Doll tells a tale of demographic shifts

Poor Marisol. She moves to the suburbs, and the old barrio turns on her.

The focus of the controversy in Pilsen, Chicago's best-known Mexican neighborhood, isn't a person but a doll: an $84 addition to the coveted American Girl series, most of which come with their own book-length back story.

The central story line in Marisol's case is her family's move from urban Pilsen to suburban Des Plaines - a move that occurs in part because Pilsen "was no place for me to grow up," Marisol says her mother told her. "It was dangerous, and there was no place for me to play."

The exodus - and the dangerous comment, in particular - has set off a firestorm among some activists, angry at what they perceive as a slight to a diverse inner-city community.

Behind the emotionalism over a neighborhood's wounded pride, however, lies a deeper tale about the changing demographics of the Midwest, urban flight, and what makes a city thrive.

Across the upper Midwest, a growing number of minorities and second-generation immigrants are moving from inner-city neighborhoods to the suburbs. Some, like Marisol's fictional family, go for the same reason generations before them have done so: a bigger house, better schools - a picket-fence slice of the American dream.

But more often, Hispanics in Chicago leave because they must: Job creation is largely in the suburbs these days, and places like Cicero and Elgin often have lower housing costs than the quickly gentrifying Pilsen.

Pilsen, an area known for its artists and murals, with carnicerías and tortillerías on nearly every block, is in no danger of losing its Latino character soon: 89 percent of its population is Hispanic, according to the 2000 census.

But as more and more immigrants of all types move to the suburbs - many of them bypassing the city completely - they raise concerns that neighborhoods left behind could lose their ethnic character and bohemian charm.

"We're very concerned about people not being able to afford the homes here, and that Pilsen is going to lose its sense of identity if people continue to move out," says Juana Guzmán, vice president of the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, located around the corner from Marisol's fictional home. "That's what makes Chicago such a great city - it's the flavor of the neighborhoods, their stories, the people, the art." Her biggest complaint with Marisol's story, Ms. Guzmán adds, is that it was a "lost opportunity" to portray a girl growing up in that urban environment.

But while the local alderman and Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D) are outraged, and a few have called for boycotts of the pricey but popular dolls, Marisol, in many ways, is simply a model of real-life change.

"The Latino demographic story right now is growth everywhere," says Rob Paral, a research fellow at Roosevelt University in Chicago. But in the 1980s and '90s, he says, the shift to the suburbs began, to the point to where a majority of Hispanics now live outside the city. Job growth, particularly in the service sector, attracted many Hispanics, while the rising cost of city living pushed others out.

While some Latinos do, of course, idealize the suburbs like so many other Americans, suburban shift is often "not entirely voluntary," Mr. Paral says. "A portion of Latinos are pushed [out to the suburbs], and that puts a whole different spin on it."

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