Beyond good burritos
A profile of Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood, written for Chicago Unzipped
http://www.chicagounzipped.com

May 2007

On a quiet side street in Pilsen, a beat up minivan is parked with its windows open. A couple of old tee shirts are stretched over the front seats as slip covers, and in the cup holder on the dash, a fresh branch of lilac blossoms announces the arrival of Spring in Chicago.

Pilsen lies on the Southwest side of the city, a short train ride away from the Loop on the Pink Line but a world away from the black business suits and take out sandwich joints that characterize downtown.  Walking the streets of Pilsen, you see things you’ve never seen before. Life seems a little more magical here. On my first visit back early May, I stepped off the Blue Island bus and two men in sombreros rode by on horseback.

For more than a century, this neighborhood has been the port of entry for immigrants, first as a home to Chicago’s Bohemian community, who named it after a city in their native Czech Republic. In the 1960s the first Mexican families started moving into the area’s square brick worker’s cottages and created a unique aesthetic experience, best appreciated with a keen eye, an undirected stroll and a good conversationalist by your side.

Along the step-gabled brick buildings on 18th street, stores sell figures of Jesus, Mary and Joseph; Spanish music blares from CD stores and round-bottomed mannequins advertise tight polyester pants outside discount clothing shops. A shiny red pickup truck with clean chrome hubs waits at a stop light. Men strut past the Western Union wearing ironed white jeans with cell phones clipped on their hip pockets. Little girls with long black hair tug their mother’s hands at the friendly jangle of the ice cream carts, announcing tamarind popsicles and ice cream sandwiches.

Pastry shops with names like Nuevo Leon entice passersby with sparkling glass-shelved cabinets filled with fresh rolls, crispy pastries, smiley-faced cookies and fluffy round breads, criss-crossed with crusted sugar. People walk between the rows, carrying metal trays and selecting golden sweet rolls to eat with coffee as an afternoon snack.

On a sidewalk off the beaten path, two women prepare burritos under a blue tarp tent. A plump elderly woman wearing a plastic hairnet scowls intently as she hacks cooked chicken with a cleaver, keeping one eye on the grilling meat and the other on a Latin version of Dancing with the Stars playing on the television nearby. A younger woman ladles watermelon and pineapple juice from tall glass jars for $1 a cup; a man in a cowboy hat sits with his elbows planted on the long table, hunched over the tightly wrapped burrito in his hands.

Pilsen is a feeling. Time seems to slow down and relax here.  Cars stop in traffic to let jaywalkers cross; people hang out on front porches. On late spring evenings, elderly couples draped in thin blankets sit on the sidewalk in lawn chairs to watch the neighborhood’s sleepy rhythms from the glow of the streetlight.  Behind a gate in a communal alley, a man sits on a set of wooden steps singing along to the radio in his lap. A mother stands with an exhausted child in her arms, its head on her shoulder, its legs falling around her waist, as she rocks back and forth to the sound of Mexican folk songs and the smell of grilling meat wafting through the balmy night air.

But Pilsen is also tiny moments of unexpected beauty. It’s in the front fence painted steel gray and bright pink. It’s in the red geraniums planted in five-gallon pails on a rickety stoop. It’s in the fruit truck parked on the street, selling bunches of bananas, green peppers and ripe tomatoes. And it’s in the art that is everywhere, everywhere.

In addition to the trendy new galleries along Halsted Street and the National Museum of Mexican Art, Pilsen is covered in street art. Colorful paintings brighten the stairwells of the 18th Street train station with images of Jesus, indigenous Mexican symbols, mariachi musicians and the Mexican flag.  The artwork continues into the streets, where sidewalk corners are inset with a bronze Aztec calendar and the area’s brick buildings serve as canvases for hundreds of murals. Some murals record the cultural life of the community with scenes of families preparing tortillas for dinner and historical episodes the Mexican revolution, while others take a more direct political approach, depicting the dangers of factory farms and global warming. 

Near the corner of 18th street and Bishop Street a large thunderbird eagle – the logo of the United Farm Workers -- protects a family unit with its outstretched wings.  On the right-hand side, the image of Cesar Chavez, the 60’s-era labor organizer for the UFW, watches over the depiction of street protestors holding up signs reading, “Stop Gentrification in Pilsen!” and  “This House is Not for Sale.” For like many South Side neighborhoods, Pilsen is bracing itself against the forces of change that have transformed such corridors as Halsted Street near the University of Illinois Chicago into an alley of condominiums and franchise coffee shops. Local muralist Jose Guerrero created the painting in hopes that his art will educate people about their history and help preserve the vibrant community that has thrived in the shadow of smokestacks, railroad tracks and other vestiges of Chicago’s industrial past.  

And after a day spent basking in the unconventional symmetry of this cobbled together place, you think of springtimes to come and silently hope that he succeeds.