“Street of Ouzo, Arak, and Tequila”: Recalling the Marvelous Strangeness of Chicago’s Near West Side with Carlos Cortéz, Sandra Cisneros, and Daniel J. Martinez

Abstract

Since the late nineteenth century, Chicago’s Near West Side has been a heterotopic urban place, exhibiting racial, ethnic, and cultural intersections not easily found elsewhere in this heavily segregated city.1 Carl Sandburg once drew inspiration from this milieu, honoring the work of Jewish and Italian immigrant residents in poems such as “Fish Crier” (1916) and “Onion Days” (1916). Currently, redevelopment efforts have overwhelmed the neighborhood’s small ethnic shops and restaurants with national retail chains and massive architecture, constituting a landscape defined by homogeneity and corporate profit. The shift in the neighborhood’s identity from ethnic and working-class to affluent and homogenous suggests a story of post-industrial urban change and “white infill,” or a reverse “white flight” (Piiparinen). As the Near West Side has become less a distinctive urban place rooted in history and cultural contact and more a predictable environment designed for consumer convenience, writers and artists have mourned that loss and interrogated the value of its redevelopment.2 I examine the interventions made by poet Carlos Cortéz, novelist Sandra Cisneros, and visual artist Daniel J. Martinez in successive stages of the Near West Side’s transformation, from the mid-1950s to the early 2000s. As Cortéz’s “Requiem for a Street” (1990), Cisneros’s Caramelo, Or, Puro Cuento: A Novel (2002), and Martinez’s installation 100 Victories/10,000 Tears (1993) and his performance Consequences of a Gesture (1993) recall the area’s vivid, ethnically and racially diverse community, they also contest the institutional and capitalist spatial practices that have reshaped the neighborhood.3