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The Difference

by CARMEN AIKEN

Around ten years have passed since I’ve been seventeen. When I go to the free screening of the Chicago independent film Maydays, I am one of the few people at the high school who barely skews the mean age in the auditorium to maybe eighteen. Maybe. I didn’t have a chance to go to the Latino Film Festival in the spring to see it and regretted it. I have been waiting to find a copy or a screening, so when my friend e-mailed me about a community showing, that’s where I spend my Friday evening.

Filmed in Chicago during the NATO/G8 summit, the film is a hybrid documentary-love story, focusing on Alicia, a high schooler at Benito Juarez High School, living in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. She meets Daniel, a lanky boy from the North Shore (portrayed as tony as we all talk about it in the City), at a Model UN conference and their relationship begins. Pilsen, officially named by the City as the Near West Side, was first home to “Bohemians”, or people from the Czech Republic and Poland, but now currently houses one of the biggest Latino populations in the city, predominantly from Mexican origins.

I am not from Pilsen but am almost from the city of Chicago, although not quite. I have lived in the neighborhood since I graduated college on the West Coast, slowly moving from three flats and their combination of terrible landlords, elevated track lullabies, and the continued seeping soot of the Coal Plant.

My neighbors and friends worked on the campaign to close it. Sometimes I pretend I can still see the END COAL graffiti on the smokestack out my window, from Greenpeacers two years ago. Benito Juarez is about five blocks from my apartment now, and many nights I’d cut through the courtyard with brass sculptures of Mexican heroes, often defaced, either seething to warm copper smells on the summer nights I got off work late or avoiding the frigid and dangerous metal on my way to the bar.

And I’m not Mexican-American. I go around the world calling myself a halfie, blithely assenting to whomever has decided to play ethnic-guessing games on our first impressions that yes, I’m Latina, no, my Spanish isn’t that great, but thank you for the compliment on mi accento. The movie, however, and Alicia’s story (who I share a name with, sort of, and if you are pronouncing it with a “Sh”, you are doing it wrong) kept me watching the trailer for weeks as I waited for Chicago’s summer to finally show the hell up.

Maybe I would have been less impressed, less happy with how much the movie met my expectations if I had seen it in a quiet theater with four screens, or at a college screening. But surrounded by high schoolers who are probably background extras, who walk along the alleys and corner stores and fruit ladies every day, the movie gained more of its verite.

When Daniel requests Alicia on Facebook after their day downtown at Model UN, the auditorium cheered. When Alicia’s friends throw shade on Daniel and his suburban lifestyle, we gave the appropriate, “Ohhhhh!” burns, snickering when he drops her off on the North side with a, “Go play Pocahontas and John Smith, right?”

Maydays is a paean to being young and falling in love, how falling in love with someone in a city makes you love that city, too. In the first days of their relationship, Daniel skips class and travels via bike, commuter and elevated train to Alicia’s house. She takes him around the neighborhood. I remembered the moments I have been in love, or trying to be in love in this neighborhood, doing the same things. Walking on sunny afternoons buying vintage clothes only to abandon them on closet, sharing mango con chili, pointing out murals, all the things a date should be that I never get to do anymore, by virtue of the ease of drinking beer after work.

At the end of this adventure, Daniel and Alicia end up in the suburbs, where she pointedly corrects his mother on her Anglo-pronunciation of her name. As a teenager, Alicia’s mother frustratingly has to come pick her up at his suburban house. The scene where her over-extended mother smacks her on the head for Alicia calling her mother an embarrassment brought back to me the fury of adolescence. I remembered how the face sets on car rides full of nothing but fighting or alienation, how furious my family made me, but how they at least knew where I came from. My mother will tell how guera she is, but always pronounces my name correctly, especially when I’m in trouble and it involves the entirety of the conjuring.

Daniel, it seems, works to widen their contact zone. In scenes he is in the city, interested in her friends, her zine she makes with the help of her abuela, a former neighborhood activist, her endless curiosity. She is more of an artist than I ever was in high school, taking photos and using old Mexican films to express her vision of the world.

I barely dated a boy who was white in high school, and I say this because I kept the relationship going through college. He was part of the reason I ended up in Pilsen — he moved here while I lived in California. I spent summers and winters at their house near the Western boundary. When I stayed in that apartment, four tiny rooms and a view of the warehouses, I told my parents I needed to because of the jobs I worked downtown, which was partly true and partly because I wanted to drink and fool around with him, pretending we were adults already.

There were many reasons we didn’t work out, most of which I’ll pin on age (to be kind). The fights we had about privilege and race, and the things he wouldn’t understand, gnawed at me, never left. He moved to Pilsen with our mutual friends at the time (who he gave up, but I still live two blocks from), Mexican-American, who gave me shit for being pigmentally challenged, whose parents speak Spanish with me and berate these boys to do the same, and they live here now.

We would drive down Ashland in the summer with Manu Chao’s “Me Llamen Calle” blasting out the windows, hungover, and I felt something I’d never felt in the suburbs. By this time I was in college, where people tried to be respectful of things like mixed-race, transnational identities, la frontera, apologizing for assuming where my tongue could go.

But the difference I needed him to understand was the difference he felt threw before him, an axe, a border. Partners and friends I have had since them have had the same problem — a white woman lover, now friend, who I took Spanish with (the only Latina in the class), who couldn’t understand why it hurt me that she told me to do better because I should’ve been able to, an abusive older man who left me voicemail slurs over the phone, friends who tell me, Well, since you pass, it doesn’t really hurt you, right?

And mostly these hurts were combined into others, like Alicia. It still amazes me that any of the friends I’ve known and still love since high school survived it. Her confused feelings for Daniel notwithstanding, her pains hit me: parents who fight and a father who is absent but doting on her, her mother who calls her “gordita” and criticizes her eating.

In a scene explaining exactly how fraught young adolescent relationships are, she tries to explain to Daniel on the phone how awful it is when your mother is constantly noting what you eat, and he responds with an awkward story about how he used to sleepwalk, and ended up one night atop his mother’s SUV. In my case, it has always been my father and my tias who are happy to tell me when I’ve lost weight, or how going to the gym is a bien awesome hobby.

During the NATO summits in Chicago last year I worked downtown at a bike store, waiting to start graduate school. The streets were empty and for weeks I’d been hearing talk everywhere — my coworkers telling me leftists were going to molotov out our store windows, my leftist friends encouraging me to attend sign-making parties. Like Alicia I have no shortage of comrades in my life, people who have made real change, whereas I am happy to cheer on the striking teachers at the three schools in a six-block radius of my six-flat. I would ride home on alternate routes, thinking how quiet it was in River North during the G8. Watching this movie, and the footage shot during the protests, I wondered how much I was missing out on.

Daniel and Alicia, and their friends from both the neighborhood and the suburb, attend the protests, and the people interviewed are real: Code Pink, the ISO, the Black Block, the CTU. During this time, she attends a party at Daniel’s house, where his father first asks if she’s from Brazil, and then he and a friend comment on how the changing landscape of Pilsen is ultimately for the better.

Of course no movie can encapsulate the complexities of something like “gentrification”, a word I hesitate to use. All it does is scatter everyone into thoughts like pepper around a bar of soap. I hope one day to watch this movie and try and explain to someone what it was like living here, in Chicago, when I can still buy Hamms at the 4 a.m. bar and carry, and walk by the bar selling ten dollar cocktails. I realize I am an outsider too. I just also realize I’m an outsider with the safe feeling of this neighborhood I can’t explain and don’t want to try to.

But I also want to make sure I can see this movie in the years to come. As the winter arrives, it made me miss Chicago, even though I live here. The days of Chicago, in May, in my neighborhood with paleta carts and block parties and micheladas and bandannas around our necks and bicycles, are beyond compare. Filled with the post-rock soundtrack I have come to love, Maydays makes me think I want to continue my adult-adolescent years I have cultivated in Pilsen.

This year I have started to feel a bitterness towards Chicago (again), and how I am still riding bicycles, and trying to do community work I don’t make enough money for, and writing poetry. I am still losing friends to other cities, or worse fates. Maydays gave me those afternoons and nights back, riding in borrowed cars along the Stevenson, jumping into our dirty, frigid third coast, nights on stoops and back porches with forty ounces of beer.

The movie doesn’t even end with the close of summer, which is a truth. And it does not end how you’d think, which is how everything works at age seventeen. In this city we’re always hoping and pretending that warmth will come again, and what will we do to our streets when it does? How many nights can we spend on them and where are all the places we will go?

Carmen Aiken is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. She is a writer living in Chicago. She tumbls here.

Photographs by the author.

"King of Bongo" - Manu Chao (mp3)

"Bienvenida a Tijuana (live)" - Manu Chao (mp3)