Local Cultural Centers & Public Art
- National Museum of Mexican Art is home to one of the country’s largest Mexican art collections, including more than 7,000 pieces from ancient Mexico to the present. The free museum, located in the Pilsen neighborhood, strives to showcase Mexican identity and artistic expression from both sides of the border through textiles, folk art, photos, drawings, paintings, sculptures and more.
- National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture is a one-of-a-kind Chicago institution. Located in a historic building in Humboldt Park, the museum celebrates Puerto Rican culture and identity through permanent and rotating exhibits, community workshops, and public events.
- Rafael Cintrón Ortiz Latino Cultural Center at UIC There is a saying in Spanish, con el corazón en mano (with the heart in hand), which implies that someone is coming to you or welcoming you with honest and peaceful intentions. The Rafael Cintrón Ortiz Latino Cultural Center at UIC does just that for Latinxs and anyone who wishes to expand their knowledge about the cultural heritage of Latinx communities and advocate for social and environmental justice.
- International Latino Cultural Center of Chicago (ILCC) is a nonprofit multidisciplinary arts organization dedicated to developing, promoting and increasing awareness of Latino cultures among Latinos and other communities by presenting a wide variety of art forms including film, music, dance, visual arts, comedy and theater. The ILCC, originally founded as Chicago Latino Cinema, attained not-for-profit status in 1987, at which time it fulfilled its mission of promoting Latino culture primarily through the annual Chicago Latino Film Festival.
- The Pilsen Murals See the mosaics detailing Mexican icons at Cooper Dual Language Academy, (1645 W. 18th St.), Jeff Zimmerman’s painted works detailing the people and cultures of Pilsen (1900 S. Ashland Ave.) and Francisco Mendoza’s glass-tile mosaics at Orozco Community Academy (1645 W 18th Place) among many other murals throughout the neighborhood.
- Humboldt Park Mural Arts Program The mission of the Humboldt Park Mural Art Program (HP MAP) is to create new murals, to restore old murals, and to develop strategies that use murals as a way to represent community issues, ideas, and vision.
- Las Puertas de Paseo Boricua (the Puerto Rican doors) This series of colorfully decorated doorways by Latino artists line Division Street between California and Western. And you can’t miss the pair of enormous metal Puerto Rican flags that serve as gateways into the community. These twin sculptures measure almost 60 feet in height and are a proud symbol of the neighborhood’s cultural pride.
- LatinXAmerican Exhibit - DePaul Art Musem LatinXAmerican is an intergenerational group exhibition featuring nearly 40 Latinx artists from Chicago and beyond. The exhibition assesses the presence and absence of Latinx artists in DePaul Art Museum’s collection, and reflects efforts to build in this area as part of a multi-year initiative to increase the visibility of Latinx artists and voices in museums, working towards equity and lasting transformation. Occupying all of the museum’s galleries, LatinXAmerican includes photographs, paintings, works on paper, sculptures, textiles, videos, and installations primarily drawn from DPAM’s collection, including several recent acquisitions, as well as new works from artists living throughout the United States and Puerto Rico.
Reports
- 60 Years of Migration: Puerto Ricans in Chicagoland This report by the Puerto Rican Agenda, a volunteer coalition and think tank interested in keeping the issues of Puerto Ricans and other Latino groups at the forefront for policy makers in Chicago, tries to capture the present conditions in the Puerto Rican community through different aspects of community life: housing, economic development, education, health, youth and justice, culture, women, and the non-profit sector.
- Latino Immigrants in the Windy City: New Trends in Civic Engagement This report is part of a series on Latin American immigrant civic and political participation, sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson Center Mexico Institute, that explores experiences in nine different cities around the United States. For the Chicago report, a roundtable community dialogue took place in October 2007 at Casa Michoacán in Pilsen.
- The Latino Landscape: A Metro Chicago Guide and Nonprofit Directory This first-of-its-kind resource is a collaborative effort undertaken by the Center for Metropolitan Chicago Initiatives of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. It seeks to provide a general introduction to the Latino community in the region and serve as a resource for philanthropic institutions, civic leaders, and public policymakers to obtain a better understanding of the Latino population and the organizations that serve Latinos in the Chicago area.
- Latinos in Chicago: Reflections of an American Landscape This report, published by the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame, focuses on Latinos in metropolitan Chicago with the goal of locating them within Chicago’s economic, political, and educational context and understanding the critical role that they can play in enhancing the present and future well-being of the metropolitan area.
- Mexican Immigration in the Midwest Because Mexican immigration is such a rapidly changing phenomenon and is having such a remarkable impact on the Midwest’s economic, political, and social fabric, The Chicago Council on Global Affairs chose this subject as the focus of its first Heartland Paper. Heartland Papers are a new Chicago Council monograph series that explore how to best position the Midwest in the age of globalization by examining key issues and providing policy recommendations to improve regional success.
- The State of Latino Chicago This report, published by the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame, provides an overview of the growth and distribution of the Latino population throughout the region, along with information on income, employment, education, and other topics essential for understanding the current status and future prospects of Chicago-area Latinos.
- The State of Latino Chicago 2010: The New Equation This report follows up the 2005 State of Latino Chicago by analyzing the economic contribution of Chicago-area Latinos in 2010. Using the most recent US Census data available, the report finds that Chicago-area Latinos earned $26.2 billion, which translates to $12.3 billion in spending power, yielding a total impact of $23 billion after accounting for the indirect impact of Latino consumption spending on goods and services. The report also finds that Latinos contribute almost $1.2 billion more in tax revenues than they cost in the delivery of public services like education, health care, and other services like public safety.
Books
Barrio by
In 1988 photographer Paul D’Amato was driving around Chicago with his camera when he decided to follow Halsted Street into Pilsen, the city’s largest Mexican neighborhood. Intrigued by the barrio and neighboring Little Village, he began to take photographs and would continue to do so off and on for the next fourteen years. D’Amato started with the public life of the neighborhood: women and children in the streets, open fire hydrants, and graffiti. But later—after he got to know the area’s Mexican residents better—he was allowed to take more intimate photos of people at work, families at weddings and parties, and even gang members.
Call Number: Lewis Library Chicago Collection F548.9.M5 D36 2006ISBN: 0226135055Publication Date: 2006-09-15
Brown in the Windy City by
Like other industrial cities in the postwar period, Chicago underwent the dramatic population shifts that radically changed the complexion of the urban north. As African American populations grew and white communities declined throughout the 1960s and '70s, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans migrated to the city, adding a complex layer to local racial dynamics. Brown in the Windy City is the first history to examine the migration and settlement of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in the postwar era. Here, Lilia Fernandez reveals how the two populations arrived.
Call Number: OnlineISBN: 0226244288Publication Date: 2012-12-01
Chicanas of 18th Street by
Overflowing with powerful testimonies of six female community activists who have lived and worked in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago, Chicanas of 18th Street reveals the convictions and approaches of those organizing for social reform. In chronicling a pivotal moment in the history of community activism in Chicago, the women discuss how education, immigration, religion, identity, and acculturation affected the Chicano movement. Chicanas of 18th Street underscores the hierarchies of race, gender, and class while stressing the interplay of individual and collective values in the development of community reform.
Call Number: OnlineISBN: 9780252078125Publication Date: 2011-09-21
Mexican Hometown Associations in Chicagoacán by
Chicago is home to the second-largest Mexican immigrant population in the United States, yet the activities of this community have gone relatively unexamined by both the media and academia. In this groundbreaking new book, Xóchitl Bada takes us inside one of the most vital parts of Chicago’s Mexican immigrant community—its many hometown associations.
Call Number: F548.9.M5 B34 2014ISBN: 9780813564920Publication Date: 2014-04-30
The Mexican Revolution in Chicago by
This project examines the diverse political culture of Mexican immigrants, the formation and efficacy of immigrant-led transnational organizations, and the variables that affect immigrant assimilation through a history of the Mexican immigrant community of metropolitan Chicago during the first half of the twentieth century. John Flores presents a narrative that revolves around the lives of immigrant community leaders, who are characterized as members of a "revolutionary generation." These immigrants include men and women, white-collar professionals, and blue-collar laborers who subscribed to a passionate sense of Mexican national identity that derived from their experience and understanding of the Mexican Revolution (1910-20), a civil war fought by diverse factions.
Call Number: F548.9.M5 F56 2018ISBN: 9780252041808Publication Date: 2018-03-21
Negotiating Latinidad by
Longstanding Mexican and Puerto Rican populations have helped make people of mixed nationalities—MexiGuatamalans, CubanRicans, and others—an important part of Chicago's Latina/o scene. Intermarriage between Guatemalans, Colombians, and Cubans have further diversified this community-within-a-community. Yet we seldom consider the lives and works of these Intralatino/as when we discuss Latino/as in the United States.In Negotiating Latinidad, a cross-section of Chicago's second-generation Intralatino/as offer their experiences of negotiating between and among the national communities embedded in their families. Frances R. Aparicio's rich interviews reveal Intralatino/as proud of their multiplicity and particularly skilled at understanding difference and boundaries. Their narratives explore both the ongoing complexities of family life and the challenges of fitting into our larger society, in particular the struggle to claim a space—and a sense of belonging—in a Latina/o America that remains highly segmented in scholarship. The result is an emotionally powerful, theoretically rigorous exploration of culture, hybridity, and transnationalism that points the way forward for future scholarship on Intralatino/a identity.
Call Number: OnlineISBN: 0252084535Publication Date: 2019-10-15
Sweet Home Chicago? by
Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among aged Mexican migrants in Chicago, Franziska Bedorf investigates the phenomenon of return migration by tracing how people's intentions to go back change over time. Considering global labour mobility, she evaluates transformations of belonging and the wider economic, political, social and cultural frameworks that shape them. In front of the backdrop of debates on integration, transnationalism and belonging, the study explores why migrants keep and form attachments to and detachments from places, people and cultures.
Call Number: F548.9.M5 B43 2018ISBN: 9783837641318Publication Date: 2019-01-15
