DuSable’s inauguration ceremony, “Celebrate the Dream,” was steeped in equal parts historical reverence and euphoria. The face of Martin Luther King Jr. was prominently displayed at both sides of the stage and James Weldon Johnson’s “Negro National Anthem” was sung; the program included a “Historical Guest List” that imagined an inaugural ball full of prominent African-American figures, from George Washington Carver to Rosa Parks to Jimi Hendrix. Dr. Stephanie Davenport kicked off the ceremony with an African libation, and performers Malik Camora and Joshua Alexander gave an African salute of drumming and dancing after the speech. Obama, sometimes called the post-racial candidate, was firmly placed in a racial narrative here. His election was presented as the culmination of African-Americans’ long and storied journey that started on the coasts of Africa, passed through Selma and Montgomery, and has finally made its way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

One of the attendees, Celestine Willis, originally had other plans for Inauguration Day. “I planned two years ago to be at Inauguration,” she said. “But I had a heart attack on December 6 and things changed for me.” Willis, like many others, expressed a mix of emotions: concern about the economy, a feeling of historical fulfillment, a guiding sense of hope, and a need for solidarity. “Being an African-American woman and an African-American woman with a disability, I understand struggle,” she said. “I understand pulling together. I understand community and grassroots support. I think he’s going to ask us [to pull together] today. He’s only one person—we’re all going to have to do this together.”

To close the event, Master of Ceremony Oba William King led the song “I Love My People.” The crowd sang of celebrating African-American self-worth. Before exiting the stage for the last time, King broke into spontaneous dance. “Obama is president! Obama is president! Obama is president! Woo, I can’t believe it.”

“This whole area was completely vacant when I started ten years ago,” says Benjamin van Horne, president and CEO of Greenline Development, of the 6600 block of South Ingleside. Now, the block is full of activity: the owners of the houses on the block are standing amidst the swirling snow, trying to figure out how to dig out the cars that line the street. A green column on the northwest corner announces the presence of the 6600 S. Ingleside Block Club. Van Horne tells me a story about an incident last year, when he was living on the block in his construction trailer: “There were some drug dealers who thought they were going to start dealing openly on the block. The neighbors know each other and we all got on the phone with each other and we all called over and over again. We got the apartment building on the corner to put in really bright [outdoor] lights, and they’re not dealing drugs on the street anymore.” Where there was once empty, overgrown city-owned land, 6600 S. Ingleside now houses a thriving community of people invested in the future of their block—and the neighborhood as well.

Greenline Development, founded in 1999 by van Horne, played no small part in bringing this change to Woodlawn’s landscape. The company was spurred by his interest in affordable housing, which developed after witnessing how decaying housing stock in his home of St. Louis affected the community. He bought his first building at 66th and Maryland for $35,000, which he charged on his credit card. Fortunately for him, the gamble paid off.

According to its website, Greenline is “a progressive housing development company, combining strong social goals with profit-seeking ventures.” All of Greenline’s properties are in Woodlawn; they plan on adding eleven condominium buildings to the neighborhood, six of which are already built. The condos are affordable—all the ones for sale currently cost from $159,000 to $184,900—with the added benefit of $20,000 in down payment assistance from the City of Chicago. Even in a depressed housing market, many buyers are finding this too good a deal to pass up. “Woodlawn has always had basic features that make it attractive,” says van Horne. “Its lakefront location, public transportation access, proximity to the University [of Chicago] as a stabilizing element, the large parks surrounding the neighborhood, and there are some strong institutions that have stuck out the hard times and have continued to survive…What makes me so attached [to Woodlawn] are the people I’ve met here.”

Over the past decade, it seems that more and more people are realizing the charms of the neighborhood. In the past ten years, the median sale price for a standalone single-family home in Woodlawn has gone up by 243 percent, according to a 2006 report from the Chicago Department of Planning and Development; in the past five years alone, it has gone up by 365 percent. For attached single-family homes, like condominiums or apartments, the equivalent percentages are 225 percent and 53 percent. This is a much more dramatic increase than in neighborhoods that analysts had high hopes for, like Kenwood and the Near South Side.

A lot has changed since 2006, which is the year that many economists agree that the U.S. housing market began to “correct” itself—in other words, when the housing bubble started to burst. According to city-data.com, housing prices generally continued to increase in Woodlawn until 2008, when the median sale price plummeted by about twenty-five percent by the end of the year. Prices were also falling in the Near South neighborhoods, but rose dramatically in the fourth quarter—right around the election of Kenwood’s own Barack Obama. Real estate analysts call this the “Obama effect”: Obama’s ascendancy has garnered a lot of attention for Kenwood and the Near South Side. “Even before Obama won the election, the resurgence of new residential development was under way on the South Side, and now we expect demand to increase during the Obama administration,” said Andy Schcolnik, president of the Southside Builders Association, to the Chicago Sun-Times on January 18, 2009. The effect doesn’t seem to have reached Woodlawn yet, which is farther from the newly-elected President’s home. Even in areas on the South Side where home prices are going up or staying stable, relatively few houses are being sold. While Greenline is staying afloat—though not with the same easy success it was enjoying a few years ago—many other developers are being foreclosed on or going out of business.

Van Horne doesn’t believe that the housing bust will send Woodlawn back in time to an era of neglect and underdevelopment; as he puts it, Woodlawn has “turned a corner.” “There are hundreds of people of means who have invested heavily in the neighborhood, either buying condos or two-flat houses, who are not going to let their investments decline in value unnecessarily,” he predicts. “There are a lot of people who have lived in Woodlawn for decades who are fine citizens and who are just waiting for Woodlawn to turn around. They, in combination with the new people who are moving in—some of whom are old people who grew up here—I don’t think they’re going to let Woodlawn slide back.”

“Turning a corner” can be a euphemism for “gentrification” or “displacement,” especially with the UofC looking to expand south of the Midway Plaisance and several seminaries setting up shop in Woodlawn. Would this concern deter a developer with a social conscience from building condos, instead of rental property, in the neighborhood? Greenline Development includes “development without displacement” as the first of its four core values on its website, alongside “creating new home ownership opportunities whenever possible; positively influencing the creation of mixed-income, stable communities; and the highest quality of products, design, management, and relationships.” Van Horne stresses the importance of keeping current residents in their homes: he only builds on vacant lots or develops empty buildings (as opposed to buying out a currently-inhabited building and booting the renters in order to make condos). And Greenline’s relatively affordable condos open up homeownership to people who might not have been able to afford homes before. “I cannot deny that the city down payment assistance has made most of these deals possible,” van Horne admits. “People probably would not have been able to find financing without it, whereas a year or a year and a half ago, people would have been able to find 100 percent financing.” Ultimately, while he says that property taxes in Woodlawn have gone up to “a frightening degree,” van Horne believes that the root of the gentrification problem lies beyond the ability of developers to fix; the responsibility lies in the hands of city planners and tax officials to change the tax structure.

Van Horne shows me around the Hathaway, one of his buildings on 6600 S. Ingleside. The model apartment is small, but clean, evidently well-built, and shiny new. It’s decorated in neutral Ikea chic, which nicely sets off the stainless steel appliances and the warm tones of the blonde wood floors and cabinetry. One can easily imagine a young couple with a baby building a home here, or a stylish bachelorette pad for the demographic that van Horne says are his most frequent customers: “young, single professional black women with some kind of roots on the South Side.” A common misconception of Greenline Development is that it was named after the El line that connects the neighborhoods in which it operates, but van Horne says the moniker originates from a less friendly past: “I wanted to build in areas that were once redlined.” Redlining was the practice of marking a red line on a map that indicated a neighborhood where a bank would not invest, denying mortgages and credit wholesale to residents. A neighborhood generally got redlined because too many African-Americans moved in for the bank’s comfort, resulting in low homeownership rates in black inner-city neighborhoods. Despite a miserable housing market that could keep homeownership out of reach, that red line is starting to turn green in Woodlawn.

The CRA was passed in response to a practice called “redlining,” where banks would not give loans to minority or racially-changing neighborhoods; once a neighborhood was determined to be “hazardous” to development, bankers would literally draw a red line over the area on a map and business loans and mortgages would not be granted within that service area. The decision to redline was often not made by any systematic assessment of the creditworthiness of the neighborhood, but by negative assumptions about racial minorities. Since no one could get mortgages within those areas, homeownership was chronically low and development was stagnant, thus pushing the neighborhoods further into poverty and farther away from an ideal investment environment. The CRA made it illegal for banks to systematically write off entire service areas, opening up lines of credit and paths to homeownership to minorities and the low-income. So what’s the problem?

One factor behind the recession was the collapse of subprime loans, or loans made to borrowers generally regarded as subprime: those who have a high risk of defaulting, or who have a history of bankruptcy. The loans were usually made at low teaser rates that ballooned after two or three years. Often, borrowers could not afford the new payments and ended up defaulting and going into foreclosure.

Critics of the CRA say that the law creates strong incentives for banks to lend to subprime borrowers. A good CRA score is important to any bank since their CRA compliance is periodically reviewed by regulators; the score is examined when a bank wants to open new branches, acquire other banks, or merge. According to critics like the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer and University of Texas economist Stan Liebowitz, this gave banks the incentive to lower their standards and give loans to those who couldn’t afford them in order to have a good CRA score. The crux of this argument is that the CRA requires that banks loan to minority neighborhoods; minorities aren’t creditworthy; so CRA requires that banks loan to the uncreditworthy, which caused them to default on their mortgages, and so on until financial Armageddon.

Aside from originating from the same race-based assumptions that drove redlining in the first place, that argument simply doesn’t stand up to the numbers. A 2008 report by Traiger & Hinckley LLP found that banks subject to CRA rules were “substantially less likely than other lenders to make the kinds of risky home purchase loans that helped fuel the foreclosure crisis”—non-CRA financial entities made about seventy-five percent of subprime loans, while CRA banks issued the other twenty-five percent, according to testimony by University of Michigan law professor Michael Barr. When CRA banks did make risky loans, their rates were much less exorbitant than non-regulated ones and their borrowers were less likely to default. In Illinois, CRA banks were fifty-eight percent less likely to make high-cost loans than non-CRA institutions.

Secondly, the CRA only applies to financial institutions that are backed by federal insurance. People have an incentive to choose banks over uninsured financial services because they know their money will be backed up and that banking practices are subject to supervision; federal insurance gives regulated banks a competitive advantage in attracting customers. The CRA is a responsibility that comes along with that substantial privilege. Increased regulation comes along with federal insurance, too, so the government is checking on banks to make sure they aren’t making bad loans; banks subject to the CRA are also subject to more quality-control and supervision than unregulated financial services. Far from contributing to the loan crisis that caused the recession, the regulation that comes along with the CRA actually deterred bankers from making those high-cost loans.

Finally, the originate-to-distribute system, which allows mortgagers to sell loans out of their portfolios and thus migrate much of the risk to another institution, creates lax incentives for good underwriting. Non-CRA lenders engage in this practice at a much higher rate than CRA banks do. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke described the process in testimony before the House of Representatives: “When an originator sells a mortgage and its servicing rights, depending on the terms of the sale, much or all of the risks are passed on to the loan purchaser. Thus, originators who sell loans may have less incentive to undertake careful underwriting than if they kept the loans. Moreover, for some originators, fees tied to loan volume made loan sales a higher priority than loan quality. This misalignment of incentives, together with strong investor demand for securities with high yields, contributed to the weakening of underwriting standards.” The Traiger report found that CRA banks retain originated loans more than twice as often as unregulated banks.

The CRA did not get us into this recession, but it can help get us out of it. In Illinois, foreclosures jumped by twenty-four percent in the month of October alone. Janet Yellen, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, described the effects of foreclosures on communities in a speech to the Community Reinvestment Conference: “Studies of cities like Baltimore, Chicago, and Cleveland have found that low-income and minority communities have been the hardest hit by concentrations of foreclosures. The rise in foreclosures may have other negative implications as well, such as reducing neighborhood property values and increasing crime. Furthermore, as declining property taxes and transfer fees shrink local government revenues, vital services to low- and moderate-income families may also suffer.” Preventing avoidable foreclosures should be a high priority because of the “domino effect” they cause across an entire community—for every house that’s foreclosed on, that’s one more abandoned house that turns into an eyesore, lowers property values, and attracts crime. The CRA can incentivize banks to work with their customers to avoid foreclosure by refinancing their loan or adjusting the loan terms.

Here on the South Side, one bank is doing just that. ShoreBank, the community development and environmental bank founded by the only banker to testify in favor of the CRA, introduced their Rescue Loan program in response to the mortgage crisis. The program offers “fixed-rate loans at competitive market rates to qualified home owners or new home buyers with credit scores of 520 or better, and not more than 90 days delinquent,” according to a recent press release. Their bankers, with a long history of making affordable loans to low- and moderate-income communities, have identified 10,000 people on the South and West Sides and the suburbs in high-risk mortgages and have launched a massive outreach campaign to get them to refinance into affordable loans before their rates go up and it’s too late. “Don’t wait,” advises Brian Berg, Vice President of Corporate Communications. “Once you get to a certain point, which is usually about ninety days, it’s hard for any institution [to provide refinancing]. As much as it’s our mission to help these folks, we’re not going to violate or jeopardize our standard underwriting.” Although ShoreBank conducts most of its activity in areas that may scare off other bankers, they have proven that community reinvestment doesn’t have to be the enemy of sound underwriting: “We know that, historically, Shore Bank has had loan losses at or below our industry peers,” says Executive Vice President for Consumer and Community Banking Jean Pogge. “Those were loans that other banks might view as very risky, and we’re quite proud of that.”

As Pogge points out, “The CRA is really about encouraging responsible lending.” There’s no reason it has to be bad business—the law itself has no quotas and requires that CRA practices “be consistent with safe and sound operations”—and ShoreBank is consistently profitable with $2.4 billion in assets. But more importantly, as Janet Yellen reminds us, “We should not view the current foreclosure trends as justification to abandon the goal of expanding access to credit among low-income households, since access to credit, and the subsequent ability to buy a home, remains one of the most important mechanisms we have to help low-income families build wealth over the long term.”

Chicago Studies, a new interdisciplinary program spearheaded by Dean John Boyer in collaboration with the College and the University Community Service Center (UCSC), wants to change that. The program is “meant to create more of a dialogue between the University and the surrounding communities,” says its new director, public policy professor Chad Broughton. “We want it to be more of a positive force.”

The program will encourage the academic study of Chicago through courses and lectures like “Introduction to Black Chicago, 1895 to 2005” and “Chicago Film History,” as well as offer extracurricular opportunities for students to access parts of the city that might not be on their usual itineraries. “We want to provide opportunities to take advantage of their time in one of the world’s great cities—an opportunity to treat their time here in Chicago akin to a study abroad experience,” says Broughton, who teaches courses like “Anti-Poverty Policy in the U.S.” that use Chicago as a case study.

The program follows in the tradition of Chicago-focused curricula, like DePaul’s Discover Chicago and Explore Chicago programs. DePaul, which has a strong focus on learning through service, requires that all first-year students spend one quarter taking a course on Chicago that involves time in the field as well as time in the classroom. Discover Chicago students come to school a week before regular classes start to participate in a week of immersion in Chicago’s “metropolitan community, its neighborhoods, cultures, people, institutions, organizations, and issues,” according to the program’s website. They, along with Explore Chicago students, are then required to enroll in a Chicago-related course for their autumn quarter, with options like “Chicago in Sound,” “Biking and Politics,” “Breaking the Glass: Privilege in Chicago,” and “Race, Politics, and Housing in the City of Neighborhoods.”
The UofC has its own version of the Chicago Quarter in the works: Kathleen Morrison of the anthropology department and Justin Borevitz of the biology department’s ecology and evolution department are working together to create the Calumet Quarter, an interdisciplinary study of Chicago’s southern neighbor, Calumet City. Like a study abroad program, students will devote an entire quarter’s worth of classes to the economically-depressed city and will study it from ecological, anthropological, and economic perspectives. It’s aimed at environmental studies undergraduates and will take place in the Spring. “It’s the perfect example of what Chicago Studies is about,” says Broughton.

Last Saturday, Chicago Studies sponsored the South Side History Bike Tour as its first extracurricular exploration of the city. Over one hundred cyclists, including college and graduate students, faculty, and staff, showed up to hear Dean Boyer and professors Terry Clark and Mark Hansen talk about the political, cultural, and architectural history of important South Side locations. Stops included the Stockyards, the Stephen A. Douglas Tomb, the Harold Washington Cultural Center, and Mayor Daley’s family home. Passers-by waved as we rode by and stopped and listened to stories about Alderman Dorothy Tillman, the Chicago Fire, and the billionaires in the Prairie District. The ride not only exposed the participants to new parts of the city, but it encouraged a form of transportation that allows riders a more intimate portrait of their surroundings: “How is the world different if one experiences it from a car seat or from a bicycle saddle?” asks DePaul professor J. Harry Wray in his book “Pedal Power: The Quiet Rise of the Bicycle in American Public Life.” “[The car] makes the environment outside the car subservient—and less relevant—to the primary mission of moving persons inside the vehicle from one point to another. . . Because the world is experienced in a different way on a bike than it is in a car, the rider inevitably thinks of that world differently than does the driver.”

A Chicago Studies website (chicagostudies.uchicago.edu), launched in September, reinforces the participatory ethos of the program. It will serve as a “connector” for existing and new Chicago-related programs at the UofC, says UCSC liaison and assistant director David Hays, with links to courses, internships and volunteer opportunities, faculty and student resources, events, and more. But it won’t just be an information hub: it will also serve as a way for students to share their experiences in the city. There’s The Blog That Works, a Flickr pool, a Wikipedia-style resource guide that students can contribute to, and a YouTube group that is in the works. “We want to move towards being an authoritative site that people turn to when they want to learn about, say, the Chicago School of Sociology,” Broughton says. “We want to balance that with a Wikipedia idea with reader participation.”

So what’s in the future for Chicago Studies? On November 14, the first edition of the Chicago Studies Annual Journal, a journal of undergraduate BA theses about Chicago, will be released. Faculty are currently reviewing submissions for the second Chicago Studies Annual; organizers hope that this opportunity to be published will encourage students to use Chicago as a case study in their BA projects. Broughton says that they’re trying to organize a Chicago film festival for the winter, with panels of movie critics, filmmakers, and actors and tours of Chicago movie locations. They’ll continue to host smaller events and tours throughout the year.

Chicago Studies may be seen as a deviation from a long history of purely theoretical study at the UofC, but that characterization isn’t entirely true. Robert Park, one of the founders of the Chicago School of Sociology, instructed students in 1927 to “go and sit in the lounges of luxury hotels and on the doorsteps of the flophouses; sit on the Gold Coast settees and on the slum shakedowns; sit in the Orchestra Hall and in the Star and Garter Burlesque. In short go and get the seat of your pants dirty in real research.” Broughton says that Chicago Studies “hearkens back to a hands-on past at the University of Chicago” and hopes that students will “go out with the outsiders and the outcasts and learn about the world from the inside out.” His academic evolution here reflects that, too: Broughton came to the UofC as a PhD student in sociology in the ’90s, when he planned on studying sustainable development in Africa. He took a class on urban poverty with William Julius Wilson that redirected his research interests towards the South Side. “I met a lot of people in the surrounding neighborhoods and got a very different view than I got from the books when I was doing ethnography,” he recalls. “I was uncomfortable at times, but that can be a good thing. I had some stereotypes dispelled. It was a complete experience…it was academic, but visceral and real.” ­

As we biked down Lake Park Avenue during Saturday’s tour, an older man emerged from his apartment building to watch. “What are y’all biking for!” he shouted. “There’s already a cure for cancer, and it ain’t at the University of Chicago!” He trailed off. He knows that you can’t find all the answers by staying within the confines of Hyde Park. It looks like we’re finally starting to accept that, too.

Photo by Sam Bowman

Her grand schemes may not be surprising on first glance—what smart middle-school kid doesn’t want to go to Harvard?—but, considering the odds against her, it’s downright shocking. Shaquocora is from Chicago’s West Side, where paths that lead to the Ivy League are scarce. She attends KIPP Ascend Charter School, a new middle school that serves students from the Austin, West Garfield, and North Lawndale neighborhoods. Through a stringent program that combines long school days from 7:25am to 5pm, a “no shortcuts, no excuses” attitude that punishes incomplete homework with lunch detention, and an emphasis on college from the first day of fifth grade, KIPP sent 100 percent of its first class of eighth grade graduates to college preparatory high schools, including Chicago magnet schools and highly selective boarding schools like Phillips Exeter and Andover Academy. In total, the fifty-seven graduates scored $1.1 million in scholarships.

KIPP’s academic support isn’t the only factor contributing to Shaquocora’s drive—she is also a member of KIPP’s step team, started by the school’s social worker Amaka Unaka in November 2007. The KIPP team is remarkably successful; they recently won second place at Cincinnati STOMPfest, a national competition open to middle- and high-school step teams. They lost to a team of seniors who had been practicing together for four years. Not bad for a group of eighth graders who had less than six months to prepare.

Stepping is best known in popular culture through its portrayal in movies like “Stomp the Yard,” which associates stepping with hip-hop dance and frat-boy antics. However, stepping is not dance, at least not in the way dance functions in the world of hip-hop. “[Stepping] is a form of self-expression through hand claps, stomping, and chants,” says KIPP’s co-coach Curtis Nash. Unaka describes it as “creating your own music through your body.” It originates from the South African tradition of Welly boot dancing, where gold miners danced in Wellington boots to parody the militaristic steps of the guards at the mines. Slaves transported the practice to the United States and created percussive rhythms that imitated the drums from their homelands, drawing appreciative crowds in town plazas. Stepping came into its own during the 1940s in the African-American fraternities of the National Pan-Hellenic Council. Popularized on college campuses, especially in the South, it began to be performed by schools, churches, and cheerleading squads.

Stepping doesn’t have much of a following in yankee-fied Chicago. Unaka learned it through her involvement with Delta Sigma Theta at the University of California, Berkeley and brought it with her to the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration (SSA). There, she met fellow SSA student Curtis Nash, who learned stepping through Alpha Phi Alpha as an undergraduate at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, a historically black university. Unaka started an innovative program for the team at KIPP with a mission to “establish and maintain a nurturing community which develops girls into outstanding young ladies who demonstrate sound Character, Leadership in their daily endeavors, an optimistic Attitude, success in rigorous Scholarship, and constant Service to others and to their community.” Put it all together—character, leadership, attitude, scholarship, and service—and the KIPP step team equals “class.”

One requirement for staying on the step team is academic performance; if a girl gets a C, D, or an F on a report card, she is suspended from the team until she gets her grades up. “A lot of girls want to be on the team, so they have to get it together,” says eighth-grade stepper Princess Nelson. The result? “Approximately ninety percent of the team is on the honor roll,” says Unaka. “When I started, thirty percent were on the honor roll.”

The step team is also heavily involved in improving their community. Although they were not included in KIPP’s budget, they were able to raise enough money to offer $250 scholarships to graduating eighth-grade students and fund a prize for a Martin Luther King, Jr. oratorical competition, in addition to covering their own travel costs. They will be involved in a Habitat for Humanity effort to improve homes on the West Side this summer, and were awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to teach preschool children how to read, create a parent-child book club to encourage adult literacy and get parents involved in their children’s education, fund a monthly essay contest that awards books to the winners, and create African-American history bookshelves in the library.

Perhaps most important to the girls, the step team acts as an extended family that supports (and chastises) each other. Ms. Unaka “motivates them, teaches them right from wrong, and holds them accountable,” says Shawntel Mables, Shaquocora’s mother. “[The team does] things collectively—when someone is down, they all pick [her] back up. You never know what a person is going through at home—no one has a perfect life.” Shaquocora agrees: “Everyone has hard times, but we know how to get over them—that’s the point of sisterhood; we have troubles, but we overcome and become one again… Curtis plays the father role model. He tells us to work hard and put education first. Ms. Unaka breaks you down, but she does it because she loves you, and she always finds a way to bring you up again.” The “Divine Nine” African-American fraternities and sororities were formed to provide a support network for black college students in an era of segregation and brutal racism. Ms. Unaka re-creates this network with the step team, which she describes as “a mini-sorority.” She welcomes them to her home if they need help with homework and took them on a skiing trip “to build closer bonds between themselves as young black ladies.” For this team, fostering self-love and respect is even more important than performing well.

Of course, all this touchy-feely stuff is not all it takes to win a national competition. You have to be damn good at stepping, too. This is where Curtis Nash comes in. “I’m the best stepper in Chicago,” he declares. “I was trained in the South, and the South breeds the best steppers. I’m in the Beta Epsilon chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha, and we have the best male step team. Therefore, any step team I coach is going to be the best. [KIPP] is the best team of all the middle and high schools in Chicago. I challenge anyone in Chicago to prove me wrong.” Nash proudly shows YouTube videos demonstrating Beta Epsilon’s mad chops, athleticism, and ability to work enormous crowds into a fever. The choreography is intricate and the dancers are impeccably precise. If this is what he’s teaching the girls, it’s no wonder they can do so well nationally. “I make sure the girls are intense,” he says. He stresses the benefits of camaraderie, staying healthy—“This is really a workout!” —and learning vital life skills. “Stepping is a microcosm of life,” Nash states. “You have to learn to deal with different kinds of people. They learn a form of humility they didn’t have before, learn to listen, and learn time management. This will follow them to high school, college, and beyond.”

Shaquocora, Princess, and the other girls on the step team could have easily fallen into another path. “I look at other young girls [Shaquocora’s] age out there on the corners drinking, getting high, not caring about life—it’s like they have no integrity and no self-control,” says Shawntel Mables. Unaka will have none of that: “Kids on my team have 15- or 16-year-old sisters with two kids and brothers who have been incarcerated since they were in the womb. It stops here.” Fortunately, none of the girls seem particularly interested in that fate. Princess dreams of being “a nurse, a model, a [news] anchor, or a chef” and loves going to school every day to study math. The girls are articulate, driven, and polite: they showered this lowly college student with “misses” and “ma’ams.” Shaquocora has a final message for the outside world: “If anything, never give up—that’s my message. There are a lot of young African-Americans with talent out there, and this is our chance to show them what we have. We need to stand up as a nation, as a community. We are that drive and that motivation.” With that attitude, Harvard and Brown will surely be battling over her one day.

Graphic by Lisa Bang and Ellis Calvin

Flores and Bejar have joined the ranks of “names changed to protect their identity.” To these women, identity is a multiply dangerous thing—it can tip off a furious ex-husband to their location; it can make it easier for the INS to track them down and deliver them back to their home country of Mexico. They are two of the countless women that make up one of the most vulnerable strata of our society: undocumented immigrants who are victims of domestic abuse.

Man has been raising fist against woman since time immemorial, and members of every social class, race, and occupation are victims of domestic violence. However, undocumented women face special hurdles when faced with an abusive situation, especially when their husbands are legal citizens or permanent residents. Some, like Flores, are married to men who pay for the fees incurred by using a ”coyote” to get across the border in exchange for a wife. Many times, the husbands may be their only connection to the greater American world when the woman doesn’t speak English and feels that she has no rights—thus he has control over her legal, medical, and employment issues. The abuser may threaten to “out” her illegal status or mess up the status of her immigration proceedings. “[Women] don’t know their rights, so they believe what the abuser is telling them and they don’t call the police,” says Rosa Abarca, the Domestic Violence Program Coordinator of the Pilsen-based Mujeres Latinas en Acción. “Working with the criminal justice system is a big fear, and something that they’re not comfortable doing.” The argument that many abusers use—that the woman can’t leave because she “needs” him—is even more potent when a woman is here illegally and her husband is not, since, in some ways, he may very well be right.

A little-known law, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), set out to rectify this power imbalance and give battered immigrant women the power to stand up against their abusers. One of its provisions allowed battered women to apply for permanent resident status and remain in the country while their application was being processed. For women who have entered the country illegally but not specifically to flee abuse, this may change. Changes to VAWA have been proposed by U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS) that would require such women to return to their home country while waiting for the immigration decision.

A trip home to stay with Mom for a couple of months may not sound like a big deal, but it can have major consequences for an immigrant woman. “These women leave their home countries for a reason,” Neusa Gaytan, Program Director of Mujeres Latinas en Acción, reminds us. “[The effect of returning home] depends on the woman’s level of education and what the home country is—what the economic situation is like, how many opportunities there are to develop professionally…but remember, there are reasons they are here and not there. For everyone, but especially for women, stability is extremely important. They have to worry about their children.”

Not only does an immigrant woman have to worry about her own fate—the loss of a hard-earned job, apartment, or support system—but when children are in the mix, the situation gets even more complicated. If she gets deported, does she uproot her children for an unknown period of time when they were born and raised in the U.S., may not know Spanish (or Korean or Polish) very well, and the education system back home is far less than ideal? Does she leave them in the United States with their friends and school—but also with their abusive father? Or do you just give up and stay in the relationship with the abuser? If the latter route is chosen, “you are perpetuating the cycle of domestic abuse since children who witness domestic abuse often suffer psychological damage and become abusers themselves,” says Gaytan. If the woman chooses to leave the relationship, there is a high risk of abduction for the children. Without the added protection of permanent residency, this unsavory decision becomes even more difficult.

Many non-profits like Mujeres Latinas en Acción dedicate themselves to helping battered women get help and they have vastly improved lives through services like legal counsel, child care, and emergency hotlines. However, the proposed changes to VAWA will dramatically limit the resources at their disposal. “Right now, we recommend the self-petition [to get permanent resident status under VAWA] and do everything in our power to help them out,” says Gaytan. “If this changes, we will not recommend to put the woman at risk. We never decide for the victim what is best for her… but we would definitely caution her that there might be repercussions. In the future, this will not be something that we will be emphasizing.” Organizations like these should not have tools taken away from them, but should be given the support they need to support one of the most vulnerable classes of human beings.

If VAWA were to be changed to require deportation while applications process, it’s not a stretch to say that many women would be discouraged from applying for permanent residency and gaining the legal tools they need to rescue their lives—and those of their children—from abuse. This can have nefarious effects not only on the women themselves, but on the communities they live in. An inability for women to protect themselves from abusers “gives legitimacy to the abuser,” says Gaytan. “The women will continue to believe that the world is against them.” This breeds a climate of fear in neighborhoods with high numbers of immigrants. Mujeres Latinas en Acción report that they receive around eighty new clients to their Domestic Violence Program’s services each month, and those are only the ones brave enough to ask for help. Even then, “some women refuse to give us their last names, or use fake names,” according to Gaytan. As for the broader community, it would make immigrant women afraid to leave their houses in case their abuser may find them. According to Ms. Abarca, they wonder, “How much exposure should I have outdoors? Should I go to work, take my kids to school? What will be out there?” Instead of integrating into society, victims of abuse shrink back in fear. If the goal of immigration is to create new American citizens who contribute to society, this is not the way to go—all it produces are homebound women stricken by paranoia and children crippled by growing up in that environment.

Anti-immigration sentiment has taken a hold on the popular imagination in recent years. There are legitimate and understandable fears behind this: worries of overloading public services, of letting terrorists across the border, of floods of undocumented immigrants pushing down wages. As a result, immigrant-heavy neighborhoods like Little Village have gone through invasive, often damaging campaigns against undocumented immigrants—the new VAWA is just one in a series of many. But VAWA protects a special group of people that have historically been afforded leniency, even in the face of harsh anti-immigration campaigns. Regardless of your opinions on U.S. immigration policy, moving the frontline of battle against the weakest of the weak violates the basic rules of war. We would not try to defeat the terrorists by targeting their wives and children; nor should we try to solve the immigration problem by targeting those who need America’s help the most and lack the ability to protect themselves. To these women, deportation not only means losing a job but possibly losing their life or their children to abduction. This is not just blaming the victim in the highest degree, but it’s empowering the perpetrators of violent crime—it takes away tools from those who want to help and gives tools, legal and psychological, to those who terrorize. To the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services: take your battle elsewhere. At least start with those who can fight back.

“We couldn’t find her anywhere,” says Folklore Society co-president Dakota Derryberry. “She eventually turned up at two or three in the morning playing fiddle with some of the other organizers and her grandson.”

Partying till the wee hours of the morning may not seem like part of the folk musician’s lifestyle, but effusive enthusiasm for getting together with friends and playing music drives everyone involved with the UofC Folk Festival past their limits. Derryberry and her fellow co-president, London native and math grad student Edward Wallace, spend eight hours a day in the cramped Mandel Hall box office during the two weeks running up to the show—mind you, these are the same two weeks when midterm madness peaks. Their dedication is born out of the same passion that has brought musicians from West Virginia to Louisiana all the way to the UofC for the past forty-eight years.

“All of our musicians love to play,” says Wallace. “We don’t get any of the stuff from performers who think they’re rock stars. They play before the show, they play backstage after the show, they stay at people’s houses and play all night after the party. The organizers join in, or the ones who dance have impromptu dance sessions backstage.”

This should not be surprising—the joy of playing just for the sake of playing is what defines folk music. Well, maybe. “You will never hear the same answer twice, not even from the same person,” chuckles Wallace when asked how he defines folk music. “And I think that’s a good thing. I think of folk music as opposed to art music, or to commercial music. It’s music which is made to serve a function for the community—it’s music to play at dances, to bring the community together, for them to discuss and talk about together…It’s not about pursuing some Elysian ideals, or to make money.”

The founders of the first Folk Festival in 1961 were uncomfortable with the blurring of the lines between folk and commercial music. At that time, many people identified “folk” with major commercial musicians—Joan Baez, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Bob Dylan, James Taylor, and so on. The organizers decided that if people were receptive to their music, they would love “true” folk music—true to the roots and from the people. Some tongue-in-cheekily called the Festival the “Anti-Folk Festival” since it strayed so far from the mainstream perception of folk music. “They wanted people to hear the hill sounds, the old-time sounds, and learn the history of the folk sounds,” say Derryberry and Wallace.

That definition of folk music has been re-written fairly regularly over the course of the Festival’s run, but a dedication to populism and equanimity has survived to this day. Instead of having “headliners” and “supporting acts,” all performers are billed with equal emphasis and many of them are close friends. When asked who this year’s standout performers would be, Wallace refuses to pick sides: “Well, we’ve got a fabulous lineup this year,” he says enthusiastically. He then proceeds to name, well, the entire lineup as standout performers. “Kim Wilson is the greatest living blues harmonica player. Paddy O’Brien from Chulrua knows more tunes than anyone else—he’s got 5,000 to 10,000 tunes in his repertoire, and started recording them 500 at a time. And Christie Gilrie of the Lafayette Rhythm Devils came to play last year when she was seventeen, and all the male undergraduates fell in love with her, so people are really excited about that…”

There is one void in this year’s Folk Festival: the absence of Professor Starkey Duncan. Duncan has been the adviser to the Folklore Society, which claims to be the campus’s oldest Recognized Student Organization. (The organization preceded the festival, first staged in 1961.) Starker, a professor of psychology, passed away in 2007. According to the Society’s dedication to him, his contributions were “immeasurable and irreplaceable.” Despite his absence, the Festival planning has been running more or less smoothly. “He really cared about students running things,” says Derryberry. “It’s really hard to do things without him, but he was so careful to teach everyone what to do and to guide them—that’s why we can carry on.” And they’re heading to a bright future: in two short years, the Folk Festival will celebrate its 50th anniversary. They’re already looking for the best acts possible, and will commemorate with the release of a book and a CD of the best festival recordings from the past 50 years. “These recordings are absolutely unique in American history,” says Derryberry. Starkey would be proud.

The University of Chicago Folk Festival, Mandel Hall, 1131 E. 57th St. February 8-10. Friday, 8pm; Saturday, 7:30pm; Sunday, 6pm. (773)702-9793. www.uofcfolk.org

This dapper man is no securities trader, but Bakari Kitwana, hip-hop political theorist and acclaimed author of “The Hip-Hop Generation” and “Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop.” He’s beginning his year-long residency at the University of Chicago’s Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, which will culminate in a Spring Quarter political science class on “Politics and Hip-Hop” and a talk from an as-yet-unnamed “famous person” (not-so-surprising hint: it will very likely be a top-selling hip-hop artist). His appointment to this post is evidence that the central message of Kitwana’s works is beginning to take hold in the minds of the intelligentsia: that, whether you like it or not, hip-hop is a very real and powerful social movement, meriting a place for its study in the halls of academia. Not only does it deserve respect as a field, but it’s an intellectually compelling one—it’s all uncharted territory, and the soil is interdisciplinary and rich, incorporating political science, economics, sociology, history, urban studies, race and gender studies, literary and musical criticism. All that’s lacking are some pioneering farmers to come and till it, and Kitwana has blazed the trail.

Kitwana’s path to being a fixture on the nationwide university circuit—crossing state lines five times in one week—and to being a professor at a globally renowned school is a winding one, cutting through publishing jobs and an editorship at “The Source” magazine. It all began with potatoes. Kitwana’s parents were migrant workers in the white potato industry in the 1950s, rotating between Elizabeth City, North Carolina and Long Island. In 1955, they simply stayed in Long Island, settling in Bridgehampton—“the other Hamptons,” as Kitwana wryly puts it. The fortuitous existence of white potatoes on Long Island produced a set of circumstances that differentiated his childhood from those of most children of working-class families in New York. Far from the inner city, Long Island produced a huge tax base for the public school system, but his school was ninety-five to ninety-eight percent black at the time. He went to an all-black church. And he was close enough to New York City to soak up urban influences—a Brooklyn-based sister provided him a springboard to witness the birth and evolution of hip-hop in the city. Kitwana witnessed the transition from DJ-centered music to MC-centered music—“People rapped sometimes, but that’s not why we went to shows; where we went on a Friday night depended on who was DJ-ing, and no one thought rap could ever be a career”—and the transition from neighborhood event-based performance (weddings, graduations, promotions, and so on) to the emergence of “gangsta rap” in the late 80s, a trend that Kitwana believes signaled the beginning of the commercialization of hip-hop. On N.W.A.’s unprecedented success, Kitwana says, “We heard people cuss before, but this violent language was a huge shift. [N.W.A] brought a Hollywood sensationalism to hip-hop; they were authentically raw, but were they authentically real?”

This proximity to hip-hop from its prenatal stages gives Kitwana a uniquely authentic perspective to analyze hip-hop as a social movement. He shuns the title of “hip-hop historian,” denying that he has the most viable point of view on its history; the true chroniclers with a sense of stylistic shifts and monumental periods are DJs, in his opinion. Instead, he prefers to go by the title of hip-hop political theorist. “I analyze the economic and political evolutions of hip-hop,” says Kitwana. His first foray into the field was in 1994 when he was at Chicago’s Third World Press. They released his “Rap on Gangsta Rap,” a “critical review” of “the ways Black culture, male-female relationships, sexism, white supremacy (racism), and gun violence converge in this controversial music form,” according to the Press. After receiving a torrent of encouragement, Bakari says, “I realized I was in my element. This is stuff that I know that nobody else knew at the time. Mainstream media was beginning to report on hip-hop and the impact on politics within hip-hop, and they were quoting academics who didn’t know what they were talking about at all.” Another impetus to continue with this sort of study was the desire to “bring political focus to the younger generation, who lacked a language to discuss this sort of thing.” This led him away from Third World Press, who he felt focused more on the older generation, and to a then-young magazine that you may have heard of: “The Source.” “The Source’s” tagline is “Hip-Hop News, Culture, and Politics,” and Kitwana introduced the third element of that list to the magazine by starting their National Affairs section. Although he ended up becoming Executive Editor, Kitwana recalls constantly having to defend his dedication to uniting hip-hop and politics during planning meetings: “People would always be asking me, ‘Why should this be in the magazine? What does politics have to do with hip-hop?’” Thinking about this so much caused him to make a “bold move” and leave “the Source” to write “The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture.” The gamble paid off—“The Hip-Hop Generation” is now taught as a textbook on one hundred different campuses.

Catapulted to the national stage by the success of “The Hip-Hop Generation,” Kitwana has completed many projects since then. These include his Rap Sessions, “community dialogue on hip-hop” that have covered “Race and Hip-Hop” and “Gender and Hip-Hop,” the latter of which was held at the UofC last year. This year’s talk will also be on campus and will be on “Hip-Hop and the Presidential Election.” He also co-founded the first National Hip-Hop Political Convention, modeled on the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana in 1972-1973; his convention attempted to formulate and endorse a national political agenda for the hip-hop generation spanning issues from gentrification and racial profiling (bad) to fair representation in the workplace and reparations (good). At the time, he was working on his most recent book, “Why White Kids Love Hip Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes and the New Reality of Race in America.” The book reflects one of the most difficult challenges faced in the convention—how do you build a hip-hop political movement across race? Some groups did not find that a desirable goal, fearing co-option of the hip-hop movement by whites, and the New Black Panthers were incensed to the point of pulling out of the convention. Kitwana’s view is more practical: “Hip-hop as a cultural movement is multiracial, so the political movement should be as well.” The turnout to the convention was surprising in terms of its demographics—most attendees were between the ages of 19 and 22. “The dominant group had no basic civil engagement, no language for gender analysis or for race analysis, aside from the ‘divide and conquer’ mentality—there was a real void,” says Kitwana.

With a void there comes possibility. To illustrate the potential of hip-hop, he draws comparisons to the Christian Coalition, whose enormous success drew on a pre-existing communicative infrastructure between churches. Hip-hop has a similar structure of informal liaisons between performers, fans, DJs, promoters, venues, websites, and so on, and he who can tap it will be fruitful indeed. Kitwana acknowledges the present flaws in the world of hip-hop—most notably, the misogynist, materialist, violent tendencies of commercial hip-hop. However, he sees potential in their redemptive power, if the artists could be won over to the side of Good. “Kanye West’s ‘Graduation’ sold 900,000 copies in one week,” he points out. “Any politician or author would kill for turnout like that.” The numbers are impressive: Jay-Z and 50 Cent have all sold 500,000 or more copies in their first week. “If Jay-Z went to a rally or supported a candidate, the political equation would change overnight,” Kitwana insists. That’s a big “if,” especially in the face of pressures from corporate backers to stay away from meaningful political action: “The media [portrayal of hip-hop] gets more and more mean-spirited the more political it gets,” he points out. In the end, Kitwana allows for a diplomatically-worded judgment: “I am…disappointed that [mainstream rappers] rap about crap, but dismissing them is a bad strategy.” His strategy, then, is not at all about dismissal and exclusion, but about coalitions and inclusion—all in the name of community transformation. And maybe along the way, people will learn that hip-hop is less scary and more intelligent than they may think.

That seems to be exactly where the company is going: @properties is Chicago’s fastest growing real estate company, with award after award falling into their lap. Their reach extends to places you wouldn’t expect to see luxury condos–@properties signs, bedecked with smiling interracial groups of young couples thrilled about their “hottest new lakefront community,” can be seen at places like 24th and Western, 26th and State, 25th and Dearborn, 69th and Dorchester, 52nd and Calumet. They represent old and new buildings, affordable to high-end luxury, from the Gold Coast to South Shore. Since its founding in 2000 by CEOs Thaddeus Wong and Michael Golden, over 1.5 billion dollars in sales have flowed through @properties’ coffers. That looming tower of cash is just one stack in the torrent of money changing the face of Chicago neighborhoods. New condo construction and “conversions” (rental buildings bought out and converted to condos) boomed in 2005 and 2006 with a slight dip in recent months. Downtown condo conversions leapt from around 700 in 2004 to 3,965 in 2005, according to Appraisal Research Counselors. It’s part of a reversal of the flow of money out of the city and into the suburbs. Urban living has once again become desirable for the city’s monied classes, and they must find someplace to go.

The “everywhere” answer that @properties poses to that question is the problematic part, according to some. If there are condos costing hundreds of thousands of dollars everywhere, then where will people who can’t afford them go? Count the Metropolitan Tenants Organization (MTO) among the ranks of dissenters. The MTO was formed in 1981 with the goal of “lifting people up,” says director John Bartlett, from a bustling Wicker Park office full of people preparing for a protest on Daley Plaza the following day. Specifically, this involves protecting tenants’ rights, especially low-income tenants, educating them and acting as an advocate in relations with the government and private developers. Thousands of people call their tenants rights hotline every year, and in 1986 they had a major role in getting Chicago’s Tenants’ Bill (now Residential Landlord Tenant Ordinance) passed into law. Most recently, they won a victory in getting a bill passed that requires landlords to give 120 days of notice to tenants when their building has been sold.

The MTO stands opposite developers and realtors like @properties philosophically on a number of issues. On whether there is really a problem: “I consider conversions worse because they’re taking rents that were affordable off the market and turning them into condos, which, for the most part, are not affordable for the people who lived there. So where do they go? They leave the community and, sometimes, out of the city. That’s a huge problem,” says Bartlett. @properties’ Thaddeus Wong has a different take: “We’re in a naturally occurring cycle that happens everywhere, and people get shifted around.” Bartlett offers a possible solution: “We need to increase subsidies, and secondly we need to offer incentives to landlords to maintain affordability. If you’re going to keep it affordable rental housing, we’ll keep your water bill lower and keep your taxes lower. We should raise taxes on new condos. We need to create laws that make it harder for a landowner to convert a rental unit into a condo.” Bartlett cited the fact that it’s cheaper and easier for developers to convert than to build new because they can get around some requirements. Wong was ambivalent on the question of a proper solution. When asked if he thought it was possible for mixed-income communities to be successful, he said “Absolutely.” Later on, though, he pointed out, “If you buy a house and it’s $500,000, and across the street they build a high-rise of subsidized apartments, your house may be worth $250,000 soon enough. Then you have homeowners asking: is this fair?”

As tempting as it may be to see it as such, developers are not one hundred-percent evil and greedy. As Bartlett contends, “It’s not like they have a commitment to that neighborhood; they just have a commitment to developing real estate so they can make as much money as possible. It’s greed is what’s pushing it.” Developers care about someone’s interests and will defend their constituency ardently—it just happens to be a different constituency than the one that MTO defends. Wong speaks passionately about the needs of homeowners, discussing how buyers on the South Side have been “ripped off” for years because the prices have been so low they haven’t been able to command good services or high-quality materials. “@ wants to bring professionalism back and improve the quality of service in South Side neighborhoods, and not just Kenwood, Hyde Park, and Bronzeville, either,” says Wong. The concerns that Bartlett and Wong voice echo each other: everyone wants a nice place to live, doesn’t want to be ripped off, and wants a quality home that is worth their money. Homeowners want their investment to mature; renters want an affordable place to live.

Despite Wong saying that we are simply part of a “growth cycle” that involves shifting people around, there is clearly some sort of problem with unfettered condo expansion. Even Mayor Daley sees it and called a condominium task force to discuss how to proceed. That was over a year ago, and the force has yet to meet, nor does it include a representative for renters (though it does include representatives from Lawyers Committee for Better Housing, the Chicago Rehab Network and Business and Professional People for the Public Interest). The task force is set to meet on November 8, and the problems they have to discuss surrounding gentrification, revitalization, urban renewal, or whatever you want to call it are intractable and numerous. Here’s a short list: subsidies to developers to encourage affordable rental housing construction are posed as a solution, but the funds needed for that must come from taxes and you aren’t going to get many taxes from a community that’s almost entirely poor. There is a lack of amenities in poor neighborhoods, but businesses don’t want to move to an area without buying power (though recent scholarship questions the assertion that the poor have as little buying power as is thought. It seems that businesses are missing a great opportunity.) It’s nigh impossible to find a solution to please the current community, or a reliable community voice, because the “community” is far from homogeneous. A neighborhood like North Kenwood-Oakland, which is ninety-eight-percent black, includes homeowners who have been there from generations and who want to see their property appreciate but fear taxes getting out of control, working-class renters who worry about a dearth of rental property, public housing residents who resist being shifted around by the government, and low-income renters in subsidized housing who are upset that their building is being sold or that landlords refuse to maintain their apartment. All these parties have particular and sometimes competing interests, and according to Mary Pattillo, sociologist and author of “Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City,” homeowners often dominate neighborhood organizations. This begs the question: will there ever be a community “voice” that is respected as legitimate, and can organizations ever accurately claim to represent the community?

Naturally, it follows that no side can really agree upon an urban development success story, a model neighborhood that has undertaken a project of injecting money and new buying power into the neighborhood, including all voices along the way and reaching a solution that lets most people stay and makes the new people happy. Therefore, there is no model to compare to during the neighborhood-building process, no formula to follow. And perhaps that is exactly the point: in Chicago, the City of Neighborhoods, a development formula would produce a bunch of interchangeable, identical communities, lacking the strong character that evokes a sense of pride in its residents. Any solution must be fundamentally community-based. And the question isn’t whether the MTO or @properties and their counterparts are “right” or “wrong.” They are all simply interest groups representing different constituencies and pushing in sometimes opposite directions, trying to convince Progress to move forward at a rate at which they’re comfortable. Both are natural and both are necessary, and Chicago will only lift itself up through their conversation, negotiation, and, yes, politics. So let’s talk.

It all begs the question: why study abroad? What are people supposed to get out of it, or rather, what do they want out of it? Surely it can’t be worth it to go through all those applications for programs and scholarships and thousands of dollars spent on plane tickets simply to mullet-watch in the swankiest clubs in Buenos Aires and Barcelona. When university education establishment figureheads talk about traveling abroad, they inevitably use the jargon of the “Study Abroad Experience,” as if we are to simply trans p l a nt ourselves onto foreign soil and absorb, and some how this makes us into better, more useful people. You can find this on the University’s Study Abroad website: “an extended period of time abroad offers a cultural immersion, an opportunity to examine habits and attitudes different from, some times inimical to, those at home […. Students] return to Hyde Park with a larger view of the world, a wider sympathy for its peoples, and a stronger sense of themselves.” Oh really? Because there seems to be a very high chance that one can simply hang out with other American students and get to know the discotecas of Spain much more intimately than the Spaniards themselves. One of the reasons I specifically chose not to go on a UofC-sponsored program was that the prospect of taking the University bubble with me to a foreign country was repulsive and seemed counterproductive— how are we supposed to enjoy raw, unadulterated foreignness that way?

What I found out was that pure foreignness doesn’t really exist, at least not in the way that I expected it to. On all programs, you receive a somewhat structured version of reality. In my case, I spent the summer— rather, winter—in Santiago de Chile living with a host family and studying at a language school. My family had been hosting exchange students for about four years, so they were used to slowing down the hyper-speed Chilean Spanish to an understandable pace and explaining all the nuances of life for our benefit. The goal is to avoid confusion, but confusion is the most distinguishing marker of foreignness that I encountered and
no number of study abroad program employees can completely eliminate it. For what is foreignness but that which is different from our daily life? People within our own country can lead seemingly foreign lifestyles, but there is a common understanding we share that defines our existence as a society. We not only have the same language, but the same jargon—we can discuss Britney Spears’ antics or the battle between the Cubs and the Brewers for their division and be fairly confident that our conversation partner will be aware of the players involved, if not the specific situation. There is a cultural consciousness specific to America created by—what? Mass media? Knowledge passed down through generations? The educational – industrial complex? Probably a combination of the above

In any case, one of my earliest lessons in Chile was an attempt by my teacher to initiate me into the Chilean cons c iousness. Santiago has three major soccer teams, some more working class and others for the elite—Colo Colo, La Universidad de Chile, La Católica — and the major newspapers are La Tercera (more leftist) and El Mercurio (conservative). Slowly, one begins to build a mental arsenal of train stations, neighborhoods, political figures and alliances, universities, and other societal signposts to help you navigate your way around a foreign country. If, as a Chicagoan, you are told that so-and-so is from Naperville and they went to Northwestern, you can probably ma ke some educated guesses about his income level and other aspects of his character that wouldn’t be too far off. The Green Line is the “sketchy” line and Lakeview, Pilsen, and Ukrainian Village are artsy neighborhoods. The University of Chicago is prestigious, University of Illinois at Chicago less so—and so on and so forth. A Chilean transplanted to Chicago would know no ne of this, and the most disorienting part about living in a foreign country is lacking the ability to make the sort of stereotypes and associations we use to order the information our world provides (and that can’t be found in a guidebook,
no matter how hard they try). The result is a confused mess of places, names, and intricate social webs that mean nothing. Chile seemed less and less foreign as I learned what it meant for someone to say that they were from Vitacura (read: criminally rich, likely Pinochet supporter) or that it was perfectly acceptable for couples to make out on the subway. Along with the formal acquisition of your foreign language of choice, abroad experiences teach you the regional language and norms that sharply contrast with your own. They challenge your sensibilities, despite all pretensions towards tolerance, and make you re-assess your habits that you normally take for granted.

And then you meet other Americans floating throughout the city. The meeting is joyous: oh, you’re from Texas and you go to Boston College! I know what that means! The expatriate community is always welcoming, always ready to make new friends despite differences that would have prevented friendship back in America. When faced with all that is violently not – American, the expat never shies away from taking solace in the American. Even though I am nowhere near jingoistic in my waking life, I’ve never been so excited to celebrate the Fourth of July and angrily demand free drinks from the bartender because I’m American, dammit, and today is my day. A bond forms amo ng the group when re miniscing about everything you miss— real grocery stores and not just dirty mini-marts, indoor heating during the winter, being able to take a shower without lighting a match first—and by being part of a novelty group. We are no longer the confident and in-charge majority, but a cute and lost minority group fo u nd terribly interesting by the locals: “Hey, what do you think of George Bush? Are there a lot of school shooters / kidnappers / high school cliques in America?” Another fun lesson: foreign perceptions of America are often formed by headline news and 80s teen movies.

Out of all the confusion and the helplessness arises purity. When meeting a Chilean (or the informed citizen of any land in which you are an ignorant stranger), you have no idea what to make of them, so you simply have to judge them as they act towards you. When meeting another American, the desperation to speak English overwhelms you and the solidarity of the lost takes over any differences you may have. The greatest lesson I have taken from my Study Abroad Experience was the ability to openly accept and assess people on their merits. I’ve lost shyness in approaching strangers and the Hyde Park tendency to stare directly at your feet when walking— or, at least, I did for awhile. Back in the motherland, it’s simply not acceptable to (soberly) introduce yourself to total strangers at apartment parties. A world of familiar places and faces means that social webs and judgmental tendencies return. Such is life— I am back in the real world. And when people ask me how my summer was, I do reply with “Awesome” or “Cold” or “I learned a lot” and not much else, and maybe they wonder how it changed me, if at all. Silently, I am missing the warmth and openness of being a stranger in a strange land. Ideally, that is what one should get from their time abroad — the reminder that people are simply people, that our values are only one set among many, and the realization of how much you have been shaped by your own culture. And if you’ve actually taken advantage of the opportunity to be forced to question why you live your life the way you do, you come out shaped as an individual, more confident and closer to your core self. But the discotecas are pretty sweet, too.