Cuesta An Immersive Week In Chicago
I have lived in Bolingbrook which is a suburb 45 minutes away from Chicago before I attended DePaul and I have visited Chicago dozens of times with my friends and family and I thought that I knew this city and that most of Chicago was the same but after immersion week I realized that Chicago has differences on every block and I saw first-hand how diverse this city really is by having various neighborhoods that are dominantly populated by certain ethnic groups and how these communities thrive with culture and unity from their people.
One of the towns that I saw this sense of unification was Pilsen, I have heard of Pilsen before, but I have never visited, and I knew that the community consisted of mainly Mexican and Latino people. One of the things that best showed their culture was their beautifully articulated murals which ranged from Mexican heritage to food inspired art. Coming off the pink line on 54th/Cermak street I was greeted with some very detailed murals with Mexican designs that made this station distinct from the other stations that I have been on and the painted stairways just made the experience much better and made me feel like Pilsen was a place where the people are proud of their heritage and want to show it to the world and the artists did a great job expressing the culture of Pilsen at a CTA station.
The best mural that I saw was a house mural named ‘Gulliver in Wonderland’ which was a mural that had a lot of hidden meanings and a lot of significance of the situation that many Mexican immigrants faced when moving to this county and it shows their story of resilience and hardships that they faced.
Going Uptown showed me a different side of the city that Is a major hub for musicals and theatres with dozens of venues across the neighborhood, gentrification is affecting Uptown positively by creating new housing for a new type of target market and it helps create a safer and more prosperous town. This can impact the people living in these areas negatively because they might be forced to moveout to make new budlings or renovate their homes and dislocating them as well as raising the price of taxes for everyone in uptown because of the median home price which makes it hard for lower income families to live in these areas because it is too expensive. Gentrification is a blessing and a curse to the people living in these neighborhoods that have been recently getting gentrified
I am very glad that I was able to take walking Chicago as my discover class because I got to meet the city in a more intimate level by walking the streets and being able to see, hear, and smell my environments and see in person what these neighborhoods that make up Chicago are about. This class has helped me better understand Chicago and how diverse of a city this really is.
