This year, in addition to music, food and carnival rides, the festival will have COVID-19 vaccines, officials said Thursday. The festival celebrates Latino heritage and culture. 1 on Cermak Road between Ashland Avenue and Morgan Street. Other local groups - from punk bands like Los Crudos to community organizations like the Pilsen Alliance - took up the mantle of political protest and cultural activism in the 1990s and beyond.PILSEN - Fiesta del So, Pilsen’s largest festival, will return for its 49th anniversary next month, after going virtual last year because of the pandemic.įiesta del Sol is a four-day festival that attracts hundreds of thousands of people from across the Midwest. Meanwhile, the PNCC’s more explicitly political work shifted away from confrontational organizing strategies and toward lobbying, leadership training and scholarship funding for neighborhood students. DJs from the legendary radio station WBMX performed as early as 1983, and this month’s 16th annual House of Sol event continues the legacy, showcasing more than two dozen performers. By the 1980s, however, as Amezcua notes, the rising popularity of punk and house music among young Latinos, in Pilsen and beyond, generated “a rupture from the politics of neighborhood authenticity and Chicano cultural nationalism.” The annual festival navigated this changing landscape by gradually welcoming less traditional musical guests. Early on, folkloric dances and traditional music dominated, reflecting the local influence of Chicano movement aesthetics. Over the years, Fiesta del Sol’s programming has mirrored ongoing transformations in the culture and politics of Mexican Chicago. In the summer of 1973, having secured approval for the project from the Chicago Board of Education, the PNCC hosted a celebratory block party, marking the beginning of Fiesta del Sol. Architects chosen by the Amigos and the PNCC drew on input from neighborhood residents and incorporated Indigenous Meso-American design elements that marked Juárez as a school for the community. The newly Mexican PNCC helped lead a successful campaign to build a new public high school in the heart of Pilsen, Benito Juárez Community Academy, named after the first Indigenous president of Mexico. In one crucial example, the Pilsen Neighbors Community Council, or the PNCC, which had been founded by Eastern European immigrants, was taken over in 1969 by a group of Chicano activists who told the previous leadership, in Amezcua’s words, “that the barrio … was firing them.” But soon, younger militants influenced by the Chicano movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s pushed for new projects such as the Casa Aztlan community center, and they challenged the older and more accommodationist Amigos. They named themselves the “Amigos for Daley” in homage to longtime Mayor Richard J. Along the way, a generation of leaders made their mark by working within, rather than against, the city’s increasingly powerful Democratic political machine. Over the course of the prior decade, the once Bohemian enclave of Pilsen had become an overwhelmingly Mexican neighborhood. The birth of Fiesta del Sol in 1973 symbolized a generational shift in Chicago’s Mexican political leadership. Residents have long opposed forced relocations, including earlier “urban renewal” demolitions and later forms of gentrification, while also fighting against racist strategies to criminalize immigration, from “ Operation Wetback” in the 1950s to the more recent Trumpian movement to “build the wall.” He draws connections between two struggles against different forms of displacement that have targeted the local Mexican community since the 1950s. Mexicans have lived in and near Chicago since the 19th century, but the population grew so rapidly in the years after World War II that, according to historian Mike Amezcua, “the Windy City became a Mexican metropolis.” In his new book, “ Making Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification ,” Amezcua documents an extended story of political engagement and cultural distinctiveness. The half-century mark offers the chance to reflect on the origins and back story of the celebration, as well as its legacy. The underappreciated history of this neighborhood festival sheds light on the long battle for rights, inclusion and cultural vibrancy in Chicago’s Mexican community. At the end of this month, Pilsen’s annual Fiesta del Sol will celebrate its 50th anniversary, complete with musical performances, food stalls, carnival rides and much more, all in a family-friendly, alcohol- and tobacco-free environment.
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