Mary Pedro, who has lived in St. Louis for nearly 20 years, has been living in Chicago for the last eight years. He had been working at a medical-tourism company in St. Louis as a security guard. He returned to St. Louis in 2007 to find a job at a small insurance chain. In 2012, a coworker from Chicago suggested he try moving there for a bit and try to find someplace to live.
“I went to work. I stayed four months, but then she says, ‘What are you doing?’ ” Pedro laughs. He moved into a room in a house, and they started buying books for the bookshelf, “because when I move here, I’ll have a book on a shelf and I need to go and look through it,” Pedro says. “That was the first thing.”
“It’s like the Wild West back there.”
In an interview in his shop, Pedro describes the culture of the United States as “the Wild West back there.” It’s tough at first to find work among those who speak different languages, and some of those same issues he sees in other cities have surfaced here — the price of housing, the problem of immigration.
“People say, ‘Oh, what happened there? Nobody wants to live here — it’s only rich white people.’ Well, what happened there, though? I mean, what did happen there? I was born in the same country as them. Nobody came to my country and took away my life,” he says. “If you look back in history where there’s been a revolution, the people that have been displaced — I mean, it’s like the Wild West back there. These white people come and it’s the people that are forced to become laborers that are the biggest losers.”
He says things are also changing in Ferguson, the city where he’s come to work with a friend.
“People don’t know what’s around the corner, and I’m not saying it’s exactly like Ferguson, but I’ve felt it,” he says. “I come down here one time for the night, and when I went into my apartment I saw my kids playing on a playground and I asked, ‘Where’s my son?’ The answer I got was, ‘I don’t know because you’re not with him.’ ”
On a recent Saturday, Pedro’s house is cluttered with junk, an inflatable