The corner of 26th Street and Homan Avenue offers a view of either the American dream or its impending doom, depending on who is looking. Recently, a Republican campaign official issued a doomsday forecast of what our country would become if Donald Trump doesn’t get to build his oft-touted wall.
“You’re going to have taco trucks on every corner,” said Marco Gutierrez, founder of Latinos for Trump.
That’s already pretty much true of 26th Street, the shopping-and-socializing rialto of Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood. From California Avenue to Cicero Avenue, food stands, carts and trucks offer umpteen opportunities to satisfy a craving for Mexican street food. For 20 years, I noshed myself up and down the street. My wife’s Aunt Bessie was one of the neighborhood’s few non-Spanish speakers.
Bessie lived in a two-flat she and her late husband bought on Homan Avenue when Czechs and Slovaks lived there. By the time I married Bessie’s niece, she and the two-flat had acquired the infirmities of age, so I became their Mr. Fix-It. Wrapping electrical tape on fraying lamp cords can get old, fast, as can replacing rotting stair treads.
But not on Homan Avenue. Every trip to the hardware store or lumber yard was proof anew that America is a work in progress.
Every immigrant group sets its predecessor to grumbling. But sometimes newcomers bring a clue to what the oldtimers went through.
Take 26th Street’s taco carts, for example. They gave me a persistent sense of deja vu. Finally I realized that my grandparents looked down on a similar view from their third-floor flat on Maxwell Street, an outdoor market in a neighborhood of Jewish immigrants.
I wasn’t alone in making that connection, as a Little Village activist explained to me. He and his group had courted a small foundation hoping for a grant. They showed the businessman whose family had endowed the foundation lots of facts and figures about a project, but couldn’t sense how their pitch was being received.
Then they took him for a ride through the neighborhood, and the taco stands convinced him to cut a check. “My grandfather had a pushcart on Maxwell Street,” he explained.
That man’s grandfather and my grandparents, Bessie and her neighbors, all came here seeking asylum from the endemic poverty of their homelands. That they found. But they constantly worried about family members they’d left behind.
Bessie’s brother — my father-in-law — lived with her and her husband for many years after they came to Chicago. That kept living expenses to a minimum, so he could support their parents in Czechoslovakia. When the last Slavic tenants moved on, the ground floor of Bessie’s two-flat was rented to a Mexican family that was similarly stressed. One distant family member was an alcoholic and difficult to live with.
Periodically the branch of the family in Mexico would grow weary and send him to Homan Avenue. Regular as clockwork, family members in Little Village would be exhausted by the burden and ship him back to Mexico. That went on, year after year, yet family members never considered giving up on him for the sake of their sanity.
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Upstairs and downstairs, the Homan Avenue two-flat was home to the Protestant work ethic.
One thing Bessie firmly believed in was dusting. Until she died at 95, she regularly got down on her hands and knees to run a cloth around the baseboards of her second-floor apartment.
The head of the tenant family was out on Homan Avenue early every workday, waiting for the battered station wagon that took him and others to factory jobs in the northwest suburbs. Little Village used to be a place where residents could walk to work at nearby factories. But manufacturing had relocated to suburbia, so entrepreneurial residents established an ersatz bus service to where their neighbors’ jobs were.
On weekend evenings, my wife and I would see Bessie’s tenant lugging a huge string bass up Homan Avenue. His second job was with a mariachi band playing the taverns and restaurants that line 26th Street.
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