Cinco años – and still looking forward to mañana

The Chicago Skyway toll road that takes many people over, and past, the South Chicago neighborhood. Photographs by Gregory Tejeda
 

Come Sunday, this weblog will be a five-year-old entity.

For half a decade, I have felt compelled to give nearly daily commentaries and updates about the status of the growing Latino population whose very presence seems to infuriate a certain segment of our society that takes itself way too seriously.

WHEN I FIRST created this site (with an explanation about how my birthplace of Chicago’s “South Chicago” neighborhood was a place that many thousands of Latinos had passed through for generations on their path to assimilation in this nation), it was with the intent of trying to explain what was going through the minds of this new and growing population.

All too often, it has turned into an angry rage of a voice in expressing the contempt that many Latinos feel toward those who try to demonize our very existence (which is about as simplistic an explanation as I can give for how an apathetic Barack Obama can get nearly three-quarters Latino voter support in the last election cycle).

As though people should realize it is not going to be a meek group that thinks it needs to go through a hazing period before it becomes a full-fledged part of our nation – or should actually listen to that Mitt Romney rhetoric about “self-deportation.”

Although I hope the reality never becomes as drastic as that described by author Raul Ramos y Sanchez in a series of novels that tell the story of tensions between Latinos and Anglos in this country becoming so heated that it turns into a “hot” war.

BUT THIS WEBLOG has had lighter moments in its five years of existence (Sunday will be the actual anniversary, but I’m going to take the advice of more religious types and rest on that particular day).

I’d like to think that I have managed to provide some explanation in the commentaries published here. Making at least a few people aware of what is happening in our society is about as worthwhile a contribution as I, or many other people, can make toward the common good.

Now I’m not about to predict how much longer this weblog will continue to exist. A part of me is astounded that I have managed to keep it going six days per week, 52 weeks per year, for five years.

The South Chicago landmark that made Hollywood!

Although part of that is due to the fact that we’re in the Obama era – in which the political partisans are willing to spew so much venom that there are times when I feel I can’t write enough in response to their verbal trash whenever ethnic issues arise.

PLUS, THERE’S ALSO the fact that I am a perpetual optimist. I’d like to think the day will come when many of our current problems with wither away.

Although I suspect that will come about when we assimilate into this society to the point where we start becoming among the grouchy ideologues who rant and rage about all “those damn foreigners” coming to this country.

Which is to say that some of my ethnic brethren can be as full of caca as anyone else. And for all I know, I’ll be the one calling them on such trash talk – because such talk really does no one any good!

  -30-