Dream

"Madonna, look at these. They are a bit amateurish, but still pretty interesting, don't you think?"

"I don't see what you like about them. They are horrific."

"We bought this house and remodeled it, and turned the living room into a gallery. Don't you think it's grand?"

The house takes up the entire block. I look out the window and across the street a line of dramatically ruined and poverty-infested shacks stare back me, a few dirty white inhabitants mingling on the front porches.

I leave the group and walk back out onto the street, pass the row of shacks and move deeper into the ghetto. The mood is very quiet and still until I come around a bend in the road and find long rows of Mexican stalls on either side. It's some kind of day market with tarp-covered stalls selling food, clothing, toys, household items, etc., and throngs of people mill up and down the street in long lines.

I become very excited by the prospects of the food, as well as the attractiveness of the ethnic density. Soon, oddly, I realize there are Thai stalls as well, and that somehow Thais and Mexicans have merged into a shared ghetto. I walk beyond the market and into the next neighborhood and down all the streets are small stilted wooden houses inhabited by Thai families, and even a few ramshackle shops with signs and advertisements.

Though I am enthralled with all these manifestations, I am aware that I am still in the US and this is as illusory as a Hollywood set. I am aware I am in a mid-western, recession-oppressed city, and these people are just immigrants, refugees. Then, I am suddenly saddened to consider than so many of these people left their homes during episodes of strife or even terror, and now find themselves entrenched within a new version of strife and utterly culturally dislocated from any familiar moorings, and begin weeping.