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!

My summer with Sones de México, or why I love Chicago

Chicago, as a major U.S. city, has always been a destination for immigrants. My grandparents on both sides arrived here from Eastern Europe in the early 20th century and settled on the south side. Chicago was an industrial powerhouse in those days, producing steel from the mills and meat from the Stock Yards in equal measure. Industry meant jobs, and jobs (then and now) often mean immigrants in search of a better life. My grandparents were preceded by the Germans and Irish, and followed by Mexicans and African-Americans (not strictly immigrants, but the American south with its Jim Crow laws could have been another country).

All of them faced hardships and discrimination upon their arrival, but hung in just the same, over time transforming the city into the multicultural place it is today. Those prejudices, sadly, haven't gone away, especially in the case of those easily identifiable by facial features and skin color. Segregation and poverty remain deep scars in our psychic and physical landscapes. Chicago is nobody's idea of paradise, but its blue collar working class culture still holds out a promise, not always fulfilled, that if you come here and you work hard, you can change your life for the better.

photo: Todd Winters

The members of Sones de México Ensemble all arrived in the early 1990s, as Pilsen, a near south side community with Czech roots that was my grandparent's starting place here, was transforming itself into the cultural and artistic heart of Chicago's Mexican-American community. I've followed the group off and on for years and became personally acquainted with some of its members. Twelve weeks ago, an e-mail arrived out of the blue asking if I'd be willing to assist them with the marketing of an upcoming concert. One of the members was aware that I was struggling a bit financially and knew of my work at the Chicago Sinfonietta, who had done a few collaborations with Sones over the years. I thought about it for about 2 seconds before saying yes.

And so it was that a part-time job quickly turned into an all-consuming endeavor and, as it turns out, one of the most satisfying projects of my professional life. More importantly, though, it was a profoundly moving experience that unexpectedly connected me to my own culture.

The concert was their 20th Anniversary Celebration, and it took place in what is perhaps the loveliest performance facility on the planet, Millennium Park's Pritzker Pavilion. Pritzker is beautiful to be sure, but it's also somewhat intimidating in its vastness, holding upwards of 12,000 people. Believe me, I've been to plenty of concerts there when a mere 3,000 or so show up and it can feel like a ghost town. So that was the challenge - go from zero awareness to a crowd of at least 6 or 7,000 in 11 weeks.

As a city owned venue, Pritzker Pavilion exists as a public service, presenting almost all of it's shows for free. It has been showcasing "world music" since it opened in 2004, mostly because of the efforts of the city's former Cultural Affairs program director. Heck, one of its first ever shows (after the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, of course) was an ad-hoc ensemble dubbed the Chicago Immigrant Orchestra made up of, yes, the city's finest ethnic musicians from its many communities. Those concerts are mostly gone now, and I miss the way the ethnic group represented on stage would show up en masse, joined by world music aficionados like myself, all of us in joyful communion for a couple of hours.

I won't bore you with details of my job but I will say this: Once we got rolling, the support and enthusiasm from the Latino community was a wonder to behold. In the hostile environment of 2014 America, where immigrants are scorned and children are deported back to their murderous homelands,  the prospect of a proudly Mexican-American music ensemble performing downtown on the city's most beautiful showcase (and a tourist magnet to boot) ignited a joy and anticipation that was nearly unquenchable.

photo: Scott Pollard

Some of you may know that I'm a freelance writer specializing in music coverage, and one of the pleasures of that endeavor is researching the artist that I'm writing about to better understand the context of their music. I do the same for my marketing clients. If I know what motivates them, then I can better tell their story. I began my Sones de México work with a series of long interviews with Juan Díes, one of their founders. One of the things I quickly learned was that Chicago was very much chosen on purpose as the place to start the group, not only because of the flourishing Mexican arts community, but also because of Chicago's broader identity as a city built by hard working immigrants. They were soon collaborating with Irish folk, blues, jazz and classical musicians to explore commonalities among cultures.

Unlike my father, I have been lucky to never spend a day on a factory floor or driving a bus. Despite this, though, I proudly self-identify as both blue collar and immigrant. When I taste Mexican food, I'm also tasting the Czech food of my childhood, and my parent's childhood, and their parents before them. When I go back to my old southwest side neighborhood and see that it's mostly Latino, it feels like it hasn't changed at all, still filled with immigrants and the children of immigrants, working hard to build a decent life.

Photo: Omar Torres-Kortright

As Sones de México was nearing the end of their astounding concert before an equally astounding crowd of 10,000 people, mostly Mexican but with a good chunk of other nationalities as well, they played a song I knew they were going to play because I had the set list. That knowledge, however, in no way prepared me for the wave of emotion I was about to feel. Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land has sometimes been called America's second national anthem, and I personally prefer it to the frankly militaristic Star Spangled Banner. "This land is your land..." Juan Díes said in English, pointing to the crowd, "... this land is my land", touching his chest. "Esta tierra es tuya." And then, "Para

todos los inmigrantes", for all the immigrants. And with that, they launched into their rollicking norteño arrangement of this beautiful song. Norteños are polkas, really, the musical result of Czech and German immigrants settling in Mexico and Texas 150 years ago, meeting both the indigenous people and the Spanish immigrants who arrived before them, sharing what they knew, sharing something that I knew from all those Bohemian weddings I attended when my cousins got married.

Photo: Dayna Calderon

For all the immigrants, indeed.

Goin' south.

I'm a frequent visitor to Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood.  Although rapidly gentrifying, it is still a mostly Mexican area that is considered by many to be the center of the Latino arts community because of its many murals, galleries and artist studios. It's also home to the National Museum of Mexican Art. Oddly, I myself have a historic connection to the area. Before it and neighboring Little Village (now mostly referred to by its Spanish name, La Villita) started absorbing waves of Mexican immigrants in the 60s and 70s, they were predominantly Czech areas, absorbers of an earlier migrant wave. As a child, I had many a hearty Bohemian meal there, and I think I even sipped my first beer at my father's side at the New Little Old Bohemia, a dining hall behind a tavern on 25th Street. But I digress....

Rogers Park, where I live, is about 1/3 Hispanic, predominantly Mexican. Large Hispanic communities exist in Albany Park and Edgewater as well, and the southwest side where I grew up has recently seen a significant increase in Hispanic population.  But the city's oldest Mexican community is in a neighborhood known as South Chicago. That's where I found myself for the very first time on Sunday.

South Chicago, along the lake near the Illinois-Indiana border, was home to several steel mills, which attracted a labor force from Mexico and eastern Europe in the early 20th century. Those mills have long since closed, and the area has yet to fully recover from the devastating loss of jobs. Most of those with European roots moved on. But the Mexicans stayed. And more came.

Chicago area arts organization Portoluz is presenting a Son Jarocho International Exchange Project that features Afro-Mexican music and culture from the state of Veracruz, Mexico. This past weekend, they presented essentially the same show twice. Local legends Sones de México Ensemble hosted two master musicians from Veracruz, Andres Flores and Camerino Utrera. Saturday night was at a fairly typical music club in a popular nightlife area. Sunday's show, however, was a matinee in a church basement in South Chicago. I hate to get bogged down in notions of 'authentic experience', but this seemed to good to pass up.

A word or two about Sones de México: Yes, they are a band, but they are a bit more. Organized as a non-for-profit, they research music from all of Mexico (just as there is no one 'American' music, there isn't a singularity to music from Mexico) and then perform it expertly and con gusto. Their participation in the son jarocho project is as almost as musicologists, albeit ones who know how to have a good time.

Back to South Chicago and that church basement. It was the first truly hot day of this summer, but the room held on to the coolness from earlier in the week.  Mass had just ended and people were still filing in, some pausing at the lunch window for tamales, tacos and carnitas. Sones, in accordance with the program theme, started playing son jarochos, to polite response. Then it was on to the state of Zacatecas and their music. Now, that got a few people going.  Just uttering the word 'Zacatecas' elicited whoops of appreciation, even before the first note was played.  It was then that I had an ah-ha moment where something that I knew became something that I understood.

To say that something is Mexican is like saying something is African.  It's not inaccurate, but it's far too broad a term for a place with many distinct cultures and traditions. People from Veracruz love and honor their roots, and people from Zacatecas, Oaxaca, Sinaloa, and dozens of other Mexican states love theirs. They respect and enjoy the other traditions, but they love what they know in their hearts and bones. And in Chicago, like great cities everywhere that become landing points in a migration, they mingle together. Not necessarily as one, but as multiple peoples eager to share the best of their culture. Like my Czech family, who made clear distinctions that they were Bohemian on my mom's side and Slovak on my dad's, meeting in Chicago not 8 miles from this church basement, becoming something that is not one thing, nor the other. Americans.

Just like me.

Happy 4th of July!

On this side of this particular border, it's a day of parades celebrating the nation's spirit. Me and Woody invite you to enjoy this one courtesy of Sones de México Ensemble.