The American Dream in Pilsen

            Before my investigation I used to think that only immigrants had an American Dream. I learned that even though many people have a similar American Dream, no one wishes for the same one because they all dream about something different for themselves and/or others. My community is Pilsen, the heart of Chicago, and the people living here are mostly Hispanics. The people I interviewed had similar American Dreams but they all have different approaches in order to meet them. Although my ideas of the American Dream ideas were very close to the ones that my neighborhood people had, I learned more about the ideas that other have about the American Dream. From my interviewees’ perspective, living the American Dream most of the time comes from luck. Sometimes even with all the hard work one makes, some won’t truly live their American Dream because they’ll always have something missing. I had never thought of that before but now I know that no one can really have exactly what they want their American Dream to include.  Their American Dreams were all summed up because of the bad events they lived in their past. The American Dream in my community sums up to not having the lack of money. The American Dream consists of having money in order to accomplish living it and without the sufficient money the Dream will not be lived.

            The hardest challenge of this project was the interviewing. Although I interviewed people I already knew it was still hard to make them answer my questions. My father is a very talkative person and when I asked him questions that needed elaborate answers, he just answered them in a sentence or two. I managed to make him talk to me by reading his mind and putting myself in his shoes. In other words, I asked him question after question to make up the details for one question. In the other hand, my neighbor Cristina talked way too much. She wouldn’t go straight to the point that I wanted her to get to. I would ask a simple opinion question but she would go on talking about herself as a teenager and aside from that her voice was a little scratchy and it made it a bit hard to understand her. The person that I actually enjoyed talking to out of the three was my neighborhood’s hairstylist Alexxis. She answered my questions brief but in depth and I understood exactly what she meant but at times had trouble understanding her accent.