1/25/17 issue

How does Chicago treat its immigrants, and why?

WOMEN'S MARCH, 57TH STREET WINES, DOGS IN BRONZEVILLE & MORE INSIDE

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SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is an independent nonprofit newsprint magazine written for and about neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago. We publish in-depth coverage of the arts and issues of public interest alongside oral histories, poetry, fiction, interviews, and artwork from local photographers and illustrators. The South Side Weekly is dedicated to supporting cultural and civic engagement on the South Side and to providing educational opportunities for developing journalists, writers, and artists.

Volume 4, Issue 16 Editor-in-Chief Jake Bittle Managing Editors Maha Ahmed, Christian Belanger Director of Staff Support Ellie Mejía Director of Writer Development Mari Cohen Deputy Editor Olivia Stovicek Senior Editors Emeline Posner, Julia Aizuss Education Editor Music Editor Stage & Screen Editor Visual Arts Editor

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IN CHICAGO

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

Rest in Peace, John Frangias Two weeks ago, on a chilly Sunday morning, this reporter hosted a public get-together at Salonica, the Greek diner on 57th Street in Hyde Park, just because. Last week, on Friday night, in a friend’s apartment, this reporter buttered saltines and dipped them in egglemon soup picked up from Salonica. This week, on Monday morning, this reporter read a sentimental essay in The New Yorker about making a new life for oneself through egglemon soup, stirring up another craving—and in the afternoon, a friend sent this reporter an email informing her that John Frangias, owner of Salonica, died over the weekend, on January 21, at the age of fifty-five. Of course, Salonica and its egg-lemon soup (and its entirely underrated corned beef hash) will remain, but these testimonies from the very recent past are offered to honor Frangias, about whom we wish we knew more. Besides being responsible for what may in all seriousness be the best restaurant in Hyde Park (as well as the best booths, best mugs, best bathrooms, best car and photo decorations, best lyre-playing regular), Frangias was an original co-owner of Hyde Park Produce and a cornerstone of Hyde Park’s Greek immigrant community. The Weekly regrets this hole in its coverage; Frangias’s family welcomes memorial donations to St. George Greek Orthodox Church in lieu of flowers.

CSU Spends Big on Lobbyists, Despite Financial Hardship Documents obtained by the Tribune this week revealed significant spending by Chicago State University to lobby state lawmakers, even though CSU hasn’t received more funding.

Over the past two years, the university spent about $200,000 on consultants with close ties to state legislators. Despite layoffs, declining enrollment, and a multitude of cuts to staff and student support, the university has continued to send money to Springfield lobbyists—up to $180,000 was paid to former Democratic state Sen. James DeLeo’s lobbying firm. They also paid $18,000 per year to Steve Brown, the spokesman for House Speaker Michael Madigan, who was hired by former President Wayne Watson in 2011 as a communications consultant. The university settled yet another multimillion dollar whistleblower-brought suit against Watson in early January, and these new revelations underscore a recent history of questionable financial decisions by the cash-strapped university. The Rauner administration and faculty union President Robert Bionaz have both criticized CSU’s lobbyist spending amid a financial crisis; according to the Tribune, “other financially struggling public universities in the state did not employ lobbyists.”

A Bird’s Eye View DNAinfo Chicago published an article on Friday about Sherry Williams, Englewood native and founder of the Bronzeville Historical Society and the AfroBirders, a birdwatching group that aims to diversify birdwatching in Chicago. The Weekly covered Williams and her organization in a May 2015 article about birdwatching on the South Side and groups, such as the AfroBirders, that work toward increasing access to birding and local green spaces for people of color. As Williams explained to The Weekly, her passion for birdwatching stems from the connections she makes between migratory birds and her own family’s participation in the Great Migration when they moved from Mississippi in the 1940s. But DNAinfo’s article doesn’t discuss how people of color have traditionally been excluded from mainstream birding and environmental culture, or how many local birdwatchers avoid South Side birding spots despite the construction of the Burnham Wildlife Corridor, and the presence of various forest preserves and two Olmsted parks in the area. Considering DNAinfo’s breadth of coverage on Chicago wildlife (which, it should be noted, many Weekly editors enjoy), it might be time to zoom out a bit and look at the politics and cultural narratives of wildlife and green space on the South Side.

IN THIS ISSUE know your rights

“The last decade is unlike any other period for immigration enforcement.” meaghan murphy..............................4 farewell, obama

“Once you’ve had a really great boyfriend, you can't go back to trash.” bridget gamble.................................9 chicago to trump: expect resistance

“They know that there’s so much at stake and they want their voice to count.” mari cohen......................................10 barc-ing up the right tree

Dogs in Bronzeville want to go for a run. christopher good..........................12 questions without answers

“I have nothing to do with anything.”

—CPD Superintendent Eddie Johnson maha ahmed....................................13 through the grapevine

Community building, one bottle at a time. isabelle lim.....................................14 hoodoisie trumps bourgeoisie

“We need social movements because [political] parties are ineffective.” nicole bond.....................................16 history in lowercase

What happens when we do not learn from the past? kristin lin.......................................17

OUR WEBSITE S ON SOUTHSIDEWEEKLY.COM SSW Radio soundcloud.com/south-side-weekly-radio Email Edition southsideweekly.com/email Support the Weekly southsideweekly.com/donate

Cover art by Lizzie Smith.

JANUARY 25, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

Know Your Rights How does Chicago treat its immigrants, and why?

BY MEAGHAN MURPHY

O

n August 5, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers raided a gas station on Belmont and Milwaukee Avenues that has long been a hiring site for day laborers (jornaleros) in Chicago. A group of workers—most of whom specialize in construction and landscaping—gathered that morning, as they do every day. They waited for employers who regularly come by to make job offers and negotiate a pay rate. The workers who frequent this particular site in Albany Park are black, Polish, Eastern European, Latinx. Some are immigrants, and some are not.

Analía Rodríguez—Executive Director of Latino Union, the only organization in Chicago that visits corner hiring sites to educate and organize workers—is still working to piece together the events of that day. According to witnesses who spoke with Latino Union and the workers themselves, two ICE officers who did not immediately identify themselves as ICE pulled up in an unmarked car and asked everyone present for their papers and fingerprints, using a mobile fingerprint scanner.

“The ICE truck really just came straight to that corner, that space where the Latino men were standing,” said Rodriguez.

“They’re like, ‘Show us your papers.’ They fingerprinted them and grabbed [them] by the arm.”

Three workers were detained, handcuffed, and taken into ICE’s custody at Broadview Detention Center, west of Oak Park. “The workers didn’t know who [the officers] were—they could be police, they could be ICE,” Rodríguez said. “They did not find out they were ICE until they were in the detention center.”

Of the three workers taken to Broadview that day, one had temporary protective status (protection from deportation) and was let go after seventy-one hours of detention over the weekend. The second was also let go for unknown or unclear reasons. The third was 4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

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JASON SCHUMER

released on bail, after Latino Union and other community partners helped him get a pro bono lawyer from the Community Activism Law Alliance. He has a court date in March.

Rodríguez has big questions about the legality of the August 5 raid and how it was conducted. Latino Union has filed a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. Who ordered this raid in the first place? Is there a Fourth Amendment argument against those mobile fingerprint scanners? Was there potentially any collaboration between ICE and the

Chicago Police Department (CPD)?

How did this happen in Chicago?

C

hicago is often referred to as a sanctuary city, a city that protects immigrants. But as the August 5 raid showed, the specific parameters of those protections matter a great deal.

Chicago protects immigrants through city ordinance, through CPD directives, and through public services. The primary mode of this protection is “non-cooperation”: the City of Chicago and its departments will not cooperate with federal authorities to arrest, detain, or deport undocumented

residents. This is what the Welcoming City Ordinance ensures. But many in Chicago are demanding more.

On January 14, a week ahead of the inauguration, around a thousand people gathered at the Chicago Teachers Union to unveil a “Platform of Resistance, Unity, and Respect.” Community leaders from across Illinois stood together reciting chants and holding signs: El pueblo unido jamás será vencido. No Muslim Registry. $15 and a Union.

“We need to stop criminalizing our communities and our cities,” declared the two emcees, Maleeha Chughtai of Asian

IMMIGRATION

Americans Advancing Justice Chicago and Araida Palacios of SEIU Healthcare Illinois-Indiana, who led the entire program in alternating English and Spanish.

The Platform of Resistance, Unity, and Respect, released by the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR) and endorsed by dozens of partner organizations, unfolded throughout the morning as speakers came up to the stage to give testimony. Students and teachers, union workers and organizers, members of the immigrant community and those with refugee status all spoke out that day. Each speaker related a personal experience with the immigration enforcement system, and called the crowd to action around the issue.

The speakers put forth a very clear set of policy demands, directed specifically at Governor Bruce Rauner and the other local, state, and federal elected officials who have yet to take action or even speak up to affirm the rights of immigrants and refugees since the November election. Only a few elected representatives were present that day, including U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, State Representative Will Guzzardi, and Cook County Commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia.

Absent from the proceedings on January 14, both in physical form and in mention, was Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who has thus far been vocal in support of Chicago’s immigrants. Emanuel stated in mid-November that “Chicago has in the past been a sanctuary city [and] it always will be a sanctuary city.” In addition to ushering through public funds to support legal defense for immigrants, he has since the election called on Rauner to back Chicago’s Welcoming City Ordinance.

These displays of support in rhetoric and in much-needed funding are welcome to groups like ICIRR. But the mayor’s record on immigration (both recent and not so recent) deserves a closer look.

O

n December 7, Rahm Emanuel sat down with then-president-elect Donald Trump, presumably looked him in the eye, and delivered a letter signed by seventeen other municipal leaders. The letter asked the incoming administration to recognize and preserve Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which grants temporary lawful residency and work permits to young people who immigrated to the United States as children and meet a certain set of requirements. Established by

the Obama administration in 2012 through executive action, the program was born out of failed congressional efforts to pass the DREAM Act, and was the product of years of organizing and political agitation on the part of immigrant communities. Tens of thousands of young people in Illinois have become “DACA-mented” over the past four years.

In the letter to Trump, Emanuel and the other signatories make the compelling point that “DACA is good for our nation’s

moratorium on naturalization, heightened border security and surveillance, an expansion of the National Guard’s role in policing the border. In a memo to Clinton, Emanuel notoriously wrote, “You will need such steps to get ahead of a bad story.”

This memo, written in 1996, coincided with the passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. To its many critics over the years— including the thirty-two members of the House of Representatives who signed a

“This is a very, very dangerous situation. You may just find yourself just hanging outside of the park, outside your house with your family members, and ICE can just fingerprint you. Not looking for specific people, just fingerprinting everyone.”

—Analía Rodríguez, Latino Union

economy.” What’s more, the letter says, “Ensuring DREAMers can continue to live and work in their communities without fear of deportation is the foundation of sound, responsible immigration policy.” The mayor also reportedly relayed a firm message to Trump that Sanctuary City policies would remain in place. Emanuel told the Tribune, “I talked about how all mayors and all cities that are sanctuary cities will stand by that principle.”

Out of all the mayors who could have delivered this message to Trump, it’s somewhat surprising that Emanuel was the one to take the meeting at Trump Tower and make the plea for the bare minimum of respect for young immigrants and their communities. As an advisor to the Clinton administration, Emanuel recommended that President Bill Clinton enact a series of extreme and aggressive measures on immigration enforcement: a month-long

resolution condemning the law in April of last year—the act was anything but “sound, responsible immigration policy.” Making it easier for the authorities to fast-track deportations and harder for immigrants to attain legal status, the 1996 law laid the foundation for the Obama-era deportation machine.

This is the immigration legacy that Emanuel brought back with him to Chicago. When the emcees at ICIRR’s January 14 rally called out, “We need to stop criminalizing our communities and our cities,” and demanded that Rauner stand up to protect immigrants, they were referring to an ongoing process that began with the Clinton administration, continued with Bush-era encroachments on civil liberties, and peaked with over two million deportations under President Barack Obama.

Trump himself has promised to

deport two to three million people upon taking office. (He has also signaled that he would get rid of DACA.) According to the Department of Homeland Security’s own estimates and other independent research, there simply are not two or three million people in this country with serious criminal records who currently fall under the criteria for removal.

“One of the things that we are very concerned about, and this is an ongoing thing, is this criminalization of immigration and the movement of people,” says Mark Fleming, National Litigation Coordinator at the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC). Speaking on the Trump administration’s deportation plans, he said, “How do you reach the two to three million? You morph and you fudge and you transform people into criminals who are not.” That means people with decades-old moving violations or shoplifting arrests— nonviolent offenses that can qualify as a felony (or a serious misdemeanor) depending on where you live. That also means people with prior deportations and reentry offenses.

And for all of Emanuel’s rhetoric around continuing to protect immigrants, these new targets of the Trump administration may not be protected here: even though Chicago is a sanctuary city, the Welcoming City Ordinance in its current form does not guarantee safety for all Chicagoans.

P

redating even the Clinton years, Chicago had some kind of welcoming policy in place towards immigrants.

Senior Policy Counsel at ICIRR Fred Tsao explains that Chicago has had a sort of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy concerning immigration status, dating back to Harold Washington’s administration in 1985.

City departments, including CPD, were forbidden from asking about immigration status or conditioning receipt of public services or benefits on immigration status.

After Mayor Washington, Mayors Sawyer and Daley reaffirmed the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” version of Chicago’s attitude toward immigration. Daley and City Council wrote it into ordinance in 2006. In 2012 Rahm Emanuel and City Council passed the current Welcoming City Ordinance, Chapter 2-173 of the Chicago Code. Amended a few times since, the Ordinance now expressly prohibits threats made by police officers and other city agents based on immigration status or

JANUARY 25, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

IMMIGRATION

GLOSSARY Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) The policy started by the Obama administration in 2012 that allows certain undocumented immigrants who entered the United States as minors to receive a renewable two-year period of deferred action from deportation and eligibility for a work permit. As it is an executive order, DACA is under threat of being discontinued by the Trump administration.

DREAM Act Federal legislative policy first introduced in 2001 by Representative Luis Gutiérrez and later debated in 2007 and 2010 that would have granted conditional or legal residency status to young undocumented immigrants who met certain requirements. Given that the federal DREAM Act has never passed, several states including Illinois have passed their own state DREAM Acts, generally aimed at granting instate tuition rates to qualified undocumented students.

Chicago Municipal Immigration Policy Working Group A group that includes Asian Americans Advancing Justice Chicago, the National Immigrant Justice Center, the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, Organized Communities Against Deportations, Southwest Organizing Project, the Korean American Resource and Cultural Center, Chicago Community and Worker’s Rights, the Chicago Religious Leadership Network, Comité de Trabajadores Unidos— Immigrant Workers Project, Mujeres Latinas en Acción, Latino Union of Chicago, Enlace Chicago, and others.

Welcoming City Ordinance The city ordinance passed in 2012 that ensures undocumented residents of Chicago will not be detained by local police at the request of federal authorities. CPD will not communicate and/or cooperate with ICE under most circumstances.

The “carve-outs” Chicago’s Welcoming City Ordinance currently has four carve-outs, or exceptions, that allow CPD to communicate and/or cooperate with ICE in cases where someone • has an outstanding criminal warrant; • has been convicted of a felony in any court of competent jurisdiction; • is a defendant in a criminal case in any court of competent jurisdiction where a judgment has not been entered and a felony charge is pending; or • has been identified as a known gang member either in a law enforcement agency’s database or by his own admission Corner hiring site Any place (a park, a gas station, a Home Depot) where workers gather and make themselves available to employers who come to negotiate a job and a pay rate.

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national origin, as well as most instances of collaboration between U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and city agencies.

But Chicago’s Welcoming City Ordinance also contains four carveouts or exceptions that the Cook County companion ordinance (widely considered to be one of the more protective sanctuary ordinances in the country) does not. ICE and CPD can collaborate, share information, and conduct joint operations under four key circumstances of Chicago’s city ordinance: when someone is currently being prosecuted for a felony (a circumstance that ordinarily should not give rise to an arrest), has an outstanding criminal warrant, has a prior felony conviction, or is in the Chicago Gang Database. By contrast, the Cook County Sheriff will only communicate with ICE if given a signed criminal warrant.

Taken individually, these four carveouts in Chicago’s ordinance are a tangle of legal and policy problems. But they often get tacked on the end of cities’ Welcoming Ordinances as a concession to federal deportation policy.

Many of these ordinances, including Chicago’s, passed in response to the federal Secure Communities program. Secure Communities was an initiative by ICE and the Department of Homeland Security— lauded by Trump, and consistently carried out under Obama—under which federal authorities had access to fingerprints that municipal police departments were routinely sending to the FBI. Federal agents could compare that local data to immigration databases in order to identify people who were in local police custody. ICE would then request that those individuals be held by the county jails and police departments past the time they would ordinarily be released. This request is called a detainer. “[This practice] is, by the way, unconstitutional,” says Tsao. “So Cook County basically said, ‘Well, ICE, you can send whatever requests you want to, we're not going obey them.’” Chicago said the same, with the exception of the aforementioned carve-outs.

The Supreme Court has not issued any final decision on the constitutionality of immigration detainers. But an October 2016 federal court order, which arose from a class-action lawsuit co-counseled

by Fleming and NIJC, deemed them, at the very least, unlawful. A detainer is not a warrant, nor is it an order signed by a judge—it’s a request for an unlawful arrest.

Fleming estimated that there are 31,000 of these unlawful detainers outstanding in the Midwest.

“I don't think people appreciate how much the last decade is unlike any other period for immigration enforcement,” Fleming said. Through Secure Communities and its successor, the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP), ICE has “co-opted and coerced local law enforcement to be front line immigration officers,” he said.

In 2014, Obama axed Secure Communities through an executive order.

PEP took its place. PEP relies less on detainers—ICE now encourages local police to notify them when people with felony convictions, three misdemeanors, or one significant misdemeanor (as well as people on a gang database) are being released, rather than extending their custody.

Federal enforcement priorities line up very closely with the four carve-outs in Chicago’s ordinance.

“They rebranded it,” Fleming says of PEP. “It’s Secure Communities Lite.”

Tsao drew similar conclusions: “PEP is still in place and will probably remain in place, and possibly even jacked up further by the new administration,” he said. “They’ll find some way to dragoon local law enforcement into cooperation or collaboration with ICE.”

B

etween PEP and Chicago’s Welcoming City Ordinance carveouts, both federal and local policies leave a lot of room for serious error—and for raids like the one on August 5. Analía Rodríguez has serious concerns about all aspects of how this raid was conducted, particularly on the legality of the mobile fingerprint scanners used by ICE—Fourth Amendment concerns.

“This is a very, very dangerous situation,” she said. “You may just find yourself just hanging outside of the park, outside your house with your family members, and ICE can just fingerprint you. Not looking for specific people, just fingerprinting everyone.”

Rodríguez emphasized that corner hiring sites are established places of work.

Some have been around for twenty years.

“People should know about it and this tradition,” she said. “We still don’t know about this specific raid...but the police also surveil this corner hiring spot. Patrol cars will stand there all morning, sometimes the police car will just pull up and keep harassing workers there throughout the

day.”

Rodríguez knows that CPD knows where traditional corner hiring sites are.

“They know there’s Latino men there,” she said, “and a good possibility there will be immigrants there. The question is: Is there collaboration?”

Rodríguez also knows that ICE has tried to justify their detention of the three workers by citing the fourth carve-out in the Welcoming City Ordinance: the gang database. Local police may share information or conduct joint operations with ICE if someone is identified as a known gang member on the CPD's “gang database.” However, the CPD gang database is notoriously classified; it’s nearly impossible to find out who’s on it, how they got on it, and how they can get off. Things as arbitrary as “wearing red” could be enough to land people on the database.

Rodrigo Anzures, who works with the undocumented-led Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD), shares Rodríguez’s concerns about the August 5 raid. Through the Community Activism Law Alliance, Anzures is familiar with the particulars of the case and how the third worker ended up in ongoing proceedings. “If you look at his profile in the gang database, there is zero justification,” he said. “There’s places where you can put where they frequent, who they associate with, like all this information about why they’re in the gang database.

And all those fields were blank. He’s just in the gang database.”

OCAD works on individual cases like this one, often in partnership with groups like Latino Union, and always with a community organizing model. Rallying support from friends and neighbors— encouraging people to show up at someone’s court date or make calls to the ICE field

office—can mean the difference between a person going through full deportation proceedings or returning home to their family.

“We understand that the majority of our cases are won because we have the community organizing aspect,” says Anzures. “So just having [legal] representation isn’t enough, because I don’t think anyone will argue that if there’s a community organizing aspect to a case, [it] has a better shot of winning.” He added: “But then also, you need community organizing to change the laws that are in place.”

In describing the kind of policy work that OCAD does, both independently and as part of the broader Chicago Municipal Immigration Policy Working Group (which also includes ICIRR, NIJC, and Latino Union), Anzures stressed that the mayor and City Council can always do more, even with the threats coming from Trump and his administration to pull some or all federal funding for Sanctuary Cities.

“Even if [the City does] not want to move forward with getting rid of the carve-outs, there are more services they can provide,” Anzures said. “And there’s more that they have control over locally that they can do for immigrants in Chicago.

Scrubbing the gang database is not going to affect their federal funding.”

OCAD has many of the same goals as the larger Working Group: getting rid of the four carve-outs in the Welcoming City Ordinance, limiting the sharing of sensitive information and data within the forthcoming municipal ID system, and designating public buildings as sanctuary spaces. “[But] I think OCAD as an organization is willing to go much further than that,” Anzures added. “And I think

To exercise your right to remain silent and request an attorney, present this card to ICE or the police if you are arrested.

TO TO WHOM WHOM IT IT MAY MAY CONCERN: CONCERN: Please be informed that I am choosing to exercise my right to remain silent and the right to refuse to answer your questions. If I am detained, I request to contact an attorney immediately. I am also exercising my right to refuse to sign anything until I consult with my attorney.

KNOW KNOW YOUR YOUR

RIGHTS.

NO WARRANT, NO ACCESS You do NOT have to answer the door. You do have the right to ask an ICE agent (through the closed door) if he or she has a warrant. If the agent says they have a warrant, ask them to slide it under the door.

CHECK IF THE WARRANT: 1) is signed by a judge or supervisor AND 2) has your name on it AND 3) is recent

REMAIN SILENT You have the right to remain silent! You can show your "Know Your Rights" card to the agent (below, left).

DON’T SIGN Do NOT sign any documents. Tell the agents you won’t sign anything until you talk with a lawyer.

TAKE DOWN INFORMATION If the agents force their way into your home or workplace, take down their names, agent numbers, and the license plate numbers of their vehicles.

IF DETAINED...

Don’t sign any documents without legal counsel. You have the right to make a call. Call a family member or lawyer to tell them where you are.

You will not have access to your cellphone, so it is important to memorize important numbers.

PREPARE FOR AN EMERGENCY Always carry your "Know Your Rights" card with you. Carefully choose a trusted adult that can take care of your children and help you during an emergency. Keep all your important documents in a safe and secure place.

CALL THE FAMILY SUPPORT HOTLINE:

(855) 435-7693 Report incidents with ICE and connect with others in order to organize and take effective action. Your information will be kept confidential. This hotline is staffed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with volunteers who can provide families with referrals for legal, financial, and counseling assistance.

Text adapted with permission from ICIRR. For more information visit icirr.org

Thank you.

JANUARY 25, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

CONOZCA CONOZCA SUS SUS

DERECHOS.

NO ORDEN, NO ACCESO Usted no tiene que abrir la puerta. Tiene el derecho de preguntarle al agente (con la puerta cerrada) si tiene orden judicial. Si el agente dice que tiene orden, pregunte que lo pase por abajo de la puerta cerrada.

VERIFIQUE QUE LA ORDEN: 1) esté firmada por el juez o supervisor, Y 2) tiene su nombre, Y 3) que la fecha sea reciente

MANTENGA SU SILENCIO Tiene el derecho de mantenerse el silencio. Puede mostrar su tarjeta de "Conozca sus derechos" (en la parte inferior, a la derecha).

NO FIRME Usted NO firme ningún documento. Dígale al agente que usted no firmará ningún documento sin consultar con un abogado.

APUNTE INFORMACIÓN Si los agentes van a forzar la entrada de su casa: Apunte sus nombres, sus números de registro, y las placas de los vehículos de los agentes.

SI ES DETENIDO/A… No firme ningún documento sin consulta legal. Tiene el derecho de hacer una llamada. Llame a un familiar o abogado para decirles dónde está. No tendrá acceso a su celular, memorice números de teléfonos importantes.

PREPARE UN PLAN DE EMERGENCIA Siempre lleve con usted su tarjeta de ‘Conozca sus derechos.’ Con cuidado pídale a un adulto responsable que le cuide sus hijos y por su ayuda en caso de emergencia. Mantenga todos sus documentos importantes en un lugar seguro.

LLAMA A LA LÍNEA DE DEFENSA FAMILIAR:

(855) 435-7693 Para poder organizar y ser efectivos con nuestros esfuerzos, necesitamos que la comunidad reporte estos incidentes. Su información se mantiene segura y confidencial.

Para mayor información favor de dirigirse a la pagína red icirr.org

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IMMIGRATION

we will in 2017. I think a big thing will be around criminalization, because we do work closely with a lot of Black Lives Matter groups, namely BYP100.”

It’s difficult to argue that Chicago police officers routinely driving by the corner of Belmont and Milwaukee, ordering workers to disperse, is making the community more secure. It is a symptom of over-policing. It is a tactic that signals to the jornaleros who gather there for work every day that they are being watched—by CPD at least, and in collaboration with ICE potentially.

But even on its own, ICE relies on public institutions, public databases, and public trust in the criminal justice system.

Going over all the ways ICE conducts operations in Chicago, Mark Fleming explained that “ICE will troll public databases, for example, when someone has a bond hearing in traffic court. They will look for names that they...I mean, I don’t know how they do it, but from the description I’ve seen in documents, it sounds like they racially profile.” ICE officers will run searches on individual names and go from there, stopping someone as they go for a bond hearing in traffic court, outside their home, or at the corner where they look for work.

Fleming continued, “And to be honest when thinking about a Trump administration, I wouldn’t be surprised in a locality like Chicago, that they would try to have a high-profile raid sort of thing. It’s a very effective way to scare the hell out of a lot of people.”

A

fter the first few days of the Trump administration, immigrants and advocates are still waiting to see if Trump will deliver on the many promises he has made: eliminating DACA, defunding sanctuary cities, restoring Secure

Communities, restricting refugees.

But everyone has an idea of where things could be headed. The Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), the union that represents law enforcement officers in the United States, released a memo in December about the Trump administration’s first one hundred days. A disclaimer at the bottom noted that the memo “does not represent the FOP’s agenda…It is an advisory to our members as to what may happen when the new Administration takes over.”

In any case, almost half—eight out of eighteen—of the policy items listed in the FOP’s memo are directly related to immigration enforcement. The memo lists things like revoking federal funds to sanctuary cities, ending DACA, an expansion of the 287(g) program that essentially officially deputizes local law enforcement as frontline immigration officers, a reversal of the “Bush-era ban on racial profiling by all or some Federal agencies,” and use of mandatory minimum sentences for immigrants with prior deportations.

Chicago’s FOP Lodge 7 did not respond to requests for comment on the national FOP’s memo.

As these exceptionally aggressive shifts in federal policy loom closer every day, Anzures and OCAD want to see some equally aggressive changes happening locally to protect immigrants. There is more Chicago can do. “In our conversations with the City, we [say we] want to get rid of the carve-outs. And they’ll say, ‘Well, we don’t actually enforce the carve-outs in any way. We don’t collaborate with ICE in any way, so you don’t need to worry about it,’” Anzures summarized. “But if there is a new administration that starts using a bully pulpit to get cities to cooperate with them, we need to codify these things.” ¬

Para ejercer su derecho a guardar silencio y solicitar un abogado, presente esta tarjeta a Inmigración o a la policía si lo arrestan.

ESTIMADOS ESTIMADOS SEÑORES: SEÑORES: Deseo ejercer mi derecho a guardar silencio y no contestar preguntas.

Si me detienen, solicito comunicarme de inmediato con un abogado.

Quisiera ejercer, además, mi derecho a no firmar nada sin consultar con mi abogado.

Gracias.

STAGE & SCREEN

Farewell, Obama

Hyde Park celebrates the 44th president on his last night in office

BY BRIDGET GAMBLE

R

ain fell in Chicago on January 19, Barack Obama’s last night in the White House. That night, a new administration descended upon D.C. for an inauguration “welcome celebration” featuring “traditionally American” musical acts.

But in Obama’s old home base, one group was determined to celebrate the past eight years, which for many represented a paradigm shift in what it means to be traditionally American.

Tanikia Carpenter, a local filmmaker and co-founder of Black Owned Chicago, created a short film, Farewell, Obama, to pay tribute to the first African-American president. On January 19, the group held a screening of Carpenter’s film at Harper Theater in Hyde Park, where Obama’s political career began over a decade ago.

Farewell, Obama is the first documentary produced by Black Owned Chicago, which Carpenter and her husband founded this past June primarily to serve as a network for black business owners and a resource for locals and tourists looking to support blackowned businesses.

Before the screening, Stevie Wonder's “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” played as guests gradually filled in the lobby. Many sported Obama T-shirts from 2008 or 2012; just for the occasion, Carpenter’s father-in-law, Tony Carpenter, took his old Obama baseball cap off the wall. Guests posed for photos holding cutouts of the Obama family’s faces and collected goody bags stuffed with gifts from local black-owned businesses.

“Tonight, let’s celebrate, because tomorrow we’ll probably be weeping,” Carpenter said as she introduced the film and people took their seats.

Originally, the budding filmmaker set out to record a five-minute video on Facebook capturing messages of gratitude and well-wishes to the president from other

Chicagoans. But when Carpenter spoke to Patricia Blessman, a prominent Chicagobased donor interviewed in the film, she realized five minutes would not suffice.

Blessman connected Carpenter with so many other campaign workers, friends, and supporters that she eventually generated enough material for a thirty-minute short film. She decided she would tell the stories of those who rubbed elbows with Obama before he was a household name.

The film opens with scenes of the South Side as Carpenter’s voice explains how she came to support then-Senator Obama during his presidential campaign.

The campaign’s message, “Yes we can,” gave her hope that her voice as a black woman, for once, could be heard. She would later attend his inauguration, which she called “the blackest inauguration ever.” She recalled proud grandmothers in fur coats and the indescribable feeling of hope as the nation swore in its first African-American president.

The cast of characters includes White House staffer Toniann Liota; Johnny Calamusa,manager of Obama’s favorite Hyde Park restaurant, Valois; Jocelyn Woodards, former director of Camp Obama; donors Stephen and Patricia Blessman; Obama’s barber; Bishop Peachman of Trinity United Church of Christ, and several others.

Some anecdotes in the film, ranging from Obama’s days as a senator to his final months in the White House, were poignant. Kati Murphy, a white member of Obama’s administration staff, described the parallel timing of the adoption of her black daughter with Obama’s election. A black president meant that her daughter would grow up in a world where her worth wasn’t based on the color of her skin, she said. South Siders described saying hello to Obama as he jogged in the street, cutting his hair, serving him breakfast on Saturday

BRIDGET GAMBLE

mornings, and shaking his hand at book signings. These anecdotes reinforced the image of the Obama we know so well: an electrifyingly charismatic man at once both cool and nerdy, graceful under pressure and optimistic against the odds. More than anything, the film showcased the treasured memories Chicagoans hold of their former neighbor, fellow churchgoer, boss, customer, and friend.

Toniann Liota, an Obama campaigner turned White House staffer, described more private moments with the president that spoke to his authenticity. After Sandy Hook, she recalled in the film a conversation with the president where the question was not about strategizing, but rather how they would all support each other in such a dismal time. “He was just as much a citizen as a leader,” Liota said.

After the film, about half a dozen of the individuals featured rose from their seats to start a panel discussion focused largely

around the question: Now what?

“Once you’ve had a really great boyfriend, you can’t go back to trash,” Blessman said to chuckles from the audience. Though Obama may not be universally appreciated

by Americans, Blessman’s husband Stephen added, his legacy will be lasting. Several panelists mentioned the Obama Library in Jackson Park as a project to look forward to organizing around, and urged the audience to stay engaged in various forms of activism, from frequenting black-owned businesses to starting civil conversations with people who harbor opposing political views.

Carpenter is already doing her part.

The filmmaker will soon start fundraising for her next documentary about black entrepreneurship on the South Side. Under the new administration, Black Owned Chicago will continue its aim to elevate black excellence, a lasting tribute not only to Obama, but also to the community that has supported him from day one. ¬

JANUARY 25, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

Chicago to Trump: Expect Resistance

CAMELIA MALKAMI

COMPILED BY MARI COHEN

O

n Saturday, an estimated 250,000 Chicagoans joined over two million people around the world to march in favor of women’s rights and in opposition to the Trump administration. The march was officially called off and converted into a rally because of unexpectedly high turnout, but that didn’t stop the Chicago crowd, who spilled out from Grant Park and crowded the streets of the Loop, chanting all the while. Drawing large crowds new to activism, the march generated excitement about the beginnings of a mass social movement opposing the Trump administration. However, the march drew criticism from some veteran activists because of messaging that excluded trans women by equating womanhood with biology.

These critics expressed hope that the large numbers of white women who marched would continue to show up beyond Saturday's rally. The Chicago march’s speakers and performers indicated what this might look like, advocating for causes from immigrants’ rights to reproductive rights to the Fight for 15 campaign to Black Lives Matter. The list included many organizations and performers from the South Side. The Weekly contacted South Side performers, speakers, and participants to get their reflections on being part of the march.

“I had an amazing time at the Chicago march. The sense of sisterhood and unity amongst differences was profound.”

Cleopatra Cowley-Pendleton, cofounder, Hadiya Pendleton Foundation 10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JANUARY 25, 2017

“It was a wonderful opportunity to participate in something that represents me, I guess, and represents the glory of humanity. The crowd was so wonderfully diverse and at ease with each other, and that was the whole point. It was a gathering of humanity and a gathering of kindness. It was okay for people to completely articulate who they were and what they believed in. There are so many folks who want to do that all the time, and it was a platform to do that and say it loud and clear.

What was really fascinating about Saturday, and I think the reason why nobody in the city could judge how many people were going to be out there, is that there were so many personal decisions that were made to make their presence there. And there was this desire to be in the space with people who felt that something needed to be done and didn’t necessarily know how to express it. To be able to share music was so unbelievably powerful to me. All these individual decisions to do a collective action were just amazing.”

Lucy Smith, jazz singer “It just felt really empowering that I was able to be with a bunch of women from all walks of life, and we were all able to come together to talk about what’s important to us. We felt that our president now didn’t really support those things, and we decided to do something about it.

Afterward, to see how many people came to ours and worldwide—it’s just like, wow, women are so powerful, we can do so much.”

Rachel Weaver, high school student and Woodlawn resident

POLITICS

CAMELIA MALKAMI

DENISE NAIM

“I would say that it was a true showing of unity; it was a wide spectrum of folks that came from various communities, religions, cultures. Even some of the poster boards were in different languages, really making a fabric of what Chicago and the Chicago area is. Young children were there, families were there—it was beautiful to see so many families. Women with their daughters, and sons, and their partners participating.

The voices that were present represented the various issues that were important to women.

I spoke about gender violence, but I very easily could have spoken about reproductive health.

We heard about access to education. The fact that we did not anticipate as many people that we did I think speaks about the energy that is there, of folks wanting to do something positive.

They know that there’s so much at stake and they want their voice to count.

Now, if I reflect on it, we want to make sure that we use that energy, that we harness it, into action. Action at all different levels, whether it’s parents becoming involved in school councils, running for office, or just picking up your phone and calling your aldermen. It really shows that everyone can play a role in making sure that, whether it’s at the local level or the national level, we stay on top of the issues that are important to us and our families.”

Maria del Socorro Pesqueira, President, Mujeres Latinas en Accion

CAMELIA MALKAMI

“There were so many people participating because of what they believe to be wrong with the direction the administration is going in. I also believe that. And I want this administration to acknowledge the young people we serve and the violence that’s in our community and the resources needed, so I decided to speak up.

By the time I got up there I was so energized from everybody speaking before me. When I got up there, I got up in the euphoria of, ‘This is the time, it’s now, it’s time to stand up to make your voice heard for what you care about.’ I felt those people knew and felt that they were all there because they cared about something.

I hope this is not the end. I hope there is a continuation of America standing up for what America is.”

Diane Latiker, founder of Kids Off the Block JANUARY 25, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

DOGS

BARCing up the Right Tree

Bronzeville dog owners are on a winding path to bringing a dog park to the South Side

BY CHRISTOPHER GOOD

“D

ogs on the South Side shouldn’t need to drive all over the city to get out more and exercise.”

When Benjamin Gerhold tells me this in an email, it makes for a funny image—a poodle in a coupe, perhaps—but it strikes upon an issue that has long gone unaddressed. The South Side needs more dog parks, and the Bronzeville Association for Recreation with Canines, aka BARC, plans to do something about it.

Of late, it’s become a bit of a running joke that North Siders are oblivious to the South Side’s cultural offerings. But when it comes to dog parks, the discrepancy between north and south is not imagined: by and large, dog parks do not exist in most neighborhoods on the South Side. The vast majority of the Chicago Park District’s twenty-two off-leash sites are scattered across trendy neighborhoods on the North Side; the southernmost “Dog Friendly Area” (DFA) is based in the South Loop at 18th Street.

As a result, most South Siders are forced to drive their pets through traffic just to reach a dog park. “There are some people who don’t have a car,” Gerhold points out, “so their dogs never really know what it’s like [to] run free outside and don’t get to socialize with other dogs very often.”

It’s in this context that BARC was formed late last year, with the express intent of bringing a dog park to Bronzeville. The actual site proposed for this park remains up in the air, with five potential locales between 31st Street and 49th Street currently being vetted. Although BARC is in its infancy (or puppyhood), the public meetings and dog picture–filled Facebook page run by the group are seeing increasing enthusiasm and outreach from Bronzeville locals.

BARC, nonetheless, is not the only group trying to change the opportunities available for dogs on the South Side. One successful park is Jackson Bark, a beloved agility course profiled in the Weekly in 2016.

12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

KATIA PEREZ

Elsewhere, the Southeast Chicago Dog Park and McKinley Park Dog Park committees have each reached the preliminary planning stage to create a DFA. But the hurdles of an agility course pale in comparison to the bureaucratic hurdles facing dog parks on the South Side. In an email, Gerhold sadly noted that Jackson Bark is “unofficial, so the Park District could shut it down tomorrow if they wanted to.”

The legal route to a DFA, on the other hand, is saddled with a steep price tag from the Park District––a “minimum” of $150,000, which the “community is responsible for funding,” according to its website. In addition to gathering the necessary funds and choosing a site, BARC is responsible for getting permission from the local residents before building a DFA, which entails a

¬ JANUARY 25, 2017

minimum of three public meetings, usage surveys of the selected site over a period of one year, and a petition of support signed by at least fifty households (such that the support “significantly out-weigh[s] the opposition”).

In short, there’s a lot of work riding on the BARC team’s shoulders. But according to founding board member (and chihuahua owner) Marc Loveless, the support for the team has been “amazing, just amazing.”

As he and his neighbors see it, dog parks have a “good impact, a positive impact on community living. [They] bring neighbors together.”

This is a view shared by Aldermen Pat Dowell and Sophia King of the 3rd and 4th Wards, who have encouraged BARC’s efforts. Loveless isn’t worried that this

momentum will wane in the event that King is voted out in the February 28th aldermanic race. “The one candidate that wasn’t very supportive ended up dropping out of the race, so I guess it wasn't meant to be,” he jokes.

The path to a dog park in Bronzeville might not be easy—but as anyone with a mutt at home can tell you, making dogs happy is its own reward. In Gerhold’s words, BARC is “a great way for people in the neighborhood to socialize and better get to know each other. [It’s] a great way to make Bronzeville an even better place to live.” BARC is holding a fundraiser at DoGoneFun (1717 S. State St.) on Sunday, February 12, at 12:30pm. Dogs, of course, are welcome.

POLICING

Questions Without Answers

J. MICHAEL EUGENIO

In a tense public meeting, the young women of Youth for Black Lives question Superintendent Eddie Johnson

BY MAHA AHMED

M

ere steps away from this newspaper’s office on Tuesday, January 17, the first of what is supposed to be a series of monthly meetings between leaders of Youth for Black Lives (YBL, formerly Black Lives Matter Youth) and Chicago Police Department superintendent Eddie Johnson took place.

In a room at the Experimental Station on 61st Street and Blackstone Avenue, around forty residents sat in rows of chairs facing the panel-like setup: four of YBL’s

members in a line next to Johnson. Outside, CPD cars lined Blackstone. Inside, the audience contained a number of children, each of whom appeared to be no older than ten. Several journalists lined the back wall of the room to record the hour-long public conversation between the teenage organizers and Johnson—a conversation that many of those in attendance criticized afterward as a wasted opportunity, with some noting the rarity of Johnson’s public appearances.

Overall, the performance of both the

students and Johnson felt lacking, although the latter’s position as a public official makes his performance more concerning and less surprising.

Representatives of the six-member female-led Youth for Black Lives group, which aims to amplify the voices of youth within racial justice organizing, included Maxine Wint, 17, who attends Kenwood Academy; Eva Lewis, 18, who attends Walter Payton College Prep; and Maxine Aguilar, 17, and Yahaira Tarr, 17, who both attend Jones College Prep. During the meeting, which took the form of a Q&A session between the students and Johnson, the superintendent said multiple times, while laughing nervously, that he felt overwhelmed, and that the students were “throwing too much” at him. The questions asked by the students were often scattered, but many were answerable through cursory internet searches.

Nevertheless, Johnson seemed unable or unwilling to answer many of those questions: some focused on the details of disciplinary procedures, training for officers, and accountability protocol, while others cited the horrific findings of the Department of Justice (DOJ)’s recent report detailing their investigation of the CPD. He defended many of his non-answers by saying that the topics he was asked about were either not under his jurisdiction, or not his “responsibility.” In response to questions about the details of the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA), which is slated to replace the Independent Police Review Authority as Chicago’s police oversight agency, Johnson repeatedly said, “I have nothing to do with anything.” After a student organizer mentioned incidents named in the DOJ report of a Taser used against high school students, Johnson said he was not “fully aware” of it.

In a representative exchange, Johnson responded with “we have to hold ourselves accountable” when asked to explain what accountability means to him. In a similar rhetorical flourish, Johnson distinguished “honest mistakes” from “intentional misconduct” by defining “honest mistakes” as “not intentional.”

The meeting was one of the demands made by YBL of the CPD superintendent back in November, after the news surfaced that students at Marist High School in Mount Greenwood exchanged racist text messages in the aftermath of Joshua Beal’s killing in the neighborhood. Beal, a black

man, was shot on November 5 by an off-duty CPD officer. Clashes between Black Lives Matter and pro-police groups followed.

YBL, at the time called Black Lives Matter Youth, planned a protest for November 11 at Marist over both the text messages and the killing. Johnson agreed to meet with the group to hear their demands; as a result, the planned protest was cancelled, and Johnson agreed to regular public meetings.

The group’s name change happened around the time of the November meeting with Johnson that replaced their scheduled protest. In response to YBL’s initial meeting with the police and scheduling of subsequent meetings, Black Lives Matter Chicago, a local chapter of the national BLM movement, said in a statement that while they believe in youth action, “police are designed to enforce Black subjugation [and] freedom can not be gained by working with our oppressors.” They called for BLM Youth to change their name. On November 18, the group changed their name to Youth for Black Lives in order to “clarify any affiliation with other organizations,” according to a statement.

In the days leading up to the January 17 event, YBL members posted on social media that a CPD officer approached one of them and said Johnson would not show up unless the meeting was made private. The meeting was kept public, however, and Johnson did show up.

About halfway through the hour allotted for last week’s meeting, the YBL students opened up questioning to those in attendance. Perhaps the most poignant part of the night was a question that came from an eight-year-old audience member: “Why do you hurt people who don’t even do anything?”

“Being a police officer is not easy,” Johnson replied. “You have people out there trying to do the job that they’ve sworn an oath to do, and it’s not always a simple thing [to be in] split-second, life-and-death situations.”

It is unclear whether Johnson will follow through on what YBL claims is the commitment he made to hold monthly public meetings. At the conclusion of the meeting, as one of the student organizers announced to the room that they would contact his office to schedule a meeting for next month, Johnson simply stood up and started walking away, as if he didn’t hear a word. ¬

JANUARY 25, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

REGINALD RICE

Through the Grapevine

57th Street Wines and the business of small businesses in Hyde Park

BY ISABELLE LIM

S

tacks of shelves, repurposed. In the Hyde Park storefront at the intersection of 57th Street and Harper Avenue that formerly housed Southside Hub of Production, a cultural center, and before that O’Gara & Wilson—Chicago’s oldest bookstore before it moved to Indiana in 2013—now stands 57th Street Wines, the neighborhood’s newest small business: a specialty wine and liquor store. At the shop’s grand opening last Friday, distributors set up tasting tables on the store’s boldly checkered floor tiles (restored from the space’s bookstore days), while customers met and mingled, wine samples in hand. The trio behind the

14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

store, owner Steven Lucy and co-workers Bex Behlen and Derrick Westbrook, were present in their semi-formal best, directing customers to shelves not unlike the ones that held volumes of books less than four years ago. This time, their contents concerned neither genre nor author, but red and white .

57th Street Wines has only been open since December, but the idea behind it was conceived in 2015. Lucy, who also owns Open Produce—a grocery store in East Hyde Park—and co-owns Cornell Florists, began selling wine and beer at Open Produce around that time, an experience that inspired him and Behlen to expand their

¬ JANUARY 25, 2017

operation. When Lucy fortuitously came across the available 57th Street storefront after Southside Hub of Production moved out, they pounced.

Last year, Lucy approached 5th Ward Alderman Leslie Hairston to talk through the idea, prompting a community meeting in July that ultimately resulted in the goahead from the neighborhood for the wine undertaking. Support from local residents was key for Lucy.

“To me, that tells me that not only did the alderman support the liquor license, which was important to deal with, but that I hadn’t misread the community,” Lucy said.

“The community really wanted us to be here, which is great. Because I don’t want to be here if people don’t want me to be here.”

Community as cornerstone is an attitude that has remained central in the establishment of 57th Street Wines. Lucy envisions the store as more than a place where people buy wine and leave, but where close interactions happen and relationships are formed.

“People come in and they don’t just feel like they exchange dollars for a bottle of wine, or exchange dollars for a piece of produce,” Lucy says. “They feel like they know their cashiers’ name and they have a personal people-to-people interaction and are not just cogs in the capitalist machine or whatever.”

Behlen, who’s been a manager at Open Produce for five years, says that she knows “about eighty percent of [the] faces” that come through the grocery store every day.

Already, she says, she’s beginning to see the same happening at 57th Street Wines, despite it being open for only a month and a half.

It’s this congenial atmosphere that Lucy hopes will encourage customers to explore wine regardless of their level of prior expertise. Derrick Westbrook, the former wine guru at Michelin-starred restaurant Elizabeth who joined Behlen and Lucy in their venture as the store’s sommelier, aims to aid this exploration. His presence has added extensive wine knowledge to the enthusiast establishment, bolstering its aspirations as the neighborhood alcoholeducational watering hole with one-on-one guidance, regular tastings, and workshops that aim to get customers acquainted with more specialized areas of the liquor world.

Despite these intentions, it’s difficult to divorce a specialty wine shop from its Eurocentric and upper-middle-class associations.

Lucy remains adamant that the shop isn’t exclusionary, with most wines in the store’s “core” being priced between $8 and $50.

“We’re not selling $3 bottles of Yellowtail,” Lucy said. “And with beer we have Ducati, we have Modelo, but we don’t have Natty Ice, or Budweiser. I just don’t have much interest in selling those things. I think there’s beer that’s a lot better that’s only a little bit more expensive. And I’d rather sell that.”

It’s a bid to keep 57th Street Wines as a purveyor of quality wine and beer, but without pretension and exclusivity. The careful balance between the two is perhaps

FOOD

maintained because the trio sees running the business as something ultimately rooted in fun. Behlen describes shopping at the store as “kind of more like going to a record shop than a grocery store.”

Westbrook’s contribution to the store has riffed off of this uniqueness, expanding the horizons of what people think wine is and should be. For him, a particular point of pride is being able to bring in and introduce wines by African-American winemakers.

The latest edition in the store’s collaboration with the Promontory—a monthly wine and food pairing night called the Hyde Park Wine Society—centers on wines from African-American winemakers like Brown Estate and Other People’s Pinot (O.P.P.), which they also carry in-store.

“Whatever it is, whatever arena that you’re in, it’s always great to be around or you look to people who you can identify with,” Westbrook says. “The first AfricanAmerican winemaker who I came into contact with…was Brown Estate. And I mean, awesome juice! It was just great wine.

And I didn’t know that they were black winemakers until after the fact, so that was fun. Because there’s a stigma that I didn’t want to like them because I knew they were black-owned. I wanted to like them because their wine was good.”

Tasting good is the underlying standard of the bottles on 57th Street Wines’ shelves, but beyond that, Westbrook says the shop looks to the community for inspiration, taking suggestions and feedback, and trying as much as possible to get requested wines on their shelves. Ultimately, he says, “We want the store to look like the community.

And the best way to do that is to bring in things that the community likes.”

T

he uphill task of starting a small business in a neighborhood like Hyde Park, with its recent rapid commercialization, can feel daunting.

Already, the daily routine of running a business—the planning and execution, the negotiating and liaising, the scheduling and physical grunt work—even split among the three-person team, is enormous. With new additions like a Whole Foods and a Target, which have the economies of scale to offer deals and low prices, small business owners like Lucy are feeling the heat.

Lucy was reluctant to point only to these new additions as the cause of slowing sales at Open Produce, citing factors like seasonal

changes, the slowdown from the spike of sales after the store acquired its liquor license, and the University of Chicago closing down a nearby residence hall, where many students were consistent customers. “There are too many variables to say definitively, but we do think that Whole Foods has eaten into our business at Open Produce a little bit,” he conceded. “Not as much as we were fearing, but more than enough that we noticed.”

As the owner of three small businesses in the neighborhood, Lucy is, naturally, concerned about the plight of small business owners in the neighborhood. He sits on the advisory board for the Hyde Park Chamber of Commerce (HPCC), an organization, he explains, that’s concerned not necessarily just with small businesses in the neighborhood, but with business interests at large. Therefore, institutions like the UofC and other large businesses like Mac Properties also have a seat at the table alongside mom-and-pop storeowners like Lucy.

“I feel like in many neighborhoods, the Chamber of Commerce is mainly sort of run by small businesses” Lucy says. “But Hyde Park has these two huge players in it, the [UofC] and Mac, and I feel like they eat up a lot of the role of what a Chamber would do in a neighborhood.”

According to him, the UofC or Mac will actively seek out businesses that they want to have in the neighborhood, facilitating the process of bringing them in by negotiating a good deal for them on rent, securing storefronts or retail spaces, or guaranteeing marketing support. And while these businesses may not always be large chain stores, there’s no specific preference for small, independent businesses.

For Lucy, the way to curb commercial swell is a quiet revolution of his own. He adopts a conciliatory attitude towards the big property owners, saying, “They have their motives and I have my motives. And to be honest, ninety-five percent of the time both sets of motives totally align.” He adds, though, that he doesn’t want to live in a neighborhood that’s filled with chain stores, so he “copes by opening more and more nonchain stores.”

Lucy and Behlen, lifelong Hyde Parkers, advocate supporting other small businesses.

It’s a simple action and one that doesn’t have to entail a militant refusal of all things chain store, Behlen illustrates. Regarding the recent closings of several small businesses on 53rd Street, Behlen notes, “It makes me sad,

REGINALD RICE

but I also, like, eat at Chipotle sometimes.

I like Chipotle. I like that it’s a block from my house now.” She emphasizes that it’s just “important that we remember and have intention to support [stores] like Freehling Pots and Pans, now that Target is there.”

In the David and Goliath battle playing out in the commercial development of Hyde Park, perhaps what’s most heartening to hear is the continued cooperation between the neighborhood’s small business owners.

Lucy tells the story of Hyde Park Produce pitching in after the freezers failed at Open Produce, and the support from other 57th Street businesses, including Medici and Salonica, shortly after the wine shop opened down the road. “We take care of each other,” Behlen says. “We have each other’s backs.”

T

he grand opening of the wine shop last week was filled with that feeling of family. With food provided by friends from restaurants along 57th Street and the store filled with Chicagoans from the neighborhood and beyond, Lucy, Behlen, and Westbrook had their hands full explaining wines to customers, ringing up purchases, and ensuring the opening was kept afloat with wine, beer, and conversation.

A collection of records culled from Hyde Park Records played in the background as visitors weaved through grasping plastic wine cups, making the atmosphere feel like a family get-together. “I’m finding it like someone’s big social room, family room,” said Hyde Park resident Betty Virginia Holcomb. “They have books, they have records, they have all kinds of spirits. And

many of them are local, which is wonderful.

It’s a real family vibe.” When asked whether she’d return, she replied, “Totally. I like mom-and-pop.”

For the trio behind the wine shop, it’s enough for now to simply keep chugging along and keeping up with the daily operations. None see the shop as some kind of game-changing commercial venture for the neighborhood, but simply as a way to meet a neighborhood need that they also enjoy fulfilling. Behlen puts it simply: “We painted the walls, we buffed the floors, and we put some wine on the shelves. And we learned about it, and we want to sell it to you, because we want you to drink nice wine.

Or wine that makes you feel good.”

It’s a modest operation that nonetheless sees Lucy, Behlen, and Westbrook working hard to keep going, and for Behlen, who refers to Hyde Park as her “forever home,” it’s a way of being yet more rooted in the neighborhood. When asked about the changes that she’s seen in recent years, she remarks that what she wants most to see in the future is more people starting businesses of their own, just as she and her partners have done with 57th Street Wines.

“A business is hard work, but it’s not impossible. It’s not just for the Targets of the world,” she says. “Every time someone has an opportunity to be creative and prolific with an idea about what to do with our community, in any way...Please, let’s do something. You know? Just do anything.

Because it’s changing and we should have a hand in it.” ¬

JANUARY 25, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

STAGE & SCREEN

Hoodoisie Trumps Bourgeoisie

NICOLE BOND

On the eve of the inauguration, Ricardo Gamboa gives Trump the finger

BY NICOLE BOND

I

nauguration Day mixed the city’s emotions into a veritable soup of angst.

Protesters dissenting the new president gathered at Daley Plaza and near Trump Tower before migrating to briefly shut down parts of Lake Shore Drive. But at an effervescent brown-owned café in Pilsen, performance artist Ricardo Gamboa’s live news show, F*ck Trump the Hoodoisie is Here, gave a standing-room-only crowd the opportunity to protest status quo politics in the nation as well as in the city.

Gamboa assembled a collective of “poetical” activists, including storyteller Lily Be, Barrel of Monkeys actor Steven Beaudion, community activist Jaime De Leon, and comedian-activist Tribble, to host

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an inspiring and motivating panel discussion based on Gamboa’s central premise: “We need social movements because [political] parties are ineffective.” Gamboa opened with a question—Trump is president; who do you blame?—and the protest, by way of information absorption, began.

The entertaining yet serious discussion tore the blindfold off the distractions that paved the way for the election’s outcome— distractions like white women who, in essence, forfeited their voice and/or vote to snap selfies in handmade pussy hats, and playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda, who lullabied the nation with Hamilton while expressing his desire to perform the play for political prisoner Oscar Lopez Rivera (once

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Rivera is released). The latter was a noble gesture at face value, though not necessarily so noble below the surface.

The panel yielded the floor to musical artist Mykele Deville who performed from his album Each One Teach One, written with his nine-year-old niece in mind as a way to help her process the times in which we live. After Deville’s performance, twentysix-year-old 35th Ward Alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa got onto the stage to share his vision for the ward and for our city.

In Ramirez-Rosa’s mind, Chicago would no longer be rubber-stamped by the mayor’s allegiance to his wealthy allies, and gentrification would be staved off, by not allowing developers to have free reign.

The protest of sorts culminated with Kristiana Rae Colón and her brother Damon Williams of the Let Us Breathe Collective and last summer’s Occupy Homan Square movement, which exemplified how genuine protest can serve a community in practical ways by providing food, clothing, and shelter while standing face-to-face with power and boldly speaking truth to it. As Williams said most eloquently, “If destruction is how we hold ourselves accountable, we are going to die.” That night, in that place full to capacity with people of every ethnicity, gender, age, sexual identity, and socioeconomic status, working to hold ourselves as a nation accountable, nothing was destroyed and nobody died. ¬

LIT

History in Lowercase

Poet Kevin Coval wrestles with the political and the personal in his tribute to Chicago

BY KRISTIN LIN

W

hat happens when we do not learn from the past?

In the wake of the Department of Justice investigation of the Chicago Police Department, Kevin Coval’s honest look at the past in his new book of poems, A People’s History of Chicago, could be a reminder of how to move forward.

“I think that white people shy away from the reality of history,” Coval said when we discussed the DOJ Report and his book two days after the report was released. “But I think when we aspire toward justice and equity, that [to] claim where we’ve been and own it and apologize and do better….is how we ultimately strive toward a more equitable and just future.”

Coval’s book reflects this sentiment of reclamation, putting into verse over 525 years of Chicagoland’s existence in an effort, according to Coval, “to insist for a different kind of civic space and a different kind of civic narrative.” The collection of seventyseven poems (one for each neighborhood in the city) begins before European arrival in North America and ends with the 180th anniversary of Chicago’s incorporation, on March 4, 2017. The book is slated to get its first public reading on that day.

Between these bookends, Coval seems to ask his readers what—if anything— has changed over the centuries. Though the poems are ordered chronologically, references to police violence, strained race relations, and an ever-culminating resistance

appear cyclically throughout the poems.

They suggest ways of seeing the present in the past as much as we see the past in the present. “Patronage,” dated February 29, 1992, demonstrates this well in the wake of the DOJ report: “when evidence of police torture / graced his [Richard M. Daley’s] desk in the early 80s / it was ignored. his ignorance made him / mayor.” The history that Coval constructs reminds, again and again, of a city that has yet to claim its past, fully and completely.

And for Coval, claiming the past does not—and should not—require any sort of embrace. It often requires the exact opposite, to stare unflinchingly at the “lakes polluted, the blood diseased, the people / rounded into prisons, reservations, Maywood.” To claim the city’s history is also to decapitalize the giants that have largely written the dominant narrative: the demotion of names like lasalle, richard m. daley, jane byrne, and barack obama to lowercase is a motif that Coval plays with throughout the course of the book. It’s another way that Coval picks and chooses his version of history, to instead memorialize figures like Ida B. Wells or Studs Terkel or Chief Keef.

But the collection is not merely a litany of historic crescendos. Another way to understand the collection of poems is as a meditation on Coval’s personal history and relationship with the city—or, at the very least, an open questioning of what it means to construct a history, and whom he can

include in such a project. Many of the events and individuals he chooses to memorialize are already unquestionably seared into the city’s collective memory: the assassination of Fred Hampton; the death of Harold Washington; the election of Barack Obama.

But others—small, introspective nods to his great-grandmother and grandfather, or to the housing development where his parents met—help carve out a small place for the personal and the individual, even in a project that bills itself as a collective history. Coval’s personal stake in these poems is actually subtler than the occasional invocation of his family members. “Don L. Lee Becomes Haki Madhubhuti,” for example, is a tribute not just to an acclaimed poet, but also someone whom Coval views as a longtime mentor.

Allusions to his personal stake in the city remind us that Coval critiques Chicago not from a distance, but as a resident and a citizen, and as someone who hopes that reclamation can pave the way for change.

Coval hopes that his book can play its part: he plans to host 180 readings across all seventy-seven community areas in the coming year. Along the way, he says he will collect narratives and oral histories from audience members he meets to begin to construct what he calls “an ongoing oral poetic story of the city.”

“History is an essential component of movement making and building,” he told me. ¬

JANUARY 25, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

BULLETIN The Challenges and Rewards of Foster Parenting Frederick Douglass Branch Library, 3353 W. 13th St. Thursday, January 26, 6:30pm– 7:30pm. Free. (312) 673-2755.

Children in the foster care system struggle with the traumas of abuse or neglect, often coupled with the pain of parental separation. This presentation will provide information to adults considering foster parenting about the special needs of foster children and the logistics and legal requirements. (Hafsa Razi)

Meeting on Proposed Englewood High Scbool Seventh District Police Station, 1438 W. 63rd St., Community Room. Thursday, January 26, 6pm–8pm. Free. (866) 845-1032. ragenglewood.org Since the revelation that CPS set aside money for a new South Side high school last month, all eyes have been on Englewood. But nothing is set in stone— two other neighborhoods, Chinatown and Roseland, are also reportedly vying for the funds. Opening a new school in any of these neighborhoods may mean the closure of existing schools. Come have your say on the issue at this community meeting.

(Hafsa Razi)

Muslim Cool: Race, Religion and Hip Hop in the United States Arts Incubator, 301 E. Garfield Blvd. Friday, January 27, 6pm–8:30pm. Free. RSVP online at bit.ly/MuslimCool (capital letters necessary). (773) 702-9724.

Su’ad Abdul Khabeer’s new book, Muslim Cool: Race, Religion and Hip Hop in the United States, discusses African-American Muslim identity and the effect of prejudice on children of that community. Join the

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author for a book reading, signing, and for performances by local hip-hop artists, including poet and activist Jacinda Bullie. ( Jonathan Hogeback)

Stop the Violence: The Solutions Project Greater Englewood Community Development Corporation, 815 W. 63rd St., 4th floor.

Saturday, January 28, 11am–1pm. Free.

(708) 845-2889. greaterenglewoodcdc.wordpress.com As the event flyer reads, “We know the Problems. Come hear some SOLUTIONS.” Join leaders of Englewood neighborhood organizations like R.A.G.E. and Teamwork Englewood gather to discuss ways to address community violence. (Hafsa Razi)

Blackenomics 101 KLEO Center, 119 E. Garfield Blvd. Sunday, January 29, noon–3pm. Free. (773) 3636941. RSVP online. blackenomics.com Stop by the KLEO Center for Blackenomics 101, a series of financial literacy workshops geared toward the black community. The workshops will provide resources, access to community leaders and financial institutions, and useful information for managing your personal finances. ( Jonathan Hogeback)

Born Out of Struggle: Book Talk on the New Dyett School The Seminary Co-op Bookstore, 5751 S. Woodlawn Ave. Sunday, January 29, 3pm– 4:30pm. Free. (773) 752-4381. semcoop.com David Omotoso Stovall’s book, Born Out of Struggle, recounts lessons learned developing a Chicago neighborhood high school, and the benefits of hands-on community engagement in social justice.

Head to the Co-op to join Stovall and writer Bill Ayers in discussion about the book. ( Jonathan Hogeback)

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Gerrymandering: The Illusion of Inclusion Whitney Young Library, 7901 S. King Dr. Tuesday, January 31, 5pm–9pm. Free. RSVP online at bit.ly/GerrymanderingScreening (capital letters necessary). (773) 800-1475.

Have you ever felt confounded by the smoke and mirrors trick our country calls “the redistricting process”? Be confounded no longer! Jauwan Hall, a student member of the UIC board of trustees, is hosting a viewing of Gerrymandering: The Illusion of Inclusion at the Whitney Young Library, followed by a community workshop on the subject. (Michael Wasney)

Glenn Greenwald: Islamophobia and Surveillance in the Era of Trump Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, 5850 S. Woodlawn Ave. Thursday, February 2, 7pm–9pm. Free. RSVP online at bit.ly/IslamophobiaAndSurveillance (capital letters necessary). (773) 834-4671. politics.uchicago.edu Glenn Greenwald, a journalist, author, and constitutional lawyer who specializes in the U.S. surveillance state will discuss with Moustafa Bayoumi, fellow author who covers the experience of Arab Americans, the evolving social and political climate of Islamophobia, and the various efforts to combat it. (Hallie Parten)

VISUAL ARTS White Seam Zhou B Art Gallery, 1029 W. 35th St. Opening reception Friday, January 20, 7pm10pm. Through Friday, February 10. Free.

(773) 523-0200. zhoubartcenter.com Polish designer Agnieszka Kulon brings a multimedia exhibition to the Zhou B Art

Center, focusing on her “fascination with the color white.” The exhibit is conveyed through fashion design, video montage, and a set of collaborative projects with fellow Chicago artists in the fields of sculptural painting, video, and sound design. (Austin Brown)

Hecho en CaSa National Museum of Mexican Art, 1852 W. 19th St. Tuesday–Sunday, 10am–5pm.

Through May 7. (312) 738-1503. nationalmuseumofmexicanart.org Francisco Toledo has spent much of his life founding and developing artistic and cultural institutions in his native Oaxaca.

This retrospective of his work not only celebrates his legacy as a champion of literacy and expression but also showcases his symbolic, politically conscious paintings. ( Jake Bittle)

Riot Grrrls Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave. Through Sunday, June 18.

Tuesday, 10am–8pm; Wednesday–Sunday, 10am–5pm. $12 adults, $7 students; free Tuesdays. (312) 280-2660. mcachicago.org As one would expect judging by the name “Riot Grrrls,” this exhibit is a refreshingly direct challenge to the sexism that has long permeated the art world. This stunning collection features a series of abstract works by eight prolific, pioneering female painters including Mary Heilmann and Charline von Heyl, as well as works from the generation of female artists that followed.

(Bridget Newsham)

Spencer Rogers: Modern Abstractions S. Rog Gallery, 739 S. Clark St., 2nd floor.

Through March 10. Open Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, 10am–5pm, and by appointment. Free. (312) 884-1457. sroggallery.com

EVENTS

It takes a painter’s imagination to curate an exhibition as dazzling as “Modern Abstractions,” comprised of mind-blowing macro photographs selected for interesting detail and exploded in vibrant, dripping acrylic paint. Over a hundred copies will be made of each of these images, which will be on sale to all attendees. Snacks also provided. (Neal Jochmann)

This week The Corner performers are jazz artist Larry Brown, Jr., a former interviewee for the Weekly’s Interview Issue, and synth-soul diva MusicReloaded—check out both next Monday for an intimate set at Promontory. (Austin Brown)

Onward! Movements, Activists, Politics, and Politicians

Kusanya Cafe, 825 W. 69th St. Wednesday, January 25, noon–1pm. Free. All ages. (773) 675-4758. kusanyacafe.org

Uri-Eichen Gallery, 2101 S. Halsted St. Through Friday, February 3 by appointment only. Free. (312) 852-7717. uri-eichen.com Photographer Michael Gaylord James’s exhibit spans fifty-four years of politics, from the Berkeley Free Speech Movement to Black Lives Matter, from JFK in Mexico to Obama at Chicago State. He hopes to show that there’s reason for hope in the long march toward progress. ( Joseph S. Pete)

MUSIC Young Tee Tee Reggies Rock Club, 2105 S. State St. Thursday, January 26. Doors 8pm. $10, free with mixtape download. 18+. (312) 9490120. reggieslive.com Englewood natives Young Tee Tee, Skee Franchise, Z Money and more bring their latest street singles to Reggies this Thursday, to celebrate the release of Young Tee Tee’s new trap-funk mixtape, Yesterday.

Admission is $10, or free if you hit up Datpiff and download Yesterday beforehand.

(Austin Brown)

Larry Brown & Music Reloaded at The Corner The Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park Ave. Monday, January 30. Doors 7pm, show 8pm. $5. All ages. (312) 801-2100. promontorychicago.com

Sound Voyage Music Series ft.

Shawnee Dez

Shawnee Dez brings her spring-loaded soul to Kusanya Cafe Wednesday afternoon, setting off the new Sound Voyage Music Series that’ll be gracing Kusanya every other week for the next few months.

Check it out if you’re a fan of soul/hip-hop crossover, or just stop in for a drink and lunch—maybe you’ll end up a convert after all. (Austin Brown)

TRQPiTECA Two Year Anniversary Juniors, 2058 W. Cermak Rd. Saturday, January 28, 9pm–3am. $5–10. 21+. (708) 314-8282.

The best party in Chicago rolls along towards its two-year anniversary this Saturday, with residents La Spacer and Cqqchifruit pulling out all the stops, and unsung Chicago club track masterminds Shaun J. Wright and Itsï Ramirez, pole dancing from Anghell, performance artist Jerry Blossom, video work by Paula Nacif, and queer tropicalia throughout. It’s DIY, digital, danceable, and drag as fuck—see you there. (Austin Brown)

Coming back twenty-five years after its debut in 1991, the film Daughters of the Dust (the inspiration of Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade) tells the multigenerational struggle of a AfricanAmerican family between the past and the future. Ytasha Womack will lead a discussion about the film’s impact on Afrofuturism. (Yunhan Wen)

winning local youth slam poetry team, will perform. The group’s coaches include Chicago poetry/music heavyweights Quraysh Lansana, Emily Lansana, and Avery R. Young. ( Jake Bittle)

Groundhog's Day: Rebirth & Regeneration

Projections Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3219 S. Morgan Ave. Wednesday, February 22, 8pm. info@southsideprojections.org

High Concepts Labs at Mana Contemporary Chicago, 2233 S. Throop St. Thursday, February 2, 7:30pm–10pm. $10. (312) 8500555. highconceptlaboratories.org Groundhog, the versatile b-boy tap dancer, will celebrate his newly released audio piece, “Rebirth & Regeneration” by staging a live show with his crew, MDK. Get ready for a wild mix of talking, dancing, rapping, beatboxing and more. It’s on Groundhog Day, of course. (Yunhan Wen)

Various Artists Independent Film Festival (call for submissions) Regular submissions due February 13, "late submissions" due by February 27. For full submission guidelines, visit variousartiststv.net/vaiff The second round of submissions for this independent film festival welcomes contributions that are "100 years old or 100 days old," and of all genres, as long as they're under forty-five minutes. As with last fall's round, the festival promises cash prizes and celebrity judges who will review all submissions. ( Jake Bittle)

Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society's Dream Films

South Side Projections comes to Bridgeport's Co-Pro next month to show what must be some of the world's strangest films—those produced by, and based on the dreams of, the "Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society," a group of New Yorkers who loved the writings of Sigmund Freud but couldn't afford to become professional psychoanalysts themselves. ( Jake Bittle)

Intents & Purposes, presented

by ACRE Andrew Rafacz Gallery, 845 W. Washington Blvd. Through Saturday, March 4. Tuesday– Friday, 11am–6pm; Saturday 11am–5pm.

(312) 404-9188. andrewrafacz.com The Andrew Rafacz Gallery will present a solo exhibition of sculptures and films by Latham Zearfoss, including a simultaneous broadcast of his new film The Butler Did It, an experimental grappling with science-fiction writer Octavia Butler and philosopher Judith Butler. ( Jake Bittle)

Rebirth Poetry Ensemble at eta

STAGE & SCREEN Daughters of the Dust Screening and Discussion Chatham 14 Theaters, 210 W. 87th St. Thursday, February 2, 7pm. $6. (773) 3221450. blackworldcinema.net

eta Creative Arts Foundation, 7558 S. South Chicago Ave. Saturday, January 29, 3pm. Free. RSVP online. (773) 752-3955. etacreativearts.org As part of eta's "Magic Box" events series the Rebirth Poetry Ensemble, an award-

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