HEGEWISCH Compiled by Alma Campos Neighborhood Captain
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he rest of Chicago seems light years away whenever I’m in Hegewisch, visiting my brother or crossing the state border while passing through to visit family in Hammond, Indiana. Living on the Southwest Side for ten years, I’ve grown accustomed to walking a few minutes to a bus stop or train station and being immediately connected to Chinatown, Bridgeport, the Loop, and other parts of the city in a matter of minutes. Driving down Brainard Ave., in Hegewisch,you’ll pass Calumet Harbor Lumber Company—a saw mill and manufacturer. Vlado Truck Parking—a lot that is dedicated to truck parking—also operates down the avenue. Great Lakes Reloading—a steel processing company—is located nearby. Power posts and power towers stand visible as the area’s skyscrapers. The rest: rows of bungalows, small businesses on Baltimore Ave., some abandoned industrial sites, and blight. For this project, I asked friends, family, and locals to describe the area. Their responses included the neighborhood’s industrial past; its steel mills, manufacturing, and factories; Wolf Lake’s natural areas as well as vacant land; and the police. Even natural spaces such as Wolf Lake are surrounded by industry. The Hegewisch Marsh, which contains 129 acres of native marsh, wetland, and prairie habitats along the Calumet River, sits south of the Ford Motor Plant at Torrence Ave. and 130th St. and east of an enormous landfill. Wolf Lake’s 804 acres straddle the Indiana and Illinois state line near Lake Michigan, and have suffered years of environmental damage caused by Hegewisch’s history of heavy industries. Local environmental activist groups have worked hard to clean both Wolf Lake and the marsh. Avenue “O” takes drivers on a narrow scenic path through Wolf Lake on the left if you’re driving south. Just as nature perseveres in Hegewisch despite the threats of polluting companies, so do its people. I met Melany Flores, who participated in the Stop General Iron
PHOTO BY LEO HERNANDEZ
hunger strike in the spring of 2021 to keep a metal-scrapping company from coming to her neighborhood. When I first spoke to Flores months back on the phone, she told me she still could not eat like she used to before the hunger strike. I also spoke to Jesse Diaz, who opened a nutrition club in Hegewisch last year. His goal is to bring happiness in the neighborhood around the topic of nutrition and provide a welcoming space to all. He opened his business in spite of the pandemic, and in spite of being the only LGBT and brown individual on the board of the Hegewisch Business Association. Flores told me that after the hunger strike, which came about during the pandemic and was motivated largely by the social momentum built during the past year’s movements such as Black Lives Matter, her neighborhood would not be the same. She said the pandemic revealed a lot of the ruptures in her neighborhood and beyond but she remains hopeful for change. This reminded me of what Arundhati Roy wrote in her latest essay, “The Pandemic Is a Portal”—from her book Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction. She writes: “Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘normality,’ trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” (Alma Campos) Neighborhood captain Alma Campos is the immigration editor at the Weekly. SEPTEMBER 16, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 49
