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Puerto Ricans--Illinois--Chicago--Social conditions
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- Notes:
- Pedro Mateo is from Salinas, Puerto Rico and now lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He first came to Grand Rapids in the 1950s, but quickly moved to Indiana Harbor to work in the steel mills alongside many other Puerto Rican immigrants of that era. Mr. Mateo describes the steel mill culture and the Puerto Rican community that developed in Indiana Harbor beginning in the 1940s. After a short time in Indiana Harbor, Mr. Mateo moved with his family to Van Buren Street near Ashland Avenue in Chicago, in the barrio area then known to Puerto Ricans as La Madison. In the 1960s, Mr. Mateo moved to Addison Ave. and Wilson Street, next to Wrigley Field. It was here that he first met the Young Lords. Mr. Mateo describes his daily travels by train to La Clark to work at “Las Gomas,” or a rubber factory, by New Orleans and Chicago Avenue. He ultimately returned to Grand Rapids, where his large, extended family plays a prominent role in the city’s Latino community.
- Date Created:
- 2012-03-08T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Grand Valley State University. University Libraries
- Notes:
- Hilda Frontany is a long-time community activist whose family first lived in the Water Hotel in Chicago’s La Clark neighborhood when they arrived in Chicago from Puerto Rico. In the late 1960s and 1970s she devoted her work to addressing the housing crisis that was displacing Latinos and the poor from Chicago’s Lakeview Neighborhood, a community located just north of Lincoln Park. As a member of the Lakeview Citizens Council, Ms. Frontany provided a public voice for Latinos and helped support homeowners.
- Date Created:
- 2012-03-30T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Grand Valley State University. University Libraries
- Notes:
- Ana Encarnación is from the San Juan metropolitan area of Puerto Rico and describes growing up there in the late 1930s and 1940s. She arrived in Chicago in the 1950s, settling in Old Town, along the border dividing Old Town from neighboring Lincoln Park. She lived on the south side of North Avenue, at the corner of Sedgewick. When the Young Lords decided in 1968 to start to defend the Puerto Ricans and the poor from being displaced, it was her dream come true to join the Young Lords Movement. She saw it as a way to help her people. Ms. Encarnación was in nursing and so she began to work in the Young Lords’ Emeterio Betances Free Health Clinic. Ms. Encarnación describes how the volunteer staff, including herself, not only provided many long hours of free services to the Puerto Ricans and poor of Lincoln Park but when money was low, they also donated from their own personal savings to keep the clinic afloat.
- Date Created:
- 2012-07-10T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Grand Valley State University. University Libraries
- Notes:
- Mike Lawson is a civil rights activist who first met Mr. José “Cha-Cha” Jiménez in 1968, after Mr. Jiménez was released from prison. At that time, Mr. Lawson was in charge of a G.E.D. program for ex-offenders that already had enrolled a number of Black Stone Rangers, Disciples, and Young Lords. The group met at Argonne National Laboratory. Because Mr. Lawson lived in Old Town, he helped some of the students who lived in Lincoln Park get to the classes. In the morning most of the students would work part-time as janitors; they would study part-time in the afternoons. As an extension of their classroom lessons, Mr. Lawson took some of his students on a field trip to Grant Park during the Democratic National Convention where they witnessed police beating up on hippies and reporters firsthand. These demonstrations helped to remind Mr. Jiménez of the goals he had set for himself while in jail. Today Mike Lawson lives on the south side of Chicago and is dependent on a wheelchair to get around, as he is plagued by muscular dystrophy.
- Date Created:
- 2012-03-29T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Grand Valley State University. University Libraries
- Notes:
- Martha López grew up in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood and recalls the thriving Puerto Rican community there, especially the youth groups, Caballeros de San Juan, and the Young Lords. She also recalls being attacked “from the whites and the blacks” who lived in different parts of the segregated Old Town and Lincoln Park neighborhoods.
- Date Created:
- 2012-03-30T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Grand Valley State University. University Libraries
- Notes:
- Carlos Flores is a cultural activist who lived at La Salle and Superior in the La Clark barrio, growing up on Armitage Avenue. He takes pride in relating that his family was “the last of the Puerto Ricans to leave Lincoln Park” and recalls life in Lincoln Park which included his share of minor street battles as a teen member of the Continentals Social Club. Mr. Flores also fought for Puerto Ricans as a full fledged member of the Young Lords. Mr. Flores served on the Chicago Mayor’s Advisory Council on Latino Affairs, under Harold Washington. This council was first set up in 1983 by the Young Lords and four other Latino representative organizations city-wide soon after Harold Washington was elected the first African American mayor in Chicago history.
- Date Created:
- 2012-03-29T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Grand Valley State University. University Libraries
- Notes:
- Carmen de Leon is a Young Lord who grew up in New York City and today lives in Loíza, Puerto Rico. A strong advocate for women, Ms. de Leon worked closely with Young Lord Richie Pérez on a range of education and youth centered programs. In her oral history, she recalls her days working with the Young Lords. Ms. de Leon discusses how the Young Lords were infiltrated by government agents and how “ideology” was utilized to factionalize and create divisions within the Movement, including encouraging takeovers, discrediting, and purging leaders. She vividly describes members being taken hostage as well as how she herself was purged from the Young Lords. Her interview provides important insights into how these repressive tactics were carried out and how they ultimately destroyed the connections between the Young Lords and the barrio base.
- Date Created:
- 2012-05-14T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Grand Valley State University. University Libraries
- Notes:
- Benedicto Jiménez is the son of Toribia Rodríguez and Miguel Jiménez. For Mr. Benedicto Jiménez, the importance of family and neighborhood ties became especially clear once he was in Chicago. There, Puerto Ricans faced the same hardships and so sought each other out and were glad to know that they were related in some way. Instead of asking what one thought about the weather, the conversation would be about, “what town in Puerto Rico are you from and what are all your last names.” Mr. Jiménez moved closer to Aurora, Illinois because he was desperately looking for work and with the help of other relatives and friends worked at the honguera of West Chicago. The honguera produced mushrooms and other vegetables for the Campbell Soup Company. Mr. Jiménez worked there for many years and since he is well educated and fluent in English, he was asked to translate. His help never translated into more pay or a better job. In those days of the 1960s and 1970s jobs were not given by skill but by national origin and by race. He says that the honguera was 50/50, about 200 Mejicanos and 200 Puerto Ricans, who lived in the dormitories of the migrant camp, by signed contract. Mr. Jiménez describes long days and work weeks in an enclosed, unlit room because the mushrooms are grown in the dark. He was reintroduced to Don Teo Arroyo, whose wife Gina cooked at the camp for the men. They began organizing the community for Aurora’s first Puerto Rican Day parades.
- Date Created:
- 2012-06-02T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Grand Valley State University. University Libraries
- Notes:
- Gloria Rosario grew up in Lincoln Park and Wicker Park during the 1960s, as those communities were becoming unstable, and the forced dislocations had already pushed many of the areas Latino pioneers from their homes. Ms. Rosario describes spending time with a neighborhood branch of the Latin Kings, many of whom were the younger brothers and sisters of Young Lords. Like the Lords, they wore Young Lords buttons and supported the community. Ms. Rosario remembers helping out with the Young Lords Breakfast for Children Program and the Emeterio Betances Free Health Clinic. She also recalls the proliferation of drugs that were allowed to flow into Lincoln and Wicker Park during the 1960s and 1970s, undermining the activism and well-being of many of the young Puerto Rican men and women who remained in those neighborhoods.
- Date Created:
- 2012-03-28T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Grand Valley State University. University Libraries