CHICAGO SUN-TIMES:
"Lab at Puerto Rican center will provide Internet access"
August 20, 2003

http://www.suntimes.com/output/zinescene/cst-fin-ecol20.html

BY SANDRA GUY, SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

The Humboldt Park community is working to bridge the digital divide with a grass-roots infusion of cultural heritage.

The neighborhood's Puerto Rican Cultural Center, a flashpoint of controversy for its social activism and campaigns for Puerto Rican independence, is building a computer lab in its fledgling library.

Volunteers and students are painstakingly digitizing portions of the library's collection so users can access via the Web a catalog of resources, including records of the community's rich history and political activities.

Eventually, people will be able to watch streaming video of the yearly Puerto Rican People's Day parade; listen to speeches by Chicago's and Puerto Rico's Latino leaders, and hook up with a computer lab at the University of Puerto Rico.

The digital archiving and cataloguing may take a year to complete, said Jose Lopez, executive director of the cultural center, which is named after the late Juan Antonio Corretjer, a national poet of Puerto Rico.

Like most grass-roots projects, the library lab is being done primarily by volunteers.

Leading the way is Alejandro Luis Molina, a community activist who has lived in the neighborhood for 35 years and spoken throughout the world on Puerto Rican nationalism and the digital divide.

The library has 10 PCs, but will have 22 when the lab is complete. Molina is refurbishing old computers for use in the lab, which will hook into an existing Internet connection at the cultural center.

"People who don't have access are left behind at a faster and deeper rate than ever," said the 44-year-old Molina, technology director for the cultural center and a tech supervisor at Chicago ad agency Young & Rubicam. "The big picture is about the construction of knowledge."

Knowledge means more than book learning, though Molina wants young people to develop a love of learning. It means they also develop a sense of self-esteem by feeling proud of their roots and their neighborhood.

The library lab builds upon the cultural center's existing resources.

The 30-year-old center, newly relocated to 2739-41 W. Division, houses a child-care center whose computer lab is used in conjunction with a structured curriculum, and a private alternative high school named after Puerto Rican independence leader Don Pedro Albizu Campos. It has both Mac and PC computer labs. Despite the high-tech nature of the cultural center, Molina remains conflicted about technology. He hates to see children engrossed in thumb-exercising video games. He finds it repulsive that high-tech know how helps businesses create and sell stun-guns that authoritarian governments use to torture people they label dissidents.

But Molina has no such reservations about teaching young people to honor themselves and their heritage even as they pass by an increasing number of gated communities where one-bedroom condos start at $199,000. It is a longstanding issue for Chicago's Puerto Rican community, which has been pushed out of Lincoln Park and Wicker Park over the last 40 years.

The cultural center relies heavily on the Puerto Rican community to sustain it. Its Family Learning Center is struggling to stay open after state funding was cut. The center's director and staff, formerly on payroll, now work as volunteers.

Community newcomers' desire for material wealth and the racial and community tensions it creates make Molina angry. It is the same indignation that got him bounced from the University of Illinois at Chicago campus 25 years ago after he led a demonstration for Palestinian rights.

He and other neighborhood leaders make every effort to remind kids that they have something to contribute, despite their battles with racism, police brutality and poorly performing public schools. Molina drinks no alcohol, scolds kids for smoking pot, and is admittedly a demanding and driven perfectionist.

He is also part of the coalition that has transformed four blocks of Division, between Western and California avenues, into Paseo Boricua, a business district made to resemble Old San Juan.

"I hear young people say, 'I'm going to get out of the ghetto,'" he said. "But I believe you have to stay and fight the good fight."

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