Love Where You Live
A few words on ICE and how we respond
I live in South Philadelphia, in a neighborhood of immigrants. My neighborhood was heavily settled by Italian immigrants and their children, who still populate the area in large numbers. Over the years, it has also become home to families from Mexico, Honduras, Cambodia, Vietnam, and other places in Central America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. The previous owner of my home was born in Italy and died here; I still get his mail from the Italian government.
Everyone knows that this is an immigrant neighborhood. People come here from elsewhere in the city to eat Mexican food, or to visit a nearby weekend Cambodian food market in the park. The government knows it, too. Last week, three people were snatched by ICE a few blocks from where I live.
I love my neighborhood. I think it’s the most special place in the world, because it’s my home. But I understand that, on another level, it’s just like lots of places in the U.S. It is characterized by the differences amongst coexisting people of varying origins who call this place home.
It’s plainly true that many of the things I love about my neighborhood (the food, the many small corner markets, the beautiful Buddhist temple, the way that people greet each other gruffly on the street which makes me feel weirdly safe, the window decorations) have much to do with the density and diversity of immigrants who live here. It’s also true that all of that is irrelevant to my understanding of the political situation at hand. Peoples’ right to be free from violence, to go home to their families or wherever it is they’re going and not be fucking kidnapped while waiting for the bus, is not tied to the economic, cultural, or social value that they deliver, whether to the nation or to the neighborhood. Good neighbors or not, nobody deserves this. But those of us who are looking to show up and resist ICE in our neighborhoods would do well to think about how we move differently through our streets and how we can strengthen our ties.
Like many of my white middle-class peers, I was raised in the suburbs and become a city-dweller as an adult, and I’ve learned how to live in a city through doing and observing. I’ve also learned from reading, and the book that’s impacted my understanding of cities most is Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel Delaney. This book, which I was introduced to years ago by my ex (shout out to Hannah), is comprised of two long essays. The first is a memoiristic essay about Delaney’s experiences cruising at the porn theaters that once stood in Times Square, which were shuttered during Giuliani’s efforts to “clean up” the area and turn it into the touristic hell it is now. The second is a critical essay exploring the importance of “contact,” a concept that Delaney adopts and expands from Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
“Contact,” in Delaney’s usage, refers to the small everyday ways that people in cities interact with one another in public spaces across lines of socioeconomic difference. These range from making small talk with another customer in line at the grocery store to nodding to a neighbor on the stoop to anonymous sexual encounters in a public washroom. The “primary thesis” of his essay is that, “given the mode of capitalism under which we live, life is at its most rewarding, productive, and pleasant when large numbers of people understand, appreciate, and seek out interclass contact and communication conducted in a mode of good will.”1 However, “the class war raging constantly and often silently” in our society “works for the erosion of the social practices through which interclass communication takes place and of the institutions holding those practices stable, so that new institutions must always be conceived and set in place to take over the jobs of those that are battered again and again until they are destroyed.”2 I would add to this that the widespread atomizing use of smartphone technology (and attendant headphones) has hastened the pace of this erosion.
Delaney’s theory of urbanism is a theory of constant change. Institutions, spaces, and practices are constantly eroding and must therefore be constantly rebuilt, re-conceived, reenergized. To contribute to this process is the task of living in a city, if you hope not just to exist within its geographic bounds but within its social fabric.
Conditions, as always, are changing. Right now, they are changing in ways that are rapid and scary. But there’s room for regular people, for us, to respond. There’s room to try to subvert and mitigate harm, to stand together and try to protect our neighbors and ourselves from state violence. I’m not an expert, but I dare say that a good starting point is to try and create new venues for contact, to build trust with neighbors, and to build from a foundation of love for whatever place you call home.
What gives me hope right now is that this is happening in my neighborhood. I won’t get more specific about it than that. But perhaps something similar is happening where you live too; if you’re not already connected, maybe someone you know is (ask a punk, etc). Maybe you can go put in some hours at Food Not Bombs or another local mutual aid group and make connections.
As I thought about what I wanted to say in this essay, I kept returning to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s provocation in Braiding Sweetgrass about “becoming indigenous.” She does not, of course, suggest that it is possible for U.S. residents not descended from Native peoples in the Americas to become indigenous in their identities. Rather, she says, “after all these generations since Columbus, some of the wisest of Native elders still puzzle over the people who came to our shores. They look at the toll on the land and say, ‘The problem with these new people is that they don’t have both feet on the shore. One is still on the boat.’” Given this, she asks, “can Americans, as a nation of immigrants, learn to live here as if we were staying? With both feet on the shore?”3
It’s a question worth taking seriously. If we can live here (wherever “here” might be) like we’re not leaving, maybe we can find new thread of solidarity and connection that will make us stronger in the fight against ICE. Protecting our neighborhoods from state violence is an act of love; let’s love each other by doing it, with both feet on the shore.
Samuel Delaney, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 111.
Delaney, 121.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2013): 207.