How Green Was My Barrio
Cheryl Sabas
January 1, 2000
San Francisco's Mission District was a troubled neighborhood in the late eighties. Back then, when gentrification was a cloud on the horizon the size of a man's hand, a rented room on the nastiest corner cost only 65 dollars a week.
The Mission's economy was strong, in its way. You could invest your two bucks in an authentic Mexican burrito, or in a conversation with a completely naked girl. For more moderate traders, a dime would buy a day-old pan dulce, a single cigarette, or a grateful "Dios le bendiga!" from the homeless people sheltering in the BART station. Of course, if you had real money, say ten dollars, you could buy crack. Or a woman who needed crack. Whatever humanity had to offer in trade—art, sex, food, respect—you could buy it in the Mission. In that way Mission Street was just like Market Street, except cheaper and therefore less respectable.
I liked the Mission. My home church was located there, so I was in the neighborhood often. Our church professed a "heart for the Mission." Our congregation had sustained its light and salty presence on the same corner for four generations. Although most of us commuted in from a prudent distance for worship, the church building itself remained—a constant and visible testimony, we were certain, of God's abiding love for the Mission, and of our love, too.
I don't know whether the overtness of Mission Street sin refreshed me after my Market Street work week, or whether its abundant eccentrics just made me feel at home. But I always lingered in the Mission beyond the prudent hour of worship, enjoying myself.
Specifically: I loved that once while I was belting out gospel tunes at the bus stop (a good strategy for repelling drug salesmen), a drunk straight from Central Casting's ...
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