Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz
Ramón López (1953-2020) feared he had lost his collection of essays on popular culture and urban change in Puerto Rican Chicago. He accidentally left them behind when he returned to his beloved Barranquitas in the mid-2000s. Fortunately, the story didn’t end there. Years later, by chance, his longtime collaborator and technological guru, Luis Alejandro Molina, recovered the essays from four dusty zip drives, a now outdated storage system. The discovery delighted Ramón, who saw them as the culmination of years of research and reflection. Sadly, in 2020, he passed away before his “Chicago” essays were made public.
Ramón was many things. A storyteller. A weaver. A historian. A healer. A musician. An educator. He was also a gifted ethnographer—a scribe and analyst of social life. Trained as an anthropologist, first as an undergraduate at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, and later as a doctoral student at the New School for Social Research in New York City, Ramón was uncomfortable with research done at a distance.
“I need the noise, the color, the words, the music of the people around me because that’s how I work,” he once remarked in an interview.
His desire for intimacy and immersion was not simply a methodological preference, but a necessity. Ramón—the ethnographer—sought to document popular forms of Puerto Rican culture, past and present. This mission, he insisted, required direct and sustained engagement with cultural objects and the relationships and communities in which they were produced, consumed, and transformed. He brilliantly illustrated this intellectual and ethical practice in his major works—Los bembeteos de la plena puertorriqueña (2008) and El movimiento de los Reyes Magos hacia la estrella sola (2008).
His recovered essays are based on, as he put it, “extensive fieldwork” in Chicago neighborhoods between 1994 and 2001. In 1994, Ramón left his faculty post at the University of Puerto Rico, moving to the Windy City to serve as the principal of Aspira Alternative High School. He arrived at an auspicious time for an ethnographer of culture.
Within his first year, he witnessed the assembling of the towering steel archways of Paseo Boricua, located at two strategic points along Division Street in the city’s Humboldt Park/West Town area. In one of his essays, Ramón returns to this moment. He narrates how “the largest monument to the Puerto Rican flag in existence” required a “breathtaking synthesis” of community history, architectural wizardry, and ingenious steelwork. Yet, the twin flags were not only an aesthetic and technical feat; they were a profound political statement against gentrification, a racialized political and economic process that had dismantled the city’s other Puerto Rican enclaves. Paseo Boricua, he argued, was “an act of territorial reclamation, a form of resistance against the steamroller of wealthy white power.”
Ramón quickly became a fixture in the community. When not taking care of his clowder of cats, one would likely find him editing the magazine Boricua at the offices of the campaign to free the Puerto Rican political prisoners or picking up some information and morcilla at a nearby bodega. His slender frame was ever-present at educational lectures, protests, and cultural gatherings—some of which he led or directed. The ethnographer dove into the thicket of community life, embodying what some practitioners of the craft call an “observant participant.” In time, this initially foreign field site transformed into his adopted home.
Much of what he saw, experienced, and heard appears in his Chicago essays. I imagine that some began as field notes or transcripts of conversations. Were the essays a prelude to a more extensive exploration? We will perhaps never know, but regardless, Ramón left behind a gift. Each essay, an archive unto itself, bursts with insights and invitations about this corner of Puerto Rican Chicago. One senses in his writing a genuine fascination, even cautious admiration, with its many political, social, cultural, and spiritual layers and edges. These stories and struggles, he undoubtedly believed, needed to be told.
In this collection of essays, Ramón, the ethnographer, assumes the role of tour guide. A fitting choice, I might add, as tours are commonplace on Paseo Boricua. Most are led by the poet and amateur historian Eduardo Arocho, whose Humboldt Park upbringing and writing are the subject of Ramón’s essay, “Poetry in Rainbow Shoes,” titled after Arocho’s celebrated “poet-opera.”
Like all tours, Ramón’s has multiple stops but, of course, isn’t exhaustive. This tour guide doesn’t tell all the stories. Indeed, he admits as much in the riveting essay, “The Maroon Migrants.” A long passage acknowledges that his essays cannot—and will not—capture the vastness of this barrio. Rather than chase the impossible, he focuses the tour, as he writes elsewhere, on “the culture the people make themselves—not the culture imposed or manufactured for them by dominant sectors.” Accordingly, he favors the spontaneous over the scripted, the hybrid over the homogenous. Popular culture, for Ramón, is complex, dynamic, and inescapably mulatto, a reality that leaves little room for essences. Woven into his tour, the ethnographer lays bare his objective, careful not to overwhelm the tour with too much abstraction.
Along the way, readers meet individuals like the elderly Doña Lula, a maker of Madama dolls. With her granddaughter, photographer Lin nearby, Doña Lula shares her faith and affirms the beauty and goodness of Blackness. We encounter the introspective, rapid-fire urban lyricism of Juan Pablo Fonseca, the Barrio Obrero-born, Humboldt Park-raised rapper. Other persons make appearances on the tour, some named, many nameless, like street vendors, protestors, singers, youth, and longtime residents. Community leaders and elected officials occasionally come into sight but are rarely centered. He prefers to direct attention to those without influence or status or capital—those often left out of history books and public commemorations. It is among those individuals that Ramón finds popular culture most vibrant, messy, and transformative.
The tour’s engagement with people is never far from the cultural products and representations that circulate here. Flags, murals, t-shirts, drums, vejigante masks, turntables, milk crates, and parade floats appear. One especially fascinating essay recounted a school art contest that selected The Three Kings as its theme. Ramón dissects two submissions, one that turned Melchor, Gaspar, and Baltasar into rival gang members and another that depicted them as vagabonds. The latter young artist reassures Ramón, “Although they are bums, they still have something to offer.” In both cases, the contestants reimagine los reyes magos as “street-wise men.”
Another of Ramón’s essays chronicles the emergence of a home-grown cultural object, Puerto Rican flag-styled pendants made of plastic beads. The pendants, he recalled, became an “instant hit,” proudly hung from necks or rearview mirrors. The item is so commonplace, some would say kitsch, that it merits no mention. The ever-perceptive ethnographer doesn’t make this mistake. The beaded pendants, the essay reveals, are a noteworthy object. Their value doesn’t rest on the quality of the materials from which they are made or the difficulty of their construction. Nor does it rest on its aesthetic fealty to the actual flag. Ramón recognized its value on other grounds—the meanings that people ascribe to these objects, the ways they are used and shared, and how they enable localized ways of living, surviving, and expressing. In short, he saw that something as seemingly simple as these pendants could serve as “meeting points” for the formation of community and solidarity.
Ramón’s tour stages interactions with cultural producers and products in different places and spaces within the community. It stops at several sites, such as the aforementioned Paseo Boricua flag archways and La Casita de Don Pedro, an abandoned lot and decaying garage transformed into a cultural anchor and home for a life-like bronze statue of the anticolonial revolutionary Pedro Albizu Campos. In the essay, “The Other Bomba Dance,” Ramón thickly describes how the Casita’s courtyard becomes a site of the sacred and the profane, as an assemblage of bodies, movements, instruments, symbols, and sounds gather for explosive bombazos and hard-fought celebrations for freed independentistas—undisturbed by gentrifier calls to the police.
Throughout the tour, Ramón doesn’t limit himself to the beautiful and the inspiring. Such a decision would shorten the tour but also defeat its purpose. The ethnographer is not a marketer. His tour isn’t meant to “brand” the area, to sanitize or fetishize its realities. It is meant to explore everyday life in this Puerto Rican barrio, telling a story that doesn’t hide its harshness and pain. Indeed, Ramón saw popular culture as creative and stubborn responses to poverty, violence, gentrification, and colonialism.
“Come take a look with me through my rough neighborhood,” one essay invites. He follows the invitation with a meditation on the color economy in the neighborhood. Historically, gang life in Chicago has made colors a matter of life and death. On at least one occasion, the ethnographer confronted that reality. “Colors are a matter of light, so when someone called out to me and I looked, I found myself staring down the barrel of a gun, illuminated.” But gangs are only one source of danger. As many Humboldt Park youth readily testify, police harassment and surveillance are routine. Notably, it’s not only gang colors that raise suspicion. Ramón instructs, “In this racist city, affirming one’s Puerto Ricanness is a risk painted in three colors.” Interestingly, it is in the moments where he delves into the spaces and conditions that most tours avoid that Ramón embraces the identity of his anthropological subject. They become we. “These rented streets, where we recognize ourselves, now carry the scent of Puerto Rico after half a century of migrant stories” (emphasis added).
Yet, Ramón says little about his imagined reader or tour-goer. As with all tours, they are designed for the presumably unfamiliar, for those who might benefit from a temporary excursion into a new domain. For this reason, I doubt Chicago Puerto Ricans were at the top of his list. His primary audience does not seem to be members of other diasporic outposts, who, despite differences, would recognize much in these essays.
Who then is he writing for? I think Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico, especially those without genuine knowledge or experience of “los de afuera.” Such Puerto Ricans, arguably more than others, may struggle to appreciate “the immense resilience and cultural creativity of Puerto Rican popular sectors in the diaspora.” Far too often, Ramón laments, Puerto Ricans in the United States are accused, on the one hand, of assimilation and on the other hand of “folklorizing” Puerto Rican culture. Neither is the case. Instead, what he found in Chicago, and expects elsewhere in the diaspora, are “ways of living where impositions, traditions, influences, discoveries, and reinventions of identity coexist and transform.” Puerto Rican popular culture outside of the archipelago is no derivative. Although transnational, it abides, in many respects, by its own rhythms, confronts its own challenges, and draws cultural inspiration from those it encounters. And, as such, nurtures its own yearnings for liberation and community. Ramón, I suspect, saw much to be learned from the culture, politics, and solidarities in such places.
Of course, no tour is eternal. Ramón’s ethnographic tour of Chicago ended with his final essay. He left, to my knowledge, no conclusion. But he did leave behind a kind of time capsule, where one can visit or revisit Puerto Rican life in the Humboldt Park area at the start of the new century. Much has changed in the decades since. The ravages of gentrification are visible everywhere. Many businesses he named no longer exist, and new ones have taken root. Some of the people he mentioned have passed away or moved out of the area. However, others remain, even if fewer by the day. Still, a walk or tour down Division Street will reveal certain continuities. The Paseo Boricua Flags still stand, and many of the cultural practices and objects visited during the tour remain present. And yet, I must admit, the collection aroused much nostalgia. It reminded me of many past comrades, defiant actions, and unrealized aspirations. Change, however, would not have surprised the ethnographer.
If Ramón were alive today and again immersed himself in Humboldt Park, I imagine he would have likely written about the profusion of murals painted over the past two decades. Perhaps more likely, he would direct his ethnographic gaze to the Puerto Rican car clubs. I wonder what he would think about the newly designated Barrio Borikén district? How much time would he spend at the National Museum for Puerto Rican Arts and Culture or the recently established contemporary art space, El Schomburg? How would he have written about the jubilant welcome home for the patriota Oscar López Rivera or the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on community relations? One can only ponder. Yet, I am sure Ramón would’ve relished the opportunity to further his explorations of these storied city blocks, asking anew the question at the heart of his ethnography. “Why this fierce insistence on clinging to a complicated but vital Puerto Rican identity?”
Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz is an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He co-directs Digitizing the Barrio, an archival project of The Juan Antonio Corretjer Puerto Rican Cultural Center in Chicago, Illinois. His current research explores the afterlives of diasporic Puerto Rican anticolonialism and political repression in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood.
