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CHICAGO

A Mexican Village Thrives in the Second City

A few miles southwest of the Loop, the densely populated neighborhood of Pilsen has long been a port of entry for the city’s Mexican Americans. In recent years a wide array of committed residents and community organizations have banded together to transform Pilsen into a permanent community of choice for immigrants and their families.

At the core of this vision is the recreation of a traditional village center, revolving around a central plaza – the zócalo – the heart of community life in a typical Mexican town. Bringing together economic, cultural, and social activities, the zócalo is a place for shopping and strolling, churchgoing and social services, an anchor in a community with a strong cultural identity as well as a catalyst of development to link Pilsen’s majority Latino population to Chicago’s economic mainstream.

The zócalo is part of a “Quality of Life Campaign” launched five years ago by the Resurrection Project, a Pilsen community organization founded in 1990 by a coalition of churches. Resurrection Project staff convened an 18-person team of block club leaders, merchants, and church members to develop a strategy to create “un pueblo dentro de la ciudad” (a village within the city), based on a series of housing, safety, education, and commercial projects, including the zócalo.

A strong supporter of the Resurrection Project campaign is the Chicago Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), which received both government and private sector funding from Living Cities. The evident success of the Resurrection Project and two similar “comprehensive community development” efforts pioneered by Chicago LISC inspired the MacArthur Foundation to provide additional support to LISC to manage comprehensive community development projects in 13 other neighborhoods. Residents in those neighborhoods are being guided in neighborhood planning by community-based organizations, focusing on such items as education, housing, crime, jobs, prisoner re-entry, and parks and open space.

Pilsen residents report that, as a result of implementing their plan, gang activity is down and that they now enjoy a more upscale retail mix and notice more of their neighbors becoming involved in community activities.