February 27, 2019 by South Side Weekly

From music to film: you want to be here.

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SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is an independent nonprofit newsprint magazine written for and about neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago. We publish in-depth coverage of the arts and issues of public interest alongside oral histories, poetry, fiction, interviews, and artwork from local photographers and illustrators. The South Side Weekly is dedicated to supporting cultural and civic engagement on the South Side and to providing educational opportunities for developing journalists, writers, and artists. Volume 6, Issue 18 Editor-in-Chief Adam Przybyl Managing Editors Emeline Posner, Sam Stecklow Deputy Editor Jasmine Mithani Senior Editors Julia Aizuss, Christian Belanger, Mari Cohen, Bridget Newsham, Olivia Stovicek Chief of Staff

Manisha AR

Politics Editor Education Editor Music Editor Stage & Screen Editor Visual Arts Editor Food & Land Editor

Ellen Mayer Rachel Kim Christopher Good Nicole Bond Rod Sawyer Emeline Posner

Contributing Editors Mira Chauhan, Joshua Falk, Carly Graf, Ian Hodgson, Maple Joy, Sam Joyce, Ashvini Kartik-Narayan, Rachel Schastok Amy Qin, Jocelyn Vega Staff Writer Kyle Oleksiuk Data Editor Jasmine Mithani Radio Exec. Producer Erisa Apantaku Social Media Editors Bridget Newsham, Sam Stecklow Director of Fact Checking: Sam Joyce Fact Checkers: Abigail Bazin, Bridget Newsham, Adam Przybyl, Sam Stecklow, Tammy Xu Visuals Editor Ellen Hao Deputy Visuals Editors Ireashia Bennett, Siena Fite, Lizzie Smith Staff Photographers: milo bosh, Jason Schumer Staff Illustrators: Siena Fite, Natalie Gonzalez, Katherine Hill Interim Layout Editor J. Michael Eugenio Deputy Layout Editors Haley Tweedell Webmaster Operations Manager

Pat Sier Jason Schumer

The Weekly is produced by an all-volunteer editorial staff and seeks contributions from across the city. We distribute each Wednesday in the fall, winter, and spring. Over the summer we publish every other week. Send submissions, story ideas, comments, or questions to editor@southsideweekly.com or mail to: South Side Weekly 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Chicago, IL 60637 For advertising inquiries, contact: (773) 234-5388 or advertising@southsideweekly.com

IN CHICAGO

A week’s worth of developing stories, odd events, and signs of the times, culled from the desks, inboxes, and wandering eyes of the editors

IN THIS ISSUE

Looking Back on a Turbulent Election Season

will chicago’s next mayor prioritize

This week, Chicago turned out for what was arguably the most momentous municipal election since Harold Washington was voted in as mayor in 1983. But in the pages that follow, you’ll notice a conspicuous lack of information about the results. The reason for this is purely logistical: Election Day was on Tuesday, but the Weekly goes to print on Monday, the night before. This means that, as I write, I have no clue what the results of this election will be. There’s no use predicting those results now. Instead, I am reflecting on this long and turbulent election season, and what we can learn from it going forward. I started out as the Weekly’s politics editor over the summer, excited to tackle the election at a community newspaper with a lot of heart, whose commitment was to the needs of South Siders. I knew that Chicago politics were nasty. I also knew that elections were inherently limited in their capacity to bring about change. But I was hopeful that we could make something redeeming out of this one. When Rahm Emanuel announced that he would not be running for re-election, I think many people shared this hope. The city’s power structure—with its strong mayor and weak City Council—no longer seemed inevitable. The mayoral race was wide open for the first time in decades. Emanuel’s longtime aldermanic allies were suddenly vulnerable. There was a chance to clean house and transform the Chicago Way. But in the months since then, that hopefulness has dissipated, replaced with a sense of paranoia and dread. Every day brings another headline about candidates’ troubled track records, their corporate funders, and their allegiances to the Chicago Machine—even among those who purport to be progressive reformers. Meanwhile, whole communities and movements have become fiercely divided in the process of choosing a single leader to represent them. Having spent months parsing nasty rumors, bitter rivalries, and backroom deals, it is tempting for me to throw in the towel and say that in fact Chicago’s system of electoral politics is irredeemable. Maybe it is. But Chicago is not. Chicago is full of people who are fighting for a more just city in the face of displacement, economic disinvestment, struggling public schools, environmental contamination, and both community and state violence. At the Weekly we have covered much of their work: Southeast Side organizers fighting to get manganese out of the air, parents and teachers who saved National Teachers Academy, Freedom Square organizers who built a small utopia next to CPD’s torture site in Homan Square. I do believe in the value of voting, but I also know that if anybody is going to save Chicago, it’s not the people who were on your ballot this week (although they may prove themselves useful). It’s all of us, who are willing to show up and fight for better. Having spent a year covering Illinois and Chicago politicians, I know they don’t care about us—not most of them, and not more than their donors and power brokers. Most likely, the new mayor and the majority of our new City Council won’t care about us either. But we care for each other. This is my last day as the Weekly’s politics editor. But tomorrow I will still show up to care for us, and to fight for a more just Chicago. I hope you will join me.

“We are not aware of any mayor that has adequately addressed this issue in recent history.” amelia diehl....................................5

—Ellen Mayer

environmental justice?

ice breakers

“He asked me if I wanted to help out. And I said yes, I’d love to.” isi frank ativie.................................7 piece by piece

Political fragmentation, displacement, and the possibility of coalition in Englewood mari cohen and sam stecklow.....10 the sonic chemistry of isaiah collier

“It’s a giant painting, in a museum we can all visit.” krishna s. kulkarni........................17 on the frontiers of community healthcare

“Domestic violence is a public safety and public health issue.” amelia aldred.................................18

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Cover art by Seon-Hyung Kim FEBRUARY 27, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

From dance to literature: you want to be here.

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Photo: Cerqua Rivera Dance Theatre dancers in Between Us, courtesy of the company.

POLITICS

Will Chicago’s Next Mayor Prioritize Environmental Justice?

At the first environmental justice–focused forum, candidates seem hesitant to commit to environmental justice policy BY AMELIA DIEHL

hicago is considered the birthplace of the environmental justice movement—but mayoral candidates have never really been grilled about how they would address the issue. This year, the Chicago Food Policy Action Council (CFPAC) and several community groups hosted a food– and environmental justice–focused forum at the South Shore Cultural Center on February 15, likely the first forum of its kind in the city, according to Anton Seals Jr, CFPAC board member and lead steward and cofounder of Grow Greater Englewood, one of the forum’s co-sponsors. Only five candidates showed up to the forum: John Kozlar, Lori Lightfoot, Paul Vallas, Bob Fioretti, and La Shawn Ford. (The original forum had been rescheduled because of extreme weather.) At the beginning of the event, Seals introduced the topics of food and environmental justice as “crucial civil rights issues that have historically and continue to disproportionately impact disadvantaged and low-income communities of color.” Kim Wasserman-Nieto, executive director of Little Village Environmental Justice Network, introduced questions alongside Seals. All of the questions concerned addressing these social inequalities. In 2017, the city passed a resolution to adopt the Good Food Purchasing Program, a national initiative to leverage government spending power to create sustainable food systems. CFPAC led efforts to lobby the city to adopt the program, and executive director Cooley hopes to see the next mayor prioritize the program, which currently involves four agencies and five city departments. Local organizations will play a role, too. The forum was co-sponsored by many

community groups, including Chicago Environmental Justice Network, Chicago South East Side Coalition To Ban Petcoke, Food Chain Workers Alliance, Ixchel (Cicero/Berwyn), Street Vendors Association of Chicago, and the Southeast Environmental Task Force, many of which are part of the Good Food Purchasing Program effort. Each candidate was in support of flushing out the city’s commitment to the program. Lightfoot called for getting private institutions to join. (Currently, the program only applies to public agencies.) Ford advocated using the program to bring more healthy food into schools. “Many times we see our children not performing well simply because they're not eating well. And many times the only meal that students get for the day, whether it’s breakfast, lunch, or dinner, is at school,” Ford said. “When young people learn how to eat, they teach their parents.” Candidates were also asked how they would support emerging farmers and entrepreneurs in ag-related fields, especially Black and brown farmers, and encourage more cooperative business ownership. Chicago is known as one of the country’s leading urban agriculture cities, with over 800 urban agriculture sites, according to the Chicago Urban Agriculture Mapping Project. Last November, state lawmakers overrode then-Governor Bruce Rauner’s veto of a bill that allows Illinois cities to establish urban agriculture zones. Sales taxes from agricultural sales in these zones will be put into a fund to be allocated to programs or initiatives of the zone members’ choosing. The city has 32,000 vacant lots, according to the Institute for Housing Studies at DePaul University. Moderators

AMELIA DIEHL

wanted to know how candidates might use this land to revitalize neighborhoods through community gardens, urban farms, and other initiatives, especially as an alternative to development projects that threaten to displace long-term residents and renters. Both Ford and Lightfoot were passionate about urban agriculture providing jobs as pathways to economic stability. Vallas had a plan to turn an empty school into an urban agriculture school for adults. Fioretti called for creating better online portals so that people can access information about how to purchase and develop land. The city sells many vacant lots through its Large Lots program, but this land is only open to people who are already landowners, and “There isn’t necessarily clear transparent

processes for transferring land,” Cooley said. The current system also makes it difficult for communities to cooperatively own and develop these areas. Kozlar failed to answer the question at all, instead taking a poll of the audience to see how many were registered to vote (most) and how many knew who they were voting for (very few). In the time he had left, he announced his website. Kozlar was also the only candidate to express hesitation about legalized recreational marijuana, which was brought up by moderators as a potential way to boost a Black- and brown-owned marijuana cultivation industry. He implied it would become a gateway drug for youth, a stance that elicited boos from the audience. Fioretti was similarly skeptical about the opportunities FEBRUARY 27, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

POLITICS

AMELIA DIEHL

legalized marijuana might create. “They’ve always decided how they’re divvying it up,” he said, referring to the power of legislators to vet marijuana licensing. Vallas, Ford, and Lightfoot were in support of ensuring revenue would benefit communities hardest hit by the war on drugs. Moderators grilled the candidates on how they would ensure community members would have a seat at the table for agricultural projects and other development. Industrial development is often fast-tracked without prior approval or input from residents, Wasserman-Nieto said. It often leads to cumulative negative effects, such as air, water, and noise pollution, and the prevalence of hazards, she said. None of the candidates provided a thorough plan to involve community input, though they each had their own riff. Ford summarized the problem, saying every candidate believes in “open government,” though the problem came down to implementation. But he failed to outline how he himself would do it. Fioretti sounded ambitious, saying he would have community meetings with every neighborhood before any project was passed. Reallocating TIF funds to undeveloped areas was a popular response from most candidates, as was establishing mayoral term limits; Lightfoot and Vallas pushed for limiting aldermanic prerogative. Vallas also mentioned the importance of having community benefits agreements, an agreement between developers and residents, for incoming projects such as the Obama Presidential Center (OPC). The OPC is likely to displace more renters than homeowners, so increasing access to 6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

affordable housing is part of his platform, he said. Overall, candidates seemed hesitant to address environmental and food justice policies head-on, instead pivoting on each question to provide vague, bigger-picture statements. Kozlar in particular tended to use the platform to express outrage at the city’s history of corruption in elections, which he considers “elitist.” In his opening statement, he claimed to be “concerned about the future of our city,” but didn’t mention the words “environment,” “food,” or “justice.” Like many other candidates, “public safety” is another key part of his platform, referring mainly to gun control and police accountability; yet he failed to extend this analysis to address the slower violence of environmental injustice. Most candidates’ platforms do not explicitly use the words “environmental justice” or “food justice,” despite the urgency of some of the issues that would fall into these categories, like the lead water crisis. Chicago has the most lead water lines in the country—360,000, according to the Chicago Department of Water Management—and a recent Tribune data analysis estimated that seventy percent of homes tested have some lead in their water. Though fixing lead pipes is mentioned in all five of these candidates’ online platforms, only Lightfoot and Vallas touched on the issue in their opening statements. Only Toni Preckwinkle, Amara Enyia, and Susana Mendoza, none of whom attended the forum, use the term “environmental justice” in their platforms. Each of their websites mention green jobs

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and replacing lead pipes as priorities, among other issues such as improving recycling infrastructure and green space. Preckwinkle, who was recently endorsed by Sierra Club, and Mendoza call for transitioning the city to 100 percent renewable energy by 2035. Though each of their plans leave room for specifics, Preckwinkle focuses on making the CTA run on electricity, while Mendoza would create a competitive bidding process among city agencies to subsidize renewable energy credits. Both would pursue utility companies that run on renewable energy, and boosting the solar industry. Enyia aligns herself with the Green New Deal, and dubs her lead pipe replacement initiative a Blue New Deal, which would help offset the costs of replacing lead pipes. Currently, residents and landlords must pay out of pocket, a cost of $2,500 to $8,000 per home. Vallas’s and Preckwinkle’s platforms call for a similar plan. Though this did not come up as a question, some candidates, including Lightfoot and Vallas, found ways to articulate their plans to reinstate the city’s Department of Environment, shuttered in 2011 to save the city money. Vallas added that he would like to have a reinstated Department of Environment overseen by an advisory council. Ford said he would “not trust my expertise” on environmental issues, but would instead ask for input from environmental experts. Enyia’s platform calls for not only reinstating the Department but also calling it the Department of Environmental Justice, the only candidate to suggest such a change. When prompted to give closing remarks, none of the candidates touched on environmental justice. Instead, they made pleas to voters to educate themselves and vote for a candidate committed to ending corruption. For Pamela Saindon, Vice President and chair of the Political Action Committee of the NAACP Chicago Southside Branch, which helped contribute questions to the forum, this election is an opportunity for voters who care about environmental justice. “We are not aware of any mayor that has adequately addressed this issue in recent history,” Saindon said. “The next mayor must ensure that environmental justice is a priority and issues associated to it are being addressed as well as create innovative ideas to combat environmental racism.” Lafayette Ford, sixy-eight, attended the forum to learn more about the candidates and decide who to vote for. A resident of

South Shore for over twenty-three years, he is the president of South Shore Preservation and Planning Coalition and a member of the Board for Black United Fund of Illinois and for South Shore Works. He said that he’s concerned about the Obama Center and other development projects displacing residents on the South Side. “South Shore does not have as much vacant land [as Washington Park] but we do have an interest in what happens with the encouragement of what type of development,” he said. CFPAC is already planning another environmental justice forum for the inevitable mayoral runoff, Cooley said. “There’s very few politicians who can talk about food justice and environmental justice in a very sophisticated way, so the more we can do to get the messaging out, the better.” ¬ Amelia Diehl is a writer and artist born in Hyde Park and raised in Ann Arbor, MI. She is a former intern at In These Times magazine. This is her first piece for the South Side Weekly.

Ice Breakers

A West Side hockey program encourages kids to overcome barriers on and off the ice BY ISI FRANK ATIVIE

n Tuesday afternoons, at the MB Ice Arena on the Near West Side, eleven-year-old Zariah Castleberry adjusts the straps on her hockey helmet, pads, and skates before hobbling over to the ice. She joins ten kids between the ages of seven and seventeen for ninety minutes of skating and stickhandling drills. Zariah comes back to the locker room tired but happy. This is her fourth year playing hockey. The ice hockey practice Zariah attends look like a typical session in a youth program, except most of the kids there are Black or Latinx and come from low-income families on the West Side. Inner-City Education (ICE), the program that organizes the practices, also provides tutoring sessions and academic scholarships. By keeping costs low and welcoming children from neighborhoods like Austin, North Lawndale, Garfield Park and Humboldt Park, ICE is slowly making ice hockey, a predominantly white and wealthy sport, more and more accessible to Chicago’s low-income communities of color. Moreover, graduates and supporters of the program say it provides a wide range of benefits for the kids involved, including improving their confidence, grades and athletic ability, while combating some of the racism and segregation in ice hockey culture. More than any other major sport in the country, ice hockey has resisted the kind of racial and economic integration seen in sports like football and basketball. In 2015, more than ninety percent of NHL players identified as white, with only five percent who were Black, and two percent who were Latino, compared to sixty-seven percent in the NFL or seventy-seven in the NBA who were Black. That segregation extends to the fans as well. In 2013, ninety-two percent of NHL viewers were white. Sociologists who study sports, as well as hockey enthusiasts looking into the issue, explain the stark contrast by pointing to two main factors: cost and culture. Hockey equipment is expensive. The costs for forwards and defensemen range between

$400 and $600, while for goalies it climbs up to $700-1,000. Just a pair of good new ice skates can go for between $500 and $900. Meanwhile, fees for joining an ice hockey program are even higher. Recreational hockey season fees usually cost between $500-1,000, while competitive youth league amateur teams may ask for $3,000-6,000, which includes travel, jerseys, socks, hockey bags, team photos, trophies, and more. Top tier 1 hockey programs can cost between $10,000-20,000. Ice hockey culture in the U.S. is also notoriously racist. The few Black hockey players in this country are faced with discrimination from players and fans alike. Just last year, four Blackhawks fans were banned for chanting “basketball” at Washington Capitals forward Devante Smith-Pelly, who is Black. Chicago SunTimes writer Evan Moore wrote in the Reader about his experiences playing hockey

the idea for ICE after a pick-up game of inline-roller hockey at North Avenue Beach in the late 1990s. “During that pick-up game, I ran into a guy named Greg, who was kind of a new player. And he was a white guy who had a dozen young Black kids with him,” Erickson said in an interview with the Weekly. “So, we started talking after the game, and he knew that I had been playing hockey all of my life. He wanted to put his kids into hockey. He didn’t have a background in hockey, so he asked me if I wanted to help out. And I said yes, I’d love to.” During ICE’s second year, the organization recruited thirty kids on the West Side from each nearby school. The program moved to the Bobby Hull Community ice rink in Cicero, where they found more potential scholars from ages nine through seventeen. Now, ICE hosts clinics at Riis Park Ice Arena, MB Financial

“Black or white, I didn’t know anyone who played organized hockey, but we’re going to try this.” and noted that the sport’s overwhelming whiteness and such reminders of its racist culture push away potential Black players. ICE could be changing that. Founded in 2003, ICE provides ice hockey classes to mostly Black and Latinx kids from low-income communities of color. Brad Erickson, co-founder and executive director, coached its first program all those years ago with ten kids who had never played hockey. Erickson played intramural ice hockey at Bowling Green State University before moving to Chicago in 1996, where he began his youth and amateur ice hockey coaching career. He’s coached for the Chicago Jets, Winnetka Warriors, and Wilmette Tribe, all youth hockey teams. Erickson came up with

Ice Arena, and Bobby Hull Community Rink on the West Side. Every season begins in September and lasts through June. ICE does a few things to make hockey more accessible. It offers hockey equipment practically for free, asking only for a $50 deposit at the beginning of the season for kids who make a full commitment to attend every practice. For every missed practice, $10 is taken away from the deposit. ICE also offers academic scholarships to students who attend every clinic and maintain at least a 3.5 grade point average in school. These scholarships help hockey parents who need assistance in paying for their kids’ tuition at private schools. To support this goal, the program provides

mandatory one-hour tutoring sessions before clinics on Tuesday afternoons and Saturday mornings. In ICE’s first year, the program gave nine academic scholarships. In 2004, ICE gave twenty-one academic scholarships to applicants, and awarded twenty-nine last year. ICE will achieve another milestone by sending thirty-four academic scholarships this year,their fifteenth anniversary. The location of the program makes a difference too. Many of the city’s hockey programs take place at ice rinks on the Far South Side or the Far North Side and surrounding suburbs. By housing the program in an ice rink on the West Side, ICE is accessible for many of its kids’ parents. In order to help raise money for the program, Erickson hosts local Chicago Blackhawks charity events. Former and current Blackhawks players volunteer by playing in pick-up games that help get their loyal fans involved. One of the main fundraising events is an annual bowling fundraiser hosted by Blackhawks defenseman Brent Seabrook. The event has raised over $200,000 in the last two years for academic scholarships. Many parents are glad to have a well-structured and educational program. Zariah’s mother, Karen Castleberry, spoke about how the program not only gave her daughter the opportunity to improve her academics and her ice hockey skills but also opened up the possibility of her daughter pursuing ice hockey in college. “Black or white, I didn’t know anyone who played organized hockey, but we’re going to try this,” said Karen. “Since she previously played soccer and did ballet, I figured she can incorporate all of the things she has already been a part of to be successful on the ice.” Karen adopted Zariah when she was a few months old, a time when her daughter’s health was in jeopardy. Zariah needed a liver, intestine, and pancreas transplant, and it would be several months before she received FEBRUARY 27, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

SPORTS

Kids beat Erickson to the buzzer for a 50/50 raffle prize at a Blackhawks vs. Jets game in Winnipeg

a triple-organ transplant. As her daughter got older, Karen felt that Zariah would be physically capable of playing sports. She believed that if Zariah could overcome tough obstacles with her health, she wouldn’t have an issue with playing hockey. “I love skating and playing with friends, I like everyone at ICE and they’re always nice to me,” Zariah said. “I like Patrick Kane. I don’t think I would continue to play hockey when I get older, but I enjoy playing hockey now.” The idea that ICE can help kids not only play hockey but succeed in other areas runs deep throughout the organization. 8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

Former scholar and current ICE Board Director Darius Mack, the first ever scholarship recipient from the program in 2003, reflected on his experience with the organization. During his time as a scholar with ICE, Mack played for the Chicago Jets youth hockey club. “Working with ICE has been great; there is definitely a feeling of the program going full-circle for me,” Mack said. “I gained a lot from the program, and it feels awesome to give back to kids similar to myself when I was a kid.” “I can relate to the everyday struggles,” Mack continued. “Being from a low-income

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family, these kids and parents know I was there at one point, and can see where I am now. They know about my hockey career, and see that this program could really help them be successful. They get to meet people and have experiences that most might not have on their own. These children display a huge sense of confidence in school, behavior, and overall pride due to this program.” ICE hockey instructor Dave Temkin is starting to see some improvement and adjustment with the hockey scholars. “We have a couple of our kids from ICE who tried out for the Chicago Stallions ice hockey team last spring,” Temkin said. The

ANTHONY NGUYEN

Chicago Stallions are one of the most wellknown youth league teams in the city. “So we’re making a little progress on moving kids up to play in a competitive ice hockey season this year.” “It’s all about growing, and helping more kids,” Erickson said. “The one thing that I love doing every year is calling families and tell them that their child has been awarded a scholarship.” ¬ Isi is a former African-American Chicagoland ice hockey player and current sports journalist. This is his first piece for the Weekly.

From family to friends: you want to be here.

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Photo: Logan Center Family Day Festival, courtesy of Logan Center Community Arts.

POLITICS

Piece by Piece

Englewood activists and aldermanic candidates reflect on how political fragmentation affects the neighborhood BY MARI COHEN AND SAM STECKLOW ELLEN HAO

n 1971, civil rights lawyer Anna Langford became the first Black woman to serve in Chicago’s City Council. An independent, she was elected to represent the 16th Ward, which at the time encompassed much of Englewood, roughly spanning from Stewart over to Ashland, and Garfield down to Marquette. Langford frequently clashed with Mayor Richard J. Daley and became known as a thorn in the side of the machine. Growing up in Englewood, Sonya Harper—a longtime neighborhood organizer who now represents parts of Englewood and surrounding areas in the Illinois House—said she learned from her elders that Englewood was gerrymandered into multiple wards as a challenge to Langford’s power. There’s no definite proof that the political fragmentation of Englewood was intended as a punishment for Langford. But Daley was known for redrawing wards to take power from independents who challenged him, and it is true for that for a variety of reasons—covered in the previous installment of this series—the ward once governed by Langford is now split into five oddly-shaped wards. The 6th, 15th, 16th, 17th, and 20th Wards all have small pieces of Englewood and West Englewood (the 3rd Ward also takes a tiny corner). And the very endurance of the Langford story shows that the neighborhood’s gerrymandering has long weighed heavily on its residents’ minds. “Ever since I got into organizing and working in the community, one of our biggest challenges that we’ve always had is knowing whenever we want to get something done, we have to consult five or six different people,” Harper said. “When people look at the Englewood community and all the challenges that we deal with and how we’re portrayed on the news media, 10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

the one thing that they don’t know is that we’re split up politically and that lends itself to some of the dysfunction that we have. Englewood gets such a bad rap but I believe that that is one of the biggest reasons why.” Combined, the population of the Englewood and West Englewood community areas is 56,818, according to 2016 Census data. That’s roughly the size of a Chicago ward, which, in the last remap, were drawn to range from roughly 51,000– 56,000. But while other communities—like Bridgeport—are largely concentrated in one ward with one elected official to lobby, Englewood’s voting power is split. In 2012, Harper helped organize an Englewood Votes campaign to educate voters about their elected officials and try to increase voter turnout, with the hope that better turnout in the Englewood portions of wards would result in better attention from elected officials. The group registered 400 voters for the 2012 presidential elections, and hosted aldermanic forums in 2015. But Englewood’s struggles with voter turnout have continued—precincts within Greater Englewood had a total turnout of 24.6 percent in the February mayoral elections in 2015, much lower than the citywide thirtyfour percent. Englewood has a variety of community groups that organize on the neighborhood level: Resident Association of Greater Englewood (RAGE), Imagine Englewood If, Teamwork Englewood, and many more. But implementing neighborhood-wide projects can require getting as many as five aldermen at the same table to agree on a plan. It “definitely” makes the job harder for Asiaha Butler, the co-founder and director of the Residents Association of Greater Englewood.. “The current status of our community has a lot to do with our political division,” she said in an interview. “It doesn’t

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make [my job] impossible, but it does make it more challenging.” Harper formerly directed Grow Greater Englewood, a nonprofit that aims to support community-based agriculture and food businesses. Recently, she said, Grow Greater Englewood has hit a snag while attempting to get aldermanic approval to place more urban farmers on land in the urban agriculture district, which runs across the planned Englewood Line rail-totrail project on 59th Street. The proposed Englewood Line runs from Halsted to Damen—crossing through the 15th, 16th, and 20th Wards—and the aldermen haven’t always agreed on whether to approve the group’s plans. “All the aldermen aren’t talking together,” said Anton Seals Jr., Grow Greater Englewood’s current director. “I think for many of the community groups it puts pressure on us to organize across the neighborhood. It kind of stalls the project when we don’t have everyone on the same note or even sometimes in the same book.” Toni Foulkes, who has represented much of Englewood as first the 15th and now 16th Ward alderman since 2007, said that the project has been delayed partially due to disagreement among the neighborhood’s aldermen, because 15th Ward Alderman Raymond Lopez had a different idea, involving building a loop in the trail up to 47th Street. Foulkes said in a phone interview that Lopez’s idea will “never manifest,” and added that now all the relevant aldermen are in support of the project as proposed—“There’s nobody pulling against it.” There is perhaps no better recent example of the ways in which political fragmentation has hurt and displaced residents of Englewood than the expansion of the Norfolk Southern rail yard. In

2013, City Council approved the shipping company’s long-gestating plan to expand its 47th Street rail yard eighty acres south, into a residential corner of Englewood. The outgoing alderman, Willie Cochran— currently serving out the rest of his term under federal bribery charges—supports the project, and has received thousands in donations from Norfolk Southern since its approval. In the recently-released documentary The Area, current and former residents strongly criticized Cochran for being nearly invisible on the issue. Foulkes attended a community meeting about the expansion when she was still 15th Ward alderman, “and I was the only alderman there,” she said in an interview. “The only thing I could tell [residents], unfortunately, was that the alderman they needed to talk to, they’re not here.” Butler said she didn’t think the project would have gone forward with a less fragmented ward map. Some residents feel that because most of the wards have power bases outside of Englewood, the neighborhood sees less financial investment. “All of the funds are split up to all these different areas, but the funds don't seem to make it to none of these different areas [of Englewood], really,” said Joseph Williams, a West Englewood resident and candidate for 15th Ward alderman. In fact, according to a Weekly analysis of 2017 and 2018 “menu money” that aldermen can distribute for infrastructure repairs and improvements throughout their ward, the money apportioned to Englewood projects was generally proportional to the percentage of the ward that is in Englewood. In some wards, Englewood even saw a larger amount of menu money than might be expected given its geographical share of the ward. That the opposite perception exists suggests both that aldermen aren't doing enough to

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Photo: The Seagull. Photo: Matthew Gregory Hollis, courtesy of UChicago Theater and Performing Studies (TAPS)

POLITICS

IAN HODGSON AND SAM JOYCE

make Englewood residents feel well-served and that the share of menu money doesn't show the whole picture.

he piecemeal development throughout the neighborhood— despite the existence of the 2016 Englewood Quality-of-Life Plan, which all five aldermanic offices worked on—contributes to feelings of neglect. In addition to the Norfolk Southern expansion, many residents and candidates have expressed concern over the other heavy industry making its way to eastern parts of the neighborhood. Recently Mayor Rahm Emanuel maneuvered the headquarters of the city’s Department of Fleet and Facility Management to a site at 69th Street and Wentworth Avenue formerly occupied by Kennedy-King College. The headquarters will also include a maintenance and repair shop for the city’s large trucks, including fire and garbage trucks. Though Emanuel has pitched the project as an engine for economic development in Englewood, it only shifts existing city jobs from the North Side to the South Side, and a retail component across the street that was teased in 2017 has yet to move forward. The project is part of Emanuel’s broader plan to build the $95 million police academy in West Garfield Park: the Fleet and Facility management headquarters formerly sat on a parcel of land on the North Side, which the city sold to developer Sterling Bay to raise funds for the academy. Sterling Bay plans 12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

to build the controversial Lincoln Yards development on that site. The developer has also bought several vacant city lots along Wentworth in Englewood. (A spokesperson for Sterling Bay refused to comment on what the current stage of the plans are, and didn’t respond to follow-up questions regarding whether or not the developer is still working on the site.) The old Kennedy-King site was the “only prime real estate” in the 6th Ward for economic development, said pastor and former police officer Richard Wooten, who is running against 6th Ward Alderman Roderick Sawyer. With the current plan, which is supported by Sawyer, “we didn’t get…new jobs. What we got was the pollution of Fleet Management being shifted from the North Side to the South Side,” he said. “You got the expansion of Norfolk Southern, you got more particles in the air, then you’re adding these major trucks on our road,” said Nicole Johnson, a former CPS teacher and communications manager for Teamwork Englewood—and the only Englewood-based candidate running to represent the 20th Ward—in an interview. “How does that then affect not just our air quality, but our soil and our water? What remediation strategies are going to be employed when you have all these big trucks coming through?” The site of the new megahigh school being built to replace the four Englewood high schools that were closed by CPS last year, as well as an elementary

¬ FEBRUARY 27, 2019

school, are directly next to the Fleet and Facility Management site, separated only by low Metra tracks. “We still don’t know what the effects will be,” added Johnson. Alderman Sawyer’s support was crucial for the success of both the new Englewood high school and its neighboring Fleet and Facility Management headquarters. By extension that means he also enabled Emanuel’s plan to close four high schools in Englewood and to build the police academy in West Garfield Park, the latter of which he also supported directly with a vote. Sawyer did not respond to a request for an interview. Pushing back against criticisms of the Fleet and Facility Management project, Butler framed it in stark terms. “Our misfortune in Englewood is that we have vacant sites that sit for decades…. Until we can have consistent development, it’s really difficult to have opinions about any projects, because there’s not many here. Most people are like, finally, they’re [building] on the old Kennedy-King [site].” Near the intersection of 63rd and Halsted, Foulkes has been building off of the progress made with the TIF-supported Englewood Square mall, which is home to a Whole Foods, Starbucks, and Chipotle. The second phase of the project is gaining momentum, with a data center and a hydroponic urban farming startup cofounded by Elon Musk’s brother both in talks to bring their businesses to strips of city land immediately north and west of the mall. A microbrewery is opening across the street. And immediately north, eighty units of mixedincome housing (including some CHA units) are being developed, as well as two affordable senior housing complexes within a few blocks. This constitutes much of the new housing being built in Englewood, which suffers from chronic vacant buildings and lots throughout, many of which are owned by banks that would rather let them sit abandoned than pay property taxes. Foulkes said that she has proposed transitoriented development around the 63rd and Ashland Green Line stop to Emanuel, who she said was impressed (she jokingly accused him of using her plan for the redevelopment of 63rd and Cottage Grove in Woodlawn), but progress on that has been

slow. At the same time, this spate of development, as well as the planned Englewood Line trail, has sparked fears of displacement; 20th Ward candidate Jeanette Taylor, an education organizer, said that residents told her they felt the new Englewood Square is “not for them.” Geographically, Englewood is well-situated for gentrification, since it’s connected to the city center by transit, with multiple commercial districts and lots of land for development. Additional factors like population decline, a mayor seemingly disinterested in the neighborhood unless it serves as a conduit for his larger schemes, a disenfranchised electorate, and a wildly split representative body on City Council portend a neighborhood vulnerable to displacement. n all of the races for Englewood’s aldermanic seats except the 16th Ward, most of the major talking points have not been Englewood issues. The wideopen race to replace Cochran, a Woodlawn resident, has nine candidates, and five of them are from Woodlawn (the rest are split between Englewood, Back of the Yards, and Washington Park). Nearly all of the myriad forums held, including one co-hosted by the Weekly, have been in Woodlawn, with only one (that the Weekly could find) in Englewood. And though, geographically, more of the ward is taken up by the three other neighborhoods, Woodlawn delivers

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POLITICS

most of its votes. Accordingly, the major issue of the race—the Obama Presidential Center and its impacts, positive and negative—is not particularly likely to engage the Englewood voters in the ward. To Johnson, whose campaign office is in Englewood, the ward’s dependency on the Woodlawn vote has posed a tricky balancing act. “The goal is to get people out to vote who have not been touched”—like those in Englewood, she said. But, given relatively limited campaign resources, she said, “it’s a very fine formula that you have to put together in order to make sure that you get the people that always come out, and also reach out to the people that historically don't come out. They're both the same people; they just want to be heard, and one of them hasn't.” The 15th Ward race, which grew more contentious by the day, became largely focused on Lopez and his perceived unpopularity in the ward, due in large part to his divisive public comments and social media posts about alleged gang members— but also his close ties to political mentor 14th Ward Alderman Ed Burke, his support for the new police academy, and his acceptance of donations from a company that runs private detention centers for ICE. Over a series of forums in Back of the Yards, Brighton Park, and Englewood, none of which Lopez attended, the four challengers provided more or less a united front against him, declining to run against each other. All of them work in anti-violence—Rafael Yañez was a crime prevention specialist with the CPD before retiring this year, Berto Aguayo co-founded the Resurrection Project’s #IncreaseThePeace initiative, Joseph Williams is a former violence interrupter with Cure Violence, and Otis Davis Jr. is a minister and activist—and have similar platforms. At the same time, young grassroots organizers, under the banner ¡Fuera Lopez!, have been demonstrating against the alderman, culminating in a protest outside his Brighton Park ward office the day before the election as part of the City Council Cleanup campaign. The 15th Ward’s shape is especially twisted; it covers a chunk of largely Black West Englewood, but the majority of people in the ward are Latinx residents of Back of the Yards, Brighton Park, and Gage Park. The ward’s power base, therefore, tends to rest outside of West Englewood. (A study of the 2011 remap by two professors at the Illinois Institute of Technology found that 14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

the new 15th Ward map, which transformed the ward from mostly Black to mostly Latinx, was the result of punitive “factional gerrymandering” that might violate tenets of the Voting Rights Act.) This year, of the five candidates, only Williams is a West Englewood resident. Lopez previously ran against Foulkes when she was 15th Ward alderman in 2011, before the ward map was redrawn for the 2015 elections. However, some aldermanic candidates and community groups see a silver lining in the the 15th Ward’s position. “The 15th Ward is one of the few wards where we have the potential to build racial unity, Black and brown specifically, because of the demographics,” said Yañez. Similarly, Voices of West Englewood co-founder Gloria Williams said she has good relationships with community leaders across the ward, and doesn’t see Englewood’s gerrymandering as a problem for her work. “I have a great relationship with the Hispanic community. I don’t see no difference because everybody has to live,” she said. “I feel like we go through the same struggles. They may be going through ICE, we may be going through the Chicago police up here. And that's why I hate the fact that it's really segregated the way it is because when you really look at it, we all are facing the same exact issues,” said Williams. “A mental facility closed down in the Back of the Yards, a mental facility closed over here in West Englewood. So when you look at it, we're almost living the exact same life.” Yet Lopez has been criticized for contributing to divisiveness instead of unity. “We have an alderman who divides our community,” said Yañez, the candidate with the most money and endorsements after Lopez. Yañez alleges that Lopez pits neighborhoods in the ward against one another: “[He] goes to one side of it a community and tells them one thing about, for example, West Englewood. He goes to another part of the community and tells them one thing about Brighton Park.” An anonymous flyer posted in West Englewood said that more demolition permits have been issued in that neighborhood on Lopez’s watch than anywhere else. (Logan Square has topped the list for demolition permits in recent years, but West Englewood had the city’s most residential demolitions in 2016, while only two permits for construction were issued, according to Crain’s.) Lopez did not respond to a request to be interviewed for this story, but he has said on Twitter that his “leadership transcends race or geographic

¬ FEBRUARY 27, 2019

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politics, brought the entire ward together, and addressed decades-old neglect in ways nobody imagined possible.” Lopez does have two offices, one in West Englewood and one in his home neighborhood Brighton Park. In 2015, Lopez opened the West Englewood office in a building owned by the domestic violence shelter Clara’s House and then failed to pay months of rent. Lopez’s opponents say this contributed to the shelter’s closure. (Lopez denies wrongdoing, according to DNAinfo’s 2017 coverage of the dispute.) He won the West Englewood section of the ward handily in 2015, but a challenger from that part of the ward (Williams) and the growing progressive critiques of his record could affect his totals there this year. The relatively low-key races in the 6th and 17th Wards are also focused outside of Englewood. Incumbent Alderman Roderick Sawyer and challengers Richard Wooten and Deborah Foster-Bonner are all residents of the greater Chatham area; Wooten and Foster-Bonner are in leadership roles at nonprofits the Greater Chatham Alliance and Reunite Chatham, respectively, though Wooten is an Englewood native and worked in the CPD’s Englewood district for a decade. He said that the area’s fragmentation has contributed to its decline. (The 6th Ward has historically been centered in Chatham.) In the 17th Ward, one-term incumbent Alderman David Moore faces Rush University Hospital employee Raynetta Greenleaf, an activist in Auburn Gresham, who, despite support from the Teamsters, has raised little money to challenge him with. Moore, for his part, said in an interview that he works well with Foulkes and Sawyer to represent Englewood, and that he’s worked with Lopez on school advocacy. More than half the 16th Ward is in Englewood—it’s the only ward for which that’s the case—and all of its candidates for alderman are residents of the neighborhood. The race has centered around accusations that Foulkes is absent, and that her lead challenger Stephanie Coleman is simply an example of Chicago political nepotism; she is the daughter of former Alderman Shirley Coleman, who represented the ward from 1991 to 2007. Coleman forced Foulkes into a runoff last election and beat her in the Democratic ward committeeman race a year later. She has received considerable support from establishment politicians, including Governor J.B. Pritzker, 34th Ward Alderman Carrie Austin, and state Senator Tony Muñoz, as well as developers, charter

school boosters, and TV personality and former Detroit judge Greg Mathis. The Weekly attempted to schedule an interview with Coleman before the election without success, but she said at a

decreasing population, and wary of the gerrymandering that has preceded them, most interviewed said that the redrawing process in 2011 hurt residents, who were, in Foulkes’s description, “bamboozled.”

In all of the races for Englewood’s aldermanic seats except the 16th Ward, most of the major talking points have not been Englewood issues. candidate forum in Englewood last month that she will be a fighter for the ward— implying that Foulkes is not. (Foulkes did not attend the forum.) Eddie Johnson III, a CPS educator, went further in an interview, criticizing Foulkes for her fifty-seven percent attendance rate at City Council committee meetings, which WBEZ reported this month. Possibly in response, Foulkes’s campaign recently released a map of the projects she has completed in her last term, or that are underway. She said in an interview that the projects amount to about $175 million in economic development. When asked about Coleman’s political supporters, most of whom have few ties to Englewood, she asked, “What is their interest? Because Englewood is hot, and it’s a lot of money to be made.”

“We need to change the formula being used,” Foster-Bonner, a Chatham resident, said. “There’s no reason why I’m here representing almost a third of the ward.… I don’t know [other parts]. I’m trying to get to know [them].” Aguayo is canvassing with University of Chicago sociologist Rob Vargas, who studies how gerrymandering increases violence. “We’re having these

conversations about what would it look like to have a truly equitable map in this part of the city of Chicago,” he said, saying he hears from many residents of his home neighborhood of Back of the Yards that they are similarly frustrated at being divided into five wards. Richard Wooten summed up the urgency of the remap: “We have to have people in position right now talking about how they want Englewood to look in the political arena, because if you’re not talking about it now, you’ve already lost.” ¬ Christian Belanger, Joshua Falk, Ian Hodgson, Sam Joyce, Samantha Smylie, and Yao Xen Tan contributed reporting. Mari Cohen is the Weekly’s workshop manager and a senior editor. Sam Stecklow is a managing editor of the Weekly and a journalist with the Invisible Institute.

ultiple candidates—including Williams, 20th Ward candidates Jennifer Maddox and Nicole Johnson, and 16th Ward candidate Eddie Johnson III—have suggested that one solution to solve the fragmentation, at least before a new ward map can be negotiated, is to create an informal council of Englewood aldermen. “I want to find ways that we can collaborate on smaller projects—start small, and build that trust, because that’s what the issue is,” Nicole Johnson said. “There’s a lack of trust between colleagues and what people’s intentions are, and who’s going to get credit for it. And you know, that’s the name of the game here. Politics is, let me make sure my name is on it.” She suggested going even further, proposing that certain grant or tax monies be only made available to aldermen who regionally plan within the city with their neighboring wards. And all of the candidates have their eyes on the 2020 remap. Conscious of the FEBRUARY 27, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

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MUSIC

The Sonic Chemistry of Isaiah Collier

The saxophonist talks to the Weekly about his new album and musical déjà vu BY KRISHNA S. KULKARNI

e have so many millennia of information recorded in our frickin’ DNA, and all it takes is the right time and place to trigger it,” says saxophonist Isaiah Collier. “Something like that happens for me sonically.” At twenty, Collier has already shared a stage with Chance the Rapper and appeared at jazz festivals across the world. These accolades make his disarming charm and unassuming composure all the more striking. I sat down with him a few weeks ago to discuss his musical philosophy over a plate of sushi. Under the looping choruses of Top 40 hits, we talked about everything from genetics to folk music. Collier’s roots in the Chicago jazz scene run deep. A Park Manor resident and a graduate of the Jazz Institute of Chicago, he recently returned to his hometown after spending a few years at the Brubeck Institute in Stockton, California. Mentorship by local giants like Willie Pickens and James Perkins Jr. has given way to performances with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and, most recently, with his own band, The Chosen Few. But Collier’s introduction to the world of jazz had a decidedly humbler tone. Less than a decade ago, a flyer for a music camp caught in a Chicago breeze landed fortuitously in his mother’s face, giving him his first shot at the saxophone. Years went by and his passion grew. His father, a keyboardist and singer, would bring a twelve-year-old

Collier to play along at gigs. “And I was like, ‘Oh crap! I made twenty bucks doing that!’ But it really put some perspective on it,” Collier said. He remembers thinking, “Wait, I can actually make some money doing this?” Soon, Collier would be playing for his local church, reviving the classic R&B tunes he heard as a child for new audiences. Collier discovered the philosophy behind jazz from an unlikely source. “I was hanging out with one of my dad's friends who was trying to help me improvise, and he told me, “learn how to play ‘Happy Birthday!,’ ” Collier exclaimed, “Anyone can play a song, but it doesn’t speak, have meaning…it’s all about making it yours. If everyone is saying the same thing, then you’ve got a problem.” From there, his musical career grew, taking him to jazz festivals from Hyde Park to California. It’s culminated in the formation of his band, Isaiah Collier and the Chosen Few. In 2017, the group independently released its first album, Return of the Black Emperor. The haunting ballad “I Am Who I Be” lines up next to the seismic bursts of “War Song” and the evocative wails of “Mali,” each displaying Collier’s versatile style. But it is the title song, “Return of the Black Emperor,” that demonstrates the heart of Collier’s approach to his craft. On one level, the listener hears an assured conversation with the legends of saxophone as he channels the creative force

SIENA FITE

FEBRUARY 27, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

of John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter. But Collier doesn’t aim to mimic these giants of the genre. “It’s a dialect I understand,” he commented, “Like, when I think about Charlie Parker and all these cats, I’m not thinking about sounding like them: it’s a style. You’ve gotta be vulnerable enough to put yourself out there.” Instead, he injects his interests—from Mayan folk music to flamenco—into the picture. As he describes it, music, like déjà vu, activates something buried in his subconscious. “I think it really just comes down to a genetic thing. Part of you has been somewhere that made this kind of music.” Collier is fascinated by how genetics, history, and music might operate in tandem. Jazz, like hip-hop, relies on excavating the rhythms and chords latent in our cultures and retrofitting them to speak to present concerns. “It’s weird,” he pondered, “it’s like we’re reaching backward and forward at the same time.”

n an era when opportunities for young artists are shrinking as clubs shut their doors, school arts budgets are cut, and record companies pursue algorithmicallycrafted pop progressions for the mass market, Collier is trying his hand at preserving accessible jazz education for kids. He’s conducted master classes at Chicago High School for the Arts and at several schools on the South Side, and has been involved with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) of Chicago. “It’s in [kids’] blood; they don’t know unless they try,” Collier said. “And there are so many different versions of themselves, but they need to have an example.” In his eyes, the perpetual struggle of the Black community in America has motivated near-continuous bursts of artistic innovation that have snowballed over time. Jazz embodies that legacy. “If you wanna talk about jazz, we gotta start further than that, with gospel, and if you wanna talk about that, then we gotta start with the blues, and for that, we’ve gotta talk about ragtime, and the Negro spirituals. It’s like we’re telling [all those stories] at once,” Collier told me with a smile. “It’s the message of the ancestors, man.” And those ancestors speak loud and clear in every chord, blues progression, and vocal harmony. “We have to stress the history. I try to make sure that the children know that. I’m telling you to know your history. Because that’s what makes jazz so 18 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

unique. It’s tailor-made for everybody who plays it. Any of us can come from different perspectives on it, and that’s what makes it so infinite.”

s we spoke, Collier reflected on how one of his mentors, James Perkins Jr., once inquired about his algebra skills. “And I would wonder why he was asking me this,” Collier mused, “And he’d say, ‘There’s no difference.’” His confusion, he remembered, soon gave way to epiphany. “They’re all utilizing the same type of properties. Music is just a sonic version of chemistry. It’s a giant painting, in a museum we can all visit.” Towards the end of our conversation, Collier showed me an image on his phone. Mistaking the star-shaped drawing for some kind of Da Vinci diagram, I asked him what it meant. “It’s John Coltrane’s spiritual geometry,” he said, “his Circle of Fifths, for ‘A Love Supreme.’ ” Considering that pentagram, with its intricate lines producing an eerie symmetry, I felt the gravity of Collier’s words on jazz. Mathematics, science, music—glued together through the sheer force of belief. Sonic chemistry, indeed. ¬ Krishna S. Kulkarni is a Master’s student at the University of Chicago, where he studies Middle Eastern history. He writes about food, music, and the people who craft them. He lives in Kenwood.

¬ FEBRUARY 27, 2019

On the Frontiers of Community Healthcare Brighton Park’s new Esperanza clinic will combine medical and social services BY AMELIA ALDRED

n March of 2018, Esperanza Health Centers broke ground on a new clinic in Brighton Park. When it opens this spring, the clinic staff, community partners, and potential patients want it to break ground in community healthcare delivery as well. Esperanza, a community healthcare provider, is partnering with Mujeres Latinas en Acción, an advocacy and social services organization for Latinas, to establish the clinic that will provide primary care and mental healthcare for adults and children in the same facility, while also housing specialized health and social services programs for survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. Integration of these services, and the partnership between a health provider and a local advocacy organization, has rarely, if ever, been tried before. “With this project we want to create a new model of how a community primary care and mental healthcare provider like Esperanza can work with a social services and advocacy organization like Mujeres,” said Linda Tortolero, president and CEO of Mujeres Latinas en Acción. “How can we move the needle on this approach?” Currently, residents of Brighton Park find it difficult to access high-quality primary care or mental healthcare in their own neighborhood. “I used to go to a clinic on the North Side of Chicago, but when I moved to the South Side, I struggled to find a clinic that would accept my health plan

and had good doctors,” said Sugey López, thirty-three, a current patient at another Esperanza clinic. In a 2018 report by the Collaborative for Community Wellness on health needs of the Southwest Side, residents reported that geographic access was one of the top barriers to receiving mental healthcare—not stigma, as it is commonly assumed. Esperanza Health Centers chose Brighton Park as its newest location in order to be closer to its patient population. The other Esperanza clinics are located in Marshall Square, Little Village, and Marquette Park. “Brighton Park is a healthcare desert,” said Esperanza CEO Dan Fulwiler. “Ninety-five percent of physician capacity is north of the Stevenson Expressway and fifty percent of our patients live south of the Stevenson Expressway, so while doing our strategic plan, Esperanza decided to build in Brighton Park.” Residents dealing with unique mental health issues like sexual assault or intimate partner violence have the additional burden of travelling to several different locations to access trauma-focused mental healthcare, primary care, and social services, since no organization offers all three at the same site. “Domestic violence is a public safety and public health issue,” Tortolero said. She hopes that the clinic will better support survivors on their path to healing and empowerment by offering mental healthcare that includes specialists in domestic violence recovery. “The Chicago Battered Women's

HEALTH

of their patients. Because a coordinated network is able to provide care more efficiently—by not duplicating medical procedures, for examples—they may spend less money per patient. When those savings come from patients on Medicare, the money is given back to the ACO by the federal government. The goal of ACO contracts, ultimately, is to reduce healthcare spending while increasing health outcomes.

SOFIE LIE

Network is helping hospitals scale up their awareness of signals that domestic violence is taking place, but this project is more about how healthcare providers can scale up the wellness path, and seeing if it will lead to better outcomes.” Mujeres Latinas en Acción already offers specialized mental health services for domestic violence survivors, and is one of three free supervised visitation programs in the city. It is the only one providing services in both English and Spanish. In 2016, the Chicago Metropolitan Battered Women’s Network, together with Loyola University Chicago Center for Urban Research and Learning, reported that while emergency shelter needs decreased among survivors after receiving assistance from Chicago-area agencies, survivors’ needs for counseling, healthcare, and divorce-specific help went largely unmet. Once completed, the Esperanza clinic will be the only clinic in Brighton Park that provides primary care, mental health,

and community health programs for both children and adults in one setting. The clinic will have internal medicine, ob-gyn services, counseling, and psychiatry. The Brighton Park location will have thirty exam rooms, eight counseling rooms, and the capacity to serve approximately 20,000 patients. The clinic will house a playground, community kitchen, and community garden that will be available to the broader public, not just those being treated at the clinic. These additions came about in response to feedback from focus groups made up of Brighton Park residents, and are part of Esperanza’s push to integrate many forms of community wellness.

speranza is breaking ground not only in what services it will offer, but how it will offer them. According to Dan Fulwiler, Esperanza Health Centers accepts almost any insurance, including Medicaid plans, Medicare, and private insurance. For uninsured patients, they offer income-

[It] will be the only clinic in Brighton Park that provides primary care, mental health, and community health programs for both children and adults in one setting.

based fees: thirty to eighty-five dollars for comprehensive healthcare services, and five to forty-five dollars for mental health counseling. For those without income, such as people experiencing homelessness, the fee is waived. Last year, twenty-nine percent of Esperanza’s patients were uninsured, according to Ricardo Cifuentes, vice president of external affairs. The new Brighton Park location will be supported through federal funding, individual and foundation donations, and program service fees. According to Esperanza’s 2017 annual report, the organization received fifty-three percent of its revenue from patients, fifteen percent from pharmacy revenue, and the rest from a combination of grants, private donations, and other revenue sources. Providing care on a sliding fee scale for uninsured patients is one of several requirements that Esperanza Health Centers must meet as a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC). FQHCs like Esperanza receive funds from the Health Resources and Services Administration to provide primary care services in underserved areas. Other requirements include operating under a governing board, of which fifty-one percent must be patients. Esperanza is also one of twelve members of Medical Home Network, an Affordable Care Organization (ACO) in Chicago. ACOs are groups of health care providers that voluntarily coordinate care

lthough the new clinic is being built to meet the needs of an underserved area, the clinic administration does not anticipate difficulty in meeting demand. “Despite the need in the community, we don’t actually anticipate exhausting this capacity for quite some time,” said Cifuentes. “Increased demand at our other sites has usually been addressed by hiring additional providers or making additional clinical space available on site.” However, the integration of healthcare services and social services presents a challenge to the new Esperanza clinic. For starters, Esperanza must abide by privacy rules set by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and Mujeres Latinas en Acción are bound by other privacy policies. Under HIPAA, healthcare providers are only allowed to share the minimum amount of medical information necessary to coordinate care with social services agencies, unless the patient authorizes the provider to share additional data. As pioneers in integrated services, Esperanza and Mujeres will have to figure out how to track patient consent while maintaining confidentiality. Despite these uncertainties, Tortolero is eager for the clinic to open. “We believe that primary care and mental health need to embrace a more holistic approach, with regards to what most people in the public consider social services,” she said. “Once we get in the space, I think we are going to see so many new ways we can work together.” Sugey López also has hopes for the new clinic. “We live paycheck to paycheck and sometimes it is difficult to afford appointments and care. I hope the new location has more health services, like a little hospital.” ¬ Amelia Aldred is a writer and fundraising researcher in Chicago. This is her first piece for the Weekly.

FEBRUARY 27, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19

EVENTS

BULLETIN The Black Presence at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton St. Lecture series, Wednesdays starting February 13 through March 20, 5:45pm–7:45pm. Cost $242. Ten percent discount for members, seniors and students. Visit newberry.org for the required materials list and first week’s reading. Register online at newberry.org As part of the Newberry Library’s adult education seminar program, Roosevelt University professor Christopher Reed seeks to question the narrative created by a Columbian-era pamphlet printed in time for the 1893 World’s Fair titled Why the Colored American is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition, which fueled the idea that Black people were excluded from the World’s Fair while failing to document their successful participation in it. Reed is a native Chicagoan who has dedicated decades researching the contributions Black people have made to the city’s growth and development. (Nicole Bond)

SSW Workshop Series: Reporting on Public Meetings South Side Weekly, 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Saturday, March 2, 1pm–3pm. bit.ly/SSWPubMeetings Part of South Side Weekly’s regular workshop series offering hands-on sessions in journalism basics, this event will break down how and why to report on public meetings. Weekly senior editor Olivia Stovicek will lead this workshop, sharing her experience covering public meetings for local outlets including City Bureau’s Documenters program, from City Council committees on zoning to the City Colleges of Chicago Board of Trustees. You’ll have the opportunity to practice finding and preparing to cover a public meeting, so bring a laptop if you can. And feel free to bring an idea of a public body you’d like to know more about. (Ellen Mayer)

20 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

My Midnight Years: Surviving Jon Burge's Torture Ring and Death Row University Church, 5655 S. University Ave. Tuesday, February 28, 5pm–6:30pm. Free. Register at bit.ly/RonaldKitchenReading Ronald Kitchen survived torture at the hands of Jon Burge and his Midnight Crew, he was wrongfully convicted of murder, and spent over a decade on death row. He co-founded Death Row 10, a group of Black men who organized from within prison and helped turn the tide against the death penalty in Illinois. He won his freedom in 2009 and has been organizing for reparations for Burge’s victims ever since. Hear Kitchens read from his memoir The Midnight Years at this event sponsored by the Seminary Co-op and the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights. There will be a book signing and reception following the reading. (Ellen Mayer)

Chicago’s Union Stock Yard and Packingtown: 150 Years of Spectacle and Innovation The Plant, 1400 W. 46th St. Saturday, March 23, 4pm–6pm. Free, RSVP requested. (773) 847-5523. bit.ly/PackingtownLecture In this illustrated lecture, historian Dominic Pacyga will guide listeners through the Union Stock Yard’s journey from slaughterhouse spectacle to, among other things, sustainable food hub. Fittingly, The Plant’s founder will give opening remarks, and “further discussion” (and drinking) will be hosted afterward at Whiner Brewery’s taproom. ( Julia Aizuss)

Fling Rahm at Trump Tower Strapped To The Bean Using The Picasso The Bean, 1 N Michigan Ave. Tuesday, February 26, 12pm–3pm. Free. bit.ly/RahmArtBomb Join 1.5 thousand other Chicagoans for a ceremony to mark the symbolic end of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s tenure (his term actually ends in May). Participants will strap Rahm Emanuel to one iconic piece of public art—Cloud Gate, colloquially known as “The Bean”—and will then fling him at Trump Tower using another iconic piece of public art—The Chicago Picasso— as a catapult. Will this become a new

¬ FEBRUARY 27, 2019

election day tradition? Only time will tell. (Ellen Mayer)

VISUAL ARTS Artists Live: Brandon Breaux and Nikko Washington Logan Center Performance Penthouse, 915 E. 60th St. Wednesday, February 27, 7:30pm– 9:30pm. Free, RSVP recommended. bit.ly/ArtistLiveFebruary27 The Artists Live series features various artists from Chicago’s diverse art scene and beyond. In conversation this week are two Chicago natives who both first became known for their work with Savemoney rappers: Nikko Washington, whose work is currently being exhibited at the Logan Center for the Arts’s café, and Brandon Breaux, artist-in-residence at the UofC’s Arts and Public Life. (Roderick Sawyer)

Speculating the Now: A Panel on Healing Justice Arts and Public Life, 301 E Garfield Blvd. Thursday, February 28, 6pm–7:30pm. Free. bit.ly/SpeculatingTheNow How can we envision new ways of responding to violence in Black and brown communities? Come find out and share your own ideas with youth participants in the Transmedia Collage program and guest speaker Audrey Petty—a writer, educator and editor of High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Public Housing. (Roderick Sawyer)

Invisible College Cobalt Studio, 1950 W 21st St, STOREFRONT. Friday, March 1, 6pm. Free. bit.ly/InvisibleCollege This group art exhibition features a variety of artists working to create their own communities outside of standard institutions. Invisible Colleges are described as “communicating groups forming an unofficial network [that] operates on an implicit circuit of institutions…” Come by and see the work of Chris Silva, Cove, Lauren Feece, and more. (Roderick Sawyer)

South Chicago Dance Theatre Community Workshop Dorchester Art & Housing Collaborative, 1456 E. 70th St. Friday, March 1, 6pm-7pm. Free. bit.ly/SouthChicagoDance South Chicago Dance Theatre will present their West African dance workshop— the fourth session in a series of five dance workshops. Each session seeks to help attendees explore movement and expression and is open to people of all ages and abilities. Save the date for the finale Modern Dance workshop on April 5. (Roderick Sawyer)

Family Day: About Face Smart Museum of Art, 5550 S. Greenwood Ave. Saturday, March 2, 1pm–4pm. Free admission adult at all times. bit.ly/SmartAboutFace Join the Smart as they bring special guest artist Kia Miakka Natisse and her Selfie Portrait Project to Chicago. Participants will have the chance to swap “written portraits,” draw their own portraits, create an imaginative mask, and even have their portrait drawn by a UofC student artist. (Roderick Sawyer)

Artist Talk: Bethany Collins and Samuel Levi Jones Smart Museum of Art, 5550 S. Greenwood Avenue. Saturday, March 2, 6pm. Free. bit.ly/SmartArtTalkFeb25 The Smart Museum presents an Artist talk with Bethany Collins and Samuel Levi Jones. Collins’s work explores the language of flowers (Floriography) while Jones’s work questions the authoritative and institutional power that materials can hold. Both artists are featured in the museum’s current exhibition Solidary & Solitary: The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection. (Roderick Sawyer)

MUSIC Sounds of WWI Concert DuSable Museum of African American History, 740 E. 56th Pl. Wednesday, February 27, 6–7:30pm. Free. (773) 947-0600. dusablemuseum.org A free performance of era-specific martial music from the U.S. Air Force Band of

EVENTS

Kahil El’Zabar’s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble The Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park Ave. Thursday, February 28, doors 7pm. All ages. $10, table seating $18. (312) 801-2100. promontorychicago.com Kahil El’Zabar is many things: a multiinstrumentalist, a maximalist, a former chairman of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. But you can add to the list that he’s performing in Hyde Park with his Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, plus trumpeter Corey Wilkes and saxophonist Alex Harding. (Christopher Good)

Zilched / Sleepwalk / Primer / Basement Family / Energy Vision Bohemian Grove, ask a punk. Saturday, March 2, 8pm. $5. More info at bit.ly/zilched-bohemian BoGro’s latest lineup is practically stacked to the ceiling. Zilched and Primer, both out of Detroit, will bring their Michigander takes on shoegaze and synthpop to McKinley Park—but the evening will be rounded out by local talents like Sleepwalk, melted-surf-rockers Basement Family, and found-sound drone duo Energy Vision. (Christopher Good)

WHPK’s Pictures and Sounds Experimental Station, Friday, March 8, 6pm–9pm. Free. (773) 241-6044. experimentalstation.org At this perennial event from Hyde Park’s WHPK radio, sight and the sonic bleed together. Norman Long will read selections from Ida B. Wells’s poetry, and “composer, clarinetist, singer & spiritual jazz soothsayer” Angel Bat Dawid will perform with her six-piece Brothahood ensemble, while animator Marvin Tate and visual artist Jonathan Woods construct visual art in real time. (Christopher Good)

TEEN

STAGE & SCREEN

OPPORTUNITY

Urban Bush Women/ Hair & Other Stories

FAIR 2019

The Dance Theater, Columbia College 1306 S. Michigan. Thursday–Saturday, February 28– March 2, 7:30pm. Tickets $30, $24 seniors, $10 students. bit.ly/UrbanBushWomentix

Recreation, Education & Job Readiness An opportunity for Chicago Teens, ages 13 to 19, to learn about programs and get information in the following fields: Recreation, Educational/Vocational Opportunities, and Job Readiness.

Described by the New York Times as triple-threat performers with a searing sense of truthfulness, Chicago favorites Urban Bush Women present a multidisciplinary work of dance, music, and humor to unpack the narrative around selfimage, race, gender identity, and economic inequities, through the lens of Black women’s hair. (Nicole Bond)

Saturday, March 2nd 10AM to 1PM

Kennedy King College “U” Building

740 W. 63rd St. - Chicago, IL 60621 Activity Code: 265569

In the Blood eta Creative Arts Foundation, 7558 S. South Chicago Ave. Friday, March 8–Sunday, March 31. Fridays and Saturdays, 8pm; Sundays, 3pm and 7:30pm; Industry Night Thursdays, 8pm. $35, $25 seniors, $15 students. (773) 752-3955. etacreativearts.org

Advanced registration is encouraged @ www.ChicagoParkDistrict.com MAYOR RAHM EMANUEL Chicago Park District Board of Commissioners Michael P. Kelly, General Superintendent & CEO

STAY CONNECTED.

@ChicagoParks

@ChiTeensInThePark

For more information about your Chicago Park District, visit our website at www.chicagoparkdistrict.com or call 312-742-PLAY (7429) or 312-747-2001 (TTY)

If you found yourself rooting for Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, you will be riveted once again by Hester La Negrita (Nyajai Ellison) in a contemporary drama, written by Pulitzer Prize winner SuzanLori Parks and inspired by the classic novel. This production is directed by Aaron Reese Boseman of Pulse Theatre Company as part of eta’s Vagabond Theatre Series, and includes an original musical score by Paris Ray Dozier. (Nicole Bond)

Photo: Hayim Heron

Mid-America will bring new depth to the DuSable’s exhibition on Black regiments in the Illinois National Guard, “Clearing a Path for Democracy: Citizen Soldiers of the Fighting 8th in WWI.” (Christopher Good)

The Last Days of Judas Iscariot University Church, 5655 S. University Ave. March 1–3 and March 8–10. Fridays and Saturdays, 7:30pm; Sundays, 2pm. $12, students and seniors $10. hydeparkcommunityplayers.org Set in a reimagined world somewhere between Heaven and Hell, the Hyde Park Community Players present a serious yet funny exploration of big questions and concepts, like: What is evil? Who decides who is a villain? Is there a conflict between divine mercy and human free will? And how does anyone make sense of it all? This is a Stephen Adly Guirgis play, directed by Leslie Halverson. (Nicole Bond)

URBAN BUSH WOMEN February 28–March 2, 2019 7:30 p.m. TICKETS $30 REGULAR / $24 SENIORS / $10 STUDENTS

dance.colum.edu

FEBRUARY 27, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 21

EVENTS

FOOD & LAND

Queens of the Nile Culture Connection 360, 400 W. 71st St. Saturday, March 2, 3pm–6pm. $20. (773) 527-6015. bit.ly/QueensoftheNile As Black History Month moves into Women’s History Month, acclaimed scholar, historian, and author Dr. Runoko Rashidi delivers a live presentation on Queens of the Nile, informed by his many Egyptian travels. (Nicole Bond)

Louder Than A Bomb Various locations, dates and times for preliminary bouts now through March 2. Team Finals: Auditorium Theatre, 50 E. Ida B. Wells Dr (formerly Congress Pkwy). Sunday, March 17, 6pm–9pm. Doors 5pm. $20 adults, $10 students. (312) 341-2300. youngchicagoauthors.org It’s that time of year again—for LTAB, the largest annual youth poetry festival in Chicago and the world. The final competition on March 17 features the four top-scoring teams from over 120 Chicagoland high schools and a headlining celebrity guest. But you can show your support at the preliminary bouts throughout the city, happening now through March 2. Several schools are repping the South Side: Butler College Prep, CICS Longwood, Kenwood Academy, Lindblom Math and Science Academy, and many more. Take note—this year no pre-sale tickets will be sold for preliminary bouts. Those can be purchased at the venue the day of, and are $6 for adults and $4 for students. (Nicole Bond)

South Side Irish Film Festival Beverly Arts Center, 2407 W. 111th St. Saturday, March 2, beginning at 3pm. (773) 445-3838. beverlyartcenter.org Celebrate a two-week head start to the South Side Irish Parade with a full day of Irish-themed programming at the Beverly Arts Center. The afternoon features the children’s film Song of the Sea, while the early evening boasts a pre-movie reception with live traditional Irish fiddle music at 6pm. The night continues with the Irish revenge thriller Black ’47 at 7pm, followed by dancing and a cash bar. (Nicole Bond)

One Earth Film Festival

Indoor Farmers Markets 61st Street Farmers Market: Experimental Station, 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. The second Saturday of every month, 9am–2pm. experimentalstation.org

The Superfood Chain: University of Chicago Lab School, Gordon Parks Assembly Hall, 5815 S. Kimbark Ave. Wednesday, March 6, 6pm–8pm. Free.

Pilsen Community Market: Honky Tonk BBQ, 1800 S. Racine Ave. Sundays, 11am– 3:30pm. facebook.com/pilsenmarket

Dreaming of a Vetter World: Beverly Arts Center, 2407 W. 111th St. Wednesday, March 6, 6:30pm–8:30pm. $6.

Plant Chicago Farmers Market: The Plant, 1400 W. 46th St. The first Saturday of each month, 11am–3pm. plantchicago.org

From the Ashes: University of Illinois at Chicago Student Center East, 750 S. Halsted St. Thursday, March 7, 5pm–8:30pm. Free.

Just because it’s cold doesn’t mean your need for fresh produce, chef demonstrations, and shopping with your neighbors is gone. This winter, the three above-listed markets are sticking around and moving indoors to make sure your needs are fulfilled. Each market offers slightly different pleasures, and all are worth making a regular habit. (Sam Stecklow)

RiverBlue: University of Chicago Green Line Performing Arts Center, 329 E. Garfield Blvd. Thursday, March 7, 7pm–9pm. Free.

One Earth Film Festival: March 1–10 Home: Jackson Park Fieldhouse, 6401 S. Stony Island Ave. Saturday, March 2, 3pm–5pm. Free. RiverBlue: Columbia College, Music Center, 1014 S. Michigan Ave. Saturday, March 2, 3pm–5pm. Birders: The Central Park Effect: St. Benedict the African Parish, 6550 S. Harvard Ave., the King Room. Sunday, March 3, 11am–1pm. The Human Element: Museum of Science and Industry, 5700 S. Lakeshore Dr. Sunday, March 3, 1pm–4:30pm. $10. Call of the Forest: St. James Church, 19 E. 29th Pl. Sunday, March 3, 1:30pm–3:30pm. Free. The Carnivore’s Dilemma: St. Paul and the Redeemer Episcopal Church, 4745 S. Dorchester Ave. Sunday, March 3, 6pm–8pm. Free. Living in the Future’s Past: Lutheran School of Theology, 1100 E. 55th St. Monday, March 4, 6pm–8pm. Free. Backyard Wilderness: The Ancona School, 4770 S. Dorchester Ave. Tuesday, March 5, 6:30pm–8:30pm. Free.

See our Food and Land calendar for details 22 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

The Guardians: Toman Library, Chicago Public Library. 2708 S. Pulaski Rd. Wednesday, March 6, 6pm–8pm. Free.

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Inventing Tomorrow: Namaste Charter School, 3737 S. Paulina St. Thursday, March 7, 6pm–8:30pm. Free. An American Ascent: Trinity United Church of Christ, 400 W. 95th St. Saturday, March 9, 5pm–7pm. Free. The World Before Your Feet: Experimental Station, 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Saturday, March 9, 6:30pm–9pm. Free. Register at bit.ly/OneEarthWBYF Every March, One Earth Film Festival puts on ten days worth of thought-provoking environmental films across the Chicagoland area, bringing local experts and organizers to most film screenings for dialogue. This year, choose from films about birds in New York’s Central Park, a family discovering the wilderness in their backyard, river conservation, and many, many more. (Emeline Posner)

Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton St. Tuesday, March 5, 6pm–7pm. Free. Registration required at bit.ly/LandscapesofHope In his most recent book, Lake Forest College environmental studies professor Brian McCammack delineates the African-American experience of green spaces during the Great Migration as one of refuge and relaxation, as well as of discrimination and violence. At this event, McCammack will talk about his research and sign book copies. (Emeline Posner)

We canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t wait to see you here.

logancenter.uchicago.edu Logan Center for the Arts 773.702.ARTS 915 E 60th St loganUChicago

Photo: Logan Center at the University of Chicago, by Tom Rossiter.

Logan Center Family Saturday: Childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Bookathon

Sat, March 2 24:30pm FREE

arts.uchicago.edu/familysaturdays 773.702.ARTS LoganCenterCommunity Arts

Childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s books are the bedrock of many of our childhoods. Join us to continue this tradition as we celebrate the whimsical authors and artists who spin creative stories and make beautiful illustrations that transport us to another time and place.

Logan Center for the Arts 915 E 60th St Appropriate for families with children ages 2-12. Registration is encouraged. Free parking in lot at 60th and Drexel.