Return to Pilsen: Reflecting on my Chicago Experience Thus Far
My favorite trip from immersion week was when we went to Pilsen. I thought it was a stunning neighborhood with a rich history. This weekend my family was in town, and I decided to take them there. We enjoyed a brunch of classic Mexican foods, looked at the murals, and shopped around some of Pilsen’s numerous vintage clothing and thrift stores. This spurred an idea for my final project. I want to write an essay about how my experiences in the class have shaped how I interact and navigate Chicago. I want to tell the story of coming to Chicago from a relatively small town, knowing nothing about it, and how, in a brief time, I was able to immerse myself in Chicago and learn the lay of the land way faster than I could have ever imagined.
In my essay, I am going to reference the readings and discussions we had about gentrification, how identity impacts the experience of walking (Walking While Black, Walking After Midnight: Women, Sex, and Public Spaces), and how much history a single block can hold (This American Life: History.) I hope to connect these concepts to my Chicago encounters thus far.
I am inspired by this prompt: “What attitudes and beliefs have you inherited from your family or community regarding exploration, particularly when it comes to exploring (unknown) public spaces? How have these attitudes and beliefs influenced your walking and your experience in public spaces in Chicago? How might these attitudes and beliefs change over time?” To accompany my essay, I will also be creating a hand-crafted field guide. I am going to make a map that shows where in Chicago I have explored and details about these locations. If time permits, I may also make a slide show to better present my final project.
Reading Reflection: Maps as a Proposition
Ce N’est Pas Le Monde, or This is Not the World, discusses maps as a proposition of reality not as a reflection of it. Meaning that maps illustrate various aspects of life but could never replicate the 3D actuality of it. A single map could never represent the entirety of the area it shows but instead only highlights certain parts of it. For example, a map may show a town’s traffic patterns but not its residential areas or vice versa or may show the current layout of a city but not demonstrate how it looked historically or in the past. In order to “map a proposition” you take a concept such as a place of worship or a highway, you assign that concept to a mark that represents it, then you pin the mark to the concept’s approximate location. An interesting quote in this article was: “Just because the real world cannot be mapped does mean we cannot map the real world.” To me, this means that while we can never map everything, we can piece together concepts and propositions to gain a complete understanding of an area.
