The South Side Weekly is an independent non-profit newspaper by and for the South Side of Chicago. We provide high-quality, critical arts and public interest coverage, and equip and develop journalists, artists, photographers, and mediamakers of all backgrounds.
Volume 11, Issue 18
Editor-in-Chief Jacqueline Serrato
Managing Editor Adam Przybyl
Investigations Editor Jim Daley
Senior Editors Martha Bayne
Christopher Good
Olivia Stovicek
Sam Stecklow
Alma Campos
Politics Editor J. Patrick Patterson
Music Editor Jocelyn Martínez-Rosales
Immigration Editor Wendy Wei
Community Builder Chima Ikoro
Public Meetings Editor Scott Pemberton
Visuals Editor Kayla Bickham
Deputy Visuals Editor Shane Tolentino
Staff Illustrators Mell Montezuma
Shane Tolentino
Staff Reporter Michael Liptrot
Director of Fact Checking: Savannah Hugueley
Fact Checkers: Cordell Longstreath
Rubi Valentin
Isi Frank Ativie
Patrick Edwards
Cesar Toscano
Christopher Good
Layout Editor Tony Zralka
Executive Director Malik Jackson
Office Manager Mary Leonard
Advertising Manager Susan Malone
Webmaster Pat Sier
The Weekly publishes online weekly and in print every other Thursday. We seek contributions from all over the city.
Send submissions, story ideas, comments, or questions to editor@southsideweekly.com or mail to:
South Side Weekly
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IN CHICAGO
Board of Education fiasco
On Monday, October 7, Mayor Brandon Johnson appointed six new individuals to the Board of Education, in place of the seven that resigned in unison last Friday, October 4. The resignations came amid an ongoing battle between Chicago Public Schools (CPS) CEO Pedro Martinez and the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) to finalize the union’s contract and approve a $300 million loan to cover a $175 million pension payment that was shifted onto the district by former mayor Lori Lightfoot, as well as salary increases and other concessions to improve working conditions for teachers and students. In early October, after months of negotiation, Johnson called for CEO Martinez’s resignation, and in what became an even more fraught battle between the district, the mayor’s office, CTU, and the Board of Education, the Board of Education was the first domino to fall. According to the Sun-Times, Board members were reluctant about the tradeoffs that come with the potential $300 million loan. While they do not want to see cuts in school funding, questions around whether the loan is a financially responsible solution in the long-term were raised. This was the stance of Martinez and the district, who have claimed that even just ten percent of CTU’s proposals could create a $4 billion deficit for the district by the 2029-30 school year. The question of school funding remains prominent in national debate, as a decades-long onslaught on public schooling has left many districts stratified and under-resourced. In Johnson’s press conference on Monday, he referenced years of disinvestment, mentioning Arne Duncan as the “chief architect” of austerity in the district. Will the district continue on a path of incremental, responsible, albeit insufficient investment in public schools? Or will the mayor’s new appointees push through a loan approval that would see significant, and relatively unprecedented investment in Chicago’s public schools?
East Coast ports strike successful
After less than a week, the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) strike has ended. Workers and management are said to have reached an agreement, the union announced on Thursday. Last Tuesday, October 1st, port workers on the East and Gulf Coast began their strike in response to an insufficient contract offered by their employers, the United States Maritime (USMX). The ILA, which represents 45,000 workers along the coast as far north as Maine and along the Gulf Coast in Louisiana and Texas, raised demands regarding pay raises for dock workers, improvements to their retirement plans, and more autonomy over the usage of technology and automation. “The biggest concern is, the dock workers do not want automated machines to be responsible for picking up, dropping off, and releasing the cargo automatically,” said Art Wheaton, director of labor studies at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations (via Vox). Instead, dock workers would prefer human operators, citing concerns for safety, quality, and job security. This was the first East Coast port strike since 1977, and with more than fifty percent of containerized imports and seventy percent of containerized exports coming through these ports, many expressed fear of a supply shortage in the near future. These goods include several products from fruits and fish to clothing, toys and electronics. However, ILA port workers returned to work the following Friday after reaching a preliminary deal. The agreement includes an additional $4/hour, according to CNN, as well as five subsequent pay raises during the workers’ six year contracts. Both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris commended dockworkers and congratulated them on reaching an agreement.
IN THIS ISSUE
a letter to t-spoon
A sportswriter bids farewell to former Sky head coach Teresa Weatherspoon.
The Illinois Department of Corrections shouldn’t ban mail and books in prisons. midwest books to prisoners 6 public meetings report
A recap of select open meetings at the local, county, and state level.
scott pemberton and documenters 7 a cumbia renaissance
Cumbia classics get a new spin at South Side venues.
charlie kolodziej ................................... 9 desde el sur de chicago para el mundo
Las canciones clásicas de la cumbia toman un nuevo giro en el Studio 51. por charlie kolodziej traducido por alma campos 10 el barrio art show celebrates latinx heritage
The Ruidosa Art Collective aims to unite youth and uplift creativity and culture. madeline cruz 12 shotspotter routinely missed reported shootings, city data shows
In a recent 20-month period, more than 20% of shootings and reckless discharges in Chicago’s coverage area had no corresponding ShotSpotter alert. max blaisdell, ethan corey, and jim daley 13 what’s after shotspotter?
Deputy Mayor Garien Gatewood discussed the City’s public safety plans post-ShotSpotter. jim daley ................................................. 15 new book sifts through chicago house music’s complex history
An interview with Marguerite L. Harrold, author of Chicago House Music: Culture and Community evan f. moore .......................................... 17 chicago’s latinx neighborhoods have less access to parks, but residents are working to change that
In majority Latinx neighborhoods like Brighton Park, residents have come together to push the city to invest more in parks and neighborhood green spaces in the face of climate change. aydali campa, borderless magazine ..... 19 improvements on archer/kedzie corridor would boost safety and connect neighborhoods
CDOT proposal could drastically shift quality of life in and around Brighton Park, but the State must step in to make larger changes.
A sportswriter bids farewell to former Sky head coach Teresa Weatherspoon.
BY MAYA GOLDBERG-SAFIR
On September 27, the Chicago Sky fired head coach Teresa Weatherspoon (affectionately called “T-Spoon” by fans and players) less than a year after hiring her. T-Spoon, a Women’s Basketball Hall of Famer, led the team to a 13-27 season in her first year as a WNBA head coach; the Sky fell two games short of making the playoffs for the first time since 2018. After the announcement, the Sky’s star forward Angel Reese tweeted that she was “heartbroken” by the decision. Maya Goldberg-Safir, who covers the WNBA for the Weekly and on WNBA Rough Notes, wrote this tribute:
Dear T-Spoon,
“I just remember watching you as a little kid, my dad took me to games,” I once ventured to tell you. It was the start of my first-ever question at a post-game press conference.
“Whatchu tryin’ to say about my age?” You shot back, and laughter warmed the room, relaxing me. “I’m trying to say that you’re still here living another basketball life,” I said. It felt like we were talking now, not as adversaries, but maybe even as friends. I asked: “What do you bring with you from the start of the league that comes through to now?”
“This is a helluva question,” you said, “that I have not been asked. And it means a lot to me for you to ask that question.” I was surprised by your openness. It made me think you have a knack for recognizing someone new and inviting them in, or perhaps find joy in meeting a need when you have something meaningful to offer back.
soulfulness.
Women’s basketball is not a carbon copy of men’s basketball not only because of historical sexism and homophobia, but because we do not want to be the same as them.
Alongside historical disenfranchisement came a deep-rooted community in the WNBA. The feeling of gratitude between fans and players as they chatted openly after sparselyattended games. The pride we all shared when people like Sue Bird and Candace Parker began living openly as gay, when the queerness of our league finally got noticed for what it is: fucking cool. Our excitement and solidarity around elevating Black women essential to the sport as leaders and coaches.
Then you answered my question, and what you said changed me. But I should back up a little bit.
You may know this already, but to be a longtime Chicago Sky fan is to live in fear
that the front office may at any moment scoop hope out of you like spoonfuls of melon. And so we steeled ourselves as the 2024 season approached. Then they hired you, and for the first time in years, I felt proud of the WNBA team in Chicago. Because despite their past mistakes, the franchise seemed to understand that
you could be a key ingredient to success. They knew, I thought, that alongside the crashing shores sea change in women’s basketball was a critical need to retain its core identity. An identity that you embody.
I believe that the WNBA, now more than ever, should anchor itself in
I also know that this season may have felt like a wonky roller coaster. You were thrown in sideways to a franchise rebuild. And yes, sometimes I felt confused and frustrated by the team’s choices. I wondered if, by the second half of the season, things had slipped from the front office and coaching staff’s fingers a bit. But I was steadfast in the need for Sky fans and media to continue celebrating the good in you specifically. My friends thought I was being overly defensive, and maybe I was. But near the end of the season, I was comforted by what everyone around me thought was true: that a second season was required to assess your performance as the Sky’s head coach. That you, and your process, deserved patience, investment and care.
It’s been less than a week since Chicago’s front office announced you’d been fired. I can’t imagine what you’re going through right now. Whether you sensed it coming, or if you were totally blindsided. If their reasons, explained over some painful conference call, made
Illustration by Haley Tweedell
any sense. If you feel as disposable or as much like a scapegoat as this bottomfeeder franchise, with their unreachable expectations, has made you out to be.
But I hope you know this: the failure of their decision does not actually lie in the Sky’s unknown future of wins or losses. Instead, this sudden, emotionless, heartbreaking move betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes women’s basketball sacred. Their failure is in an attempt to deny what remains the heartbeat of this sport: our interconnection.
The Sky’s leadership clearly doesn’t get it, but so many others do. I mean the season ticket holders who have been priced out and may only return to Wintrust the next time you do. I mean the University of Mississippi’s head coach Yolett McCuin, who upon hearing the news of your firing tweeted, “This a joke right?” Yes, I even mean Sky Guy, or at least the actor/dancer/artist performing as Sky Guy, who I imagine relates to you, since rumor has it he was the last in the building to know about his immediate dismissal.
And I mean Angel Reese, the greatest blessing to Chicago professional sports in a decade, this record-breaking-Rookieof-the-Year-sensation. Our prized star, more valuable on and off the court than most of us can even comprehend, who seems as gut-punched as the rest of us. “I’m heartbroken,” Reese wrote after the announcement. “I came to Chicago because of YOU… You didn’t deserve this but I can’t thank you enough. I love you Tspoon.”
I’m worried about love in the WNBA these days. About how it might get lost, or flattened. How the fast track of capital runs away with precious things. How a hunger for profit can smack us into walls of exclusion and half baked ideas by new executives. How the Chicago Sky’s courtside could become just like that of the NBA: not a place for longtime fans, but an impenetrable universe full of shiny, filthy-rich people. How we are already on our way toward dangerous dead ends: the floodgates of popularity now open to faux-“new fans,” people who believe whiteness is both corrective and endangered, and who will pay high ticket
prices to reinforce this agenda. Their racism is a special kind of poison: intent on turning Black and queer WNBA players into threatening side characters instead of the foundational leaders they really are.
But back to that press conference, in June, when I asked you what you’d brought from the beginning of the WNBA to now. “When you experience something in life,” you said, “and as much as I’ve experienced in the game of basketball, the beautiful part of it for me is to give back. You don’t experience things to keep. You experience it to give it back.”
Perhaps you were speaking about basketball, but to me your words meant the most perfect and personal writing advice: “You don’t experience things to keep. You experience it to give it back.” How badly I needed to hear this. “Keep going,” you were telling me. “Keep trying.” And so I did. And so I will.
T-Spoon, we all need you in women’s basketball. You have so many more basketball lives left in you and in Chicago, we’re grateful to have witnessed one of them. The fact is that no matter what decisions the people controlling the commands make, no matter how they gate-keep their little growing kingdoms or their swaths of internet, what they cannot stop is our knowing. How we know each other. How we remember. How we remain connected. How we believe in you, T-Spoon, as someone continuing to build the very world we are lucky to stand inside of.
I hope that in the future, another WNBA franchise doesn’t fail you like this again. I hope the Chicago Sky stops gaslighting its own fans.
But those are only hopes. You are something immortal. Thank you.
Love, Maya Goldberg-Safir ¬
Maya Goldberg-Safir is a Chicago-based independent writer and audio producer from Oakland who writes about the WNBA and its culture at WNBA Rough Notes.
Op-Ed: Censorship Alert
The Illinois Department of Corrections shouldn’t ban mail and books in prisons.
BY MIDWEST BOOKS
TO PRISONERS
Facing pressure from Republican legislators, the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) is considering draconian new restrictions on incoming mail and books, including banning all mail pending a transition to controversial privatized mail digitization services. We are organizing to stop this egregious censorship attempt that undermines education, rehabilitation and community connection. To the IDOC and the IL general assembly: do not ban people from accessing physical letters and books through the mail, do not concede to easily disproved right-wing drug war copaganda—invest in resources, not restrictions!
Several Republican state representatives published a letter to IDOC acting director Latoya Hughes hyping up an imagined epidemic of guards overdosing in prison mail rooms, urging that they “temporarily suspend the processing of all non-legal mail.” This is an egregious, blunt ban on all incoming communications. The letter cites several incidents where prison staff sought medical attention due to alleged “drug exposures.” WSILTV reported that six staff members at Shawnee Correctional Center “experienced medical symptoms while sorting mail.” However, the Marion Fire Rescue Hazardous Material Team found negative test results on any supposed contraband or the officer’s clothes. So far, no evidence has been produced that connects any incoming mail to any actual harm to these officers. Editor’s note: IDOC’s press office did not respond to a request for comment.
Toxicologists have repeatedly
concluded that it is literally impossible for an accidental exposure to drugs like fentanyl through simple handling of the drug in one report after another after another after another. This phenomenon of police overdosing in the field has been debunked thoroughly and frequently, yet prison staff continue to trot out this same narrative again and again, and media and legislators continue to parrot inaccurate police talking points without any verification. This familiar script composes the core of the prison censorship regime’s playbook, now infecting the majority of state prison systems and county jails: police and politicians spread panic about drug overdoses through the mail, then their friends in private prison tech giants like Smart Communications and, and Securus swoop in to sell expensive dystopian “solutions.” They repeat this bit in every city and town, including nearby federal prison USP Thomson and Cook County Jail. Scanning services are widely used in state prison systems, despite studies showing such security services have not slowed the availability of drugs in places that have been scanning for years like Pennsylvania DOC.
Illinois already contracts with Global Tel-Link to provide tablets for ebooks, texting and video visits, which are used not as a means to provide the unlimited wealth of knowledge available to everyone else in the world, but are instead heavily restricted corporate sandboxes with no internet access. Prisoners are robbed of the constitutional right to receive physical books and mail and are instead nickel-and-dimed on
unaffordable tablets with extremely limited selections (for example, Illinois only has copyright-free texts for titles more than eighty years old). The tablet’s “texting” features have no formatting options or pictures, and they are often unavailable because of lockdowns, equipment failures, or for group punishment. If someone transfers to another prison or county jail, all their previous communications are lost forever. This tech is marketed to prison administrators as progressive technologyforward secure alternatives so that they can then eliminate physical visits, physical mail, and physical libraries, against prisoners’ constitutional rights, against American Library Association standards, against the UN Mandela Rules standard minimum conditions of confinement, and against general rehabilitative goals and common human decency.
This new push by Republican legislators comes after IDOC has already been quietly imposing new restrictions on incoming books and mail. Last year, an unpublished IDOC Administrative Directive added a requirement that all books must come from the “Publisher”, preventing friends and family from sharing reading materials (although there are exceptions for “approved visitors”). The IDOC policy 05.02.151 Mail Procedures for Individuals in Custody was not passed with any public comment period, and it is still not even public on their website (we had to FOIA for it). For a while, several IDOC prisons including Menard began rejecting dozens of our packages, wasting hundreds of dollars in postage, until we demonstrated our legitimacy as a Publisher/Distributor. Then last year, IDOC quietly added the words “no hardback books” to their website—another major policy change also without any public comment or published Administrative Directive. Illinois was one of the few states remaining that we were even able to send hardcover books to, until now: already several dozen packages of books are being turned back from institutions such as Menard (even packages with a mix of hardcover and softcover). Menard, like so many other prisons, had already been increasingly rejecting hundreds of books for any perceived “stain,” “odor,” “page crinkle,” “yellowed pages,” and a dozen other frivolous “content-neutral” reasons,
without any actual drug test confirmations.
Despite priding itself on the “first state to ban book bans,” Illinois seems to be following the shameful nationwide prison censorship trend making up the nation’s biggest ban on books characterized by mail scanning services, monopolistic authorizedonly book vendors, and “content-neutral” restrictions often used as cover for political censorship. Prisons in neighboring Wisconsin and Missouri both now use mail scanning services, and have pushed out groups such as ours and Wisconsin Books to Prisoners. Last year the Illinois legislature passed HB2789, which denies funding to libraries if they do not follow the American Library’s Association’s “Library Bill of Rights.” But there’s no justice unless everyone’s included: it would be refreshing to see that same logic and compassion applied to incarcerated people at prisons that routinely ban books and aren’t in compliance with the ALA’s 2024 Standards for Incarcerated and Detained Individuals.
It is disturbing that we are often contacted by staff members at various prisons and jails asking us to donate books while others in their same administration are actively making it more difficult for people
inside to access literature. Consider Cook County Jail, which does not have a library, heavily restricts incoming books and mail, and last year imposed a paper ban. For all the TV news segments that Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart has appeared on to blame books and the mail, so many of their own staff and contractors end up being caught for smuggling drugs. We were contacted by CCDOC’s Education Department asking us to provide donated books because they are “looking to create a book cart,” while at the same time their mail room is rejecting several hundred packages of books for the pettiest fictitious reasons, and throwing our appeals in the garbage.
Editor’s note: A spokesperson for the Cook County Sheriff’s Office provided the following statement: “There has never been a ban on paper, mail, and books at the Jail, nor have individuals ever been denied access to their legal documents. Books are allowed, but in order to conduct thorough searches for drug soaked paper there is and always has been a limit on the total number of books allowed. We continually search and find pages of books containing suspicious substances, and in rare occasions, content within the books that depict anything that poses a threat to the safety and
security of the Jail. These measures are critical in preventing the spread of dangerous substances, safeguarding lives, and maintaining a secure environment for everyone at the Jail. Last year, seven individuals in custody tragically lost their lives from a fatal overdose, four of which were related to drug-soaked paper. The Sheriff’s Office implemented necessary protocols to deter the smuggling of drug-soaked paper, which poses a deadly risk to individuals in custody at the Jail.”
For over twenty years, we have been sharing reading materials with our community behind bars. We know how life-changing books and mail are to people behind bars, and how destructive book bans are to our civil rights and collective humanity. We’re not going for it. Let’s make Illinois the state where prison book bans go to die! We are calling on Governor Pritzker, IDOC Director Latoya Hughes, and the Illinois General Assembly: leave the mail and books alone! ¬
Since 2004, Midwest Books to Prisoners has been engaged in direct support of incarcerated people and their educational goals by mailing them books, magazines, and other printed material free of charge.
Illustration by Haley Tweedell
Public Meetings Report
illustration by Holley Appold/South Side Weekly
A recap of select open meetings at the local, county, and state level.
BY SCOTT PEMBERTON AND DOCUMENTERS
September 10
What is the City planning for the Pilsen Industrial Redevelopment Project area? The Chicago Community Development Commission learned more about the City’s goals in negotiating an agreement. The redevelopment would include a new eight-story building with ninety-eight units of only affordable multifamily housing called Casa Yucatan. The development qualifies for equitable transit-oriented development regulation because it’s near a CTA Pink Line stop and two major bus routes. The site is currently a vacant lot at 21st Street and Ashland Avenue with an adjacent gas station. The proposal would be headed by The Resurrection Project, a major Latinx Southwest Side community development organization. The development would cost $69.1 million with IDOT providing $6.1 million and TIF funding $23 million. A key responsibility of the Committee, according to its website, is to “assist private redevelopment projects” by reviewing and recommending action based on tax increment financing. Its fifteen members are appointed by the mayor and confirmed by the City Council.
September 11
The Chicago Park District Board of Commissioners at its meeting voted to keep Riot Fest in North Lawndale’s Douglass Park. Council Member Monique Scott (24th Ward) supported that position, despite strong and persistent pushback demanding community input when large festivals are under consideration. Previously reported to be leaving Douglass Park for suburban Bridgeview, Riot Fest can now remain in Douglass Park. Public comments before the vote were both pro and con. On the plus side, proponents touted the fest as an opportunity for the area to be connected to the Chicago art scene. Among the problems, some attendees maintained, are noise violations, lack of community input, and poor treatment of the park. A letter-writing campaign demanding transparency and accountability from Mayor Brandon Johnson and the park district garnered more than 1,400 signatures, opponents reported. "Douglass Park has deep problems of soil compaction, yet continues to be damaged each year by festival-goers and heavy equipment in exchange for money,” said Karina Solano, who was opposed to keeping Riot Fest in Douglas Park. “The park needs repair; not for the soil, the trees and the plants to be sacrificed."
September 16
At its meeting, the Chicago City Council Committee on Finance approved settlement amounts for five wrongful convictions. Alvin Waddy, for example, had alleged malicious prosecution and conspiracy in connection with a CPD tactical team arrest in 2007. Wrongfully convicted for possessing cocaine with intent to deliver, Waddy spent 394 days in prison. Paroled and released in May 2008, he received a certificate of innocence in 2019. To reduce the city’s ongoing financial liability for police misconduct and abuse, City attorneys generally attempt to make final settlements out of court. In Waddy’s case, they recommended $500,000.
September 18
During a highly charged meeting, the Chicago City Council voted to give CPD Superintendent Larry Snelling the power to extend a contract with the controversial gunshot detection company ShotSpotter or sign a new one for similar technology. The
ShotSpotter contract was to run out four days later, on September 22, and had been deployed in twelve of twenty-two police districts. Mayor Brandon Johnson announced he would veto the move, which attempted to circumvent a rule that gives contracting power to the Mayor. City attorneys have said that a law requiring “separation of powers” does not allow the Council to compel mayoral actions. The controversy revolves around whether the technology is effective in reducing crime or disrupting neighborhoods in a negative way. An investigation the Weekly published this week found that ShotSpotter failed to alert CPD to more than 20 percent of reported shootings over a twenty-month period. Said one public commenter: “Don’t do ShotSpotter, don’t throw that money away.” Since August 2018, the city has spent more than $53 million on contracts with ShotSpotter.
At its meeting, the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability (CCPSA) conducted a 2025 CPD Budget Town Hall. Commission President Anthony Driver explained that the commissioners plan to prioritize budget transparency in connection with CPD’s budget, especially with workforce allocations, officer training, and wellness and civil litigations. The commission is preparing for the City Council’s budget process, which normally takes place in October and November after the mayor has presented a proposed budget. City Council members and the public can then weigh in on the budget, in particular how much money is allocated toward things like public safety, public health and city services, including police. Though CCPSA is not in charge of the Chicago Police Department budget, council members are allowed to voice opinions. In the 2024 fiscal year. CPD made up slightly less than forty percent of the city’s workforce and accounted for nearly twelve percent of the city budget.
September 19
At a meeting of the Chicago Police Board, CPD Superintendent Larry Snelling applauded officers for their behavior during the recent Democratic National Convention (DNC). Several community members from neighborhoods near the DNC’s location, the United Center, said they are grateful for CPD’s work. Seventeen complaints were reportedly filed against CPD officers related to the DNC, including several for use of excessive force. The CPD used mass arrests to break up a West Loop protest, a tactic that was strongly criticized by legal groups. Fifty-six people, including three journalists, were arrested. The Chicago Police Board, by law, is “an independent civilian body that decides disciplinary cases involving Chicago police officers,” according to its website. Additional responsibilities are set out in the City’s Municipal Code.
September 25
This meeting of the Chicago Board of Health coincided with the City’s announcement that police officers and fire department paramedics would no longer be included in the Crisis Assistance Response and Engagement (CARE) pilot program. Launched in 2021, the pilot was funded with $3.5 million from the City, and CARE employees have since responded to 1,500 calls. The City reported that the calls haven’t led to any arrests and have resulted in the use of force in less than 0.1 percent of incidents. A mental health crisis intervention effort, the original CARE teams consisted of a police officer, a Chicago Fire Department paramedic, and Chicago Department of Public Health (CPHD) crisis clinician. Now, the program will be completely under CPD. A response team is to include a clinician and an EMT from CDPH. The non-police response model is in line with the Treatment Not Trauma ordinance passed in 2023. That model calls for the reopening of public mental health clinics shuttered by former Mayor Rahm Emanuel. It also authorizes further investment in additional clinics and a non-police crisis response team. Under Mayor Brandon Johnson, the City has reopened a mental health center in Roseland and additional mental health service sites in West Garfield Park and Pilsen.
September 26
The Chicago Board of Education at its meeting voted to retain district CEO Pedro Martinez and to place a moratorium on school closures until 2027. “Black leaders and parents have been vocal about the need for improving Black student outcomes,” said a public commenter and a CPS parent since 2006. “Pedro Martinez, despite his faults, has ensured that Black student success has been prioritized in the strategic plan.” Commenters spoke both for and against Martinez. Mayor Brandon Johnson has asked Martinez to resign amid disagreements over school policies. Martinez has said he will not resign and has denied rumors that he’s looking to close and consolidate schools considered to be under-enrolled. (Under Mayor Rahm Emanuel, fifty schools were shuttered in 2013, mostly on the South and West sides, causing some 17,000 students and 1,500 staff to switch CPS schools or leave the school district.) On October 4, all seven members of the Board resigned, and Johnson announced their replacements on October 7.
A Cumbia Renaissance
Cumbia classics get a new spin at South Side venues.
BY CHARLIE KOLODZIEJ
Asummer spent at Gage Park’s Studio 51 is a blur of shots, laser lights, and sequin dresses. Every Friday and Saturday night, women twirl across the dance floor, their partners catching them in perfect time with the music. Outside, people pass around cigarettes like whispered gossip, and a man sells bags of chicharrones to partiers exiting the club.
Known locally, as “la catedral de los sonidos” or “the cathedral of sounds,” Studio 51 has been the go-to spot to hear cumbia in Chicago since the nineties. But if you were there this past summer, you may have heard a little something new—a bit of hip-hop or techno, snuck in by a new vanguard of cumbia-heads who have been shaking up Chicago’s scene by mixing the genre’s familiar rhythms with more contemporary sounds.
“I think right now, we’re living in what some people would call a cumbia renaissance,” said Citlalic Jeffers Peña, a.k.a DJ La Colocha who recently played at Studio 51’s Gran Bailazo event this past August. Peña is one of a few Chicago DJs in recent years that have been mixing cumbia classics with more contemporary influences like new wave, electronica, and punk. Along the way, she and others in the Chicago scene are paying homage to cumbia’s rich history at spaces like Studio 51 and across the city as more venues welcome new takes on an old sound.
A cumbia connoisseur, Peña described her DJing as “a journey across timelines and across mediums.” She is heavily influenced by cumbia’s historical ties with sonidero culture, a sound system scene, or ambiente, that first arose in working-class communities in 1950s Mexico City like Iztapalapa, where her family is from. At the time, folks in these communities were either unwelcome in the city’s dance halls or lived in neighborhoods that were difficult to access. As a result, people began to close off their neighborhoods for big Bailes,
block parties with music and dancing. This gave rise to sonideros, emcees that would build their own massive sound systems for spinning records.
Cumbia sonidera is “barrio sound,” said Maneul Chavira Sr., a Studio 51 veteran who has been on the mic as sonidero Arcania since the early 2000’s. The Weekly spoke with Chavira Sr. ahead of his 4To Festival Sonidero, a yearly sonidero festival held in the parking lot of Little Village’s Mi Tierra restaurant that attracted a crowd of a few hundred this past August. Now in its fourth year, the festival attracts sonideros from across the Midwest who are eager to showcase the culture’s wide sonic diversity.
Sonideros have different sounds depending on what neighborhood in Mexico City they are from, Chavira Sr said. The Chaviras represent el barrio de Mexico. Other sonideros like sonido Canandonga were also at the festival, representing neighborhoods like Tepito, which has more of a salsa sound popular in parts of Brazil, Puerto Rico, and Colombia. Others, like sonido Disco Movil Oso from Milwaukee, represent the Mexican state of Puebla with a sound that Chavira Sr. described as
more recognizably Mexican. “We all repeat different styles, but with the same interest of entertaining people,” he said.
Cumbia had a long journey before it found the sonideros. A percussion-heavy genre that some describe as having a “chuchucu-chu” rhythm, cumbia’s roots can be traced to the funeral traditions of AfroIndigenous communities in colonial-era Colombia. In its early form, cumbia’s signature rhythms were played with the guacharaca, a tube-like instrument played with a small rake designed for scratching out a raspy beat. Eventually, cumbia traveled up through Central America to Mexico, where it became the music most people are familiar with today, adding more brass and piano. In more recent years, producers in New York and L.A., have picked up the genre, turning the old-school rhythms into a worldwide sound.
The popularity of cumbia sonidera has ebbed and flowed over the years as new waves of immigration from Mexico and Latin America brought the culture to the States, said Peña. When Manuel Chavira Sr. first arrived in Chicago in the early ’90s, legendary Mexican sonideros like La
Changa would spin cumbia at major venues such as the Aragon Ballroom. “When you talk to older generations, they remember going to Aragon to see La Changa,” Peña said. “There has always been a scene for cumbia. I think sometimes people just don’t have access or don’t know where to go.”
Part of that scene has been places like Studio 51, which has been bumping cumbia since it first opened in 1993. Performing with Peña at Studio 51 in August was Chavira’s son, Manuel Chavira Jr., who in recent years has taken up the Arcania mantle. While on the mic, Chavira Jr. gives saludos, or shoutouts, to hype up the crowd. Less like traditional DJs, sonideros are more like emcees. These shoutouts can take the form of commentary on upcoming songs, or praise for someone putting in the work on the dance floor.
Peña has begun integrating saludos into her own mixes as DJ La Colocha. If you catch her at her California Clipper residency in Humboldt Park, or when she performs at Simone’s in Pilsen, you may just get a shoutout of your own. Other DJs, like Peña’s friend and frequent collaborator DJ Trumbull Shadow, are also doing shoutouts on the mic (Shadow’s saludos can be heard at his monthly cumbia night at Pilsen’s Penny Whistle Tavern). This past June, Shadow and Peña collaborated on an event with RUIDOSA!, a Latin American artist collective that often throws cumbia-centric pop-ups in the city. Peña helped curate the event’s lineup, bringing on DJ Alex Garcia, the son of local sonidero Bombo Latino. Together, the father-son duo host a popular Facebook livestream interviewing Midwest Sonideros.
“When I have an opportunity to recommend or curate or include, I’m always trying to include someone from the sonidero community or their kids,” Peña said. “Their kids are also coming up in the culture and it’s important to connect all of us so that we can keep the scene alive, growing and changing.”
The crowd at Studio 51 tears up the dance floor to the sound of cumbia.
Photo Jesus J. Montero
Jr. gives a shout out to the Weekly
As Chicago’s cumbia scene continues to change, it has also embraced a new subgenre, kumbia oscura, that mixes traditional cumbia with darker, punkier sounds—think synths, electronic pops and lots of heavy bass.
“Obviously it’s cumbia, but it’s not necessarily the mainstream cumbia that people are kind of used to hearing, or the things that they expect to kind of hear at their quince or a wedding,” Peña said. “I think it’s exploring the depths that the genre can go to beyond some of the things that we’re accustomed to hearing.”
One of the progenitors of this new sound is Flores Negras, a DJ and creator of the cumbia-adjacent rave series Mictlan Productions. Flores Negras performed at Thalia Hall’s Noche de Kumbia in September alongside fellow DJs Karenoid and Eva Maria. (Eva Maria also hosts a popular weekly cumbia night at Punch House in Pilsen.)
Flores Negras began her music career in Chicago’s punk and metal scene, performing as lead vocalist in the band Rosaries before switching to DJing during the pandemic. She said she brought her punk rock with her to the turntables, and likes to mix cumbia with metal, rock, merengue, and juke.
“It’s just real ratchet,” she said of her sound. “Cumbia goes hard!”
To get the darker sounds of kumbia oscura, Flores Negras will play two tracks simultaneously: one that skews techno,
EDM, or industrial, and the other a cumbia classic she knows will mix well. “You can tell which songs have a happier note to it than the others, so I purposely look for those ones that sound darker or that have deeper voices,” she said. Her unique mix creates dancefloor moments that could seemingly only happen at a Flores Negras production. “Once I saw these people doing like a Cholo dance with my techno and that literally made my life, it was sick.”
According to Flores Negras, prepandemic, cumbia was really only being played in spaces for older adults, like sonidero events and spaces like Studio 51. It was rarer still to hear cumbia mixing with genres like punk and metal. “I played this one show a long time ago and it was a lot of rock and Español metal, and there was cumbia played in the middle of the sets,” Flores Negras said. “I was like, ‘This is so fucking sick,’ and they’re an older crowd so I was like, ‘This needs to be brought to the younger crowd.’”
In 2019, she started hosting a party called CUMBIA vs. new wave, combining cumbia with ’80s synths and electronica. When the pandemic came, this morphed into CUMBIA y Los goths, a virtual party where Flores Negras began to perfect her signature kumbia oscura style. You can see her live at her upcoming CUMBIA y Los Goths show on October 25 at Subterranean in Wicker Park.
Flores Negras has also been excited to see DJ’s like Peña and Trumbull Shadow incorporate old school cumbia sonidera culture with newer sounds, in particular at spaces like Studio 51 that have been celebrating the genre for decades. “
“It’s been so sick to see. I remember when La Colocha just started doing that, I was like, ‘hell yeah’ because in Mexico those parties just have everyone dancing on the street and stuff and it's cool to see it happening out here,” Flores Negras said. She hopes that DJs in Chicago will continue to push the envelope on cumbia’s possibilities and create more spaces for the genre to thrive.
“That music is home to us, and we deserve to feel like we’re at home.” ¬
Charlie Kolodziej is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in South Side Weekly, Windy City Times, and the Chicago Reader
Del sur de Chicago para el mundo
Las canciones clásicas de la cumbia toman un nuevo giro en el Studio 51.
POR CHARLIE KOLODZIEJ TRADUCIDO POR ALMA CAMPOS
Un verano en el Studio 51 de Gage Park es una fusión de luces láser y vestidos de lentejuelas. Cada viernes y sábado por la noche, las mujeres se deslizan por la pista de baile, mientras sus parejas las guían al ritmo preciso de la música. Afuera, la gente comparte cigarrillos y un hombre vende bolsas de chicharrones a quienes salen del club.
Conocido en el barrio como "la catedral de los sonidos", Studio 51 ha sido el epicentro de la cumbia en Chicago desde los años noventa. Pero si estuviste allí el verano pasado, quizá escuchaste algo diferente: una mezcla de hiphop o tecno, presentada por una nueva generación de amantes de la cumbia que están revolucionando la escena musical de Chicago, combinando los ritmos tradicionales del género con sonidos más modernos.
“Creo que ahora mismo estamos viviendo lo que algunas personas podrían llamar un renacimiento de la cumbia”, dijo Citlalic Jeffers Peña, mejor conocida como DJ La Colocha, quien actuó en el Gran Bailazo de Studio 51 el pasado agosto. Peña es una de las pocas DJs de Chicago que en los últimos años ha estado combinando los elementos clásicos de la cumbia con influencias modernas como el new wave, la electrónica y el punk. Ella
y otros miembros de la escena local están rindiendo homenaje a la rica historia de la cumbia en espacios como Studio 51 y en toda la ciudad, ya que más lugares abrazan nuevas versiones de este sonido tradicional.
Una experta en la cumbia, Peña describe su trabajo de DJ como “un viaje a través del tiempo y de los medios”. Está muy influida por los lazos históricos de la cumbia con la cultura sonidero, sonora o ambiente que surgió en las comunidades de clase trabajadora de la Ciudad de México de los años 50, como Iztapalapa, de donde es su familia. En aquella época, la gente de estas comunidades no era bienvenida en los salones de baile de la ciudad. Como resultado, las personas empezaron a cerrar sus vecindarios para celebrar grandes bailes, fiestas en las calles con música y baile. Esto dio lugar a los sonideros, artistas que arman sus propios sistemas de sonido.
“La cumbia sonidera es el ‘sonido del barrio’”, comentó Willy Chavira padre, un veterano de Studio 51 que ha estado al micrófono como el sonido Padre Arcana desde principios de los años 2000. El Weekly conversó con Chavira antes de su 4to Festival Sonidero, un evento anual que se celebra en el estacionamiento del Restaurante Mi Tierra en La Villita
Chavira
during his sonidero set at Studio 51. Photo by Jesus J. Montero
y que reunió a cientos de personas en agosto. En su cuarta edición, el festival atrae a sonideros de todo el Medio Oeste, deseosos de mostrar la gran diversidad del género.
Los sonideros tienen sonidos diferentes según de qué vecindario de la Ciudad de México sean, dijo Chavira Sr. Los Chavira representan el barrio de México. Otros sonideros, como el sonido Canandonga, también estuvieron en el festival, representando a vecindarios como Tepito, que tiene un sonido más salsero, popular en partes de Brasil, Puerto Rico y Colombia. Otros, como el sonido Disco Móvil Oso de Milwaukee, representan al estado mexicano de Puebla con un sonido que Chavira Sr. describió como más reconociblemente mexicano. “Todos repetimos estilos diferentes, pero con el mismo interés de entretener a las personas”, dijo.
La cumbia recorrió un largo camino antes de llegar a los sonideros. Este género cargado de percusión, que algunos describen como un ritmo “chuchucu-chú”, tiene sus orígenes en las tradiciones funerarias de las comunidades afroindígenas de la Colombia colonial. En sus comienzos, los ritmos característicos de la cumbia se interpretaban con la guacharaca, un instrumento tubular que se raspa con un pequeño peine para generar un sonido áspero. Con el tiempo, la cumbia se expandió por Centroamérica y llegó a México, donde adoptó los elementos con los que la mayoría está familiarizada hoy en día, como los instrumentos de viento y el piano. En los últimos años, productores de Nueva York y Los Ángeles han redescubierto el género, transformando sus ritmos clásicos en un sonido global.
La popularidad de la cumbia sonidera ha tenido altibajos a lo largo de los años, a medida que las nuevas olas de inmigrantes de México y Latinoamérica han traído la cultura de la cumbia a Estados Unidos, dijo Peña. Cuando Willy Chavira Sr. llegó a Chicago a principios de los 90, legendarios sonideros mexicanos como La Changa tocaban cumbia en locales importantes como el Aragón Ballroom. “Cuando hablas con las generaciones mayores, recuerdan ir a Aragón a ver a La Changa”, dijo Peña. “Siempre ha habido
un ambiente para la cumbia. Creo que a veces las personas no tienen acceso o no saben adónde ir”.
Parte de esa escena han sido lugares como Studio 51, que lleva ofreciendo cumbia desde que abrió por primera vez en 1993. En agosto actuó con Peña en Studio 51 Willy Chavira hijo, que en los últimos años ha asumido el papel de Padre Arcana. Cuando está al micrófono, Chavira Jr. manda saludos para animar al público. Los sonideros se parecen menos a los DJ tradicionales y más a los maestros de ceremonias. Estos gritos pueden consistir en comentarios sobre las próximas canciones o en halagos a alguien que baila muy bien.
Peña ha empezado a integrar los saludos en sus propias mezclas como DJ La Colocha. Si la ves durante su
la cultura y es importante conectarnos a todos para que podamos mantener la escena viva, en crecimiento y cambio”.
La escena de la cumbia de Chicago sigue cambiando y también ha adoptado un nuevo subgénero, la “kumbia oscura”, que mezcla la cumbia tradicional con sonidos más oscuros y punk, como sintetizadores, pops electrónicos y mucho bajo pesado.
“Obviamente es cumbia, pero no es necesariamente la cumbia convencional que las personas están acostumbradas a escuchar, o las cosas que esperan oír en sus quince o en una boda”, dijo Peña. “Creo que explora las profundidades a las que puede ir el género, más allá de algunas de las cosas que estamos acostumbrados a oír”.
Uno de los progenitores de este
“Estamos viviendo lo que algunas personas podrían llamar un renacimiento de la cumbia” – DJ La Colocha
residencia artística en California Clipper en Humboldt Park o cuando actúa en Simone’s en Pilsen, puede que hasta recibas un saludo. Otros DJs, como el amigo y frecuente colaborador de Peña, DJ Trumbull Shadow, también gritan al micrófono (los saludos de Shadow pueden escucharse en su noche mensual de cumbia en Penny Whistle Tavern de Pilsen). El pasado junio, Shadow y Peña colaboraron en un acto con RUIDOSA, un colectivo de artistas latinoamericanos que con frecuencia organiza eventos pop-up centrados en la cumbia en diferentes lugares de la ciudad. Peña ayudó a organizar el programa del evento, trayendo al DJ Alex García, hijo del sonido local Bombo Latino. Juntos, el dúo padre-hijo presenta un popular livestream en Facebook en el que entrevistan a sonideros del Medio Oeste.
“Cuando tengo la oportunidad de recomendar, seleccionar o incluir, siempre intento incluir a alguien de la comunidad de sonideros o a sus hijos”, dijo Peña. “Sus hijos también están surgiendo en
nuevo sonido es Flores Negras, DJ y creadora de la serie de raves de cumbia Mictlan Productions. Flores Negras actuó en la Noche de Kumbia de Thalia Hall en septiembre junto a sus colegas DJ Karenoid y Eva María (quien también organiza una popular noche semanal de cumbia en Punch House en Pilsen).
Flores Negras empezó su carrera musical en la escena punk y metal de Chicago, actuando como vocalista principal del grupo Rosaries, antes de dedicarse a DJ durante la pandemia. Dice que llevó su punk rock a los tocadiscos y que le gusta mezclar la cumbia con el metal, el rock, el merengue y el juke
“Es un verdadero sonido fuerte”, dijo sobre su sonido. “¡La cumbia se pone dura!”.
Para poder alcanzar los sonidos más intensos de la kumbia oscura, Flores Negras pone dos canciones a la vez: una que tenga un toque tecno, EDM o industrial, y otra que sea un clásico de la cumbia que sabe que se mezclará bien. “Puedes saber qué canciones son más
alegres que las demás, así que busco a propósito las que suenan más oscuras o las que tienen voces más profundas”, explica. Su mezcla única crea momentos de baile que aparentemente sólo se pueden dar en una producción de Flores Negras. “Una vez vi a unas personas que hacían como un baile de cholo con mi sonido techno y eso literalmente me alegró la vida.”
Según Flores Negras, antes de la pandemia, la cumbia sólo se tocaba en espacios para adultos mayores, como eventos sonideros y espacios como Studio 51. Era aún más raro oír cumbia mezclada con géneros como el punk y el metal. “Hace mucho tiempo, toqué en un show en el que había mucho rock y metal en español, y se tocaba cumbia en medio de los sets”, dijo Flores Negras. “Dije: ‘Esto me encanta’, y eran gente mayor, así que pensé: ‘Esto hay que llevarlo a la gente más joven’”.
En 2019, inició una fiesta llamada CUMBIA vs. new wave, que combinaba cumbia con sintetizadores de los 80 y electrónica. Cuando llegó la pandemia, esto se transformó en CUMBIA y Los goths, una fiesta virtual en la que Flores Negras empezó a perfeccionar su característico estilo de kumbia oscura. Puedes verla en directo en su próximo show CUMBIA y Los Goths el 25 de octubre en Subterranean en Wicker Park.
A Flores Negras también le ha emocionado ver a DJs como Peña y Trumbull Shadow incluir lo clásico con sonidos más nuevos, en particular en espacios como Studio 51, que llevan décadas celebrando el género.
“Ha sido algo tan maravilloso de ver. Recuerdo que cuando La Colocha apenas empezó a hacer eso, yo pensé: 'Sí', porque en México esas fiestas hacen bailar a todo el mundo la calle y es increíble ver lo que pasa aquí”, dijo Flores Negras. Espera que los DJs de Chicago sigan ampliando las posibilidades de la cumbia y creando más espacios para que el género prospere.
“Esa música es nuestro hogar, y merecemos sentirnos en casa”. ¬
Charlie Kolodziej es un periodista independiente cuyo trabajo ha aparecido en el Weekly, Windy City Times y el Chicago Reader
El Barrio Art Show Celebrates Latinx Heritage
The Ruidosa Art Collective aims to unite youth and uplift creativity and culture.
BY MADELINE CRUZ
On the eve of National Hispanic Heritage Month, people gathered into a South Side community hub to kickstart Mexican Independence Day weekend in Chicago. The space was filled with rows of vendors selling prints, stickers, clothing, pottery, and more. Throughout the night, poets, musicians, and a DJ took the stage, while new and familiar faces browsed the booths and art installations.
“There’s a lot of people who are afraid to show who they are,” said Ruidosa Art Collective Founder and El Barrio event coorganizer, Francisco ‘Pancho’ Garcia. “This is an opportunity to show out…and to be proud of, like: this is my culture, and I love it.”
El Barrio Art Show welcomed artists and performers to showcase their work at Southside Sociál in Back of the Yards. Organized by Ruidosa Art Collective founders Stephanie ‘Soli’ Herrera and Garcia, the legacy event was transformed in its second year from a backyard show to an evening of art, vendors, tattooing, and music. It was followed by an official afterparty at Subterranean in collaboration with Mictlān Productions, which hosts underground dance parties and punk shows.
Paradice Tattoo joined the festivities by offering Friday the 13th flash tattoos and selling shop apparel. Ricardo Ibanez, one of the artists at their booth, said they got to participate through a friend who knows Garcia. The Pilsen tattoo studio has participated in similar events in the past, but Ibanez noted this was one of the best vendor experiences because of the supportive environment. “Networking is the best part of it,” she said.
The Ruidosa Art Collective was founded in March 2023, born out of a Latin American book club called Amoxtli. The weekly book discussions at Pilsen Arts & Community House began almost two years ago when Herrera, an automation engineer and artist, was going through a personal sobriety journey and started the book club
by gathering interest on Instagram. After Garcia joined Amoxtli, they knew it was something special. Seeing artists, musicians, and creatives all participating led them to start the collective to create spaces such as El Barrio for the Latinx community.
Prior to organizing this event, Herrera and Garcia hosted a series of artist podcast interviews through Ruidosa called ‘El
One of the many artists at the event was Mariaelena Velasquez, who found out about El Barrio through online mutuals. Their booth showcased crochet pieces of all styles and sizes, including a fourteen-inch Our Lady of Guadalupe doll for sale.
“I actually first made it for myself like three years ago, and then I posted it online and people wanted to buy it from me, so
“I love helping people find who they are, encouraging people to do better for themselves, and give people opportunities like this,” – Pancho Garcia
Barrio.’ Although the name can carry a negative connotation, Herrera said they are taking it back as part of their identity, which is often lost through assimilation. They hope to inspire youth participants and show that they can be themselves even in America.
“Me and Pancho were overwhelmed with the responses of the youth. There were a lot of people under eighteen that submitted or demonstrated interest in this and we were just so happy to mentor them, and show them this is how you do this, and ‘please come and sit with us at this table,’” Herrera said.
I started actually making them to sell,” Velasquez said.
Currently accepting custom online orders as Mars Crochet Critters, Velasquez has been crocheting since late 2019 and is self-taught mostly through YouTube videos. Born in Chicago, Velasquez is now a community college student living in Romeoville, but goes back and forth quite a bit to the city for family and events. Her mother, who used to also crochet, supports her at events and helps with set up.
Garcia believes the art show and collective are essential for the community,
as they understand the struggle of growing up with dreams of being a recognized creative only to be sidelined.
“When we started Ruidosa, I wanted to give everyone the opportunity, especially the alternative brown kids.” he said. “Alt rock or heavy metal can be assumed to be just for white people, but there’s actually a whole scene and community in Pilsen and Little Village.”
By helping book events for Ruidosa and beyond, Garcia is always looking for new spots to host shows which can include even taquerias like Casa Cafe. “I love helping people find who they are, encouraging people to do better for themselves, and give people opportunities like this,” he said.
The El Barrio organizers also gave a shout out to Chicago hardcore band Si Dios Quiere for their impact motivating brown folks in the community. “The first time that I saw those brown people, brown teenagers, that were alternative and standing with such pride, confidence, and owning who they were, it completely transformed the relationship that I had, not only as a spectator and a fan, but in my identity,” Herrera said.
Ruidosa Art Collective hopes to continue to help others, create visibility, and in the future open a venue or creative studio for community members to use.
Herrera tries to live by the motto “Amor con amor se paga,” which translates to “love is paid with love.”
“If somebody shows you love, you need to show them love back,” she said. “That’s how the world becomes balanced.” ¬
Madeline Cruz works as an administrative coordinator for an Illinois nonprofit organization. She is committed to social justice and uplifting stories especially within Chicago’s Latinx community. As an appreciator of films and food, Maddie spends her free time watching movies at home or finding new coffee shops and restaurants to try.
Ahead of Mexican Independence day, the El Barrio Art Show featured Mexican American artists from across the city.
Photo Credit: William Guerrero / Phnx.waxv
ShotSpotter Routinely Missed Reported Shootings, City Data Shows
In a recent 20-month period, more than 20% of shootings and reckless discharges in Chicago’s coverage area had no corresponding ShotSpotter alert.
BY MAX BLAISDELL, ETHAN COREY, AND JIM DALEY
This article was produced in partnership with the nonprofit newsroom Type Investigations, with support from the Puffin Foundation and the Wayne Barrett Project.
On September 23, thousands of ShotSpotter sensors that have been monitoring city streets for gunfire on Chicago’s South and West Sides stopped providing alerts to the police department — at least for now. The shutdown follows a monthslong fight between Mayor Brandon Johnson and members of the City Council over the effectiveness of the technology, and the mayor’s decision not to renew the company’s contract.
ShotSpotter’s supporters have argued that the technology helps police respond more effectively to gun violence, and may even save lives. But ShotSpotter has routinely failed to detect shootings in its coverage area, according to an analysis by the Weekly and Type Investigations.
ShotSpotter sensors detect loud noises that are then analyzed via computer algorithm and human analysts to determine if they’re gunshots. ShotSpotter’s parent company, SoundThinking, promotes its technology as highly accurate and promises to meet a certain threshold of performance to cities who agree to pilot programs or contracts. Chicago’s contract required ShotSpotter sensors to detect at least 90% of outdoor, unsuppressed gunfire above a .25 caliber.
An analysis of public data by the Weekly and Type Investigations indicates that ShotSpotter did not alert Chicago police to more than 20% of the shootings and reckless
firearm discharges that occurred within its coverage area between January 2023 and August 2024, however, which raises questions about how well the company fulfilled its contractual obligations. That includes at least 180 gun homicides, as well as more than 600 nonfatal shootings and more than 400 reckless firearm discharges that ShotSpotter apparently failed to alert police to.
Some of these incidents could have involved small-caliber or suppressed (or “silenced”) gunfire—but it doesn’t seem likely. Suppressors are rarely used in
criminal shootings. And while handguns are used in the overwhelming majority of shootings in Chicago, handguns below a .25 caliber are rarely traced to gun crimes.
ShotSpotter’s sensors are currently deployed in roughly 170 cities and 19 university and corporate campuses across the country and the world, according to the company’s most recent annual filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Its listening devices— essentially microphones outfitted atop poles and rooftops—blanket more than 1,100 square miles of cityscape, including
areas of New York, Denver and San Francisco. The Chicago police department and SoundThinking have repeatedly claimed the sensors detect more than 97% of gunfire.
SoundThinking’s vice president of corporate development, Gary Bunyard, agreed to an interview for this story, but backed out at the last minute, citing an unforeseen scheduling conflict. After reviewing the findings of the analysis by the Weekly and Type Investigations, a SoundThinking spokesperson did not offer an explanation for why ShotSpotter’s sensors apparently failed to alert police to the shootings and reckless discharges.
“We are pleased to see the level of transparency being promoted by the CPD with the ShotSpotter data now available to the public,” the spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement.
To assess ShotSpotter’s effectiveness at alerting police to gun crimes, the Weekly and Type Investigations analyzed three sets of data from Chicago’s Violence Reduction Dashboard, which the Mayor’s Office uses to provide public access to real-time CPD data. The first dataset includes all crimes since 2001, and the second tracks every homicide and nonfatal shooting across the city from 2010 to the present. The third tracks all ShotSpotter alerts notifying police of possible gunfire since 2017.
All three datasets include latitude and longitude coordinates and timestamps. This allowed reporters to match ShotSpotter alerts to police data on gun crimes in districts covered by the company’s listening devices between January 2023 and August 2024.
ShotSpotter sensors were still on the roof of a park building in Kenwood two weeks after the city’s contract with the company expired in September. Photo by Jim Daley
In its ShotSpotter contracts, SoundThinking claims its technology can identify and locate at least 90% of gunshots above a .25 caliber without a suppressor that occur outdoors, to within 25 meters, or about 80 feet, in under 60 seconds. To be as exhaustive as possible, our analysis searched for ShotSpotter alerts within one half-mile and one hour of shootings confirmed by police. We excluded any shootings that happened indoors or inside of a vehicle, because ShotSpotter claims it is not designed to detect these kinds of gunshots. The public datasets do not indicate whether suppressors were used in shootings.
The Weekly and Type Investigations found that the percentage of reported gun crimes that had a ShotSpotter alert varied significantly across the seasons. But it never reached 90%, the contractually required threshold. The average detection rate over the 20-month period was about 78%.
In February 2023, a winter month when shootings are usually far lower, the detection rate was nearly 86%, the highest of any month we analyzed. In July 2023, a summer month when shootings typically peak, ShotSpotter alerted police to about 70% of all shootings in its coverage area, the lowest of any month we looked at. For homicides and nonfatal shootings, the average detection rate was 70% across the 20-month period.
In all of 2023, more than 100 fatal and nearly 400 nonfatal shootings in the coverage area had no ShotSpotter alert. Through August of this year, ShotSpotter has missed nearly 70 fatal and more than 250 nonfatal shootings in its coverage area.
One of the shootings took place on August 3 in the Back of the Yards neighborhood on the South Side. Around 6 p.m., two teenage boys were shot in a drive-by shooting. Although there were sensors in the area of the shooting, CPD had no corresponding alert. Both boys died from their wounds at a local hospital.
Records obtained from CPD align with our findings. At a September 18 press conference, 15th Ward alderperson Raymond Lopez (whose ward has 52 ShotSpotter sensors) announced that CPD had provided him with a report on shootings, ShotSpotter alerts, and associated 911 calls. Following a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for
those same records, CPD provided a spreadsheet listing every fatal and nonfatal shooting from January 1, 2023 to August 1, 2024 and indicating whether each had a corresponding ShotSpotter alert. According to CPD’s own data, 41% of fatal and nonfatal shootings in ShotSpotter’s coverage area during that time frame had no alert. A department spokesperson did not respond to questions about this data.
SoundThinking did not respond to questions about the seasonal differences in detection rates, or why the detection rate for homicides and nonfatal shootings was lower than the overall detection rate for all types of gunfire. The company claimed, without evidence, that it was not only meeting but exceeding its contractual obligations.
“Based on the feedback we receive from CPD regarding misses and mislocates, as well as the rigorous process SoundThinking follows to produce Monthly ShotSpotter Performance Scoreboards for each Chicago Police District we serve, we remain fully confident that ShotSpotter’s overall performance in Chicago consistently exceeds our service level commitments to the City,” the statement provided by the company read.
In 2023, CPD emailed ShotSpotter to report missed or mislocated shootings at least 575 times. Internal company emails obtained by the Weekly revealed Bunyard admitting the company missed a 55-round shooting in Back of the Yards in 2022 that
wounded two men because nearby sensors weren’t working properly.
A common criticism of ShotSpotter has been that its sensors generate frequent false positives, which can lead to police wasting resources. A 2021 report by City’s Inspector General found that police recovered evidence of a gun-related criminal offense in fewer than 10% of the ShotSpotter alerts to which they responded. (In a blog post, SoundThinking alleged that ShotSpotter’s alerts are in themselves “digital” evidence of gun crimes, and said the report’s findings had been “twisted by a few critics to spread a false narrative” about the technology.) During the 20-month period we analyzed, there were more than 70,000 ShotSpotter alerts. In ShotSpotter’s 12-police-district coverage area, there were more than 5,000 homicides, nonfatal shootings, and reckless firearm discharges that took place outdoors, according to the analysis of CPD data.
Not all cities have deemed ShotSpotter worth the price tag. Atlanta and Portland declined to sign long-term deals with the company, and San Diego, Dayton, and Charlotte decided not to renew their contracts after years of using the technology. ShotSpotter did not respond to questions about those cities’ decisions to cancel the contracts.
In 2024, the New York City Comptroller’s office released an audit which found that 87% of the time, when police responded to a ShotSpotter alert, they
found no evidence of a shooting or could not confirm whether one had occurred. The office called on the New York Police Department to “reassess the performance of ShotSpotter, and its ability to detect shootings, before the contract is renewed.”
A SoundThinking spokesperson told the New York Times that the audit was “gravely misinformed in its assessment of data.”
In February, Johnson’s office announced he would fulfill a campaign promise to cancel ShotSpotter’s contract. But he ended up paying a premium to keep the system in place through the Democratic National Convention and, in the months since, faced intense pressure from the City Council to renege on his pledge.
Ald. Desmon Yancy (5th), whose ward has 81 ShotSpotter sensors, voted in favor of 17th Ward alderperson David Moore’s ordinance that would attempt to force the mayor to keep the system. Yancy told the Weekly and Type Investigations that gunshot detection technology benefits the city, even if it “isn’t the end all, be all” to gun-violence prevention.
“It’s an investigative tool that triggers other tools, like POD [Police Observation Device] cameras and license plate readers, which assist police in their investigations,” he said in a written statement. “The police use this technology, along with community policing, and violence intervention organizations as a part of an ecosystem to keep communities safe."
ShotSpotter’s advocates say the technology saves lives. At a public meeting in February, Remis Herrera, a community member, advocated for expanding the use of the technology, claiming that her brother’s life might have been saved had a ShotSpotter sensor been installed nearby to alert the police near instantaneously when he was shot.
“If this technology can save someone’s life, how can we quantify a person’s life?” she asked.
Ald. Andre Vasquez, who voted against Moore’s ordinance, effectively supporting Johnson’s cancellation of the contract, gave an impassioned speech at the Council meeting. He said he lost a friend to gun violence but thought SoundThinking had not done enough to prove ShotSpotter’s value.
Records obtained by the Weekly and Type Investigations via a FOIA request show that instances of life-saving police aid resulting solely from a ShotSpotter alert are few and far between. Between December 2020 and May 2024, ShotSpotter alerted police to 498 gunshot victims to whom they rendered aid. Just 30 cases had no corresponding 911 call.
Critics of ShotSpotter claim that, rather than saving lives, the technology leads to over-policing in the neighborhoods where it's deployed, priming police for a potentially violent response. In 2021, police, responding to a ShotSpotter alert, killed 13-year-old Adam Toledo in the Little Village neighborhood as he was surrendering to police.
Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez (25th Ward), who represents the ward where Toledo was killed, voted against Moore’s ordinance.
In an interview, Sigcho-Lopez was adamant that the technology contributes to the over-policing of poorer communities of color and discriminatory policing practices such as stop-and-frisk. He said it has been difficult to reconcile the conflicting accounts about the technology from the OIG’s report and academic studies with the opposing messages and briefs put out by the company and CPD.
“How are we going to rely on the data of the software company that is trying to sell us a contract?” he said. “There is a clear conflict of interest.”
He said that ShotSpotter “is not a good replacement” for 911 calls.
“We need to distinguish and invest in what we know works,” he said.
Nat Palmer, an activist with the Stop ShotSpotter campaign, said that their main objection to ShotSpotter is that it attempts to address violence through surveillance, rather than by alleviating its root causes. But they said that millions of dollars a year for a technology “that doesn’t even seem to work at a high percentage rate” seems like a poor use of the City’s financial resources. “It’s dangerous to continue to blindly throw money at things,” they said. Chicago is currently experiencing a massive budget shortfall.
Palmer said the City should consider investing that money in an alternative
dispatch system for mental health and social services workers to respond to certain kinds of crisis calls. This alternative-topolice response is part of a larger movement called Treatment Not Trauma.
A CPD spokesperson did not respond to emailed questions.
The Mayor’s Office, which hosts the City’s Violence Reduction Dashboard on its website, and the Office of Public Safety Administration, which provides technical support to CPD, likewise did not respond to requests for comment.
On September 18, Johnson issued a scathing critique of ShotSpotter, promising to veto Moore’s ordinance that would’ve allowed CPD Superintendent Larry Snelling to sign a new contract with SoundThinking.
“When this was brought before the people of Chicago, this is what they were told, that it would reduce violence and it would lead to more arrests. It’s done neither,” Johnson said at a press conference. “It’s an ineffective tool and I’m not going to allow the interests and the greed of a corporation to play on the fears and anxiety of the people of Chicago.”
SoundThinking representatives have said the company will work with Chicago police over the next several weeks to ensure the transition is smooth, and that the company has begun “prioritizing and deinstalling ShotSpotter sensors on publicowned infrastructure throughout the 12 police districts being served.”
But a reprieve is still possible. Hours before ShotSpotter’s sensors began to go offline, the Mayor’s Office announced that the city is looking for “law enforcement response” technology that can detect incidents with 95% accuracy, in order to assist police and other emergency personnel.
SoundThinking has indicated that it plans to apply. ¬
Max Blaisdell is a fellow with the Invisible Institute and a staff writer for the Hyde Park Herald. Ethan Corey is The Appeal’s Research & Projects Editor. Jim Daley is the Weekly’s investigations editor.
What’s After ShotSpotter?
The gunshot-detection company stopped sending alerts to CPD last month. Deputy Mayor Garien Gatewood discussed the City’s public safety plans post-ShotSpotter.
BY JIM DALEY
Justafter midnight on September 23, SoundThinking, the company formerly known as ShotSpotter, stopped providing gunshot alerts to Chicago police.
The technology, which the City first signed a contract for in 2018, was deployed in twelve police districts on the South and West Sides and one on the far Northwest Side. In February, Mayor Brandon Johnson made good on a campaign promise by announcing that he would cancel the City’s contract with the company. Johnson agreed to an extension of the contract through September (and the August DNC) followed by a sixty-day “transition period,” according to SoundThinking. The Mayor’s Office has been unclear on what precisely that transition entails.
CPD Superintendent Larry Snelling, who was hand-picked by Johnson; Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability President Anthony Driver; a significant majority of City Council members; and the editorial boards of the Sun-Times and Tribune all vehemently disagreed with the mayor’s decision to cancel ShotSpotter.
Undeterred, Johnson forged ahead— but he also announced a new Request for Information (RFI) for “first responder technology” on Friday, though the mayor was vague about whether this could result in ShotSpotter returning or another
gunshot-technology company taking its place. On Monday, the City issued an RFI for “law enforcement technology.”
The Weekly spoke to Deputy Mayor for Community Safety Garien Gatewood about ShotSpotter, recent efforts by the Mayor’s Office to reduce violence, and the future of public safety in Chicago. Before joining the Mayor’s Office last summer, Gatewood was the director of the Illinois Justice Project, a nonprofit focused on reforming the legal system. As deputy mayor, he has led the rollout of Johnson’s “People’s Plan for Community Safety,” which has included community outreach events and plans to invest in violenceimpacted people of “Highest Promise.”
The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
In February, a WBEZ reporter asked Mayor Johnson if he was considering any other gunshot-detection vendors, and he flatly said, “No.” Now he’s issued an RFI for other technology. Can you discuss how and why the mayor’s position has evolved?
I think the evolution has come from us wanting to see what else is out there, not necessarily committing to another gunshot-detection technology, but we need to see what is in the marketplace to
see if there is a fit for the City of Chicago. And quite frankly, I think it’s important to put an RFI out to explore what options are there.
Why not issue that RFI much sooner?
We went through a process of looking at our options on what would make the most sense. We don’t ever want to be an administration that rushes things. We’re going to take our time to make sure we get these things right. So in the process of getting this right, we had a lot of conversations with community members, some members of law enforcement, and folks in and outside of the administration, to understand what options and recommendations are in front of us. And we wanted to make an informed decision by issuing an RFI, given the timeline throughout the decommission phase, because the RFI closes before that phase is over.
We have multiple police districts in the city that do not have ShotSpotter, and they seem to be doing just fine. So we
can replicate that work, as the mayor has mentioned multiple times, by investing more in communities that have been disinvested in.
What does the sixty-day transition period entail?
We’ll be working out the rest of that later today, and we can come back to you on that one, because we’re going to work on the specifics of that literally in the next hour. [Editor’s note: The Mayor’s Office did not respond to follow-up requests for clarification.]
This spring, the Weekly reported that in several municipalities where ShotSpotter contracts were canceled or expired, the company’s sensors remained active, and in some cases provided alerts to police departments. What is the administration doing to ensure the sensors are actually turned off in Chicago?
In our discussions with [SoundThinking] on decommission and what these next steps are, we’ll make it abundantly clear that we don’t want them
listening in on the City of Chicago once this deal is done.
What has your office been doing to encourage residents to dial 911 and get more engaged with community safety?
That effort has included community engagement, not only from our People’s Plan [for Community Safety] quarterly meetings, but from some of the other work that we’ve been doing on the ground, and also some community engagement we’ve been able to do alongside the police department. Now that work is going to have to intensify. We’ll have a quarterly People’s Safety update on October 8 in the Austin neighborhood, and we will have updates on CPD there.
But a big push is going to be at that level of connectivity that is needed from community members to call 911, and a big push to make sure folks are getting the responses they’re looking for. My team has been leading an effort to train people on 311 requests; some of the folks who call 911 should really be reaching out to 311.
there the entire week leading up to it, and then my team has had follow-ups with those blocks to address some of the needs that folks have highlighted.
How do you balance advocating for a long-term vision for community safety with responding to the immediate needs of people who live in communities plagued by gun violence?
Something we’re exploring now is, what are the 911 calls for service that we are seeing…so we can deploy additional resources in those spaces? So, what do we do when some areas are having a spike in gender-based violence calls? How do we lean on our partners in the community to dispatch resources? So again, we’re trying to be more proactive and more comprehensive than we’ve been in the past.
How do the administration’s Take Back the Block events fit into the plan? How are you measuring the success of those events?
Ultimately, they’re almost a template for what the People’s Plan can be in particular blocks. So, we take a four-block radius and hit it hard with sidewalk repairs, light repairs, cleaning, and an increased presence from our police department, and our partners on the ground, and we bring the mayor out there. He has his entire administration showing up for folks on these blocks. That is a microcosm of what the People’s Plan is.
Not only did we show up on those days that we took back the blocks, we had the infrastructure departments, the CPD, our community-based organizations out
I think we have been in a place where we have been remarkably fortunate, because of the partnerships that we actually do have with the CPD. And I’ll tell you why that’s important. By every objective measure, if it wasn’t Mayor Brandon Johnson, people would look at our [crime] numbers compared to last year, and they would say, objectively, across the board, with crime we have been successful. There is a close to 10% decrease from last year in homicides, which had a 13% decrease the year before. We put together a robbery task force that included folks from all departments inside CPD and also our teams, and we’ve seen a massive decrease in robberies. We’ve also seen a massive decrease in thefts. [Editor’s note: The City’s violence reduction dashboard shows that homicides have decreased 9.1% since 2023, in line with national trends, while robberies have decreased 10.9% and carjackings are down 21.7%. Aggravated battery, aggravated assault, and multivictim shootings are up, however.]
We created a rapid-response team at the beginning of the summer because we saw the number of mass shootings and the number of tender-age children that were shot throughout Chicago. So our teams put together a protocol to respond to that. We had to activate that protocol forty times over the summer. Our teams and departments worked together to activate victim services for those folks. We had multiple departments who never played a role in safety before showing up to the people in the City of Chicago, and that is the story that we have to tell them. ¬
Jim Daley is the Weekly’s investigations editor.
New Book Sifts Through Chicago House Music’s Complex History
An interview with Marguerite L. Harrold, author of Chicago House Music: Culture and Community.
BY EVAN F. MOORE
Poet, essayist, and activist Marguerite L. Harrold, who grew up in and around Chicago (Morgan Park on the South Side and suburban Markham and Bolingbrook), painstakingly details Chicago house music’s complex history in her book, Chicago House Music: Culture and Community.
As most house heads know, everyone has their own story when it comes to the locally crafted genre.
As someone who was a part of the 1990s Chicago hip-hop scene, which was adjacent to house music, Harrold penned a vivid description of what happens when the social spaces relied upon by teens are yanked away, causing an adverse effect within the city’s marginalized communities. She immediately noticed the connection to today.
In the book, Harrold, who turned twenty-one in 1991, describes Chicago’s social scene for teens when the juice bars, venues that did not serve alcohol and were patronized by teenagers, went away. One could say the same could be apt for 2024 Chicago regarding spaces for teens to safely gather being taken away over time. Venues appear to not cater to teens as they did during my teenage years. Some schools hosted events called “mixers,” when teens social groups would rent venues and community centers to host parties.
Some of those juice bars include Medusa’s, The Warehouse, The Orbit Room, and The Powerplant, all wellknown venues in house music lore.
“Things really did change in Chicago after that,” Harrold writes. “More teens
struggled with alcohol and drug use. Teen violence increased. Without the music and safe spaces that the juice bars provided, teens had no place to go and nothing to do on weekend nights. Of course they were going to get into trouble.”
Harrold sat down with the Weekly to discuss her book, house music’s history, the genre’s “family” aspect, and more.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why a book about house music? What did you say to the publisher to get them to take on your book?
It started with a conversation with a friend of mine named Andrew Peart, who at the time was the editor of Chicago Review, and he was working on his dissertation at the University of Chicago. So I was drinking bourbon, talking shit, and he just started talking about his dissertation. I asked him how it was going, and I didn’t realize that he was doing it about a lot of the different Chicago music. I thought he was just working on it related to the blues, but he started talking about jazz and gospel and soul. And so I just asked him. I said, “Well, you’re doing your dissertation about all of these different types of Chicago music. Are you going to do anything about house music?” He looked at me with a straight face and said: “House music? What is that?” I’m like, how the hell? And then we just start laughing. How the hell have you been in Chicago for nine years and not know
house music. I just started describing to him what house music was, how I first came into house music, and what those experiences were like for me.
Peart suggested that I write an essay because he was putting together a Black Arts Movement issue of Chicago Review And it took a while to kind of get into writing it because one, there’s the idea of: Well, who am I to write about house music? I’m not an authority. I’m not an ethnomusicologist. And so I figured the
best way to explain to people what house music is to take them to the party. And so I wrote the essay just describing my first experience going to the Music Box. Andrew sent me a message saying that there was a small Midwestern press called Belt Publishing, a small, woman-owned Midwestern press that was putting out proposals because they were going to be doing a series of books about Midwestern music, and suggested that I send them something. I just sent them the proposal that just had excerpts, I think, from the essay, and highlights just talking about the fact that house music stems from all of the different types of music that goes into traditional African rhythm. And then the influence of jazz and blues and particularly gospel. So it wasn’t really a very long proposal, but it basically was clips from the essay, and they accepted it. So my hope with the book was that, yes, people who didn’t know anything about house music could always learn something, and that people in the community would see themselves in and see their experiences in it, be inspired to do their own thing and to get their own voices out there if that’s what they wanted to do. And I definitely had, with myself, probably spent more time replaying those arguments [about house history] that people have, some of which you captured, I think, very well in your earlier article. And I tried to address those things, particularly about house music’s place, and LGBTQ Black people’s place in the creation of house music and in the creation of house culture, and in the creation and being able to sustain, I think,
Chicago House Music: Culture and Community. Photo provided
the communities that surround it.
What was it like to write a book about a music genre so many Chicagoans love where a lot of the lore is steeped in spoken word?
I think because I’m a poet, I value the oral tradition that we come from, and so I think that was helpful for me to listen to those oral histories. And to listen to Frankie [Knuckles], who is not with us, but he’s always with us in spirit. So to be able to hear him in different interviews say the same thing over and over and over and over again, I think that was helpful for me, honestly, and then I knew that I could do my own fact checking on those things. I also had an editorial team with [Belt Publishing] to be able to do some fact checking on that. And I just enjoyed hearing the stories of people. So this is part of why I included interviews with folks so that oral tradition could continue. That their stories could be told in their own voices as opposed to me interpreting their voices and what they had to say. I feel like as Black people, people are always trying to interpret our voices.
The Weekly’s Michael Liptrot and I recently attended separate house music events where spirited debates regarding the creation of the genre took place. Seems like many house heads have different experiences within the community. Why is that?
It’s like a family, right? We’re not all going to agree about a situation or what happened, and a lot of that has to do with just our own different perspectives and where we’re coming from and our point of view, right? So again, depending on who you are, where you from, you’re going to see a situation differently. And I think with house music, especially because it’s something so personal for each one of us, that we’re going to go into it and come out of it with different experiences. And I feel like that’s okay. I don’t feel like there’s anything wrong with that, as long as you’re respectful in your discussion and your argument.
What was the reasoning behind starting
the book with a timeline explaining house with the forces and moments that created it?
It helped me to frame the book; I was going to talk about the history. Timelines, to me, are very helpful because you can also see the other things that were happening in the world at the time. And so, for example, I found out through my research that the very first discotheque was started in 1947 by a woman named Régine Zylberberg. In Paris, it was a club called the Le Whisky à Gogo where she literally had the lights on the floor, and the Christmas lights around the room. And she had two turntables because she was really the only person working so she could put on a record, go make a drink, go clean the bathroom, come back, and then put on another record.
I think it’s important for us when we’re looking at the development of house music to see all of the things that went into making it. And so when you look at all of the other music that was being made in Chicago, and all of the other art that was being made in Chicago, and the political things that were happening in Chicago, right? So not only what other historical things were located, but where
are you? What were you doing in 1987 and what were you doing in 1991 and what else was happening around that time? And people like to know that kind of thing. When did the Chosen Few start hosting their picnic? When did Lil Louis’s “French Kiss” come out? So it’s a great way to locate yourself. It’s a great way to locate yourself within the book, and it’s a great way to locate house music within the cultural and historical context through which it was born.
You discussed house operating in the same orbit as hip-hop. Can you talk more about how house heads view hiphop?
House was already happening. It was in its second or third wave by the time hiphop started to take form in those golden years of the ’90s. There were some of the same people. Some of them were in a hiphop crew but they would also go to house parties and make circles, and people would be breakdancing at house music parties. Some people would have their hip-hop clothes and go to the hip-hop party and then change into their house clothes and go to the house party. And what I found was that, again, in house parties, it was a
safe space. There was nobody coming out of pocket. There was nobody being rude.
During your interview with local poet (now Chicago Poet Laureate) Avery Young, you described Disco Demolition Night in the best way I’ve heard it: They were burning Black bodies in effigy, basically, right? Why do you see it that way?
Me and my dad were watching it as it was happening, and it felt like a Klan rally. And it felt like they were—I didn’t have the language for that then—it felt like they were burning us; that they were burning representations of [Black people]. They were burning our music. So we talk about music as being something that is from the soul, and that is of the soul, then they’re trying to burn our soul, literally. It was terrifying. How does house make you feel? How would you describe it to someone who isn’t aware?
Music is something that touches the soul, and with house music the communities that it created were friend groups, right? Most people didn’t just find a house party. Somebody brought you to the party, and it was usually somebody close to you and the music and the freedom that you feel in the house community of not being judged. There were none of those kinds of expectations. And so when you go into a house party, function, an event, you’re allowed to be free and be yourself and really feel and experience the music. Also, a lot of house music is based on literal gospel songs. Music that, in particular, is designed to touch your soul. ¬
Chicago House Music: Culture and Community by Marguerite L. Harrold. 208 pages. Belt Publishing, 2024. $24. Paperback.
Evan F. Moore is an award-winning writer, author, and DePaul University journalism adjunct instructor. Evan is a third-generation South Shore homeowner.
Marguerite Harrold.
Photo Kelly D Swedick
Chicago’s Latinx Neighborhoods Have Less Access to Parks, But Residents Are Working to Change That
In majority Latinx neighborhoods like Brighton Park on the Southwest Side, residents have come together to push the city to invest more in parks and neighborhood green spaces in the face of climate change.
BY AYDALI CAMPA, BORDERLESS MAGAZINE
This story was originally published on September 25 by Borderless Magazine, and is part of a collaborative reporting project led by the Institute for Nonprofit News and includes Borderless Magazine, Cicero Independiente and Inside Climate News. It was supported by the Field Foundation and INN. Reprinted with permission.
Carmen Barragan remembers the church bells ringing from her village’s plaza in Michoacan, Mexico. She recalls looking out at the bustling courtyard filled with fruit vendors, children playing games and the verdant trees that engulf the plaza in her hometown of Cotija.
That vibrancy is a standard that she hopes to see in outdoor gathering spaces in her neighborhood of Brighton Park on Chicago’s Southwest Side. It led her to become a community organizer focused on promoting health through her neighborhood council.
Her mission: create safe community hubs for her neighbors to use and come together.
But it hasn’t been easy.
“I would take my kids to parks in other neighborhoods and see that they are in better conditions, and it seems like people there didn’t have to fight for those parks to be maintained, but here we do,” said Barragan.
Her organizing efforts contributed to multi-year campaigns that led to renovations at Kelly Park, a play area known as Hidden Park and a school playground in Burroughs Elementary School.
This organizing is vital for Barragan’s community.
Brighton Park is one of the hottest
neighborhoods in Chicago, experiences high levels of air pollution and is susceptible to flooding. Its residents are also among the most physically inactive.
At the same time, it lacks a key element to combat these conditions brought on by climate change: substantial green space and parks.
Barragan was happy when the Chicago Park District announced plans to build its headquarters with a park in her neighborhood. The new facility, which includes indoor and outdoor recreation and nature areas, opened in the neighborhood last year—a significant win for the community known as a park desert.
Still, the Chicago Park District has a long way to go to help Brighton Park and other neighborhoods catch up with other parts of the city with greater green space
access.
Research has shown that a lack of access to parks and green spaces isn’t rare for communities with demographics like Brighton Park. The neighborhood comprises mostly low-income residents and a majority Hispanic population.
In a recently published study, researchers examined access and connectivity of green spaces in ten major cities, including Chicago. The study found that neighborhoods in Chicago with a higher proportion of Hispanic residents are associated with smaller and fewer parks, less vegetation and less connectedness between those spaces than neighborhoods with higher proportions of any other race or ethnicity.
The research highlighted that larger and better-connected trees and green areas
are essential for helping urban communities respond and recover from the effects of climate change, including more frequent heavy rain events, poor air quality days and extreme heat. Green spaces can lower air temperature, improve air quality and absorb floodwater.
Disparities in green space connectivity can affect the extent of these benefits for nearby communities, according to the new study co-authored by Michelle Stuhlmacher, assistant professor of geography at DePaul University.
Barragan notices daily the difference the study points to in her city. “We need to be more equitable,” she said. “We all deserve the same opportunities as those in the south and north.”
Uneven distribution of green space and parks in Latino communities
Chicago fares pretty well compared to other cities when it comes to average accessibility to parks. Data from the Trust for Public Lands shows that 98 percent of Chicago’s population lives within close proximity to a park. However, access to parks is not evenly distributed across the city, with Hispanic and Latino neighborhoods having 41 percent less access to parks than the average Chicagoan.
Stuhlmacher noted that having a park nearby doesn’t necessarily mean access to substantial tree canopy coverage and vegetation.
Her study found that some densely populated and more affluent areas, like Fulton Market and the Near North Side, also have low levels of green space, parks and tree canopy. However, the study
Carmen Barragan, a Brighton Park Neighborhood Council health organizer manager, stands at the renovated Kelly Park on Tuesday, Sept. 3, 2024. Barragan leads programs in the neighborhood that aim to attract people to use and gather at community parks.
Photo Aydali Campa for Borderless Magazine
identified nearly half of the areas with significantly low clusters of green spaces are in majority-Hispanic neighborhoods like Brighton Park, Belmont Cragin, Pilsen and West Elsdon.
For example, some parts of Chicago, like Lincoln Park, have over 30 percent tree canopy coverage, while Brighton Park has 12 percent. The Southwest Side neighborhood is about 80 percent Hispanic, with more than 40 percent foreign-born residents.
According to the study, large tree canopy clusters are concentrated in Chicago’s outer edges, on the far North and Far South Sides, due to their lower population density and larger parks. Neighborhoods in the West, Northwest and Southwest Sides with a majority Hispanic population tend to have smaller and less connected patches of green space.
Several of these majority-Hispanic neighborhoods are also communities that were historically redlined. According to the Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental justice mapping and screening tool, they face economic hardship and additional environmental burdens exacerbated by climate change, like higher temperatures, poor air quality and susceptibility to flooding.
In recent years, the city’s investments have reduced this disparity, including building the new park district headquarters
in Brighton Park with climate change in mind.
The Chicago Park District did not respond to questions from Borderless Magazine.
Barragan said that sometimes people don’t understand how vital parks and green spaces are in fostering healthier and more connected communities.
A more robust community network, like the one Barragan is fostering, can encourage collaboration and resourcesharing during emergencies, making them better equipped to respond to and recover from climate challenges, said Sara McTarnaghan, a principal research associate at the Urban Institute.
A community campaign for more green space
Barragan moved from Mexico to Brighton Park in 1999. At the time, she was recently married with two children and another on the way. She described culture shock in those early days. She didn’t speak English, felt unsafe, didn’t know anyone in the city and lacked a space in the neighborhood to meet people.
A few years after settling in, she discovered the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council through her children’s school, Burroughs Elementary. She volunteered to
fundraise for a community gathering—the first time she felt part of a community since leaving Michoacan.
“I had fallen into a depression, but the feeling of being a part of a community helped me get out of it,” she said.
Over the last decade, she’s organized programs focused on community health for the neighborhood council, including advocating for city investment in parks in the neighborhood.
In 2011, she led efforts to push the city to renovate Kelly Park—the neighborhood’s only park. More than 300 Brighton Park residents gathered in the basement of St. Pancratius Catholic Church to discuss the park’s problems. Residents wanted a place for their kids to relax and play safely. Kelly Park wasn’t cutting it, Barragan said.
Brighton Park Neighborhood Advisory Council members recall Kelly Park’s dilapidated playground, crumbling turf and flooding after rain because of poor drainage.
“It would turn into a swamp after it rained,” said the executive director of the neighborhood council, Patrick Brosnan.
“We basically didn’t have a green space in Brighton Park,” said Sara Reschly, former Kelly Park Advisory Council president.
For community members like Barragan, that meant driving her kids to parks in other neighborhoods to play soccer.
The meetings kicked off a community-
wide effort to pressure the city to significantly improve the park. They knocked on doors, held meetings, fundraised, and attended Park District budget meetings. They called out the city’s inequitable distribution of investments in Chicago’s North Side parks, some of which have bountiful vegetation, new fieldhouses, and well-maintained play fields, said Barragan.
A 2011 Chicago Tribune report about the unequal distribution of quality parks in Chicago and the campaign to renovate Kelly Park highlighted Brighton Park as “park poor.”
The neighborhood campaign raised about $2 million and ultimately secured the support of the Chicago Park District to renovate the park. Kelly Park was renovated in 2015, with two added soccer fields, a new playground, refurbished baseball fields, updated drainage, renovated basketball courts, and restored landscaping.
More than a decade later, the Chicago Park District relocated its new headquarters with a sprawling park in the neighborhood last year. According to the Chicago Park District, the location was selected as part of the city’s effort to prioritize investing in communities and the community’s need for more open space.
Brighton Park Community Campus spans seventeen acres and was built on a vacant lot, formerly home to a number of factories and processing facilities.
Kelly (Edward) Park, which includes a playground, sports fields and mature trees, is seen on Friday, Sept. 13, 2024. For many years, Kelly Park was Brighton Park's only park.
Photo Max Herman for Borderless Magazine
Claudia Galeno-Sanchez visits plants she helped plant in Orozco Community Academy's front yard on Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2024. Photo Aydali Campa for Borderless Magazine
According to the Chicago Park District, the park was designed to have “minimal impact on the environment,” with an energy-efficient facility for both the park district headquarters and a fieldhouse for public use. It also features native gardens, trees and grasses to absorb stormwater and reduce the effect of urban heat islands.
The new park is also part of a larger effort by the city to address disparities in quality park and green space access, according to the Chicago Park District’s Capital Improvement Plan. In recent years, the city has committed millions of dollars to expand natural areas, create new and improved fieldhouses, build climateresilient playgrounds and plant 75,000 trees by 2027.
This year, Chicago moved up in rankings from 16th place to 10th when it comes to access to parks among major cities in the U.S., according to an annual analysis by the Trust for Public Land.
Still, Stuhlmacher said that to address the gap in green spaces, the city needs to focus efforts on communities that lack these spaces and face environmental burdens because they need these benefits the most.
She said planting more trees soon and where possible is critical in densely populated neighborhoods with limited space in large vacant lots, like Brighton Park. It takes years for trees to reach the
level of growth that provides the most environmental benefits.
Who will look after our parks?
Less than two miles north of Kelly Park, Wence Garcia brings his eight-yearold twin daughters to La Villita Park multiple times a week. They enjoy the playground and run through the splash pad on sweltering days.
If they get there early enough, at around noon, it’s peaceful before the bigger kids arrive.
“I like that it’s very clean,” said Garcia, who often sees people cleaning the park.
The park is in Little Village, another community with a majority Hispanic population and lower levels of green space connectivity. Many years of advocacy led by the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO) resulted in the creation of La Villita Park in 2014.
Many people want more green space, but are concerned about who will pay for maintenance, said Jacqueline Vasquez, a park organizer at LVEJO. Organizers say Park District funds for general maintenance aren’t enough to upkeep parks. Volunteers help with the upkeep in Little Village, while donations have supported adding more trees to the park.
In neighboring Pilsen, Claudia Galeno-Sanchez promotes green spaces
Kids play at a playground in La Villita Park on Tuesday, Aug. 13, 2024.
Photo Aydali Campa for Borderless Magazine
Improvements on Archer/Kedzie Corridor Would Boost Safety and Connect Neighborhoods
CDOT proposal could drastically shift quality of life in and around Brighton Park, but the State must step in to make larger changes.
BY MRITTIKA GHOSH
Tand native gardens in the Lower West Side neighborhood. Galeno-Sanchez, a coordinator for Women for Green, has planted gardens in schools, churches and homes throughout Pilsen. Promoting and creating green spaces has also meant finding volunteers to help maintain the gardens.
“Parks are supposed to be public areas for green spaces,” she said. “I feel like there aren’t sufficient trees for the kind of heat we get here.”
Like Brighton Park, Pilsen is a heat island. These urban areas are significantly warmer due to the built environment, such as buildings, roads and infrastructure that absorb and re-radiate heat more than natural landscapes like forests and bodies of water. That makes the communities’ work advocating and maintaining parks vital in the face of climate change.
Over the years, Barragan has gathered volunteers to clean up parks in Brighton Park. She recalls a campaign she led over a decade ago in which neighbors helped pick up trash and bring their own lawn mowers to trim the grass at Hidden Park—an effort that eventually led to the park’s renovation.
She plans to continue promoting the use of outdoor spaces and other practices for a healthy life.
After almost twenty years of community organizing, Barragan’s grassroots efforts have significantly improved Kelly Park and other community spaces.
“We’ve always had to fight [for these improvements], so it is frustrating, but at the same time, it is very gratifying to see these spaces open,” Barragan said. “It makes us think back on how we got these spaces, how we fought for them and how we came together.”
She feels proud when the space comes alive with families gathering at Kelly Park for games in the afternoons and Friday evenings—a small reminder of the bustling plaza in Cotija. ¬
Aydali Campa is a Report for America corps member and covers environmental justice and immigrant communities for Borderless Magazine. Send her an email at aydali@ borderlessmag.org
he heavily-trafficked ArcherKedzie intersection on the Southwest Side has been left without significant changes to safety measures in decades, making it the site of rising traffic incidents. Nearly 600 people have been injured or killed in the last five years across over 2,300 total crashes, accounting for nearly half of all traffic injuries in Brighton Park.
When attempting to go downtown from the southwestern edges of the city by car, bike, or on foot, this risky throughway is the only street that runs from city limits all the way to State Street. Along any other route, you’d run into physical barriers: a street that dead-ends, industrial yards, or other infrastructural snags.
After years of advocacy and a steady rise in fatalities on this stretch, Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) presented a long-overdue proposal this summer for major changes to the ArcherKedzie corridor to address these traffic safety concerns, which are “ranked one of the top two issues in the 12th Ward,” according to Alderwoman Julia Ramirez (12th). Walking down the street today, the sounds of traffic and speeding make it near-impossible to hold a conversation, with long intervals between crosswalks (the proposals for changes include added pedestrian crossings), and stressful to use
regularly.
The design changes would update Archer Avenue from 47th Street to Western Avenue (the entire stretch running through Brighton Park) with amenities such as protected bike lanes and bus boarding islands, making life safer and more feasible for many to use alternative modes of transit.
Dixon Galvez-Searle, a transportation advocate for Southwest Collective and lifelong local cyclist, is hopeful that these changes would encourage a stronger sense of community between neighborhoods. “I live in Archer Heights, and if I want to go to McKinley Park, which is not far away…I could easily bike there if Archer was safer,” he said.
The sentiment in neighboring McKinley Park was similar. Kate Eakin, president of the McKinley Park Development Council, pointed out that while the improvements technically end at the border of her neighborhood, many residents “will use them to get to those everyday services that they need, but that are just over the line” in Brighton Park.
The proposed updates resemble changes made to Milwaukee Avenue on the Northwest Side in the mid-2010s. (According to Galvez-Searle, “Archer is the Southwest Side version of Milwaukee.”) As an arterial street that follows a CTA train line and is full of thriving businesses,
Kelly (Edward) Park, which includes a playground, sports fields and mature trees, is seen on Friday, Sept. 13, 2024. For many years, Kelly Park was Brighton Park's only park. Photo Max Herman for Borderless Magazine
there are clear parallels. To residents like Galvez-Searle, it’s evident that investment in infrastructure “isn’t nearly at the level that it’s been on the North Side.” The equivalent changes to similar streets on the North Side have cut injury crashes in half and drastically decreased speeding.
Alderwoman Ramirez, who came into office in May of 2023, supports making changes, and names traffic safety as one of the most important concerns to be addressed in the ward. “Through our ward office, we had our first community meeting this summer, and have asked the collective and CDOT to coordinate with us,” she said.
According to Ramirez, the community meeting was better-attended than most, thanks in large part to outreach from community-based organizations like The Southwest Collective that have been raising awareness about the issue. Attendees included parents, local school principals, nonprofit representatives, and business owners.
government agencies.
“I think that we were probably in the, like, seventy to eighty people that attended,” said Ramirez. “It allowed for people to see those very specific details, block by block, and make suggestions.” Representatives from CDOT and other neighborhood organizations also attended, with members of The Southwest Collective giving opening remarks. Also present were members of the McKinley Park Development Council and Equiticity.
To make larger-scale changes than this, the responsibility will need to be shifted to the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT). While the stretch of Archer running through Brighton Park is under the jurisdiction of the city, the portion running west of 47th Street and east of Western Avenue are under the state’s purview. Many residents involved share the idea that these developments will put pressure on the state to continue this work along other parts of the Southwest Side.
Galvez-Searle said that though the proposed changes are a good start, “we need to go beyond that, and in order to do that, we have to get IDOT on board” to make the area truly accessible. Eakin echoed this, naming the importance of having the support of larger state departments and
“Implementation occurs under city jurisdiction, and we can see that it’s helping to reduce accidents and making it easier for people to walk and bike,” Eakin said. “That will give us more leverage to put pressure on the state to do it on our section through McKinley Park.”
The plans are not quite in motion yet. CDOT officially lists the Archer Ave. project as active, but Ramirez said that she “did not feel comfortable enough to start the project with just one community meeting under our belt.” Some in the neighborhood have lingering concerns, particularly those who use Archer as a way to commute. An employee of Thomas Kelly High School who is a former Brighton Park resident said, “In just those peak hours, there’s so much traffic and it would really increase everyone’s time to get to work.”
Jose Manuel Almanza, Director of Advocacy and Movement Building for Equiticity, highlighted the need to encourage greater dialogue between CDOT and the people who have such concerns. The responsibility of doing this outreach falls to community-based organizations like Southwest Collective, McKinley Park Development Council, and Equiticity.
“We need to be investing in doing real outreach to get to the people that haven’t been at these meetings before and get their feedback and buy-in,” Almanza said. “It takes a lot of work and effort and capacity to talk to people and walk
the neighborhood [so we should] attach funding so that CBOs [community based organizations] are getting paid to do the hard work of getting community members to come to a meeting.”
The task of increasing community buy-in is ongoing, and continues to
be driven by neighborhood advocacy organizations. While it is unclear when exactly construction would begin, the wheels are in motion as CDOT completes the process of gathering feedback on their detailed maps (which can be sent to completestreets@cityofchicago.org). Looking forward, after these changes are implemented and the resulting benefits are shown, Eakin anticipates that they would have “more leverage to put pressure on the state to do it through McKinley Park.”
As a longtime resident and activist in Brighton Park, Galvez-Searle remains optimistic.
“The more that we can do to help people navigate the space between those neighborhoods, the more we can connect those neighborhoods,” he said. “Those are the kind of connections that we really want to be establishing, period, on the Southwest Side.” ¬
Mrittika Ghosh (she/her) is a reader, writer, and arts journalist living in Chicago.
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