San Francisco is a city of neighborhoods. The neighborhood in which I currently dwell
is called “The Mission” or, sometimes, “the Mission District.” I have heard it said that a year or two ago The New York Times called it “the
hippest neighborhood in the country.” No
doubt that would have been around the time I happened to look through the front
window of a taqueria I was passing
and saw Quentin Tarantino eating chimichangas. Or a few months later when I suddenly came upon
Woody Allen – whom I had previously seen in person only on a street on the
Upper West Side of Manhattan, then walking in the company of Mia Farrow –
talking with a crew member while working on “Blue Jasmine.”
Much of the allure of the Mission is the complexity of its
social fabric. It has been home over the
past century and a half to successive waves of immigrants, each bringing the
cuisine, the music, the traditions, and the folk culture of its homeland. One sees everywhere remnants of each epoch,
like strata in the rock containing fossils of the forms that life has taken
through the ages: German, Irish,
Italian, Mexican, and Central American influences can be seen in architecture,
restaurants, street names, art (including the ubiquitous murals), and music
that thrive in this neighborhood.
Such are the relics of the past. Now, quite suddenly, a wholly new and
entirely unexpected wave of immigrants has hit the shore and is flooding the
streets and alleyways of the Mission.
Like every one of the past waves of immigrants, this one is viewed with
suspicion, its manners and mores are decried as uncivil and disruptive, and its
displacement – or replacement – of the previously existing social structure is
giving rise to anger, resentment, and occasional violence. Yet also like each previous wave, these
immigrants see themselves as innocents who have happily discovered a new home
that is to them so exciting and so inviting that they feel only pride and joy
at taking up their residence here.
The new immigrants are – well, what shall I call them? The first epithet that came to my mind
earlier this afternoon was “privileged white kids,” but that is not at all
accurate. Yes, they are young, but their
ethnic backgrounds are Asian, African, and Latin, as much as “white.” Indeed, I would say that their tribe, as it
were, is determined not by any shared biological traits but by shared biographical ones. These are well-educated, highly paid, and
adventurous people. One of them rode in
my cab a couple of weeks ago. He was
born in Nigeria, and after graduating from MIT had gone home to visit his family. Now he had returned to the United States and come
to San Francisco to make his career in internet enterprises. He told me that San Francisco is for young people
today what New York was for my generation when we were in our twenties and
thirties: this is the place to come if
you want to make your mark on the world.
And within San Francisco, these young people gravitate to
the Mission and, to a lesser extent, to the Tenderloin.
*
I walked through the Tenderloin tonight and saw – or, more
accurately, felt – a disquieting change in the short nine months since I moved
to the Mission. The neighborly feeling
of comradery, of sharing a relaxed and occasionally messy communal life, seems
to have evaporated. In its place is a
loud, rough, and sharp-tongued hostility.
Last autumn I felt that people seeing me walk down the block would
wonder where that crazy white boy was going and how he got so lost that he was
walking through here. I felt tonight
that they were eyeing me as an enemy. At
the Lafayette Coffee Shop, where I ate my dinner, the usual crowd of regulars
was augmented by a dozen or so young men of that new tribe I described
above. Usually the Lafayette is filled
with a general conversation among the regulars who discuss sports and their
neighbors, gossip and kid one another, and anyone so moved is free to add their
two cents worth. But last night that
inclusive conversation was not to be heard, and the young men carried on one of
their own.
When I left the restaurant, I passed three or four small
groups, some of women and some of men, who were walking home from work and were
chatting with one another oblivious to the long-time residents they passed
along the way. The old-timers sauntered
along the sidewalk or stood in clusters along the blocks of Hyde from
McAllister to Eddy. I saw, though the
young bourgeoisie did not, the looks and the posture, the attitudes, of the
folks in the shadows through which the kids passed. The friction between these two entities, the
heat generated by their passing so closely to one another, a heat unnoticed by
one party and inciting the other, intimated to me a future that I do not care
to name. Let us pray that the heat does
not burn, that it does not burst into flame.
*
Let me return to the Mission, literally and figuratively,
for it is this neighborhood that I make my subject tonight. The neighborhood takes its name from the
Spanish Mission, which still stands on Dolores Street near 16th
Street. A low, thick-walled adobe
building, Mission San Francisco de Asis (La
Mision de Nuestro Padre San Francisco de Asis) was founded June 29, 1776,
five days before the Declaration of Independence was published, on land claimed
by the Spaniards in the name of their King Phillip. This land was, at the time, known as Chutchui to the Bay Miwok, the Coast Miwok,
and the Patwin peoples who had considered the area to be their neighborhood for
at least a thousand years before the Europeans registered their own title to
it.
The common name for the Mission, Mission Dolores, comes from
the name of the creek that flowed by it: Arroyo de Nuestra Signora de los Dolores, or
The Creek of Our Lady of the Sorrows. It
is here that Europeans first settled. An
historical marker at the intersection of Camp and Albion Streets records the
basic facts. (Camp Street takes its name
from the fact that the Spanish made their camp on the site.) That marker stands just a block and a half
from the room in which I now write. I
have long wondered why the Spaniards chose such a name. Was their journey to this spot so harrowing
that they believed that they camped in Her quiet, grieving company? Or was the spot itself so inhospitable (I
have read that ferocious swarms of mosquitoes plagued anyone who was here in
those days) that they felt themselves to be encamped among sorrows? Had many of their party succumbed to sickness
or even death here? I have searched many
sources, and I have found no answer.
Certainly for the Miwok and the Patwin, as well as the other
tribes of Ohlones living in the bay region, the arrival of the whites, with
their murderous warriors and their strange religion, not to mention their
foreign diseases, meant unrelenting, disastrous, and ultimately genocidal
sorrows. I do not know what the Ohlone
might have thought of the new immigrants in their neighborhood, but I have read
many of the accounts written by the Europeans regarding the inhabitants of
their “New World.” The Europeans found
the First Peoples to be indolent, unproductive, ignorant, and child-like. They thought their own right to take the land
and its resources for their own purposes was obvious in the fact that, as they
saw it, the Ohlone had failed utterly to make any use of the bounty that
surrounded them.
I have found this view of the prehistoric residents of San
Francisco (and of the rest of Northern California) to have been held
consistently into the early twentieth century.
The first prominent voice that I have found raised in defense of and
respect for the Native Americans was that of Theodora Kroeber, the wife of the
University of California anthropologist Alfred Kroeber. Her book “Ishi in Two Worlds” tells the story
of the last surviving Native Californian, a man who wandered into the white
man’s world in the town of Oroville, almost dead with sickness and hunger, in
1911.
Now, another hundred years later we are beginning to
understand the wisdom of the people who lived within the nexus of the ecosystem
of which they were part rather than seeing their habitat only as “wealth” to be
extracted. We Europeans have by now so altered
that ecosystem that we may find that “making use” of all that wealth has cost
us our lives. If we survive, we may well
lament the 200 years during which we looked down on the First Peoples as lazy,
ignorant, and unproductive and judged them unworthy of the wealth that their
land held. That world view excused our
wholesale appropriation of the land, and at its extreme that view justified slaughter.
Just short of that extreme this same language of judgment
justified the oppression of Africans and African-Americans both during the
period when slavery was practiced and on through the time after its
abolition. To this day the same terms
are used to devalue the poor and to justify the refusal to help them. The unemployed are called lazy. The drug-addicted, the alcoholics, and the
mentally ill are described as spoiled children who just want to play and have
fun instead of being responsible and productive. The judgments passed against these people are
not drawn from any investigation or evidence:
they are the shadow side of Capitalism’s supposed virtues and of its
attendant bourgeois morality, and they are indiscriminately thrown at anyone
the ruling class wishes to push aside.
*
The language of the conquerors, first the Spanish and then
the Americans, defined the vanquished and marginalized them as
individuals. In the Mission, as the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries progressed, this language of oppression
continued in force but in a sense reversed direction. Now it was the immigrant who was viewed as
lazy, ignorant, and child-like. And each
wave of immigrants, as it moved up the social hierarchy on the backs of a new
wave of immigrants from a different land, adopted the same terms to denigrate
the newcomers. So Germans who had been judged
in this way condemned the Irish who followed them in the same terms; the Irish
then condemned the Italians; and so on to today when these terms are used to
denounce the poor in general, since the taboo against racism keeps that part of
the oppressor’s world view unspoken.
In December of last year, Greg Gopman, the CEO at the time
of AngelHack, a Silicon Valley tech company, posted the following on his Facebook
page:
“Just got back to SF. I've traveled around the world and I
gotta say there is nothing more grotesque than walking down market st in San
Francisco. Why the heart of our city has to be overrun by crazy, homeless, drug
dealers, dropouts, and trash I have no clue. Each time I pass it my love affair
with SF dies a little.
“The difference is in other cosmopolitan cities, the lower
part of society keep to themselves. They sell small trinkets, beg coyly, stay
quiet, and generally stay out of your way. They realize it's a privilege to be
in the civilized part of town and view themselves as guests. And that's okay.
“In downtown SF the degenerates gather like hyenas, spit,
urinate, taunt you, sell drugs, get rowdy, they act like they own the center of
the city. Like it's their place of leisure... In actuality it's the business
district for one of the wealthiest cities in the USA. It a disgrace. I don't
even feel safe walking down the sidewalk without planning out my walking path.
“You can preach compassion, equality, and be the biggest
lover in the world, but there is an area of town for degenerates and an area of
town for the working class. There is nothing positive gained from having them
so close to us. It's a burden and a liability having them so close to us.
Believe me, if they added the smallest iota of value I'd consider thinking
different, but the crazy toothless lady who kicks everyone that gets too close
to her cardboard box hasn't made anyone's life better in a while.”
Again and again in the course of its history, San Francisco
has been said to be in the throes of “another Gold Rush.” The same thing is being said today. But seldom does anyone examine the conflicts
that arise when each wave of fortune hunters floods in. We have had two kinds of immigration crisis
in this city: one kind is the influx of
poor and displaced people fleeing disasters in their homelands and the other is
the influx of middle and upper-class fortune hunters. The two have at times alternated and at times
come in tandem, as they do today, when hysteria about illegal border crossings
is combined with the kind of rancor toward the existing lower-class population
that I just quoted.
This afternoon, while walking first in the Mission and later
in the Tenderloin, I saw and felt that the great tear ripping open in this
city’s social fabric is not so much the result of the pressures of a growing
population from Central and South America but is rather the result of the
pressures exerted by the influx of a wealthy and privileged elite. I do not doubt that the rich and powerful
interlopers will win and drive the lower classes out of the two neighborhoods
that have been, until recent months, affordable for them. But with them will go the rich cultural
mélange that has been the Mission’s charm.
They will find themselves conquerors of a barren field, rulers of an
emptiness whose lack of interest and of cultural value will leave them
wondering why they came here at all.
