The Immigrant Advantage by Claudia Kolker

Author:Claudia Kolker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

6

How to Be a Good Neighbor:

Barrio Stoops, Sidewalks, and Shops

Little Village

I got to know Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood the old-fashioned way: by stalking. It was early October, delicious walking weather, and the El had just dropped me at the portal of the biggest Latino community in the Midwest. I’d never before been to this area on Chicago’s southwest hip, and was unsure where to head. Some streets, I’d read, were plagued by gangs. Then the turnstile behind me rolled, once, twice, three times.

A plump, middle-aged Latina with margarine-colored hair and a brisk expression marched out, clutching the hand of a boy who looked about ten and another who might have been seventeen. They lacked the spent, ill-tempered look I often wear myself, emerging from the train. All three, in fact, seemed to be in unusually chipper spirits. Both the younger boy in his cargo shorts and the teenager with his buzz cut looked content in their handholding phalanx. So I resolved to follow them home.

I was hoping the little family would lead me toward some answers in an epidemiological mystery. A magnet for Mexican immigrants, and one of the poorest and least educated communities in Chicago, Little Village boasts surprisingly good markers of health and well-being. Of all these, perhaps the most enigmatic is Little Village’s exceptionally low reported rate of asthma. According to an influential 2007 study in the American Journal of Public Health, foreign-born Latinos in South Lawndale, where Little Village is located, reported asthma diagnoses at less than one-third the average in either Chicago’s white or black neighborhoods. Rich or poor.

And Little Village, overwhelmingly, is poor.

Even if it’s controlled with inhalers, allergy shots, emergency room oxygen, and adrenaline, asthma cannot be cured. Something irritates the airways that deliver oxygen to our lungs, and they swell and narrow. Less air passes through. Chest muscles contract, and the airways respond by squeezing still smaller. With a tickle in her chest, or an itch in her throat, an asthmatic child starts to cough. In twenty minutes, the same child can be audibly, visibly suffocating to death. The sound is terrifying: a whistling, desperate wheeze. She may turn blue, lose consciousness.

We know it’s triggered by allergies and by lung irritants such as diesel exhaust or cigarette smoke. It’s aggravated by poor primary care : failure to visit a doctor early on can lead to an emergency room crisis that costs far more money to treat. Studies also strongly implicate psychological stress—a shorthand term for negative emotions that overwhelm our coping abilities.

Stress seems to correlate with asthma in many ways at once. Behaviorally, it’s been linked to higher rates of smoking—a known asthma trigger. Physiologically, it alters the endocrine, immune, and autonomic nervous systems, all of which can inflame breathing passages. So it’s not a big leap that the literature now shows strong links between asthma and low-income neighborhoods. In the United States, most of these areas are urban, with more mold and cockroaches, worse violence, and fewer medical services.

That’s what makes enclaves such as Little Village so striking.

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