Pilsen and working class

10/19/2011

            I feel that studying and visiting the Pilsen neighborhood was the perfect example of how the racial make-up of the city of Chicago has changed and moved over the last fifty to one hundred years.  Immigrants are very important to the make-up of Chicago and have been for the last century, giving Chicago the culture and diversity that make Chicago the global city that it is today.  While Chicago is definitely an immigrant city, as easily seen driving down the streets and seeing how much immigration has played a role in Chicago, immigrants still face many problems today; more than they have ever faced in the past.

The majority of immigrants came to Chicago and saw it as a city of opportunity with many factory and labor jobs that would provide them with enough money to afford a home and food for their families.  However this has greatly changed with the loss of factory jobs in Chicago and the increasing cost of living.  We could blame it on NAFTA or the exporting of jobs overseas but this is a problem that would have eventually come regardless.  As the job market in Chicago shrunk, the problems for immigrants grew and they became more locked in service job niches as the city went from being primarily a labor and manufacturing economy to being primarily service based.  As Koval points out, 30 to 45 occupational categories encompass 75 percent of all immigrant males and females in Chicago’s labor force.  Although this number is quiet small, immigrants are incredibly important to the Chicago economy and without them many service industries would be non-existent.  It is also becoming increasingly difficult for immigrants to leave the working or labor class due to the high necessity for a degree in order to get higher paying jobs in the U.S..  This is an issue that isn’t only true in the city of Chicago but also just about every other major city in the United States.  All of these facts are also evident in the fact that immigration issues are becoming more and more important in both state and national politics. 

This change in the job market caused less European immigration while immigrants from Mexico kept coming, which helps explains the transformation of the Pilsen neighborhood from being primarily Polish and Bohemian to being now largely a Hispanic neighborhood.  All of these issues that the Latino community face are holding them down in the lower working class and in turn is making our economy more and more reliant on them, which isn’t a bad thing.  Overall the Latino community is a very open culture and on the bright side, with less factories and manufacturing in Chicago the city is becoming a better place all around for us to live unlike the ‘little hell’ area which is now long gone.