Coffee is the honey of every swarming indie bee hive. I perch in a corner comb and watch as beautiful tattooed women zig zag past, into the nest to brew and consume and bring it back into the world. Trails of smoke replace the constant buzz of work to be done. We have found the hip section of phoenix - a tiny cherished enclave sitting within the sixth most populous city in the nation. The Arts District is Portland, concentrated into five arizonan blocks. Screen printing spaces, book stores, vintage boutiques, and record shops. Walls plastered with angry graffiti and/or silhouettes painted by ex-urban outfitters employees in protest of the mass produced. It thrives and is alive in a way that demands a moment of marveling at least, but those who study bees see beyond the random motions and delicious production process. There is routine, patterns in the chaos, common ground among the indie-viduals, similar trends across wide communities. Still, for phoenix this enclave is particular and unique.
Move out a layer and you find corporations reaching glass paned arms towards the sky, Capitol buildings bulbous and lain in brick. Again another layer and your streets begin to widen, your storefronts may seem few and far between. Zoom out further until the names of incorporated cities appear in bolded black Ariel - Tempe, Scottsdale, Glendale, Peoria, Mesa. And smack dab in the middle of these incorporated cities that make up metro-phoenix lies Guadalupe - a one square mile town from mexico, cargo that must have been airlifted and dumped in central arizona due to excess weight. Like day and night, Guadalupe rubs up against the Tempe mall - mass corporate billboards tower over modest colorful houses that have been occupied by the same families for generations. The space is Yaqui and Mexican although the divide is palpable to locals. But to the untrained visitor it all seems to fold into one place. Even within the enlcave there are sub-divisions. Ahhhh the complexities.
My host's car is colorfully chalked on the back - window paint reads "We will not comply! Say no to SB10-70" She explains how the town set up road blocks for the police raids - 80 year old women with canes standing next to the Guadalupe's mayor and judge holding off 100 police cars. She describes the police raid on a sunday; the image of a little girl in confirmation with the military tank in the background. She describes the shift of apathy towards the recent shooting in the neighborhood and the flux of a town that stands so strongly together at some times and turns the other cheek at others. But this is the nature of community, the nature of all enclaves. Just like the Arts District, and Portland, and every other self-selecting "cool" community.
Enclaves - it's what defines the great urban space. They shift and dissolve and are celebrated for their separateness while simultaneously being criticized for their exclusivity. They are spaces that fill you with a constant sense of angst about your role in being there, drawing bold black lines separating insiders from outsiders as if it were the only and ultimate distinction. And the irony of territorialism sits in the front row and throws tomatoes at you during your monologue. At the large scale, it's bullshit. Everyone has the right to movement! they say. And pushing others out is wrong, self-involved, unprecedented, injust. But on the communal level we all sing a different tune. Any group who has been in a space for more than 10 years prints out their own personalized rights to the neighborhood on glossy cardstock. Any changes, whether or not they occur naturally, without the unanimous consent of the rightful community members causes uproar. Outsiders! Gentrification! Attack, Assault, Abuse! Yes yes i know it's always more grey than we can explain, but we see the trend now don't we? How come the most liberal of us don't delve into our own NIMBYism? How can we poke fun at the irony? Or should we just bring our own tomatoes and come prepared to heckle?
My host's car is colorfully chalked on the back - window paint reads "We will not comply! Say no to SB10-70" She explains how the town set up road blocks for the police raids - 80 year old women with canes standing next to the Guadalupe's mayor and judge holding off 100 police cars. She describes the police raid on a sunday; the image of a little girl in confirmation with the military tank in the background. She describes the shift of apathy towards the recent shooting in the neighborhood and the flux of a town that stands so strongly together at some times and turns the other cheek at others. But this is the nature of community, the nature of all enclaves. Just like the Arts District, and Portland, and every other self-selecting "cool" community.
Enclaves - it's what defines the great urban space. They shift and dissolve and are celebrated for their separateness while simultaneously being criticized for their exclusivity. They are spaces that fill you with a constant sense of angst about your role in being there, drawing bold black lines separating insiders from outsiders as if it were the only and ultimate distinction. And the irony of territorialism sits in the front row and throws tomatoes at you during your monologue. At the large scale, it's bullshit. Everyone has the right to movement! they say. And pushing others out is wrong, self-involved, unprecedented, injust. But on the communal level we all sing a different tune. Any group who has been in a space for more than 10 years prints out their own personalized rights to the neighborhood on glossy cardstock. Any changes, whether or not they occur naturally, without the unanimous consent of the rightful community members causes uproar. Outsiders! Gentrification! Attack, Assault, Abuse! Yes yes i know it's always more grey than we can explain, but we see the trend now don't we? How come the most liberal of us don't delve into our own NIMBYism? How can we poke fun at the irony? Or should we just bring our own tomatoes and come prepared to heckle?
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