Uncertain fate of mural mirrors the history of local Latino community
June 2003
Jessica Rodríguez
Originally published in Lerner News
The mural can be seen from the No. 72 bus as it heads east on North Avenue: a blue and red rectangle quartered by a white cross and dotted with Puerto Rican heroes and icons. It is an image of Puerto Rico's first flag.
Weathered from time and the elements, the most noticeable aspect of the painting is not the colors that have faded to watery pastel shades or the cracks that run their way up the building like veins.
The most striking element of Chicago's oldest Puerto Rican mural, which has been on the border of West Town and Humboldt Park for 32 years, is the white cinderblocks piled in front of it, slowly creeping their way up the wall. They are being laid in preparation for a new condo that will cover the space and wipe the icon of history from memory.
The mural is appropriately titled "La Crucifixion de Don Pedro Albizu Campos," and depicts Puerto Rico's best known leader, and two former political prisoners, ensconced on wooden crosses, presumably for their fight to liberate the Caribbean nation from U.S. control.
What is happening to the mural serves as a symbol for Chicago's Puerto Rican community, which has suffered through years of displacement in the name of progress. The community members have been moved from neighborhood to neighborhood, pushed out as middle class residents move into what were once their homes.
But just as the cinderblocks have been stopped in their tracks, the community is fighting to stop gentrification and hold onto the space and place they call "un pedacito de Patria [a little piece of home]."
TRAIL OF TEARS
The issue of gentrification forms a long trail of tears for Puerto Ricans who migrated to Chicago in the 1950s. Although Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, they still faced racial prejudice and hardships due to language barriers.
Work was found in steel mills and factories and people took up residence near their jobs on the Near West Side. But the incoming University of Illinois-Chicago campus transported them north to Lincoln Park.
"I have the only documentation [that people of color lived] in Lincoln Park," said Carlos Flores, 54, a stocky caramel-colored photographer who migrated to Chicago from Guayamo, Puerto Rico, at 10. "My father came because things were pretty hard on the island," Flores said. His neighborhood was once filled with families like his: ethnic minorities searching for better opportunities.
Lincoln Park, today Chicago's most expensive neighborhood, was in fact an ethnically diverse working class community until the Chicago 21 Plan was created by business leaders after the 1968 riots. "That was the major plan to redevelop the whole city," Flores said. "One of the first places they started [redeveloping] was Lincoln Park." When DePaul University and McCormick Seminary were built, an influx of white professionals and students displaced residents.
This moved people farther west to Wicker Park, another space where Puerto Ricans attempted to sink roots. The redevelopment of the area into an artists' haven in the late 1970s once again displaced the community.
"I live in a gentrified neighborhood, but I was here first," Flores said of the Wicker Park home he has owned for 20 years. His resentment is palpable when he begins talking about how the faces around him have changed. Flores said he doesn't fit the "profile" of his current neighbors. "They're young, white...prosperous looking. The Bobs, the Robs, the Joans," he said. "As I've been outside watering my garden I've had people ask if I'm the gardener."
Unlike Flores, many Puerto Ricans did not, or could not, stay. After being pushed out of Wicker Park, the community was again forced to move west, this time to Humboldt Park, an area that was plagued by gang violence and drugs throughout most of the 1970s and 1980s.
GENTRA WHO?
Gentrification is defined as the restoration and redevelopment of urban property by middle class or affluent people, often resulting in the displacement of lower-income people.
"There are certain patterns of [gentrification,]" said Michael Burton, a resource development manager with the Bickerdike Corp., an organization that redevelops Northwest Side neighborhoods for low and moderate income families. "Often it becomes trendy housing. Groups like artists...are attracted by affordability and the proximity to transit and easy access to downtown where there are good jobs."
Tell-tale signs of this process include a stream of new businesses that cater to new residents, which in turn popularizes the neighborhood. Real estate developers and land speculators soon follow. "There's a lot of money to be made," Burton said. "Speculators are already buying vacant lots. Stuff that was a few thousand is now [going for much more.]"
These tactics allow developers to buy and rehabilitate properties cheaply while selling or renting them at and above market rate prices. New developments bring up property values and taxes for historically low income communities.
This is how longtime residents are bought or priced out of their homes and neighborhoods.
Subtle and not so subtle signs began to appear throughout the 1990s: The Pedro Albizu Campos Puerto Rican Cultural Museum was moved out of its space on North California Avenue because it could not afford the $1 million price tag. There is now only a statue of Campos in the front yard of the former church-turned-apartment-complex.
Real estate developers have already marked Humboldt Park by christening areas with new names like East Humboldt Park and West Bucktown.
Humboldt Park is ripe for the picking because of its location. Just 20 minutes from the loop, the area houses the second-largest park in the city and has historical housing stock.
Burton said gentrification's social consequences are often the hardest felt. "Gentrification makes gated communities in the city," he said. "[In the suburbs,] people have no interaction with their neighbors. That is not the model that cities have built upon. The social fabrics of these neighborhoods are that they are close-knit and have these social networks."
Urban pioneers, young white couples in their 20s or DINK's (double income, no kids) -- opt to live among the community instead of in it.
"They come in here, they don't interact with us and they bring this sense of entitlement with them," said Sol A. Flores, 29, who was raised in Lincoln and Humboldt Park. "It's that adventurous spirit that lets them do that. The challenge with that is they never integrate themselves into the community. They don't work here or eat here. Their intentions are good [but] they're just going about it the wrong way."
Sol, like her uncle Carlos, is fiercely proud and protective of her community. After making the "conscious decision" to leave her neighborhood for college, she found herself seeking it out when she returned after a year in New York.
When Sol, an energetic speaker who talks with her hands, returned to attend the University of Chicago, she said she could see and feel the difference when she moved back to her old stomping grounds in Lincoln Park. "I very much felt like it wasn't diverse enough anymore," Sol said. While living with her grandparents there, she said she grew tired of white couples assuming her grandfather was a gardener at the building he owned. The experiences and feeling like an "other" motivated her move.
Sol made the conscious decision to return to Humboldt Park as an adult. "I learned that home is really where your heart is," Sol said. "I want to live amongst people that are like me, that have the same values. That's why I live here."
Her involvement with the neighborhood has even prompted a career change. Sol, who was once a consultant for Price Waterhouse Cooper, is now the executive director of La Casa Norte, a non-profit crisis center in Humboldt Park that aids people who are homeless or near homelessness. This all stemmed from volunteer work she did with San Lucas, her neighborhood church.
Through community efforts and struggle, the Puerto Rican community has reached its final destination, a space they have embraced and are not willing to let gentrification take.
THE ART OF WAR
Two 59-foot steel Puerto Rican flags are firmly planted in the cement sidewalks at Western and California Avenues. The flag's red and blue beams stream into the ground as if permanently waved by tropical breezes. Since 1995, they have run the length of Division Street and are the gateway into and out of Paseo Boricua, Humboldt Park's business district. El Paseo is to Puerto Ricans what Pilsen and Little Village are to Mexicans, Greek Town is to Greeks and Bronzeville is to African-Americans. The spiraling lamp posts and stone benches that line the streets were purposefully placed to recreate old San Juan, Puerto Rico's capital.
El Paseo is being developed with deliberate precision and care. The plan is to develop the current businesses on the strip while attracting new vendors from the region as well as from Puerto Rico. No one knows that better than Enrique Salgado Jr.
Salgado, swathed in sweats and tennis shoes, looks more like a kid ready to play basketball instead of ready to answer questions about the non-profit agency he runs. The 25-year-old is the executive director of the Division Avenue Business Development Association, a non-profit agency dedicated to the social and economic development of Humboldt Park. Their recent mission has been to make El Paseo the economic anchor of Humboldt Park.
Salgado, who was born and raised in Bucktown and Humboldt Park, said he knew gentrification had hit his community in 1995 before he fully understood its meaning. "My family was the one Latino family left on the block," Salgado said. "We went from being the oldest family there to the outsiders."
Salgado is proud that since the two flags were erected, 48 new businesses have opened their doors on El Paseo. "We've gone from a 70 percent vacancy rate to a 92 percent occupancy rate," Salgado said. He also said that 88 percent of the businesses in Humboldt Park are owned by Puerto Ricans.
This falls in line with his organization's vision of developing the community for the people who have lived there for decades rather than allowing outside developers to build for a community they hope to attract.
"We want to stay here and relish in the good times," Salgado said. "We want to take the benefit of what we've done over the past 20 years."
Salgado is motivated, like most others, by a sense of obligation and responsibility. "I do this not because it's a job but because it's my duty," Salgado said. "I was born and raised here. I hold myself accountable to the 30 years of struggle to get to this point."
The Division Street Business Development Association is not alone in its battle. Members are working with the Humboldt Park Empowerment Partnership, a collective of 120 neighborhood organizations to take an economic stake in their neighborhood.
Strategies being utilized by community business groups are their government representatives. The community's arsenal includes city, state and federal politicians like U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez, who bring their causes and concerns to the political arena. Gutierrez knows the issues because he is a product of the community, having lived and worked there and first representing the area on the Chicago City Council before moving to Congress.
"Property tax was increasing tremendously, making elderly and long-time residents unable to stay in this neighborhood," said Eluid Medina, executive director of the Near Northwest Neighborhood Network, a member of the empowerment partnership. "With [local politicians] we were able to look at freezing taxes for those who lived here 19 years or more." The freeze has kept property taxes stable for long-time residents whose new neighbors live in tax-inflating condominiums and co-ops.
Medina's organization also has developed a five-year strategic plan to further develop the neighborhood that has so far won the neighborhood two tax increment financing options for business and conservation.
HPEP applied for empowerment zone status a year ago but was denied since only states or counties can exercise the option. The group charged ahead with its plans anyway. "We are actually doing better than some areas that have been declared an empowerment zone and without the federal dollars," Salgado said.
Medina is optimistic that HPEP's work is not being done in vain. "The people that can stop gentrification are the people that live here," Medina said.
SCATTERED HISTORY
"The [flags] are like the stake in the vampire's heart," said Alejandro Molina, technology director for the Puerto Rican Cultural Center Juan Antonio Corretjer.
Molina, a Mexican man with a linebacker's build and a Buddha-like calm, is a lifelong resident of Humboldt Park. He became a math tutor at the center when he was 16 and has been involved ever since.
The cultural center is a neighborhood institution started in 1973 as a non-profit community organization to meet the social and cultural needs of Puerto Ricans in Chicago. The center has followed the community through its many phases and homes, relocating three times in its 30-year history. The center runs a library, family learning center, high school and health center.
Molina said the PRCC moved to Division from North Claremont Street in Wicker Park because the community it served lived in Humboldt Park.
This was clear to him last year when residents in Wicker Park started a petition to force the PRCC to paint over murals, mostly of historical Puerto Rican figures, on the building. "The petition said [the murals] were an eyesore," Molina said with exasperation.
Although residents campaigned for six months and collected several thousand signatures, Molina said the First Ward alderman told them "there was nothing they could do." Molina explains that sense of entitlement and arrogance contributes to the changing social dynamic that is gentrification.
There are eight different murals throughout various streets in Wicker Park-all are cultural orphans that speak of a past life and reality. They are murals that gave lessons of Puerto Rican history and culture as an attempt to educate and empower.
"La Crucifixion" is a child the community will not abandon. Consequently, the wall's ascent is stopped a quarter of the way up.
After community organizers and activists protested the wall's construction on April 16 by camping out in tents beneath it, Puerto Rican Ald. Billy Ocasio (26th) brokered a deal on behalf of his constituents. The development company agreed to halt construction until an agreement could be reached on what would be done with the mural.
The mural's significance is double-sided. El Grito de Lares an insurrection led by exiled nationalists and island abolitionists against Spanish rule in the town of Lares. Although the rebellion was unsuccessful and squashed within a day, the flag represents the only time in the country's history that it was independent. It also represents the literal and symbolic persecution that Puerto Ricans have endured in their quest for freedom.
Without community intervention and resistance, evidence that a cohesive community ever existed in Chicago will be buried beneath bricks and cement, and the flag that once represented a proud people will be obscured forever.
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