Only in Chicago

Only in Chicago. As a declaration, I realize that's likely not true. I know there are other cities around the globe where immigrants and the descendents of immigrants make up the bulk of the population. And while it is often said that Chicago is the most segregated city in the United States, I find that in the circles in which I move, that is not quite the case.

One of those weekends is coming up that remind me that I indeed live in a startlingly diverse city, even if the communities in which any given population resides tend to lean one way or the other. In a way, that's good. My life is enriched by the fact that I can spend time in neighborhoods that are heavily Mexican, African-American, Indian, Puerto Rican or Polish, knowing that they will be filled with businesses that cater to local residents and bring delight to me. Or, I can go to Albany Park, where the Middle Eastern, Central American and Korean storefronts are lined up one after another.

Ethnic enclaves are a treasure. It is only when economics and politics force people into one setting and discourage movement to another that it becomes problematic. That sort of thing brews distrust and fear and has a way of insuring that undeserved communities remain that way. But I digress. Sometimes I sit down to write one thing, and another emerges. I'll get back on point now.

I'll be running around a lot this weekend in a way that makes me glad I live in Chicago.

Tonight, a band I first heard at a street festival in my neighborhood less than two years ago celebrates the release of their first single and full length CD with a show at Martyrs' in the North Center neighborhood. Dos Santos Anti-Beat Orchestra started out as a electric cumbia band, modelling their sound and attitude around chicha, a variant of the Colombian music once it reached Peru in the 1970s and adapted by an indigenous urbanized population. That sound is still at the heart of the band, but it has taken a trip around the rest of Latin America as well, not surprising when you consider that its members hail from Texas (yes, I'm calling Texas Latin America - more on that later), Mexico, Panama and Puerto Rico. Each of them is something of a folkloric specialist in their respective traditions, but together they are a hard charging rock band with a fat, danceable groove. In something of an odd twist, they have invited a popular mambo orchestra to open for them. If I have the story right, the uncle of Dos Santos' Puerto Rican conga player is a trombone player in the mambo group. All in the family. It will be a long night. I'll wear comfortable shoes.

Tomorrow night, though, is when I'll really get a workout.

First I'll be running out to the Hermosa neighborhood where the Segundo Ruiz Belvis Cultural Center (I've written about SRBCC before - you can check that here.) is presenting a big band tribute to perhaps the greatest of all Puerto Rican songwriters, Rafael Hernández, who passed away in 1965.  Humboldt Park born Puerto Rican bandleader Edwin Sánchez has put together a 14 piece orchestra of crack Chicago musicians to handle these classic songs. That's only half of it. The center is bringing in the son of Rafael Hernández, Alejandro "Chali" Hernández, to sing his father's songs. In the process, two, perhaps even three generations of Puerto Ricans, island and mainland born, will come together for one historic event. Tradition and cultural identity handed down, from generation to generation.

That, however, is not the last historic musical event of the night, nor is it the only one with strong cultural significance. I'll end my night in Lincoln Square at the Old Town School of Folk Music where two of Chicago's prominent ethnic communities, the Irish and the Mexicans, come together for something of a musical history lesson. The Mexican folkloric group Sones de México and the Irish Music School of Chicago will tell the story of the St. Patrick's Battalion (Los San Patricios). The battalion was a group of largely Irish immigrants who, stung by discrimination, found themselves sympathizing and then siding with Mexico during what we call the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. Mexicans view it differently and call it the unjust invasion of Mexico by North America. It was a land grab, plain and simple, and Mexico lost. As a result, most of California, all of Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and much of Texas became the United States, and Mexico became much smaller.

There I go digressing again.

Anyway, the St. Patrick's Battalion fought bravely but lost, and many of them were hanged as deserters.  The concert, then, will combine Mexican son and Irish jigs to tell their story. There will be songs both lively and lamenting. There will be dancing from both a Mexican dance company and Irish dancers. It's all not as incongruent as it sounds. Both traditions utilize 6/8 time, fiddles, harps, accordions and toe tapping. Both are handed down generation to generation, lest they be lost. And both are, at heart, ballad forms that tell stories. This will be quite a story. Chances are if you grew up in the U.S. you know nothing about this, but in Mexico Los San Patricios are heroes.

I'm not saying Chicago is the only place this can happen. But we uniquely situated in the middle of the country, and wave after wave of immigrants (including my grandparents) have been arriving and building lives here since before the city was incorporated.

¡Todos somos inmigrantes!

Summer in the City

There's something about summer in Chicago that, for me anyway, brings out the multicultural mélange that makes living here a wonderful thing. A couple of factors are really bringing that to the fore this year. First, there was the awfulness of the polar vortex winter combined with a rather dreary and rainy spring. This one-two punch has kept me indoors a lot, but starting around the middle of June sunny, warm days became more common than the other kind. It was time to break out.

The other thing that started in the middle of June was the World Cup. Despite all the well deserved controversy leading up to the Cup (FIFA corruption, political corruption, you-name-it corruption), I've been hopelessly hooked since the games began. I confess that I'm a relative newbie to futbol, having first gotten excited during the 2010 Cup in South Africa. This year, though, Univision (By all means watch the games in Spanish, even if you don't understand a word. It's a lot more fun than ESPN.) is getting a serious workout on my TV. Catching broadcasts in public is fun as well. The phenomenon that is the Cup can leave even the most isolated individual feeling part of a larger global community. Whether your loyalties lies with Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Germany or the United States, there is a party somewhere. I keep seeing this guy walk past my house (I'm pretty sure it's the same guy) with a large flag flowing behind him. The thing is, it's never the same flag. One day it's Spain, the next Switzerland, the next Brazil. I don't know where he's going, but I may follow him the next time he comes by.

So, let me tell you about my weekend.

It started quietly enough at home on Friday evening, although I did try out a new Italian recipe and watched a Mexican film that I borrowed from the library. I had a number of things that I needed to do during the day on Saturday, but the double hit of two World Cup semi-final games featuring all Latin American teams kind of obliterated that plan, especially the overtime + penalty kick Brazil-Chile nail biter.

Saturday evening began one of those 'only in Chicago' nights. First up was delicious Cuban food on the patio at 90 Miles, although that was a bit rushed because of an approaching summer thunderstorm. Fortunately, by the time we reached our next destination, the storm had passed and the sun was shining.

Segundo Ruiz Belvis Cultural Center is named after a Puerto Rican abolitionist. The center was screening a documentary about a nearly (and, some argue, deliberately) forgotten figure in Puerto Rican history who, in the mid 19th century, had a vision of a united and free Antillean confederation consisting of Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Puerto Rico. Only Haiti was a nation at the time. Only Puerto Rico remains a colony today. You can see why the schools in Puerto Rico might not want to teach kids about Ramón Emeterio Betances, or El Antillano as he was known.

Segundo Ruiz itself is quite a remarkable place, which I wrote about here last December. The screening was the second one of the day (one of the organizers told me that he spent most of the 3pm screening watching the Colombia-Uruguay game on his iPhone) and both were well attended. The community served by the center probably has divergent thoughts about Puerto Rican independence, but most everybody feels that there is something not quite right about the United States still ruling the island over 100 years after invading it. The film was a thoughtful call to arms, a questioning of why this is still the case. 

I would have loved to stick around for the post screening reception, but we still had one more thing to do.

A local band that I love, Dos Santos Anti-Beat Orchestra, was opening for Chicha Libre, a band from Brooklyn that mines some of the same Peruvian and Colombian sources for inspiration. That was an irresistible double bill, so we we're off to Martyrs, a rock club in the North Center neighborhood. We unfortunately arrived near the end of Dos Santos' set, but managed to catch 4 songs. They were on fire, and I'm glad they'll be playing again in a few weeks at a street festival in my neighborhood. Chicha Libre was awesome, and we ran into some Peruvian friends who welcomed them as heroes. I'm getting up there in age a bit, but Chicha Libre had me dancing at the foot of the stage for well over an hour.  Exhausted and sweaty, we finally stumbled home at 1:30am.

Sunday is a day of rest, but the Mexico-Netherlands game demanded that the rest be had over tequila sunrises and huevos con chorizo at a Mexican restaurant, so there we were meeting a friend at the bar at 10:30 the next morning. Could it be a coincidence that one of the stars of El Tri is named Dos Santos? Mexico ultimately lost in a heartbreaking finish, but for 88 minutes I was in the happiest place in the world. Well, outside of Mexico City.  Costa Rica relieved some of the sadness with their surprise win over Greece later that day.

Monday is work day, but looky here, it's a short week because of the 4th of July holiday and Brazil faces Colombia on Friday afternoon. There's this little Brazilian bar I know and I hear a samba band will be there...

Dos Santos' pan-Latin brew

Dos Santos Anti-Beat Orquesta

“When it comes down to it, the story of ALL music is one of change, of hybridity, of a diversity of experiences and encounters. So, when we talk about crossing musical borders, there needs to be the recognition that music has always been crossing cultural, social, and expressive borders. This is its history—one of multiple crossings. We shouldn’t try to fix music (or its audiences) in place, that is, construct borders around it.”

If you've read any number of this blog's articles over the past year, you might assume that I wrote that. I could have. It sounds like me. But it's not.

The above quote comes from Alex Chávez, guitarist, organist and songwriter for Dos Santos Anti-Beat Orquesta, a stripped down, rocking electric cumbia group that's been playing all over Chicago for the past year. They are celebrating their first anniversary with a show next week at Beat Kitchen. I discovered Dos Santos about the same time I started writing this blog, and in fact I devoted a paragraph to them in a post about a festival in my neighborhood.

It may seem like I'm cribbing my Border Radio posts lately from stuff I've written for the Afro-Latin organization Agúzate, but I guess that just means that my passions and those of Agúzate are well aligned. Which is a way of saying that I interviewed Alex Chávez and the members of Dos Santos (who have roots in Panama, Mexico, Puerto Rico and the U.S.) to learn more about the band and why they play, of all things, cumbia.

My introductory comments are reproduced below, but to read the far more interesting stuff the band had to say, click on through to the original Agúzate post.
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Last summer, I went to the Celebrate Clark Street Festival in Rogers Park and stumbled across a band whose musical style was simply described as ‘psychedelic cumbia’ on the festival website. I was intrigued by this description as well as the group’s name: Dos Santos Anti-Beat Orquesta. I subsequently learned that the band had only recently formed and that this was one of their first gigs, but the tightness of their sound suggested a group that had spent years getting to know one another. The farfisa organ and fuzzed out wah-wah guitars that Dos Santos employed resonated with my rock n’ roll youth, while at the same time the deep cumbia rhythms compelled me, and a lot of other people, to dance.

They were playing what I identified as chicha, a Peruvian variant on a traditional Colombian sound. It’s a music that sprung up in the 1960s and 70s when Caribbean rhythms, Andean folk melodies, rock instrumentation and a strong dose of the mind-altering indigenous corn liquor called chicha mixed together in Peru’s newly urbanized environment. It’s a sound that only recently came to the attention of North American audiences through a handful of reissued recordings from that period. Dos Santos pretty much blew me away that day, and I’ve been keeping track of them ever since.

Click here to read the rest. But you might want to watch this first.