Talking Story 
by Polo

I have an idea. Okay, it’s not a new idea, but you know not many are.

My idea is drawn from the same reasoning folks used when they came up with New Delhi and New York and New Year. They said Old Delhi was cozy but a little cramped. And the old York, smack in the center of stinky old U.K., was staid and a bit stuck, so they conceptualized an energetic New York — a place with a harbor open to a new world of ideas. And on the same upbeat note, every December 31 an old year’s done and a new one promises a lot more fun.

So okay, here’s an idea we could call "New Portland." Pero relax. Breathe easy. This is not an idea about renaming anything. It’s not about an avenue running downtown to Chinatown. No northside businesses or eastside activists need to organize around or against it.

It’s more of a belief about us than an argument about a person, place, or thing.

It’s a belief about our American ability to reinvent ourselves — that incessant creativity the rest of our marvellous blue marble looks up to.

But first, a word (actually three) about some old burdens sucking the vitality right out of our financial and emotional reserves. Bad national mortgages we need to move from.

Right up until last fiscal year, America owned unprecedented wealth. Right up until that last accounting quarter, we were able to squander incalculable sums of money, love, and time, dealing with some ugly history. Or not dealing with it. The awful chapters are easy to cite. Ask any New Delhi college kid or any old York blue-collar stiff; ask any elder auntie in New Mexico or the old one just next door.

America is chocked by three enduring burdens: ethnocide got us this continent; slavery lit our economy; racialized immigration policies have kept us in a constant state of insecurity. The accumulated violence and suppressed guilt of our mainstream, taken together with the intergenerational evisceration of our subordinated ethnic minority streams, make for one badly disabled nation.

Portland, Oregon — from the tidy Pearl out to chaotic 82nd — is no exception.

But we are not bound to the patterns and practices of this legacy. Not a lot of us swear by it. On the contrary, Portlanders plan and build our future on principles of sustainability and equity. Everyone recalls city council trading that cool sky trolley humming between très chic South Waterfront and the tip-top of pill hill, for affordable housing. For nice homes for our poor folks. And who hasn’t seen our mayor getting as focused on schools failing brown boys as he’s been on sooty skies, green roofs, and sweaty bikeways.

A sustainable brick and mortar city must in the same moment be an equitable human community. Of course it’s possible for civil engineers to construct, and for big blue cops to patrol, leafy and hip urban environments for one kind of Portlander — excluding and expelling other kinds of us. Of course it’s possible. But just as obviously that’s been tried and failed. That history has not worked. The costs of that old story to our dominant culture and to our subordinated ones are simply not sustainable. Our money, love, and time are gone.

We really can pattern and practice a new place. A New Portland.

Our city is alive with newcomers. They’re from New Orleans; they’re from our Old World. Some are Mother India’s software engineers, some are Mother Mexico’s drywall hangers. Many new Portlanders fled the old Soviet Union, and many left the frantic East Bay for creative spaces on N. Mississippi.

Whatever pushed families from their homes, and whatever pulled them into our city, two propositions about new Portlanders are certain.

One: New families come full of optimism; newcomers are shamelessly ambitious and tirelessly entrepreneurial.

And two: A New Portland cannot afford to fall into the old toxic policies of subordination. We cannot squander one more moment of energetic humanity. That stuff can’t make it into our city’s new budget.

An expression of New Portland is City Hall’s neighborhood coalition offices cutting deep into their permanent budgets to make room for immigrant and ethnic minority Portland’s organizations. Establishing equity among old and new participants in local democracy. New Portland is CIO and Urban League, NAYA and Latino Network and IRCO, each contributing each community’s considerable social and cultural capital to our city’s common treasury. Securing a much broader-shouldered and more open-hearted kitchen table when city council takes a break to catch a bite.

New Portland will require comprehensive principles and practices integrating newcomers into the life of our city.

Portland police officers not talking to federal immigration cops is a good start but it’s not enough. Our cops handing newcomers over to Multnomah County officers chatty with the feds, is in effect a return to the inefficiencies and inequities of Old Portland. It’s outsourcing an ugly old habit.

A Ukrainian ethnomusicologist selling Parkrose real estate, a Togo electrical engineer sitting at home, are both failures for us to integrate. Imagine their minds at work for Portland. Efficiencies maximized. Bitterness mitigated. Everyone breathing easier.

Between slurps and sighs, most adults at our Saturday morning noodleshop table speak their regional or tribal lingua, and their national language, and their former-colonial language. And English. Imagine how many more families would feel like Portlanders if firefighters and pool lifeguards, if Water Bureau workers and information line staffers, could say the same.

Imagine a grandma panicked by flames, panicked further by her suddenly evaporated English, hearing my accent and knowing we understand each other. That’s public service to the max. That’s a Portlander’s home saved. That’s an American believer redeemed.

Here’s an idea; okay it’s not exactly a new one, tentu it’s as old as history, pero dig this: City Hall employs thousands and serves millions and spends billions. Those jobs and contracting opportunities, those facilities and services, can make us a New Portland, an equitable and sustainable place where mainstreamers and ethnic streamers, where newcomers and old neighbors, homeless and document-less, can create what New Delhi and New York and New Year re-create. Free of old ugliness. Full of new energy.

You know, the way we are.