SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is an independent nonprofit newsprint magazine written for and about neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago. We publish in-depth coverage of the arts and issues of public interest alongside oral histories, poetry, fiction, interviews, and artwork from local photographers and illustrators. The South Side Weekly is dedicated to supporting cultural and civic engagement on the South Side and to providing educational opportunities for developing journalists, writers, and artists. Volume 5, Issue 24 Editor-in-Chief Baci Weiler Managing Editors Bridget Newsham, Sam Stecklow Deputy Editor Adam Przybyl Senior Editors Julia Aizuss, Christian Belanger, Mari Cohen, Andrew Koski, Hafsa Razi, Olivia Stovicek Politics Editor Adia Robinson Education Editor Rachel Kim Stage & Screen Editor Nicole Bond Visual Arts Editor Rod Sawyer Food & Land Editor Emeline Posner Music Editor Christopher Good Contributing Editors Elaine Chen, Mira Chauhan, Amy Qin, Rachel Schastok, Kristen Simmons, Michael Wasney, Yunhan Wen Data Editor Jasmine Mithani Radio Editor Erisa Apantaku Radio Hosts Andrew Koski, Olivia Obineme, Sam Larsen Social Media Editors Bridget Newsham, Sam Stecklow Visuals Editor Ellen Hao Deputy Visuals Editors Kahari Black, Ellie Mejía, Lizzie Smith Photography Editor Jason Schumer Layout Editor Baci Weiler Staff Writers: Maddie Anderson, Ashvini Kartik-Narayan, Kiran Misra, Anne Li Staff Radio Producer: Bridget Vaughn Fact Checkers: Abigail Bazin, Sam Joyce, Bridget Newsham, Adam Przybyl, Hafsa Razi, Sam Stecklow, Tammy Xu Staff Photographers: milo bosh, Kiran Misra, Jason Schumer Staff Illustrators: Siena Fite, Natalie Gonzalez, Katherine Hill, Courtney Kendrick, Kamari Robertson Webmaster Publisher Operations Manager
Pat Sier Harry Backlund Jason Schumer
The Weekly is produced by an all-volunteer editorial staff and seeks contributions from across the city. We distribute the paper each Wednesday in the fall, winter, and spring. Over the summer we publish every other week. Send submissions, story ideas, comments, or questions to editor@southsideweekly.com or mail to: South Side Weekly 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Chicago, IL 60637 For advertising inquiries, contact: (773) 234-5388 or advertising@southsideweekly.com
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IN CHICAGO IN THIS A week’s worth of developing stories, odd events, and signs of the times, culled from the desks, inboxes, and wandering eyes of the editors
No Cars2Go on the South Side Two weeks ago, City Council approved a pilot program for Car2Go, a car sharing service that allows members to rent a car and park at any legal curbside parking space. The service area for the pilot excludes much of the West Side and everything south of Cermak Road from the test area. After paying a one-time membership fee of five dollars, members can drive at about forty cents a minute or buy cheaper timed packages. Reader transportation columnist John Greenfield found that the program was blocked by several South Side aldermen, including Pat Dowell (3rd), Sophia King (4th), and Leslie Hairston (5th), who all expressed worries that it would conflict with limited parking space in their wards. Perhaps they didn’t read about a 2016 UC Berkeley study that found each shared car took off up to eleven private cars from the roads—or didn’t consider that many of their constituents could have used the opportunity to save on transportation costs. Dirty Schools, Done Dirt Cheap Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has been caught brushing things under the rug again. This time, it was literal dust (among other things) that the district was trying to hide. In response to the discovery of rat droppings at Mollison Elementary School in Bronzeville this past November, city officials ordered health inspections for schools citywide—what they called a “blitz.” The Sun-Times obtained the results from the 125 schools that CPS ended up inspecting, and found that schools were not as spick and span as previous reports may have depicted. Only thirty-four passed, a stark contrast from the ninety-six percent of schools that apparently passed the round of inspections prior to this one.While this discrepancy may be a surprise to some Chicagoans, it’s old news for families with kids enrolled at CPS, as well as their teachers, both of whom have long complained about unsanitary conditions in class and lunchrooms. The overlooked dirtiness has a lot to do with CPS’s dirty practices: tipping off the janitorial staff about when inspections come and even where they’ll look when they do. The janitorial staff, for their part, often don’t receive the cleaning supplies they need until the lead-up to an inspection. Many blame the general disarray of CPS’s custodial services to the various private agencies now contracted to supply (and inspect) those services. Time will tell if CPS and partners will permanently polish up their act in the wake of this cleanliness crisis. An Ignoble Education Charter schools have long been a controversial topic in Chicago. While many public school parents, teachers, and advocates blame charters for many of the issues with Chicago Public Schools, those same issues understandably lead some parents to wonder what the other side of high school education has to offer. Noble Charter Schools, the largest charter school network in the city, offers an outlook that’s very severe, as exposed by an NPR Illinois report. The mostly Black and Latinx students in its schools are forced to adhere to a strict dress code that allows for no individuality, and the consequences could mean a white teacher filling in the dyed color of a Black student’s hair with black sharpie just so they can stay in class—and the teacher isn’t penalized. Students who get into fights are arrested and escorted off campus, demerits are given for slouching in your desk, and, in the hallways between class, teachers shout “Hands Up!” to demand that the students move in “complete silence.” It’s not all bleak. Last year, Deshawn Armstrong graduated from Hansberry College Prep, a Noble school in Auburn Gresham, with a 35 ACT score and acceptances to Harvard and Brown. Despite his accomplishments, Armstrong told NPR Illinois he has encouraged relatives and friends not to attend Noble schools because it “felt like a prison.” To Armstrong, it seems that the benefits of a “quality” education weren’t great enough to outweigh the cost of breaking the students’ spirits.
ISSUE evans’s order under watch
“Very basic information about our court system [is] not accessible.” kiran misra........................................3 roots of the 1919 riot
Eugene Williams’s death was just the last straw. sammie smylie...................................4 uncovering forgotten histories
“No one ever handed me a book full of Black women, about Black women, by Black women, ever, in my public education.” tammy xu...........................................6 recommended reading
“I’m driven by what’s culturally relevant to my students. Reading levels and challenging their skills is very important, but secondary.” anne li...............................................8 new rental report
“Most new developments are oriented toward higher-income renters.” christian belanger.......................12 meet ricard(ito) gamboa
“Mexican hyphen Americans.” itzel blancas..................................13
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Cover illustration by Ellen Hao
JUSTICE
Evans’s Order Under Watch
With court watching and town halls, organizers continue to push criminal justice reform BY KIRAN MISRA
A
t a presentation held last month at the Grace Place Episcopal Church in Printer’s Row, the Coalition to End Money Bond released the most recent results of its community courtwatching initiative. Their efforts tracked the implementation of an order, issued by Circuit Court Chief Judge Timothy Evans, that bond court judges set more affordable bonds for legally innocent pretrial detainees in the Cook County criminal justice system. This is the most recent result of the long history of activism for bail reform in Cook County—a history which began in the 1970s, as detailed in a three-part series in the Weekly earlier this year. “Very basic information about how our court system, how our government is treating our neighbors, our friends, and our loved ones [is] not accessible,” said Coalition member Sharlyn Grace of the Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice at the release event. As she explained, the fact that Illinois courts are not subject to the state public records law makes it difficult for those looking to hold judges accountable to get data on the activities that occur within their courtrooms. (There is a process to request court data from Evans’s office, but whether or not the data is released is up to the discretion of the Chief Judge and can take months longer than a public records request.) In the absence of publicly available data, the Coalition turned to the time-tested practice of court watching to gather their own data on whether Cook County bond practices were constitutional or not. Evans implemented General Order 18.8A in September 2017, as the Coalition was planning its latest round of court watching. To determine the effects of this order on the pretrial practices in the County, the Coalition trained over one hundred court watchers to observe the practices in bond court a month before the order went into effect and a month after the order was implemented. In bond courts, the court watchers
KIRAN MISRA
collected both quantitative and qualitative data on bond court activities from August to October 2017, answering questions including: Were you and loved ones able to get in? Were you able to hear what was happening? What type of attorney did the defendant have? What was the risk assessment score? What were the State’s Attorney’s recommendations? What was the bond type set and amount? Were there any additional pretrial conditions? Grace told the Weekly that there had been a significant improvement in bail practices in Cook County after the implementation of the order. Court watchers
reported a forty-eight percent decrease in the use of money bonds in Central Bond Court overall and a twenty-six percent increase in the use of recognizance or I-Bonds, which assign each person a fee to pay if they do not show up to court but do not require that individuals pay a deposit to be released pretrial. They also noted a decrease in the rate of detainer, or D-Bonds—in which a person is required to post ten percent of the total amount of bond to be released pretrial— from forty-eight percent to twenty-three percent. The order also resulted in a decrease in the use of electronic monitoring as a pretrial condition, and a near-elimination
of C-Bonds—which require defendants to pay the entire bond amount to be let out of jail pretrial—but resulted in an increase in instances in which individuals were denied bond altogether and were required to stay in jail pretrial, according to Grace. “You take one tool away, you see more restrictive conditions…. What we want to make sure is that we are not replacing these unpayable money bonds with no bonds,” she explained. Though the order has also resulted in a seventy-three percent increase in judges inquiring into a person’s ability to pay before setting bond, people were given a bond amount that they could actually APRIL 11, 2018 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3
JUSTICE
afford to pay in only fifty-seven percent of these cases. The order also resulted in greater judicial adherence to the recommendations provided by the court’s Public Safety Assessment (PSA) pretrial risk assessment tool, which provides recommendations to judges that are less restrictive than what judges would assign without PSA recommendations. However, the PSA has been strongly criticized by the Coalition and others for its use of racially biased data to make its assessments. Overall, these findings are consistent with the publicized 1,400-person drop in the jail population in the first three months after the order went into effect. However, the decrease in the jail population has stalled in recent months, remaining steady at about 6,100 people in Cook County Jail, with an additional 2,117 people on electronic monitoring. Additionally, as Coalition member Sharone Mitchell of the Illinois Justice Project noted at the release, there is no indication that those whose bonds were set at unaffordable amounts before the order was implemented will have a chance to take advantage of the order. “The people who were put in jail before the order was implemented haven’t had much of a change in their circumstances and we don’t see much of a plan to change that,” he said. One of the most crucial findings of the Coalition’s court watching initiative was that judges’ adherence to the order varied widely, with some continuing to set unaffordable bonds frequently and others more closely following Evans’s instructions. “Your freedom is determined by chance, is determined by what judge gets assigned to you the day you are in court. And that’s just wrong,” explained Mitchell. “Different crimes get treated differently and different judges have different biases.” “Even though the practices of bond court have changed significantly, we are a long way from where we want to be and where the order would like us to
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be,” Grace said. She highlighted ongoing bond reform activism, including efforts to encourage the Illinois Supreme Court to code Order 18.8A into law for all 102 counties in Illinois, a class action lawsuit against Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart for his attempts to prevent the immediate release of people who have paid their bail, and the #NoCopAcademy Campaign, an activist effort to get the city to cancel plans to build a ninety-five million dollar police training center in West Garfield Park.
B
eyond watching the actions of bond court judges, organizers have been pressing other elected officials for criminal justice reform in Cook County. Prosecutors in particular are among those who have the most power to change the unfair criminal justice practices in the county and are led by State’s Attorney Kim Foxx. Attendees from churches all over the South Side packed St. Luke Missionary Baptist Church in South Shore to attend a town hall with Foxx hosted by activist group The People’s Lobby (a Coalition member). Those present discussed how to hold elected officials accountable, ensure economic justice in their communities, and make the practices in the Cook County criminal justice system more just. Last March, making good on a campaign promise, Foxx’s office stopped opposing the release of defendants who are only being held because they can’t post bonds of up to $1,000. “We’re here to talk about hope…. We have to stop believing that a toughon-crime policy is a necessary evil to stop crime; it is not,” St. Luke Rev. Scott Onque declared at the beginning of the town hall, which included strategy sessions, testimony by attendees on their experiences in the Cook County criminal justice system, and analysis of the prison industrial complex with local faith leaders, in addition to a questionand-answer session with Foxx. Attendees called for Foxx to
publicly advocate for more funding for drug diversion programs to combat the effects of the opioid epidemic. They also called for an end to the practice of “overcharging,” in which prosecutors file charges they know they can’t prove so that defendants will accept plea deals, and asked her to implement a felony review guidebook in the State’s Attorney’s office by June 1, as well as to clarify what types of cases the office prosecutes—demands which Foxx largely agreed to. Both Foxx and community leaders were in agreement that issues of criminal justice in Chicago exist within a larger landscape of inadequate healthcare, closing schools, lack of access to fresh food, and intergenerational trauma that characterizes many Chicago neighborhoods, and that all of these factors must be addressed together to mitigate the problem of crime in Cook County. Foxx voiced her agreement on the need for reform across the criminal justice system in Cook County, stating that her office needs to “not just to make sure we’re locking up the right people, but to make sure we’re not locking up the wrong people,” and that it can’t afford to keep prosecuting people who are innocent. She cited the first-ever mass exoneration in Cook County history last November, which resulted in the vacation of eighteen convictions for fifteen South Side men convicted in cases connected to corrupt former CPD Sergeant Ronald Watts, currently serving a federal prison sentence. “The work has to be done with us right here in our own communities,” Rev. Lawrence Marshall said, reflecting on the importance of creating opportunities for Chicagoans to interact with public officials like Foxx. “It is important for us to have face time with leaders because we are the ones who got them into office and we are the ones who can get them out of office.” ¬
Roots of the 1919 Riot “A Few Red Drops” looks beyond an incident of chaos to understand its underlying causes BY SAMMIE SMYLIE
I
n national conversations about the legacy of anti-Black racism in America, the subject of racial violence is often only discussed as being a Southern phenomenon. We can recall examples of the violence used to enforce the South’s racial hierarchy: Jim Crow laws, the lynching of Black men, and the bombing of Black churches. Despite the popular narrative of the North being much more progressive than the South, with the abolitionist movement and more economic opportunities for African-American citizens after slavery, the history of Chicago in the early twentieth century is also filled with continuous occurrences of racial violence and discrimination. The Chicago Race Riot of 1919, which lasted for a full week and resulted in thirty-eight deaths and over 500 people injured, is an often-overlooked event in Chicago’s history that undergoes new examination in the book A Few Red Drops: The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 by Claire Hartfield, published this January.
LIT
Claire Hartfield, A Few Red Drops: The Chicago Race Riot of 1919. $9.99. Clarion Books. 208 pages. A Few Red Drops begins with the story of Eugene Williams. July 27, 1919 was a hot and humid day in Chicago, and many Chicagoans went to the beach to cool off. The beaches were segregated—not by law, but by an unspoken rule enforced by white Chicagoans. Black Chicagoans went to the 26th Street Beach, while white residents went to the 29th Street Beach (neither beach exists today). On this day, Williams and four of his friends went to the beach to sail a raft out on Lake Michigan. The raft that the boys created ended up between the boundaries of 26th and 29th Street Beaches. A white man started to throw stones at the boys, and according to some reports, one hit Williams in the head, knocking him into the water. His friends were unable to get help for him in time and he drowned in the lake. Williams’s friends told a Black policeman at 26th Street what happened and dragged the officer to 29th Street Beach. Once there, a white policeman, Officer Callahan, refused to arrest Williams’s killer. Tensions began
rising across the city as news spread, and after a Black man was arrested when a white man complained about him, the tensions bubbled over into a riot, according to a history by WTTW. Williams’s death was not an isolated incident. As Hartfield explained in an interview with the Weekly, “I would call Eugene’s death the instigator. It was the near-term catalyst. The tensions had been building for many, many years and were just waiting for an event of that type to set everything it off.” Instead of documenting the terror that took place each day of the riot after Eugene’s story, Hartfield’s book forces us away from the riot to investigate the tension between white and Black Chicagoans that led to the riot. Her nuanced investigation of the issues that resulted in the riot serves as a reminder to look beyond an incident of chaos to understand the real problem. Racism and classism intersected at the heart of issues like employment, housing, policing, education, and social life in Chicago in the early 1900s. European immigrants from Ireland, Poland, and Lithuania were competing with Black migrants from the South, who came north during the first wave of the Great Migration for assembly line jobs at the stockyard. The conditions in the stockyard were horrible, consisting of manual labor for long periods of time with low pay and no job security. To push back against elites who controlled the stockyards, European immigrants created unions to represent and fight for the needs of the workers. Many of the jobs that were initially unionized were held by few Black workers, and unions further excluded Black workers that would have been eligible for membership. So when white union workers went on strike, management would hire Black workers to take their place. White union workers were unable to get their demands met and needed their jobs to support their families. Instead of blaming the butchers, they blamed the Black workers, causing further strife between Black and white workers. Furthermore, following the large wave of migration from the South to Chicago,
Black people were restricted in terms of where they could find housing. Many Black families lived in small apartments in the Black Belt (modern-day Bronzeville), but those who had more money and moved to white neighborhoods faced violence and discrimination, including the bombing of their homes. Schools were not legally segregated, but Black children were discriminated against in schools. Teachers refused to teach them in classes; afterschool programs were off-limits for nonathlete Black children. Instead, many Black children went to the Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s Negro Fellowship, Wabash YMCA, or other institutions within their communities. When Black people were victims of racial violence at the hands of white people at work, school, or in their community, they could not call the police. The police harassed and arrested Black people without evidence of crimes being committed. Black southern migrants were second-class citizens and were reminded of it daily; Williams’s death was just the last straw. According to Hartfield, her grandmother largely influenced her interest in exploring the history of the riots. Hartfield’s grandmother moved to Chicago from New Orleans during the first wave of the Great Migration. Hartfield’s grandmother got an apartment in the Black Belt and a factory job in the industrial area near the Stockyards. “One day in the summer of 1919, shortly after she had moved [to Chicago], she was taking a streetcar home from work in the afternoon. As the streetcar moved closer and closer to her home, she was looking out at her window and she saw these mobs of young men in the streets, both Black and white, fighting with one another and actually throwing rocks at the streetcar. She was scared out of her mind,” Hartfield recalled. “The streetcar driver was very cautious and he refused to stop at any of the normal stops. He took everybody straight to the end of the line and dumped them out there. She had to walk back home through this chaos. She ended up being fine but she later found out that this was the beginning of the week-long race riot. That went on for
seven days and seven nights.” “So she told me this story when I was young and it got buried in the back of my mind as many memories do,” Hartfield continued. “But a few years ago as I would see on my TV screen, all of these new instances across the country where people taking to the street in protest, I remembered that story that my grandmother had told me. I thought, ‘Wow, this is nearly a hundred years ago.’ I wanted to know more about what caused that situation and how it was the same and how it was different from what we’re experiencing today.” In reading A Few Red Drops, it becomes apparent how the issues that led to the 1919 race riots are similar to the issues that Chicago continues to face almost a hundred years later. Even though her book chronicles a very dark time in Chicago’s history, Hartfield also spotlights the places where solidarity between groups can take place: in the workplace, unions, schools, and neighborhoods. A Few Red Drops was written for teens to learn a lost piece of Chicago’s history to give them a foundation to understand why Chicago is still segregated today. Nevertheless, this book’s accessibility makes it easy for anyone to digest this long, complicated history. As the city approaches the centennial of the riots, Hartfield said that she hopes that the book gives “context for some of the challenges we are going through today so that we can see that this period in time is a part of a much longer arc of history.” By learning from this landmark event in Chicago’s history of race relations and class, she also hopes that the centennial will bring new conversations about “how we have made significant progress in terms of justice than what we were able to do a hundred years ago.” Ultimately, her goal is that A Few Red Drops will “encourage people to talk to one another about the issues that we face these days—that’s our hope for coming up with better solutions.” ¬
APRIL 11, 2018 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5
LIT
Uncovering Forgotten Histories
A new guidebook brings forth Black women’s contributions to their South Side communities BY TAMMY XU
“A
ll of my life I sat in history classes when we were young, and we didn’t see ourselves. No one ever handed me a book full of Black women, about Black women, by Black women, ever, in my public education.” Activist and communications professional Essence McDowell was giving a welcome speech to the crowd gathered at the release party for the new guidebook she coauthored, Lifting as They Climbed: Mapping a History of Black Women on Chicago’s South Side. All around the packed, sunlit room at the University of Chicago’s Arts Incubator in Washington Park, audience members nodded along in recognition. “To be part of a project like this, it informed my present. It helped me understand what’s missing.” The guidebook is a compilation of thirty-three main sites across the South Side (and ten additional sites of interest) that are linked to prominent Black women from the mid-nineteenth century to today, and it works to fill in the histories McDowell found were missing in her education. The women featured had a wide range of vocations, from pilots to ministers to poets, and many were active in building their communities, creating institutions that still serve residents today. McDowell and her coauthor Mariame Kaba—herself a Black woman with a long and respected legacy of activism in Chicago, though she is now based in New York—decided to format the book as a selfguided tour so that readers could feel more grounded within the history of their city. “It’s important to understand where you live, to be centered in that place, to understand everything that went into making that place the place you live in,” said Kaba. She said she especially hopes young Black women will be able to see their place in that history and understand themselves as “standing on the shoulders of people who came before them.”
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The histories and work of most of the women in the book are not widely known, and even the authors had much to learn; when McDowell first joined the project, she was astonished to realize that she had never heard of most of the women Kaba had begun to uncover. At the time, McDowell was involved in several community organizing efforts, which she loved but also found emotionally exhausting. When Kaba, who had begun the project, wrote about it on Facebook seeking encouragement and assistance, her enthusiasm “about these women was just like a light went off for me,” McDowell recalled. As she learned, she felt uplifted and reinvigorated by their stories and compelled to help finish the project in any way she could. McDowell was particularly impressed by the impact these women’s lives had on the city. “A lot of the women in the book came to Chicago in a time where there was no infrastructure to support Black life at all. And instead of being overwhelmed by the fact that there were no support services, they literally were the solutions themselves,” she said. She was especially impressed by the life of Melissa Ann Elam, who was born into slavery but went on to found a home that supported working women and girls who moved north to Chicago during the Great Migration. At the release party, Kaba spoke to the significance of highlighting these stories: “I think it’s really important in our culture right now, when there’s a lot of hashtags about Black girl magic and how Black women are going to save the universe because of voting for the Democratic party, which is bullshit—we’re not saving the country, we’re actually trying to save ourselves,” she said. “People are doing what they need to do, like they’ve always done.” “What I’d like people to do is actually take our intellectual labor, our contributions
Mariame Kaba and Essence McDowell, Lifting as They Climbed. $15. Selfpublished. 69 pages. Essence McDowell (above) will give an author talk at the Newberry Library, 60 West Walton Street, at 6pm on April 22. KIRAN MISRA
to history, our presence in the world seriously. And this book is an attempt to make that possible, so that it’s not a just surface-level, ‘Black women are great’ kind of situation, but like, know us, you know. Pay attention to what we’ve done in the world,” Kaba said. “I think in particular for us who
are either so invisible-ized or hyper-visible, in really weird, distorted ways, I think for all of us to just be able to be ordinary and good and to let [us] be understood as that in this culture is so incredibly important.” The crowd that listened to Kaba and McDowell’s words at the release was in
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a celebratory mood, with people talking, laughing, and eating snacks. There was a display of books on Black women from Chicago, a button-making station, and a coloring station with free Lifting as They Climbed coloring books. People of all ages were present, highlighting the continuity of the history in the guidebook through today. Kennie James, 86, who moved to Chicago during the Great Migration in 1936 and attended school with Ida B. Wells’s grandson, stopped by after reading about the event in the morning paper. She was surprised by the number and diversity of attendees, calling the event “magnificent.” The next day, on a perfect blue-sky afternoon that felt like spring, thirtyfive people joined a tour of a selection of sites from the book, guided by Kaba and McDowell. The group started in the Loop at Jones College Prep, where one of the earliest Black families in Chicago donated land for a public school in 1871. Then, the group boarded a bus and made its way south. Participants visited the original printing site of the Chicago Defender, where Ethel L. Payne got her start as a reporter; Payne later became one of the first Black women to join the White House press corps. They explored the South Side Community Art Center, which was founded by Margaret Burroughs, an artist who taught at schools and prisons and also founded the DuSable Museum of African American History, then known as the Ebony Museum of Negro History and Arts. At Gwendolyn Brooks’s one-time home on 4259 S. King Drive, the group read “kitchenette building,” a poem Brooks wrote about the apartment complex. The bus stopped down the street from Wells’s house to learn about the woman who sparked the idea for the guidebook in the first place. Kaba, who had sported a pair of earrings with a portrait of Wells
the previous day, thought up Lifting as They Climbed while reading about her for another project. “While I was doing that research, it occurred to me that I never saw anything in terms of a tour that had been particularly focused on the histories of Black women in Chicago,” Kaba said, even though she “had been on other kinds of architecture tours, tours around gangsters and mobsters, those kinds of things.” Wells is the person in the guidebook Kaba finds most fascinating. Wells “singlehandedly put lynching on the map,” she said, but was exceedingly conservative in morals; she was a fearless journalist and activist, while also alienating allies who tried to work alongside her. In short, said Kaba, “She’s not perfect, and that’s what I love about her.” Like the women in Lifting as They Climbed and its authors, many of the many Black women who were present at the book release and bus tour were involved in their communities and working towards a vision of the future that they wished to see. One attendee of the bus tour, Maria Hadden, is running for alderman of the Far North Side 49th Ward. Alicia McGhee, a friend of the authors’, brought her five-year-old son to the book release. “It’s important for him to learn at an early age, and to see Black women in every position, authoritative and supportive,” McGhee said. McDowell is already looking ahead at a new project in her community. At the release she cited Fannie Barrier Williams, a woman who helped build many organizations that supported Black women, as inspiration to start an organization of her own for Black women in Chicago. There were cheers and applause. “I look forward to doing more work around Black women and girls,” said McDowell. ¬
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APRIL 11, 2018 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7
EDUCATION
Recommended Reading
How CPS teachers and librarians seeks to find a story for each student BY ANNE LI
“W
hen people read stories, the first inclination is to find yourself on the shelf— things that reflect you, what your current knowledge and current experiences are,” said Tamela Chambers, the school librarian at Chicago Vocational Career Academy in Avalon Park. But are Chicago Public Schools kids on the South Side reading the age-old standards like Hamlet, flashy titles like Divergent, or something else altogether? In short, are students reading books they can find themselves in? The answer, it turns out, varies considerably across schools and even between classrooms. Aaron Talley, a language arts teacher at Lindblom Math and Science Academy in West Englewood who has contributed an op-ed to the Weekly, explained that teachers and principals consult CPS reading lists to varying degrees. Some base their curriculum off the books recommended on the lists, whereas others create independent reading groups that give students considerable leeway in what they read. CPS reading lists themselves are also a bit of a puzzle, due to their varied usage and sourcing. In a statement to the Weekly, Dorsey Chambers, the CPS Library Coordinator, explained that the basic Recommended Reading List “features recommended newer books, with copyright dates in the past several years, which are quality, critically reviewed literature.” CPS librarians update the Recommended Reading List every other year, along with the Spanish Acclaimed Literature Summary for All (SALSA) booklist and the Diversity Recommended Reading List. The district Department of Literacy also releases specialized reading lists and resources, such as the Social Science Print and Digital Resource Library, which teachers adapt to changing state Social Science standards. Another example is the Power of Peace Reading List, which covers all grade levels and was created by the Department of 8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
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Literacy and CPS librarians to highlight books that emphasize tolerance and conflict resolution. The three biennial reading lists are created by a team of librarians drawn from a larger pool of applicants every other October. They work together to determine the evaluation criteria, rubrics, priorities, and documentation for the reading lists in question. After reviewing five to ten books each month, the team reconvenes in the spring to select the titles to be placed on that reading list. The lists are then distributed to schools by librarians and the Department of Literacy, and presented to the Illinois School Library Media Association, a statewide consortium of school media specialists that develops best-practice guidelines and other professional development resources for school librarians. Despite the heavy involvement of librarians in the creation of reading lists, however, the lists are hardly the primary tool school librarians use. Chambers, for one, envisions herself as a sort of literary matchmaker. “We are champions of reading for pleasure, so generally when I interact with the kids, we chat about the things they like,” she said. “My goal is the match them with the perfect book based on what they tell me.” Recommendations are highly individualized, and can be based on anything from past books a student has liked to their popular culture interests. For example, Chambers said, kids who like dramas and reality television are often recommended realistic fiction, which mimics the forms of structured plot and interpersonal conflict. The last book she had recommended was Maya’s Choice, by Earl Sewell, an author well-received by her students. Talley, at Lindblom, agreed that student choice is a very important part of reading. Librarians play a key role in teaching students how to choose books, but that all the students in his class still read the same texts in class. “It helps build shared experience. The kids can all go see Gatsby together,” he
said. For Talley, like Chambers, the heart of the reading curriculum is student interest. “I’m driven by what’s culturally relevant to my students; that’s the biggest thing, and reading levels and challenging their skills is very important, but secondary.” In practice, however, reading levels are important determinants of what students read. Teachers sometimes use these structures to have students pick books from their assigned reading level shelf. As Talley explained, “Best practice says these aren’t to dictate what students should or shouldn’t be reading, but should instead help teachers attend to students’ needs.” Used properly, reading levels allow teachers to personalize each student’s reading assignments according to their skill level. Another tool teachers use is Accelerated Reader: students decide which books they want to read from the online database, and can take the online reading comprehension tests to get points, creating an incentive for independent reading. For librarians, reading levels are generally not prescriptive. As Chambers explained, “If the students are using books for research, you don’t want to give them something that’s too difficult, but when it comes to reading for pleasure, it’s for that kid’s comfort level.” Tools like Acelerated Reader often end up filling in the gaps at schools without a school librarian, in which students don’t have the same resources for learning how to choose books. Marie Szyman, a school librarian at Nathaniel Greene Elementary in McKinley Park, told the Weekly during reporting on a story last year that school librarians play a critical role in connecting students with new books. This is in part because of the extensive time and resources that a wellstaffed school library has for students. Her favorite books have been ones that she’s found serendipitously in a large library, and for her students she values the experiences of “walking in a grabbing a book that a teacher would never have handed you, and going ‘Woah!’,” she said. “[In a classroom
library] the teacher has chosen ten books, and that’s your library. One below, one above, and the rest are right on your level... That is not a library! They can call it a library, but classroom libraries are not libraries.” Partnerships between classrooms and school libraries, however, are very fruitful. Charles Gunn, former president of the Chicago Teacher-Librarians Association, also told the Weekly last year, “The teachers come with kids, and we can co-teach, and you’re kind of the resource person, the technical advisor, making sure that the kids find what they want—but the teachers are making sure that the lesson itself is done completely.” School librarians also flesh out students’ exposure to cultural ideas. Gunn addresses holidays such as Halloween by including fifteen or twenty books that provide students with multiple perspectives on the holiday. A classroom teacher, Gunn noted, would be lucky to have even a couple of relevant books. For a sense of scale, Gunn explained that a large classroom library will maybe have 500 books, whereas a school library will have 10,000. It’s school libraries that expand student exposure to books beyond the prescribed reading lists, and really encourage kids to read on their own. In spite of their importance, however, school librarians are a vanishing breed in Chicago. Only a quarter of schools have a school librarian this school year, and, as of 2015, among high schools that are at least ninety percent African-American, only two school librarians remain. Szyman adds, “A lot of schools have dismantled their libraries, they’ve put the books in classrooms, given them to parents, given them to other schools…we’ve got boxes of books from other schools in the back of our library.” The Department of Literacy, too, is seeing cuts. “It’s no longer a department,” she said. “It used to be twelve, fifteen people. It was wonderful. We used to have quarterly meetings, and we would share ideas.” Now, CPS records only list a department staff
ELLIE MEJÍA
of eight. The reading lists are still being created, but the level of robust resources is not the same. For all the effort put into creating district-wide reading lists to determine classroom curriculums, standardized testing often becomes the determinant of what students read. The tests are very important in determining student, teacher, and school outcomes. Schools are evaluated based on their test scores and can be shut down if they don’t perform well enough by city standards, with the students being scattered to other schools. As a result, there is a lot of pressure to teach to the test, including in English classrooms, said the teachers interviewed for this story. Class reading material is dictated by the testing metrics. For Talley, “even though I really value kids getting a strong cultural background and reading what they connect to, a lot of what’s on these tests is Shakespeare and Shelley, so a lot of white authors. Even though I’d like to see kids read more actual novels. I think people would be surprised at how much testing dictates what students know.” Talley also noted that he has more freedom to build a reading curriculum that goes beyond the Western canon at Lindblom, a magnet school, than he did at the neighborhood school where he previously taught. Librarian Tamela Chambers and CPS Library Coordinator Dorsey Chambers both recognize the presence of standardized testing in classrooms, and each noted that reading lists are designed to support Common Core standards, while also aiming for diversity and quality. Testing also impacts school libraries in the schools lucky enough to have them.
With CPS so pressed for money, individual schools face tight financial constraints, and testing cuts further into library budgets. Szyman recalled an episode a few years ago when the principal informed her that he had bought her a cart of iPads to use with the students. Szyman was very excited to incorporate the new resource into her lessons with students, but was never able to use the apps she had downloaded for them that summer because the iPads were constantly being used for round after round of standardized tests. Worse, she wasn’t able to buy as many books that year. “My library budget had gone to the iPads, which went to teachers for testing,” she said. Within this context, however, reading lists can still help teachers diversify what students read. As Dorsey Chambers noted, “Our Spanish reading list is particularly popular with teachers who don’t speak Spanish and want to provide access to outstanding Spanish literature for their Spanish-speaking students.” Teachers may also send the lists to parents seeking book recommendations for their children, while others look to the lists for ideas on what to stock in their classroom or school libraries. The large number of books reviewed for the reading lists, as well as the large number of books featured between the three biennial lists, provides teachers with a wide array of current authors. Dorsey Chambers added, “For our featured book lists, we’re especially interested in books that reflect the diversity of CPS students and families.” Diversity and representation mean many things when it comes to stories. Tamela Chambers said that she hasn’t noticed any changes in themes over the years, regardless of testing or Common Core content, because young adults haven’t really changed. “Whether it’s coming to grips with something, coming of age, working with issues of popularity, or depression—maybe the characters look different, but there are something things that are universal across YA fiction.” That being said, “Literature is just like all art, it reflects life—a wide range of experiences across a wide range of reading material,” she said. The same is true for Talley. “Social media is fast, and algorithms are set up for you to react rather than meditate. In a good literacy classroom, students are reading books that are reflective of who they are, that teach them to be politically motivated, and that challenge their ideas and cause them to pause. Reading, as an experience, allows them to dialogue with each other.” ¬
GILDA
Designer Thrift Boutique 1703 E. 55th St Hyde Park 773-888-3134 @gilda.designer thriftboutique APRIL 11, 2018 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9
HOUSING
New rental report shows many Cook County residents still struggle to find affordable housing BY CHRISTIAN BELANGER
L
ast week, the Institute for Housing Studies (IHS) at DePaul University released its newest annual report on the state of rental housing in Cook County. While the report shows small changes within individual neighborhoods, the overall trends across the county are largely unchanged from previous years: less traditionally affordable housing, high levels of cost-burdened tenants, and a large gap between the supply and demand of affordable housing. The last number is perhaps the most immediately jarring. Across Cook County, the affordability gap in 2016 was around 182,000 units; while down by 6,000 units from the year before, that’s up from 157,000 in 2007. The affordability gap, as the IHS defines it, is the difference between the number of lowincome households that earn 150 percent of the poverty-level income (the demand for affordable housing) and the number of rental units available to one of those households at thirty percent of their monthly income (the supply). (The calculation also includes households that earn above 150 percent of the poverty-level income but are occupying one of the affordable units, since they affect the supply level.) The report also finds that this gap is largest on much of the mid-South Side, in the area made up primarily of Hyde Park, Bronzeville, Kenwood, Woodlawn, and Washington Park. There, the affordability gap in 2016 was around 15,800 units. Though that is 1,400 more units than in 2015, Geoff Smith, executive director of IHS, cautioned against drawing out too much significance from year-to-year comparisons, since the IHS analysis stretches back over multiple years. He did note one possible reason for the increase, though: “Along the south lakefront there have been population increases in places like Woodlawn and Washington Park. I think some of that population increase has 10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
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been lower-income households who would be in that demand component for affordable housing.” (Note that the data the report uses only measures through the end of 2016— that means sudden, recent trends, such as a hotter real estate market in Woodlawn, won’t necessarily show up in full for another year or two.) Worryingly, the report also shows that the stock of two-to four-unit buildings across the city continues to remain below its historical level. That’s important because two-to-fours, as they’re commonly called, have long been an important source of affordable housing in the city. But after the financial crisis, foreclosures of two-to-fours in neighborhoods on the South and West Sides increased dramatically. For example, a 2012 report from IHS showed that forty-three percent of Englewood’s twoto-four unit buildings went into foreclosure from 2005 to 2011. That was the highest share of foreclosures in the city, but statistics from other South Side neighborhoods are almost as jarring: forty percent in Burnside, forty-one percent in Washington Park and Woodlawn. Things have hardly gotten better in the half-decade since then. In 2016, 30.8 percent of the rental supply was in two-to-four unit buildings; compare that to 35.7 percent in 2007. And the loss of those buildings is bad news for lower-income renters. “The reason that we’re focused on two-to-four housing stock is because most people who are trying to find affordable housing don’t really get it from subsidized buildings,” said Smith. “Replacements for those units are probably going to be expensive. Most new developments are oriented toward higherincome renters.” The loss of traditionally affordable housing stock goes hand in hand with another continuing trend: the high percentage of rentburdened households in Cook County. Any household that pays more than thirty percent
of its income in rent is defined as rentburdened, while those who pay more than half their income are severely rent-burdened. In 2016, 87.5 percent of households that made less than thirty percent of the area median income in Cook County (about $77,000) were rent-burdened, and seventyfour percent were extremely rent-burdened. In other words, a large majority of the poorest households in the city and suburbs are facing a continuous, monthly affordability crisis. To solve these problems, IHS recommends a nuanced approach that differentiates between the needs of different neighborhoods. In gentrifying areas, for instance, Smith suggests that nonprofits and the city focus on maintaining existing affordable housing, while more affordable housing should be built in already-rich neighborhoods that lack it. Lower-income areas, meanwhile, don’t tend to suffer from a lack of affordable housing; rather, residents’ incomes are often too low to afford any sort of housing without shouldering undue costs. “The problem is that incomes for folks in those neighborhoods are so low that any housing
DATA FROM THE INSTITUTE FOR HOUSING STUDIES AT DEPAUL UNIVERSITY DATA VISUALIZATION BY LIZZIE SMITH
isn’t affordable,” said Smith, nothing that IHS wants to focus on “getting investment to improve existing housing stock, while also providing some rent support for tenants in the neighborhood.” ¬
STAGE & SCREEN
Meet Ricard(ito) Gamboa
A look into the artist, activist, and academic’s “alternative cultural ecology” BY ITZEL BLANCAS
C
hances are that you’re rarely going to see Ricardo Gamboa’s name associated with any mainstream Chicago theaters. And that’s how they like it. Instead, these days you’re more likely to find them at the Storyfront, a theater in Back of the Yards that just a year ago was a storefront, camouflaging with audience and community members who curiously wander in to performances of Meet Juan(ito) Doe. They always break this facade at the end of the performance to express their gratitude and urge audience members to share their stories and reviews with them. Last, they urge the audience to keep using the Storyfront as a community and arts space, letting them know about events that are occurring there in the future and encouraging anyone to reach out to them with ideas of how else to use the space. All this is part of Gamboa’s role as a “triple A”—an artist, activist and academic— committed to making radical, intersectional work centered on people of color (POC). “What I’ve been trying to do for the majority of my career is create stuff apart from those systems that don’t really care about us, don’t really care that we are losing our lives, don’t really care that we’re not living full lives, that our lives get compromised, that only include us or incorporate our talent when it is profitable or when it serves them,” Gamboa explained. “So, part of what I’ve been trying to do is create what I call an ‘alternative cultural ecology’ where we own the means of our own representation.” Crucial to creating this new cultural ecology is embedding their work within the communities that they seek to represent. That’s why, last fall and then again in these past couple months, they produced their new play, Meet Juan(ito) Doe.They produced it with Free Street Theater, a company established in 1969 that has a long history of engaging racially, culturally, and socioeconomically diverse audiences, and in the Storyfront theater. In spaces like these, Gamboa can hold themself and their work to a higher, real standard of cultural integrity. They can make
Meet Juan(ito) Doe. Free Street Storyfront, 4346 S. Ashland Ave. Through April 20. Mondays and Fridays, 7:30pm. Free or pay-what-you-can at the door, advance tickets $5. (773) 772-7248. mjdreboot.brownpapertickets.com sure that their work is created with and for Blacks, Latinxs, queers, radicals, and others from the “hood.” Gamboa is a Mexican American from the South Side—they describe their upbringing as taking place in Pilsen and Little Village as well as Mount Greenwood, where they went to a predominantly Black high school, an experience that was formative for their politicization. Their parents are second-generation, working-class Mexican
Americans who grew up in front of Cook County Jail, an area also present in Gamboa’s childhood memories. After graduating from New York University, Gamboa returned to Chicago to pursue a career in theater. However, the more they became involved, the more they realized that they were “seeing largely absent [the narratives] of people like my parents. And all the Mexican Americans, Mexican hyphen Americans, that grew up here that have their own cultural particularities and singularity.” “It’s not about the usual narrative of ‘I’m trapped between two worlds,’” Gamboa said. “It’s about straddling and effectively doing it and becoming something else. And that’s a different type of empowerment that is often taken from us because of the fact that there are no affirmative images of it and because
we don’t get the resources to make our own representations.” This last year Gamboa was at the helm of several projects that cultivated this “alternative cultural ecology” and worked not only to increase the representations of MexicanAmericans (emphasis on the hyphen) but also to socially engage communities of color. At the beginning of 2017, in the wake of the presidential election, Gamboa went on to write and host a bi-weekly live radical news show, The Hoodoisie. Each show, which takes place every other week in different gentrifying neighborhoods, is organized around a specific theme and invites a panel of specialized guest speakers to help deconstruct the topics and lead conversations that radically engage the community. Past themes have included environmental justice, Chicago education reform, the criminalization of Black bodies, and most recently, imperialist state power. At these events, Gamboa and the other Hoodoisie panelists always create a collaborative atmosphere that welcomes audience participation and questions. The Hoodoisie not only provides a space for these communities to have these conversations in a radical, POC-centric framework, but also consistently offers its audiences tools with which to radically engage with these issues in real life. Last year also saw the release of Brujos, Gamboa’s web series that they wrote and act in. The series follows a group of four gay Latinx witch-academics as they “navigate magic, sexuality, and surviving a witch-hunt led by a secret society of white heteronormative male descendants of the first new world colonizers.” The first season has attracted a loyal following since its full release, but what makes its popularity all the more meaningful is Gamboa’s commitment to centering traditionally erased narratives and making sure the filmmaking process was community-based. Here, too, Gamboa centered the communities they belong to: the show primarily takes place in Pilsen and Little Village, two predominantly Latinx neighborhoods in Chicago that are fighting against gentrification. In its presentation of queer brujos who engage in anti-colonization work through magic and spirituality, the show delivers a fresh, urgent take on how to engage the community, and the most marginalized within it, in the fight against gentrification in these neighborhoods. Next to The Hoodoisie, one of Gamboa’s most involved projects of the past year has been Meet Juan(ito) Doe. Gamboa wrote this play with Free Street Theater and, APRIL 11, 2018 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11
STAGE & SCREEN
along with Ana Velazquez, co-directed the production. A community-based play that took about ten months to develop, Juan(ito) offers several fresh perspectives on what it means to be “brown, down in Chi-Town.” From its inception, Gamboa and Free Street were invested in producing a play that would not only be reflective of different Chicago Mexican experiences, but that would also engage the very communities it seeks to represent. Juan(ito) was so popular that in its original run it sold out nearly every show, and was extended twice. “There was not a day that wasn’t sold out,” Gamboa said. “That to me is crazy and I think about that all the time.” When the play was revived for a second run this past March, it was intended to run through March 28—but was once again extended due to popularity until April 20. The Storyfront, the theater that houses the play, is located on 43rd and Ashland and is the newest theater on the South Side. When they began to conceive of Juan(ito), Gamboa knew that it was important to locate the play somewhere geographically accessible to the communities that they were representing. Given that many of of Chicago’s Latinx and Black communities reside on the South Side, they found Back of the Yards to be an ideal location. The Storyfront space, which was once a storefront belonging to the Guerra family, possesses a history that is “emblematic of many of our brown, down, Chi-town families,” Gamboa said, making it
BULLETIN ChiTech’s ‘Black Panther’ Hackathon Chicago Tech Academy High School, 1301 W. 14th St. Friday, April 13, 10am–5pm. bit.ly/blackpantherhack What could be better than seeing Black Panther again? A Black Panther-themed hackathon of course! Any sixth, seventh, and eighth graders interested in learning more about tech, coding, or gaming can join ChiTech Academy and Blue1647 for a fun day of project-oriented learning. No prior coding experience is necessary. (Amy Qin)
The Field in Englewood Kusanya Cafe, 825 W. 69th St. Opening Friday, April 13, 6pm–8pm. Coffee tasting and 12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
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a perfect location for the stories it houses. The space has been rented out to Gamboa and Free Street Theater for one dollar a month. With the help of Alonzo Torres, Velazquez’s husband, the Juan(ito) team converted the storefront to a multipurpose theatrical space. While small and cozy, the space offers the perfect intimacy for the shared moments delivered on stage—and, already, for a life beyond the stage. As Gamboa has promised, the space is becoming a community center for the neighborhood, and some artist-led resident groups have recently borrowed it as a performance and fundraising space. Las Topo Chicas, a femme and queer people of color collective based in the South Side, for example, used the space to fundraise and for their first tianguis, a market where handmade goods and crafts were sold by local femme and queer people of color. In the future, Free Street hopes to offer more programming out of the space which could include youth and adult acting classes, more original productions, and educational workshops, such as immigrant know your rights workshops; last month they teamed up with ProPublica Illinois to hold a workshop about the misrepresentation of Latinx communities in the media. For now, the Storyfront is the home of Meet Juan(ito) Doe on Monday and Friday nights. The play is simple in its design and execution, but that only heightens the emotional intensity of what is shared. The actors, most of whom were untrained just a year ago, use only themselves and whatever
props are already found in the space to create their worlds. The play takes the form of a series of monologues thematically connected by short interspersed vignettes and drawn from stories that the Juan(ito) team collected from community members at different events. From drag-lotería nights where the ensemble shared coming-out stories and invited others to do the same, to karaoke nights where the community sang prompt-based songs and then shared their associated memories, all of the monologues are inspired by real stories of Chicago’s Mexican community. Gamboa worked with the ensemble to adapt these stories into the different monologues. From this they arrived at the range of stories presented onstage, from that of a queer youth who refuses to succumb to the pressures of their homophobic and machista family (played by Sebastían Olayo), to that of a longestablished community bar-owner, played by Anthony Soto, who swears by the curative properties of mezcal and fights against gentrification. Together, they produce a collective, and at times nostalgic, experience of Chicago’s Mexican-American and Mexican immigrant community. For those that are unable to attend performances, or even just want to revisit the stories, Gamboa and the Juan(ito) team are working on developing a mix-tape that will include the monologues and other primary sonic elements of the play. The beautifully creative aural landscape designed by Jacuelyn Carmen Guerrero (CqqchiFruit) is one of the details
ingeniously interwoven with the monologues to create a recognizable past and present. Throughout the play, empathetic chuckles could be heard throughout the room as the speakers played everything from the theme song to 1970s Mexican sitcom Chavo del Ocho to classic rancheras that everyone has heard an enthusiastic relative sing along to at a Mexican family gathering. This feeling of cameraderie is only heightened by many of the props used on stage. The iconic, ridiculously feline-faced cobijas and the traditional arroz con leche dessert that is shared with the audience bring an unimaginable warmth and sense of familiarity to those who understand the nostalgic tones of these items but also invites those who don’t to participate and share in that nostalgia. To use a term coined by the loveable stoner played by Keren Díaz de Leon, this play is anything but “estilo de güeros” (white people shit). From the onset, the play reminds us of the importance of telling and retelling these kinds of stories. They might start out as tales of brave stupidity told by a chismosx relative, but they contain the contents of a unique history and culture. Telling these stories is one of the only ways that we can ensure that our communities are not erased from a society that is all too willing to write us out. The stories Gamboa and their collaborators tell in Meet Juan(ito) Doe—as well as in Brujos and The Hoodoisie—go beyond the importance of representation, but are tools for the survival of vital cultures and communities. ¬
talk Saturday, April 21, 1pm–3pm. Exhibits through Sunday, April 22. Free. (773) 6754758. fieldmuseum.org
from the UIC College of Urban Planning and Policy who’ve spent the last three months researching how best to boost commercial corridors in the Greater Chatham area, along 71st, 75th, 79th Streets and Cottage Grove. Come by to hear what they have to say and to share your own opinions. (Michael Wasney)
“fresh” Latinx voices. Come through and learn how to write poems and hear others perform. This week’s feature is VICTOR! (Roderick Sawyer)
This week, visit Kusanya Cafe for more than just their great coffee: the café and the Field Museum are collaborating to host The Field in Englewood, a presentation given by Field Museum scientists about the neighborhood’s natural history. If you miss the presentation itself, stop by over the next week to catch the exhibits. (Michael Wasney)
VISUAL ARTS
Corridor Convo
YCA On The Block: Pilsen
Urban Partnership Bank, 7801 S. State St. Saturday, April 14, 10am–noon. Free. Registration strongly suggested. (773) 6441451. bit.ly/CorridorConvo
La Catrina Café, 1011 W. 18th St. Friday, April 13, 6pm–8pm. Free. bit.ly/YCAontheblock
The Greater Chatham Initiative will showcase the work of seventeen students
YCA on the Block: Pilsen is back! Hosted by Young Chicago Authors, this event is a free open mic and workshop series for
Artists’ Talk: A Tender Power—A Black Womanist Visual Manifesto Rootwork Gallery, 645 W. 18th St. Friday, April 13, 7pm–10pm; gallery open 6pm. Free. facebook.com/rootworkgallery Get to Rootwork an hour early on Friday to check out the gallery’s current exhibition before listening to Kimberly M. Harmon and Tracie D. Hall in conversation about their work in the show, intended to act as “testimony to the redemptive capacity of Black women’s physical, emotional, and spiritual labor and a call for reciprocity.” ( Julia Aizuss)
EVENTS
Meg Duguid: Parade for a Nuclear Bomb boundary, 2334 W. 111th Pl. Saturday, April 14, 1pm–3pm. (773) 316-0562. boundarychicago.space In 2012, local artist Meg Duguid received the rights to use a script originally written by James Agee about Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp character; now, as part of her exhibition for boundary, Duguid is preparing multiple events whose documentation will be used in The Tramp Project. This parade—which intends to use the boundary gallery to enact “a scene in which a town excitedly prepares for the launch of an earth-destroying bomb”—is one of those events. ( Julia Aizuss)
8A5E OS Series: VR Night 8A5E, 1200 W 35th Street. Friday, April 20, 7pm–midnight. Free. 8a5e.com Experience virtual reality at the 8A5E cafe/ hybrid space. Featuring a demo of the VR experience with Akaxe Gomez & Boyu Li, live painting from Rahmaan Statik, Cujo Dah, Jasmina Cazacu aka Diosa, and Kawaii Sugar, and more. All are welcome. (Roderick Sawyer)
Poets for Puerto Rico: Chicago Roberto Clemente Community Academy, 1147 N. Western Avenue. Tuesday, April 17, 6pm–9pm. $10 donation suggested, but no one will be turned away. bit.ly/PuertoRicoPoets Join the Poets for Puerto Rico to raise awareness and raise funds for the Institute for Socio-Ecological Research (ISER). ISER is a group working to restore community resources in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. In honor of your support, more than twenty poets and artists will be reading poems and engaging in discussion with the audience. (Roderick Sawyer)
MUSIC Rear View Mirror Sessions: Leon Ware Arts + Public Life, 301 E. Garfield Blvd. Thursday, April 12, 6pm–9pm. Free, RSVP at bit.ly/leon-ware. (773) 702-9724. arts.uchicago.edu Some producers set up mics and press “record”––but Leon Ware, as they say,
played the studio. Music historian and “Custodian of the Indie Soul Movement” Duane Powell will lecture on Ware, who cut landmark records by Marvin Gaye and Michael Jackson before his death last year. (Christopher Good)
Bridgeport’s Over! Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3219 S. Morgan St. April 13–14, 7pm–midnight. $10/day, $15 for weekend. All ages with parent. (773) 8239700. coprosperity.org This weekend, the Co-Prosperity Sphere is hosting a two-day music festival to benefit its in-house radio station, Lumpen Radio. In addition to acts like Dogs at Large, Myrcenes, and Color Card, there will be an art exhibit and food vendors, including Princess Pierogies. (Adam Przybyl)
The Real Jamaican Ska Experience Reggies, 2105 S. State St. Saturday, April 14, doors 7pm. 17+. $25–$30. (312) 949-0120. reggieslive.com No one’s quite sure where the term “ska” comes from––but this weekend, you’ll have the chance to see where some of the genre’s greatest songs came from. Two Legends & A Son, comprising former members of the Skatalites and the son of Prince Buster, will play some deep cuts with the Chicago Jamaican Jazz Ensemble and DJ Chuck Wren of Jump Up Records. (Christopher Good)
BIT X BIT at DADS Digital Art Demo Space, 2515 S. Archer Ave. Saturday, April 14, 7pm–midnight. $7 before 9pm, $12 after. Streaming live at twitch.tv/dadschicago. (312) 451-2962. dadschicago.com If you’ve been on the concert circuit, you’ve probably seen your fair share of DJs––but at #bitxbit, the South Side’s premier chiptune series, DADS ups the ante with live music and VJs (video jockeys). This round will feature Floor Baba, Pulsing, and Chicago’s own Cherry Cherry Bomb. (Christopher Good)
Free CSO Chamber Concert: Beethoven & Smetana Kenwood Academy High School, 5015 S. Blackstone Ave. Sunday, April 15, 3pm. Free with RSVP at bit.ly/cso-kenwood. (312) 2943000. cso.org
For the latest installation of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s All Access series, the Kittel Quartet will perform two works in Kenwood. The first, Beethoven’s Op. 18 No. 3, is already a crowd-pleaser. But the second, Smetana’s String Quartet No. 1, could be your new favorite. (Christopher Good)
STAGE & SCREEN Don’t Tell Anyone (No Le Digas a Nadie) Yollocalli Arts Reach, 2801 S. Ridgeway Ave. Friday, April 13, 5:30pm. Free. southsideprojections.org This film, a 2015 documentary about undocumented youth activist Angy Rivera, is the third in South Side Projections’ series examining the lives of undocumented immigrants. A post-screening discussion led by Elizabeth Lozano, media studies professor at Loyola and Stephanie Manriquez, a writer who teaches at Yollocalli, will follow. (Nicole Bond)
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. Through April 15. $38–$71. (773) 753-4472. courttheatre.org The classic 1967 film about the latent racism that surfaces when an upper-class San Francisco couple hosts their daughter and her Black doctor fiancé has been adapted for the stage by playwright Todd Kreidler. The acclaimed Marti Lyons, who’s directed for several theaters in Chicago, makes her Court directorial debut with this still-topical adaptation. ( Joseph S. Pete)
Spotlight Reading Series: Puddin ‘N Pete AKArama Community Service Center, 6228 S. Ingleside Ave. Monday, April 16, 6:30pm. Free, but tickets recommended. (773) 7027005. courttheatre.org Aspirational executive secretary Puddin, who deeply distrusts men, and uneducated high school janitor Pete, who is wise beyond his book learning, discover what they have in common in the latest installment of Court’s reading series that highlights underrepresented writers of color. Find out if the unlikely couple can put their bad experiences and failed marriages behind them. ( Joseph S. Pete)
Jackie Taylor Drama Series DuSable Museum of African American History, 740 E. 56th Pl. April 7–22; Saturdays, 3pm and 8pm; Sundays, 3pm. $35. (773) 7694451. blackensemble.org Three dramatic plays, all relevant to current events, will be presented at the DuSable throughout April. Each play was written during Black Ensemble Theater’s Black Playwrights Initiative, an educational incubator for aspiring playwrights. The series opens with National Anthem by Ervin Gardner the first weekend, followed by Reginald Williams’s The Plea, and closes the third weekend with In The Shadow of Justice, by L. Maceo Ferris. A discussion led by the actors about the topics explored in each play will follow every performance. (Nicole Bond)
Double Feature: Chelsea Williams and Keenan Dailey Dorchester Art + Housing Collaborative, 1456 E. 70th S. Friday, April 20, 7pm–9pm. Free. (312) 857-5561. rebuild-foundation.org Students get the spotlight at this Black Cinema House screening, which features the short work of NYU student Chelsea Williams and UIUC student Keenan Dailey. Williams’s “Wake Up: A Dope Short” is drawn from an ongoing video project, and Dailey will be at the screening to discuss “Greene,” about a young Black gallery owner. ( Julia Aizuss)
Comfort Stew eta Creative Arts, 7558 S. South Chicago Ave. Friday, April 20–Sunday, May 20. Friday through Sunday, 8pm; Fridays and Saturdays, 3pm; Sundays. $15–$35. (773) 752-3955. etacreativearts.org Playwright and poet Angela Jackson weaves a tale of a missing child ripped straight from the headlines. Her play, directed by Cheryl Lynn Bruce, concerns how parents love their children in an evening of “memory and hope” and the “actions of the spirit.” ( Joseph S. Pete)
Hyde Community Players General Meeting 57th Street Friends Quaker House, 5615 S. Woodlawn Ave. Wednesday, April 25, 6:30pm. hydeparkcommunityplayers.org If you have been interested in getting involved with Hyde Park Community APRIL 11, 2018 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13
EVENTS Players, this public general meeting is for you. They usually play some theater games, then get busy planning for future productions of the 2017–18 season. Current members would also do well to attend this meeting—the Players will be electing next year’s board members. (Nicole Bond)
FOOD & LAND 61st Street Market Day Experimental Station, 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Saturday, April 14, 9am–2pm. (773) 2416044. experimentalstation.org Ah, springtime in Chicago: when farmers and gardeners have begun sowing seeds and bulbs are blooming even as it’s still snowing. Fortunately, the folks at the 61st Street Market know better than to move the market outdoors until May. Swing by for veggie burgers, produce, coffee, cheese, meats, baked goods, and the South Side diabetes table—and, as always, the market will match your LINK purchase up to $25. (Emeline Posner)
Dishing on the Farm Bill The Plant, 1400 W. 46th St. Saturday, April 14, 2pm–4:30pm. Free. (217) 528-1563. ilstewards.org What’s the deal with the 2018 Farm Bill? The Plant is hosting Liz Moran Stelk, Executive Director of the Illinois Stewardship Alliance, who will give a presentation that will walk you through the most important provisions and help to demystify the complex bill. Complimentary local treats and refreshments will be offered after the presentation, and there will be the opportunity to write letters to your representatives. (Emeline Posner)
Play Garden Planting Day McKinley Park Play Garden, 3518-28 S. Wolcott Ave. Sunday, April 15, 9am–1pm. Free. bit.ly/McKinleyParkPlayPlant It’s time for the first planting phase at McKinley Park Play Garden, just south of the McKinley Park Library, and the organizers are eager for volunteers— especially high-schoolers who need community service hours. Bring gloves if you have them! The organizers will have necessary tools and a free lunch on hand, as well as more information about the garden’s official opening in June. (Emeline Posner) 14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
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Book Talk: Draining the Central Area of Chicago and Exorcising Clout Chicago Maritime Museum, 1200 W. 35th St. Friday, April 20, 7pm–10pm. $5 for members, $10 for non-members. (773) 376-1982. chicagomaritimemuseum.org Richard Lanyon, former executive director of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, will discuss his latest book, <i>West by Southwest to Stickney: Draining the Central Area of Chicago and Exorcising Clout</i>. He’ll go over how the city “eliminated the stagnant, encrusted cesspool that was Bubble Creek” as it drained the South and West sides. ( Joseph S. Pete)
Planting the Seeds of Curiosity: A STEM Make-a-thon on Botany The Blue Lacuna, 2150 S. Canalport Ave. Saturday, April 21, 10am–12pm. For kids ages 3 through 7. $25, parents free. (312) 7786374. thebluelacuna.com A workshop dedicated to growing young green thumbs, this STEM Make-a-thon will be taught the essentials of “how plants work.” Kids will go home with a signed storybook, Paige & Paxton Go Green, about kids who get their hands dirty, and their very own seedling. (Emeline Posner)
Dismantling Racism in the Food System Leadership Training Bridgeport Art Center, 1200 W. 35th St. May 4-5. Friday, 9am–6pm, and Saturday, 8:30am–6pm. $200. Scholarship applications available upon request at info@urbangrowerscollective.org. (773) 376-8882. urbangrowerscollective.org Are you an urban farmer, community leader, or worker in the food chain? Urban Growers Collective (UGC) is hosting a two-day workshop designed to help attendees understand the many levels on which racism and privilege manifest and to foster discussion about sustainable agriculture as a means of empowering low-income communities and communities of color. All meals will be provided by UGC. For childcare, please send an email to the address listed above. (Emeline Posner)
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Announcements The National Latino Education Institute (NLEI) will host a Job Fair on Thursday, April 12, 2018 at its main building at 2011 West Pershing Road in Chicago. The fair runs from 9 a.m. until 1 p.m. and admission is free. Don’t miss the opportunity to job search, network, and meet with employers. Bring plenty of resumes and dress for success. Free workshops will also be onsite. For more information and to register, please call us at 773-247-0707 ext. 264. www.nlei.org
Services Preeminent Computer Repair: PCR is here to help with all your computer and technology needs. Old laptop need an upgrade? Got that new device and it won’t quite connect to your computer? Call us today and let us help you out! 312-307-4397
Merchandise I pay top dollar for your vinyl records. Rock, punk, soul, jazz, folk, etc. LP’s 45’s, whatever you got. Give me a holler and get some cash instead of letting your records sit there and collect dust!! Contact: 773-372-6643
Jobs Work with Grassroots Campaigns on behalf of one of the nation’s leading organizations to combat hate. Fight Hate Groups. Teach Tolerance. Seek Justice. Earn $11.50-$15.50/hr
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Part-time/Full-time/Careers (312) 574-3794 Looking for Creative Talent! Ink Factory is one of the world’s most recognized and leading visual note-taking studios. Our mission is to create visual experiences that inspire and engage. We are looking to expand our team of visual notetakers and are exploring all creative outlets in Chicago! Don’t know what visual not-taking is? Check out our site: http://www.inkfactorystudio.com. Compensation is based on upon skill-set. Deadline for Submissions is April 16th. Contact: (312) 972-0305 Original Afro: Interns needed for clothing company for graphic artist, freehand artist,photography and website design. Internship includes some cash incentives free apparel and a wealth of resources. Contact: (773) 895-7210
Volunteer Volunteer ESL Literacy Tutors Needed: Help adults learn English at Aquinas Literacy Center! Volunteer as a 1-on-1 tutor for just 90 minutes a week at 1751 West 35th Street in Chicago. All tutoring is in English, so you don’t have to speak another language to volunteer. Volunteer tutoring opportunities are 9am-8pm, Monday-Thursday. Our next tutor training workshop: Friday, April 27th (6pm to 9pm) and Saturday, April 28th (9am to 4pm). Register in advance and come both days to begin tutoring. Email sabrina@aquinasliteracycenter.org or call (773) 927-0512
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You are invited to hear spiritual master S R S J M
in Chicago
Malcolm X College Conference Hall, 1900 West Jackson Blvd., Chicago, IL 60612 Free parking The program is free
Countdown to the New 95th/Dan Ryan South Terminal!
Saturday, April 21, 2018 at 2:30 PM
MEDITATION FOR SPIRITUAL CONSCIOUSNESS
Sunday, April 22, 2018 at 2:30 PM For more information, please visit: www.sos.org/tour/ChicagoEvent. ChicagoInfo@sos.org | 630.955.1200
9500S
South Terminal Stationhouse
tte Ave
Red Line Fares & tickets Staff assistance Lost & Found
S Lafaye
Effective 10pm April 14, 2018, the original 95th/Dan Ryan terminal will close and customers will board trains from the new South Terminal on the south side of 95th Street, with stair and elevator access.
W 95th St
S State St
We are nearing the halfway point of the transformational new 95th/Dan Ryan station, with the opening of the first of two brand new terminals on April 14, the South Terminal. This new facility will include wider bus lanes, sidewalks and waiting areas for bus passengers; elevators and escalators; expanded rail platforms; and Bus Tracker and Train Tracker signs. The North Terminal, now under construction and anticipated to open by the end of 2018, will offer our customers a modern transit facility that is larger, more comfortable and more convenient rail and bus connections.
New bus boarding areas
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
0E/W
LOCATION FOR BOTH TALKS
FIND INNER AND OUTER PEACE
30W
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“Meditation is a private retreat from the problems of the world.” Sant Rajinder Singh Ji Maharaj
To learn more about this project, visit transitchicago.com/95thTerminal
Abbott Park