This project was very interesting. My group and I choose to do the South Chicago neighborhood because it would be easy since Naiomi works in that area. We all agreed and gave out tasks. Kate was supposed to collect as much information about the neighborhood and about its history as possible. Naiomi was the person that went to the neighborhood, took some local pictures, and did a few local interviews. I created the cook book. After each task was given, I told the membors of the group to have all the information, interviews, and pictures sent to me via email before the friday that came before the project was due. I got everything from kate on time. Naiomi had some difficulty getting things to me on time so I looked up additional pictures of the neighborhood on the internet. She also only gave me a few pictures, so the additional found pictures helped me a lot. I went to the store and bought construction paper and glue. My found items were scisors and the pictures I had found online. Kate also brought some screws in for the found items, which helped represent the steel history of the neighborhood. I also asked each member to send me at least two recipies for the book, these were made up recipies to help describe the neighborhood rather than food recipies. I looked up some added food recipies that I know are popular among the black and hispanic community. Black and hispanic population dominated this neighborhood. I then cut out pictures of the neighboorhoods and put colored constrution paper behind them to make the cook book more colorful, creative, and interesting instead of plain. I typed up the recipies and glued them onto the pages. I copy and pasted the things that the rest of my group sent me and added those to the cook book. The recipies that we wrote for the cook book were things on poverty, friendship, street cleaning, etc. We found that parts of the neighborhood were very dirty and many things were broken down with abandon biuldings. We also learned that there was a great deal of gang violence in the neighborhood which helped create a no violence recipe. The neighborhood was very diverse with black and hispanics, and through interviews, we learned that pretty much everyone knew eachother and most were friends. It was like a big family. This helped create our friendship recipe.
The message of our piece is just that of explaining the South Chicago neighborhood. Also it is to explain our guiding question which was * How are the images and imagination of a community generated? This question was answered mainly through our interviews and research. The images are generated because many people see this neighborhood as dirty, broken, and violent. The people there all respect each other and get along. Just because a place is suffering from poverty, does not mean that it is a bad area. Yes there is gang violence, but not everywhere is perfect. Infact there is no place in the world that is perfect. There will always be crime and violence no matter where one goes. The imigration was because of the history and the steel minors. Also, these people migrated to this neighborhood in chicago more than likely because of the costs and cheep rent. But because others see this place as dangerous, they tend to lean towards the people that live in the neighborhood as violent, which is majority black and hispanic. This is not always the case. Most people are good, from what I believe. Because there are people of that neighborhood gang banging does not mean the whole race and or people living in the neighborhood are bad.
This project related to a paper I did in my writing and rhetoric 2 class. That class is mostly about sub cultures and how people see other people. I believe this project related very much so because of the fact that this neighborhood has its own types of people. Because of where these people live, others outside the neighborhood might judge them because of their living location. This brings me back to the papers I have had to write in my other class. We had to see why ohters see people in different ways. Its because they are different from us, have some sort of different culture and therefore makes others judge them.
The strenghts of this project is definitely the cook book. I think I did a really good job on it and it took me forever anyways. Another thing is that I beleive our group did a good job demonstrating what the neighborhood was all about. I think we answered the guiding question very well and displayed it in our cookbook. I also think that the participation of our group was together and no one had a problem. We described the neighborhood to the best of our ablility.
The weeknesses of the project was the interviews. The questions answered werent given much thought. The answers were very straight forward and boring. I wish we could have had more time to make the interviews better or stress more questions. I also think that we could have made it better by having more interviews.
The object we brought in for the class was blow pop minis. I chose to bring these candies in because our project had recipies on diversity and how different races in the community were friends or considered themselves part of a larger family. As children, if not all, most liked blow pops and most still do. Thats why I chose the blow pops because it represented diversity.
We decided to do the recipe book becasue we all agreed that it would be fun, and that we could add our own recipies along with food recipes.
