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Guest Column
My hometown of Cicero is in the news again. Recent headlines have covered both a raucus political campaign for town president and a U.S. Justice Department suit alleging unfair housing practices by the town government. Cicero has definitely been newsworthy of late. But media coverage has missed perhaps the most profound change occurring in the old working-class suburb that hugs the western border of Chicago: Cicero's white population is shrinking rapidly at the same time that a huge immigration of Latinos is underway. Almost overnight, Cicero has become a Latino suburb. Its Latino population grew to 37 percent of the town's total by 1990, up from only 8.6 percent Latino a decade earlier. Cicero's 25,000 plus Latinos constitute the Midwest's second largest Latino settlement, after Chicago. As Latinos move into Cicero, the town government has adopted an aggressive posture to slow the influx. The town passed an ordinance that limits the number of persons that can inhabit a housing unit. The Justice Department claims the housing ordinance discriminates against new Latino residents, who tend to have large families. Cicero protests that its housing ordinance is blind to skin color, but this falls apart upon examination.
The letter writer might be surprised to learn that Cicero's Latinos actually exemplify many American values more than the non-Latino Cicero residents. According to the U.S. Census Bureau:
• The traditional two-parent family is more common among Cicero Latinos than non-Latinos. Some 76 percent of Latino families include a married couple, compared to 71 percent of non-Latino families. In the 1930s my mother's family in Cicero included eight persons living in a single apartment. In my father's family, seven individuals lived under the same roof. In the annals of Cicero history there was never an outcry over the large size of these Czech families, like there is now about Latinos. A common myth about Latinos, in Cicero and elsewhere, is that there is something un-American about their extensive use of Spanish. It takes a sort of amnesia about our immigrant heritage to believe this. Immigrants have spoken languages other than English for a hundred years now in Cicero and the adjacent west side of Chicago. Drive down Cermak Road (named after a Czech American) in Cicero or Berwyn and you can still pick out Czech language signs. Scratch the surface and you'll uncover a Czech linguistic subtext buried beneath the Latino neighborhoods of Chicago's Pilsen and Lawndale communities. Observe the Czech language engraving in the limestone cornerstones and tin cornices of old businesses, churches and social centers, and you'll realize that a lingua franca other than English existed here long before the arrival of Spanish. I consider myself a perfectly representative Ciceronian precisely because I no longer live there. My parents, like many white, working-class town residents, raised me with a clear mandate: "You will go to college and move away from here." Barely a handful of my 1979 Morton East High School graduating class still lives in town. It's no wonder that Cicero is more than a third Latino these days. The Latino community hasn't "pushed" out white ethnics: Many of us left of our own free will. We went to college, got decent jobs and acquired values that prefer life in newer suburbs, or exciting
10/June 1993/Illinois Issues north side Chicago neighborhoods, over a rust-belt manufacturing community in economic decline. I would be willing to attribute Cicero's white ethnic fear of Latinos to old-fashioned ethnocentrism if it weren't for the presence of an even more important factor. Strangely enough, to understand this fear you have to understand the Mike Ditka symbol. A television commentator hit the nail on the head when he described Mike Ditka's departure from the Chicago Bears as more than the loss of a football coach. It was the loss of a symbol of a Chicago that is disappearing. Ditka represented a man who made good in life without a fancy education or a privileged background. Cicero always had more than its share of Mike Ditkas. They left high school and entered unionized, well-paying jobs with benefits and security. They married, bought a house, a car, raised children and generally lived a prosperous life. Sometime — it's hard to tell when because it came so fast — all those opportunities began to vanish. It got so that a kid from Morton East couldn't walk over to the factories on 16th Street the day after graduation and get a job. The manufacturing industry in Cicero along with its good jobs has been devastated. Those factories aren't hiring anymore; many of those factories are empty. They are not coming back and we all know it. Enter a group of newcomers into this scenario — Latinos — and is it any wonder that they become a target of anger? I too am angry about the devastation of Cicero's past. When I drive past the corner of Cermak Road and Cicero Avenue I see that the factory where my father worked for almost 40 years, Cicero's famed Hawthorne Works, has been leveled to become a discount merchandiser's parking lot. Everyone has a right to feel angry about that kind of loss. But we have a duty to recognize that hardworking Latinos, living in traditional nuclear families, earning significant household incomes, had nothing to do with it. Rob Paral is a researcher with the Latino Institute in Chicago.
June 1993/Illinois Issues/11 |
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