Check it out here.

http://sct.temple.edu/blogs/murl/2010/02/07/mayfair-a-neighborhoods-hope-for-its-children/

LaborPHL

I’m officially announcing my project focusing on labor in Philadelphia, LaborPHL. I’ve been working on aggregating news from around the region, as well as researching stats about labor, unions and the workforce, and exactly what the numbers mean for Philadelphia laborers. LaborPHL will cover anything and everything related to the workforce, unions and management/labor relations in Philadelphia.

Check it out each Sunday for Sunday Numbers, which highlights an interesting or unseen side of labor statistics. Follow it on Twitter, too, for up-to-the-minute updates and fun factoids.

The basics

www.laborphl.com

Twitter.com/laborphl

On one of my visits to Michelle, I stopped at the gas station down the block from her house. I had only a dollar on me, but spent 50 cents on a Little Debbie snack.

As I was waiting in line, I noticed some people were buying scratch-off lottery tickets. A young woman at the counter asked for another ticket, and told a man next to her it was her last for the day.

I’ve never been much for the lottery. Winning millions of dollars is appealing, sure, but I’d usually rather buy a candy bar (I have a terrible sweet tooth) and know I will enjoy myself for five minutes than buy a one-in-millions chance that I might walk out a rich man.

That being said, I’ve always been fascinated by the lottery.

I had a friend in high school who was fond of saying that all you need in life is cigarettes and hope.

I’ve been reminded of this saying time and again whenever I stop at a gas station, especially one in an economically impoverished neighborhood. Quite a few people will walk out with a pack of cigarettes, scratching off a lottery ticket, only to toss it into the trash. Cigarettes and hope. Fleeting hope, perhaps, but hope nonetheless.

I don’t know if Michelle buys lottery tickets, but the way she raises her kids seems to suggest she doesn’t. She doesn’t take chances with them. If she doesn’t think someone is a good influence in their lives, she doesn’t mince words telling them so. Discipline is not a foreign concept.

I think the effect is hugely positive. When Pepon brought in the pictures, he asked the kids and their friends what they saw in them. I looked at them too, and was struck by one thing: their confidence. Their poses were not conspicuously intense, as some kids are when they try to be tough to cover insecurity, or shrinking away from the camera. They seemed comfortable in their shoes (or socks in one case) and their place in the world. See a picture below.

During one of my visits to see Michelle, she asked me where I was from. I told her Lancaster, a county about an hour’s drive west of Philadelphia.

Michelle said she had been there when she was younger. I asked her where in Lancaster she went, and she said it was an amusement park, with rides for children, but that she couldn’t remember the name.

There are only two real amusement parks in Lancaster. One is Hershey Park, and I thought she would know the name of that. The other is Dutch Wonderland, a child-friendly park in the middle of the tourist area of Lancaster. I asked if that was the one she had been to, and she recognized the name.

A little background: I have been to Dutch Wonderland several times, mostly as a child. For pre-teens and children, it’s quite a thrill. It’s lack of character and non-existent Lancaster connection make it grow old pretty fast, though (A common snarky observation in Lancaster is that Dutch Wonderland is neither Dutch nor a Wonderland).

Michelle mentioned that she had been to some of the many Amish tourist attractions while in Lancaster. I told her that I had grown up Amish. At first, she didn’t really react to it. But then she opened up and told me I reminded her of Amish people a little bit when we first met.

I think it was the dark dress pants and shoes and black peacoat I wore the first few times (I was usually coming from an internship).

Michelle seemed interested in the Amish, but in a somewhat limited way, like she wasn’t quite sure how to talk about them. I wasn’t surprised, since I’d be surprised if many of my Amish relatives could talk about Michelle or her environment with much lucidity.

Still, she said Lancaster seemed nice.

It struck me afterward that for most people in the world, there isn’t really a language to talk about things happening in places not like their own. I don’t mean language as in an actual language, but a way of talking about things. How do the Amish fit in to Michelle’s worldview, and her neighbors’ worldview? How does a woman who wants her daughter to get into a school with a focus on computers and computer skills talk about a people who believe that technology removes them from God, and should be avoided if one wants to live a good life? Are they holy? Self-sacrificing? Stupid?

Along the same lines, I’ve wondered what Michelle thinks of me as a person. I am well on my way of becoming part of the establishment, more than I have been before, and not really worried about that. Does she think I can understand what her life is like? Does she care?

In a previous post, I mentioned that Michelle is fond of saying “respect for respect.” I thought it was a refreshing take on authority. In my own experience, I’ve always chafed at people who demand respect be bestowed upon them. It’s like insisting someone tell you you’re a lady, in a way. You can make someone pay you lip service, but it doesn’t make you a lady, or respected.

The more I talk to Michelle, though, her mantra makes more sense.

She grew up in Puerto Rico. As a girl, she moved to Philadelphia. It was not the best move for her, it seems. She fell into the wrong crowds, and had trouble adjusting to such a different life. She ended up getting pregnant.

Life as a Puerto Rican native in a rough section of a rough city couldn’t have been easier. Add in that she seems more comfortable speaking in Spanish and that she is a single mother, and you have a life that requires quite a bit of perseverance and confidence in yourself.

Michelle told me she never did well in school. Talking to her, you get the feeling that perhaps she had too many teachers demand respect, and not earn it. She probably knows that you can’t force respect out of someone. She knows that her children will not respect her because she yells and screams and threatens hell and high water if they don’t. That tactic never worked with her.

“Respect for respect” is what makes sense to her. It isn’t hard to believe that a Puerto Rican immigrant with a penchant for trouble in her youth doesn’t always get the respect more squeaky clean people do. And not being respected didn’t get her to shape up, to follow the straight and narrow, as a girl, so she knows it won’t get her far with her own children, facing a world that isn’t ready to celebrate them.

That doesn’t mean Michelle isn’t willing to lay down the law. When her young boy once started a trend of kicking and screaming that he didn’t want to go to school in the morning, she took care of it quickly. She grabbed all his shoes and toys and put them into a trash bag. She set the bag on the front step. Along with him.

“If you’re not going to school, you can’t live here,” Michelle said, she told me.

He quickly changed his mind about school, she said.