“What will we grow from this crisis?”
These words were in my head as I was walking in Rogers Park recently, a north side Chicago community, wearing an orange arm band and orange whistle on my way to my neighborhood Rapid Response Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (ICE) School Watch.
These same words jumped out at me a few years ago at the center of the COVID-19 pandemic, from a neighborhood storefront window sign in the dead of winter.
As a Chicago community health scientist, I was, at the time, a lead of a hyperlocal Chicago COVID mitigation response- building the capacity of our neighborhoods in Chicago to address our own needs. In all of the loss and confusion, we tried to stay focused on the regrowth that was inevitable.
But a better question today might be, “What implicit strengths or assets can we draw on from our past resistance to address this one?”
I had been worried that all the hard learned lessons from the pandemic were lost, but I was wrong. The growth and resistance evident in my neighborhood of Rogers Park, is not only everywhere but it is life affirming.
ICE arrived in Chicago on September 8th, as part of what President Trump is calling “Operation Midway Blitz.” In this time, more than 1,000 have been arrested. One person, Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, a 38-year-old father of two was killed. Numerous injuries have been reported such that protestors and journalists have filled a lawsuit to restrain ICE tactics. In response to the lawsuit a federal judge has tried to reign in the violence ICE can wield against neighbors protecting neighbors and an appeals court moved to block some of these protective actions. So Chicagoans continue to be traumatized every day by ICE. The duration of ICE occupation in Chicago is unknown.
Even with this heinous aggression, in recent days, residents have organized themselves into ICE Watch around neighborhood schools at school arrival and dismissal, bolstered community mutual aid work, experimented with how to keep street vendors and small restaurants in business, and established communication systems and protocols to keep ourselves and our neighbors safe.
Every day the resistance grows stronger building on the assets of our community members to protect ourselves.
A remarkable quarter of a million people were estimated to have gathered at the “No Kings’ protest last Saturday.
As a professor of Community Health at University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health, I study, in partnership with community members and community-based organizations, how to foster and sustain healthy communities.
The team assesses community conditions and create community health improvement action plans to foster healthy communities.
Theoretical and empirical evidence suggest that the structural drivers of a healthy and safe community include factors relating to the people, place and equitable opportunity.
Witnessing real time the community resistance and resiliency of my neighborhood, it is possible to concretely understand what strength through diversity looks like.
Rogers Park, on the far northside is one of the most racially and socioeconomically diverse neighborhoods in the country. A quarter (24.5%) of the 54,388 residents are foreign born.
Over 80 languages are spoken in the streets. The per capital median household income is $58,876 with a Childhood Opportunity score of 25 on the health and environment domain out of 85.
Rogers Park is home to artists and activists, organizers and community organizations with deep roots. We are home to participatory budgeting and the former Heartland Café where former President Barack Obama announced his campaign for a seat in the U.S. Senate.
In 2022, when Rogers Park was named one of the nation’s best places to live, the community had a collective surprised chuckle. Residents know how rich the community is, and we actively work towards a community with equitable access to health for all.
As a community-based participatory researcher who does research in partnership with those most impacted by the current ICE aggression, I pay attention to the balance of learned and lived experiences.
People are healthier in places where they feel connected and where they belong. Social capital is a community-level concept defined as the features of social organization, such as civic participation, norms of reciprocity, and trust in others, that facilitate cooperation for mutual benefit.
People with strong social networks and social capital have better health and longevity. Communities with strong social networks have lower rates of mortality rates.
The classic definition of community resilience is the collective ability of a neighborhood to deal with stressors and efficiently move through daily life through cooperation following shocks.
University of Chicago sociologist, Robert Putnum, in his classic 2001 book, Bowling Alone, defined three kinds of social capital: bonding, bridging and linking. Bonding social capital is evidenced by connections among individuals who are emotionally close. Bridging social capital is characterized by connections among loosely connected individuals. Linking social capital connects people across power gradients.
Over the past few weeks, President Donald Trump has sent ICE to rip at the fabric of neighborhoods in Chicago.
Bonding social capital forms as community members who never met each other offer what they can. Someone shows up with whistles, then another with ribbons for the whistles, another with arm bands, then whistle protocol, then translation of whistle protocol. Then another offers access to meditation for those on ICE watch. Then a restaurant owner offers free coffee for ICE watchers. Then a grocery store offers free whistles. Then store fronts add signs to their windows prohibiting ICE from entering.
One’s sense of community, is classically defined by the late Yale University Psychology Professor Seymour Barnard Sarason in 1974, as the perception of similarity to others, an acknowledged interdependence with others, a willingness to maintain this interdependence by giving to or doing for others what one expects from them. It is the feeling that one is part of a larger dependable and stable structure. When’s one’s sense of community is threatened people tend to bolster their identity with that community. The threat to our communities couldn’t be more real right now compounded by the breaking news that our efforts to resist may be being monitored by AI-driven social media surveillance.
As the threat of ICE continues in neighborhoods across Chicago, Portland, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Philadelphia Phoenix, San Diego, Denver, Miami, Atlanta and possibly more, it is critical to note that communities have the collective power to resist and strengthen their neighborhoods together.