A batey is a special gathering place where sacred rites are performed, collective decisions made, celebrations convened, and community action brought to life.

This past winter in Chicago a handful of creative Latino activists in their early twenties were talking about street theater. About visibility. About laying the case of Boricuas (people from Borikén, i.e. Puerto Rico) everywhere at the doorsteps of their neighbors, and the world.

One result was the establishment of a storefront performance venue at 2647 West Division with the express mission of "providing Chicago's Latino youth with an outlet for expression and community action" - the Café Teatro Batey Urbano. To follow were six months of culture on warp speed with no end sighted, as literally hundreds jumped in for weekly spoken word poetry, Hip Hop, and a revolving culture piece, and signed on as members. Dance and music lessons in salsa and bomba, traditional Puerto Rican vegigante mask-making, lectures on Vieques and the future political status of Puerto Rico: it's all "run by Latinos for Latinos." The organizers are conscious of recreating a life-sustaining thread amidst the anticultural, colonized existence of those attending. To the participants, it's just a natural jam. And more than that, to them, it all seems, somehow, just so, so... familiar.

TAKING OVER
To them it should be. This is where Chicago Puerto Ricans rioted in the sixties after brutal murders by racist police. This is where neighbors marched for better housing, where students walked out and won a new public high school, where the Puerto Rican Parade opens the carnival of La Semana Puertorriqueña [Puerto Rican Week] and therefore summer itself, which ends in Fiesta Boricua [The Puerto Rican Festival]. This is where buildings burned by slumlords or street battles left a stark, gaptoothed reminder that Division Street is the heart of where 50,000 Puerto Rican people struggled to live in the city of Chicago - and barely survived.

Now other people want it. As the nineties land grab swept the areas to the east, neighborhoods called Bucktown, Wicker Park, and West Town, once full of Latinos, were gradually seized by affluent whites who outpriced the residents in a well known process in US cities called gentrification. Puerto Ricans were dispersed west, and became concentrated again in their now classic Chicago home of Humboldt Park. Due to the massive capital behind real estate speculation, this upscaling is as easy as it is profitable. But in America of course the lines cut not just by income brackets - but by colour.

"My understanding is that to counter gentrification we must control space, because it's the usurping of space that belongs to others," Michael Rodríguez lays it out. Without that control, he explains, "in the end what you have is a diluted community. Then it's easy for people to be displaced." "Batey is one piece of the puzzle. If we can fortify spaces, it makes it a lot more difficult for gentrification to take place." He points to obvious interdependence: with strong youth centers on Division Street, the businesses will begin to thrive, people will have places to go, community organizations and service agencies can get more done. All will in the end be stronger - and still "run by us, with our vision."

It's also clear to the collective that the Batey is about more than arts for youth. "This space reclaims this neighborhood as a Latino community," David Thibault-Rodríguez says. "That's what's most political about it." But his claim appears abstract in the face of the $300,000 condos going up nearly in sight of the front doors. "Those nice new buildings are not for us," Saul Meléndez adds, and people from the neighborhood know it. "They're trying to get rid of us. They're moving the problem, not solving it."

What is the problem? Nearly everything. Puerto Ricans in Chicago either top or bottom out on nearly all the statistics, depending what you count. Some of the highest American incidences of poverty, AIDS, alcohol and drug addiction, homelessness, teenage pregnancy, single parenting, mental illness, gang involvement, incarceration, domestic abuse, violence, and murder, balance against the lowest percentages marking stability: college matriculation, income, home and business ownership, and representation in government. Professor José López, executive director of Chicago's Puerto Rican Cultural Center, answers why by describing the Puerto Rican Diaspora: unlike all previous waves of immigration to the States - from the Irish, Italians and Jews, to the Polish, Mexicans and Chinese - Puerto Ricans arrived without institutions, or the capital means to construct them. Why this difference? Because Puerto Ricans do not control these institutions on the very island of Puerto Rico.

"Colonization. White supremacy." Michael Rodríguez names his targets. "My belief is that so many things fall from that. The US led Puerto Ricans to come here, but what they encountered was racism... And our community today suffers from the lack of access. Young people have no options. And this becomes a vicious cycle... The colonized person innately has to be angry: drugs, alcoholism, AIDS, homelessness... It all comes from this, when you dehumanize people."

Therefore the Batey. Mike Reyes sums it up: "We're providing Latinos a space, to share, to organize, to heal the wounds of dealing with this situation, this chaos. We're working with all these elements, searching for identity, for history, things we're not taught in school, providing options, and consciousness, not just rhetoric, a space where people can share, and call their own." Saul paints it in stark lines: "We believe in self-determination of the people… We are not funded by anybody. Who sustains the Batey is the community. What people are seeing here is that Puerto Ricans can be self-sufficient." His voice rises as he leans over the table, "If we can do it here, then why the hell can't we do it in Puerto Rico?" And then, after a breath, "We don't want to impose any ideology. We just want people to analyze. We want to be a model." That model was to be tested for the first time in the heat of summer 2002.

DEATH AND REBIRTH
It was just this past July. One single weekend blasted the heart out of a community no one thought could be shocked by violence. In a space about a mile around the Batey, 25 shootings left 5 people dead.

Mike Reyes recognized, "There was no organization to address gang violence and the drug trade in this community from the perspective of young people." It's an unstated fact that gang members and gang affiliates are obviously part of the intended audience of the Batey - and therefore constituents. Simply denouncing them would do no good." In fact, part of the success of Batey Urbano, beyond doubt, is because "it's not a place where young people get judged for decisions they've made," Rodríguez admits. "It's not like the Batey came here. It's been able to immerse itself, and made an impact on the streets. It's not like outsiders run it." All the members agreed by definition the Batey exists to include, not exclude, the very people who on these streets become the victims as well as perpetrators of the blood legacy of that weekend.

"The solution is not prisons. There are root causes to the problem," said David. Across the board collective members echoed Saul: "We want to challenge the community to not blame people, but to come up with solutions." The result was a decision by the entire cooperative which set in motion a fortnight's fury of youth organizing and action, artistry and argument, unseen on Division Street in years.

The result was the first ever Chicago neighborhood march against violence done one hundred percent by and for young people.

LA MARCHA
"People decided, on different levels, that they wanted to figure something out," Michael Rodríguez describes the moment. "This was to be a youth led process. We brought this to the alderman. The layout, the props, the route, every aspect of it was chosen by the youth. Let's say they would have rejected it. It still would have taken place. The idea was simple: as a community the conditions that exist now breed violence."

For days, people sprawled across the Batey floor, writing, drawing, taping, gluing, creating and uncreating, deciding and delegating, and then went home to stay up all night writing verse. But the kids did their homework.

They spread the word, stuffed more youth in the hot storefront making art, flyered all the streets touching Division between the flags, called up all the youth groups, blitzed the newspapers, radio and TV with media alerts - even met with the city councilor and the police. First they told them, not asked them, what they were doing. Then they asked them, not told them, to join them.

COMMUNITY GENERATION
The marchers were all invited back to the Batey for what David has called "community generated analysis." Many left, being kids. The rest packed the storefront ready to talk about what had just happened - and what to do next. Around David sat loud sweaty children just off Division, young men and women full of contradictions, yet busting open with solutions. For the first time in their lives someone honestly asked them not just, "What's wrong?" but "How would you solve the problems in this community?"

They responded by asking why so many of their teachers were not Latino, and were not from their community. They wanted peer educators about gangs, drugs, and sex, and action to stop divisions between Puerto Ricans, Mexicans and African Americans. They added to a growing list of dreams now germinating in the Batey: an afterschool program, serious arts classes, internet access, a tutoring center, a recording studio, a jobs center, and a place to be safe. Within one hour they built a group profile of the new spaces they wanted in their new neighborhood.

"There are so many talented people in this community. There's a lot of aspirations on this block," Michael Rodríguez loves affirming. "The community on Paseo Boricua has such a proud legacy of struggle. Hopefully the future will show there is a continuity to that, and that our destinies aren't held enslaved by this system. The key is a lot of creativity, and a lot of heart, and an intimate, seamless connection to this community."

Jesse Mumm (Community Activist and Writer based in Chicago)
(September 2002)

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