For this week’s assignment, I have chosen to use one of my two “freebie” tokens, solely because I feel it is important to describe the happenings of the previous two weeks in vivid detail. In the last 14 days, I’ve been a witness to remarkable feats of organization and community unity, bouncing back and forth from local institution to local institution, watching how members of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center work tirelessly to program an incredible schedule of events, all of which culminated at the Puerto Rican Day Parade on Sunday, June 18th.
My first assignment last week was the proofreading of the hyper-local newspaper La Voz del Paseo Boricua (or The Voice). This newspaper, normally printed in batches of around 200, was ordered in a special batch of 1000 this week for the Puerto Rican Day Parade. Meant to focus on the Puerto Rican Community in Humboldt Park, as well as the specific portion of West Division Street entitled “Paseo Boricua,” this week’s edition of La Voz featured various stories commemorating the newly-released Puerto Rican political prisoner (and PRCC cofounder) Oscar Lopez Rivera. One particularly intriguing article focused on the F.B.I.’s history of targeting Puerto Rican leftists who have called for independence since the implementation of J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO program. Various members of the PRCC took the gruelling 14 hour drive to New York City to pass out copies of La Voz to attendees of the city’s own Puerto Rican Day Parade, only to take the same punishing trip back to Chicago just over 24 hours later.
In doing office work at the PRCC’s main branch on Paseo Boricua, I was privy to the colorful and lively conversations and arguments between the Cultural Center’s employees regarding planning for the Parade. I vividly remember overhearing several members argue over how to regain the excess $5,000 in the parade budget, after which Jose Lopez, my boss, the executive director of the PRCC, and the brother of Oscar Lopez Rivera, turned to me and exclaimed “Do you see how fucking crazy it gets around here this time of year, Jonathan!?!”
The next week, the festivities began occurring. First was the graduation ceremony of Pedro Albizu Campos High School, the alternative Puerto Rican High School, featuring a keynote speech by its cofounder Oscar Lopez Rivera. When Oscar left for prison, the High School only had around seven students in attendance. At the graduation ceremony, there were about 200 students. The metaphor I have come up with for this situation is this: you plant some seeds in the hopes of building something beautiful, then are forced to never revisit the planting site ever again. But, by some miracle that occurs half a lifetime later, you are able to witness the beautiful flower that has grown since your departure. Needless to say, watching Oscar hold back tears as he shook the hands of the young people educated in an institution he helped found four decades ago, was quite powerful.
Later that day would be the 2017 Puerto Rican Parade Cacia Queen Coronation at Segundo Ruiz Belvis Cultural Center, a Puerto Rican arts space originally located in Wicker Park, Chicago but relocated to further west Hermosa after heavy gentrification displaced much of the area’s Latino population. The event, honoring the event’s first transgender queen, was a delightfully entertaining drag show featuring dancing and copious dollar-throwing. My favorite moments included Ricardo Jimenez, Oscar’s co-defendant and the event’s planner, getting up to say “I’ve become comfortable saying that I’m a revolutionary, I’m a Puerto Rican, and I’m gay” to an applauding audience. Another came when Jose Lopez got up and gave a rousing speech about the need to include transgender people in our spaces, followed by a devastating critique of sexist, male-dominated society. This criticism of patriarchy was firmly rooted in an anti-colonial logic, and for that reason it rung with an exceptional degree of passion and urgency.
Finally, the parade itself. On a perfectly warm June day, I met with Marvin Garcia, a PRCC volunteer and the Director of Chicago’s Alternative Schools Network, to hold a banner and march down Paseo Boricua. Unlike the New York parade, this event oozed with local love and flavor, with Humboldt Park residents calling out to say “Hi!” to Marvin from second floor windows and nearby streets throughout. One particularly interesting observation I had was how brief the parade was, only lasting slightly less than a mile. After asking my advisor Michael Rodriquez about this, he told me that “Back in the day, we used to walk all the way around the park, but now there’s not that many of us anymore. We’d be marching alone through a gentrified section of the city.” This to me was perfectly indicative of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center’s attitude; though gentrification is here and here to stay, we, the Puerto Rican people of this community, will march on.
Excellent use of the “freebie” assignment since this event is so crucial to your experience at PRCC. I had no idea that Oscar Lopez Rivera had co-founded that PRCC (or that his brother was your supervisor.) Do you think the relationship between the Chicago and New York communities is a strong one? Do you see Chicago being an under-represented location of the Puerto Rican freedom struggle — with New York being its centerpiece? Do you have a sense about how the PRCC and the Chicago Puerto Rican community in general has responded to the recent Puerto Rican statehood vote, particularly considering the sophisticated anticolonial and antipatricarchal positions of the organization?