My neighbors
I'd like to tell you about what it's like living in a neighborhood with diversity.
The Tower of Babel, as told in the Abrahamic traditions, is an origin story explaining why humanity has so many different languages. The short version is that humans used to have one common language, but they were getting a little too successful in working together. They built a big tower that got too close for God's comfort, so he split them up and gave them a bunch of different languages to make it hard for them to work together.
And sure, it has that kernel of truth in it, as pourquoi tales do. Speaking a different language from your neighbor can make things trickier.
Let's fast-forward a few thousand years, to where I live. I live on a one-block-long street in San Francisco, and I get to share it with the folks who live in the handful of other houses on this block.
I'm sure you've seen photos of houses in San Francisco. We're packed in pretty darned tight here. There are a lot of people living in a city that's only 7x7 miles. There are no front lawns in this part of town, and almost all of the houses here on our street are touching at the sides, no space between them. Ours is one of two on the block that are free-standing on both sides, but there's still only a three-foot gap between our house and the one next to us. I could open my window and reach over and touch the neighbor's house, no problem.
It's close quarters, is what I'm saying.
We've lived here on this block for more than 15 years now, and we're still the "new kids" on the street—while some of the houses contain in-law units with renters that have come and gone over the years, the community of neighbors has been pretty stable. Last week, one of the homes on our block was listed for sale; that's the first time that's happened in the 15 years since we bought our house.
On our little street, we have neighbors who were born in China, Mexico, El Salvador, the Philippines, Jordan, and Vietnam. And likely more I don't know about. Ours is one of the few homes where English is spoken at home; the homes around us are full of Chinese, Spanish, and Tagalog. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Atheism are all represented here, with widely varying levels of observance, of course.
Many of our neighbors speak very little English, despite living here for decades. I've been living with these neighbors for a long time now. Enough time to go through a lot with them. Living in such close quarters takes coordination. Maintaining shared fences, coordinating major house repairs and painting, roof issues, parking, you name it.
And major life moments. The whole street celebrated with us when Wanda was born. The whole street came out to be with our neighbors when they had a fire. I held my neighbor as she sobbed in my arms when her husband unexpectedly died. We didn't need words.
The language differences make it different, but after all of this time and experience with it, I don't know that I can say it makes any of it harder. I just don't experience it that way. There have been rare times when we've had to line up some translators (almost always children or nieces). But almost everything is coordinated just fine via smiling, pointing, nodding, and a few simple words. There are so many ways to communicate that don't use words. It doesn't actually impact our ability to live together with joy, caring, and support.
I like my neighbors a lot! They're sweet, and they're there for us, and we're there for them. We've fed neighbors' pets, they've done it for us. We've helped each other move furniture, deal with packages, you name it. When it looked like some leaves might be clogging our downspouts, our neighbor was there with his ladder, and he got right up on the roof with us to make sure we were okay. When our other neighbor was starting to have mobility issues as she aged, one neighbor brought her garbage bins out every week, and Rich brought them back in for her every week. He helped her with all kinds of little household things: batteries in her remote, moving her laundry. She speaks very, very little English, and all of it has been handled just fine via pantomime. It works!
If you want to go looking for an issue, the neighbor wanted to pay Rich back for his kindness, and she did it by gifting us with a bag of frozen broccoli. Every. Week. Once we hit the point where we had six bags of the stuff piled up in the freezer, he tried to pantomime to her—graciously—that we were all set on broccoli. It didn't work, the broccoli train kept on a-rollin'. So he had to eat a lot of broccoli. (We later found out, in talking to her nephew who had been shopping for her, that he'd wondered how she went through so much broccoli. We suspect she didn't like the broccoli he was buying for her and was pawning it off on us.)
The Filipino family shared pancit with our Salvadoran neighbor, who then shared it with us. Our neighbor used to share her caldo de pollo with us all the time, back when it was easier for her to cook; now we share our food with her. Two of our neighbors give me Meyer lemons from the trees in their backyards, and I make them lemon tarts. My baked goods fly out randomly to different neighbors, and we've gotten dim sum and donuts in return. And of course, at Christmas, I give a big box of cookies to every house on the block.
When Rich and I got married, it was in the street right in front of our house, and all of the neighbors were invited.
Now, we're not magically immune to assholery around here. There have been moments where some neighbor has been a challenge for one or more of the others here on the street. Humans have asshole moments, we're kinda famous for it. Life is hard on all of us sometimes, and that difficulty comes spraying out and other people get hit with the shrapnel. That's just a fact of life. But the root of that assholery does not lie in whether someone was born here or not. The idea of that boggles me.
I'm really, really worried for my neighbors. I love them. They deserve to live here as joyfully and freely as I do. They shouldn't worry about who might hassle them about whether they "belong" or not. They exist here, so they belong, end of story. They are people. They don't owe anyone credentials beyond that. This manufactured idea that some of us are here in an "okay" way and some of us aren't is bonkers. The only ones I want to hear talking on that subject are the Natives who were here for tens of thousands of years before any of the rest of us showed up.
I want to find new, bigger, more intentional ways to signal to my neighbors that I want to have their backs in this messed up chapter of our shared history. I have some ideas cooking in my head about how I can do that, but they're half-baked so I'm not ready to talk about them here. I want to expand it past our block a bit, I want to get to know the people on the streets next to ours. My closest friends in the neighborhood are one street over, and I've started talking with them about doing something together. Something that helps us all connect, something that won't leave anyone out. To get to know each other a little more, even if it's just through more smiles and nods. Nothing fancy, no concrete goals, just start by knowing each other a smidge more. See what can naturally grow out of that.
I figure, that's acting in direct opposition to the destructive forces we're up against. There are people benefiting from us being fearful, divided. From our seeing difference before we see commonality. It's a good time to put a little effort into being more united. This country is us, and if we can feel that in small moments in our neighborhood, maybe it will be easier for us to feel it if history comes crashing on our heads.
For now, I'm keeping the phone number for the San Francisco Rapid Response Network handy, they have a hotline for reporting ICE activity in the city: (415) 200-1548. I'm also learning more about existing groups in the city and neighborhood who support the immigrant community, like Poder SF and Casa de Apoyo. And there's this webinar next Monday I'd like to attend, "¡Ya Basta! Lessons from the Northern California Coalition for Immigrant Rights (1986-96)."