[Oe List ...] OpEd Saipan Tribune Thursday

[Jaime R Vergara]

Blue in Uptown Chicago

I wore a blue beanie in Uptown Chicago last Monday, looking like a reincarnation of Che Vergara, ehe, Guevara, of the montañosa de Cuba fame. Not that I was trying to call attention to myself, nor even to look like the revolucionario, but it was nice not to have anyone notice our longish curly grey hair waving out of the hat gifted us by our Hawaii nephew. We were not in an area where the trimmed hair was predominant.  The longish hair, in fact, held its fair share of the crowd.  And ‘blue’ is the color of my true love’s hair, or, at least, dress and shirt!

Vietnamese pho shops on Argyle and Broadway streets (where the landmark Uptown theatre sits) and the Green Mill watering hole, erstwhile hangout of the late Al Capone, down to Lawrence (where the other landmark theatre Aragon is located) and east towards Michigan Lake where Lawrence St. crosses Sheridan, are now in the vicinity of the New Chinatown of Chicago. 

Waiters in two shops where I ate revealed what I surmised to be extremely wary and suspicious immigrants.  I asked a Chinese girl, after ascertaining she was from Zhongguo, which province she was from, and she just smiled and responded: “China.”  At the Gyros shop run by Latinos, I ordered breakfast in my limited Spanish, and mumbled to the shop attendant about traveling to Latin America in the late 70s, and how delighted I was to use Spanish again, and she just grinned.  When I asked where she was from, she grinned some more.  It was then I realized that with the tight immigration watch across the country, undocumented presence was not about to reveal information to unknown strangers.

I felt sad for this new attitude.  The Kemper building was our official home from 1975-85, and though crime was not unknown, the innocence of a diverse population was still delightful evident.  The eight-storey building was donated by Kemper Insurance to house the Ecumenical Institute (EI) of Chicago, baptized in the racial fires of the first human development project in Fifth City on the Westside.  Kemper became the headquarters of the Institute of Cultural Affairs (ICA), with some “blue shirts” running around in communities in ‘every time zone’ around the world including the Majuro Human Development Project in the Marshall Islands of Micronesia. 

The “blue shirts” showed up on occasion in Saipan to seek TT support for the Marshall Islands’ experiment in social transformation; they were members of the religious order experiment, the Order: Ecumenical (O:E).  Its members were Roman Catholics, Reformers of various hues, Orthodox, and other Christian groups; it also included secular activists and serious atheists.  They wore ‘blue,’ ever forgiving of the past, confidently affirming of the future, and demonstrating with their lives a quality of transparent humanness that matched their walk with their talk.
 
There were close to 3,000 from around the world at the peak of its corporate engagement, an organized servant force to catalyze a new reformation of the historical Church, and the radical reformulation of the new social earthrise.  A tall order but vision was vivid, mission intense, strategies engaging, and maneuvers lively.  We crafted tactics carefully, and we died our deaths in the implementation of them, giving everything we got in the process, plus.  

But like any movemental force, legal forms weighed heavily on strategic operations, especially the requirements of nation-states, and when the center no longer held, minds cognizant of operational effectiveness cast an eye on efficient order and social accountability.  Stratification calcified snuffing the spirit of creativity; in 1988, EI/O:E had enough sense to call the movement out of being, scattered itself like a thousand lights, and 4750 Sheridan became ICA USA.

In this visit, 15 years after the parting, we were impressed by the environs of Uptown, and Lakeshore Drive that houses the creme de la creme of the US midwest; three blocks inland where 4750 is located is the flipside of the coin.  The homeless and other folks in need are served by Chicago’s Human Services offices located on 4750.  The first five floors of the building offer shelter for battered women, a social net for the differently-abled, those of physical wants, and those whose psyche and spirit are calling out for care and the human touch.

The ICA offices occupy the sixth-to-the-eighth floor, serving as a venue for all kinds of transformative pedagogies, and promoting a peer-to-peer enablement of other ICA offices elsewhere.
 
Siam Cafe next door with portraits of King Bhumibol and Queen Sirikit on the wall is now more affluent than before but has not changed much.  The marginalized are still in the neighborhood, and though the sidewalk tables and chairs of Cafe Innovation typify the gentility that has set in, change has not altered obvious need and the courage to care.  The ICA gave Kemper a facelift while it seethes with the drumbeat of its latent spirit and movemental echoes from around the world on its archives, halls and walls.

The blue shirts are gone, but blue still holds the cutting edge of the ICA, and not surprisingly, remains handmaiden to the passion of my soul.


j'aime la vie
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