The day that hundreds of East Side neighbors stood off with the federal agents at 105th and Avenue N, Joaquin Brito kept his bakery’s doors locked.
A few blocks from Brito’s storefront, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection vehicle had just crashed with a car it had been pursuing.
The crowd grew. Chicago police arrived. Someone threw a rock. Agents fired multiple canisters of tear gas into the crowd. At least three people were detained during the confrontation.
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Wariness permeated the neighborhood for months after.
Brito, a blue bandana knotted around his neck, remembered the cascade of phone calls from that day as workers in green shirts filled and unloaded trays of bread and pastries. Freshly baked conchas and loaves of bread piled up in the self-serve cases. A table with a coffee canister and stack of Styrofoam cups sat nearby.
At the height of the blitz, he remembered, the neighborhood was deserted after 7 or 8 p.m.
Now, he said, “it’s not like in October, but they’re still looking around in the streets.”
Brito shares some of that apprehension. He’s been in the United States since he resettled here from Mexico at 16, he said. He has no family here.
“I’m worried — you never know,” Brito said. “If they catch me, who would take care of my business?”
Brito said business had largely returned to normal, spurred in part by demand for baked goods for Day of the Dead, Thanksgiving, Christmas and then Three Kings Day in January. Over last September and October, he said, business had fallen by about half.