I was too young to get into the clubs. But with my best friend or cousin, we would walk about a mile from our house, going east, passing corner stores, eloteras, and el Arco de La Villita, following the faint sound of the tambora.
We’d try to balance on the tracks in front of Cook County Jail, on that little stretch between Sacramento and California, with the sun beaming down on us. I remember squinting under the sleek sombrero I just bought on 26th Street, my ostrich boots slipping on the rails.
Finally, we’d arrive at a dirt field hidden behind the jail parking lot.
We were in Plaza Garibaldi. It was the only Garibaldi I’d heard of at the time, completely unaware of the famous plaza in Mexico City known for its mariachis. I’d visit that one much later.
Everything about Garibaldi felt welcoming. It was like I was in the rancho. The horses, the bullpen, the banda playing, the jaripeo emcee. It was a feeling I struggled to make sense of because I wasn’t born in Mexico. I was born here, in Cook County Hospital. However, the rest of my family had grown up in Guanajuato and I felt like I had missed out on something big.
Plaza Garibaldi gets filled to the brim with dancing couples and entire families on certain Sunday afternoons—before returning to the grind the next day—who want an unabashed taste of their culture. The day starts with a lineup of bull riders that hype up the crowd forming around the corral. This is followed by grupos and bandas, sometimes on two stages, who play until sundown.
My dad was a bull rider in the eighties, and he has the scar to prove it: of the time he survived the horn of a toro piercing his chin and knocking out his front teeth. Back in his day, to ride bulls (without dying) was such a status symbol that when I had the privilege to visit Mexico as a child, everyone in town knew who my father was.
I’ve been told by people who spent the weekend in jail that they could hear everything at Garibaldi. Even the gritos mexicanos.
A Chicago Tribune paper from 1990, back when the Garibaldi had weekly events, described a charreada. It’s a better-known competition and different than a jaripeo in that it showcases charros in nice suits and wide-brimmed hats demonstrating their livestock-handling skills on their horses instead of mounting bulls.
“And what a fiesta it was,” the paper said about the event that drew 800 attendees. “The crowd drank huge glass jugs of aguas—refreshing drinks made from watermelon or lemons—as well as Coca-Cola and Budweiser. There were mangos on a stick and packs of peanuts, cowboy hats and bolo ties, and little girls in cotton-candy fluffy dresses.”
It continued: “A team of four kept appetites sated, cooking up tacos, carne asada and plump rounds of corn masa called gorditas—’I’ve done, oh, about 300 so far,’ said Teresa Sanchez, rhythmically patting gorditas while a brass band, El Recuerdo de Celaya, kept the sound level high.”
When I heard that in early September ICE vehicles were seen driving into the lot, I didn’t freak out because it was a weekday morning. But I’m like, “Shit, what’s next?” and I started to imagine them arriving on a Sunday when it was full of mexicanos. Especially because the weekend before it was a packed house with top-tier artists (El Fantasma, Tierra Cali, Marcos Flores y la Banda Jerez, Gerardo Díaz, and Los Alameños).
Maybe it’s the editor in me or maybe it’s the Mexican American in me that makes me picture the worst case scenarios. It’s not a healthy way to live, but it’s what these times call for. The reality is that our cultural spaces in Chicago are few and sacred—and they’re endangered.
We can’t lose our plazas to authoritarianism, to state-sanctioned racism, to la migra, Trump or gentrification. Let’s attend, support, donate to, and promote the decades-long traditions we’ve built in the city.