(Holly Zaharchuk)

You won’t find any vegetables on this menu. The distinct scent and hushed bubbling of deep fryers in Troha’s Shrimp and Chicken invite you into this mom-and-pop style joint–and immediately you know you’re in for a fried food feast. The menu board glows behind the counter, featuring crispy confections from frog legs to jalapeno poppers, and a glass display case offers a preview of the coming meal. Troha’s décor reflects the humbleness and familiarity of its food, with a collage of movie star portraits and nautical tchotchkes on its walls.

Troha’s has been a family institution in Little Village since 1920, serving up piping hot carry-out eats to their loyal customers. Stepping inside this place is reminiscent of the classic greasy spoon diner, without frills or pretentiousness; but the absence of seating and the presence of styrofoam take-out containers remind you that you’re meant to be eating on the go. The friendly waitstaff, greeting customers with a smile and speedy service, also captured that diner feel.

As suggested by the restaurant’s name, Troha’s knows a thing or two about shrimp and chicken–both were perfectly fried with a crisp cornmeal crust outside and succulent meat inside. Both items, however, left my fellow diners and me in want of seasoning. The lack of spices, let alone salt, was a recurring theme as we tasted our way through the fried fare. Neither my companions nor I were daring enough to attempt the fried frog legs, but the jalapeno poppers were a hit–delightfully crunchy on the outside with a kick of spice and a healthy dose of soft cream cheese inside.

It was obvious from one bite of Troha’s food that the kitchen really mastered the technique of frying.  Surprisingly then, the French fries were a low point of the meal, since they appeared to have been bought precut and ready to be fried without any other preparations. They were soggy and bland; however, the catfish, as with the jalapenos and shrimp, was tender with a—you guessed it—crunchy coating. The overall lack of flavor was alleviated by the array of sauces, including mild, cocktail, hot, and tartar sauce. The tartar sauce was simple, yet balanced between tangy and creamy; and when I combined a bit of catfish with some of Troha’s coleslaw, the result was true seaside bliss. The cold cabbage maintained its natural crunch, offset by the soft fish and its hot cornmeal crust, with the acidity of the slaw adding a punch of flavor to complete the bite.

Our meal at Troha’s Shrimp and Chicken had been decent, well-executed, but not ambitious. I suppose ambition isn’t relevant for a joint so committed to capturing the simple pleasure of American comfort food. But in this context, I was searching for that one missing element in each thing I tried, which would have created that spirit of down-home, unapologetic food. Maybe I should’ve gotten the frog legs. 4151 W. 26th St.  Monday, 2pm-9pm; Tuesday-Thursday, 10am-10pm; Friday-Saturday, 11am-11pm; Sunday, 12pm-8pm. (773) 521-7847. chicagoshrimphouse.com

The gore on screen did not seem as out of place as perhaps it should have, projected in a fourth-floor room of La Villita Community Church in Little Village. Its viewers ranged in age from five to fifty-plus. Except for one older woman who sighed and turned away from the screen as the blows intensified, no one seemed fazed by the fighting.

In this nondenominational church, boxing is associated not with violence but with peace. The basement is home to the Chicago Youth Boxing Center, a place known for promoting restraint, respect, and confidence in neighborhood youth, including those with troublesome pasts. Victor Rodriguez, the pastor of the church and a CYBC board member, later told the story of a neighborhood teenager who walked away mid-street fight with another adolescent. Rodriguez related the boy’s decision, “I just realized I could take him,” the boy said, since he knew how to box. “It wouldn’t be fun.”

The Alvarado fight was not the main attraction of the viewing party. Although it was nine o’clock when he came on, more than half of the chairs remained empty. Most of the people present were volunteers from the church who sold tickets, directed people to the viewing room, and set up the homemade nachos and gorditas. The highly anticipated fight between world champions Manny Pacquiao and Juan Manuel Márquez did not start until eleven. As the hour approached, people gradually trickled in. By the time the boxers touched gloves, the energy was high and the whoops and cheers were unified as everyone in the room turned their attention to the screen.

Before the fight, board member Karen May went to the front of the room to thank people for coming, reminding them about the raffle. All proceeds went to supporting the center. May recognized the three CYBC members in the room, making it immediately clear that the volunteers, board members, and community allies at the viewing party outnumbered the kids they came to support. But in a neighborhood where violence too often spills off the screen and onto the streets, a program that teaches kids discipline and self-esteem is, as May said, “very fortunate to have a lot of support.”

Maggie Sivit

[Show as slideshow]

Many South Side residents are used to long waits for buses. But for members of five Southwest Side neighborhoods, the wait is going on its 14th year.  In April 2008, the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, as part of their 30-year plan for the city, held a series of meetings in Little Village, where residents vocalized their need for better transit. Soon afterwards, the community decided it was time to restore east-west bus service along a main commercial corridor in their neighborhood that was cut by the Chicago Transit Authority in 1997. Organizers from Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO) met with community members who both remembered a historic 31st Street bus and expressed interest in bringing back the service. They worked with the CTA to locate a source of funding. That summer, the CTA received a federal grant earmarked for the 31st Street bus totaling $1,067,659.

But today, there is no bus along 31st Street. In the neighborhoods the street cuts through—Bronzeville, Armour Square, Bridgeport, McKinley Park, and Little Village—east-west bus service is lacking. Between Cermak Road and 47th Street, Chicago’s grid system of bus service breaks down, leaving large areas of white space on the CTA system map and roughly 200,000 people without a direct route. The #35, #39, and #60 buses provide service along 35th, 39th, and parts of 26th Streets, but the #35 and #39 terminate near Kedzie Avenue, and the #60 diverts north to the loop at Western Avenue. No bus provides a straight route from the lake to Chicago’s western boundary. “You have to hopscotch—go past where you need to go to get where you’re going,” says Bridgeport resident and community activist Maureen Sullivan.

The grant the CTA received in 2008 as part of the Job Access Reverse Commute (JARC) program of the U.S. Department of Transportation was a victory, but it came with a catch. The program requires that 50 percent of the transportation project’s operational budget be provided by state and local funds.

This has proven to be a major roadblock for the 31st Street bus campaign. The implementation and operations costs for the proposed route are estimated by the CTA to be approximately $2 million, not including the portion of the expense to be covered by fares. The CTA must match the $1 million grant in order for the bus to become a reality, at least for the trial period. In an e-mailed statement, the agency stated, “Currently, there are no local match funds identified to implement the project.”  Residents have waited for this to change for the past three years.

The CTA has drafted a route to connect to the Red and Orange ‘L’ Lines as well as the new Rock Island district Metra stop at 35th Street, though the proposal has not been finalized. It would provide transportation for working, transit-dependent residents of the West and near South Side to major workplaces such as Domino Sugar, Prima Plastics, and Dearborn Produce. Teens and families could access parks and the 31st Street beach. The route would end at Cicero Avenue, traveling north a few blocks through a commercial center to Target. LVEJO has also proposed that the route extend north on its eastern end, running express on Lakeshore Drive to McCormick Place and the Museum Campus. Mike Pitula, a community organizer and LVEJO’s director of public transit, claims that currently, “this area has no direct bus access from the West or South Side.”

Although the grant specifies that the 31st Street route provide access to jobs, Pitula argues that this service is important for two more reasons: to contribute to environmental efforts and to create safe routes to local schools.

The proposed bus route would service De La Salle Institute and Illinois Institute of Technology in Bronzeville, as well as Holden Elementary School in Bridgeport. And, more urgently, the 31st Street bus would provide safe transportation to a school in dire need of it. According to a survey conducted by LVEJO, Little Village-Lawndale High School is the only high school in Chicago that does not have CTA service within 2.5 blocks. According to Pitula, approximately one-quarter of the students who attend LVLHS must cross a gang boundary while walking to school. Violence has spiked along 31st Street since 2009. One of two closest CTA stops to the high school is on Cicero Avenue, but Pitula says there have been reports of young women being sexually harassed after school on a nearby bridge. “While it wouldn’t be a magic bullet, having a bus route would be one way to prevent these interactions from happening,” he says.

Schoolchildren aren’t the only population the bus would impact. Older residents have struggled with the lack of bus service for a long time. Senior citizens with limited mobility, who can’t get to checkups at Mercy Hospital or to the senior club at Piotrowski Park, have been particularly vocal in the 31st Street bus debate. Tom Gaulke, a pastor at the First Trinity Church in Bridgeport has heard his parishioners complain and summarized their dissatisfaction: “all these little old ladies at the senior home can never make it out anywhere.”

In May 2011, after three years, LVEJO decided to take action once again. “This spring, we realized there was a deadline coming up,” said Pitula, “you don’t just get a grant and sit on it forever.” The CTA claimed in an August community meeting and in an e-mail statement this past week that the $1 million will not expire. But according to the Federal Transit Authority’s website, JARC funding is available only for a total of three years after apportionment.

According to Pitula, the CTA has applied for a one-year extension of the grant. “It’s a fairly routine procedure,” he says, but the current phase in LVEJO’s campaign is to put pressure on the Federal Transit Administration to approve the extension. They expect to hear back before the end of the year.

This summer, working under pressure of an imminent deadline, the campaign expanded to encompass other communities along the route. In fact, some groups were already vocalizing their concerns about the bus route’s progress independently from LVEJO. According to Pitula, the campaign began in two places simultaneously three years ago: Little Village and Facebook. The Facebook page was created by lifelong resident of Bridgeport and video store owner Joe Trutin as part of his campaign for state representative in 2009. He and the Little Village activists have since joined forces, with Trutin rallying residents of Bridgeport and McKinley Park. He’s also taken on the task of gathering data to bolster their case—over the last few months, Trutin has been measuring the width of streets in attempt to refute one resident’s claim that 31st Street is not wide enough for bus service. He and Pitula have fought all opposition, however small, but Trutin says only two members of these communities have publicly voiced it.

Though much of the organizing has been centered in Little Village and Bridgeport, the issue crosses many neighborhood boundaries and has engaged many people. In late August, the CTA held a meeting with community members at the McKinley Park library. In addition to residents of Little Village, Bridgeport and Chinatown, senior citizens from Armour Square and McKinley Park came to emphasize their dependency on transit. “We showed them that we were a diverse group of people who had a common goal,” says Connie Ma, who works at the Chinese American Service League in Chinatown. Many community organizations have signed on to the campaign, from church groups and cultural clubs to the more extreme Citizens Against Terrible Transit. Pitula expressed that his goal this summer was to build “a cross-town coalition composed of residents along this route,” and it appears he has been successful.

At one point in this process, some residents—bus drivers and mechanics who could contribute their skills to the community—tossed around the idea of providing their own bus service. Pitula summarized this project as a “worker self-managed bus cooperative” that would be organized by the Chicago chapter of the Industrial Workers of the World. “It would be a demonstration for the CTA, but also an alternative model of transit to provide work and service for people in the community,” he said. The idea, added Ma, would be “to utilize the people the CTA has laid off.” While progress on this alternative has stagnated over the past few months, the idea of an independent bus service is not foreign to Little Village. Pitula remembers a free shuttle service along 26th Street that was disconnected a few years ago—a single school bus that residents could flag at street corners, funded by advertisements on its exterior.

The push for a 31st Street bus is a fight to provide South Side residents with easier mobility, a need that other Chicagoans recognize. Sullivan, who lives and works in Bridgeport, points out that the major expressways are easily accessible from the near South Side, but there are many people in these neighborhoods who do not own cars and their movement is, as a consequence, limited to their own neighborhoods. To some extent, a 31st Street bus would unite the neighborhoods it serves and reduce this isolation. “Once people travel, they start exploring,” Trutin explains.

The people behind the 31st Street bus campaign realize that theirs is an uphill battle—to add a route at a time when CTA trends have tended towards increased fares and cutting service—but pressure on the CTA is building. The project has received letters of support from one state senator, two state representatives, and three aldermen, according to its Facebook page. The $1 million needed to implement this route is less than one tenth of one percent of the  CTA’s annual budget, but Pitula nonetheless has taken them at their word that the agency does not have the identified funds.

Residents of these communities will not stop fighting for the 31st Street bus—some have already been fighting for 14 years. In the meantime, local organizations are simply asking for acknowledgement by transit officials. The CTA claims that service along 31st Street was originally cut in 1997 due to low ridership, but Ma argues that the people who the decision affected were the people who needed it most. “If one person needs the bus more than someone who has a car, shouldn’t it be more important that the first person receives this service?” she asks. While a bus would be a major victory on many levels, the immediate issue is a lack of communication between the CTA and the people it serves.

“We just want a confirmation that the CTA sympathizes with us on a human level,” Ma reflects, a sentiment she said many expressed at the August meeting. “But they kind of stared blankly at me.”

Claire Hungerford

The flashing disco lights signal that a musical performance is about to begin. An artist picks up the mic, singing one of his old Mexican favorites, barely even looking at the screen for the correct lyrics. People in the crowd begin to whistle and howl, some getting up from their tables to dance. After he warms up the mic, a person walks up from the bar to take the stage. It is Sunday night in Pilsen, and Simone’s Bar and Grill has come alive. It is karaoke night.

This tradition is part of a larger project, called the People’s Stage. The founder, Pablo Serrano, got interested in karaoke with a few friends at a party in 2005. For him, it was simply a way to get the wallflowers engaged. Since then, the artist, who is well known for his murals which decorate public walls all over the neighborhood, has discovered that singing, too, is a “vehicle to explore different traditions, different genres, different periods in time.”

He started the People’s Stage to prove that light-hearted social events like karaoke can promote the growing diversity of the neighborhood, which has been a little resistant to change.

Pilsen, with its deep immigrant roots, has seen its share of changes. But now settled families have to reckon with the fact that their neighborhood is becoming the home to a growing population of transplants from all over the city. Young Chicagoans and college students who attend classes in the nearby Loop have found a hip, artistic atmosphere in the neighborhood’s rich culture, and have been flocking in increasing numbers.

Lately the spotlight on the area has intensified—the Red Eye recently added Pilsen to its ‘hoods’ section—but the enthusiasm of its older residents hasn’t necessarily followed suit. The neighborhood, which is home to the National Museum of Mexican Art, is still for many a source of predominantly Latino art and culture. This past spring, a resident found and posted on the internet a sign in an abandoned factory with the warning “White Hipsters Get Out of Pilsen.”

Serrano believes that the rift in the community can be traced to a lack of dialogue between new and longtime residents. He explained that many view the up-and-coming district of Pilsen as “foreign to the community as a whole, which is struggling to affirm its Mexican-American identity”.

But Serrano, who was raised in Pilsen, hopes to change that through the social singing experience. The typical soundtrack in Simone’s, ranging from ’80s punk rock to South Side house, is aimed at the English listeners. However, during karaoke nights, “the Spanish songs are extremely well received by the Latinos in the bar,” says Serrano. “They’re like a blast of the past or a breath of fresh air to a Latino cultural identity.” And the Spanish words flashing across the prompter screen give non-Latinos the opportunity to feel engaged in new genres and cultures of music.

Serrano has big plans for the People’s Stage, hoping to build on its early success. He hopes the mic will one day turn to a broader range of talent that includes poets and other artists. The karaoke nights are currently held at multiple bars across Pilsen and Little Village, including Martin’s Corner Bar and Grill each Thursday and Caminos de Michoacan Bar every other Friday.

Simone’s sees a lot of regulars—people call the bartenders by name, and crack jokes with the waiters.  Karaoke adds a new dimension to their happy-hour meeting place. “All of a sudden you have a person that works a 9-to-5 that you didn’t think had a musical bone in their body go up there and blow up and you think, ‘wow,’ I didn’t know they could do that,” says Serrano.

This kind of camaraderie is exactly what the People’s Stage was designed for: belting out a ballad that a singer takes to heart, knowing that the crowd will join in on the refrain. The stage belongs to everyone.

“My joy comes from creating a space where our common humanity is affirmed as we sing music that was passed onto us by our parents,” says Serrano. “That make us move in our own ways so that we may feel like a part of the whole.”

Last Saturday upright citizens from around the city arrived to catch a glimpse of society’s outlaws in their “natural” habitat, the architecturally imposing zoo that holds them.

The Cook County Jail and Court House is the largest jail in the country, housing an average of 9,000 inmates daily. Incorporating large columns, Greek-inspired statues, and neoclassical architecture, when Cook County Jail was built in 1929 it represented yet another attempt for young Chicago to join the ranks of world-class cities, with the elegant architecture to prove it. Lieutenant Joseph Guinta, one of the tour guides who has worked at the jail for the past 22 years, is very proud of this architectural monument, referring to the structure as “the best built building in the country” on numerous occasions.

The courthouse is made of hand-cut Indiana limestone, the high ceilings are hand-painted in an intricate, geometric design, and brass fixtures are ubiquitous throughout the building. But while the exterior and the courthouse were extravagant structures with intricate, high-minded symbols of justice and wisdom, the interior of the maximum security Division I jail provided a stark contrast. The spaces for those on the inside are not nearly so luxurious.

The prison cells do not conform to state standards, Guinta said. But because the building is so old, the state of Illinois grants Cook County Jail a waiver every year. Each cell consists of two beds, a toilet, and a sink, but there is hardly any room for inmates to walk, even a few feet. The ceilings hang low, and there are no windows. Behind bars, tired inmates looked out. The tour guides felt that it would be safer for the tourists to only witness the behavior of the weaker, older inmates—the prisoners were all around 40 years-old. The visitors only got to peek into two of the prisoners’ quarters, but the rows of cells seemed to go on forever.

These quarters would be pretty terrible living conditions for even the most hardened criminals. But Cook County Jail only houses those accused of crimes who are awaiting trial, not convicts. Guinta, an obstinate believer in the justice and prison system said, “These people aren’t used to following the rules and regulations of society. What makes you think that they’re going to follow ours? We can barely manage them under these constraints. Imagine if these constraints didn’t exist.”

This weekend, for the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s Open House Chicago, the Martinez Funeral Home opened its doors for the first time to more than its usual coffins and mourners, showcasing its mid-20^th century architecture and, the main attraction, its embalming room.

Originally built in 1945 as the Frank Marik and Sons Funeral Home, the building continued in its funerary tradition when Manuel Martinez bought it in 2009. The original ornately carved wooden doors open into a lobby with high-beamed pastel ceilings, and calming wall décor. A painting titled “Quiet Getaway” hangs over the mantle of the stone fireplace, stained glass windows softly filter sunlight, and a drawing depicts a bald eagle silently soaring through a forest of pine trees, presumably a metaphor for escaping the confines of mortal life.

This soothing atmosphere and even the architectural history of the building belied  what the visitors really came to see: a glimpse at the secrets of the mortician’s trade. When asked his reasons for joining the funeral industry more than two decades ago, Martinez reflected for a bit and stated simply, “I was a paramedic for a long time, and I wanted to do something different.” They seem like opposite fields—helping keep people stay out of the ground versus putting them there—but Martinez says he still uses many of the skills he acquired from emergency response.

Gazing upon the embalming table, it did appear as if one had walked into an operating room, albeit one with a wide selection of makeup, nail polish, and hair products. Scattered around the room were complicated pumps and hoses, forceps, clamps and knives, a vague smell of formaldehyde, bottles of preserving solutions, a two-body refrigerator, and even a solution of Botox-for-the-dead. With Martinez’s help, his customers look as good in death as they ever did in life. For the amount of dead he sees on the table,  Martinez said he doesn’t feel that there are any ghosts lurking. No angry ones, anyway.

Martinez Funeral Home, 2534 S. Pulaski Rd., Chicago, IL 60623. 773-521-3972.

The festival, which was volunteer-run and sponsored by the Little Village Chamber of Commerce, turned local businesses into impromptu galleries, placing the neighborhood on exhibit alongside its art. Patrons visited Catedral Café to pick up maps and event information, passed the hot pink and orange corner store, and even stepped into panaderías for a pastry on their way to the next gallery space.

Unfortunately, many of these makeshift galleries remained mostly empty, leaving Little Village residents alone to go about their everyday business. “We need more publicity,” Maya said as she distributed fliers. “Media, the newspapers, even door-to-door. More needs to be done.” However, Maya acknowledged that the problem isn’t entirely external: “It can be hard to get people interested. They are busy. They need to go to the grocery store and to work.”

The lack of attention doesn’t indicate a lack of talent, though. This year, the fliers, posters, and other advertising materials were created by graphic designer and long-time contributor to the festival Laura Vergara. Mike Silva, a first time contributor, displayed his linoleum block prints of intricate designs with a subtly gothic nature. Yet, even Silva almost missed out: “I live two blocks away and I hadn’t even heard of [the festival] until this year.”

Despite the lackluster response from some of the older residents and visitors to the neighborhood, the spirit of the Little Village Arts Festival was buoyed by the enthusiasm of its youngest participants. The Sticker/Urban Art Gallery bustled with families and smiling tots. Children ran around the gallery space learning about, interacting with, and creating their own graffiti art while watchful festival volunteers guided them along with helpful pointers. With such a generation waiting in the wings, the best of the neighborhood’s art scene seems like its still in the works.

Maggie Sivit

Pilsen and Little Village are cousins—not only because families often extend across the neighborhood boundaries, nor simply because they are both port-of-entry regions for recent Mexican immigrants. These two are a pair, now more than ever, because of a growing exchange between the two.

Pilsen is a neighborhood of cultural juxtaposition. Dimly lit Café Mestizo, filled with studious patrons eating pasta salad, is just across the street from the abuelas watching lurid novellas inside of Gloria’s Tacos. When asked about some of the best places in Pilsen, one woman who works in the neighborhood snapped, “Do you mean real Pilsen or gentrified Pilsen?”

While the gentrification story is accurate, it’s too simple. Yes, affluent twenty-somethings are moving into the neighborhood, driving up rents and pushing rooted Latino families out. And the number of foreign-born residents in Pilsen has decreased dramatically in the last 20 years, but the young, educated children of the American Dream remain steadfastly committed to the barrio. Places like Working Bikes, which treats bicycles not as an ironic symbol but an important vehicle for working men and women, and Simone’s Bar, which has begun to host weekly karaoke nights where Latinos and non-Latinos alike gather to sing classic Mexican pop hits, are bridging a gap between the cohabiting communities.

In contrast, walking across Ogden into Little Village, also known as La Villita, or, half-jokingly, “the Mexico of the Midwest,” can feel like crossing a real border. Quinceañeras dresses fill storefront windows. On the sidewalk, old men push brightly colored plastic carts filled with paletería, while bored teenage boys occasionally sneer at passing “white hipsters.” Though signs in Little Village’s commercial district are almost always in Spanish, many neighborhood restaurants have begun warming up to visitors by offering menus translated into English, following Pilsen’s lead.

Those who worry that the neighborhoods will renounce their titles as the twin centers of the city’s Mexican-American community seem to ignore the fact that many of the area’s transplants are pulled by the ethnic sounds, sights, and smells. And arguably, both neighborhoods are benefiting from the new (bilingual) conversations about what it means to thrive as a community.

Best Fabric Selection 
Textile Discount Outlet
The Textile Discount Outlet is a 75,000-square-foot warehouse filled with shiny fabrics, glittery tulle, and thick polar fleece. No other place in Pilsen, or perhaps the entire city, can offer what this place does all under one roof—materials to make your daughter’s quinceañera dress, to reupholster your couch, or to colorfully decorate a birdcage. The store’s clientele is mixed: young women speak Spanish as they swap gauzy fabric swatches, middle aged men systematically gather stack after stack of seemingly unrelated fabric, and bossy old ladies snap at the the staff to cut just here and there. The stock caters to this wide range of personages and their projects—paper flowers and buttons in varying degrees of ostentation, dozens of tiebacks, and materials for belly-dancing costumes.  The fabric starts at around $3 per yard, and the staff is ready to direct customers to anything they need. 2121 W. 21st St. Monday, 9:30am-7pm. Tuesday- Wednesday, 9:30am-5pm; Thursday, 9:30am-7pm; Friday, 9:30am-2pm. Sunday, 10am-4pm (773)847.0572. megafabrics.com (Cecilia Donnelly)

Best Food from a Factory
Tortilleria Sabinas
When the school bell tolls, children overtake Tortillería Sabinas, the 50-year-old tortilla factory at 18th and Wood, and one of a host of tortillerías that supply the culinary staple of Pilsen and Little Village. The disordered rainbow of backpacks blocks the view, but once inside the big glass windows reveal how to make a perfectly circular corn tortilla. Unfortunately, there are no tours, since their insurance no longer covers the possibility of photo-snapping visitors getting sucked into one of the huge machines and flattened into perfect round circles appropriate for wrapping tacos. Nonetheless, with or without a chance to watch the tortilleros in action, make sure to bite into a hot, soft, almost sweet corn tortilla next time you visit. If you’re in a hurry, definitely pick up a bag of tortilla chips, and if you want a larger meal, the steaming tortillas at Sabinas are said to supply Nuevo Leon right next door. 1509 W. 18th St. (312)738.2412 (Cecilia Donnelly)

Best Cowboy Boot Selection
Durango Western Wear and Almacenes Maria’s
For most of today’s urban fashion boutiques, the art of outfitting the modern cowboy has gone the way of the buffalo. The presence of aging men in oversized sombreros lingering along the commercial strip of 26th Street, though, signals that this place might be your best bet. Entering Durango Western Wear feels like walking into, well, rural Durango, tumbleweeds excluded. They’ve got wide-collared button-ups embroidered with ornate crosses and flowers, and belt buckles as big and heavy as a gold brick. Female mannequins sport Almaneces Maria’s off-the-shoulder mini-dresses, belted blouses, and stretchy leggings. Pairs of disembodied legs, dressed in Wrangers and Levis,  mount overstuffed clothing racks. But Durango Western Wear really stomps out the (admittedly limited) competition when it comes to boots. Colorful ostrich print short boots, soft suede skinny heeled boots, pink painted and heavily bejeweled boots, boots that look like alligator snouts, boots made of glossy eel skin. Buyers beware: the more lavish the adornment, the higher the price. And with some pairs marked upwards of $400, these boots are made for walking, not riding. 4136 W 26th St. Weekdays, 10 am – 8 pm, Sunday, 10 am – 6 pm. (773) 762.2610 MariasChicago.com (Kelsey Gee)

Best Soy Taco
El Faro
Forget the rice and beans, vegetarians. Instead, rejoice at the city’s best restaurant for authentic vegetarian Mexican food. While for some Little Village taquerías the “vegetarian” means a torta filled with turkey or other non-beef meats, at El Faro there are dozens of dishes made specifically for vegetarian and vegan customers. The soy chicken and soy pork tacos are textured and seasoned perfectly, serving as hearty replacements for—if not perfect imitations of—their animal-based counterparts. Not into fake meats? Faro’s nopalitos guisados (a spiced cactus entree) and any of their egg dishes are just as good. The menu extends far beyond vegetarian fare, however, so fear not for your meaty friends. The waitresses are helpful and speak more Spanish than English, and the restaurant is packed at all times of the day with customers from around the city. While you’re there, make sure to say hello to the neighborhood’s sweetest elotero, David, whose van of spicy dried mangoes, candies, and nuts is always parked out front. El Faro, which means “lighthouse,” is a gastronomic beacon indeed. 3936 W. 31st St. Monday-Friday, 5am-11pm; Saturday, 5am-12am; Sunday, 7am-11pm. (773)277.1155. elfarorestaurant.com (Kelsey Gee)

Best Iced Coffee
Café Jumping Bean
“Cream and sugar?” the friendly waiter asks, a question that calls to mind immediate dental rot in a Dunkin Donuts world. At Café Jumping Bean, however, the $2 iced coffee is milky, lightly sweetened, and brewed from high-quality beans. Add a sandwich of fresh veggies and peppery tuna beside a half-cup of warm lentil soup, and your afternoon pick-me-up can become a meal. The café serves up an eclectic mix of Mexican licuados, hot soups, filling pastas, and focaccia-bread sandwiches. The food is as delicious and affordable as the coffee—Jumping Bean is committed to sticking to the neighborhood’s working class roots by keeping all of their meals as cheap as possible. Decorated with the work of neighborhood artists, the room buzzes with life—a middle-aged man talks shop on his Bluetooth; a model-thin student reads for class over a bagel; a curly-haired couple whispers to each other in Spanish; all sit cozily surrounded by the work of neighborhood artists. Your search for a caffeine fix couldn’t take you further from corporate humdrum. 1439 W. 18th St. Monday-Friday, 6am-10pm; Saturday-Sunday, 7am-7pm. (312)455-0019. cafejumpingbean.org (Kelsey Gee)

Best Free Art Classes
Pros Arts Studio
Currently housed within a Park District complex in lush Dvorak Park, Pros Arts is a community art program that runs youth camps all summer and art classes during the school year. The Clay Studio class is free and open to the public on Friday nights—often  visitors get their hands a bit dirty before heading out on a Second Friday art crawl. Pros Arts prides themselves on keeping Pilsen’s Mexican cultural and artistic traditions alive — this season participants in the clay class will make soup bowls for a pozolada cook-off fundraiser this winter. Attendees will enjoy the pre-Columbian soup, even having the chance to take one of the bowls home. But if soup and clay are not your thing, Pros Arts also puts on a Día de los Muertos parade and festival. Though they don’t have a standing gallery, their events showcase the art of all participants and serve as community get-togethers. Dvorak Park. 1119 W. Cullerton. Youth Classes, ages 6-12, Friday, 4pm-6pm. Community Classes, all ages, 6pm-8pm. (312)226-7767. prosarts.org (Cecilia Donnelly)

The girls were on their way to the University of Chicago’s campus for College and Career Day. The event, organized by the mentoring organization Women and Youth Supporting Each Other (WYSE), was intended to encourage them to attend a four-year college.

After eating lunch at the UofC’s South Campus Dining Hall (the blue ice cream was a hit), the 23 girls and their mentors headed to a mock class with professor of anthropology Nené Lozada on her archeological dig in Chile. Several girls were slouching in their chairs towards the end of Professor Lozada’s 45-minute lecture, but after she concluded, none of them could stop talking about it. “College lectures are long, but I like it,” one girl remarked. “All you do is, like, sit and watch and take notes and stuff.”

After class, the group embarked on a scavenger hunt around campus, in search of coffee shops, brochures from the admissions office, and pieces of chalk, ending at the Bartlett Trophy Lounge for theater games with the student improv comedy group Off-Off Campus. In a career panel discussions held at the end of the day, the girls heard a doctor, a middle school drama director, and a third-grade teacher starting sentences with the clauses, “when you do your undergrad…” or “when you go to college.”

But despite all the careful messaging, at the end of the day, the girls had eaten lunch in a dining hall, fallen asleep during a lecture, and trudged around campus looking for a cheap cup of coffee.  They had seen college. And in the Chicago Public Schools system, where only 17.5 percent of graduating Latina girls enroll in a four-year college within a year of graduation, the girls didn’t take the college routine for granted. One of the students, Kiara Azarte, surfaced from Bieber fever to put it well and simply. “After today, it made me think of colleges I could go to, what I could major in, what jobs there are, and that there is a lot you could be good at.”

Three blocks from the Kedzie Pink Line station I’m brought to a halt by a giant stop sign that reads ARTE. The bright red banner in the window of Yoli Furniture indicates that art can be found in this unlikely setting, inviting curious passersby in with a handwritten sign on the door directing them to the rear of the building. To get to this exhibit, one of seventeen in last weekend’s Little Village Arts Festival, attendees must follow a narrow path in between a parted sea of piled sofas and dining room tables.

Hanging up on the concrete walls in the back of the store are colorful 2-D works done in acrylic and spray paint. The exhibit, which also includes a painted air tank on the floor and a bloody bust of Jesus Christ with rotary saw blades behind his hair, is made up of art submitted by young males in the area between the ages of 18 and 24 who have spent time in a Chicago correctional facility. The curator’s brother points to his own piece, a neon pink-and-purple-striped image with outlined graffiti letters in one corner.

The Little Village Arts Festival (LVAF) started as a temporary solution to the growing number of local artists who had work on display in every neighborhood but their own. Unlike the adjacent neighborhood of Pilsen, La Villita has no permanent venues for the display of community artwork. In 2006, the LVAF claimed five gallery spaces, a few committed artists, and a small amount of money granted by Enlace Chicago, a Little Village non-profit dedicated to community organizing and development. Organized by Villarte, a neighborhood arts coalition hoping to invite members into the heart of the community with unique gallery and performance spaces, the Arts Fest was never intended to be a regular event. But the festival brought a much larger turnout than they had anticipated. Interest from local schools, churches, and businesses willing to donate extra space and talent, Villarte was inspired to make it an annual Villita celebration, held in October of each year. Says Elias Corral, a local artist and LVAF founder, the fest is “a great way to increase awareness about the amount of ‘home-grown’ talent, and for the community to enjoy and experience the world of artistic creation right in their backyards.”

Four years later, the Little Village Arts Festival lives on. Now without a gallery space of its own, Villarte relies on the friendships and close connections within the tight-knit Little Village community. Villarte board members—almost all practicing artists—have other jobs, teaching high school chemistry, working as dance instructors, or running local stores, enabling them to call on a diverse mix of up-and-coming artists. The festival now boasts seventeen converted spaces and spans three days of performances, activities and workshops. The tie between most exhibition areas and the work they contain is simply the neighborhood—when asked why he chose Las 3 Campanitas ice cream shop for his exhibit “Vision,” the curator responds frankly, “They said yes.”

The festival’s main hub, Catedral Café, is a stone castle on the corner across the street from a gallery that Villarte used to own. Although it’s rainy and bleak outside, the inside is bustling with artists and neighborhood families. Children put together photo frames at round tables in the front of the building as a performance takes place in the back. A remix of Miike Snow’s “Animal” bumps in the background; Jose Art, a local airbrush artist, and an assistant apply paint to the stomach of a willing, tube-topped teenage model. She looks proud to be the canvas, an image of theater masks taking over her chest in the colors of the Mexican flag. A crowd of the girl’s friends, a few older Caucasian couples, and various community members watch the work come together, as girls in traditional Mexican floral dresses and their mothers bring bags of costume changes across the stage to the back.

In the living-gallery style for which Pilsen has come to be known, Exhibit 8, “Faces of Little Village,” is located on the second-floor of an apartment building. When asked about the differences between the two neighborhoods, a friend of the artist, keeping her company in the gallery, comments, “I see Pilsen as a place representing the past of Latinos in Chicago. Little Village for me feels more like the present.” And with two bundled-up toddlers traipsing through the apartment’s front door as we exit—undeterred by the weather or the fact that gallery hours are almost over—the future of the neighborhood’s art scene looks bright.

“Appreciate everything. Why else you do think we came to this goddamned country?” Javier stands in his kitchen, facing his adolescent daughter—she’s drunk, failing high school, and ready to run away. The low stage he stands on is bare except for a table, two chairs, a few milk crates covered with a sheet, and a stream of smoke from an incense stick burning off stage right. In the small, back-room auditorium of Café Catedral in Little Village, a family audience of about sixty watches the tense scene unfold under a barn-shaped ceiling painted in faded shades of red, white, and blue.

At the Little Village Arts Festival last Saturday afternoon, Teatro Americano gave the first bilingual performance of Con Raices, Sin Papeles. Put on by an all-volunteer and mostly teen-aged cast, the play is based on the true stories of Latino immigrant families around Chicago, and will show several more times in locations across the city.

The story follows a family of first generation Mexican immigrants over four years, with flashbacks to their days in Mexico. Javier and Marta lived in Mexico until their infant son Ivan’s illness forced Javier to cross into el norte to find work. The money he makes as a laborer isn’t enough, and Marta must eventually cross herself, carrying her Ivan with her.

In Chicago, the family faces generational struggles as they try to establish a new life without losing their identity. They are forced to tell their college-bound son that he isn’t a citizen, and can’t apply for a scholarship to Harvard. “Este Harvard, está en Chicago?” Dolores asks, trying to avoid the inevitable. “Har-vard. That’s an animal, right?” Javier puts in. “I watch the Discovery Channel.” At the same time, their daughter, Sophia, who is a citizen, runs away, rebelling against a broken system. “Teachers don’t care, so why should I? I’m a number.”

The themes are familiar, but they’re also timely; the play is overtly political. In his introduction, director Emmanuel Guttierez introduces Teatro Americano as a branch of Latinos Progresando, a Pilsen-based non-profit that also provides affordable legal services to immigrant families and gives scholarships to promising students who face legal issues because of residency or documentation. There are even a few direct, somewhat awkward speeches about Latinos Progresando, the Dream Act (an initiative to improve access to higher education for immigrants), and discriminatory legislation in Arizona.

This is a community theater company; the play lacks some of the smoothness of a professional production. There are moments of unconvincing dialogue, clumsy acting, and stuttered or repeated lines, but they aren’t serious distractions, and between them there are moments of startling, fresh, and powerful theater. In one of the most affecting scenes, the young Javier desperately tells his wife that he will send money soon, and that he wakes up crying during the night for fear of never seeing his son. He is cut off when his phone card expires.

Some of the best moments in the performance come directly out of its community roots. “Got that job at the carwash,” Ivan tells his father. “The one on Kedzie.” The audience laughs; that carwash is a few blocks away. Even the accidents—Javier slaps a cup off of the table and accidentally sends it onto an audience member, the burning incense sets off the smoke alarm for thirty seconds—reinforce the interaction between the story of those on stage and the story of those in front of it.

The crowd itself is part of the show. The spectators have almost all come as families, many of them spanning at least three generations, and roughly a fourth of the crowd is children. Several play on the floor between the aisles, and one bold toddler climbs on stage and sits down during a scene. Another stood on the back of a reporter’s chair while he jotted down notes.

Yes, this plotline has been done before, and there are gaps in the acting, and by the third scene you will have guessed the ending, but there is something more important going on. This isn’t about the suspension of disbelief; it’s a direct, present reflection on a reality being lived by much of the audience watching it. It’s more powerful than it would be if it were perfect, and if an affected audience is any measure of success, the play is a triumph. When Javier’s phone call is mid-sentence, many, many people in this room are crying.

After the production ends, the director and the actors come to the front of the stage and introduce themselves. They are from Back of the Yards, Pilsen, Gage Park, Brighton Park. They take questions from the audience about their personal experience as immigrants. The actor who played the elder Javier jokes about his own real trip across the river, while the director Gutierrez admits he cried during rehearsals. “What inspires you?” one audience member asks. The teenage actress who a few minutes before had been Dolores now stands before the crowd as herself, and recounts her personal realization. “It was like, oh…we’re living this.”