City Love

I've been reading up on Los Angeles because I'm thinking of applying to UCLA's sociology program for grad school, but being a true Bay Area girl at heart have always looked down on the place as an endless wasteland of mindless consumerism. Now I'm tring to find reasons to like it, aside from the main things attracting me to the place: the strength of the labor movement and the immigrant movement and their intersection (which is what I want to study in grad school.) In any case, I was reading through a popular and very well-written LA blog, when I came to a response that interested me regarding a recent post. Essentially, the reader remarked that the measure of a city is not what you get from it but what you give to it It's perhaps poorly phrased, but it was a novel idea to me and I think perhaps to a lot of people my age who move to big, exciting cities with high expectations about what their going to get from it.

But I think that you can only begin to feel close to a city, love a city, and make it your home, when you give to it. San Francisco is a beautiful place to live, but even after a year, I still felt like an outsider because most of my friends lived in the East Bay (or elsewhere -- shout out to New York, DC, Boston, Providence and Des Moines) and my work was in the Central Valley.

Santiago is not an easy city to love: it's big and dirty and crowded and life is rat race for most. But I love it here and feel very much at home because I teach here and I care about the kids I work with and I love my friends and I feel engaged with the life of the city. It's not Paris or Barcelona, but it doesn't matter.