Mexico and Pilsen
(a neighborhood of juxtapositions.)
"She sits all day by the
window and plays the Spanish radio show and sings all the homesick songs about
her country in a voice that sounds like a seagull. Home. Home. Home is a house
in a photograph, a pink house, pink as hollyhocks with lots of startled light."
- "No Speak English" The House on Mango Street (1)
Pilsen was not always a predominantly Mexican community. In fact, before the Mexican community settled in this neighborhood, it was populated by immigrants from Poland, Lithuania, Croatia, and Italy. As of the past fifteen years, Pilsen has since become home of the largest Mexican community in Chicago as well as one of the largest Mexican communities in the entire United States.
While a vast number of the population of Pilsen share the Mexican-American racial identity, they also seemed to have gained new aspects to their culture from the past inhabitants of their neighborhood. Pilsen houses both the Mexican Fine Arts Center of Chicago and Czechoslovakian sokols. Scattered between the trappings of modern day society are old-fashioned bakeries that still retain their eastern European roots and modern-day labor unions organized by the United Farm Workers.
(A sokol is a czechoslovakian gymnastics society that was formed to cultivate cultural pride and cultural interest in the United States. While the sokols began as purely a way for Czechoslovakians in the United States to retain their racial identities, they have since been assimilated into the Mexican American culture of Pilsen. Mexican American children now go to Pilsen's sokols as a safe place for them to be after school and of course, to learn gymnastics.) (11)
Pilsen is a pure example of what makes the city of Chicago so unique. Despite Chicago's past history of ethnic tensions, the different ethnic groups are slowly, but surely melting into one another and sharing cultural identities (6). In The House on Mango Street:
"One day we were passing a house that looked, in my mind, like houses I had seen in Mexico. I don't know why. There was nothing about the house that looked exactly like the houses I remembered. I'm not even sure why I thought it, but it seemed to feel right.
Look at that house, I said, it looks like Mexico.
Rachel and Lucy look at me like I'm crazy, but before they can let out a laugh, Nenny says: Yes, that's Mexico all right. That's what I was thinking exactly. (1)"
Walking in Pilsen today is like walking through a ghost of Mexico hiding in the Midwest. While the area looks nothing like Mexico, that feeling embodied in Cisneros's text is ever-present.
Perhaps if The House on Mango Street had been written more recently, Cisneros would also have featured the unique ethnic blending that comes from a community of Mexican American (with a variety of other latin america ethnicities added to the boiling pot) immigrants living in a neighborhood named after the second largest city in Czechoslovakia. It would still feel like Mexico at times, from potentially shabby buildings to the atmosphere of hearing conversations in Spanish float from windows into the streets. But, it would be a Mexico with a different european atmosphere, instead of the Spanish conquistadors who had conquered their native Mexico, their origins would be immigrants pouring in from Czechoslovakia seeking a new, more profitable life in the United States. Their origins would be that of each and every ethnic group that had lived in that area before them, leaving their unique memory marks for each new race to follow in the current of Chicago to note and add to. Pilsen is all of these currents mixed into one community.