Conversations Across Our America: Talking About Immigration and the Latinoization of the United States

Raúl Raymundo

Raúl Raymundo is the executive director of the Resurrection Project in Chicago ’s historic Pilsen neighborhood. I met him on a late Friday afternoon in his office. The Resurrection Project’s mission is “to build relationships and challenge people to act on their faith and values to create healthy communities through organizing, education and community development.” raúl: From my perspective, if you live in places like Iowa, Nebraska, the heartland, if you will, you better be welcoming immigrants, because they are the ones who will be paying for your Social Security. The population is aging, and they are taking care of your future. There has been research comparing the economy of Chicago with the economies of Detroit and Cleveland , particularly during the ’90s and especially the late ’90s when they were booming, and why Detroit’s and Cleveland’s economies didn’t prosper as well as Chicago. Number one reason: immigration. In Chicago, Latinos primarily but immigrants in general reversed the decline of the population. Latinos are all over now. Pilsen, along with southeast Chicago, used to be the key port of entry for mexicanos. This community has always been an immigrant community, even going back to the turn of the century. It was built by Eastern Europeans. This used to be Czechoslovakian, Croatian, Lithuanian, Bohemian, Polish, German, so there are about fourteen Catholic churches in this neighborhood. And every church was an immigrant, ethnic parish. I would love to have been a fly on the wall to hear their conversations back then. You still have tenement housing here. But the difference in this community , as opposed to other communities where it got just devastated, is that the population was replaced by mexicano communities. This city has been a working immigrant city for many years; it was founded on that and raúl raymundo 117 confronting threats to community developed a very strong foundation of support organizations. So there are a lot of coalitions, networks, nonprofit organizations, social service agencies. It used to be that in the suburbs you didn’t need services, you made it, you were well-off enough to leave the problems in the city. That has come back to bite them in the ass, because now that you have a whole demographic shift in the region a lot of these cities and municipalities are not ready to adapt in the schools. The challenge of serving the new population, in this case Latinos, has become a big issue. louis: Is there an effort to gentrify now that people want to move back into the city? raúl: Oh yeah, we are in the path of gentrification. But you know gentri- fication is like a double-edged sword. It is not about pricing people out, as much as it is about why people move. You have got to have development to progress. We are an organization that is doing a lot of work in that area, and that is what I call natural displacement. There is no way in hell that everybody who wanted to could live here. That is why new communities get formed. People leave for different reasons; people leave because of poor schools, safety, and so forth, and then others are priced out, so there are multiple reasons for it. Raúl Raymundo in his office at the Resurrection Project in Barrio Pilsen, Chicago. Photo by Louis Mendoza. 118 conversations across our america The city has come through a tremendous renaissance. A lot of development has taken place, and a lot of development is unaffordable. So on our end, we are trying to create what I would call balanced development. The private sector is going to do what it is going to do. We have to figure out how to create opportunities for existing families to remain in the community by creating affordable housing. And that is sometimes what people fight about, you know, they say, “We want to preserve the community the way it is,” and I am like, “Well, sometimes you don’t want to preserve it the way it is. I don’t want the gangbangers on the corner. I don’t want to preserve that.” So you have to figure out why you are creating that opportunity for balanced growth, but you know the other thing that is going on is that the face of affordable housing...