The student revolutionary hung her head. Now that MTV had opened a house for The Real World in her favorite Marxist neighborhood, the process of gentrification seemed complete. It was exotic, really, to most of the world, this feeling she felt, but it isn’t giving fair credit to say that she felt it naively. She had thought this to be a fertile recruting ground, under the Blue Line, under the station, whatever was lost, whatever had been spent here in the midst of capitalist splendor: it was still a place where the smell of cheap newsprint and tamales rode the streets in rich and interweaving flavors. These were people to be recruited. But Viacom told her what she already knew, secretly. This neighborhood was already lost. It had been lost from the beginning. It wasn’t old bourgeois, but it was something new and equally contradictory. It called her attention to herself; the economic contradictions in her own history. But she didn’t want to give up. She believed this was really, really, really, really, really, really important. She urgently needed to be part of the solution, not one in the deck of problems.
Time to buy some tamales for a quick break, a burst of energy.
Time to ride the Blue Line one stop further on.