Bring Back Water St. Chinatown!
Hey, all you ten million undocumented people out there. Are you tired of being treated like unwanted refuse by your local community? Are the bosses trying to keep you illegal to keep your wages down? Is racism rearing its head all around you?
Come to our town. We need you here. We are suffering from a cultural famine here. Its been this way my whole life. Maybe its been this way ever since the persecution of Chinese immigrants in the 1800's that drove Olympia's Chinatown into the sea, so to speak. (Olympia's sizeable Chinese population faced such an extreme unwelcome campaign that they left their home--our home-- and moved to Seattle.)
I want to say now, (100 years too late?) that I for one welcome any immigrant in Olympia. Chinese, Vietnamese, Hmong, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Ethiopian, or anything else. Legal or not.
We're tired of Lacey having all the fun. Olympia's immigrants are lonely. People miss speaking their native language with anyone other than 3rd year foreign language students. Olympia misses what it has not yet had. A vibrant, multi-cultural community.
I can only speak for myself, but I say to American immigrants: Welcome. I will stand for you.
posted by Jade at 10:52 AM
3 Comments:
Actually, there is a huge immigrant community in Evergreen Village Apartments, mostly Southeast Asian. There is also a sizable Mexican American community in the area, with spanish language stores and bars as close as Centralia.
True. Still we've got nothing on our surrounding communities like Lewis, Mason and Pierce Counties. Anyway, the more the merrier as far as I'm concerned.
What you are saying is that diversity is what makes a community truly great. Not just diversity amongst races and ethnic groups, but also of economic groups. The poor and the homeless are often overlooked as being positive elements in a society. All over America some of the most interesting and fullfilling neighborhoods can be found in what can be described as the poorest areas. By eliminating the poor from the city centers, as is going on today, we turn our city centers into plastic suburban malls. Sure there will be plenty of clean looking McDonalds and Quizno's', but no doubt they will be staffed by people that can not afford to live in the very neighborhood they work. Don't get me started, Crenshaw Sepulveda.
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