The city where you live without hurry and the chickens are domestic animals. The new chapter of the great American crisis is unfolding these days in Portland, a city that feels strange and is delighted to be so. Trump has sent a veritable army to suppress the local faction of the Black Lives Matter movement and the world attends a pitched battle in astonishment, unbecoming of what had become one of the most placid places with the highest quality of life in the States United.
In 1988, the Vigo band Os Resentidos published Galicia Different Site, an outrageous hymn to the Galician cultural exception. It was a denunciation of the frivolous and unpunished pyromania that causes forest fires, true, but also a paid tribute to the women "with metal pupils" and to eternal Galicia, land of spells, morriñas and dolls. A song to the place "where rain is art and God lay down to rest", as Siniestro Total proclaimed in another great song of the time, Miña terra galega.The Galicia of the United States is called Oregon, a land of hills and forests parked, next to the neighboring state of Washington, in the northwest corner of the country, on the shores of a great ocean. And if there's one place in Oregon with a (just) reputation as a different place, it's Portland, a city of 632,000 at the foot of Mount Hood, between the Willamette and Columbia rivers. A city that boasts of its own rarity and has made it an essential part of its identity.
In a dramatic turn of events, the different city is now being the victim of a traumatic political and social experiment with little precedent in Western democracies. Donald Trump has decided to deploy what the neighbors call "an occupation force" there, an unusual number of agents of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS, for its acronym in English), dressed in the same camouflage clothing that the special units used of the army during the war in Afghanistan. The press has started calling them "the little men in green." They have come, in the words of the president, to suppress “an anarchist insurrection”, the one promoted by those who continue to protest in the streets over the murder of citizen George Floyd. According to a complaint on CNN, the lawyer specialized in human rights Benjamin Haas, "DHS agents are arresting protesters and taking them away in vehicles without a badge", in a line of action that responds to a "paramilitary" logic and is legal " very doubtful ”.
Writer Froma Harrop explains in an article on the Real Clear Politics website that the "invasion" of Portland by Donald Trump's "underground army" is nothing more than a gigantic smoke screen, a dress rehearsal of the policy of law in order with which the president expects to be re-elected next November. Harrop believes that Trump seems doomed to defeat due to his disastrous management of the covid-19 health crisis: “Even Barbados, a satellite island that lives off American tourism, asks us for visas and imposes quarantines because it sees us as carriers of infectious disease that we have not been able to contain ”. In this context so negative for his interests, Trump aspires to change the trend by presenting himself as the candidate of "law and order", the only one who can "restore peace." And to restore peace, you first need to declare a war that doesn't exist.
Another commentator, Ryan Cooper, describes what Trump is doing in Portland as applying a "manual fascist tactic." Those who are creating chaos with their expeditious suppression of a generally peaceful protest are the same ones who are running as defenders of order. However, Cooper acknowledges that, except for a handful of downtown streets, "the city remains quite untouched by this induced chaos." People continue to frequent popular markets and slow food restaurants , dipping their feet in the man-made lake on Jamison Street or sitting on the terraces of the craft breweries in the Pearl District.
Portland, the City of Roses, resists Trump without losing its character as an island of serenity and relaxed bohemia, without giving up its credentials of a different place. Cooper also wonders why the president has chosen Portland. Why sow the chaos of "normality" precisely there and not anywhere else. Why apply so much pressure on a city in which the Black Lives Matter movement had articulated in a massive but non-violent way. Why prey on the hipster youth of this far corner of the West Coast when the most radical activism was focusing on places like Minneapolis, Cleveland, New York, Los Angeles or Detroit. Maybe because it is a city with an overwhelming white majority, but so progressive, so “left-wing” that it has enthusiastically embraced an African-American civil movement? Could be. But it doesn't seem like a sufficient reason.
Portland, the City of Roses, resists Trump without losing its character as an island of serenity and relaxed bohemia, without giving up its credentials of a different place
The Valencian journalist and writer Vicent Chilet, who knows Portland well, because he visited it in 2013 and dedicated several chapters of his book Slow West, crònica d'una ruta americana (Editorial Drassana), has a theory. "Trump charges precisely against them because they are dangerous: they show by example that it is possible to live differently." Chilet describes Portland as "the city to which young people who want to retire go, those who have a simple and sustainable vital design and do not pursue material success, but a decent life in a community in which they can feel comfortable."
Seen this way, what makes Portland a different place is that it proposes an alternative to the American dream, to the edgy and hysterical urban experience offered by cities such as Chicago, Boston, New York or Los Angeles, where life is a race frenetic and even leisure is competitive and stressful. In Portland, according to Chilet, you can "live with very little money." That is why local businesses of assumed modesty proliferate, driven by young people with no greater ambition than to do something they like. Ecological gardens, food trucks, craft markets, tiny cafes, second-hand bookstores, slow food restaurants ... In Portlandia, a Dada television comedy that tries to capture the atmosphere of this different city, there are gags like that of a couple who, before buy a roast chicken in a street stall, ask the seller about the life that the poor animal led: if it was raised in freedom and fed with non-industrial feed, if it was cheerful or rather taciturn, if it was sacrificed respecting its dignity and Your rights. Not that they are vegan, but they are concerned about the material and spiritual well-being of the animals they eat.
Chilet considers Portlandia's polite satire to be "pretty accurate." He remembers Portland as a very alternative city, "but in a very genuine way, with true local pride and without the point of affectation and snobbery that perhaps is breathed in places like Brooklyn, San Francisco or even nearby Seattle." The Valencian writer recalls a conversation with a group of young artisans in one of the popular markets in the city center: “None of them had a car, it seemed an unnecessary and irresponsible luxury to them. They hardly considered leaving Portland because they felt they had put down roots there and had everything they needed. In any case, they went on bike tours of the surrounding area, which are magnificent, and some hitchhiking trip to the coast, which is an hour away, at the end of the route that Lewis and Clark followed in the early nineteenth century. great explorers of the Northwest ”.
In the Pearl District, bohemians are not agents of gentrification, but members of a caring community that resists it. It reminds Chilet of "the atmosphere of rebellious neighborhoods with a lot of local flavor, like Sankt Pauli in Hamburg." Portland has, in her opinion, "a curious air of a Nordic European city, but also a Frenchified atmosphere, a culture of coffee and after-dinner, of spontaneous gathering in the open air, which is not very frequent in the United States. " In Portland you live a lot from doors to outside whenever the weather, cold and humid in winter, allows it. It was also one of the first American cities to be equipped with an almost universal bike lane, "often a priority over cars," according to the writer, and one of those with the best ecological record.
The sports journalist in Chilet was surprised by the sincere passion with which the city lives sports: “It has nothing to do with the conventional sense of American entertainment. I didn't get to see the Portland Trail Blazers, who are a team very involved in the community and its social causes, but I did see the local soccer club, the Portland Timbers, face the Seattle Sounders in the Northwest derby. The atmosphere in the stands was like that of the European stadiums, but without the exaggerated hostility to the rival or the climate of violence ”.
Portland is different by vocation, but also as a survival strategy. The city has an industrial past, closely linked to forestry operations. It was also a major river port and, in the 1950s, a city notable for its nightlife, controlled by criminal organizations and heavily focused on prostitution and gambling. It wanted to be the northern branch of Las Vegas and had already entered a clear decline in the early sixties, a period in which Life magazine described it as one of the "most inhospitable and corrupt" cities in the country.
The hippie subculture came to the rescue. Young college students with countercultural ideas began to settle in cheap houses downtown, in neighborhoods, such as the now fascinating Pearl District, where insecurity and drug trafficking had driven the middle class to flight. The new tenants transformed the city until it became proof that another way of living, more relaxed, friendly and supportive, was perfectly possible. In the 1990s, graffiti with the slogan Keep Portland Weird began to proliferate throughout the city, an exhortation to residents to do what they could to keep their city "weird." The slogan had previously been adopted by Austin, the college town that is an island of youth and progressivism in the highly conservative state of Texas.
In just a few years, Portland had taken the bet on weirdness much further than its Austin brethren. The new bohemian hipster replaced the beatniks and hippies, a fertile alternative music scene was consolidated with bands such as Modest Mouse, The Decemberists, She & Him, The Shins or Chromatics performing in venues such as the Crystal Ballroom and its adjoining room, Lola's Room . Portland became a green, welcoming and culturally stimulating city. This new prosperity and this new urban model based on sustainable growth also served for the city to recover areas of tourist interest that had degenerated, such as the Japanese garden, with its spectacular waterfalls, the historic Pittock mansion or even the modest and very charming zoo local, with its "rare" elephants.
Chilet tells us about a Portland in which people “have turned chickens into domestic animals that they walk on a leash and whose excrement they collect”, in which commercial beers cannot compete “with dozens of traditional locally brewed breweries, in line with what is happening in Brooklyn, but also in Germany or Belgium ”, in which people“ are kindly curious about foreigners and seem to have all the time in the world to talk to you ”.
Faced with choosing places that capture the essence of the most eccentric and stimulating Portland, our interlocutor is left with Powell's City of Books, “the world's largest independent and second-hand bookstore,” a temple of print that occupies an entire block of buildings in the Pearl District. And above all, bet on Voodoo Doughtnut, the legendary artisan donut shop whose motto is The magic is in the hole : “It is a local institution. The store is tiny and people are willing to queue for hours to visit it and explore its incredible menu, full of donuts of all kinds. We waited patiently, enjoying an impromptu concert with a fire brigade who had parked their truck on the corner ”.
In the 1990s, graffiti with the slogan Keep Portland Weird began to proliferate throughout the city, an exhortation to residents to do their best to keep their city 'weird'
Urban guides also recommend a visit to old Chinatown, with its Saturday Market (the closest thing to a traditional oriental market that can be found on this shore of the Pacific) and the oyster omelettes and scrambled eggs with tofu offered by the charming Bijou Café. Or the trolley tours through Nob Hill, the neighborhood of vegan recipes, bio-sustainable local cuisine, the ephemeral cuisine of the famous food trucks, seafood and sushi. Next, it's worth shopping around that fascinating bazaar that is always the Pearl District and getting your feet wet in Jamison Square, not far from where the Willamette flows into the Columbia. The surrounding area lends itself to excursions such as a visit to Mount Hood Ski Resort, Astoria Beaches, the Willamette Valley Wine Trail or the spectacular Columbia Gorge.
In recent years, the traditional Keep Portland Weird begins to be replaced by a new motto: Make Portland Weird Again (let's make Portland fly is going to be weird). It is a response to Trump's Make America Great Again, but also the nostalgic recognition that the city is gentrifying and beginning to lose some of its eccentric and alternative bellows. On the website of the neighborhood movement of that name, local glories are remembered today that have disappeared, such as "Elvis's church, the stripper who became a novelist or the guitarist with a hundred piercings" , as much missed as "the cabarets open all night, the hacker dens open all day, clandestine parties in secret places, guerrilla theater, street punk artists or ballet in neighborhood patios ”.
For the purists of the different Portland, for the irreducible Gauls, the disappearance of all those examples of eccentricity and fertile madness proves that "America declared war on the weirdness and the weirdos have lost." If that were true, if the different city were already giving up, Portland would no longer pose a threat and Trump and his little men in green would be making the wrong enemy.
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