STARTING AT HOME
In my neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota, there’s a strong will among neighbors to decide our community’s future for ourselves—what new developments or demolition will come next. Affordable housing, home ownership, problem properties, and crime are big issues here. We’ve campaigned for better schools and to make sure there are safe places for our kids to play, and we’ve worked to clean up the toxic rail yard next door.
This is St. Paul’s East Side, traditionally a working-class area with a strong sense of identity. Europeans settled here at the turn of the twentieth century—Swedes, Irish, Italians, Norwegians, and Poles. Mexicans came during the early 1900s. All these immigrants arrived by rail and squatted along Phalen Creek in Swede Hollow before gradually moving up into the more established communities on the bluff lands of the Mississippi River. Here, virtually all of the businesses on the main street are family-owned and -operated. People know each other. They take care of each other. It feels like a small town.
But there is hardship here. The elimination of thousands of blue-collar jobs has disturbed this community’s sense of security. We are now the second-poorest community of all St. Paul and have the highest crime statistics. The largest Native American community in St. Paul lives here too. People of color now make up the majority of this neighborhood. Many old-timers are moving away, and many new immigrants from Laos and Cambodia, Mexico, and Somalia have moved in. They all had reasons for leaving where they were and choosing to come here. Generally, people only move when they have to, or when they see hope for a better life somewhere else. In the nearest public grade school, some ninety percent of the kids move every year. The kind of transience evidenced in St. Paul, Minnesota, and, indeed, throughout most of the world, is proof positive that global conditions are far from okay.
Can we build an inclusive multicultural community on the East Side of St. Paul that is both financially healthy and socially happy? I think we can. In my view, it depends on sustaining and strengthening the democratic principles and organizations for which Minnesota is famous. Our democratic-farm-labor party, part of the national Democratic Party, has roots deep in the populist era of the farm and labor movements of the early twentieth century. Yet popular participation and commitment to populist economics in St. Paul, like everywhere else, have faded over the years.
Globalization has permeated St. Paul’s East Side, just as it is permeating most communities on Earth. No matter the locale, people are reacting to the loss of control over their futures. In my neighborhood, the business association has not sought to attract corporate chain franchises; we are developing through investments in family-owned businesses. In my neighborhood, the development company is committed to generating wealth for the people who already live here, and it stands by the principle that we can do this better together—all of us, the current residents of the East Side. Recently, this community elected the first Hmong person to any state legislature in the United States, to the Minnesota Senate. And she is a Hmong woman—a refugee from Laos after the Vietnam War—named Mee Moua. Senator Moua’s victory demonstrates that community strength and political power can rise quite literally from the ashes of displacement and social destruction—and a shared vision for the future can be defined across our cultural differences.
Still, if transnational corporate interests are allowed to continue their raid on human resources, natural resources, and financial resources in every country on Earth, the future appears grim.
If, on the other hand, we can develop the capacity to control our immediate neighborhoods, the knowledge and strength to achieve accountability from our municipal and regional governments, the collective wisdom and power to structure a more democratic formation of national government, and the friendships and global solidarity to create an international system of just governance—why, there just may be a future we need not fear for our children.