The Chicago Boricua 60s and 70s: A Radical Renaissance

In “The Chicago Boricua 60s and 70s: A Radical Renaissance” I explore the participation of Puerto Rican artists in the 1960s and 1970s in a burgeoning Chicago Arts Renaissance. Boricua artists often engaged the multimedia... [ view full abstract ]

In “The Chicago Boricua 60s and 70s: A Radical Renaissance” I explore the participation of Puerto Rican artists in the 1960s and 1970s in a burgeoning Chicago Arts Renaissance. Boricua artists often engaged the multimedia that encompasses Diaspora Puerto Rican expressive culture, manifesting new forms that now represent the vanguard of Puerto Rican arts and politics. During this period, Chicago experienced an arts renaissance that complemented the political movement advancing in the Puerto Rican community. Emerging from the cultural center of the Midwest, the movement shared some of the major characteristics of the Nuyorican Movement in New York. To begin with, both movements emerged from the struggles of neighborhoods facing economic and cultural oppression and systematic neglect. The movements were embedded and evolved from prior generations of communities that had set up strong and enduring cultural foundations for themselves as Puerto Ricans in urban spaces facing profound adversarial conditions on a number of levels.

Poetry, theater, music and visual artists among other craftsmen and women cultivated cultural identity for Chicago Puerto Ricans providing the impetus for a political movement that changed the course of history for Puerto Ricans in the US. Churches, particularly the Chicago Roman Catholic Archdiocese and the parish councils, played an important initial role in creating the social spaces for new migrants to form communities in neighborhoods like Lincoln Park, Old Town, Humboldt Park and other Chicago lakeside communities. Theater spaces including The San Juan, The Plaza, The Senate, The Biltmore and The Alameda theaters, brought to audiences Spanish language movies and hosted variety shows featuring local, national and international Puerto Rican artists. In it’s own condensed version of the famed “Cuchifrito Circuit,” Puerto Rican entrepreneurs opened the first nightclubs including Habana Madrid, Café Olé and Coco Loco in the 1960s. Along with other Latino-owned music venues in the 1970s, like Latin Village, Cats and Tania’s, as well as mainstream venues like the Aragon, the International Ballroom and the Golden Tiara Chicago audiences not only enjoyed big international acts but also witnessed the Golden Era of the Chicago Puerto Rican music scene that included salsa, R&B and rock groups like The Mustangs, Bob Stone Group, La Confidencia, La Mafia del Ritmo, Típica 78 among others. Newspapers and periodicals including El Informador, El Puertorriqueño, Vida Latina, Revista Chicano-Riqueña documented from even earlier decades the works of poets, improvisadores, as well as the social and political developments of the Chicago Puerto Rican community.

What was clear about Chicago’s reinvigorated commitment to culture and creativity in the 60s and 70s was the unwillingness of artists to disengage themselves from the struggles that had led the community to properly contextualize its place in the Chicago political structure. This generation of cultural producers did not aim for assimilation, as previous generations had been led to contemplate. The Chicago Puerto Rican Renaissance artists engaged a similar progressive nationalism demonstrated in the philosophy of many of the era’s political activists as many artists engaged themes and directly engaged city and national politics.