Ramón López
Walking these streets on foot is both beautiful and dangerous. These rented streets, where we recognize ourselves, now carry the scent of Puerto Rico after half a century of migrant stories. Here, the same mulatto glances meet—the ones that wander through Santurce or the plaza of any Puerto Rican town you might name; the same sway of the Boricua gait, though dressed in different clothes and laced with words spoken in English. But here, too, the streets carry the scent of gunfire.
They say that living itself is dangerous—that’s true enough. But living in Chicago as a migrant Boricua is doubly perilous, an everyday high-risk existence. Here, on this slice of the world called Division Street, dance and violence meet, greetings and arrests intertwine.
Come take a look with me through my rough neighborhood. Here you fight for everything—even the simple act of walking. Look at the clothes you’re wearing. If your outfit combines black with another solid color—just regular, everyday clothes—you might, without meaning to, be wearing the colors of a gang. Dangerous. If those colors aren’t black and blue, you might be flashing the uniform of a rival gang, whose presence in this neighborhood is a direct provocation to the fearsome Disciples, who mark themselves with a trident and dominate this zone. I felt that danger up close one night, walking alone down a dark street in green and black—unwittingly representing the hostile Cobras. 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.
Despite all this, this is the part of the city where I feel most at home, where people greet me on the street. On this corner of Division and Western stands Roberto Clemente High School—a borderland. Here, Puerto Rican, African American, and Vietnamese students mix—a sharp contrast of skin tones. Across the street, the Latin Kings dominate—a gang in black and gold. For those who know the code, a few colors say everything.
But of course, you aren’t hearing my warnings because your kite-like gaze is lifted, enchanted by the towering monument to the largest Puerto Rican flag in the world—its triangle, weighing fifteen tons, all sky blue and not a trace of navy. Color is territory: in a city built of brown brick buildings in endless shades, our blue tells the story of migration from an island.
Color is suspicion. We’ve barely been walking a few minutes and already we’ve been watched—again and again—by the swift patrol cars of the police: white with a blue stripe, more threatening than comforting. I amuse myself spotting cars driven by regular folks, each one displaying the single-starred flag from its rearview mirror. For Chicago’s Puerto Ricans, this is tradition—a stylish flourish of pride—though it carries the risk of triggering retaliation from racist police officers bent on being stricter with “these fucking Puerto Ricans.” In this racist city, affirming one’s Puerto Ricanness is a risk painted in three colors.
It’s May, and the trees lining Division are leafing out green again. These young, slender trees are immune to the tangle of graffiti that relentlessly claims every other surface: walls, doors, shop windows, signs, lampposts, mailboxes, phone booths. These layered markings—one over another—are the words, signatures, and numbers of the ghetto: fossilized threads of defiant rebellion, knotted and interwoven in sprays of color, hissing from aerosol cans.
The commercial signs, in loud colors, made of metal or plastic, bring together the logos of corporate giants—Pepsi, Budweiser, McDonald’s—with the insistent specificity of Puerto Rican place names: Jayuya Hair Stylist, Mi Coquí Flower Shop, Borikén Bakery, Lares Second Hand, La Bruquena Restaurant, El Ultimo Vacilón Bar. At La Mano Poderosa botanica, images, necklaces, and prints organize faith into other strict and ritualized colors: the hues of saints and orishas, blessings and curses, oils and essences, rosaries and scapulars. Meanwhile, everything at KFC is red and white. Meanwhile, in Pentecostal churches, the colors soften in modesty and devotion. Meanwhile, at the Latin American Motorcycle Club, the colors turn black.
Night is falling. On the lamp posts, yellow bulbs glow like lanterns. The sky, caught between day and night, undresses in orange and slips into blue. You might feel inspired, but the night can bring gunshots, sirens, flashing lights from fire trucks, police cars, and ambulances. The traffic lights dictate their regulated rhythms.
Puerto Ricans listen to salsa and telenovelas. Or sell drugs on the corners. Or raise hymns inside the church. Or book flights. Or plan anti-colonial protests.
I say goodbye to you, but I stay on the street, walking, alert to danger. The sky wants to be gray but turns violet. The buildings blink at me with their windows. I count green lampposts and examine red hydrants—to weave them into something later. Someone shouts. I want to look. I want to see. The di-vision of the light.
The Maroon Migrants
We can speak of Puerto Rican visitors and residents in Chicago dating back to the late 19th century, but the true birth of a Puerto Rican community—one that became an active part of the city’s history—took shape in the mid-1940s.
This wasn’t the arrival of well-off island families sending their children to pursue university degrees. Instead, a sample of the “excess sons and daughters” of Operation Bootstrap was recruited and brought to Chicago under conditions of uncertain migration. The earliest founders of the Boricua colony in the Windy City did not bring their families with them.
Puerto Rico was in the thick of its industrialization boom. An abundant, cheap labor force was ready and waiting for postwar American investors to put it to work. The island was building new structures it called factories. The Americans—owners of both the factories and the government—were eager to bring the “progress” of industry, urban sprawl, hourly wages, and the pleasures of consumerism to the island. They guaranteed the success of this experiment as long as Puerto Ricans avoided having large families and, at the same time, agreed to emigrate in large numbers. In other words, the foreign-capital-dependent industrialization demanded both birth control and depopulation.
It was the tail end of the slow sea voyages and the dawn of the fast plane trips. Puerto Ricans used the term embarcarse—“to embark”—whether traveling by sea or by air. But embarcar also had another meaning: to be tricked or conned. “Fulano me embarcó” meant “So-and-so took me for a fool.” The Puerto Rican Department of Labor was embarcando workers—shipping them off under contract to U.S. territory. Whether by boat or by plane, they were being “shipped out.”
In 1946, dispossessed people began to settle in the most miserable, despised corners of Chicago. These were Puerto Ricans who, after personally experiencing the harsh reality of migration through government-backed work contracts, escaped their jobs. They had been embarcados—duped with promises of prosperity—but instead of comfort, they found themselves in semi-slavery. They fled the cramped quarters where their employers locked them up and took to the streets. Thanks to their pioneering struggles for survival, there is today a significant Puerto Rican community in Chicago.
Some were farmworkers sent to pick fruits and vegetables. They fled the cold of the fields, the fenced-in barracks, the crushing debt of round-trip tickets, the relentless racism, and the illnesses brought on by hunger.
Others were young women, domestic workers from small towns, recruited by agencies partnered with the island’s government. They escaped from being the city’s worst-paid domestics, from grueling 15-hour workdays, from sudden job transfers, and from the debt of their passage.
Still others were industrial laborers in steel foundries, living in old train cars owned by the steel company. They fled the freezing conditions, the lack of clothing, the terrible food—and the dreadful math of their paychecks:
A standard paycheck would be as follows: Gross Pay for 40 hours, $35.40. Deductions: Federal Old Age Benefits Tax $.35; payments toward transportation from Puerto Rico and agencies fees, $5.00; payment toward return trip $2.00; board $9.45; lodging $3.50; payments to the worker’s family in Puerto Rico $8.85 (25% of wages); Balance, $6.25. From this $6.25 is deducted the withholding tax, which varies with the size of the worker’s family, and payments for the clothes bought from the company. Many workers have received less than $1.00 in cash for a week’s work.
The Puerto Rican community in Chicago was built on the broken contracts of those who refused to keep working under these enslaving conditions. Our founders were maroons—fugitives who chose to break the law, flee their employers, and remain in the city. Other Puerto Ricans came later, drawn by a powerful, growing city. Many managed to improve their circumstances, others returned to Puerto Rico disappointed, and many more kept coming. Eventually, they organized mutual aid societies, celebrated their traditions, moved homes, and gathered in accessible areas like Division Street.
That history is too vast to include in full here. It holds Catholic and Protestant devotions, arrests for roasting pigs in public parks, clandestine cockfights, exuberant queen coronations, winters without heat, bodegas filled with food and conversation, racist humiliations, visits from Doña Fela, baseball championships, bolita gambling, second-class masses in church basements, nostalgic Christmases, rebellious summers, fights for bilingual education, clashes with gangs and police, Puerto Rican parades downtown, hot spots, Young Lords, short-lived newspapers, FALN bombs, political candidates, jukebox songs, and single-starred flags—hundreds of thousands of flags waving their colors through half a century of Boricua life in Chicago.
One of those flags was hoisted by a teenager high up on a lamppost on June 4, 1997, during a riot against police on Division Street. A police officer pulled it down and spat on it. That is not forgotten. In fact, it was commemorated in 1995 with this 40-ton flag that we planted deep into the same street—because this street is part of Puerto Rico.
And here’s the best part, at the end: IT’S NOT JUST ONE PUERTO RICAN FLAG WEIGHING 80,000 POUNDS BUT TWO—READ THAT WELL—TWO IDENTICAL FLAGS, ONE AT EACH END OF THE PASEO BORICUA ON DIVISION STREET IN CHICAGO. The territory between these two flags is our gathering point, the place that marks our vital presence.
A Walk Between Two Flags
In just a few months, when June’s early summer warmth gathers tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans into parades and caravans, Division Street will look transformed. As soon as the buzz of Puerto Rican Week fills the air and the streets around Humboldt Park become choked with Boricuas eager to celebrate their culture, there will be an explosion of flags—huge and tiny alike—and Division Street will take on a new brilliance. When T-shirts shout “Puerto Rico” and puertorros proudly display the names of their hometowns on their car windows, Division Street will stand as the crown jewel, because it will be a gathering point with a name and a surname: Paseo Boricua.
Paseo Boricua is a street reborn. It’s a community-led effort to reclaim this stretch as the backbone and territory of the Puerto Rican community—a place of gathering and celebration.
The project was born out of an alarming concern. On Division Street, signs of the community’s dispersal were beginning to show: vacant buildings, a lack of bustling businesses, the fraying of neighborly bonds and property upkeep. These early symptoms of urban decay were an irresistible lure for wealthy white investors. They buy up cheap buildings, drive out the residents, and take over the territory—turning it into a playground for speculators and “yuppie” leisure. We know this process all too well—it’s called gentrification, and it’s the force that has displaced Latino and Black communities across the United States.
What’s new is that certain Puerto Rican groups have decided to stop Division Street from following that well-trodden path of social and cultural dissolution. Paseo Boricua is an act of territorial reclamation, a form of resistance against the steamroller of wealthy white power.
Paseo Boricua brings together the efforts of various groups and institutions: the Puerto Rican Chamber of Commerce, the Division Street Development Association, the Puerto Rican Parade Committee, the Juan Antonio Corretjer Cultural Center, among others. These people aim to involve both the community and the city government in transforming Division Street into a thriving, welcoming place.
Fortunately, the community already has leaders who are sincerely committed to its betterment, like Congressman Luis Gutiérrez and Alderman Billy Ocasio. The latter played a key role in moving Paseo Boricua beyond discussions and plans into reality. Billy Ocasio secured a commitment from the Chicago city government to bring the project to life and continues to work tirelessly to improve the living conditions of a neighborhood that, notably, lies outside his own electoral district—in other words, it doesn’t deliver votes for him.
Paseo Boricua on Division Street includes renovating buildings, installing outdoor tables and seating, adorning lampposts with Puerto Rican emblems (vejigantes, Three Kings, Taíno petroglyphs, musical instruments), placing trash bins, planting trees, and—most importantly—offering financial support for small businesses in the area.
Of course, there’s one spectacular ingredient of Paseo Boricua that outshines the rest: that monumental flag arching over the street at a height of 56 feet, its 40 tons of weight anchored 37 feet deep into the ground. Here we present a brief account of the creation and installation of what is, to date, the largest monument to the Puerto Rican flag in existence.
The initial concept for the flag came from a collaboration between two architectural firms: Rodríguez & Associates and DeStefano & Partners. The latter were responsible for taking the desired image—a flag dancing in full motion—and transforming it into an artistic and architectural project feasible in a bustling public space like Division Street. It’s difficult to describe the meticulousness and complexity of this design work, computerized down to the smallest detail to ensure the sculpture’s stability, durability, wind resistance, and—above all—its seductive, monumental grace. What they achieved is what all great art aspires to: a breathtaking synthesis that blends enormous effort with astonishing agility in the final product.
The company Chicago Ornamental Iron took on the construction of the flag. Despite their experience with many monumental works, they had never handled a project this demanding and complex. Our flag took over their entire workshop, filled with an urgent buzz of measuring, welding, bending, and assembling—a process that left them in a constant state of worry and wonder.
Transporting the pieces from the factory to Division Street was a spectacle in itself. It had to be done at dawn to commandeer the traffic lanes safely. To install the flag, the street was closed off, and work proceeded day and night through cold, wind, and snow. Freezing temperatures delayed the welding, and the flag was inaugurated even as workers were still on the scaffolding, finishing their tasks.
While all this labor was underway, the community was preparing to receive the flag as a gift from the Three Kings. Radio stations broadcast announcements, people passed the word along, and the buzz grew until the long-awaited Day of the Kings in January 1995.
Hundreds of children from nearby schools arrived. The curious and the organizers, the architects and the politicians, the skeptics and the believers all gathered, gazing skyward because the flag is so high. The Three Kings themselves arrived—on horseback and in person—and so did the January snowfall, though no one paid it much mind. After the inauguration ceremony, the Kings led a procession down the street, followed by the children and neighbors, until they reached the Puerto Rican Parade House, where they handed out gifts and sparked a lively celebration.
