SSW 11.11.21

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SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is an independent non-profit newspaper by and for the South Side of Chicago. We provide high-quality, critical arts and public interest coverage, and equip and develop journalists, artists, photographers, and mediamakers of all backgrounds.

Volume 9, Issue 5 Editor-in-Chief Jacqueline Serrato Interim Managing Editor Jim Daley Senior Editors Christian Belanger Christopher Good Rachel Kim Emeline Posner Adam Przybyl Olivia Stovicek Sam Stecklow Martha Bayne Arts Editor Politics Editor Education Editor Housing Editor Community Organizing Editor Immigration Editor

Isabel Nieves Jim Daley Madeleine Parrish Malik Jackson Chima Ikoro Alma Campos

Contributing Editors Lucia Geng Matt Moore

Francisco Ramírez Pinedo Jocelyn Vega Scott Pemberton Staff Writers Kiran Misra Yiwen Lu Director of Fact Checking: Kate Gallagher Fact Checkers: Susan Chun, Hannah Faris, Maria Maynez, Ebony Ellis, Grace Del Vecchio, Savannah Huguely, Yiwen Lu, and Peter Winslow Visuals Editor Haley Tweedell Deputy Visuals Editors Shane Tolentino Mell Montezuma Anna Mason Staff Illustrators Mell Montezuma Shane Tolentino Layout Editors Haley Tweedell Tony Zralka Webmaster Pat Sier Managing Director Jason Schumer Director of Operations Brigid Maniates The Weekly is produced by a mostly all-volunteer editorial staff and seeks contributions from across the city. We publish online weekly and in print every other Thursday.

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IN CHICAGO IN THIS ISSUE COVID-19 vaccines for kids Children ages five to eleven are now able to receive the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine and will be eligible for a $50 Visa gift card for each of the two vaccines at any City-sponsored event or clinic. Chicago Public Schools will begin to offer vaccines via mobile vaccination vans and appointments at school clinics; classes are cancelled on November 12 for “Vaccination Awareness Day.” The vaccines are free and no insurance or government ID are required. This news is welcome: COVID-19 hospitalization rates of children spiked nationwide this summer, and unvaccinated teenagers were about ten times more likely to be hospitalized than vaccinated teens. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, some 8,300 children ages five to eleven have been hospitalized for COVID-19 in the U.S., and at least ninety-four children have died. COVID-19 hospitalization rates are three times as high among Black, Latinx, or Native American children than white children. The vaccine for children is one-third of the dose that is given to adults. Two doses are still required, three weeks apart. Vaccine locations in Chicago can be found at chi.gov/covidvax.

Cleaning house Clarence Carson, the CPS facilities chief, left his position one week after the Sun-Times revealed conditions at Eberhart Elementary School in the Southwest Side community of Chicago Lawn were so dirty—with cockroaches in the classrooms and no toilet paper or soap in the “filthy” bathrooms—that staff and parents had to clean the building themselves. CPS has outsourced the upkeep of its schools to private companies since 2014. In October, more than a year after announcing it would end their relationship with Aramark, one of two facilities contractors that has repeatedly fallen short of its custodial duties at multiple schools, CPS inked a $369 million, three-year contract with the company. That same month, CPS also initiated a $375 million, three-year contract with a new vendor, the global real-estate management company, Jones Lang LaSalle, to manage the district’s facilities. The new CEO, Pedro Martinez, recognized CPS is going through a “rough transition.”

Not lovin’ it Chris Kempczinski, the CEO of McDonald’s, headquartered in Fulton Market on the city’s Near West Side, apologized to employees Monday for a text message he sent to Mayor Lori Lightfoot in April. In the text message, which the mayor did not directly respond to, he blamed the parents of Adam Toledo and Jaslyn Adams for the children’s fatal shootings. In the text, Kempczinski wrote “p.s. tragic shootings last week, both at our restaurant yesterday and with Adam Toldeo [sic]. With both, the parents failed those kids which I know is something you can’t say. Even harder to fix.” In an open letter dated November 3, the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and other community organizations cited a culture of “racial discrimination” at McDonald’s restaurants and noted the company’s public statements decrying injustice and racism. The letter demanded Kempczinski meet with Black and brown workers and community leaders by November 10 to present a plan to address systemic racism. As of press time, he had not done so.

public meetings report

A recap of select open meetings at the local, county, and state level. documenters, scott pemberton, india daniels, jaqueline serrato...................................5 southeast side, worker-led nonprofit expands to serve immigrants

Centro de Trabajadores Unidos is a resource hub for marginalized immigrants in Southeast Side neighborhoods and the south suburbs. james garrison........................................6 un espacio de apoyo a la comunidad

Una organización liderada por trabajadores del sureste se expande para servir a los inmigrantes. james garrison, traducido por alma campos............................................8 activists demand half of target warehouse jobs go to little village residents

“Why is it that we have this warehouse, our folks cannot even get the jobs here?” ata younan, city bureau......................10 hungering to breathe

Organizers from Stop General Iron reflect on this spring’s hunger strike. corli jay, ahmad sayles, olivia stovicek, and bridget vaughn, city bureau............................................13 community orgs helping push to vaccinate kids

Vaccines are available for kids, but accessibility remains a challenge. josephine stratman..............................17 a pattern of abuse

Cop in lakefront attack has a history of similar incidents jim daley................................................19 op-ed: cps’ failed attempt to return to business as usual

A former CPS teacher’s take on the district’s return to in-person learning. jenna forton.........................................21 the exchange

The Weekly’s poetry corner. dontay m. givens, chima ikoro...........................................23

Cover Illustration by Saadia Pervaiz

calendar

Bulletin and events. south side weekly staff......................25

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Public Meetings Report A recap of select open meetings at the local, county, and state level for the November 11 issue.

BY DOCUMENTERS, SCOTT PEMBERTON, INDIA DANIELS, JACQUELINE SERRATO

Oct. 27 While most Council members praised the 2022 budget at the City Council meeting, not everyone was satisfied. Alderpersons Byron Sigcho-Lopez (25th Ward) and Jeanette Taylor (20th Ward) opposed the $76.5 million property tax hike. Sigcho-Lopez also called the $10 million allocated for mental health a “pittance,” saying more funds should have been diverted from ShotSpotter, CPD’s controversial gunshot detection program, and invested in vulnerable communities. His remarks echoed the spookythemed protest outside City Hall by community organizers. Member Raymond Lopez (15th Ward) called the 2022 budget proposal a “$16 billion spending spree” that he said could pass debt to future generations. Budget elements lauded by City Council members include dollars for homeless prevention and intervention, domestic violence prevention, and mental health services for police and the public.

The moratorium on school closures in Chicago will be effective immediately after SB 1784 was passed out of the Illinois General Assembly and onto Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s desk. The trailer bill made a series of technical changes to the historic elected school board bill that passed in the summer and was celebrated by community groups.

Jurors will get a pay bump to $35 per day from $17.20, Chief Judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County Timothy Evans reported during a 2022 budget hearing with the Cook County Board of Commissioners Finance Committee. Commissioner Frank Aguilar (16th District) recalled that he was paid $17.20 per day for jury duty circa 1988; it helped cover parking and lunch, but would barely do that today. Chief Judge Evans also said he hasn’t seen a flood of evictions as anticipated by some now that the eviction moratorium has ended. He also reported that his team has reached out to use mediators and to point tenants and landlords to available rental assistance.

Oct. 29 Alderpersons voted 30-13 not to repeal the City worker vaccine mandate during a City Council special meeting. The mandate, issued by Mayor Lori Lightfoot, requires that City employees show proof of vaccination against COVID-19 by December 31 or submit to twice-weekly COVID-19 testing on their own time and at their own expense. An ordinance to repeal the mandate, sponsored by Council members Silvana Tabares (23rd Ward), Anthony Napolitano (41st Ward), and Jim Gardiner (45th Ward), would have required City Council approval of any future policies leading to discipline or no-pay status for City employees.

Nov. 2 Nearly forty-six percent of Cook County Jail detainees currently receive mental health services; the average incarceration time for such individuals is greater than that of those who do not receive mental health services. That’s according to a report submitted to the Cook County Board of Commissioners Health and Hospitals Committee

ILLUSTRATION BY HOLLEY APPOLD

during committee meetings. The report noted that in the past two years the mental health caseload has grown both in number and in percentage of the total jail population.

COVID-19 precautions limited in-person mental health services provided by the jail’s health center. Returning to normal operations has resulted in more detainees asking for mental health services.

The Cook County Department of Public Health is aiming for seventy percent of the eligible population to be vaccinated in all communities, department senior medical officer and co-lead Rachel Rubin reported. The percentage of the county’s eligible population receiving at least one dose fell short, at 68.9 percent as of the meeting, and, not including boosters, 55.6 percent have been fully vaccinated. On a community level, the vaccination rate varies widely: The average rate for at least one dose is seventy-five percent in northern Cook County, but sixty percent in southern Cook County.

Nov. 3 It’s not clear whether next year’s taxes will go out on time. Cook County’s integrated property tax system was scheduled to go live in the spring of 2020, but Tyler Technologies, the company managing the transition to its iasWorld software, has moved that date to September 2023, a setback that affects many county operations.

During committee meetings of the Cook County Board of Commissioners, members of the Technology and Innovation Committee received an update. Chief Deputy Assessor Sarah Garza Resnick reported that while elements of the transition to iasWorld have been completed, the Assessor’s Office also uses the County’s outdated mainframe, a challenge that contributed to causing property taxes to be late. While Garza spoke highly of the collaboration with Tyler Technologies, representatives from the County Clerk, Treasurer, and Board of Review, which would also rely on this software, emphasized that they would not tolerate additional delays.

Nov. 4 The “Bienvenidos a Little Village” arch at 26th and Albany was approved for historical landmark status at the meeting of the Department of Planning and Development’s Commission on Chicago Landmarks. Built in 1990, the arch resembles the structures found at the entrances of many Mexican ranchos and is a salute to the largest nonAnglo demographic group in Chicago. The arch is located in the neighborhood’s main commercial street and is considered to be in the public way. Its maintenance falls to the Chicago Department of Transportation and is also undertaken by the Little Village Chamber of Commerce. With this approval, architect Adrian Lozano is the first Mexican to be recognized by a Chicago landmark designation. He also designed Pilsen’s Benito Juárez Academy and the National Museum of Mexican Art. This information was collected in large part using reporting from City Bureau’s Documenters at documenters.org.

NOVEMBER 11, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

IMMIGRATION

Worker-led Nonprofit Grows to Serve and Empower Immigrants in Southeast Side Centro de Trabajadores Unidos is a resource hub for marginalized immigrants in Southeast Side neighborhoods and, increasingly, the south suburbs.

BY JAMES GARRISON

T

he far Southeast Side of Chicago, once a clout-heavy workingclass stronghold whose steel mills fed and furnished neighborhoods like Hegewisch and South Deering, has become something of a forgotten quarter. Far removed from the massive development projects that many other communities of the city are seeing, Chicago’s Southeast Side has languished since the collapse of the area’s manufacturing industry in the 1970’s. Once a heavily Polish community, many of the areas’ Spanish-speaking immigrants lack access to resources that other gateway communities like Little Village or Uptown can tap into.

Ana Guajardo, founder of Centro de Trabajadores Unidos (CTU), aims to change all that. A native of the Southeast Side and the daughter of a thirty-sevenyear veteran of an area steel mill, she bluntly assesses the loss of vibrancy that accompanied the demise of the community’s main economic engine.

“Here's the thing: old-school South Siders have this pride of their community, and a lot of it comes from when they were younger, there was a sense of family, and everyone knew each other. Now, it’s very disconnected. Back then, there was a sense of belonging. Especially with the

churches, people were very active. On Commercial Ave., it was packed. Now, instead of going to Mom and Pop shops, people go to Walmart and Target. A lot of the people who grew up have left.”

Centro de Trabajadores Unidos serves as a knowledge and resource hub for immigrant and socially marginalized communities on the Southeast Side, and increasingly in the south suburbs. Chicago’s role as an economic powerhouse has long translated into ample employment opportunities for new arrivals to our midwestern shores, but this doesn’t always result in equitable treatment or access to much needed resources. None of this is lost on Guajardo. “There is not enough investment in our communities,” she notes. “The Southeast Side has the most dumps and landfills in the city.

When the steel plants started closing and leaving, there was no investment and no attention. The focus was Hyde Park and downtown.”

She adds that the loss of jobs led to a rise in crime and mental health issues. “There is only one mental health professional in 60617, and none in Hegewisch. But on the North Side, there are myriad choices. The south suburbs are even worse–there are no agencies or nonprofits. In Calumet City, there aren’t

6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ NOVEMBER 11, 2021

even meeting halls for nonprofits to meet in.”

W

hen Guajardo first started the organization in 2008, a lot of her early work was on making sure that immigrant workers weren’t being taken advantage of by employers.

She talks of cases where immigrants were being paid $3 an hour. Some of those companies were immigrant-owned.

Today, the Centro is making inroads in a variety of ways. With the expanded array of programs comes a need for more space, and so the center is breaking ground on a new workspace. Formerly housed in the basement of Our Lady of Guadalupe church in South Chicago, the new building will include a community center that can host leadership training workshops, citizenship classes. Though the project for the new building was originally greenlighted in 2014, construction was delayed after former Governor Bruce Rauner cut funding.

With the assistance of local grassroots organizations and labor unions, the Illinois Department of Commerce and others, things are underway again.

Another show of progress is the Community Navigator Committee, which trains people to become community

navigators and be on the alert for illegal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) practices. Another common danger is that immigrants facing deportation of immigrants who have loved ones in the deportation system are sometimes fleeced by scammers posing as immigration lawyers. The Community Navigators Committee recently received a referral for a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) applicant who didn’t hear back for years after applying, so they worked with his attorney to send legal requests for a response to his application. Then, when his application was denied, the community navigators investigated why.

They discovered he was ineligible for DACA because he hadn’t completed high school and was listed in the Chicago Police Department’s (CPD) gang database. His inclusion in the gang database was based a tattoo.Immigrants facing deportation did not have a right to a government-appointed attorney until August, when Governor JB Pritzer signed a law that would allow the Cook County Public Defender to represent immigrants in the Chicago immigration court, the community navigators supported him with legal representation. (As of press time his deportation case is still pending.)

IMMIGRATION

PHOTO COURTESY OF ANA GUAJADRO

Chicago’s infamous gang database affects many more people like him. The gang database is an opaque and seemingly arbitrary scarlet letter at CPD’s disposal.

Ostensibly a method for keeping up with hardened gang members, the database has become deeply divisive and controversial.

The Chicago Office of Inspector General audited the gang database in 2019 and found it constituted a “deeply flawed collection of gang data, with poor quality controls and inadequate protections for procedural rights.” The audit uncovered more than 135,000 names in the database, and the vast majority of those included were Latinx or African-American.

An added worry for immigrant neighborhoods like East Side is about building rapport with the school community, where many people have limited English fluency. In Chicago, where Chicago Public Schools (CPS) rules over a sprawling network of schools, support tools, local school councils,

extracurricular programming, and having access to the corridors of influence is crucial. To address this, another one of the Centro’s grassroots initiatives is the Parent Mentor Program, which places parents in classrooms to assist parents with the granular components of a typical school environment. “Parent mentors check up on kids who aren’t coming to school, and it’s really great that they call home to find out why a child isn’t in school on a particular day,” said Claudia Sumuano, an enthusiastic parent mentor and mother to an area charter-school student.. “This helps parents feel like someone cares about them.”

Sumuano, who works with preschoolers, kindergarteners, and first graders, is often the only Spanishspeaking adult present who can help.

Despite being located on the Southeast Side, she said Gallistel Language Academy doesn’t have a bilingual teacher or teacher’s assistant present in each

classroom. She said the Parent Mentor Program holds meetings and workshops to inform parents about the programs in the center and in the community. “An example is a program about sexual abuse and workplace accidents that I learned about through participating in the program of community navigators,” she said. “It teaches us that it doesn’t matter if we are immigrants, we still have rights in the workplace.”

Sumuano notes how proud her kids are to see her in school. “I work one to one with the students who need extra help with homework or classwork. I can pull them out of class. I also organize the classroom supplies, like the books and other materials.” So far the parent mentor program operates in four schools: Gallistel Language Academy, Douglas Taylor, John L. Marsh Elementary School, and Orville T Bright. Sumuano said she thinks many more schools could use the help of dedicated parents who

want to invest themselves in their local school community.

The new building will allow the Centro to take on bold initiatives like a food incubator and industrial kitchen to house worker cooperatives. The upper floor will be transformed into temporary housing for newly arrived immigrant families.

The Centro is playing the latest part in Chicago’s long history of grassroots immigration activism and community service. The scale of growth for a newly formed organization is impressive, and effusive praise like that of Sumuano is revelatory: “I am very grateful for this program and I feel so thankful for the things they do for our community.” James Garrison is a freelance writer and South Side native, and also the owner of a small travel company. He last wrote about a grocery-delivery app designed by a South Sider to mitigate food deserts.

NOVEMBER 11, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

CORTESÍA DE ANA GUAJARDO

Un espacio de apoyo a la comunidad

El Centro de Trabajadores Unidos es un centro de recursos para los inmigrantes en los barrios del sureste y los suburbios del sur.

POR JAMES GARRISON, TRADUCIDO POR ALMA CAMPOS

E

l lado sureste de Chicago alguna vez tuvo gran influencia y ha permanecido de clase obrera. Las fábricas de acero fueron la fuente que mantenía a los barrios como Hegewisch y South Deering, que antes eran poblados mayormente por inmigrantes polacos.

Pero esa comunidad se ha convertido en una región olvidada. Alejada de los grandes proyectos de desarrollo que otras de las comunidades de la ciudad han visto, el lado sureste ha sufrido desde el

colapso de la industria de manufactura en la década de 1970. Muchos de los inmigrantes latinos de la zona no tienen acceso a los recursos que tienen otras comunidades inmigrantes como La Villita o Uptown.

Ana Guajardo, fundadora del Centro de Trabajadores Unidos (CTU, por sus siglas en inglés), quiere cambiar todo eso. Guajardo nació en el sureste de Chicago y su padre trabajó en una fábrica de acero en la zona por treinta

8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ NOVEMBER 11, 2021

y siete años. Sin tapujos Guajardo reconoce la pérdida de la vitalidad de esta comunidad que ha sufrido la pérdidas de su motor económico. “La cuestión es que los habitantes que han vivido en el sur de Chicago por muchos años están orgullosos de su comunidad, y gran parte de ello proviene de cuando eran jóvenes… había un espíritu familiar y todos se conocían. Ahora, [la comunidad] está muy desconectada. En aquel entonces, había un sentido de pertenencia. Especialmente

en las iglesias, la gente era muy activa.

En la Avenida Commercial, estaba lleno.

Ahora, en lugar de ir a las tiendas locales, la gente va a Walmart y Target. Mucha de la gente que creció aquí se ha ido”.

El Centro de Trabajadores Unidos ofrece recursos para los inmigrantes y las comunidades del lado sureste y, con mayor frecuencia, está sirviendo a los suburbios del sur. El rol de Chicago ha sido el de un motor económico porque ha ofrecido abundantes oportunidades de empleo para inmigrantes que llegan a las costas del medio oeste, pero esto no siempre se ha manifestado en un trato equitativo o en acceso a recursos necesarios. Guajardo entiende esto. “No hay suficiente inversión en nuestras comunidades”, señala. “El lado sureste es el que tiene más basureros y vertederos de la ciudad. Cuando las fábricas de acero empezaron a cerrar, no hubo inversión ni atención. La atención se centró en Hyde Park y en el centro”.

Añade que la pérdida de empleos provocó un aumento de la delincuencia y de los problemas de salud mental. “Sólo hay un profesional de la salud mental en el [código postal] 60617, y ninguno en Hegewisch. Pero en el lado norte hay infinidad de opciones. Los suburbios del sur son aún peores: no hay agencias ni organizaciones sin fines de lucro. En Calumet City, ni siquiera hay salas de reuniones para las organizaciones sin fines de lucro”.

C

uando Guajardo fundó la organización en 2008, gran parte de su trabajo al principio consistía en prevenir que los empleadores se aprovecharan de los trabajadores inmigrantes. Habló de casos en los que se le pagaba a los inmigrantes $3 dólares por hora. Algunos de esos negocios eran propiedad de inmigrantes.

Hoy en día, el centro está haciendo avances de diferentes maneras. La expansión de los programas implica la necesidad de más espacio, por lo que el centro está construyendo un nuevo espacio de trabajo. El nuevo edificio, que antes se encontraba en el sótano de la iglesia de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, en el barrio de South Chicago, incluirá un centro comunitario que podrá albergar talleres de entrenamiento de liderazgo y

INMIGRACIÓN clases de ciudadanía. Aunque el proyecto del nuevo edificio fue originalmente aprobado en 2014, la construcción se retrasó después de que el ex gobernador Bruce Rauner recortara los fondos. Con la ayuda de organizaciones locales de base y sindicatos, el Departamento de Comercio de Illinois y otros, las cosas están de nuevo en marcha.

Otro avance es el Comité de Navegadores Comunitarios, que entrena a personas para que se conviertan en navegadores comunitarios y estén atentos a las prácticas ilegales del Servicio de Inmigración y Control de Aduanas (ICE, por sus siglas en inglés). Otro riesgo común es que los inmigrantes que se enfrentan a la deportación o que tienen seres queridos en el sistema de deportación, a veces son estafados por personas que se hacen pasar por abogados. El Comité de Navegadores Comunitarios recientemente atendió a un solicitante del programa de Acción Diferida para los Llegados en la Infancia (DACA, por sus siglas en inglés) que no había recibido respuesta sobre su aplicación durante años después de haber solicitado, por lo que el Comité de Navegadores Comunitarios trabajó con su abogado para enviar peticiones legales para poder obtener una respuesta sobre su solicitud. Luego, cuando le negaron su solicitud, los navegadores comunitarios investigaron por qué.

Descubrieron que no era elegible para DACA porque no había terminado la secundaria y también porque estaba incluido en la base de datos de pandillas del Departamento de Policía de Chicago (CPD, por sus siglos en inglés). Fue puesto en la base de datos de pandillas por tener un tatuaje. Antes, los inmigrantes que enfrentan la deportación no tenían derecho a un abogado designado por el gobierno hasta hace poco, en agosto, cuando el gobernador JB Pritzker firmó una ley que le permitirá al Defensor Público del Condado de Cook que represente a los inmigrantes.

Los navegadores lo apoyaron con representación legal. (Al cierre de esta edición, su caso de deportación seguía pendiente).

La conocida base de datos de pandillas de Chicago afecta a muchas más personas como él. La base de datos conlleva un estigma y es aparentemente

arbitraria y utilizada a la discreción de la Policía de Chicago. Supuestamente es un medio para mantener información sobre los miembros de las pandillas, pero se ha vuelto muy polémica y divisiva.

La Oficina del Inspector General de Chicago auditó la base de datos de pandillas en 2019 y descubrió que constituía una “recopilación de datos de pandillas profundamente defectuosa, con controles de calidad inadecuados y protecciones inadecuadas del debido proceso”. La auditoría descubrió más de 135,000 nombres en la base de datos, y la gran mayoría de los incluidos eran latinx o afroamericanos.

Una preocupación adicional para los barrios de inmigrantes como East Side es la de establecer una relación con la comunidad escolar, en la cual muchas personas tienen un dominio limitado del inglés. En Chicago, donde las Escuelas Públicas de Chicago (CPS, por sus siglas en inglés) gobiernan una extensa red de escuelas, es importante contar con herramientas de apoyo, concejos escolares locales, programas extracurriculares y acceso a los círculos de influencia. Para afrontar esto, otra de las iniciativas del centro es el Programa de Padres Mentores, que coloca a los padres en los salones para ayudar con los elementos básicos de un entorno escolar. “Los padres mentores observan a los niños que no vienen a la escuela, y es realmente importante que llamen a casa para averiguar por qué un estudiante no está en la escuela en un día en particular”, dijo Claudia Sumuano, una mentora y madre de un estudiante de una escuela chárter del área. “Esto ayuda a los padres a sentirse como si alguien se preocupara por ellos”.

Sumuano, que trabaja con estudiantes de preescolar, kínder y primer grado, es a menudo la única adulta presente que habla español y que puede ayudar. A pesar de estar ubicada en el lado sureste, dijo que la Academia de Lenguaje Gallistel no tiene un maestro o un asistente de maestro bilingüe presente en cada salón.

Dijo que el Programa de Padres Mentores realiza reuniones y talleres para informar a los padres sobre los programas en el centro y en la comunidad. “Un ejemplo es un programa sobre el abuso sexual y los accidentes laborales que aprendí a través de la participación en el programa

de navegadores de la comunidad”, dijo.

"Nos enseña que no importa si somos inmigrantes, seguimos teniendo derechos en el lugar de trabajo".

Sumuano señala lo orgullosos que están sus hijos de verla involucrada en la escuela. “Trabajo uno a uno con los estudiantes que necesitan ayuda adicional con las tareas dentro y fuera de clase.

Puedo sacarlos de la clase [para ayudarlos].

También organizo el material del salón, como los libros y otros materiales”. Hasta ahora el programa de padres mentores funciona en cuatro escuelas: Gallistel Language Academy, Douglas Taylor, John L. Marsh Elementary School y Orville T Bright. Sumuano dijo que cree que muchas más escuelas podrían utilizar la ayuda de padres que quieren contribuir a su comunidad escolar local.

El nuevo edificio permitirá que el centro asuma iniciativas ambiciosas, como una incubadora de comida y

una cocina industrial para albergar cooperativas de trabajadores. El piso de arriba se transformará en viviendas temporales para familias de inmigrantes recién llegadas.

El centro está desempeñando el papel más reciente en la larga historia de activismo relacionado con la inmigración y el servicio a la comunidad en el sureste de Chicago. La escala de crecimiento para esta organización es impresionante, y elogios como los de Sumuano son muy reveladores: “Estoy muy agradecida por este programa y por las cosas que hacen por nuestra comunidad”.James es un escritor independiente y un nativo del sur de Chicago. También es propietario de un pequeño negocio de viajes.

Anteriormente escribió sobre una app de entrega de comida a domicilio diseñada por un habitante del sur de Chicago para mitigar los desiertos alimentarios.

NOVEMBER 11, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

Activists Demand Half of Target Warehouse Jobs Go to Little Village Residents

PHOTO BY SEBASTIÁN HIDALGO, COURTESY OF CITY BUREAU

Little Village applicants say they are qualified for the 2,000 positions but haven’t received calls for interviews.

BY ATA YOUNAN, CITY BUREAU

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very day on his way to work, Steven Chavez passes by the newly constructed Target distribution center in Little Village. As he makes his way to I-55 to drive upwards of half an hour to his seasonal landscaping job in Hyde Park, he is reminded that a job at the distribution center would mean a shorter commute time, better wages and the possibility of health benefits, which he currently lives without.

So when the opportunity came, he took the time to update his resume and immediately applied for the warehouse operations position. On August 5, he

filled out the application in English, a primary language for the MexicanAmerican who has been living in Little Village for two years.

Chavez says he has more than ten years of experience working in a warehouse, including six years of work in a facility vulcanizing semi truck tires and three years at Chicago Block and Brick, where he operated a forklift. So Chavez was confident his application would result in a hire. His hopes slowly started to dwindle as weeks passed with no response from Target. Six weeks after applying, he received an email that his

10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ NOVEMBER 11, 2021

application was denied.

“I was kind of shocked,” Chavez said. “I had been doing that kind of work for ten years or more. I’m qualified for forklift and working on machines. To get that email, I was kind of surprised.”

If Chavez’s application resulted in a hire, his would be just one of up to 2,000 jobs that Target has promised. Available positions include warehouse operations starting at $18 an hour.

Chavez is also among a number of applicants who say they haven’t gotten a call back from Target. Activists in Little Village say that although Target has

promised thousands of jobs at its new distribution center, a number of Spanish speaking applicants are not getting call-backs.

In March 2019, despite growing opposition from community members and leaders about increased truck traffic, the City Council approved a $19.7 million tax break for Hilco Redevelopment Partners to build the million-square-foot Target distribution warehouse in Little Village (the completed warehouse is 1.3 million square feet). For a community already struggling to pay the bills and put food on the table, activists say the

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“Why is it that we have this warehouse, our folks cannot even get the jobs here?”

–Kim Wasserman promise of jobs is too often used to pass legislation that ends up burdening Black and brown communities with environmental pollution and poor air quality while those jobs never find their way to local residents.

In preparation for the distribution center, Hilco imploded a nearly 400foot concrete smokestack at the former Crawford power plant on April 11 of last year. The botched procedure, overseen

by The Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) and The Department of Buildings (DOB), sent a cloud of dust that blanketed over six blocks of homes in the Little Village neighborhood during Easter weekend in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In their quarterly report published on October 18, the Office of Inspector General concluded that an employee from the CDPH should be fired and two employees from DOB should be disciplined for the mismanaged implosion.

“If [the Target warehouse is] going to be here, fifty percent of the jobs need to go to 60623 and 60632” ZIP codes, Little Village Environmental Justice Organization’s Executive Director Kim Wasserman said outside of Target’s private ribbon-cutting ceremony in July.

“Why is it that we have this warehouse, our folks cannot even get the jobs here?”

Target’s first community meeting on August 31 confirmed that over 700 employees have been hired at the distribution center since recruitment

began in spring and that about 112 individuals, or sixteen percent, of those hired reside in the Little Village 60623 ZIP code. None of the hired workers are temporary.

The new Target facility currently sits atop the site of the Crawford coalfired power plant that activists fought for twelve years to shut down. A Harvard School of Public Health study found that forty-one premature deaths, 2,800 asthma attacks and 550 emergency room visits each year were linked to emissions from the two coal plants in Southwest Chicago—the Crawford plant in Little Village and another in Pilsen.

In the case of the new distribution center, activists say one pollutant is being replaced by another. Where there was once concern of coal as a pollutant, now there are worries about the amount of diesel fumes emitted into the air by trucks.

Activists from LVEJO initiated their own survey of truck traffic on Pulaski and 31st and say they’ve counted an average of two diesel trucks per minute.

“Our goal is to make sure that we’re continually supporting the community and leveraging the community to improve both our business as well as the surrounding area,” Allen Brown, the senior distribution director at the facility, said during Target’s first community meeting on August 31.

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long with the promise of jobs, Target partnered with Central States SER and Instituto del Progreso Latino to host two job fairs during the first week of August. City Bureau attended one of the fairs and met a number of prospective applicants who were dismayed at the lack of engagement during the event. One applicant described the experience as an “application fair” where attendants were handed instructions to go online and fill out an application. Others who had already applied said they were told to look for a followup email in a couple of weeks.

Alderperson Michael Rodriguez (22nd Ward) considered the job fairs productive and said he’s received reports that over 100 people applied. And while he doesn’t know if any of those applicants

received callbacks, he is “very hopeful that many folks who signed up at the job fairs will obtain employment.”

“From what I understand, it takes several weeks for Target to process folks,” he said.

A City Bureau reporter applied for the warehouse operations position on August 2, and received an offer of employment one week later without interviewing for the position.

At the community meeting, Brown said that the two job fairs resulted in the hiring of “some very talented employees that reside right here in the Little Village neighborhood,” but was unable to share specific numbers.

Sara Heymann, a member of Únete La Villita, a grassroots organization engaging residents around issues of housing, civic involvement and community-led development, has been working with residents struggling to stay in their homes after the statewide pandemic-induced eviction moratorium ended on October 3. She said the same people who are often struggling to pay for their rent are the same ones looking for jobs. Several months ago, she helped four people fill out Target applications online.

She said none of them have gotten a call back from the distribution center.

Heymann was not aware the application was available in Spanish.

For someone who describes herself as proficient with the computer and the internet, she was surprised that she missed the option of a Spanish version.

She also described the application as long and confusing. “​​ There was this testing portion of [the application] that was super confusing even for me as I was helping them,” said Heymann. “And I consider myself a pretty competent person… and English is my first language. It was extremely confusing.”

Besides needing help accessing the application online, she said applicants also struggled with understanding the meaning behind a lot of the behavioral personality questions.

“Just the way the questions were being asked,” she said. “[Applicants] were like, ’What do they mean by that?’ They’re just trying to figure out basically do you

talk with your coworkers while you’re working. They’re just trying to see if you’ll be a good worker.”

Chavez, who had not taken a personality test for employment before, said he had no issues filling out that portion of the application.

“I was fairly confident answering all the questions,” he said. “Like any other warehouse, safety procedures, helping others, I already know how that stuff kind of goes.”

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erving as one of the main entry points for Mexican families into the Midwest during the 1970s, Little Village has seen its Latino population stay strong. Today, the community on Chicago’s southwest side is home to a predominantly multi-generational Mexican American population.

When Mexicans arrived in Chicago in the 1970s, they confronted a changing industrial landscape and declining industrial employment. Where earlier waves of European immigrants had found higher-paying, unionized industrial jobs, Spanish speaking migrants were left with lower-wage nonunion manufacturing and service jobs. By 1970, about fiftysix percent of Latinos worked in manufacturing compared to only thirty percent of the rest of the city.

The need for work in Little Village is still apparent. As the number of jobs in the Little Village industrial corridor increased, residents experienced unemployment rates nearly double the countywide average between 20152019. A recent study also detailed how communities experiencing heavy burdens of environmental pollutants are largely low-income and communities of color.

Javier Garibay, executive director at Central States SER, says that besides getting a job, Little Village residents experience two issues when it comes to employment: the amount of travel time to work, often upwards of an hour each way, and finding child care during working hours.

Alderperson Rodriguez agrees that travel time to work and a consistent work schedule are some of the driving factors of quality of life and the main contributors to work equity, a cause he says he

NOVEMBER 11, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

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PHOTO BY SEBASTIÁN HIDALGO, COURTESY OF CITY BUREAU

championed through his co-sponsorship of the Fair Workweek Ordinance.

“Predictive scheduling, primarily for Black and brown women, I think that’s something that we care a lot about in our community,” Rodriguez said. “And something we’re working toward heavily.”

Yet many Little Village residents still have to drive out to the suburbs for temporary warehouse jobs. And often, their schedules change with little notice.

For those who have opted to apply to the new distribution center, activists say filling out the application in English was difficult. And while they’ve managed to fill out the application with the help of community activists and leaders, many of them are not moving along in the application process.

“What we know is people have reached out to us to say, ’I don’t speak English. I applied to a job, and nobody called me back.’ We’ve heard tons of stories in that regard,” Wasserman said in an interview after Target’s private ribbon cutting ceremony. “Why aren’t people getting hired? Specifically, why aren’t

Spanish speaking people being called back if you know that that’s who lives in our neighborhood?”

A Target representative declined to comment on the challenges residents may face when filling out the online application.

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ince the first official zoning ordinance in 1923, the city of Chicago has been concentrating industrial activity in key areas of the city. Usually near waterways and rail systems, these areas now form the city’s industrial framework.

Chicago has a total of twenty-six designated industrial corridors that crisscross approximately twelve percent of the city’s footprint. One such industrial corridor is located in Little Village and encompasses 1,252 acres along the Sanitary and Ship Canal and Stevenson Expressway (I-55).

The Little Village industrial corridor is also part of the first group of corridors to undergo an overhauling land use and zoning review under the city’s 2016

12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ NOVEMBER 11, 2021

Industrial Corridor Modernization Initiative, which places all corridors under scrutiny by city officials, industrial manufacturers and business stakeholders.

As it stands today, the City’s plans to rezone the Little Village industrial corridor is in draft form and comes with recommendations to revise the corridor’s boundaries and continue to expand manufacturing in the area.

One of those expansions is Target’s distribution warehouse.

José Acosta-Córdova, LVEJO’s environmental planning and research organizer, says he expects more warehouses like the Target distribution center to take up residence in Little Village because facilities that operate in the same industrial sectors want to be near one another.

And warehousing along I-55 has particularly seen a boom in the last twenty years because it provides easy access to Chicago’s dense population, said Acosta-Córdova.

“The I-55 corridor is one of the busiest freight corridors in all of North

America in terms of the amount of rail and the trucks that come through here,” he said.

For e-commerce companies like Target and Amazon, which is constructing its own 112,000 square foot distribution center in the Pilsen Industrial Corridor, being near a modern highway system means shorter travel times for drivers which means shorter wait times for customers.

“This last-mile logistics conversation is important because you can see these companies, they don’t want to be out in the middle of nowhere anymore because it still took them too long to get into the city,” Acosta-Córdova explained. “They want to be closer to where they can promise people next day delivery or same day delivery.”

That means people like Chavez may have more opportunities to apply for jobs as warehousing facilities open up. Whether he, along with other Little Village residents, gets a job at one of these warehouses remains to be seen.

“We’re supposed to be an immigrantfriendly city. Our community is built on the backs of immigrants,” Wasserman said. “Our economy is built on the backs of immigrants, yet people cannot get a job.”

Chavez says his current landscaping job will come to an end in the first couple weeks of December. Without a call back from Target, he will likely have to apply for unemployment till he resumes work in late March or early April.

With his resume still on file with Target, Chavez says he still has hopes that he’ll eventually get hired at the distribution center.

“I just wanted the opportunity and I’m sure a lot of people do,” he said.

“It’d be a good job for people to better themselves and not kill themselves at the same time.” Ata Younan is a multimedia storyteller covering culture and equity in Chicago.

As a first-generation American Assyrian born in Iraq, she explores the nuance at the intersection of origin, culture, and identity.

She is a 2021 City Bureau Reporting Fellow and contributing reporter at Borderless Magazine. This is her first piece for the Weekly.

Hungering to Breathe

Stories and lessons from inside the Stop General Iron hunger strike.

BY CORLI JAY, AHMAD SAYLES, OLIVIA STOVICEK, AND BRIDGET VAUGHN, CITY BUREAU

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hen Jade Mazon reflects on how she persisted through February’s hunger strike to stop metal scrapper General Iron from moving to her home of the Southeast Side, she keeps naming more sources of support: medics from organizations like Chicago Action Medical and Ujimaa Medics who helped strikers manage their health while they demanded the City deny a permit to the polluting company, community members who provided meals for her daughter so she could rest, organizations that checked in on them.

“I never felt community like I did when I was on the hunger strike, and I feel so blessed and energized by it, even all these months later,” she said. “I still had to take care of my daughter, I was still trying to come up with rent money— life did not stop for those twenty-five days. And without that support, I know I personally would not have lasted that long.”

The month-long hunger strike that Mazon took part in ended with the City delaying the permit for the move.

But even without the permit denied as organizers demanded, it was a climactic moment in a much longer fight—one that is still ongoing.

With the General Iron permit still delayed, the hunger strikers’ story—and the story of the entire Stop General Iron campaign so far—is one of community power changing what is possible. This summer, we talked to hunger strikers and others who contributed to the fight.

Interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

Jade Mazon Co-founder of the Rebel Bells and member of the Southeast Environmental Task Force and the Southeast Side Coalition to Ban Petcoke I have been part of the environmental justice community here on the South Side, specifically the Southeast Environmental Task Force, the [Southeast Side] Coalition to Ban Petcoke, and the Rebel Bells. I had been plugged into those organizations already—we were already fighting. This is my third fight, my third company to go up against, but I’m kind of a late bloomer, I’m fifty-one; I didn’t really start getting active till about maybe six years ago.

[My motivation was] pure frustration.

I grew up in the ’80s, a couple of blocks away from the Wisconsin Steel mill, in the ’70s and ’80s. And our neighborhood motto was, “What’s that smell today?” We were just always inundated with toxins in the air, and then in the dirt, and nobody ever checked our water.

I’m not even in it for myself anymore.

I’m in my fifties now. Now it’s about my children. Now it’s about all children of the neighborhood—they deserve better than this. When we were kids, we didn’t know that we deserved better. That was never a question for us. That’s what we got, that was our lot in life, and while the steel mill was up and running, everybody had food on the table, everybody had school shoes.

Afterwards, it was a different story.

GENERAL IRON'S FORMER SITE IN LINCOLN PARK, BY BRIDGET VAUGHN

Oscar “Oso” Sanchez Co-founder of Southeast Youth Alliance and director of Youth and Restorative Justice Programming at Alliance of the Southeast [The hunger strike] was literally our last resort. This was saying, if this doesn’t do anything, how much do our lives really matter to the City? And that was the beginning of it. When we first started this, we didn’t get a lot of attention. I think it wasn’t until like the seventh day where people were like, “Oh, there’s a hunger strike going on in Chicago.” And then a lot of my friends reached out asking how can we support, and that’s when we asked people for one-day solidarity [hunger strikes].

I thought about my community. And I think of my own family. My brother, when he was five years old, he had to be hooked up to a machine at night so he could breathe. He had to do that for five years. I thought about my grandpa. He died in December due to COVID. The doctor said he had weak lungs. And during that time, him and my grandma were sick at the same time. So my grandfather passed away. And we had to lie to my grandma for a week saying, “Oh, he’s just in the hospital,” but we had to prepare for his funeral... They put her on an air tank— the doctor said you can’t breathe that air out there. It’s the accumulation of all the impacts on my family. And being in these town hall meetings, and hearing mothers and fathers cry about how they wanted

NOVEMBER 11, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

COMMUNITY ORGANIZING

IN ORDER: JADE MAZON, PHOTO BY TERRY EVANS. OSCAR SANCHEZ, PHOTO BY TERRY EVANS. CRYSTAL VANCE GUERRA, PHOTO BY AHMAD SAYLES. WILLIAM "KID" GUERRERO, PHOTO BY ANTHONY GOSLAWSKI.

to live here in this community, and raise their children here and have their dream house here. Then finding that all out and then seeing all the contamination and pollution.

Crystal Vance Guerra Co-founder of Bridges // Puentes and strike supporter We had already done petitions, we had already done peaceful marches, we had already done marches at Lori Lightfoot’s house, we had already done all these things. We needed something. And that something was the hunger strike. As an organizer, you never want to put people’s lives at risk. That is the last, last, last, last thing you want to do. Because that’s what we’re fighting for. We’re fighting for our lives.

My role was to help coordinate hunger strikers and medics, to get the medics on board to make sure the hunger strikers had things so they could check their blood pressure, they could check their pulse.

Before we even decided on the hunger strike, we reached out to the Dyett

[high school] hunger strikers to let us know how it went for them, what did they learn from it? What were their reflections afterwards, what could have they done better? What were the tricky parts? So learning the history of organizing already about the thing, or whether it’s the issue, environmental organizing, or whether it’s the action you’re thinking about taking— whether it be a march, blockade, hunger strike. Learning about that history, within your own community area, city, and connecting with those people, was really what one, gave us the strength to make it a city-wide movement, but then also gave us the knowledge.

William “KiD” Guerrero Photographer and friend [I decided to join the strike] when Oscar was on the seventh day. You know when you see your friend going through something like that, that’s not supposed to happen in the first place at all. And to know that he’s been part of an organization that’s been fighting this for years now. It really got to me. And then I was like, maybe I should join. And they

were doing one-day solidarity [strikes], and he challenged me to do a one-day. I was like, “I’ll do you one better. I’ll just join you.” So I joined. My hunger strike lasted for eighteen days.

I remembered when there was a factory in Pilsen next to a high school. It was polluting our air, and I was waking up with dust on the car. I thought it was normal. And going down the highway on Damen, I thought it was cloud makers as a child. And I thought: That’s nothing, that’s harmless. Then, in high school, I came to realize that was polluting our air.

I had some friends with asthma. And it may be that reason. Seeing some of my friends excluded from activities because of asthma, because the air has contaminated the lungs and all that, really made me think like, this is all preventable. This is all preventable. And we’re the generation to stop it.

Marcelina Pedraza Activist and union worker You know, we’ve been fighting for what seems like forever, from toxic polluters moving into our neighborhood. And it

seems like no one’s listening. So that’s why we decided to take it to the next level with the hunger strike. And I just knew what I can do, I’m capable of at least spreading the word and showing solidarity by doing a one-day hunger strike.

We first started a COVID Resources Group, a kind of super group of people from different organizations in the neighborhood, just to get resources out to the community, like, “Hey, do you need PPE? Do you need access to testing?” So we started this group, we started this page on Facebook, and it kind of escalated from there. We got connections with other organizations, youth organizations, student organizations, and community groups.

Then, we’re like, “Hey, we’re also doing this campaign against General Iron, are you interested?” We were having meetings once a week, then we had them twice a week, all online, all virtual. And so because we had a huge amount of help from the youth, high school students, other youth-based organizations—they’re big on social media. They were really good at making flyers and would make interactive GIFs, and all these things to post and share and retweet and all that.

IN ORDER: LAUREN BIANCHI, COURTESY OF LAUREN BIANCHI. DONALD DAVIS, COURTESY OF DONALD DAVIS. CHUCK STARK, PHOTO BY TERRY EVANS. YESENIA CHAVEZ, PHOTO BY TERRY EVANS.

14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ NOVEMBER 11, 2021

COMMUNITY ORGANIZING

Lauren Bianchi, Donald Davis, and Chuck Stark Teachers at George Washington High School LB: Once I heard that more community members of different groups were getting involved, I reached out to some activists to find out what we could do. We started meeting. So for all of us, we didn’t hear about the hunger strike; we actually were part of the decision-making body that decided whether or not we would have a hunger strike.

I don’t think that this campaign and the hunger strike would have looked the way that it did, had there not been a movement at this school to remove the police. Just a few months before, the teachers and students got involved. So those student leaders were confident, feeling really good about that victory, and wanted to win more in their community.

CS: On Earth Day of 2020, I saw a Change.org petition to sign to Stop General Iron. And that’s when I started looking more into it directly. That’s when I took that as an opportunity to teach about it and teach about particulate matter with my students via remote learning. That resulted in one of my students helping present at an end of the year conference about this issue. From that there were other teachers that got interested in it, got involved.

All that built up to the point where we realized that we had exhausted every other effort. And so a more extreme measure was needed to make a point.

LB: If we all got arrested, we would be at risk of getting sick. Olga Bautista from Southeast Environmental Task Force, she was the one that was like, “I think we have to escalate, and I don’t think we can get arrested. I think we need to do a hunger strike.”

DD: I know a couple of students who did a couple weeks each, and they weren’t under supervision of health care, and that was a concern. That was a big worry we had was that people would use this, and then they wouldn’t take the precautions necessary to look out for their health.

That was why it took a couple months to plan this, so that the health officials could be consulted.

Yesenia Chavez Member of United Neighbors of the 10th Ward [It’s important to] understand that you can’t really create and maintain movements like this with just one or two organizations. Even if they’re spearheaded by one or two organizations, the maintenance to upkeep and stay relevant in today’s media is a whole different ballpark.

On the civic level, it’s been a challenge to bring to light a different perspective for our residents, because they’re so accustomed to being neglected politically, you know, misrepresented, right? They’re so used to just getting scraps from the City and performative politics. And then on top of that, there are

a lot of immigrants on our side of town.

And there is that language barrier, where all the information that we’re gathering in English, political jargon included—we have to make sure that that’s translated, because if not, we’re missing half of our audience.

A big focus of ours was to uplift voices that weren’t heard. To have parents included that wouldn’t always take the mic; to have students included, to have someone that’s taking care of their elderly parent that’s connected to an oxygen tank, that you wouldn’t usually see on the news, but their voice in our community should still be respected… And I think that approach led to a lot of our success.

Chris King Communications strategist and friend My best friend is Oscar Sanchez. And I’ve been watching him go through all these struggles with environmental justice for a really long time now. About a week into his hunger strike, I had talked to my ward Independent Political Organization, 32nd Ward United, and we were going to do a single-day solidarity strike to try to raise awareness… I went on hunger strike for a week.

I think our social media kits were probably our most important thing [I worked on] because we could be loud with people power. One of our social media kits, we were able to get #DenyThePermit to trend, which was a pretty big deal.

this was bigger than just the Southeast Side, bigger than just Chicago, that this could impact environmental policy for the entire country.

It should be enough to hear the stories of these marginalized communities that are taking it upon themselves to fight for clean air, which should be a human right to everyone, but at the very least, [understand that] the Southeast Side is fighting for all of us, for all of our rights to breathe clean air. All authors were recently reporting fellows with City Bureau. Corli Jay is a freelancer from Auburn Gresham whose work largely focuses on Chicago’s music scene and systemic injustice; she last covered Black artists’ pandemic experiences. Ahmad Sayles is a Documenter with City Bureau; this is his first piece for the Weekly. Olivia Stovicek is a senior editor at the Weekly who last reported on public meetings. Bridget Vaughn is a contributor to the Weekly and was part of a team that covered the closure of Robeson High School in Englewood.

Carlos Enriquez Organizer and strike communications team member

IN ORDER: CHRIS KING, PHOTO BY BRIDGET VAUGHN. CARLOS ENRIQUEZ, PHOTO BY BRIDGET VAUGHN.

We knew that if we fought back and we won—or even if we fought back and got close—that this could be a story that can inspire communities throughout the entire country to actually say that we have a voice and we will be heard when it comes to matters of our health, the health of our families. And so, I think all the while, we knew that this was what it was, NOVEMBER 11, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

FALL 2021 In-person arts events and conversations, including: Saturday, Nov 13 Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts

Saturday, Nov 13 Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts

Teju Cole

Angela Jackson

Sunday, Nov 6 Columbia College Student Center

Saturday, Nov 20 Symphony Center

In conversation with Amanda Williams

Imagining Chicago’s Future Film screening and conversation

Explore the full calendar and get tickets:

chicagohumanities.org

Illinois Poet Laureate

Nikole HannahJones

On the 1619 Project

HEALTH

Community Orgs Helping Push to Vaccinate Kids

Vaccines are available for children, but getting to them remains a challenge.

BY JOSEPHINE STRATMAN

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yshayla Echols, a twelveyear-old Englewood resident, decided to get vaccinated in August for two reasons: First, “to protect myself,” and, second, her love of seafood.

Although Echols was scared to get the shot, her father persuaded her with the promise of her favorite treat. “I was on the phone with my dad, and he said, ‘I’m gonna get you some seafood,’” Echols said.

After her feast of lobster tails and crayfish, the idea of a second shot wasn’t so bad. And once Echols got her shot, her twin sister was more eager to get it, too. “They’re talking to each other, having conversations with friends,” said Nashone Greer-Adams, founder of the nonprofit Something Good in Englewood.

Something Good in Englewood is one of many community organizations that are working to improve COVID-19 vaccination rates for children and youth and repair institutional and systemic health issues in particularly vulnerable parts of the city. These organizations are uniquely positioned and able to fill holes left by the City in some of the most underserved neighborhoods in Chicago.

Teens aged twelve to seventeen became eligible for the vaccine in May, and children ages five through eleven were approved for the Pfizer vaccine on October 29. By now, all minors can get vaccinated at select pharmacies, community clinics, City Colleges of Chicago, and hospitals in the city—but accessibility in the South Side has been a persistent challenge.

As of late October, twelve ZIP

PHOTO BY JOSEPHINE STRATMAN

codes had vaccination rates below forty percent—all on the South or West Sides, according to data obtained by a public records request. In South Shore, just 31.3 percent of youths aged twelve to seventeen, or 873 teens, had received just one dose.

Chicagoland Vaccine Partnership, a collaboration of more than 160 organizations, is leading efforts to vaccinate Chicagoans in these areas, as well as strengthen a severely disinvested public health system. It has provided funding to around sixty local organizations around Chicago through a fund of $1 million from local philanthropies to provide community-designed vaccination outreach efforts.

By investing in Black- and brownled groups, the Vaccine Partnership believes that vaccination outreach efforts will be more effective and address the root causes of the vaccine disparity that has been widely reported. “This is not a quick fix to make sure we satisfy a dashboard,” said Max Clermont, the U.S. Public Health Accompaniment Unit’s senior project lead for Chicago. “This is really about building community capacity to respond not just with what is relevant, but respond to everything that plagues communities that have had a history of disinvestment.”

The Vaccine Partnership aims to empower residents by involving communities and hosting events like vaccination drives and youth programming. The collaborative works to mobilize community knowledge. “Your expertise in your community or your

expertise doing community engagement, or around violence or working with seniors or parents and families… that is exactly the expertise we need,” Clermont said.

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ayor Lori Lightfoot’s Protect Chicago 77 Initiative also seeks to involve community organizations. The initiative has been an effort to vaccinate seventy-seven percent of the city’s population aged twelve and up by the end of the year.

Citywide, 75.3 percent of Chicagoans aged twelve and up have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine,

according to the city portal on November 4. However, these rates vary widely within the close to sixty different ZIP codes in Chicago.

The City hosts vaccine drives and strives to educate residents in underserved community areas, working with regional and community-based organizations already receiving funding through a separate City initiative, as well as health care providers, business partners, and faith leaders, a spokesperson told the Weekly.

Some residents needed other motivations to get the shot. According to organizers from Something Good in

NOVEMBER 11, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

HEALTH

PHOTO BY JOSEPHINE STRATMAN

Englewood, incentives such as Six Flags tickets, provided by the State of Illinois, have proved especially successful with young people.

But some community leaders said they haven’t seen much City outreach in their neighborhoods. “We don't see any City of Chicago presence in the South Side concerning vaccination,” said Justin Morgan, director of operations for Something Good in Englewood.

Although the vaccination initiative explicitly targets efforts in neighborhoods with lagging vaccination rates, it hasn’t exactly leveled the playing field.

Vaccination rates are continuously increasing citywide, but some South Side neighborhoods still lag behind neighborhoods on the North Side.

Something Good in Englewood is one of the roughly sixty recipients of funds from the Vaccine Partnership.

Englewood, in ZIP code 60621, recently had the second-lowest youth vaccination

rate in the city, with just 27.9 percent of those twelve to seventeen fully inoculated with two shots.

Something Good in Englewood is a “one-stop shop” for an array of mental and physical health and finance services.

The charity hosts monthly pop-up events, teaches community members financial literacy with partner Greenlight, offers job fairs, and provides onsite mental health services—all in addition to providing COVID-19 testing and vaccinations.

Morgan said making the vaccine as accessible as possible is very important, especially when appealing to young people. At one recent COVID-19 vaccination drive, Morgan said that the vaccination bus was two hours late. Many waiting for the bus to arrive eventually just walked off. “We persuaded a lot of our residents to get vaccinated and they were sitting there, and they were like, ‘I guess this is a sign we’re not gonna get vaccinated.’… it was absolutely terrible,”

18 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ NOVEMBER 11, 2021

said Morgan.

Trust is a key element in the operations of these community organizations. Part of this trust is understanding that each individual has different needs and motivations. “We understand this community because we are of this community,” said Adams.

Something Good in Englewood also door-knocks and canvases for vaccination efforts. “We need more feet on the ground spreading the right information. There’s so much misinformation out here about the vaccine,” said Adams.

Melanely Cortez, nineteen, of Back of the Yards, got the vaccine after a family member in Mexico died of COVID-19.

“I was scared at first,” she said, noting the side effects of the vaccine. However, now she feels glad she got it, despite worries of new variants.

Devonta Boston is the founder of TGI Movement, a nonprofit that creates an “oasis” for area youth. When

working with teens, Boston said he tries to be relaxed in his approach toward the vaccine. “I try not to push it,” Boston said.

“It’s there if you want it.”

The Oasis is a place for young people to “reclaim the hood.” The organization gives youth a space to showcase talents and nurture passions. Like Something Good in Englewood, TGI Movement brings the city-run vaccination bus to events. This has helped people get vaccinated, Boston said.

At a September back-to-school event, Boston said around ten people got vaccinated. “There’s so many reasons not to get it,” Boston said. “They need a reason to come…You gotta make it worth their while.”

Looking forward, as vaccines become available to even younger age groups, Clermont said Vaccine Partnership’s approach may need to change even more.

“The strategies we employed for adults are not going to be the same for [children],” he said.

Some of the biggest challenges in vaccination efforts lie not in the vaccine or COVID-19, but in larger, more structural issues, organizers said.

Community organizations in Chicago are tackling two pandemics as they strive to improve vaccination rates in South Side neighborhoods.

Gun violence and other structural disinvestment were issues in the community long before COVID-19.

“We've been in a pandemic before there was a pandemic in Englewood,” said Morgan.

No matter the age group, changing who gets a seat at the table to address bigger-picture inequities in Chicago is key. “The real work is not going to be done in some braintrust operations center downtown, Clermont said. “It’s gonna be done on the local level.” Josephine Stratman is a reporter and student at DePaul University. She has previously worked for the New York Daily News and City Bureau Documenters, and currently works at two campus publications. This is her first piece for the Weekly.

POLICE

A Pattern of Abuse

Officer Bruce Dyker already had two dozen complaints before he attacked a woman in August.

BY JIM DALEY ILLUSTRATION BY HALEY TWEEDELL

CW: Police violence, racist slurs

O

n October 28, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) concluded its investigation of an incident in which CPD officer Bruce Dyker attacked Nikkita Brown, a Black woman who was walking her dog along the lakefront path, in August. Dyker had approached Brown to demand she leave the park because it was after 11pm, and following a brief argument, the police officer “forcibly grabbed Ms. Brown and a physical altercation ensued,” according to COPA’s report.

A widely circulated video of the incident shows Brown walking away from Dyker after asking him to put a mask on because of COVID-19. Dyker refuses.

“You need to move away from me, I feel threatened,” Brown says as she backs away from him. “Good!” Dyker responds. “I’m about to put handcuffs on you if you don’t keep walking.” Then he grabs her arm and attempts to wrestle Brown to the ground before releasing her.

The incident was the latest in a string of similar ones Dyker has allegedly been involved in over his twenty-threeyear career as a Chicago police officer.

According to records obtained by the Weekly, civilians have accused Dyker of verbal abuse, excessive force, and making threats on multiple occasions.

In nearly every instance, investigators determined the allegations were unfounded or that Dyker had acted

within departmental regulations. In some cases, investigators were unable to contact witnesses or victims; in others, complainants did not sign affidavits.

When that happened, investigators typically concluded the allegations were not sustained.

Signing an affidavit accusing a police officer of misconduct can be daunting, and civilians may be afraid of retaliation or simply want to put the encounter behind them. In 2017, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) launched a civil rights investigation of the CPD that resulted in the department being placed under an ongoing consent decree. As part of the investigation, the DOJ found that the affidavit requirement “creates a tremendous disincentive to come forward with legitimate claims and keeps hidden serious misconduct that should be investigated.”

The Illinois Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity-Today (SAFE-T) Act, a comprehensive policing-reform bill signed by Governor J.B. Pritzker in February, seeks to remedy that. Among other reforms, the bill changed the Uniform Peace Officers’ Disciplinary Act so that civilian complaints no longer require a sworn affidavit.

O

fficers who are accused of abuse and misconduct often have a long history of citizen complaints. A 2019 study published in the American Economic Journal that analyzed 50,000

civilian complaints against Chicago police officers found that cops who have more civilian complaints were far more likely to be involved in civil rights lawsuits.

Via a public-records request, the Weekly obtained Dyker’s disciplinary records from CPD and reviewed more than twenty civilian complaints made against him. Nearly half allegedly

involved a verbal or physical altercation.

In November 2000, Dyker pulled over a man who later alleged that Dyker called him a “sp*c and other racial slurs” and threw his car keys away. No one else witnessed the incident, and investigators concluded it was not sustained due to insufficient evidence.

In August 2002, Dyker and his

NOVEMBER 11, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19

POLICE

The incident was the latest in a string of similar ones Dyker has allegedly been involved in over his twenty-three-year career as a Chicago police officer. partner were called to a gym in Belmont Cragin to remove an intoxicated man from the premises. The man alleged that when he did not leave quickly enough, Dyker shoved him to the ground, striking his head against the concrete and knocking him unconscious. The police took him to the hospital, where he made a complaint to a CPD lieutenant. Dyker and his partner claimed in their reports that the man “slipped and fell.” According to investigators, the man later dropped the complaint, and they concluded it was unfounded.

In September 2003, Dyker arrested a blind man for operating a toy scooter on a sidewalk in Portage Park. When he handcuffed the man, he told Dyker he was blind and needed help being guided into the patrol car, to which Dyker responded, “It’s not my problem.” The man also alleged Dyker caused him to bump into objects while being put in the car. When the investigator interviewed the man at his home he repeated his initial story, and Dyker also confirmed that “he did state [the man’s] blindness was not PO Dyker’s problem,” according to the report. The investigator found that Dyker “could have chosen better terminology” but did not violate departmental regulations.

In March 2004, Dyker and his partner brought a man they had arrested to Lutheran General Hospital in suburban Park Ridge for emergency treatment. According to a nurse who filed a complaint, an emergency room physician wanted to allow the arrested man’s family to visit him, but Dyker refused, saying it would interfere with his investigation. When the doctor insisted, Dyker threatened to “make his life miserable if he allowed the visit.”

The doctor declined to cooperate with

investigators, and they concluded the complaint was unfounded.

In July 2004, a man alleged that while off-duty, Dyker got into an argument with the man’s wife in a Toys “R” Us parking lot in Belmont Central, and said “What the fuck? You don’t know how to park?”

The man said he pushed Dyker, who then drew and pointed his handgun at him, identified himself as a police officer, and told him to get on the ground. When the woman got out of her car, Dyker pointed his gun at her and ordered her to get back in. Other officers arrived and arrested the man. Dyker confirmed to investigators that he said, “Don’t you know how to park?” to the woman, but alleged the man punched him before he drew his weapon.

The investigation exonerated Dyker.

In November 2008, Dyker was arrested in Tennessee for aggravated assault after he pointed his gun at a civilian during a domestic dispute. A CPD sergeant reported the incident to IPRA, and investigators sustained allegations against Dyker, who was given a twenty-day suspension.

In May 2014, Dyker pulled over a Polish-speaking man who told him he had difficulty understanding English. Dyker asked him how long he had lived in the United States, and the man said he’d been here for fourteen years. Dyker responded, “That’s bullshit, you have been in this country for so long, you should speak English.” The man told Dyker his son was a cop, and pointed to a police medallion on his car. Dyker responded, “I don’t give a shit that your son is a police officer,” and took the medallion. Dyker admitted all of this to investigators, and another officer confirmed the man’s story. This was one of the few times investigators found the allegations against him sustained.

20 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ NOVEMBER 11, 2021

In December 2017, Dyker pulled over a Black woman who was driving for Uber in Wicker Park. When she asked to speak to a supervising officer before signing a traffic ticket, Dyker pulled her from the car, handcuffed one of her wrists, and slammed her against the car.

The woman later went to the University of Chicago Hospital for treatment of a bruised and swollen jaw. COPA cleared Dyker of any wrongdoing.

I

t shouldn’t take a cop’s own admission or the word of another police officer to sustain civilian allegations against them. This is especially true when the accused officer has a long history of complaints, according to according to Jill McCorkel, a sociologist at Villanova University who studies policing.

When “there’s consistent patterns associated with the kind of interactions that are prompting the complaint, this is a really important moment for police administrators to get out ahead of a problem,” McCorkel said.

“Particularly when there are officers who have more serious complaints that are disproportionately responsible for a lot of the events that subsequently make the news because of their violence or the disproportionality of the force given the nature of the incident.”

The 2019 study found that the worst five percent of officers—those who had more civilian complaints than ninety-five percent of their fellow cops—were forty percent more likely to be named in civil rights lawsuits than those in the bottom seventy percent of complaints. According to the Citizens Police Data Project, Dyker has more civilian allegations than eightyeight percent of CPD officers. In 2016, the City paid $15,000 to settle a lawsuit

stemming from a false arrest Dyker made of a Latinx junk collector, according to the Chicago Reporter.

McConkel said administrators should “absolutely” take previous complaints into consideration when they’re investigating an allegation of abuse. She said they typically don’t in part because police departments are cynical when it comes to believing the public and have entrenched cultures of loyalty to cops, and in part because collective bargaining agreements with police unions often prevent administrators from doing more thorough investigations.

As of press time, CPD Superintendent David Brown has not made a final determination in Dyker’s latest allegation, and the officer remains on the force. Jim Daley is the Weekly’s interim managing editor. He last investigated the CPD’s inconsistent adherence to overtime supervision requirements.

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OPINION

Op-Ed: CPS’ Failed Attempt to Return to Business As Usual Chicago Public Schools have missed an opportunity to better the learning environment by attempting to continue operating as normal amidst the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

BY JENNA FORTON

L

ong before the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers have been the ones on the ground having to wrestle care out of a system committed to ranking and filing students and teachers.

In a city where there is one police officer budgeted for every 228 residents, there is only one social worker budgeted for around 1,000 students. After teaching at CPS schools for almost a decade, and interviewing current teachers, it’s clear that teachers in CPS are still working to fill those gaps in care for students and continue to demand a massive change in CPS budget priorities as they have been for quite some time.

Nurses and social workers in every school were primary demands of the 2019 teachers strike. Unfortunately, teachers' priorities were pushed to the side and the agreement reached by CPS and CTU leadership to end the strike left these demands as mere promises. As teachers and communities were recovering from the strike, the pandemic hit in March 2020. COVID-19 disrupted everyone’s business as usual. Educators and students transformed our conceptions of schooling. In response, CPS systemically standardized “distance learning” to “remote learning,” where teachers and students were expected to maintain the same standards as in the school building.

ILLUSTRATION BY MELL MONTEZUMA

NOVEMBER 11, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 21

OPINTION

“Suddenly it wasn’t all about the testing. We could teach just to teach, it was a totally different atmosphere,” said Dani, a pre-K teacher, about the first phases of remote learning. For the first time, school transcended the walls of the building. Educators had to think a little more creatively. In March 2020, teachers entered into “distance learning” with more autonomy in their curriculum and assessment than ever before. With little to no resources and support, teachers were the ones tasked with designing and redesigning, again and again, the lessons and strategies to reach and connect with young people all across the city.

Learning took place in an organic way, and as teachers and students we were all creating brand new structures of learning together. “One thing about remote, if you don’t engage them, you lost them. This made you think carefully about your lesson to ensure it was worthwhile.

We cut out the unnecessary.” Dani said.

“Virtually, we ensured everything was relevant,” a teacher who spoke on the condition of anonymity said. Young people and teachers were able to be responsive to individual and collective needs when establishing the schedule together at the start of distance learning.

When the pandemic canceled plans for 2020 annual standardized testing, teachers and students saw the possibility of a system of true transformation and care on the horizon.

Soon after a rhythm in learning was created, CPS began to tighten the reins, mandating minutes per academic content area. Teachers were told to schedule the school day to mimic a “normal” school day. Teachers were required to allocate

significantly less time to the increasingly important mental and social emotional learning of their students and more time teaching to the test. Many teachers spoke about the inequity of grading students during a pandemic. District although many students did not have a home, internet or device to access school. As communities began to expand their ideas of schooling, CPS doubled down on “normal” punitive grading as their priority during the pandemic. Teachers and community members realized school was no longer defined by the school walls as CPS gradually pushed everyone back into the building.

As the 2021 school year crept closer, kids were being incentivized to return in person for “optional” standardized testing and gradually transitioned students back to the school building for hybrid learning plans. It wasn’t long before CPS began to threaten educators (by locking them out of their Google accounts) back into the buildings prior to any safety agreements with CTU. Teachers did not feel safe and many school communities voiced their concerns about the unsafe plans to reopen schools. Despite this fight, CTU reached an agreement with CPS, ending the threat of another teacher strike and forcing nearly all teachers back into the buildings, many prior to full vaccination.

Why was remote learning removed as an option? We had an opportunity to radically change the old system. “What about the kids who are bullied? Kids who have experienced racism?” Dani asked.

Laura, a sixth-grade CPS teacher, said, “Racism, homophobia, anti immigrant, etc. … many kids felt safer at home.” This one-size-fits-all approach, to mandate in-

22 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ NOVEMBER 11, 2021

person learning, was not created to serve neurodivergent kids, teachers who are immunocompromised, or high schoolers who need to work during the day to support their family. This plan is not to do what is best for all teachers and students, this is a mandated in person learning plan to uphold the same systems that have always existed in CPS. If we want different results in an ever-evolving world, we have to move forward differently.

The start of the 2021-2022 school year was like no other before. CPS mandated in-person learning for teachers and students during the ongoing pandemic. For example, second grade students had never routinely learned in a school building before. “This year has been the most surreal I have ever experienced,” one fourth-grade teacher said. “Tell me why, on the first day of school, I had a network observer.”

Principals and assistant principals answer directly to network chiefs, who primarily come to “underperforming” schools to observe teachers and students.

The transition back to in-person learning has been riddled with instances of the district pushing pacing of standardized curriculum and testing on teachers and students. CPS continues to invest in the “curriculum-industrial complex,” both creating the problem of learning loss and deeming themselves the only solution. As Dani said, “We haven’t got to small group work in person this year because the way they did the schedule, we are constantly moving and testing kids. We are not getting through the curriculum because we have to do more mandated testing.”

Teachers have also been tasked with allocating a large amount of time toward enforcing physical safety measures such as mask wearing and distancing. “We have to spend so much time on masks and distancing,” Dani said. I cannot even express how difficult it is with Pre-K and Kindergarten. … Kids are supposed to be able to have sensory experiences, now we are teaching them to get away from each other. Half of our day is spent on that.

Where is the teaching?”

In addition to the curricular stress, the physical and mental health of our

students and staff is also an ever-looming stressor. From teachers being forced to teach from their classroom while their whole class is remote to the fact that COVID-19 sick days were taken away, teachers are feeling the harm. “This is the worst profession, I feel safer at Jewel.

Where is the support when we are doing this in a pandemic?” Dani said.

Since mandated in-person learning began, “how do we actually tune into how we are feeling?” Laura said. “We have had such a traumatic year. Kids are struggling with engagement because their systems are overwhelmed. We are not giving them the space they need. We need time and space.”

“We are expected to be so much more [than teachers],” the fourth-grade teacher said. “This past week we did data analysis of our gradebook and Star 360 data analysis, when I could be doing so many better things with my time to support children.” It is time we stop seeing teachers and students as data points and tertiary stakeholders in education. CPS could use the $135 million for the Skyline Curriculum, or the $11 million budgeted for CPD officers to patrol schools, on investing directly in teachers and students to transform the system.

The educational-industrial complex, which includes the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) Reach assessments, NWEA MAP Assessments, SAT and the Follett for Aspen Grading and Data Tracking, have set CPS priorities for far too long. These backward priorities keep us fighting one another for that elusive “top spot.” Teachers are given the impossible task of helping everyone to succeed in a system that is designed for people to fail. A return to business as usual with mandated in-person learning is also a return to the racial and economic learning gaps that CPS produces year after year. Hilario, a special education teacher said, “The district really missed an opportunity to transform the education system.” Jenna Forton is a former CPS Teacher and writer. This is her first time contributing to the Weekly.

LIT

T

Our thoughts in exchange for yours.

h e Exchange is The Weekly’s poetry corner, where a poem or piece of writing is presented with a prompt. Readers are welcome to respond to the prompt with original poems, and pieces may be featured in the next issue of the Weekly. ¬

THIS WEEK'S PROMPT: DESCRIBE SOMETHING OR SOMEWHERE YOU FIND BEAUTY DESPITE ADVERSITY.

This could be a poem, a stream-ofconsciousness piece, or a short story.

Submissions can be sent to bit.ly/ssw-exchange or via email to chima.ikoro@southsideweekly.com.

Sans Fleur

by Chima “Naira” Ikoro Gymnosperms are plants that don’t make flowers or fruits to hold their seeds.

There’s a bunch of types of gymnosperms, One classification is Conifers— cypress trees, cedar trees, pine trees, usually having needles instead of flat leaves, for example.

Gymnosperms make cones; hard, wood-like casings that hold their seeds.

But no fruit. No flowers.

There’s one coniferous tree that will not agree.

The Yew. It creates a faux fruit—a soft red flesh that encases its cones.

The “fruit” is bright and alluring, but the Yew is a highly poisonous plant.

While that red casing is technically edible, the bark, the leaves, the cone that’s disguised as a seed, every other part of this tree will kill you.

For some reason, I still wonder what it tastes like.

Even though it’s not really a fruit, just Yew,

trying to present as something you’re not— a gymnosperm, luring lost hikers and small animals to your needles, looking like fruit, tasting like fate.

Yew and I could both ask ourselves; was it worth it?

Me, curious enough to know a Yew could kill me, but even more curious about how Yew fake it so well, and why, and Yew, channeling all of yourself into creating fruit you weren’t meant to grow, so much so, it makes your entire being poisonous.

But Yew didn’t choose to be a conifer—if Yew could pick, you’d be a peach tree, with a real pit and a real seed.

So I lay in the shade of your needles, love them like they’re leaves, acknowledge how hard you are trying and taste what you made for me. So if I die here, it’s not as if I didn’t know. In fact, knowing was just that worthwhile.

Chima Ikoro is the community organizing editor for the Weekly. She last wrote about two artists from Roseland.

NOVEMBER 11, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 23

LIT

Featured below is a reader response to a previous prompt.

Unprecedented Times

by Imani Joseph

A phrase used by white capitalist corporations to describe the Black liberation struggle rising up and the ongoing global pandemic. It means profit has been lost. Revolution trapped in a blink. It is a phrase used by white institutions to pacify a lynching. Small talk a genocide. This phrase is the second sentence of a company’s diversity and inclusion statement. The white capitalist repeats “unprecedented times” to preface their exploitative business plans. Multinational shoe companies, sports teams, and private prisons use it in press releases. Private, predominantly white colleges and universities use this phrase as they send tuition bills.

Unprecedented is niggas smashing in grocery store windows. Stealing carts of toilet tissue and soap. Mothers stealing milk and diapers. Pigs chasing young men with mattresses strapped to their cars.

Unprecedented times is niggas tearing down Christopher Columbus statues.

They wonder if the consumer will bite the hand that starves them.

What profit is there in revolution?

The white capitalist thinks I know your suffering and will distract you. I know your suffering, and I want to profit off it. People are dead in the streets, and we want you to go to work/school, and act like nothing has happened. We will never talk about it. We must never talk about it. You must continue to die, and grieve, and work. That is normal. Nothing will change.

Nothing has happened but elusive, unprecedented times. Quirky woke times of satirical third-wall artistic authenticity. It means “I see your suffering but my white ass does not really care.” The benevolent master.

dismantle white supremacy for me? Because it feels like I’m still doing all the work.

What will the capitalist give me? What will white people give me? Because all you do is take up space. In these unprecedented times white people should learn to be quiet.

The benevolent master and his diversity emails give me nothing. This phrase is a hollow condolences. It is saying “move the fuck on, nigga.” Move the fuck on and act normal.

Move the fuck on and give me your money. Buy this product, support this corporation, enroll in this digital plantation.

All the souls we have mourned this year are unprecedented circumstances.

Never-before-seen overflowing ICUs. Never-before-seen footage of a pig murdering a nigga on camera.

What does a nigga look like in time?

The most intersectional are always the ones asked to compromise, And I normally do.

I get lost in time, my body warped by history.

I blinked and my hell of a year, Summer of burning, Mobilization fever, Turned into an uncomfortable outburst That they must confine to nicety.

When Lori Lightfoot increases funding of CPD by $200 million City council is empowering maskless pigs to slaughter children.

That is a declaration of war.

How do you define these times? Whose names went viral first? Which city burned the longest? This public display of Black liberation and rebellion is not a singular instance in time. The U.S. is not a police state by accident. It is intentional and evil. To say Black insurgency is just a radical facade based in aesthetics is dismissive, disrespectful, and a tool of white supremacy. A tool of white supremacy is the disorientation of history.

The intentional deconstruction of culture.

“During these unprecedented times we cannot proceed with business as usual when the health and welfare of our residents and communities are at risk,” the mayor said while unveiling her 2022 Budget plan.

Police funding amounting to 1.9 billion dollars.

In other words Swallow your discomfort and get back to work nigga.

It is a parasite. Infects your land. Poisons the water. Poisons the heart. Plants the poison in your stomach. So you grow around anti-Blackness till it's festering in your gut. Rotting your roots. White supremacy has Black people stuck in time. This country burning is not a shock to me. It has been prophesied.

Imani Joseph is a writer from Woodlawn. You can find her on Instagram @itsssssimaniiii!

Does acknowledgement give me rent? Does empathy buy me dinner? Will allyship

24 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ NOVEMBER 11, 2021

Scan to view the calendar online!

ILLUSTRATION BY THUMY PHAN

BULLETIN City Council Committee on Finance Meeting

Online, Monday, November 15, 10:00am.

Free. chicityclerk.com The committee will meet remotely to consider financing of the Chicago Lighthouse Residences, a multi-family affordable housing development on the Near West Side. Written comments will be accepted at Owen.Brugh@ cityofchicago.org until 3:00pm on November 12. Commenters may also call in on the day of the meeting to 1-833548-0282. ( Jim Daley)

City Council Committee on License and Consumer Protection Meeting

Online, Monday, November 15, 2:00pm.

Free. chicityclerk.com The committee will meet remotely.

Public comment may be submitted to marye.phillips@cityofchicago.org or to carl.erickson@cityofchicago.org until 2:00pm on November 15. Instructions on remote attendance and a meeting agenda will be posted on the City Clerk's website. ( Jim Daley)

City Council Committee on Committees and Rules Meeting

Online, Monday, November 15, 3:00pm.

Free. chicityclerk.com The committee will hold the third of

three public hearings on the City's 2021 redistricting process, which will redraw ward maps. The window for written public comment for the hearings closed on November 8. Instructions for remote attendance will be posted on the City Clerk's website. ( Jim Daley)

City Council Committee on Zoning, Landmarks, and Building Standards Meeting

Online, Tuesday, November 16, 10:00am.

Free. chicityclerk.com The committee will meet to discuss proposed zoning changes and applications for planned developments.

Questions may be sent to nicole. wellhausen@cityofchicago.org and raymond.valadez@cityofchicago.org. The agenda and instructions for participation in public comment will be posted on the City Clerk's website. ( Jim Daley)

Love & Nappyness Hair Care Drive

Various locations, Wednesday, November 17, Free. instagram.com/loveandnappyness The Love & Nappyness Hair Care Drive is a community service initiative that promotes community wellness through natural hair care. Donations will go to Ignite and St. Leonards Ministry. A full list of drop-off locations is available on the Instagram @loveandnappyness.

Volunteer opportunities are also available. (Chima Ikoro)

City Council Meeting

City Hall, 121 N. LaSalle St., Wednesday, November 17, 10:00am. Free. chicityclerk.com The full City Council will meet. Agenda and instructions for public comment and online and in-person attendance will be posted on the City Clerk's website. ( Jim Daley)

City Council Public Safety Committee Meeting

Online, Friday, November 19, 1:00pm.

Free. chicityclerk.com The committee will meet remotely.

Written public comment may be sent to Committeeonpublicsafety@ cityofchicago.org until 12pm on November 18. Instructions for attendance and the meeting agenda will be posted on the City Clerk's website. ( Jim Daley)

Pilsen Food Pantry (Despensa De Comida Pilsen) Friendsgiving Jam Pilsen Food Pantry, 1850 S. Throop St., Sunday, November 21, 5:00pm–9:00pm.

Suggested donation. instagram.com/pilsen_food_pantry

Pilsen Food Pantry invites the community, friends, and local musicians to its Thanksgiving fundraiser. There will be food, drinks, live music, games, raffles and more! There is a $10 suggested donation ($5 for musicians and free for pantry volunteers). All ages are welcome.

(Chima Ikoro)

Speak Your Peace Live

Lumber Studios, 2147 S. Lumber St., Saturday, November 27, 8:00pm– 12:00pm. $13. instagram.com/fourtunehouse Speak Your Peace Live is a special event curated by Fourtunehouse, a creative company founded by young artists from the South Side. The event will feature live music, and headlining performers including Kai Crewsade and Senite, an interactive art installation, and DJ sets

by Jay Ziah and DJ Stimmy. The event is sponsored by Jon Basil Tequila. Tickets will be available via Fourtunehouse's instagram. (Chima Ikoro)

EDUCATION CPS Vaccine Awareness Day

Multiple locations, Friday, November 12, 9:00am–4:00pm. Free. bit.ly/3occPbv On November 12, classes will be cancelled and CPS's Youth and Family COVID-19 Vaccination Clinics will operate between 9am and 4pm, giving vaccines to children aged 5-11 years. The South Side locations where CPS will offer vaccines are Richards High School and Chicago Vocational. (Maddie Parrish)

November Chicago Board of Education Meeting

CPS Loop Office, 42 W. Madison Street, Garden Level, Board Room, Wednesday, November 17, 10:30am. Free. cpsboe.org Advanced registration for speakers opens

NOVEMBER 11, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 25

CALENDAR on Monday, November 15 at 10:30am.

You can register at www.cpsboe.org or by phone at (773) 553-1600. Speakers will have the option to participate in person or virtually via an electronic platform. The public will have access to the meeting via live stream at cpsboe.org.

(Maddie Parrish)

IMMIGRATION Making Mexican Chicago: Author Talk

Online, Tuesday, November 16, 5:00pm.

Free. bit.ly/3bV7ek8 Mike Amezcua, assistant professor of history at George Washington University and the author of the upcoming book Making Mexican Chicago, will take part in an in-person and livestreamed conversation. He will speak to how working-class Chicago neighborhoods like Pilsen and La Villita became sites of upheaval and renewal after WWII as Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans attempted to build new communities in the face of white resistance and racial capitalism that cast them as perpetual aliens. Register online. ( Jackie Serrato)

ARTS African Diaspora: Chicago | An Exhibition Curated by Gallery Guichard

One Two Pru, 180 N. Stetson Ave., Thursday, November 11, 6:00am–8:00pm.

Free. bit.ly/2Yqkev2 Gallery Guichard, located on the first floor of the Bronzeville Artist Lofts, prides itself as being a safe haven for fine-art enthusiasts looking to immerse themselves in rich culture that touches the soul. Led by gallery owners and artists Andre and Frances Guichard, the gallery’s mission is to expose patrons to multicultural artists specializing in the African Diaspora. Now with One Two Pru, Gallery Guichard seeks to create an even larger platform for underrepresented artists and introduce them to a host of potential collectors.

(Isabel Nieves)

La Santa Cecilia

Joe's Bar, 940 W. Weed St., Friday, November 12, 8:30pm. $36. lasantaceciliachicago.com The Los Angeles-based band has amassed a fanbase in Chicago, and as an extension of the Frida Festival that took place in Pilsen last weekend, the Mexican-American band will be performing at Joe's Bar. The group plays a blend of cumbia, bossa nova, Latin rock and boleros. Must be twenty-one or older. ( Jackie Serrato)

Paint Your Own Alebrije with Puech Ikots' Carlos Orozco

Online, Saturday, November 13, 12:00pm– 1:30pm. $10-$35. bit.ly/3rkP1Ua Learn how to make your own handcarved alebrije with artist and Indigenous activist Carlos Orozco from Puech Ikots, an Indigenous arts collective of eighty families based in Oaxaca, Mexico. Their mission is to preserve their traditional artistic traditions, especially the creation of copal wood alebrijes in traditional Oaxacan style, while also learning about their culture, sustainability practices of Indigenous peoples, and the beautiful artistic traditions of Mexico's Isthmus region. This event recurs every Saturday through the end of the year. (Alma Campos)

Pilsen Vendor Market

Pilsen Art House, 1756 W. 19th St., Sunday, November, 14, 12:00pm–5:00pm.

Free. bit.ly/3m9yMID This family-friendly weekly market invites artists and vendors to sell their wares such as candles, jewelry, woodwork, apparel, handmade goods, and more. There are both indoor and outdoors space, and masks are required throughout the event. (Alma Campos)

Free Painting Sessions

Pilsen Arts and Community House, 1637 W. 18th St., Tuesday, November 16, 12:00pm–4:00pm. Free. https://bit.ly/3mXGWUJ Join artist Julia Kay Morrison for weekly painting sessions designed to help you

26 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ NOVEMBER 11, 2021

tap into your imagination. Materials will be provided. Participants should feel free to bring ideas, photographs, images, and sketches that inspire or speak to them.

(Isabel Nieves)

Young Creatives Open Studio (Children's Art Class)

Local Color Arts Studio, 2151 W. 79th St., Sunday, November 14, 1:00pm–3:00pm. $25. bit.ly/3bOJMoV Embrace your inner artist so your true colors can show! No matter if you are a beginner or a seasoned creative, you will walk away with a masterpiece of your own making. Experience the "Maker" movement: Children are planning, modeling and creating things from their own ideas using a variety of objects and mediums. Students are free to bring their imagination to life. Children get to do three activities in one class. (Isabel Nieves)

Dawtas|Mirror, Mirror Performance

Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave., Saturday, November 16, 4:00pm– 6:00pm. Free. bit.ly/3EWJkBh Join the Hyde Park Art Center for a hybrid in-person/virtual collaborative performance led by Jamaican artist Yasmin Spiro. Dawtas|Mirror, Mirror brings together dancers, performers, and sound artists performing with and within Dawtas-a series of sculptures the artist has been creating for over fifteen years. The performance will be forty minutes long, followed by an open reggae dance session. Register online.

(Maddie Parrish)

FOOD & LAND Plant Chicago Farmers Market Davis Square Park, 4430 S. Marshfield Ave., Saturday, November 13, 11:00am– 3:00pm. Free. bit.ly/3A2TBtd

Plant Chicago hosts a weekly farmers market through November 15 featuring locally grown produce and flowers, plus honey, coffee, baked goods, and more.

The nonprofit also runs a community composting site where residents can drop

off their food scraps. Link card purchases are matched up to $25. (Martha Bayne)

Austin Community Market

5713 W. Chicago Ave., Saturday, November 13, 10:00am–3:00pm. Free. healthauthority.org Enjoy food and crafts sold by local vendors—including Forty Acres Fresh Market and Thank God 4 Raw & Vegan Treats—along with live entertainment at this weekend community market organized by the WestSide Health Authority. The market is seeking licensed vendors and musicians; email menewman@healthauthority.org or call (773) 378-1878 for vendor/performance opportunities. Market runs Saturdays and Sundays through December 19. ( Jim Daley)

After School Meals

Chicago Public Library - Back of the Yards Branch, 2111 W. 47th St., Friday, November 12, 3:30pm–4:30pm. Free. bit.ly/3bRfqSq Free after-school meals will be provided by the Greater Chicago Food Depository for kids and teens. Meals must be eaten on site. (Alma Campos)

McKinley Park Birdwatching

McKinley Park Field House, 2210 W. Pershing Rd., Saturday, November 13, 8:00am–10:00am. Free. bit.ly/3EXxpDn The Chicago Audubon Society invites all to enjoy birdwatching at McKinley Park. With over seven acres of native plantings, the park is a fruitful oasis for currently migrating and resident birds alike, such as goldfinches, waxings, catbirds, flycatchers and more. Wearing a mask and maintaining a social distance of six feet is mandatory. All are welcome to bring their own binoculars, but extras will be available. (Alma Campos)

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