad to sound like the most wonderful person on this earth because he is, and I want that high school relationship to sound messy because that’s what really happened. I’m definitely more honest with myself now. I don’t want to exaggerate any experiences or feelings or sights because that doesn’t make me feel like I’ve accomplished anything, even if it sounds good. 

Audio/Visual: Catholic on Campus

Final (draft): Catholic on Campus

(Audience: The Index, or the Gazette)

Two days before 43 Catholic groups nationwide filed a lawsuit against the Obama Administration for its mandate requiring some religious institutions to offer health insurance that covers contraception, anti-gay protestors appeared at the site of Kalamazoo College’s annual Crystal Ball dance. For one night every spring, students can dress in drag to reclaim their identity and look beyond the limitations of gender stereotypes. One protestor wore a t-shirt that said, “Stop sinning! Trust Jesus!” and gripped a sign with the rainbow-colored words, “Homo sex is sin!” Tempers on campus subsided by that morning, but that same protestor was met with a hot resistance a few days earlier during his first of two campus visits that week. He shouted that K's students deserve hell, that they support AIDS, that they are a load of sinners. A mildly composed female student sat on the grass waving a sign that read, “Homo sex is fun!” while one gay couple flaunted a kiss in front of the protestor and another laid entwined at his feet. During his visit the next day, after receiving emails from administrators urging the campus to pay no heed to this man, students stood near him in silence holding posters with the message, “God loves everyone.”

Sophomore student Marissa Dawson remained quiet, not so she could get her peaceful point across or deflect the attention from him, but because, as a practicing Catholic, she feels silenced by the campus community.

She only heard about the protestors in conversation and read about them in Facebook and Tumblr posts, but that already left her upset about the campus’s reception of its unpleasant visitors. She saw a student blog, “Variety of Reactions to Those Damn Evangelicals,” followed by pictures of Lady Gaga saying, “Go Fuck Yourself”, Steven Colbert jolting wide-mouthed from his seat, and Ryan Stiles joyfully whipping out his middle finger. She wondered if her peers actually knew his denomination, or if they were just stereotyping.

“We do not need something else on this campus to add a stigma to religion,” she said, half grinning. “I was never taught to hate.”

Marissa’s relationship with her Catholic faith began like many others’; born to Catholic parents, she had no say in the matter. She went to Mass and Sunday school, prayed and read the scripture. Early on she learned that religious practices extend to how she lives her life; they are a combination of institutional and individual things. She admits that she would have given up her religion if not for certain spiritual experiences. It was not a coincidence, she says, that she was able to lift herself out of dark places like depression and self-deprecation at a young age.

Her religious life transformed after she was confirmed in her freshman year of high school. Grade school religion classes failed to remind her that she still had the individual power to choose, and that the Church’s institutionalism is not black and white.

“There’s a space for personal decision among all those big issues [like gay marriage and contraception]. The judgment is left up to God.”

Despite her strong religious convictions and unwavering relationship with the Church as an adolescent, the protestors reminded Dawson why being Catholic on K’s small campus has never been easy, and why she no longer feels a passion for practicing. Support is scare, she says. People are not that accepting of religion.

“I don’t blame them. I’ve been made aware of the issues people have with the Catholic Church. But just because I do believe in God doesn’t mean I don’t understand the doubts that people have.”

She just wishes her peers understood why she believes what she believes. But her recent insecurities surrounding her religion and the backlash against the anti-gay protestors on a small campus in the small city of Kalamazoo lend themselves to an escalating nationwide discourse involving the Catholic Church.

One week ago, Catholic organizations around the nation—hospitals, universities, and charities—sued the Obama Administration over a mandate requiring birth control coverage in most health insurance plans, charging it for violating their religious freedom. Several sources assert that the lawsuit is not about preventing women from having access to contraception; it is based on the conviction that the Government is imposing values onto these organizations that conflict with their religious teachings. If the Supreme Court upholds the mandate, they believe it will set precedent for future administrations to undercut the values of religious organizations. Catholic institutions were still displeased after Obama’s proposal to allow religious universities and charities to have their health insurers offer the coverage instead, seeing as many of them, like the archdiocese, are self-insured.

Dawson’s strongest frustration, stemming from her personal experience as an impaired Catholic voice on a liberal college campus, is that people do not understand why the Catholic Church has its stance on contraception and abortion. Behind its pro-life stance is a compassion for the child and its mother, a desire to protect and keep sacred the inherent beauty of life. Conservative viewpoints are vilified, she says, twisted to sound like people want to deny medical care and are against women’s rights.

But Dawson prefers not to politicize her religious views, even though they are closely tied to her politics, because she has doubts. She stays away from arguing for the Catholic Church, like she stayed away the day of the protests, because she has the same doubts as her gay best friend and other liberal friends when it comes to Catholic teachings; Catholic institutions should not be forced to provide contraceptives, but a woman should have access to abortion if she wants one. God did not create man to be with man, but she knows that gay couples often live a more Christian lifestyle than straight couples. She believes in sin, but in love just the same.

If people see her doubt, Dawson thinks people will ride her off. They will play up her insecurities and inner conflicts. They will look at her interactions, experiences, and relationships, and pass judgment, call her hypocrite.

“We don’t celebrate the student with doubts. We’re oriented towards believing something 100%. We’re high achieving individuals. We’re rational, logical. Faith and religion don’t work that way. They require an amount of intangibility. But that doesn’t necessarily follow the logic of how the world works, and how this school thinks.”

Profile: Final

Sonia González works the reception desk at the National Museum of Mexican Art (NMMA) in Pilsen, a low-income Latino neighborhood located just southwest of Chicago’s central business district. This means she interacts with more tourists than anyone else at the Museum. As the largest Latino museum in the country and the only one accredited by the American Association of Museums, the NMMA is in part responsible for putting Pilsen on the nation’s radar. In anticipation of out-of-state and country visitors, González has developed programmed responses to their most popular question: Where should we go next? They can check the Museum off their lists, which leaves Pilsen’s first great appeal: its Mexican food. She usually rotates El Milagro, Nuevo Leon, and La Casa del Pueblo as her top restaurant recommendation.

Over at La Casa del Pueblo, a white woman and her young daughter approach the counter. The woman taking her order of caldo de pollo with arroz and frijoles just finished serving three Spanish-speaking parties. She releases a thick accent when she initiates the interaction with, “Hello. What would you like?”

All of the employees speak English, but judging from the dominant Spanish dialogue in the restaurant, they prefer to speak their first language. La Casa del Pueblo commands attention from Latinos mostly, but it’s been attracting a growing non-Latino audience for a while now.

If restaurants in Pilsen like La Casa are grateful for the diversity of its clientele, it can thank the Museum. Employees like González are encouraged to send visitors to the neighborhood’s best taquerías, panaderías and tortillerías. A city’s best eats is usually a matter of personal opinion, but in Pilsen, where the smell of carne asada, pozole and sweet conchas penetrates the walls of Catholic churches, bilingual schools, and apartment buildings adorned with Museum-commissioned murals, residents are in agreement. La Casa del Pueblo is the place for Mexican soul food, and some of the best tacos are made at El Milagro Taquería

El Milagro and its adjacent small-scale tortilla factory are tucked into a neglected corner on Blue Island St. They stand a block from the Museum’s “Declaration of Immigration” mural, created by local artists and local high school kids, painted on a brick wall behind the Yollocalli building, the Museum’s radio station. Five columns of black-and-red-painted statements read:

WE ARE A NATION OF IMMIGRANTS
NO INHUMANE TREATMENT, DEPORTATION, FAMILY SEPARATION,
DETENTION
NO WALL
NO HUMAN BEING IS ILLEGAL
NATIONAL SECURITY IS USED TO FOSTER INTER ETHNIC TENSIONS

Two days after its completion in 2009, the spray-painted words, “LIES LIES LIES” and, “MEXICANS ARE RACIST” covered the last statement. One Yollocalli employee remembers feeling gutted, but not too surprised.

Who would write those graffiti words? The answer can be traced back to the Museum.

The NMMA is a blessing and a curse for the neighborhood. It gives off an exciting vibe, a vibe of ethic pride seen in colorful murals on Ashland Avenue, Damen, and school buildings on 19th street. They wear the faces of Mexican icons like Joan Sebastian, María Félix, Frida Kahlo, Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, and Benito Juarez. Many of these murals, like at Casa Aztlán on Racine Ave, were painted by the 1960s Chicano Movement’s most powerful activists, like David Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco. The Movement was an extension of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement that began in the 1940s, whose purpose was to achieve Mexican American empowerment. Several years ago, the Museum purchased a modest home directly across from it to house visiting Latino artists from all over the nation and Mexico, people like the late Francisco Mendoza who are now taking on the task of once again creating revolutionary works of public art that also honor local Latino leaders.

The Museum itself and the surrounding area are a retreat for youth. Bordering the NMMA are soccer fields and baseball diamonds; the two sports fight for the attention of neighborhood youth, but both are given equal respect when the dozens of grade and high schools let out during the week. Director of Operations Ignacio Guzman says that soon all of that space will be converted into soccer fields. “This is a reflection of the community; soccer is a dominant sport.”

The Museum also offers free art education programs inside their studios, stage nationally-recognized events like Día del Niño every April, and invite high school students to broadcast live at the Yollocalli radio station. Every Easter they organize a reenactment of the crucifixion during the Passion of the Christ walk on 18th street. They team up with the many Catholic churches to celebrate other holidays, too. The Catholic faith takes on a life of its own in the Museum’s murals on Ashland Ave that span the length of brick apartment exteriors.

It is likely that the NMMA is Pilsen’s most prized possession, but not everybody in the community sees it that way because of the looming threat of gentrification.

The most obvious sign is the young white man with a trendy messenger bag standing on the same corner as the champurradovendor and his traveling cart is a tip off: the ethnic composition of Pilsen is different and has been since the first signs of a diminishing Latino population around 1990. (But Pilsen’s very first residents in the 1920s were immigrants from Czechoslovakia, Poland, Lithuania, and Italy. Their influence is what gives Pilsen its distinct Bohemian feel, mostly in the architecture of its homes. It was not until the start of the 1950s that the neighborhood demographic changed to reflect the increasing Latino population, most from Mexico).

The NMMA has a lot to do with how this non-Latino population got here. González knows the repercussions of her answer to, “Where do I go next?”

“Some individuals may say, ‘I like Pilsen’, and it doesn’t take long for them to realize that Pilsen is in the ideal spot,” says Development Coordinator Anel Ruiz. Pilsen is ideal because of its access to public transportation, its proximity to the major expressways, Lake Michigan, the Chicago River, a big university, its housing stock, the numerous churches, restaurants and bakeries. “And then people who are trying to gentrify the neighborhood are starting to realize that these rents are not your typical depressed rents. The property values are still very good there so that draws in more affluent people, and people who want to invest in properties because they’re seeing an opportunity to make money,” she adds. What results is higher rents and, eventually, the displacement of existing community members.

González and Ruiz recognize that Pilsen is one of those “up and coming” places that attract young urban professionals, so it seems inevitable that the neighborhood will lure people with more financial means.

That knowledge is spreading quickly and affecting the way locals do business. “It's likely you have businesses that spring up with a business plan that relies on the people who are leaving the Museum,” says Ruiz. “I see more higher end businesses going up, I see businesses similar to those in Near North, where they have the fancy delis, sandwich shops, coffee shops. And some of them survive but most of them don’t. They haven’t been able to feed that type of clientele yet. People still want their ethnic foods. I’m always surprised to see that they don’t last. But you put up a taco joint and those type of places still hang in there.”

It makes sense that Pilsen’s ethnic pride persists, for now at least, since that was the initial attraction of neighborhood gentrifiers. Ruiz hopes that persistence prevails with business owners now trying to attract a different type of clientele, a clientele that is not “our people”, she remarks.

There is a movement, although not formally organized, trying to prevent gentrification. Guzman knows one local developer in particular who is buying up a lot of properties and hiking up the rental price. Most of his clients are the very people that anti-gentrification organizations are trying to keep out. He explains that, now, people in Pilsen are pushing back because they realize if they do not, the neighborhood will probably start to change too quickly and drive the Latino residents away over time. “You see these commercial banks going up, and you see these large buildings that were not used at one time--now they’re condos. You see a lot of conversions going on,” he says.

Ruiz and her Development coworkers willingly admit that the Pilsen area is under pressure in part because of the Museum. People who frequent museums are not only the people who the museum is about; a big portion of the NMMA’s visitors are not Latino, just like the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago does not only attract African Americans. The NMMA knows it brings in other ethnic groups that end up visiting the neighborhood, becoming familiar with it, and moving in. González has stories as proof.


The Museum provides many great services to the community and lends much stability. Founded in 1987 by a pack of public schoolteachers who raised $900 to get it started, it is certainly a model for other small community museums to emulate. But there comes a point when it stops being a beacon of culture and ethnic pride and turns into a commodity of locality and neighborhood identity. Thankfully, that is a line many Museum employees know not to cross.

Events of October: Reading Response

Reading The Events of October as a Kalamazoo College student is a unique experience because I can imagine everything taking place on a small campus, and how different a murder suicide affects a small campus like ours. Knowing how intimate the setting is here--how people interact, and how information is spread, how close relationships are formed--changed the way I read this book. There was something very eery about Gail's description of Neneef standing on a chair glaring at Nick at the Homecoming dance, for the obvious reason that it is creepy, but also, those dances are so intimate that it's the kind of action that does not go unnoticed. On a campus where your business isn't only your business, I wonder just how many people knew Maggie and Neneef's situation, and maybe foresaw serious consequences.

One question I would like to ask Gail has to do with the emotional experience of writing this book. It's hard to feel the same sympathy for Neneef as I do for Maggie, especially when Gail includes chat histories that portray Neneef as a violent, needy, hyper-aggressive person who was never satisfied with Maggie's constant reassurances that she loved him. Gail really paints two drastically different portraits of them; Maggie, a very confident, intelligent, mature woman--always growing throughout the book--and Neneef, this insecure boy who blamed everybody else including Maggie for his personal struggles. I wonder how her emotions and personal feelings about these events affected her writing and the process.

Democracy in Yemen: Reading Response

At the beginning of the series "Yemen: Exporting Democracy", I liked how David Finkel uses foreshadowing to tell the reader what to expect in the following pages. He opens with, "On the first day, which would turn out to be the best day, the one day of all 180 days when everything actually seemed possible, the president of Yemen hadn't yet dismissively referred to an American named Robin Madrid as an old woman." Using words like "had yet" kept me engaged, although so did the content of the pieces. Finkel puts this very convoluted topic of exporting democracy into words that anybody without a background in foreign policy (me) and knowledge of the U.S.'s history with Arab nations (me again) can understand. I thought he did this well by weaving in Madrid consistently throughout. She was, of course, a major player in bringing democracy to Yemen, but the times she emerged acted like reference points, always bringing me back to the real issue. The way he sometimes posed questions to the reader also helped. Then he introduces a cast of important characters from President Bush, to the sheiks, to President Ali Abdullah Saleh; this part reminded me of something that would come out of a Quentin Tarantino film.

He recounts some of Yemen's history and what the city physically looks like today through profiling Madrid. I felt like he was describing the current situation there from her perspective, like when he quotes her saying, "I cried. I mean, it was magical," and then, "First there's this horrible city, then there's this beautiful city, then I almost get sho
t." He presents the conflict through her eyes, while simultaneously telling us about her life, her routine, her expectations versus the reality, and commenting on the culture.

I really enjoyed this piece and the ease with which I could read most parts. The consistent dialogue helped, and the outlining of individual characters broke it down for me.

Process Writing: Profile Piece

I think there's some confusion surrounding my profile piece. I chose to profile the National Museum of Mexican Art, but more specifically, the NMMA's role in the gentrification of Pilsen, the surrounding neighborhood. Maybe that was too much for me to take on, though, because I found myself getting really overwhelmed during the writing process with so many descriptions, interviews, and observations to include. I got to 700 words and thought this would never get finished. That resulted in me leaving out a lot of important points, quotes, and personal insights.

Still, I think it's a fascinating topic, and that was reinforced as soon as I drove into the neighborhood last week. I went to school just a couple of blocks from the heart of Pilsen--18th street--and my family and I frequent the local restaurants, so I'm familiar with the people and the places. The reason I chose to focus on the NMMA's role in the gentrification of Pilsen was because 1) in my mind, the Museum has always been a great, fascinating addition to the neighborhood and I love art museums and 2) in my last couple of high school years, I began to notice more than before the changing demographic. I saw more diversity in skin color, in clothing choice, in physical appearance in general. It no longer was a neighborhood of and for Latinos. I myself have been to those higher end Mexican restaurants which are also part of gentrification. But I've also been to El Milagro, La Casa del Pueblo, and Nuevo Leon. To me, those are the "authentic" places that give Pilsen its unique cultural identity. Maybe subconsciously I went to La Casa del Pueblo before I went to the Musuem for my interviews to get into the right mindset. I didn't know what my interviewees were going to say about the local food joints, but once I headed home after my day of research, I perceived my experience at La Casa del Pueblo that morning in a completely different light. I noticed the interaction between the white woman and the Latino employee, but I didn't realize the implications right then.

I had a ton of fun writing this piece. I got to eat some great Mexican food in Pilsen, my second favorite neighborhood of Chicago, hang out with my family at the Museum, and talk to some fascinating people.