The Magnolia neighborhood in Stockton, CA was designed as a “live/work/play” neighborhood, meaning people were encouraged/allowed to run businesses in their homes, without the going through normal licensing procedures most business owners must go through. Hence, when I walked into a corner-lot, art-deco style, white with blue trim structure, I was greeted by a slew of elderly black women getting their hair done by men. An incognito hair salon! Fun! The neighborhood is full of beautiful, old Victorians, the majority of which have been turned into 4-unit residences, with heavily locked gates and/or doors. Because these residences are owned by absentee-landlords, they are for the most part dilapidated, and many have been abandoned, landlords leaving the houses to rot rather than bring them up to code as mandated by the city. There are also a variety of residential social services located in the neighborhood: substance abuse programs; re-entry programs for offenders; mental health; women’s shelters; and more. Small 5-15 unit apartment buildings are also interspliced throughout. Many residents are newly arrived from the east bay, driven out of the same type of housing due to regentrification. This process of regentrification is slowly getting started in Magnolia, which means that the people from the east bay will be forced to pack it up again and go….where?
Anyway, my purpose in the Magnolia neighborhood was to encourage people to come to the community meeting coming up next week. The community meeting is basically a forum for community members to share their questions and concerns with their city council representative. The neighborhood covers about 40 blocks, we walked it for almost 5 hours and didn’t cover everything. Walking a neighborhood, and knocking on every door you can, is different than just taking a walk. When you are done, you are exhausted. Your energy is sapped by the sun, you are filthy from dirt and sweat, legs hurt from walking up and down lots of stairs. When we tell people that the meeting is a place to discuss their concerns about what’s going on in their neighborhood, they are quick to tell you their concerns. My favorite was a group of about 5 men who were hanging out on the corner at 1:30 p.m., having a smoke, one of whom tells me “Yah, you know what I’m tired of?! I am tired of all these people just hanging out all day, doing nothing. I mean, they ain’t got no job, just standing around, what are they doing? Nothing, they just causing trouble”… It was really hard not to start laughing. People demanded more police presence, and then the person next door would complain that the police were cramping their style. At some point, I had to call my dad and ask him how to say “meeting” and “concerns” in Spanish, because I could’nt remember, and kept trying to explain the meeting as an appointment with the rest of your community…yikes. Anyway, I got it together after that, but then realized that it really didn’t help to be able to tell monolingual Spanish-speakers everything about the meeting if I was going to hand them a flyer in English. Also, if they do come to the meeting, who will translate for them?! I posed this question to my supervisor (the councilmember), who said “well, you!” Oh Lord, we’re in trouble. In an effort to surround myself with more Spanish, I changed my facebook page to Spanish.
So I guess my first experience walking Magnolia (we’ll have to do it once a month) made me really resent Rudy Guiliani’s snide remark about community organizing. God forbid a politician have skill and expertise in actually assessing the needs of and then representing the PEOPLE. To me the comment just illustrates that our society’s values are totally out-of-whack, i.e. the tiny salaries of teachers and social workers vs. the giant incomes of engineers and CEOs.
