Since I was three years old, The Kiva was where my parents would go spice and cheese shopping. Oakway Fitness is where my grandma has always gone to her tri-weekly water aerobics class. The Saturday Market was every middle schooler’s first place of employment. And the UO campus was always the cool-kid lunch spot in high school.
Some classify Eugene as the city of hippies, Hacky Sacks and hemp. While others see this city of about 160,000 as a sanctuary for the rich, righteous and retired. One thing for certain is how unique growing up in Eugene is. There is a handful of us who have spent the majority of our lives in small-town Willamette Valley, and have chosen the path of even going through college here.
As someone who considers himself a Eugene native, Michael Enseki-Frank has always recognized the good that comes from the people and culture of Eugene.
“Everyone I’ve grown up around has been really nice and inclusive and tolerant, which are things I really value, and are all things I did not see much of in other parts of the world that I’ve been to,” Enseki-Frank said. “For example, I went to a very liberal church growing up, the First Congregational, and we had this program called Peace Village where we’d learn from a Rabbi, a Buddhist monk and a Native American figure all at once.”
Outside of church, curriculum in Eugene schools is known to be both eclectic and effective. UO senior Haley Stupasky remembers how different some of her schooling was.
“When most people would be making paper airplanes in school, at Edison Elementary, we were learning how to make sushi,” Stupasky said. “I’ve never heard of any other school doing the kinds of things we did.”
Stupasky moved to Eugene from North Carolina as a young child. She explains how she would never change the fact that she grew up in Eugene, but one aspect of life here she hasn’t been able to ignore is the Caucasian-majority demographic.
“I think about whenever I go back to North Carolina and with being white, I would actually be a minority,” Stupasky said. “I was never given any sort of tools to interact with other people in that sort of way as a kid in Eugene.”
Although there is a lack of ethnic diversity in Eugene, inherited through decades of majority-White populations settling in the area, apparent divisions and sub-communities within the city have existed from South, to North and West Eugene. Going just a few miles in one direction or another can land you in a completely different environment than where you were before.
I’ve described life in Eugene to people who have never visited and some can’t help but think I’m making it all up. On one henna-painted hand, there is positivity and creative culture to be celebrated here, but on a more rugged dirt-under-every-nail hand, Eugene has its maladies. I see so much good, so many peculiarities, yet a lot of issues in this town that all seem to live in harmony together in a way that sometimes feels fictitious. The disparity in diverse ethnicities, the glaring issue of homelessness, the ongoing drug culture and the socioeconomic gap that all exist within Eugene oddly weave into the city’s culture in a way that works.
There is this transparent juxtaposition in Eugene where so many individuals are white on the outside, but are ethnic and world-minded on the inside, where being homeless has turned into its own sort of accepted culture and where the rugged streets of the Whiteaker are now the trendiest spots in town. From my experience, the harmony is seen as an anomaly to outsiders.
However for insiders like Stupasky and Enseki-Frank, the unique way Eugene runs provides them with a place of solace they will always appreciate as the place they grew up in. But because of all the comfort within the city, the two almost-UO graduates also agree that Eugene tends to suck people in, often in a bad way.
“South Eugene, specifically, tends to be a bubble that’s hard to break out of for a lot of people,” Enseki-Frank said. “It can be easy to not want to leave, or be ‘rock-happy.’ That’s what my dad says – where you sit on your little rock and are completely content, too content to not go out and explore. It’s because Eugene is such a nice place and if you go out, the world can be kind of scary.”