Thursday night WTTW aired an hour-long documentary, My Neighborhood: Pilsen, the centerpiece of a multimedia project on a part of Chicago that’s preoccupied with something the documentary barely mentioned.
And with that oblique observation the program abandoned the subject. My Neighborhood: Pilsen is a mosaic, a look at Pilsen that doesn’t linger on anything and neither imposes nor extracts any particular point of view beyond the celebratory. “We’re survivors,” said someone at the start, though of what wasn’t made clear. “We’re all in this struggle together . . .” said someone else. “A community that’s well organized can do pretty amazing things,”
“All I could think of was my daughters,” said Silva.
“But Pilsen has a long history of fighting back.”
WTTW might have produced a more involving, if very different, documentary on Pilsen if it had examined those tools and explored the question “whether any community has the right to claim ownership of an urban neighborhood for very long.” Are Pilsen’s extraordinary leaders now fighting a rear-guard action in hopes of preserving their community in amber?
