Ten days after Pablo and Elvia Mendoza ran across the Mexico-Arizona border with their three small children, they found themselves in Pilsen.
This place has sabor. Flavor. Character. The sign above the entryway to the supermercado El GŸero #6 on 19th and Blue Island says it all: Somos Mexicanos, Igual Que Usted. We’re Mexicans, Just Like You. Pilsen and the nearby Little Village make up the largest, most concentrated Mexican community in the midwest. According to the 1990 census, Pilsen is 88 percent Latino–and Latinos are traditionally undercounted by the census. There’s no question about whose neighborhood this is.
“OK. We’re going to go to City Hall,” says Juan Soto, Pilsen Neighbors’ executive director and only paid organizer. Their strategy will be to pass out flyers on LaSalle Street, then go upstairs to the City Council chambers for the monthly CDC meeting, where a tax increment financing district for Pilsen will be introduced.
Most TIFs in Chicago have been proposed, reviewed, and passed without much public awareness of what was happening. “I don’t recall that folks have shown up to protest like this,” says Dion Miller Perez, who does community outreach for the Neighborhood Capital Budget Group, a city budget watchdog organization that’s been researching TIFs. “What’s kind of odd is that this really fits in with the way Mexicans protest. I don’t think it was intended that way, but we have a long tradition of showing up places and not saying anything but being a strong presence nonetheless. When Cesar Chavez was thrown into prison, when they had the court case for him, it was the same thing. Nobody said anything, nobody did anything. They just showed up.
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When Rout started the bike shop in 1972, about a third of his customers were Mexican. Within a few years the number went up to about 80 percent, he estimates, and most of his non-Mexican business started coming from outside the neighborhood. Whether it was the push of race or the pull of the suburbs, white residents had begun leaving Pilsen en masse. If now it’s the Mexicans’ turn to leave, “That’s progress, I guess,” says Rout. “I mean, if the Hispanic people are moving out of here it means they found a better place or a nicer place. The Hispanic people who bought buildings here, if they have a chance to make a profit on their building, why shouldn’t they have a chance to do that? That’s what this country is all about. Nobody’s gonna stop progress. You can do whatever you want, you can demonstrate, and in the long run you’re gonna lose out. You’re not gonna win.”
Rout’s first home, a three-flat at 1159 W. 17th St., is gone, replaced by a small brand-new single-family home. It has vinyl siding, big picture windows, and a backyard–a rare item in Pilsen. Most of the two-flats and three-flats that line Pilsen’s streets hide two-flats squeezed behind them. Grass and trees are uncommon. Pilsen’s thousands of children–nearly a third of the community is under 18–play soccer on the narrow, crumbling sidewalks, jump rope between parked cars, and shoot hoops through milk crate rims nailed to light posts in alleyways or to the sides of buildings. The neighborhood is starved for park space; on sunny days, kids in Harrison and Dvorak parks wait in line to use the swings.
