Finding the Beat of Chicago’s Latino Quarter

December 4, 2008 by Elizabeth Beachy  
Filed under Arts & Culture

By Jeff Bailey of the New York Times
IN a fifth-floor art gallery in Pilsen, Chicago’s fashionable Latino neighborhood, vibrant guitar chords were pouring out an open window on a recent Friday night. Four Latina artists were showing their paintings, and the shoebox of a gallery was jammed with a mixed, talkative crowd. Some swayed in time to the music, swigging beer and sipping wine. The din seemed to be drawing art patrons and good-time Chicagoans from all over the huge building at 1932 South Halsted Street, the central site of an every-second-Friday art walk.

Many come to the art walk from the suburbs or other parts of the city, but like much of Chicago these days, the affair draws its real energy from the city’s surging Latino population. One of the painters whose work was on display — Carolina Reyes — moved to Pilsen from a North Side neighborhood two years ago to paint. “Being a Latina, I’m still searching to learn more about my culture,” she said.

For that, there is no need for her to leave Chicago. More than 1,000 miles from the Mexican border, the city is home to about 800,000 people of Hispanic origin, mostly Mexican. That’s more than a quarter of the population and gaining share daily — this when the city shrank by nearly a million residents after the 1950s. But in Latin Chicago, there is a new boomtown to explore.

A native of a mostly Latino suburb of Los Angeles, I moved here 25 years ago; my wife, a Latina from Texas, came 12 years ago. So, it’s natural we would be drawn to areas like Pilsen, where Spanish and English mix against a backdrop of brilliant mosaics and murals of Mexican heroes, and Little Village nearby, where mariachi bands carrying their instruments into restaurants could easily be south of the border. But it’s more than just familiarity and the fact that eating and entertainment on the Latin side of Chicago is generally cheaper. It’s where the energy is.

“It’s happening so fast,” said Carlos Tortolero, who came to Chicago from Mexico at age 3 and, as a 28-year-old school teacher in 1982, started what would become the National Museum of Mexican Art, the city’s leading Latino cultural organization. “It’s becoming a very Mexican city.”

The museum made a name for itself in 2006 when it opened an exhibition about the influence of Africans in Mexico. In a city known for its racial separation, blacks flocked to Pilsen for the show. This summer, the museum will insert itself into the national political debate with an exhibition opening on the Fourth of July — “A Declaration of Immigration” — that will go beyond painting and sculpture to present data to argue that point. “It is pro-American to be pro-immigrant,” Mr. Tortolero said.

Immigrants certainly made Chicago one of history’s great boomtowns. It grew from a nearly uninhabited swamp in the early 1800s to a metropolis of a million people by 1890. An up-to-date version of that multicultural frontier town is on display every Sunday morning at a flea market, just around the corner from where Mrs. O’Leary’s cow — in fable, anyway — is said to have kicked over the lantern that started the Great Fire of 1871. Known as the Maxwell Street Market, it runs along Canal Street south of Roosevelt Road. (The city closed down the original location on nearby Maxwell Street in the 1990s, but the name stuck.) After more than 100 years, it still attracts immigrants and their offspring from many points on the globe. But today, as with much of Chicago, the market moves to a Latin beat. Browsers seem to move in step with the blaring Latin music as they peruse the four-block stretch of stalls that feature art, jewelry and the usual knock-off purses and leather goods.

If you see a skinny fellow with a goatee who appears to know the street-food vendors, he might be Rick Bayless, the Chicago chef and cookbook author who raised traditional Mexican cooking to gourmet status, stopping by on his day off to snack on mole and hand-pressed tortillas. The crowds become thicker around the stall for Lencho’s Tacos, where people take a number and wait their turn. Well before 10 a.m., Lencho’s fans are three and four deep around the counter, lined up for tacos of grilled beef, onions, cilantro and hot sauce — a perfect on-the-go lunch for about $5.

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Source: New York Times