Boxed in by this phrase: "west side"

By Elaine Jarvik
Deseret Morning News
Published: Saturday, March 4, 2006 10:05 p.m. MST
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Professor Ed Buendia's West Side Story is this: In Salt Lake City, we use the words "west side" as a shorthand to box in whole populations of people, reducing them to something impoverished and "lesser-than."

"It is a deficit discourse instead of a conversation about assets," Buendia told University of Utah social work students. His talk this past week was part of a program called "Class and Consciousness: Knowing the Worth of the Person," this year's theme of the annual Diversity Conference sponsored by the U.'s College of Social Work.

In the Salt Lake Valley, the term "west-side populations" has the connotation of "a species," an objectifying that assumes everyone who lives there is the same, and that they all need help, says Buendia, who has researched how teachers there view their students' families.

"I'm not saying they are 'bad' teachers, rather that teachers become carriers of this discourse," said Buendia, associate professor of education, culture and society at the U.

The conversation about "the poor" in America — in literature and in scientific research — began in earnest at the end of the 19th century, he says, and included books like Stephen Crane's "Maggie: A Girl of the Streets."

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The poor depicted in these books and, later, in research conducted at the University of Chicago and elsewhere, were reduced to pathologies, poor moral choices and "the self-perpetuating cycle of downward mobility," he says. Their urban spaces were defined as "blighted," their families "dysfunctional."

It's a description that continues today, he says, although today what used to be explicit — statements like "the poor are morally weak," for example — has now become "codified and hidden." Today, in Salt Lake City, instead of saying "zones of blight," he says, we simply say "west side." The words, he says, often assume the listener has a shared belief that the area is characterized by crime and a home environment in which parents don't read to their children.

The I-15 freeway contributed to the division; media continues it with stories like the one, in a local newspaper, about the Guadalupe School. The children there, the story reported, live in an area of drive-by shootings, with parents who don't pay enough attention to them. The school, according to the story, is "a refuge."

He urged his audience of future social workers to ask "how do people defined as west side, or for that matter east side, live their lives in ways that exceed these discourses?"

The boundaries of Salt Lake's west side are shifting, he added. "It's now 7th East."

E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com

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