Thursday night in the Mission

Walking through San Francisco’s Mission district at night will cause you to readjust your eyes every few moments. It is an exercise in contradiction. Hipster dives stand side by side with SROs. Round a corner from the west-coast yoga day spa and you will find a dollar store and a shop selling wonderful Mexican-style pastries. In one storefront you will find the latest indie clothes and music and from the next emanates the sweet sounds of salvation at a thunderous pentacostal church service.

Gentrification has made the Mission a neighborhood of sharp contrast. A mural depicting Latino folk imagery covers an entire side of an apartment building a stone’s throw from the 18th-century Mission Dolores as rents push low-income residents of color out of the now-trendy area and farther from the BART (light rail) station.

The neighborhood is diverse and vibrant, but not without contradiction and an ever-shifting cultural geography. It is a haven for the young and creative, for artists and activists, but its very popularity is what most endangers the cultural “authenticity” that people come to absorb, if such a thing exists. It is worth entertaining the idea that the presence of burritos with whole avocado, mango, and tofu on local menus is more situated in a Californian culture than in yuppie cooptation of Mexican food. However, the people whose tastes drive this place-rooted culinary style also drive the area's high rents.

It is easy to cynically dismiss the mix of cultures in the Mission as consumption-based or the night life as overly-focused on alcohol. As with any discussion of a 24-hour city, it is difficult to look beyond the more obvious expressions of night-life: young people getting drunk at bars. But I think there is more to it than that- after the sun goes down over the Pacific, it is the noise and commotion of street poets and worshippers, skateboarders and salsa dancers that brings the Mission alive.

E. Mattiuzzi