I was very skeptical in the beginning of the course to pick this district since I am fairly new to San Francisco and I hadn't heard much about it. In the end, I'm glad I picked it. It was a really good experience and I think I learned a lot about myself as well as the Excelsior District. I remember thinking the first couple of weeks, "God, I hope I find enough things to cover for the whole semester..." My first perceptions were that it was pretty small compared to other districts and there didn't seem much to do.
As I went around, interviewing people for my final paper, I realized there was a lot more than I thought. I also realized the social issues in this neighborhood were
more serious than I had imagined. It interested me how the consequences can range when new waves of immigration settle in a community that already has been taken by other ethnicities.
We see movies, learn history and, in my experience, even live in places where there is a lot of territorial issues, but I never sat down and tried to deconstruct it. In the beginning I felt stand offish about the older Italian American generation that still lives in
the neighborhood. I had a really hard time seeing things in their point of you. I kept thinking to myself, "Wow, these white people are kinda of racist." Then I kind of put myself in their position and tried to imagine how I would feel if a new wave of immigrants
came to my neighborhood and change
d it. I realized when it comes to things like claiming a certain space, I can't really take sides, and like Yvonne said, "This isn't about me."
Doing this last paper also made me reflect on how I saw the place I grew up. When people ask me here, where do I come from, I'm always proud to say East LA. I feel that j
ust like the Excelsior District, it also carried an unnecessary negative stigma. I felt like since I grew up there, I knew what East LA was all about. But just like the Excelsior has a history, so does my home town. East LA was not always a Latino community. Before the wave of Mexican immigrants in the 40s and the 60s, there was a large population of Japanese that were forced out of East LA and everywhere else after Pearl Harbor. Now when I go back home, I understand why there are random japanese gardens in different place around East LA. They symbolize the little remains of an older wave of immigrants.
I see the Excelsior District very different as I saw it in the beginning. Like most community leaders I interviewed, I feel like this neighborhood has a lot of potential to flourish and be as interesting as the rest of San Francisco. I also realized how a city can be constructed to isolate certain neighborhoods and residents. These people really feel neglected from the rest of the city. I tried to compare the Excelsior with the Mission because I couldn't comprehend how these two neighborhoods can be so different when they are right next to each other. In a way I felt like if you take away the trendy shops, hip bars and clubs, and the ides that "it's cool" to hang out in the Mission, the differences wou
ld not be so visible. I feel like the Excelsior is a smaller version of what the Mission was before it got gentrified.
One of the things that separates San Francisco from other major cities in California, is how it is constructed into various districts and each one is completely different from the next. But these separations carry territorial conflict that to me, just like the neighborhoods are separated, there is also separation between San Franciscans. And things wouldn't be so complicated if all residents were treated the same, regardless on how rich the neighborhood is. All public schools should provide equal education whether the person is from the Marina or from the Tenderloin.
But of course it is not like this, and all these stories that we came up with are prefect examples of the consequences from these inequalities.
