Close to the Edge by Sujatha Fernandes Page A

city administrations cut back spending on public services and infrastructure.
    â€œThe Chicago authorities just allowed the communities to decay and die,” said Mike. “There are no good grocery stores. There are liquor stores everywhere.” He motioned around us. “Just after white people started to run like hell from the black folks, that opened up housing and Mexican people moved in to this area, too. It's unique to Chicago as well, since Chicago is extraordinarily segregated, and this is one of the few areas where you have Mexican and African American communities living together with the small remnant Irish American community.”
    Chicago was segregated. The North Side of Chicago and the suburbs were very white. The South Side and West Side were mostly black and Latino. Each ethnic group had its own separate enclave. The melting pot didn't seem to extend much beyond cross-sampling of cuisines or music—blues at the Checkerboard Lounge on the South Side, kalamata olives in Greektown, Dim Sum in Chinatown, or a dosa in the South Asian neighborhood of Devon. Public spaces were also divided by race. When I went to the University of Chicago to enroll in my classes for the fall, I noticed that many of the students, professors, and visitors to the university were white. The staff serving food in the cafeterias and unloading boxes, the janitors, and security guards were almost all black. While I was at the university, a black graduate student friend was mistaken for a member of the cleaning staff in the student housing where she lived. A city could be multiracial and racially divided at the same time. But could music overcome these kinds of entrenched barriers and help people to see beyond the bubbles in which they lived?
    I gazed out the window of the van. Most of the store signs along Kedzie were in Spanish: Envios de Dinero, Fotos: Bodas y Quinceaneras, Tamales. There were auto parts stores, Mexican restaurants with cartoons of cacti and men in sombreros, a dollar store with its sign half ripped off, and the ubiquitous liquor stores. A kid with a do-rag on his head cruised along the sidewalk on his bike. One sign read in bold red lettering: “Sell your property in 30 days!!” A thrift store was boarded up with a “For Sale” sign posted outside.
    We pulled into Sixty-second Place and Mike parked the car outside his parents' modest brick house. His mom lay asleep on the couch, a movie blaring on the television screen. We tiptoed past her. “She works night shifts as a nurse, so most days this is how she falls asleep.”
    We chatted over cans of Coke in the kitchen. Mike had grown up on the South Side. He came of age in the mid-1980s at the height of the crack epidemic.
    â€œThere wasn't a tremendous amount of jobs to be had when I was growing up,” Mike explained. “We all had our share of shit jobs at factories, and mowing people's lawns, and low-paid service work. But we also had our own alternative economies, like stealing and selling things at Maxwell Street.” 6
    Along with other kids in the neighborhood, Mike became involved with the b-boy craze of the ’80s. “It was just something we did out on the street,” said Mike. “If you were sitting on the curb, and somebody came along and you didn't have a tape or a box and they did, they'd stop, you'd run in to get your cardboard, and then soon people would gather. We never established a proper crew. It was much more fluid than that, and I think that's how most blocks were. It was like baseball—pick-up. You'd just be sitting on the curb, and people would come by and you'd start playing, same as b-boying.”
    â€œRun-DMC was huge back then in the early eighties,” Mike reminisced. “We had a cheap-ass turntable and this really cheap tape recorder, and I would put the microphone by the speaker on the turntable and record the shit off the vinyl to the tape, just so we would have a tape