by Carlos Cortez, 1990
presented by Preserve Maxwell Street
Carlos Cortez is a Chicano artist and poet living in Chicago. This poem is about a stretch of Chicago's Halsted Street, between Roosevelt Road and Greek Town, that was destroyed in the late 1950s/early 1960s to make room for the University of Illinois and the Congress Expressway. This included the northern edge of the Maxwell St. neighborhood
The poem and these notes were submitted by Mary Calderon <mcalde6@uic.edu> a UIC student from the nearby Pilsen Neighborhood.
"I found it in a poem book called Crystal-Gazing, the Amber Fluid by Carlos Cortez. It brought back many memories that I had about Halsted St. and Maxwell St. from the 50's and 60's when my parents use to go down there for their weekend COMPRAS (mexican products, shopping), attend Spanish mass at St. Francis of Assisi with my mother or sometimes visit my father who worked at one of the meat markets. As I was reading the poem I could imagine how it was and recalled the variety of smell of food, cigars, the people, the music, etc. mentioned in the poem." - MC
Click here for more information about Carlos Cortez.
Well, they have finally gotten around to the Street, these apostles of civic improvement, they are advancing with their cranes and bulldozers tearing down the old slum so that newer and bigger and loftier slums can be built on this, the Street once lined with an endless array of small shops, bistros and hole-in-the-wall restaurants where one could bask in the culinary delights of far way places, where one could walk by small music stores and hear strange music that somehow was not strange at all, where the sidewalk passerby would be constantly beset by side walk pitchmen and Gypsy fortune tellers; and where else in this standardized American metropolis could you hear of the wonderful quality and ridiculously low price of the latest fashion in suits extolled to you in Spanish with a Yiddish accent or the Gypsy girls who take one quick size-up and start handing you their con-line in the tongue of your ancestors?
It was not the cleanest of streets, not here in this unclean city, but it was a happy street, happy with the smell of pizza, roasted lamb heads, Turkish coffee, and tacos; happy with the raucous babble of many voices; happy with the voices from the ghettos of Bucaresti, Odessa and Wilno; happy with the voices of those who had known only the roof of Romanian, Hungarian and Serbian skies; happy with the voices from Morelia, Ixtapalapa and Nuevo Laredo; happy with the voices from Caguas, Ponce and Arecibo; yes, happy with the voices from Mobile, Beaumont and Chattanooga; happy with the voices from Palermo, Catania and Livorno, a small united nation s that somehow wasn't completely united and somehow it didn't make too much difference.
True, it was quite a dine but it was a human din, it was a mess but it was a human mess, not like the din that is heard on the Street now, the mechanical roar of the cranes and the mechanical thump of the large ball and the mechanical roar of the bulldozers directed from distant offices, committees and kickback artists with mechanical mentalities and mechanical hearts and not like the mess left in the wake of the redevelopment juggernaut leaving behind a mess that would put a B-29 to shame.
The rubble creeps up on the last remaining pawnshops, bodegas and pizzerias, the last remaining small haberdasheries, kafenios and taquerias; Street of zucchini, baklava and enchilada, at last you are falling before the advance of standardization; Street of olives, snails and avocados, your days are numbered; Street of chianit, mazel and retsina, of ouzo, arak and tequila with your guitar thumping cantinas and belly-dancing tavernas, those who do not know you have the power to destroy you for behold advancing in the distance following in the wake of bulldozers and rising above the clouds of dust of your corpse are your brand new tombstones called civic redevelopment; human anthills that look like a combination of cell-block and skyscraper, yes they are building bigger and better tenements that are destine to become bigger and blightier areas.
And you, you good city planners and you fat pocket contractors, when you job is completed and you come down here to look at your accomplishments, are you honestly going to believe you've made any improvement other than in the health of your back pocket?
Carlos Cortez(60K) was born in Milwaukee in 1923, today and today he turns 74 and we celebrate his accomplishments. His father was a Mexican Wobbly, and his mother a German socialist-pacifist.. Carlos followed in both of their footsteps. He is the author of Where Are The Voices? & Other Wobbly Poems, and Crystal-Gazing the Amber Fluid and Other Wobbly Poems, both published by Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company. He is published in the anthology Emergency Tacos: Seven Poets con Picante (MARCH/Abrazo Press). Carlos joined the IWW in 1947 after being released from two years of federal detention as a conscientious objector. During his many years as a Wobbly, many of his poems have been published in the Industrial Worker. He is also a renowned graphic artist, and his wood cut prints were recently featured at the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum. - from the Guild Complex
Carlos Cortez
Upon his release from federal detention in 1947 he joined the IWW and has remained active for five decades as a graphic artist, poet, and advisor within that organization. In 1985 at the Gato Negro Press [transl. Black Cat Press] he printed a catalog for a touring exhibition of cartoons, Wobbly: 80 Years of Rebel Art.
Cortez has been a muralist, woodblock and linoleum-block artist, and cartoonist. He added the name Koyokuikatl (using the Náhuatl for coyote) as an adult, but usually does not include it in identifying his poetry. He typically signs his art with the letters CAC, the imprint of a coyote baying upward, and a date. His formal art training consisted of two years of art basics in high school and later night classes at Layton Art School (uncredited).
He says of his current life: "After some 40 years of being a construction laborer, record salesman, bookseller, factory stiff and janitor, am no longer punching a clock for some employer and am now engaged in the most productive phase of my life." (Resumé submitted to project, June 1997). -- from About Carlos Cortez Koyokuikatl in Chicana and Chicano Space: A Thematic, Inquiry-Based Art Education Resource
Carlos Cortez, Activist Art
With his sometimes radical and often politically-inspired artwork, Carlos Cortez has gained international recognition as one of the county's great artists. We'll take a look at the human figures, Mexican traditions, and human rights struggles depicted in the murals which have decorated the Pilsen area during his thirty years as a Chicagoan. Cortez's belief that "all art is political" adds to the powerful and universal messages depicted in his work. --WTTW Artbeat
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