First off: Maryam, way to be awesome.
And to a lesser degree, this week’s readings were pretty awesome too. It was great to hear the personal accounts of narrators from such diverse backgrounds attest to the unique flavor that immigrants tend to impart on the neighborhoods in which they settle, and to see them so often express the same sort of intense love of neighborhood that we’ve encountered in several of our previous readings.
I found it especially interesting that the deep local-neighborhood attachment felt by long-time residents like Jose and Lucille carries over just as easily to recent immigrants like Maria and Mohamed. Piri’s focus on his community stands out as particularly indicative of the incredible life-shaping role that home neighborhoods can play for their residents. Actually, for me, this immediately brought to mind our walking tour tour-guide’s fierce devotion to the integrity of East Harlem and her correspondingly fierce opposition to what she saw, in the construction of the East River Mall and overpainting of local murals among other things, as undermining the character of her neighborhood. If this set of readings has impressed one idea upon me most deeply, it’s that a neighborhood is more than just a set of bounds on a map, and far more to its residents than simply a place where they live.
