Profile: Final

Sonia González works the reception desk at the National Museum of Mexican Art (NMMA) in Pilsen, a low-income Latino neighborhood located just southwest of Chicago’s central business district. This means she interacts with more tourists than anyone else at the Museum. As the largest Latino museum in the country and the only one accredited by the American Association of Museums, the NMMA is in part responsible for putting Pilsen on the nation’s radar. In anticipation of out-of-state and country visitors, González has developed programmed responses to their most popular question: Where should we go next? They can check the Museum off their lists, which leaves Pilsen’s first great appeal: its Mexican food. She usually rotates El Milagro, Nuevo Leon, and La Casa del Pueblo as her top restaurant recommendation.

Over at La Casa del Pueblo, a white woman and her young daughter approach the counter. The woman taking her order of caldo de pollo with arroz and frijoles just finished serving three Spanish-speaking parties. She releases a thick accent when she initiates the interaction with, “Hello. What would you like?”

All of the employees speak English, but judging from the dominant Spanish dialogue in the restaurant, they prefer to speak their first language. La Casa del Pueblo commands attention from Latinos mostly, but it’s been attracting a growing non-Latino audience for a while now.

If restaurants in Pilsen like La Casa are grateful for the diversity of its clientele, it can thank the Museum. Employees like González are encouraged to send visitors to the neighborhood’s best taquerías, panaderías and tortillerías. A city’s best eats is usually a matter of personal opinion, but in Pilsen, where the smell of carne asada, pozole and sweet conchas penetrates the walls of Catholic churches, bilingual schools, and apartment buildings adorned with Museum-commissioned murals, residents are in agreement. La Casa del Pueblo is the place for Mexican soul food, and some of the best tacos are made at El Milagro Taquería

El Milagro and its adjacent small-scale tortilla factory are tucked into a neglected corner on Blue Island St. They stand a block from the Museum’s “Declaration of Immigration” mural, created by local artists and local high school kids, painted on a brick wall behind the Yollocalli building, the Museum’s radio station. Five columns of black-and-red-painted statements read:

WE ARE A NATION OF IMMIGRANTS
NO INHUMANE TREATMENT, DEPORTATION, FAMILY SEPARATION,
DETENTION
NO WALL
NO HUMAN BEING IS ILLEGAL
NATIONAL SECURITY IS USED TO FOSTER INTER ETHNIC TENSIONS

Two days after its completion in 2009, the spray-painted words, “LIES LIES LIES” and, “MEXICANS ARE RACIST” covered the last statement. One Yollocalli employee remembers feeling gutted, but not too surprised.

Who would write those graffiti words? The answer can be traced back to the Museum.

The NMMA is a blessing and a curse for the neighborhood. It gives off an exciting vibe, a vibe of ethic pride seen in colorful murals on Ashland Avenue, Damen, and school buildings on 19th street. They wear the faces of Mexican icons like Joan Sebastian, María Félix, Frida Kahlo, Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, and Benito Juarez. Many of these murals, like at Casa Aztlán on Racine Ave, were painted by the 1960s Chicano Movement’s most powerful activists, like David Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco. The Movement was an extension of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement that began in the 1940s, whose purpose was to achieve Mexican American empowerment. Several years ago, the Museum purchased a modest home directly across from it to house visiting Latino artists from all over the nation and Mexico, people like the late Francisco Mendoza who are now taking on the task of once again creating revolutionary works of public art that also honor local Latino leaders.

The Museum itself and the surrounding area are a retreat for youth. Bordering the NMMA are soccer fields and baseball diamonds; the two sports fight for the attention of neighborhood youth, but both are given equal respect when the dozens of grade and high schools let out during the week. Director of Operations Ignacio Guzman says that soon all of that space will be converted into soccer fields. “This is a reflection of the community; soccer is a dominant sport.”

The Museum also offers free art education programs inside their studios, stage nationally-recognized events like Día del Niño every April, and invite high school students to broadcast live at the Yollocalli radio station. Every Easter they organize a reenactment of the crucifixion during the Passion of the Christ walk on 18th street. They team up with the many Catholic churches to celebrate other holidays, too. The Catholic faith takes on a life of its own in the Museum’s murals on Ashland Ave that span the length of brick apartment exteriors.

It is likely that the NMMA is Pilsen’s most prized possession, but not everybody in the community sees it that way because of the looming threat of gentrification.

The most obvious sign is the young white man with a trendy messenger bag standing on the same corner as the champurradovendor and his traveling cart is a tip off: the ethnic composition of Pilsen is different and has been since the first signs of a diminishing Latino population around 1990. (But Pilsen’s very first residents in the 1920s were immigrants from Czechoslovakia, Poland, Lithuania, and Italy. Their influence is what gives Pilsen its distinct Bohemian feel, mostly in the architecture of its homes. It was not until the start of the 1950s that the neighborhood demographic changed to reflect the increasing Latino population, most from Mexico).

The NMMA has a lot to do with how this non-Latino population got here. González knows the repercussions of her answer to, “Where do I go next?”

“Some individuals may say, ‘I like Pilsen’, and it doesn’t take long for them to realize that Pilsen is in the ideal spot,” says Development Coordinator Anel Ruiz. Pilsen is ideal because of its access to public transportation, its proximity to the major expressways, Lake Michigan, the Chicago River, a big university, its housing stock, the numerous churches, restaurants and bakeries. “And then people who are trying to gentrify the neighborhood are starting to realize that these rents are not your typical depressed rents. The property values are still very good there so that draws in more affluent people, and people who want to invest in properties because they’re seeing an opportunity to make money,” she adds. What results is higher rents and, eventually, the displacement of existing community members.

González and Ruiz recognize that Pilsen is one of those “up and coming” places that attract young urban professionals, so it seems inevitable that the neighborhood will lure people with more financial means.

That knowledge is spreading quickly and affecting the way locals do business. “It's likely you have businesses that spring up with a business plan that relies on the people who are leaving the Museum,” says Ruiz. “I see more higher end businesses going up, I see businesses similar to those in Near North, where they have the fancy delis, sandwich shops, coffee shops. And some of them survive but most of them don’t. They haven’t been able to feed that type of clientele yet. People still want their ethnic foods. I’m always surprised to see that they don’t last. But you put up a taco joint and those type of places still hang in there.”

It makes sense that Pilsen’s ethnic pride persists, for now at least, since that was the initial attraction of neighborhood gentrifiers. Ruiz hopes that persistence prevails with business owners now trying to attract a different type of clientele, a clientele that is not “our people”, she remarks.

There is a movement, although not formally organized, trying to prevent gentrification. Guzman knows one local developer in particular who is buying up a lot of properties and hiking up the rental price. Most of his clients are the very people that anti-gentrification organizations are trying to keep out. He explains that, now, people in Pilsen are pushing back because they realize if they do not, the neighborhood will probably start to change too quickly and drive the Latino residents away over time. “You see these commercial banks going up, and you see these large buildings that were not used at one time--now they’re condos. You see a lot of conversions going on,” he says.

Ruiz and her Development coworkers willingly admit that the Pilsen area is under pressure in part because of the Museum. People who frequent museums are not only the people who the museum is about; a big portion of the NMMA’s visitors are not Latino, just like the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago does not only attract African Americans. The NMMA knows it brings in other ethnic groups that end up visiting the neighborhood, becoming familiar with it, and moving in. González has stories as proof.


The Museum provides many great services to the community and lends much stability. Founded in 1987 by a pack of public schoolteachers who raised $900 to get it started, it is certainly a model for other small community museums to emulate. But there comes a point when it stops being a beacon of culture and ethnic pride and turns into a commodity of locality and neighborhood identity. Thankfully, that is a line many Museum employees know not to cross.