What is your Portland Story?

http://concordiapdx.org/2018/09/concordia-murals-still-we-rise-mural-is-history-and-art/

Please share your experiences in the spaces of Portland! Feel free to reflect on the questions below or share your own stories.

  • What is your Portland story?
    • This can include but is not limited to: How long you have lived in Portland? What neighborhood(s) you have lived or continue to live in? How these areas have changed? How have you experienced the connection between spaces and stories in Portland?

  • How does your experience overlap with the stories of displacement of Black folks in Portland represented in the storymap?

14 replies on “What is your Portland Story?”

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I’ve lived in Argay in Northeast Portland for pretty much my whole life. As a kid, I attended a small Catholic private school and parish. The majority of the spaces I was immersed in were largely white. Neighbors, classmates, church parishioners— all were largely unaware of how my family lived out their Vietnamese culture. Still to this day, I feel that culture only slip through the cracks from place to place, either at home or all along 82nd Avenue. These restaurants, markets, and meeting places are bittersweet reminders of my childhood, made even more bittersweet by their disappearance from the public eye as the pandemic continues to impact BIPOC communities. In time, due to my immersion in white-dominated spaces, I felt the same disconnect with my own culture. Though I was born into an immigrant family, where some traditions remain strong at home, my parents’ relationship with the dominant culture of the US had a great impact on the formation of my own identity.

My parents didn’t call Portland home until the 1980s, where they had no other family and very little resources to succeed. They followed the American dream, but were thrown into a system that cares very little for BIPOC communities. The resources they had access to were resources for the most marginalized— my father as a young man worked alongside other minorities and individuals suffering from addiction. I believe my parents feared the marginalized (and still do to this day) to such a degree that integration into the dominant culture was what they believed to be best. Because of this, I grew up with limited knowledge of my own culture and of other BIPOC communities. Despite living in a neighborhood with a sizable BIPOC community, I was clueless. In my neighborhood, there is a strong division based primarily on socioeconomic status; when I was younger, I was taught there was a side of the neighborhood that was okay to walk around, and then there was the other side. I didn’t begin to learn the effects of gentrification on BIPOC communities until there was a drive-by shooting next to our house.

As gentrification in the Portland area continues, those who are impacted by systemic racism and intergenerational trauma will continue to suffer. Unequal distribution of resources for at-risk communities will continue unless empathy for these communities grows and that empathy drives action. Work that uplifts BIPOC communities will only serve to uplift the community as a whole.

I’ve been living in North Portland for going on three years now as a student at the University of Portland. Despite the insular community that the University creates for its students, it was in a few of my classes during my freshman year that I learned about Portland’s history when it comes to racism. In a sociology class we discussed an older example of displacement in Portland, the community of Vanport and the floods that led to scores of people losing their homes. This served as an introduction to a city that I barely knew, but what I’ve seen in Portland isn’t exactly unfamiliar. My siblings have lived in San Fransisco and Oakland, CA and its not hard to spot how the rising property values and lack of sustainable housing have either driven people out or forced them to pay exorbitant prices for substandard housing in all three of these cities.

Almost four years ago, I moved up from Southern California to start college at the University of Portland. Before the school year even began, I got the opportunity to participate in an optional program through the university’s center for service and justice that educated incoming freshmen on the history of the North Portland community. Unlike a large portion of the student body, I was immediately made aware of the “bubble” that exists on campus. The UP community is isolated from the rest of our North Portland neighbors, so students can spend their entire four years at the university without ever learning about or connecting with the people who live right next door.

This bubble is not solely a result of physical separation of the campus from the rest of the neighborhood; the primary cause is the immense disparity of privilege. The predominantly affluent white student body is disproportionate to the community it resides in, and the fact that students can live in the area for years without being made aware of that is a major issue. I’m grateful that I was included in that educational opportunity when I first became a part of the North Portland community. I learned about the socioeconomic displacement, gentrification, and racial inequity ingrained in the neighborhood’s history. It is unfortunate that all UP students are not required to learn the history of the area they live in. It green-lights the ability for them to remain blissfully naive of the many key issues that others in our community do not have the luxury to ignore.

I am a Milwaukie/Portland native. I’ve lived in Milwaukie for most of my life, hung out with my friends in mostly SE and downtown Portland, and moved up to North Portland after starting at UP. Portland has changed a lot since I was a kid. I remember there being more small businesses when I was younger, when businesses in Portland didn’t need a social media presence in order to thrive. I’ve noticed in recent times that minority businesses especially have had to accommodate for white cultural norms in order to stay afloat. I identify as half-Japanese and half white, and grew up eating and meeting friends at family-owned Asian-American restaurants. As time went on, my favorite food items were slowly being replaced with foods popularized by white culture, labelled as “ethnic” or “diverse.” Now, in the context of COVID, some of these businesses have had to close down because of the prejudices against Asian-Americans.

I also remember how in school my teachers were uncomfortable with talking about the effect of gentrification and white privilege in Portland. Instead, we learned about “Benson Bubblers” and “Big Pink.” I never learned about the origins of Emanuel hospital until my dad told me– and if you ask younger Portland natives about what used to be where Emanuel is today, most wouldn’t know unless their parents had told them, too. Whenever I walk by Emamuel, through N Williams and N Vancouver, seeing all the new “trendy” shops, I am constantly reminded of the sadness and suffering that displaced Black folks have experienced because of gentrification in Portland.

Portland needs improvement. Portland needs to better acknowledge the suffering of minority populations in light of the city’s continued push for gentrification. Displacement is still occurring and is still a threat to many BIPOC communities in Portland; as such, it is important to better educate Portlanders and emphasize how gentrification has affected BIPOC communities in the past and how it still affects those communities today.

Thank you for creating this space to tell the story of Portland that most Portlanders don’t want to hear.

Having lived in downtown Portland (in an apartment near PSU campus) for around three years, I was vaguely aware of black displacement that has taken and is still taking place in Portland, yet I feel this map has and will continue to grow my understanding. Over this last summer, as the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM) grew in response to widely disseminated videos of racially motivated police brutality, voices recounting how gentrification and displacement have affected the black community were lifted up and centralized. It was heart breaking to hear a lot of the testimonies I heard this summer, yet I am grateful these stories are now being discussed. Hearing testimonies from the family as well as those protesting the “red house on Mississippi” foreclosure really hit home for me, and connected this idea of story and place. This foreclosure has recently become the posterchild for gentrification in Portland, and many in the community as well as those involved in the BLM protests have rallied around this family in attempts to keep the family in the house they had lived in for so long. Additionally, I have enjoyed reading the Willamette weekly, and I think they have done a great job highlighting and publishing experiences and testimonies from people of color.

Thank you to the creators of this map for creating a space for the voices and stories of those in the community to be shared, compared and uplifted. All of your activism and hard work is greatly appreciated. 🙂

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