Playwright and performance artist Pablo Helguera says that buildings have memories–a truth that Americans don’t understand, much to the distress of our national soul.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Helguera first arrived in Chicago from his native Mexico City in 1989. After a year at the School of the Art Institute he headed off to the University of Barcelona to study painting and philosophy. He returned to Chicago in 1991 to finish his degree, bringing with him a new artistic mission “to confront places, read into them, take empty places and fill them up, give them new life.”
Work on the play began a year ago, when Helguera began hearing rumors that the ghost of a 19th-century anarchist haunted the streets of Pilsen’s Mexican community. No one knew who the ghost was or why he was condemned to roam there for eternity. Whoever he was, he certainly wasn’t out of place. Pilsen was a hotbed of revolutionary stirrings a century ago, home to a host of radical activists and organizers involved in confrontations with federal troops and the police, such as the 1877 Battle of the Viaduct and the 1886 Haymarket riot. Its residents enthusiastically attended the Working People’s Social Science Club at Hull-House in the 1890s.
“Once the ghost in the play remembers everything that happened, once the mystery is cleared up, the ghost dies,” Helguera says. “His essence as ghost, as myth, is gone. He’s not an unanswered question anymore. He is only history.”
