LATINO HERITAGE & HISTORY
THERE ARE LOTS OF MURALS IN LITTLE VILLAGE, but this one at 26th Street and Ridgeway Avenue really stands out.
Done in 2018 by Chicago artist Juan De La Mora, it’s part of a four-mural series he painted in Chicago and Mexico depicting the process of making ancestral mezcal, the distilled Mexican alcoholic beverage made from agave — a plant native to the southern United States and Latin America that’s harvested to make spirits and sweet syrup.
De La Mora says he took a sabbatical in 2017 to live with a family in a rural town in Oaxaca, Mexico, and
learn about the process of making the mezcal.
The black-and-white mural shows a father and son working with cooked agave. De La Mora says the agave is smoked in ovens in the ground as part of the process, and he was able to bring home some of the charcoal from the family’s oven to use in creating the mural.
The father in the painting is cutting into the cooked agave with a machete. The son, uncovering smoked agave, is there to represent how the art of making ancestral mezcal has been passed through generations, according to De La Mora.
HOME MURALS are relatively rare in Chicago. But wherever you do see one, the shimmer and swirl of daring color does more than disrupt the monochrome of brick walls or plank siding. The homes become reference points, places to meet, a source of wonder and admiration.
Artist Hector Duarte’s home at Cullerton Street and Wolcott Avenue in Pilsen may be Exhibit A.
Stretching about 100 feet along the entire east side of the house and wrapping around the front is a mural, created by Duarte, of a man ensnared in barbed wire. His cold, black eyes suggest he’s given up the fight, though that’s open to interpretation.
The man is a Latino “Gulliver,” trapped at the U.S.-Mexico border not by Lilliputian ropes, as in Jonathan Swift’s story, but by barbed wire.
“The figure could be seen as falling down and being tied up by the barbed wire, or it can be seen as him getting up and getting off the barbed wire,” says Duarte, who has a studio attached to his home.
Begun in 2001, the mural took Duarte about four years to paint. That was mostly because his paid work came first.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN to be Puerto Rican in Chicago? That’s something muralists have been trying to answer for decades in Humboldt Park, the Near Northwest Side neighborhood known for Puerto Rican pride and culture.
Humboldt Park has some of the most controversial public art in Chicago, rooted in political commentary on the Puerto Rican community’s struggles with police violence, displacement and self-determination.
Murals there also portray Puerto Rico’s struggle to gain sovereignty from Spain and later from the United States.
Luis Raúl Muñoz, a Puerto Rican muralist, was behind the mural “Our Story of Resilience” in Humboldt Park at Division Street and Maplewood Avenue. It depicts people from the Young Lords Party — a Puerto Rican political movement founded in Chicago that mirrored itself on the Black Panther Party — holding a Puerto Rican flag and marching.