“I was Aggressive for the Streets, Pretty for the Pictures”

Abstract

It is a late June afternoon and I am standing outside of a caf6 on Fillmore Street in San Francisco. I am holding flyers for Kiara', a young woman I met a few hours earlier. Kiara is 22 years old with a light brown com plexion and long, wavy hair that suggests a multiracial heritage. Her style of dress is 1980s-retro. She wears a purple lace glove with the finger cut off on her right hand, a short-sleeved jacket over a yellow and green Brazil fdtbol jersey, and tight denim jeans that ride low, causing her belly to peek out sometimes between her jeans and her jersey. Two large star-shaped earrings dangle from her ears and a small white flower is tucked into her hair. She was born and raised in the Fillmore, a once-vibrant Black neigh borhood that is now quickly gentrifying after decades of blight and neglect. I have conducted field research here since 2005 and just finished interviewing Kiara inside the caf6. Kiara's grandmother, like many older Black Fillmore residents, migrated from the South. She owned the house in which she raised Kiara after Kiara's mother was killed by her father, who, Kiara tells me, was a big-time drug dealer in the neighborhood before he was sent to prison. Kiara remembers how her father's tough rep utation influenced how others interacted with her in the neighborhood; even though she was a child she garnered a level of respect. She learned early on how to manage her interactions with others differently in differ ent situations: [as a child] I had the street element, and I was aggressive for the streets, pretty for the pictures. Kiara is helping to collect signatures for an antiredevelopment cam paign in Hunter's Point-Bayview, a larger and even more distressed Black neighborhood in San Francisco. Kiara offers to give me a tour of the