Mexican Bohemia: Chicago’s Pilsen

From the Loop, the Pink Line El bursts west, floating among the rooftops of a low-rise industrial district. As the city’s wall of downtown skyscrapers drifts away and the train enters an expanse of limitless sky, it’s as if the Pink Line is darting toward far more distant destinations than its terminus in neighboring Cicero. The slightly undulating horizontals of the warehouse roofs take on the characteristics of the rolling, arid Plains and desert beyond, stretching almost ceaselessly to the south and the west.

Stopping at 18th St., though, it’s more apparent the journey transports mentally further than it has physically; the Sears Tower still looms totemically, as it does over most of pancake-flat Chicago’s south and west sides. But something else has happened: the station is covered in a riot of color; art infuses every step and crevice. Alighting here, the rider descends this urban canvas into Pilsen: first settled by crafty vrais Bohemians, resettled by Mexicans and increasingly claimed again by bohemians of a different sort, Pilsen is a neighborhood where artistic traditions run deep.

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Noodles and a Sex Shop

J’avance, j’arrive à ce qui semble être les confins de ce quartier.

Un dimanche soir pluvieux. Mi-printemps boueux, 23h42.

L’odeur est très désagréable, ça me prend au nez. Pas étonnant, un îlot complet à récemment été calciné. Quel gâchis ! De grands bâtiments aux arcades encore sensibles, qui tombe en ruine, qui semble prêt à tomber. Dans la rue, je suis désormais presque seul.

À l’intersection, une ample place. Métro Atwater : un immense forum, un cinéma gargantuesque et puéril.

Elle m’étonne : malgré que je sois si prêt du centre-ville, à un jet de pierre de la tourelle de la bourse, cet espace est vide. Vide. Et vide de sens.

Dans un angle de la ville qui semble vide de tout sens d’urbanité. Je suis déstabilisé.

Je retourne sur mes pas, je n’aime pas les limites.  Sans pour autant éprouver le moindre désir à me voir traverser cet îlot à nouveau, incinéré, laissé pour compte, et où l’odeur de la poussière est si forte qu’elle me prend à la gorge. M’étouffe ! L’indigeste sentiment est d’autant plus fort lorsque je balaye ces vitrines, brisées, d’où émanent, d’un coup de bourrasque, ces souvenirs d’une nuit enflammée.

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French Expats, Here and There

French football fans celebrate in 2006 on the Plateau Mont-Royal
Photo by Oliver Lavery

It’s been a long time coming, but the French — in the words of a shop manager on Mount Royal Avenue — “are taking over the Plateau!” French immigrants have been coming to Quebec for decades, but the past few years have seen an especially large influx. This year, Canada will issue 14,000 temporary visas to French people between the ages of 18 and 35, most of them on working holidays. Many choose to live in Montreal, and especially on the Plateau Mont-Royal, where French accents have become common enough to elicit half-joking exclamations like the one above. According to the French consulate, there could be as many as 100,000 French citizens living in Montreal.

In today’s La Presse, Émilie Côté takes a look at the growing community of young French émigrés on the Plateau. Many of the people she encountered say they want to stay in Montreal long-term, but finding permanent employment has been difficult. There’s also some lingering prejudice against “les maudits Français,” though some admit that the animosity could be well-deserved, considering that French people “have a chauvinistic streak” and are “notorious whiners.” In any case, the French influx is beginning to reshape the social fabric of the Plateau in some potentially fascinating ways.

Though Montreal is unique in that it is the only large, economically-developed French-speaking city outside Europe, it is not the only place with a growing French community. More and more French people are moving to Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver; a number of American cities, including Boston, San Francisco and New York, have been popular destinations for quite some time now. According to the French magazine Les Echos, there are 210,000 French expatriates in Canada, 175,000 in the United States and 158,000 in the United Kingdom. But here’s a surprise: the country with the absolute largest number of French expats is China, with 252,000.

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Indiana Jones Arrives in Catania: Taxi Driver

DCORBEIL | L’Etna fume la pipe : 2006

« Je suis à peine débarqué de cet avion trop petit que je pose mes pieds sur la piste. Le bus m’attend sous une pluie froide battue violemment par un vent gonflé d’une chaude humidité. On embarque, on débarque. Dix mètre à peine, tour de bus inutile et paresseux.

Les douaniers me parlent avec mollesse et estampillent mon passeport canadien sans me jeter le moindre regard. Je ne comprend rien de leur anglais, et ils n’essaient même pas de me parler en italien. Traitement éclair, acceptations hâtives. On me force à dégager le maigre espace dédié aux étrangers et je m’engouffre dans les couloirs du terminal, les secousses du vol encore au ventre.

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A Hasidic Exodus from Park Avenue?

The Montreal Gazette reported this weekend that the Hasidic community in Outremont and Mile End is suffering from a housing shortage. In 2002, there were about 4,200 Hasidim in the neighbourhood; today there are more than 6,000. Rising property values mean that many new Hasidic families are finding themselves priced out of their own Montreal heartland. Apparently, the hunt is on to find a new neighbourhood with suitable and affordable housing.

If the Hasidic community does move on, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time a Jewish community has come and gone. The entire swath of city from Chinatown right up to Little Italy is littered with former synagogues that were abandoned when the original Jewish community moved west. But it wouldn’t be a good thing if the Hasidim leave.

First of all, a Hasidic exodus would be a disaster for Park Avenue’s economy. Hasidic Jews make up more than 25 percent of Outremont’s population, and even they have their own Yiddish bookstores and kosher eateries, they still rely on non-Hasidic businesses for everything else, like drugs, hardware, stationery and fresh fruits and vegetables. Most of those shops are on Park Avenue; imagine the impact if they lost a quarter of their business.

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The Teenage City

“The thing to do on prom night 1998 was to take the rented limo up to the lookout on Mount-Royal after a soirée of underage bar-hopping to see the sun rise,” writes Alanah Heffez on Spacing Montreal. “We didn’t make it. Dizzy on newly-discovered drinks, my date and I watched the sun come up from the rooftop of a grocery store around the corner from home.”

The teenager’s city is one of escape, adventure and a constant search “for something to climb, for a hole in the fence, for an undiscovered place, a final frontier to push against,” she writes. Too old to play at home and shut out from other venues (movies get expensive and bars are for the pleasure of the 18-plus), teenagers begin to see the entire city as a playground. “If my experience was any indication, teenagers rely on public space more than almost any other demographic,” Alanah notes.

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Riga: Language and the City

Having travelled in other parts of Eastern Europe when younger, I was excited about my first trip to Riga, Latvia, a few months ago. I was not sure exactly what to expect but had an idea that it would feel more developed than other parts of Eastern Europe while still bearing quite some traces of its communist past. The prosperity of the city surprised me – it feels like a wealthy Scandinavian city and, indeed, it has many cultural and business ties to Scandinavia. I did not feel during the course of my week there any hint of a communist inheritance.

I was also curious to see how the ethnic Latvians and ethnic Russians co-existed in this Baltic city. Having read up on Riga before my trip, I knew that Riga is about 42% ethnic Latvian and about 42% ethnic Russian, and thus was not surprised to hear quite a lot of Russian spoken in the streets. It did not take me long to find out that there is indeed some antagonism between the two groups.

What I was not prepared for, however, was the complete lack of any signage in Russian. I do not know what the law is there, but it does not appear to consist of having a Latvian sign at least twice as big as a Russian sign. I saw plenty of English signs. Russian was most noticeable for its absence.

I cannot decide if this is a good or a bad thing – the Latvians were unwillingly taken over by the Russian-dominated Soviet Union, and their culture almost destroyed. Independence provided them with a precious chance to protect and restore their culture. On the other hand, Russians are, unless they are willing to Latvianise, clearly treated like second class citizens. I met one Russian who used a Latvianised spelling on his business cards, but used his native Russian spelling to sign his e-mails.

I sympathise with both groups and cannot help but compare and contrast the situation in Riga with that in Montreal, which it seems to resemble more greatly than that in other bilingual cities such as Brussels. Is it the difficulty in reconciling the conflicting demands of justice for a minority within a minority?

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Chinatown’s Jewish History

If Chinatown’s Jewish heritage isn’t obvious, it’s probably because it has been erased by time and redevelopment, swept away like Chenneville St. and its quietly imposing synagogue.

Makom: Seeking Sacred Space, an ongoing exhibition at Hampstead’s Dorshei Emet synagogue, examines the historical traces of Montreal’s Jewish community with photos of former synagogues near the Main.

“The exhibition raises some really interesting questions about the way that spaces that are claimed by one group of people or one community are also claimed, in their own way, by other communities,” said Leanore Lieblein, a retired McGill English professor who helped organize the exhibition. Even in a synagogue that has been renovated and used for something else, she added, “you can feel the presence of past lives in that building.”

Chenneville’s synagogue was a case in point. Located on a small street (now shortened and written as Cheneville) between St. Urbain and Jeanne Mance Sts., below Dorchester (now René Lévesque) Blvd. and above Craig (now St. Antoine) St., it was built in 1838 by Montreal’s oldest Jewish congregation, Shearith Israel.

In 1887, when Shearith Israel moved to a much larger home on Stanley St. – following the westward migration of Montreal’s older generations of Canadian-born, anglicized Jews – the synagogue was rented by Beth David, a congregation of Romanian immigrants who arrived in the late 19th century, part of a huge wave of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. Over the next three decades, the area around present-day Chinatown – with Bleury St. to the west, Sanguinet St. to the east, Craig to the south and Ontario St. to the north – became the heart of Jewish Montreal, a haven for Yiddish-speaking immigrants who established businesses, synagogues and many of the Jewish institutions that still exist.

Israel Medresh, a journalist for the Kanader Adler, a Yiddish-language daily newspaper, sketched a portrait of the neighbourhood in his 1947 book Montreal Foun Nekhtn, translated into English in 2000 as Montreal of Yesterday.

“The corner of St. Urbain and Dorchester was the very heart of the Jewish neighbourhood,” he wrote. “Nearby was Dufferin Park, then a ‘Jewish park’ where Jewish immigrants went to breathe the fresh air, meet their landslayt (compatriots), hear the latest news, look for work and read the newspapers.”

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Indo-Fijians, Filipinos and Romanians

Winnipeg: it’s a long way from the Philippines. Photo by Jezz

I’ve been pouring over the new 2006 census data on language and immigration released by Statistics Canada last week. Nationally, all of the attention is being paid to the fact that one-fifth of all Canadians are foreign-born, one of the highest rates in the world. Here in Montreal, the focus is on both a surge in immigration (especially from North Africa and China) and the changing linguistic makeup of the city.

Francophones — people whose mother tongue is French — are now a minority on Montreal Island, thanks mostly to high levels of immigration from non-francophone countries. The number of anglophones, meanwhile, has increased for the first time in 30 years. Arabic, Spanish and Chinese have become the fastest-growing non-official languages in Montreal.

But enough with the big picture news; it has already been dissected ad infinitum in the media. What interests me are some of the odd, surprising and overlooked trends in immigration that are having an impact on Canada’s cities.

Indo-Fijians in Vancouver

Looking through the census data, I wasn’t surprised to see that nearly 17 percent of Vancouver’s population now speaks a Chinese language, and I certainly wasn’t surprised to see that China and India were its top sources of immigrants. I was a bit surprised, however, to note that there are more than 17,200 immigrants from Fiji who live in Vancouver. Most of them arrived before 1991, but enough came between 2001 and 2006 (1,670) to make the tiny Pacific island Vancouver’s fifteenth-largest source of new immigrants, after Mexico and before Afghanistan.

People from Fiji have been immigrating to Canada since the 1960s and most of them have landed in Vancouver. The vast majority are Indo-Fijian and they have a distinct sense of cultural identity, not unlike other immigrants of Indian descent from countries like Guyana.

Filipinos in Winnipeg

Winnipeg is not normally a major draw for immigrants, yet it has become one of the principal centres of Filipino immigration to Canada. Winnipeg is home to Canada’s third-largest Filipino population despite being the eighth-largest city (even then, at 694,000 inhabitants, it has only a couple of thousand more people than Hamilton). 6,885 Filipino immigrants arrived in Winnipeg between 2001 and 2006, more than three times as many people as the city’s second-largest source of new immigrants, India. One-fifth of all immigrants in Winnipeg, or roughly 25,000 people, come from the Philippines.

The reason why so many Filipino immigrants settle in Winnipeg is obvious: friends and family who are already there. That’s the case for most immigrants across Canada, whatever their origin and wherever they choose to live. But what is especially notable is that Winnipeg has maintained such a large Filipino community despite continually losing people — both native- and foreign-born — to other provinces.

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Fort McMurray Goes Supernova

Oilsands refinery in Fort McMurray, Alberta. Photo by Chad Young

VBS.tv, the online documentary arm of Vice Magazine run by Spike Jonze, has a thought-provoking documentary called Toxic Alberta available to view for free (in 15 segments, with some interruptions for ads). The film touches on the extreme environmental impact of tar sands operations; the burning of natural gas to reform bitumen into crude oil is responsible for a staggering 20% of all of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions, and this is set to rise as there are calls to quintuple output in the next decade.

However, the film also inadvertently exposes the crisis the boom towns face, in terms of managing a 9% population growth rate. Most cities struggle to deal with 2-3% growth; 9% would be crippling. (Imagine adding another 100,000 people to Montreal in a very short time.) Thousands of people — many of them Maritimers looking for work — have flocked to the towns of Fort McMurray and Fort Chipyewan. I’ve heard stories of people getting paid insane amounts of money — even fast food workers make $20 an hour — and thus everyone with some sort of skilled trade has headed west. The documentary bears this out, with one surveyor mentioning a $10k monthly paycheck.

The problem is that planning has lagged far behind. The influx of newcomers and lack of housing has left many in a quasi-homeless situation. On top of that, the enormous salaries have distorted the local economy; a one-bedroom apartment rents for $1800 a month, and a small house can cost upwards of $500,000. Developers are building everything from dormitory-style bunkhouses, to subsidized apartments. One developer, quoted in the film, says that ‘anyone making less than $70,000 here basically needs public assistance.’

When the boom is over — or if there’s a massive switch to renewables and energy efficiency — what will become of these towns?

Looking for Chinatown

“There’s no Chinatown in Quebec City. There’s never been one,” snapped a research assistant at the city archives. It sounded as if I wasn’t the first to come asking for information. “There were a handful of Chinese-owned stores in the lower city, but it was hardly a ‘Chinatown.’”

Had I been misled all these years? I had first heard about Quebec City’s former Chinatown in the NFB documentary Pâté Chinois. Articles mentioned it in Le Devoir and the Globe and Mail. I’d heard local Chinese reminiscing about it on the six o’clock news. Louisa Blair devotes a chapter to Quebec’s Chinatown in The Anglos.

Then there’s star playwright Robert Lepage, who staged a six-hour opus called La Trilogie des Dragons. It begins in a Lower Town parking lot where the kids, poised to dig to China, realize they don’t have to dig too deep to find it. They discover instead that memories of opium dens, mah-jongg, and Chinese laundries exist very close to the surface. “It used to be a Chinatown,” the play ends, “now it’s a parking lot.” Was it all just exaggeration, someone digging for a story? Well yes—and no.

The Chinese first began arriving on the West Coast during the 1850s gold rush. A second wave came in the 1870s, cheap labour for the cross-country railway, where they earned ten to twenty times what they could earn in Guangdong. The last spike in the CPR railway was driven in 1885, and a discriminatory Chinese head tax was implemented that same year. This made further immigration difficult. Anti-Chinese sentiment ran high and many landlords would not lease apartments to them. They banded together and created Chinatowns.

Some Chinese fled discrimination by coming east in the 1890s. A trickle made it to Quebec City, but most settled in larger cities. In 1911, there were 68 Chinese in Quebec City while 1,200 had settled in Montreal. Nevertheless, their presence was visible. Most ran laundries or restaurants.

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Where Latinos Speak Korean

Se habla español in LA’s Koreatown. Photo by Hunhee.

Multiculturalism is usually framed in terms of the relationship between immigrants and a “host society.” But what about the relationship between immigrants themselves? In Los Angeles’ sprawling Koreatown, a growing population of Latino immigrants is leading to a cultural and linguistic exchange that is unprecedented in recent American history.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal describes the trend: “At the Galleria, a large Korean supermarket here, store manager Yoonah Yoon greets Hispanic cashiers and bag boys each morning with a hearty ‘buenos dias’—’good morning’ in Spanish. The Latino workers, who make up more than half the store’s 162 employees, answer him with the equivalent greeting in Korean: ‘Ahn-nyung-hah-seh-yo.’”

Korean immigrants began settling along Wilshire Boulevard in the 1960s, gradually establishing a vast Korean neighbourhood that eventually became the epicentre of the world’s largest Korean community outside of Asia. Eventually, most of the neighbourhood’s Korean residents decamped for other neighbourhoods and suburbs around Los Angeles, motivated in no small part by the 1992 riots that targeted Korean-owned businesses above all. Over the course of the 1990s, Koreatown became home to a new wave of immigrants from Mexico and Central America.

Despite the area’s changing demographics, Koreatown remained the most important hub of commerce and culture for the Los Angeles Korean community. In fact, in recent years, Korean investment in the neighbourhood has increased, including the construction in 2001 of a $40-million Korean spa and a new Korean shopping mall.

That’s where things get interesting. Many of these Korean businesses draw their employees (and, in some cases, customers) from the surrounding area’s largely Latino population. The relationship is such that many Koreans business owners are learning Spanish—and many Latino workers are learning Korean.

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No Ching-Chong Here

“Yeah, but where are you really from?” It’s a question familiar to many Chinese-Canadians who grew up feeling torn between different cultures, identities and places. Tomorrow, seven young Montrealers of Chinese descent will share a roundtable discussion on what it means to be Chinese in a multicultural Canada: General Tao, Kung Fu, Ching-chong: Chinese Identity in a Multicultural Canada.

I met up with three of them last week at Magic Idea, a popular Chinatown café. Shuang Liu is a 19-year-old college student who is one of ten students allowed to skip her undergraduate studies and enroll straight into dentistry at McGill University in the fall. Sandra Lee is 26 and an environmental activist. Cedric Sam, also 26, is a web developer who runs Smurfmatic and the upstart subway-oriented restaurant review site Métro Boulot Resto (to which he has graciously allowed me to contribute). As we made introductions, a Jay Chou song came on and the café staff cranked up the stereo. We almost had to shout.

I started with the obvious question: why pick a title that plays so heavily on stereotypes? “The media plays such a huge role in how others see us,” Shuang answered. “When you think about Chinese food, you think about General Tao. When you think about a Chinese guy, you think he must do kung fu and talk like ‘Ching-chong ching-chong.’ The influence is huge and how I perceive myself is not really separate from that.”

Like many young Chinese-Canadians, Shuang has struggled to find her place in Canadian society. Born in Beijing, she immigrated with her family to ethnically homogenous Sherbrooke when she was two years old. (They later relocated to Quebec City, which isn’t any more diverse.) After a few years of being the only Asian kid on the playground, Shuang adopted a non-Chinese name, Melissa, to better blend in. It wasn’t until after her family had finally moved to more cosmopolitan Montreal that she decided to change it back. “It’s a name I’m really proud of. My parents happened to have the same [family] name and ‘Shuang’ sort of means ‘bringing together.’ It’s really beautiful,” she said.

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The Greeks of Tarpon Springs

Close to three major metro areas and thirty suburbs make up the collection of cities known as Tampa Bay. Starting with Apollo Beach to the south on the mainland, the arc of towns curves counter-clockwise through Brandon, Tampa, Dunedin, Clearwater, and finally ending with St. Petersburg on a spit of land in the Gulf of Mexico. They’re affable places, full of friendly people and a succession of strip malls in varying states of repair. The quality of life is high. The amount of hurricane hits has been surprisingly low. Still, with so much suburban development sandwiched into such a small area, it’s unavoidable that Tampa Bay—once the home of pirates and the Spanish explorers—has somehow faded to vanilla.

But life is not all beach condos and lattes. At eleven o’clock on Tampa Bay’s arc, there is a place where working fishing boats still bob daringly on choppy green water and everyone speaks… Greek? It’s a metropolitan suburb, but it’s also everything you’d expect from a place where people still dive for sea sponges for a living. The dining is unforgettably good, though it’s a stretch to call it “fine,” and you can pick up CDs of the hottest Hellenic pop stars before you leave town for the day. Welcome to Tarpon Springs.

Tarpon Springs has somewhere between 6 to 8,000 Greek-Americans living in its borders, which—incredibly—still only accounts for a quarter of its population. (The entire state of Florida is home to about 150,000 Greek-Americans.) Still, the cultural ties are so strong that Tarpon Springs is the smallest city in the nation with its own consulate. The Greek Orthodox community is still alive and thriving, and the town’s annual Epiphany festival is one of the largest of its kind anywhere in the United States.

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