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4 Cavities of Contagion Networks and Nodes of TB in Chicago Tuberculosis, Chicago Style In New York, my buddy Spanner and I used to joke about “jacking into the matrix” every morning when we hit the streets of the city looking for lost TB cases. We had taken the phrase from William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, where it referred to the process of entering the virtual world, a world that was dependent on the “real” world, existing in parallel to it, subordinate and separate, but nonetheless real. For me, what the term also evoked was the sense of the city as a living grid, composed of countless interrelated parts, tied together by the entangled strands of human relationships, yet divided into sectors by history, power, money, steel, cement, bricks, parks, and bridges, as well as space and time. Venturing forth into the social realms of TB patients was mindaltering because of its very reality. In spite of modern transportation and communication technologies, many people in large cities such as New York and Chicago live intensely local lives. This is especially true among those populations most susceptible to TB, many of whom have no addresses or phones, much less cars or computers. Our health department automobiles gave us quick access to these multiple sectors, which amounted to different local life-worlds. We were urban planet-hoppers, on a mission to arrest disease. To do this, though, we had to understand the rules of the worlds that we entered—we could not simply walk in and unilaterally have our way. Like fire-jumpers, we had to know and respect the landscape. But my experience in New York was more kaleidoscopic than ethnographic. I saw patients there for relatively brief periods of time, and did not spend long periods in particular neighborhoods. When I moved to Chicago in late 1993 and began working in tuberculosis control at a large public hospital, I had a much different experience. In part this was due to the fact that Chicago’s social geography differs markedly from that of New York. New York has a densely packed hub in Manhattan, with rich and poor, black, brown, and white peoples often living side by side and on top of each other, passing 87 in the street every day and mingling through an extensive transit system which is widely used on a daily basis by almost everyone. The outer boroughs , though more horizontal than vertical in orientation, are also multicultural patchworks. Chicago, on the other hand, is a city that is radically segregated into distinct zones or territories, with New York-style diversity being the exception rather than the rule, and confined mainly to the high-density neighborhoods along the northern lake front. Though there are stretches of the South Bronx and Brooklyn in New York which are populated almost entirely by poor people of color, and neighborhoods such as Harlem or Bensonhurst or Washington Heights, which are known by reputation as black, Italian, or Latino-dominated areas, New York is a compressed polyglot mosaic compared to Chicago, where whole swathes of the city are profoundly racialized. There is no doubt that Chicago is ethnically diverse, and that New York is also ethnically divided; but New York is Balkanized, while Chicago is sliced up like a pie. The lines of division in Chicago are as precise as ZIP codes and seem to be accepted within the city itself, as natural and inevitable as the location of Lake Michigan. The West Side and the South Side of Chicago, for example, are commonly perceived by Chicagoans as “black” areas, even though there are large pockets of white, Latino, and Asian population located within them. My grandmother and my godmother both lived on the far South Side, and we visited them there every holiday when I was a kid, yet as a suburbanite I was always instilled with a fear of the South Side. If you were going to visit downtown Chicago and planned to take the “L,” Chicago’s subway system, people would always warn you, “Watch out that you don’t end up on the South Side.” My grandmother didn’t help this any when she would talk with reverence of the late local alderman who had “kept the niggers out.” My father promptly expressed his disapproval of Grandma’s bigotry, but the underlying message was successfully delivered in many subtle and not-so-subtle ways: “we” just don’t live around “them.” This sentiment, and the reality...

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