Building Community in Latinx Chicago and DePaul: Conversation with LALS Faculty Dr. Jesse Mumm

Jesse Mumm is a cultural anthropologist interested in gentrification, race and racism, Latino community formations in Chicago, and the intersections of latinidad and whiteness. He has articles in CENTRO Journal and Focaal: The Journal of Global Anthropology and is collaborating on a comparative GIS mapping project on race, housing and property value, and a digital ethnography of online gentrification discourses in Humboldt Park.

Interview Conducted by Sara Luz Torres

When did you start working at DePaul?

I was an adjunct my first year, then I became term faculty the following year. So altogether, it's been nine years. I'll be having my little 10-year anniversary soon. Before arriving at DePaul, I was part of so many conversations across the city. I tried to introduce myself to everybody working on anything related to urban development, Chicago neighborhoods, race and racism, and issues around gentrification.

I was there when a couple of friends of mine at UIC started forming this collective, collaborative research group. It was about all kinds of forms of displacement, and I really enjoyed that. We hosted a bunch of sessions that were collaborations between community leaders, people working on issues of immigration, deportation, evictions, gentrification, and anything that was about people being forced to move in some way, shape, or form, and we saw a lot of correlations in our work. We hosted one event at the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture. I had lots of great conversations with folks there, so when this adjunct position opened here at DePaul, Lourdes Torres put the word out. Amalia Payares recommended me right away and said “Oh, you should hire this guy. He's really good. He really knows his stuff about the community, he's done all this work,” but I knew Lourdes because she was good friends with my close friend Roberto Sanabria. We had drinks together in Roberto's gigantic apartment Roberto and I had worked together at the Puerto Rican Cultural Center in the 90s.

Is there a lecture that you specifically can think of that you love to teach and that gets students fired up? What do you often tell students who want to get involved?

I'll talk about the topic from this week, which I titled “Living Against Gentrification.” The reading was on the crucible of this long battle over space, how people grow up in neighborhoods they love, where kids play on the street. They go out the door and look for a paleta or an elote, and how all those things they love about the place-making in their communities disappear over time.

One piece was about the Lower East Side by Caitlin Cahill, and one was Merida M. Rua’s work. She has a book called A Grounded Identidad: Making New Lives in Chicago’s Puerto Rican Neighborhoods about Logan Square and all the issues surrounding her family. The book then extends outward to the community, centering on the people living and dealing with it.

That was the focus of my piece, “Stomping Ground: Living Against Gentrification in Humboldt Park,” which is coming out in Diálogo later this year. It focuses on two incredible storytellers I interviewed: Roslyn Velasquez and Rafael Lugo. They describe conditions in their neighborhoods with the depth of insight and analysis real analysis just phrased in casual talk.

I see students get excited thinking about those undegreed scholars who are out there around us in the world. As someone who teaches people to go out and talk to people, that gets me excited because then they start submitting interviews with people that, up until that moment, they might not have thought of as an expert in life but they are. Sometimes the expert is their mom, or someone they've known or lives in their building. They get excited about bringing that to class. My own teaching around this is changing too, and I'm trying with two classes this year more and more to have students gather things and then share them with each other.

I see students get excited thinking about those undegreed scholars who are out there around us in the world.

Where do you get the inspiration for this style of teaching? How does this relate to your personal research?

I wouldn't have gotten into anthropology if I hadn't been an English teacher at an alternative high school that was completely activist in its outlook and approach. I wouldn't have done that if I hadn't been involved in spoken word performance poetry and hip-hop. I did that when I was a late teen. By the end of that, as I was thinking about what to do with my life, I was thinking about how spoken words can transform people's lives.

If you listen to your life course, those things push you towards the very next step in your life in a really dialectical way I couldn't have guessed at any stage that it would lead me into anthropology and teaching I don't know where exactly it goes next, but all the issues that came out of it matter, like belonging, claims to space, and how people find their way in this country.

All of that led me in a roundabout way to a new research project in Kankakee County, and this came out of our own interests. My wife Lily and I bought a cottage with two other couples on the river near some forest. It's beautiful. Part of the wetlands that's just an hour South of Chicago, and for about a year, I didn't know what it was that was obsessing me with learning the history of that area, specifically on Black native and Latino history of Kankakee County. Also, their intersections and how these communities find each other, share space, and collaborate in majority-white rural America.

There I was in Kankakee, just playing in the water with my son, boating, and examining these beautiful terrains of Savannah and Prairie, and then it started coming back to me. Everyone I tell this to thinks I've lost my mind because, I mean, it's nothing to do with gentrification. It's nothing to do with Chicago neighborhoods, but to me, it's some of the same stuff.

Something unique is happening more in Chicago and Kankakee; Latinos are no longer staying away from Black neighborhoods. That does not mean they have conquered all of their internal racism or antiblackness, but something has changed in the next generation they are building community. They’re sometimes having conflicts, but they are moving into Englewood. They're moving into the parts of the Back of the Yards that are Black. It's interesting that the next generation could see some kinds of partnerships arising that people are still just talking about on an organizational level happening on a block level.

Dr. Jesse Mumm

Quick segway: You’ve spent time in Ireland. What was that like? How does it relate to your research interests?

I spent a year in Ireland, and this was really because of my own inspiration from ten years of working with Puerto Rican, Latino, Mexican, and Black teenagers and helping them think through issues of their identity growing up, families, migration, and community through writing about them because that's the stuff that was most relevant to people.

My students were challenging me as I was in my late 20s. “What do you know about your origins, Jesse? What do you know about where you're from?” And I'd be like, “I read some books about Ireland, but I didn't grow up in an Irish neighborhood.” I grew up in Logan Square, where it was 70% Latino, which it isn't now, of course My closest friends when I was a kid were Puerto Rican.

I came to the conclusion that I wanted to live in Ireland long enough that it would become normal for me. I wanted to understand its ways and not just visit it or read about it. I had already visited Ireland three times, but I didn't want to stay with my family. We have a farm on the West Coast and County Mayo and more family members who live in Dublin. I wanted to find another place, another community, where I could continue to do activist work. I spent half a year working in Derry at a place called the Pat Finucane Center, which did human rights work in the wake of all this horrible violence sponsored by the British Government. That was 2000/2001. I spent the other half of the year in Galway, on the West Coast, working with the Galway One World Center, which is their one-stop activist center. At the time, they mainly did a lot of work around refugees and asylum seekers I spoke on panels about immigration in the US. I spoke at this gigantic welcoming event for migrants, but mostly I just did everyday work trying to hook people up with apartments, and I was the go-between.

Our final question: Are you still writing poetry?

Why do you want to make me cry? I wrote a poem last year just one I still write in my journal quite a bit I did something else. I went through all my old creative writing and put together a collection of about 100 pages that I thought was the best. I don't know what in the world I'm thinking of doing with it, but I want to at least type it all up.

It's pretty amazing. I got this job here at DePaul, and then everything in my life got better. I found the love of my life, bought a house, and had a baby. Then, she got elected to the Illinois House. I still write, and I would like to write more creative stuff because that was always my joy.

I had a friend of mine, John Cologne, whom I grew up with in Logan Square. He challenged me to write a poem, and he was going to do an art piece, which we were going to share with each other because that's what we loved so much when we were teenagers. So I wrote a poem and sent it to him. He sent me a photo of a piece he did that week. It was great.