Ghetto Speak

certain ghettos and slums (yes there's a difference) have pretty names yet they've been some of the most notorious neighborhoods in our cities: Cabrini green. Highland park in L.A. where i used to live. Inglewood. Echo park. guess they're trying to raise those property values somehow. the most notorious in L.A. tried to shake their reputation by changing their name: from South central L.A, to South L.A (!).

THEN There are those areas that sound inner city but add a "ville" or a "manor" to their name and somehow become these upscale suburbs: "BronxVILLE". "Pelham MANOR." and even "Bronxville MANOR".

like i said i lived in a pretty strong ghetto area with big gang presence. lived in a pretty basic apartment complex but it actually was named: the "Shadow Oaks'" because of a big oak in front where the squirrels ran amok. they tried to be like NYC, where you don't just live in a snobby sounding neighborhood like the "Upper West Side," but you live in a snobby sounding building like the "Dakota", the "Beresford", the "Century".

anyway in a neighborhood like mine with so many gangs and gang graffiti tags, you would often see buildings with names like mine, then underneath the name would be a gang tag. so it was almost this weird subtitle system we had going, because my neighborhood was in America of course, but it had a strong majority of Spanish speakers so much of the neighborhood had bi lingual signage and language, then there was the gang subtitle which probably read something like "Avenues' turf" (one of the big gangs), or "Crip's country'" or whatever.

kind of gives new meaning: when we were in high school we would paint on the walls of the field "Eagle Country" for our teams. now i think that i was tougher than i knew in school as i was really gang tagging haha.