A Different Explanation: A Spirit of Adventurous Experiment: Civic Life in the Twin CitiesTale of Two Cities: Civic Health in Miami and Minneapolis-St. PaulJanuary 24, 2011
“Perhaps the most attractive feature of [Minnesota], after its rare natural beauty, is its refreshing attitude toward adventurous experiment. . . One sees this spirit operating in the State’s cooperatives, the largest number in America. . . . With greater economic security has come a new kind of pride, and today every town of any size boasts its park, playgrounds, and scenic drives.” —WPA Federal Writers Project Guide to Minnesota, 193819 Compared with many communities in the nation, the Twin Cities vibrates with civic energy. Drivers bringing leaves from their yards can create traffic jams at the St. Paul compost sites in the fall. At Halloween, neighborhoods are like zany carnivals, with ghosts and goblins hanging from the trees. In election years, yard signs and posters fill the windows. People rally for candidates on street corners, and passing motorists honk their horns. The Twin Cities area has a readily apparent civic culture, a spirit of “adventurous experiment” as the WPA writers guide put it decades ago, not simply scattered civic activities. The culture is in a state of constant flux and remaking. It generates a widespread sense of civic empowerment, or agency, along with the belief that people can work across differences to shape their common future. As noted above, the Twin Cities and surrounding suburbs rank first among the nation’s metropolitan areas in rates of voluntary membership, first in voting, fourth in membership in groups, and among the top in all the major indicators measured by the CPS. Other surveys document the patterns. The 2010 Knight Soul of Community study found that 45% of Twin Cities residents are active in school groups, neighborhood organizations, or community associations. More than 50% talk to neighbors several times a week. Civic activity is closely linked to political activity. Twenty-one percent demonstrated support for a candidate in 2009; 14.2% reported going to meetings where political issues were discussed; 18% indicated they had participated in a boycott of some sort. According to the National Research Center in 2008, 66% of Minneapolis residents say they would contact a community group if concerned about a local issue. More than a third would agree to be on a city advisory group if asked.20 The numbers intimate a widely shared conviction: People feel that civic life in the Twin Cities is a relatively open landscape. The spirit of adventurous experiment translates into a belief that citizens of diverse backgrounds can contribute their civic energies and talents, and help to shape civic life as a work in progress. Head hunters’ quip the Twin Cities is the hardest community to get emerging leaders to move to because of its frigid cold—and the hardest place to get people to leave. The spirit of adventurous experiment dates back at least to statehood in 1858. “Those who grew up in Minnesota during the period immediately after the Civil War saw Minnesota emerge from a frontier state and grow into a modern commonwealth,” wrote Bertha Heilbom of the Minnesota Historical Society in “Second Generation Devoted to Pursuits of Culture” for the special 75th anniversary issue of the St. Paul Pioneer Press commemorating statehood. She profiled, as an example, Charles M. Loring, president of the Minneapolis park board from 1883 to 1890. Loring laid the foundations for the city’s system of parks. “He published articles, gave illustrated lectures, and in various other ways made clear to the people of the state the advantages of parks and civic improvement.” Civic efforts spearheaded by leading citizens built libraries and schools, colleges and universities, orchestras, art galleries, theaters, and symphonies that complemented the growth of business and industry.21 Civic construction projects expanded through the middle years of the 20th Century, creating a large-system civic architecture that became famous across the country, suggesting the relatively strong trust of public institutions in the Twin Cities stems, in part, from the feeling that citizens created them, along with other instruments of common action. This architecture included the sanitary district of the 1930s, the airports commission in 1942, the Metropolitan Planning Commission, created by the efforts of Senator Elmer Andersen in 1957, and later the Metropolitan Regional Council. The Urban Coalition emerged out of racial protests and civil rights campaigns in the 1960s, lasting far longer than in most cities. Public radio and public television set trends for the nation. The Twin Cities was a center of musical and cultural innovation from the 1930s on, decades before Bob Dylan got his start in coffee houses around the University of Minnesota and Garrison Keillor began his famous radio career. The cultural scene in general produced institutions well known across the country like the Guthrie Theater, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Walker Arts Center. A rich array of community-rooted arts and culture programs developed alongside, including Intermedia Arts, Penumbra Theater, Migizi Communications, and others. The spirit of adventurous experiment continues in the 21st Century. When Timothy DenHerder-Thomas visited Macalester College in St. Paul on a college tour in 2005, he felt immediately the contrast with the East Coast city where he had grown up. There, he observed, “People tend to think of themselves as consumers of society. Young people feel they don’t have any agency, any power. Things just happen to them.” He liked Macalester’s academic program and international atmosphere but the sense of engagement in the Twin Cities impressed him the most. “It seemed to me like an active community. People actually treat things as if they can shape them, rather than react.” Tim jumped into the renewable energy movement, linking college activities to the larger community.22 Efforts of prominent civic leaders are best known, but civic life in the Twin Cities has mostly been the fruit of labors of unsung heroes and heroines who raise children, care for the elderly, earn a living, and work to build healthy communities. These labors are dramatized by immigrants to the area from around the world. In the 19th Century, Swedish immigrants wrote thousands of “America letters.” One described “the democracy that obtained in the new country. . . . Caste lines in Sweden were severely restrictive [but] here was a land where everyone was a landlord and servants sat down to table with the masters.” “I am my own master, like the other creatures of God,” wrote another immigrant, after two and a half years in Minnesota. “Neither is my cap worn out from lifting it in the presence of gentlemen. There is no class distinction here between high and low, rich and poor, no make-believe, no ‘title sickness’ or artificial ceremonies.”23 That picture was complicated—racism and prejudices mingled with openness and opportunity. In the 1930s, Minneapolis was known as the anti-semitic capitol of the nation. But meeting grounds for diverse people to get to know each other and work on common projects also existed throughout the Twin Cities. Thus, for instance, the Twins Cities Federation of Settlements (TCFS), a group of 11 settlement houses in the 1920s and 1930s which consciously promoted values of respect and cultural interaction between immigrants and established residents. The Federation had a mission “to develop neighborhood forces, arouse neighborhood consciousness, to improve standards of living, incubate principles of sound morality, promote a spirit of civic righteousness, and to cooperate with other agencies in bettering living, working, and leisure-time conditions.”24 Settlement houses typically had staff living on site “in order to ensure that those employed understood the local community dynamics and undertook all their work from that vantage.” They stressed working with neighborhood residents and new immigrants, rather than “ministering unto” them. According to the federation, this meant that settlements did most of their work through “the influence and power of example.”25 Lori Sturdevant in her biography of Harry Davis, a school-board member who was also the first black elected official in Minnesota, describes how the Phyllis Wheatley settlement house, established in 1924 by Gertrud Brown for African American immigrants coming up from the South, was a vital community meeting ground in North Minneapolis. “It is fair to say that Phyllis Wheatley Settlement House is what brought the African Americans of North Minneapolis together into a functioning community,” Sturdevant writes. “The Wheatley settlement provided [blacks] with self-awareness and pride. It fostered relationships. It taught people to help one another and to raise their families in a difficult and challenging environment.”26 The formative experiences of Richard Green, a leading American educator who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, illustrate. Green remembered Wheatley as a community commons full of public activities and extended relationships that shaped his vision for what public schools should be: a commons for the modern age. Like the commons of old, Green told Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter Kay Miller, Wheatley was “the focal point” of social life and more. It taught values of hard work, self-discipline, accountability, achievement, and giving back. “Even though we were not a community of wealth, it certainly was a community of cooperation and helping the young people grow up in a healthy manner.”27 In recent years, new waves of immigrants from Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America have reshaped Twin Cities’ neighborhoods and the overall civic culture. The story of the Hmong illustrates this pattern. The Hmong were a hill people who had resisted imperial authorities in China for millennia. Many migrated to Laotian and Vietnamese hill country in the early 19th Century. Fearful of communist totalitarianism when war broke out in Indochina in the 1950s, many allied with the United States in what is called the Secret War in Laos. More than 30,000 ended up fighting alongside the Americans and their allies. After the victories of the communists in Vietnam and Laos, Hmong were targeted for re-education or extermination. Tens of thousands were killed. Many more fled their homes. Hmong immigrants to Minnesota were refugees without a land of their own. Kao Kalia Yang’s highly acclaimed family memoir, The Latehomecomer, vividly recounts her family’s story of survival in the jungles of Laos, harrowing passage across the Mekong River, life in settlement camps in Thailand, and then migration to America. “Even in the very beginning, we knew that we were looking for a home,” explained Kalia Yang’s father. “Other people. . . can look to a place in the world where they might belong. We are not like that. I knew that our chance was here . . . to share in a new place and a new home.”28 Minnesota seemed a highly unlikely destination. “Toua [my husband] and I arrived at the international airport in Minneapolis on March 15, 1976,” recounted Mao Heu Thao, an early settler. “I was wearing a pair of sandals, a light shirt, and a skirt. . . . I was so surprised when the extreme cold greeted me at the door.”29 Challenges multiplied over the years. Climate, language, clothes, smells, foods, customs were unfamiliar. Most Hmong came without formal education. A written Hmong language dated only from the 1950s (ethnographers argue that Hmong learned other ways to communicate, like the intricate patterns in their beautiful hand-woven “story cloths,” whose messages imperial powers could not decipher). Hmong family life,based on a strong clan system in which elderly men were recognized heads of the household, underwent dramatic change. Women took new public roles and often became family breadwinners. Children learned English, picked up American behavior patterns, and negotiated the new environment far more easily. Divorce, gang violence, and depression, rarities in Laos, came to beset the community. In these circumstances older Hmong often despaired. “If we heard that someone has been murdered, or if someone has left the family and [is] not returning, we feel sad, but we don’t have the power . . . to help resolve the issue,” explained Xiong, a CIA-trained soldier, clan leader, and business owner.30 Despite such difficulties, the Hmong community over the decades nonetheless came to prosper in the Twin Cities. They drew both on their own traditions of hard work, community self-help, strong commitments to education, and also from a network of support from strong allies that ranged from Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services to the University of Minnesota cooperative extension service. Supporters encouraged families to learn English and to find jobs which allowed them to translate mechanical and farming skills into new settings. “This was a friendlier environment for newcomers [than other parts of the country] based on the fact that we were given the opportunities to work,” explained Gaoly Yang, an immigrant who created a Hmong women’s empowerment project. “I recruited my sister. . . . My husband encouraged many of his relatives to move here. After learning about our lives in St. Paul, they want to settle here. So it is the Hmong people who helped and recruited each other to create their own community here.”31 In contrast, as noted above, the Cuban community in Miami feels “institutionally complete”: residents can engage only with Cuban-American associations. Moreover, as Jan Nijman argues, the shared narrative of Miami is one of economic and population growth fueled by in-migration and economic competition but not loyalty to the community as a whole. Nijman observes, “Newcomers to this city tend to experience Miami’s social climate as cold and have difficulty in forging a social network that extends beyond their own ethnic group. At a different level, this lack of sociability and social control is reflected in the exceedingly large number of gated residential communities in Miami (reminiscent of some Latin American cities with their highly stratified social structure) and thriving security businesses.”32 In 1990, only 11% of Hmong [in St. Paul/Minneapolis] held high school diplomas; by 2006, Hmong American graduation rates in St. Paul reached the same level (83%) as that of white students. Many Hmong became outstanding students, in ways that fulfilled the passionate hopes which their parents voiced in family meetings, vividly described in Yang’s account. New civic and political leaders also came to prominence. Choua Lee was elected to the St. Paul school board in 1991. Mee Moua became the first Hmong member of a state legislature when she won a seat in the state senate in 2002. Official census figures in 2000 showed a growth rate of 135% over the decade of the 1990s, to 41,800, though community leaders and service organizations insist that as many as 70,000 Hmong lived in the Twin Cities by that year. The numbers continued to climb through the 2000s.33 Pekou Hang, a prominent political activist from one of the early arriving families, insists that the story of the Hmong and their allies was of crucial importance to the flourishing of the Hmong. Former CIA and military comrades of the Hmong living in Minnesota, along with political allies like Congressman Bruce Vento and Senator Paul Wellstone, helped the community “craft a public narrative that made an enormous difference,” she explained. “The Hmong people were U.S. allies, fighting for their own freedom, not mercenaries or victims.”34 Further, they were allies betrayed. The CIA had gone back on its promise of expedited citizenship. Lee Vang, a Hmong play writer, wrote Hmong! The CIA’s Secret Army, which first appeared on stage in 1999. That same year, Hmong leaders in St. Paul—many students in area colleges—enlisted family networks and friends, Hmong and non-Hmong alike, across the nation in an organizing campaign to secure passage of the Hmong Veterans Recognition Bill. The bill, passed with the strong advocacy of Vento and Wellstone, granted the status earlier awarded other U.S. allies. By the 2000s, the Twin Cities was known as the “Harlem Renaissance” of Hmong cultural and intellectual life, likened to the black intellectual and cultural center during the 1920s and 1930s. Each July, the Hmong Freedom Celebration brings tens of thousands of new immigrants and their native-born American friends together for three days in Como, a large park in St. Paul. Dozens of soccer teams play round the clock. The smells of Hmong cooking fill the air. Extended families gather for conversation, story-telling, and celebrations. Children play traditional Hmong games with cousins, alternating with American-style games, showing off their twittering skills at the same time. Adults spend much of their time discussing key social and political issues facing the Hmong community, sometimes coming to decisions. The event is dedicated to the concept of “freedom,” at the heart of Hmong culture. It refreshes the idea for native residents on the Fourth of July. They also lend it the positive meanings which it held for earlier generations—not simply freedom from oppression but also freedom to create a common civic life. The story of the success of the Hmong in Minnesota illustrates the continuing vitality of a civic culture of empowerment. Such a culture, in turn, suggests important innovations in the theory and practice of the civic field and civic engagement generally. For decades, scholars have pointed to trends such as technocracy, narrowing understandings of professionalism, and marketplace assumptions that detach schools, nonprofits, businesses, even government agencies from the life of communities. In a recent study for the Kettering Foundation, for instance, Richard Harwood and John Creighton found that even leaders of nonprofits with strong community-serving missions, such as strengthening local schools and helping vulnerable children, feel enormous pressures to turn inward, define success in terms of narrow definitions of service delivery, and avoid genuine partnerships with lay citizens in their work. Derek Barker, terming such dynamics the “colonization of civil society,” has described how intellectuals have assumed these trends to be an irreversible, one-way process. But as Barker points out, there are counter examples of institutions “realigning their identities and routines with the habits and civic norms of communities.”35 The spirit of adventurous experiment in the Twin Cities—a vital, empowering civic culture—is full of such examples, with lessons for civic renewal in communities everywhere. If you like this kind of content, sign up for an NCoC.net account and we'll customize your homepage recommendations based on your interests..
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