Devon Avenue in Chicago is probably the most annoying street in the world to navigate by car. The parallel parking on the street is always full, and often people will double park next to those spots completely blocking an extremely busy thoroughfare. There are trucks everywhere unloading groceries and electronics and blocking alleyways. You can’t even get around sometimes by going the back door way. Pedestrians cross kamikaze-style, not looking at anything around them. Other drivers seem to have no awareness of the rules of the road or, sometimes, even the laws of physics.

  (Photo courtesy of YrVelouria on Flickr)

But Devon Avenue is, in my humble opinion, some of the best America has to offer. The street began as a Jewish enclave. Full of temples, bakeries, Kosher food stores and the like. Gradually all that has moved West as Devon has become Little India and Little Pakistan.

And think about that for a minute: Little India and Little Pakistan, not neighboring countries, but actual neighbors on the same street in the same city. People from these countries with a long history of suspicion and hatred of each other came all this way to America to live side by side. What wonderful insanity we inspire. Maybe they realized they had more in common with each other as new immigrants than they did with other Americans. Maybe the opportunity to have a better job and living wage made it easier to live in general and not be so full of distrust and fear. I have no idea, but I love this street and all it can symbolize.

I love Rogers Park in general. In my corner of the ‘hood almost all the store signs are in Spanish. There are vendors with carts that troll up and down the sidewalks selling aguas frescas and elotes. I am constantly reminded that people come here from everywhere. We are a place of hope and desire, still, in spite of everything. America is where people want to be.Where they think they can make a better home. (Courtesy of  M.GOLO ["f/stop Fitzgerald"]'s Flickr photostream)

It makes me grateful for myself and my daughters. We are far from the perfect country for women, but where else could they have such opportunity as there is here? So many great women are paving the way to a future for them where they can be anything they dream: a soldier, an artist, a doctor, even the President of the United States. I want to see it happen in my lifetime and I have great hope that I will.

I think that kind of hope is what built my neighborhood.

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