I Have Seen the City and It Is Us - Umberto Tosi
Latinx Chicago poet, author, professor Sánchez It's not easy being an American metropolis, forever hassled, baited and struggling to live up to the sometimes conflicting ideals of opportunity, freedom, enterprise, and cosmopolitanism. Urban dwellers like myself like to dream of their hometown being a center of creative arts, education, science, architecture, and enterprise. On days when the sunlight glistens off the lake and the splendid downtown towers, when festivals and budding trees announce early spring, and when the trains run on time, we glimpse the shining promise of our urban work-in-progress. Just as often we watch it fail miserably. We note its corruption, squalor, and violence on sorrowful, embarrassing display. Then, with little fanfare, we've also watched it rise - with little credit given - stubbornly from all manner of adversity, storm, strife, blunders, chicanery, and disease. In so doing we confound the naysayers who fear and loathe our urban ways as...