What Are The Young Lords In Lincoln Park Essay
“The Young Lords in Lincoln Park”
Final Report: Student Summer Scholars Program, 2012
José “Cha-Cha” Jiménez
Liberal Studies Department, Grand Valley State University
In the fall of 1968 in Chicago, Patricia Devine and Dick Vision, members of a church organization called the Concerned Citizens of Lincoln Park approached me to see if I could help them bring people to an upcoming housing meeting of the Lincoln Park Community Conservation Council. At the time, I was still president of a loose knit street gang, the Young Lords. I had recently come out of jail and wanted to get back with my girlfriend and daughter and settle down. During the day I was studying for my G.E.D. while also working as a janitor at the Argonne National Laboratory in an ex-offender program. It was not an easy task to get a group of relatively undisciplined young people to attend a formal, political meeting. Convincing them bruised not only my ego, but my face. But when the evening of the meeting arrived, about 40 young people from the neighborhood showed up.
The young people were quiet, to avoid police detection, walking in small groups one behind another, traveling down Armitage Avenue for about six blocks to 2020 North Larrabee Street. Once inside they stopped and gazed briefly at a glass and wooden …show more content…
display that showed their neighborhood with vacant spaces in placed where their homes currently stood. In the meeting hall were about nine, white males, well-dressed sitting at a folding table at the front of the room. Barely ten other people sat on folding chairs in the audience. From our perspective, this did not look much like a public, professional meeting at all. They were meeting in private, secluded in a tiny back hall room.
These were the representatives appointed by Mayor Richard J. Daley. Most were also members of the Old Town Triangle Association or the Lincoln Park Conservation Association, which later joined and consolidated. The official Community Conservation Council, whose meeting we attended that night, had little, collective decision-making power; they primarily followed the directives of George Stone, a surrogate of Lewis Hill, the top urban renewal man for the city of Chicago. Members of the Council prided themselves on being “urban renewal professionals,” but they were only there to legitimize and rubber stamp the mayor’s fifty-year Master Plan to destroy the “blighted, deteriorating areas of Lincoln Park, and areas near downtown and the lakefront.” This would increase the city’s tax base and their property values. In Lincoln Park the so-called blighted areas were primarily Puerto Rican homes, churches, businesses, and gathering spaces. These same groups had already successfully displaced the large barrio of Puerto Ricans from where Carl Sandburg Village Complex now stands, Old Town, and later, the primarily African American Cabrini-Green Homes. Only one Puerto Rican was named to the Lincoln Park Community Conservation Council, Felix Silva, a Caballero de San Juan (Knight of St. John) member. But Mr. Silva handed in his resignation publically, making it clear that he stood with his Puerto Rican brethren. His resignation letter was published in the first edition of the Young Lords’ newspaper.1
Before the Young Lords successfully blocked the meeting and left the building, they told the Council that they could not meet there again until there were “Blacks, Latinos, and poor Whites on the Council.” To make their point, they trashed the place. Chairs were thrown against the walls, windows were broken, toilets and sinks were pulled from their pipes, and the wooden and glass display was broken into pieces. The emotional action was spontaneous; I was the only one who was arrested days later. But the action of these youth marked the beginning of a movement within Lincoln Park to save the Puerto Rican and poor areas of the city – a movement that grew to encompass all sectors of that neighborhood and eventually lead to the creation of a national Young Lords Latino movement for civil and human rights. Documenting the birth of this movement, its growth within Chicago’s Lincoln Park Neighborhood and its ultimate expansion through chapters across the United States, fighting for self - determination and neighborhood empowerment is the focus of this larger research project that now includes more than 90 oral histories and other primary data.
Documenting and writing this history is critical. Like scholarship by historian Robin Kelley, political anthropologist James C. Scott, and by now, nearly a generation of others who have been influenced by their work and applied these ideas to political studies around the globe, this project takes seriously the theory of “infrapolitics.” As Scott writes, “[T]he circumspect struggle waged daily by subordinate groups is, like infrared rays, beyond the visible end of the spectrum. That it should be invisible…is in large part by design – a tactical choice born of a prudent awareness of the balance of power.”2 This theory helps to locate the early work of the Young Lords and countless other Latino youth within inner-city Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s within a larger framework of individual and collective resistance.
It is equally important to recognize the aspects of this movement that were unique to the Puerto Rican experience of imperialism and diaspora – contexts that are lost when studies of the movement are reduced to narrow, local case studies alone. United by the slogan, “Tengo Puerto Rico en mi Corazon,” the Young Lords movement both grew out of the struggles and organizing efforts of their immigrant parents while it also forged new forms of activism, new priorities, and a new political gaze. In other words, this Movement embodies what Andres Torres has called “a new chapter in Puerto Rico’s political history.”3
This lens provides an important counter to existing work on the Young Lords, much of which has only focused on the media town and heavily Puerto Rican populated, New York City while actively excluding the Chicago birthplace and downplaying the work of chapters elsewhere across the United States, as well as the Puerto Rican movement in Puerto Rico. Their argument fogs the mission of the Young Lords which is to free Puerto Rico and empower the barrios. To say what the police and these so called scholars have proclaimed: that the original Young Lords in Chicago were just a gang and not “political”4 is like saying that the actions taken by Rosa Parks when she refused to give up her seat on the bus were not political, nor the voter registration campaigns, nor the freedom riders; nor the murders of black children and activists. Such isolated case studies privilege only the local while ignoring the larger diasporic context that not only birthed but has sustained the Movement. These studies have also privileged the college educated, middle- and upper-class Latinos at the expense of the working-classes and the poor who were the ones heavily repressed and scorned by the media, and yet remained consistently active within the Movement well beyond 1969.
Puerto Rican Migration to Chicago At least 91,000 people, or about 2600 people a year, emigrated from Puerto Rico to the mainland United States between 1910 and 1945.5 In 1947, the U.S. federal government launched a program it called “Operation Bootstrap.” In addition to investing heavily in industrial development within Puerto Rico, largely by offering tax incentives and low rents to industrialists from the mainland to relocate to Puerto Rico, the program recruited young Puerto Ricans to work in agricultural and service jobs across the United States with the understanding that they would return to the island after their term of employment was over.6 According to a New York Times article, farmers were so pleased with the 1400 Puerto Rican migrant workers who arrived in 1948 that they wanted double that number in 1949.7 Federal census estimates record over 4,200 individuals arriving from Puerto Rico to the United States each year between 1946 and 1956.8
A large contingent of the first Puerto Ricans during the “Great Migration” of the 1950s and 1960s were contract laborers to steel mills, farm labor camps, downtown hotels, meat packing and other factories, and domestics. Most of them came from the country, mountain towns or some seasonal, sugarcane coastal cities. In 1949, a migration office was opened in Chicago to serve migrants across the mid - west, including in Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Ohio. The office was located at Superior and La Salle Streets.9
These newcomers joined a small community of Puerto Ricans who had first arrived in the city in the 1920s. According to a pamphlet written by Manuel Torres, a member of the Caballeros de San Juan, “in the 1920s, middle and upper class Puerto Ricans regularly sent their children to study abroad, including to the city of Chicago.” He documents that a large Puerto Rican family lived in a Puerto Rican enclave near 47th Street and Michigan in the 1930s and 1940s. As the Puerto Rican community grew, more and more families began to move to what became known as the La Clark neighborhood. La Clark started at Grand Avenue on the south and stretched up to Armitage and Clark on the north. To the east was Dearborn Street. The western boundary stretched to Halsted, but along Chicago Avenue it extended to Ashland Avenue. A second significant barrio known as La Madison spread west from downtown until Ashland. Both neighborhoods followed the bus routes or trains that led to downtown, where Puerto Ricans worked in the many hotels and nearby factories, and many women worked as domestics, cleaning apartment buildings and private homes.
Several of the oral histories recall life in La Clark and La Madison through the 1940s and 1950s. Eugenia Rodríguez Flores describes living in the Water Hotel at Superior and LaSalle Streets when she and her family first arrived in the city in 1951. Every time she moved, her friends and family followed. Still, she had to travel to St. Francis on Roosevelt, a primarily Mexican parish, because that was the only place that there was Spanish mass at that time.10
Ricci Trinidad talk about his mother, “Nine’s,” small restaurant on the corner of Wells and Superior. The business had only a couple of tables and chairs. Customers came to eat and to play dominoes. The restaurant began by her cooking in her apartment for separated men in the building that were working or grabando discos (cutting records), as dishwashers, or at the nearby factories working in El Mani(the peanut factory) or at Las Gomas (the rubber factory) striving to bring their wives and children from Puerto Rico. She found this small restaurant space and her business quickly grew.11
Most of the structures in La Clark were the same: old, dilapidated hotels or rooming houses converted into one or two room kitchenettes where families crowded. Rents were inexpensive, averaging about $25 a week which included linens and furniture. This also meant that most of the new immigrants were accustomed to living near roaches, rats, and chinches (bed bugs). As Eugenia Rodriguez recalled, “We had to hurry and get another apartment or get eaten up.” Despite the struggles of such poor quality housing conditions, the low cost was what kept many Puerto Ricans there. Most intended their stay to be temporary, returning back to Puerto Rico as soon as possible to make their dream house on the island. This could only be accomplished by saving on rent and living expenses in Chicago.
Times were changing quickly and by 1954 La Clark was being eyed for urban renewal. After milking the tenants for as much rent as they could, landlords began giving notices for Puerto Ricans to move quickly. Families moved north up La Salle Street first, then west down North Avenue, Division Street, and Chicago Avenue. These displacements and resettlements helped form the first large Puerto Rican barrios of Lincoln Park and Wicker Park in the late 1950s and early 1960s – it was actually one gigantic Puerto Rican barrio or neighborhood that was split in half by the Kennedy Expressway.
Birthing a Movement Very few are aware of how the Puerto Ricans of Lincoln Park, like many other new immigrants to cities across the United States, were assaulted, discriminated against, and robbed of prime real estate.
Few also understand how their unsupervised sons and daughters did not initially have the support of any city or church programs and had to fend for themselves. The oral histories in this collection describe how the first youth formed social sports and cultural clubs and played at the boys’ club and Y.M.C.A. As more Puerto Ricans were displaced and forced to move into previously white-only areas of Chicago, clashes became more frequent and these social clubs turned to become
gangs. Antonio (Maloco) Jiménez, Vice President of the Hacha Viejas, the first Puerto Rican gang in Chicago, recalls:
We just came here [in the 1950s] because there was no work in Puerto Rico. On weekends we just wanted to relax and drink beer in a club owned by one of our family. One day a few of us came to the tavern on Clark and Armitage where we usually played pool and just hung out. The Italian, Irish, and Germans were waiting for us. They were like a mob. This was before Lincoln Park was Puerto Rican. They had us trapped. We could not get away and tried to hide under cars but they cut me and the others real bad. We were put in the hospital for a few weeks and our family wanted revenge.12
This racist experience was not unique to Puerto Ricans. It had happened before to African Americans and strange how only the Puerto Rican victims were called a gang. Nor did parents abandon their children as some proponents of “slum clearance” and urban renewal claimed.
Another interviewee, Carmen Rivera, explains how her father, Cesario Rivera, Jesus Rodriguez, and others organized door-to-door, establishing the Caballeros de San Juan (an equivalent of the Knights of Columbus) and the Damas de María.13 Together these groups set up the first Puerto Rican festivals honoring their patron saint, San Juan Bautista. These events led to the first Puerto Rican parade being organized from St. Michael’s Church in Lincoln Park.. Although in another oral history of the project Father Don Headley recalls that the first Puerto Rican Parade was really celebrated in June, 1953 at the Chicago Avenue Armory at Lake Shore Drive with a mass at Holy Name Cathedral in the old La Clark Neighborhood. “It was in the news and I was there,” he states. The Caballeros de San Juan and Damas de Maria also organized dances, softball leagues, picnics, retreats, fairs and other activities to raise funds and to assist the youth and their families. But it was not enough to encompass the entire neighborhood. Still, it is significant that many of the local gangs that developed over this period, including the Young Lords, grew up within these activities and values of the Caballeros de San Juan and the Damas. They also provided a critical reference point as groups like the Young Lords reorganized themselves into a political movement.
The Young Lords in Lincoln Park
There were other factors that contributed to the Young Lords’ political awakening. [[[to be continued]]
Final Report: Student Summer Scholars Program, 2012
José “Cha-Cha” Jiménez
Liberal Studies Department, Grand Valley State University
In the fall of 1968 in Chicago, Patricia Devine and Dick Vision, members of a church organization called the Concerned Citizens of Lincoln Park approached me to see if I could help them bring people to an upcoming housing meeting of the Lincoln Park Community Conservation Council. At the time, I was still president of a loose knit street gang, the Young Lords. I had recently come out of jail and wanted to get back with my girlfriend and daughter and settle down. During the day I was studying for my G.E.D. while also working as a janitor at the Argonne National Laboratory in an ex-offender program. It was not an easy task to get a group of relatively undisciplined young people to attend a formal, political meeting. Convincing them bruised not only my ego, but my face. But when the evening of the meeting arrived, about 40 young people from the neighborhood showed up.
The young people were quiet, to avoid police detection, walking in small groups one behind another, traveling down Armitage Avenue for about six blocks to 2020 North Larrabee Street. Once inside they stopped and gazed briefly at a glass and wooden …show more content…
display that showed their neighborhood with vacant spaces in placed where their homes currently stood. In the meeting hall were about nine, white males, well-dressed sitting at a folding table at the front of the room. Barely ten other people sat on folding chairs in the audience. From our perspective, this did not look much like a public, professional meeting at all. They were meeting in private, secluded in a tiny back hall room.
These were the representatives appointed by Mayor Richard J. Daley. Most were also members of the Old Town Triangle Association or the Lincoln Park Conservation Association, which later joined and consolidated. The official Community Conservation Council, whose meeting we attended that night, had little, collective decision-making power; they primarily followed the directives of George Stone, a surrogate of Lewis Hill, the top urban renewal man for the city of Chicago. Members of the Council prided themselves on being “urban renewal professionals,” but they were only there to legitimize and rubber stamp the mayor’s fifty-year Master Plan to destroy the “blighted, deteriorating areas of Lincoln Park, and areas near downtown and the lakefront.” This would increase the city’s tax base and their property values. In Lincoln Park the so-called blighted areas were primarily Puerto Rican homes, churches, businesses, and gathering spaces. These same groups had already successfully displaced the large barrio of Puerto Ricans from where Carl Sandburg Village Complex now stands, Old Town, and later, the primarily African American Cabrini-Green Homes. Only one Puerto Rican was named to the Lincoln Park Community Conservation Council, Felix Silva, a Caballero de San Juan (Knight of St. John) member. But Mr. Silva handed in his resignation publically, making it clear that he stood with his Puerto Rican brethren. His resignation letter was published in the first edition of the Young Lords’ newspaper.1
Before the Young Lords successfully blocked the meeting and left the building, they told the Council that they could not meet there again until there were “Blacks, Latinos, and poor Whites on the Council.” To make their point, they trashed the place. Chairs were thrown against the walls, windows were broken, toilets and sinks were pulled from their pipes, and the wooden and glass display was broken into pieces. The emotional action was spontaneous; I was the only one who was arrested days later. But the action of these youth marked the beginning of a movement within Lincoln Park to save the Puerto Rican and poor areas of the city – a movement that grew to encompass all sectors of that neighborhood and eventually lead to the creation of a national Young Lords Latino movement for civil and human rights. Documenting the birth of this movement, its growth within Chicago’s Lincoln Park Neighborhood and its ultimate expansion through chapters across the United States, fighting for self - determination and neighborhood empowerment is the focus of this larger research project that now includes more than 90 oral histories and other primary data.
Documenting and writing this history is critical. Like scholarship by historian Robin Kelley, political anthropologist James C. Scott, and by now, nearly a generation of others who have been influenced by their work and applied these ideas to political studies around the globe, this project takes seriously the theory of “infrapolitics.” As Scott writes, “[T]he circumspect struggle waged daily by subordinate groups is, like infrared rays, beyond the visible end of the spectrum. That it should be invisible…is in large part by design – a tactical choice born of a prudent awareness of the balance of power.”2 This theory helps to locate the early work of the Young Lords and countless other Latino youth within inner-city Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s within a larger framework of individual and collective resistance.
It is equally important to recognize the aspects of this movement that were unique to the Puerto Rican experience of imperialism and diaspora – contexts that are lost when studies of the movement are reduced to narrow, local case studies alone. United by the slogan, “Tengo Puerto Rico en mi Corazon,” the Young Lords movement both grew out of the struggles and organizing efforts of their immigrant parents while it also forged new forms of activism, new priorities, and a new political gaze. In other words, this Movement embodies what Andres Torres has called “a new chapter in Puerto Rico’s political history.”3
This lens provides an important counter to existing work on the Young Lords, much of which has only focused on the media town and heavily Puerto Rican populated, New York City while actively excluding the Chicago birthplace and downplaying the work of chapters elsewhere across the United States, as well as the Puerto Rican movement in Puerto Rico. Their argument fogs the mission of the Young Lords which is to free Puerto Rico and empower the barrios. To say what the police and these so called scholars have proclaimed: that the original Young Lords in Chicago were just a gang and not “political”4 is like saying that the actions taken by Rosa Parks when she refused to give up her seat on the bus were not political, nor the voter registration campaigns, nor the freedom riders; nor the murders of black children and activists. Such isolated case studies privilege only the local while ignoring the larger diasporic context that not only birthed but has sustained the Movement. These studies have also privileged the college educated, middle- and upper-class Latinos at the expense of the working-classes and the poor who were the ones heavily repressed and scorned by the media, and yet remained consistently active within the Movement well beyond 1969.
Puerto Rican Migration to Chicago At least 91,000 people, or about 2600 people a year, emigrated from Puerto Rico to the mainland United States between 1910 and 1945.5 In 1947, the U.S. federal government launched a program it called “Operation Bootstrap.” In addition to investing heavily in industrial development within Puerto Rico, largely by offering tax incentives and low rents to industrialists from the mainland to relocate to Puerto Rico, the program recruited young Puerto Ricans to work in agricultural and service jobs across the United States with the understanding that they would return to the island after their term of employment was over.6 According to a New York Times article, farmers were so pleased with the 1400 Puerto Rican migrant workers who arrived in 1948 that they wanted double that number in 1949.7 Federal census estimates record over 4,200 individuals arriving from Puerto Rico to the United States each year between 1946 and 1956.8
A large contingent of the first Puerto Ricans during the “Great Migration” of the 1950s and 1960s were contract laborers to steel mills, farm labor camps, downtown hotels, meat packing and other factories, and domestics. Most of them came from the country, mountain towns or some seasonal, sugarcane coastal cities. In 1949, a migration office was opened in Chicago to serve migrants across the mid - west, including in Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Ohio. The office was located at Superior and La Salle Streets.9
These newcomers joined a small community of Puerto Ricans who had first arrived in the city in the 1920s. According to a pamphlet written by Manuel Torres, a member of the Caballeros de San Juan, “in the 1920s, middle and upper class Puerto Ricans regularly sent their children to study abroad, including to the city of Chicago.” He documents that a large Puerto Rican family lived in a Puerto Rican enclave near 47th Street and Michigan in the 1930s and 1940s. As the Puerto Rican community grew, more and more families began to move to what became known as the La Clark neighborhood. La Clark started at Grand Avenue on the south and stretched up to Armitage and Clark on the north. To the east was Dearborn Street. The western boundary stretched to Halsted, but along Chicago Avenue it extended to Ashland Avenue. A second significant barrio known as La Madison spread west from downtown until Ashland. Both neighborhoods followed the bus routes or trains that led to downtown, where Puerto Ricans worked in the many hotels and nearby factories, and many women worked as domestics, cleaning apartment buildings and private homes.
Several of the oral histories recall life in La Clark and La Madison through the 1940s and 1950s. Eugenia Rodríguez Flores describes living in the Water Hotel at Superior and LaSalle Streets when she and her family first arrived in the city in 1951. Every time she moved, her friends and family followed. Still, she had to travel to St. Francis on Roosevelt, a primarily Mexican parish, because that was the only place that there was Spanish mass at that time.10
Ricci Trinidad talk about his mother, “Nine’s,” small restaurant on the corner of Wells and Superior. The business had only a couple of tables and chairs. Customers came to eat and to play dominoes. The restaurant began by her cooking in her apartment for separated men in the building that were working or grabando discos (cutting records), as dishwashers, or at the nearby factories working in El Mani(the peanut factory) or at Las Gomas (the rubber factory) striving to bring their wives and children from Puerto Rico. She found this small restaurant space and her business quickly grew.11
Most of the structures in La Clark were the same: old, dilapidated hotels or rooming houses converted into one or two room kitchenettes where families crowded. Rents were inexpensive, averaging about $25 a week which included linens and furniture. This also meant that most of the new immigrants were accustomed to living near roaches, rats, and chinches (bed bugs). As Eugenia Rodriguez recalled, “We had to hurry and get another apartment or get eaten up.” Despite the struggles of such poor quality housing conditions, the low cost was what kept many Puerto Ricans there. Most intended their stay to be temporary, returning back to Puerto Rico as soon as possible to make their dream house on the island. This could only be accomplished by saving on rent and living expenses in Chicago.
Times were changing quickly and by 1954 La Clark was being eyed for urban renewal. After milking the tenants for as much rent as they could, landlords began giving notices for Puerto Ricans to move quickly. Families moved north up La Salle Street first, then west down North Avenue, Division Street, and Chicago Avenue. These displacements and resettlements helped form the first large Puerto Rican barrios of Lincoln Park and Wicker Park in the late 1950s and early 1960s – it was actually one gigantic Puerto Rican barrio or neighborhood that was split in half by the Kennedy Expressway.
Birthing a Movement Very few are aware of how the Puerto Ricans of Lincoln Park, like many other new immigrants to cities across the United States, were assaulted, discriminated against, and robbed of prime real estate.
Few also understand how their unsupervised sons and daughters did not initially have the support of any city or church programs and had to fend for themselves. The oral histories in this collection describe how the first youth formed social sports and cultural clubs and played at the boys’ club and Y.M.C.A. As more Puerto Ricans were displaced and forced to move into previously white-only areas of Chicago, clashes became more frequent and these social clubs turned to become
gangs. Antonio (Maloco) Jiménez, Vice President of the Hacha Viejas, the first Puerto Rican gang in Chicago, recalls:
We just came here [in the 1950s] because there was no work in Puerto Rico. On weekends we just wanted to relax and drink beer in a club owned by one of our family. One day a few of us came to the tavern on Clark and Armitage where we usually played pool and just hung out. The Italian, Irish, and Germans were waiting for us. They were like a mob. This was before Lincoln Park was Puerto Rican. They had us trapped. We could not get away and tried to hide under cars but they cut me and the others real bad. We were put in the hospital for a few weeks and our family wanted revenge.12
This racist experience was not unique to Puerto Ricans. It had happened before to African Americans and strange how only the Puerto Rican victims were called a gang. Nor did parents abandon their children as some proponents of “slum clearance” and urban renewal claimed.
Another interviewee, Carmen Rivera, explains how her father, Cesario Rivera, Jesus Rodriguez, and others organized door-to-door, establishing the Caballeros de San Juan (an equivalent of the Knights of Columbus) and the Damas de María.13 Together these groups set up the first Puerto Rican festivals honoring their patron saint, San Juan Bautista. These events led to the first Puerto Rican parade being organized from St. Michael’s Church in Lincoln Park.. Although in another oral history of the project Father Don Headley recalls that the first Puerto Rican Parade was really celebrated in June, 1953 at the Chicago Avenue Armory at Lake Shore Drive with a mass at Holy Name Cathedral in the old La Clark Neighborhood. “It was in the news and I was there,” he states. The Caballeros de San Juan and Damas de Maria also organized dances, softball leagues, picnics, retreats, fairs and other activities to raise funds and to assist the youth and their families. But it was not enough to encompass the entire neighborhood. Still, it is significant that many of the local gangs that developed over this period, including the Young Lords, grew up within these activities and values of the Caballeros de San Juan and the Damas. They also provided a critical reference point as groups like the Young Lords reorganized themselves into a political movement.
The Young Lords in Lincoln Park
There were other factors that contributed to the Young Lords’ political awakening. [[[to be continued]]