une 30,
2008 — In a fifth-floor art
gallery in Pilsen, Chicago’s
fashionable Hispanic
neighborhood, vibrant guitar
chords were pouring out an open
window on a recent Friday night.
Four Latina artists were showing
their paintings, and the shoebox
of a gallery was jammed with a
mixed, talkative crowd. Some
swayed in time to the music,
swigging beer and sipping wine.
The din seemed to be drawing art
patrons and good-time Chicagoans
from all over the huge building
at 1932 South Halsted Street,
the central site of an
every-second-Friday art walk.
Many come to the art walk from
the suburbs or other parts of
the city, but like much of
Chicago these days, the affair
draws its real energy from the
city’s surging Hispanic
population. One of the painters
whose work was on display —
Carolina Reyes — moved to Pilsen
from a North Side neighborhood
two years ago to paint. “Being a
Latina, I’m still searching to
learn more about my culture,”
she said.
For that, there is no need for
her to leave Chicago. More than
1,000 miles from the Mexican
border, the city is home to
about 800,000 people of Hispanic
origin, mostly Mexican. That’s
more than a quarter of the
population and gaining share
daily — this when the city
shrank by nearly a million
residents after the 1950s. But
in Latin Chicago, there is a new
boomtown to explore.
A
native of a mostly Hispanic
suburb of Los Angeles, I moved
here 25 years ago; my wife, a
Latina from Texas, came 12 years
ago. So, it’s natural we would
be drawn to areas like Pilsen,
where Spanish and English mix
against a backdrop of brilliant
mosaics and murals of Mexican
heroes, and Little Village
nearby, where mariachi bands
carrying their instruments into
restaurants could easily be
south of the border. But it’s
more than just familiarity and
the fact that eating and
entertainment on the Latin side
of Chicago is generally cheaper.
It’s where the energy is.
“It’s happening so fast,” said
Carlos Tortolero, who came to
Chicago from Mexico at age 3
and, as a 28-year-old school
teacher in 1982, started what
would become the National Museum
of Mexican Art, the city’s
leading Hispanic cultural
organization. “It’s becoming a
very Mexican city.”
The museum made a name for
itself in 2006 when it opened an
exhibition about the influence
of Africans in Mexico. In a city
known for its racial separation,
blacks flocked to Pilsen for the
show. This summer, the museum
will insert itself into the
national political debate with
an exhibition opening on the
Fourth of July — “A Declaration
of Immigration” — that will go
beyond painting and sculpture to
present data to argue that
point. “It is pro-American to be
pro-immigrant,” Mr. Tortolero
said.
Immigrants certainly made
Chicago one of history’s great
boomtowns. It grew from a nearly
uninhabited swamp in the early
1800s to a metropolis of a
million people by 1890. An
up-to-date version of that
multicultural frontier town is
on display every Sunday morning
at a flea market, just around
the corner from where Mrs.
O’Leary’s cow — in fable, anyway
— is said to have kicked over
the lantern that started the
Great Fire of 1871. Known as the
Maxwell Street Market, it runs
along Canal Street south of
Roosevelt Road. (The city closed
down the original location on
nearby Maxwell Street in the
1990s, but the name stuck.)
After more than 100 years, it
still attracts immigrants and
their offspring from many points
on the globe. But today, as with
much of Chicago, the market
moves to a Latin beat. Browsers
seem to move in step with the
blaring Latin music as they
peruse the four-block stretch of
stalls that feature art, jewelry
and the usual knock-off purses
and leather goods.
If
you see a skinny fellow with a
goatee who appears to know the
street-food vendors, he might be
Rick Bayless, the Chicago chef
and cookbook author who raised
traditional Mexican cooking to
gourmet status, stopping by on
his day off to snack on mole and
hand-pressed tortillas. The
crowds become thicker around the
stall for Lencho’s Tacos, where
people take a number and wait
their turn. Well before 10 a.m.,
Lencho’s fans are three and four
deep around the counter, lined
up for tacos of grilled beef,
onions, cilantro and hot sauce —
a perfect on-the-go lunch for
about $5.
To
the north, above the stalls and
the brightly dressed shoppers,
rises the Loop and its towering
skyscrapers, and in a single
frame the city’s remarkable
accomplishments and its
restless, unrealized dreams come
into focus.
With much of Chicago’s Hispanic
population relatively new, many
of the restaurants, much of the
music and other cultural
offerings burst with the flavor
of home.
Upon arrival in Chicago, “people
are much freer to be who they
are,” says Mr. Bayless, an
Oklahoma native who has adopted
Mexico’s cuisine with singular
fervor, and in 1987 opened
Frontera Grill in the River
North area. Its success, along
with the success of his more
refined restaurant next door,
Topolobampo, has spawned many
other serious and
un-Americanized Latin places,
making Chicago an unlikely
culinary standout when it comes
to Latin cuisine.
Frontera is decorated with
Mexican art that Mr. Bayless and
his wife have collected over the
years, a riot of color and
images, and Latin music plays at
a volume to permit dinner
conversation, though you may
still find your legs dancing
under the table. His simplest
dishes, like the tacos al carbón
($16) — grilled meats served
with guacamole, beans and
tortillas made on the premises —
are memorable for their
simplicity and freshness.
Mr. Bayless’s restaurants are,
of course, just one side of the
story when it comes to Chicago’s
Latin cuisine. In the West Side
neighborhood of Humboldt Park, a
lively Puerto Rican and Mexican
area, Carlos Reyna’s small
restaurant, Maiz, is a shrine to
the many corn vessels —
tortillas, tamales, sopes — used
in traditional Mexican cooking.
In the cozy storefront, Mr.
Reyna waits on many of the
tables himself and can help you
choose a series of small dishes,
like a vegetable tamale cooked
in banana leaf and triangular
tamales covered in mole, to be
washed down by tart margaritas.
He also serves bebidas frías,
the sweet, refreshing mixtures
of fruit and water that he grew
up drinking in Mexico City. (Try
the cucumber flavor.)
Mr. Reyna moved to Chicago in
1986 to pursue a career as a
dancer, waiting tables to
support himself. When he decided
to open a restaurant, he focused
on food that reminded him of
home. “I always wanted to bring
it to Chicago,” he said.
Similarly, over the last 36
years, another immigrant,
Roberto Marín, has kept playing
the salsa he grew up on in his
native Colombia. He works days
as a machine operator at an
electrical components factory
and plays bass most Saturday
nights at Las Tablas, a mid-p
