After seven years of the Michelada Festival and its relocation from Pilsen to Oakwood Beach in 2024, the beloved community event had to cancel this year’s festivities. In a sudden announcement last month, festival organizers pointed to “uncertainty around artist visas and the shifting political climate” for the cancellation.
The fallout of an up and coming Chicago music festival underscores how current immigration policies are not only disrupting cultural exchange but also straining local labor and stoking fear within immigrant communities.
“We wanted to be responsible with not only the kind of experience that we give [festival goers], but also their hard earned dollars,” Miche Fest co-founder and owner Fernando Nieto said. “If we’re going to pull the plug, it’s now, rather than two, three months from now.”
The grassroots South Side festival, which was slated to be held in July, began in Pilsen’s Harrison Park, boasting local mariachi bands and asking attendees for a suggested donation. Last year, the festival moved to Oakwood Beach, upping the scale of the event but still managing to harness community spirit.
Through the years, the lineup has grown to feature artists like Kali Uchis and Junior H while uplifting local talent like Los Kbros and DJs from the likes of Nanoos and Mo Mami. Art installations curated by South Side artists like Sentrock highlighting the vibrancy of Chicago culture became the backdrop for the sounds and smells; at the center of it all, however, always remained the michelada.
“It’s a perfect representation of our culture,” Big Mich co-founder Javier Garcia said. “When you’re able to make someone a michelada, you’re going out of your way to squeeze some limes, put the ice in, rim the glass, make sure the beer is cold, the presentation—it’s a sign of love.”
The michelada is a spicy Mexican drink, often made with tomato juice, lime, salt and beer with variations depending on the person’s palate. In recent years, local companies across the city have sprouted by either hosting pop-up events or selling their homemade mixes in jars. For many, Miche Fest was a way to introduce their product to the market.
“[Miche Fest] gave us a springboard. They gave us an opportunity to have a platform for like-minded individuals,” Garcia said.
Garcia founded Big Mich alongside his wife Natalie in 2017, just two years prior to the inaugural Miche Fest. Big Mich has had a stand every year since and has now expanded to sell their products in over 500 retailers across the country. This magnifies the impact that the cancellation of Miche Fest has on the community and the ability it provides for small businesses to expand and grow alongside each other.
“We started as a street festival with four team members, and now we have about twenty independent contractors on our team,” Nieto said. But their influence stretches past the core festival team to the vendors seeking involvement to the people outside festival grounds selling homemade merch out of their trunks.
“We hire small businesses that provide our generators, our sanitation, our security, our tent companies…We hire Latino owned, small, independent companies. And so it was a hard conversation letting them know that, ‘hey, we’re not doing the event this year’,” Nieto said.
“We pump a lot of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars into community reinvestments through these contracts,” Nieto added, emphasizing how deeply the festival’s operations are rooted in local economic ecosystems.
The current Trump administration launched an “unprecedented crackdown” on immigration that began on day one. With the goal of deporting one million immigrants annually, Trump has created a spectacle fueled with fear.
Before Miche Fest was canceled, Los Alegres del Barranco were part of the initial lineup. Within 24 hours of dropping confirmed artists on their social media platforms, festival organizers had to replace the Mexican regional group because their visas were revoked after a performance in Jalisco, Mexico.
At that performance, the group projected the image of a notorious cartel leader mentioned in the song, potentially breaking Mexican laws that have been enacted to combat narco/cartel culture.
“I’m a firm believer in freedom of expression, but that doesn’t mean that expression should be free of consequences,” wrote U.S Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau in a post on X.
Mexican regional artist, Julion Alvarez, took to his Instagram account to let his fans know via video that his and his band’s visas were revoked—despite his music being overwhelmingly love songs. Alvarez was due to perform at a sold-out show in Arlington, Texas. Grupo Firme, another Mexican regional talent, had their visas suspended late last month causing them to miss their scheduled performance at La Onda Fest in California.
The administration’s policies are trickling down, affecting not only artists’ visas but leaving many wondering if ICE raids could be a possibility at community events. Places traditionally protected from ICE raids like churches and schools have now been authorized to be targets for federal immigration authorities.
“We asked the city, and we asked Chicago police, very candidly, what does it look like if ICE shows up at an event that’s free versus a hard ticket event that’s gated and private,” Nieto said. “And to be quite honest, they really didn’t know.”
This uncertainty is being felt in other parts of the country. In South Carolina, the Latino fan base of the Nashville Soccer Club, la Brigada de Oro, posted on social media that they would be canceling their tailgate activities due to recent ICE operations in the area. ICE also showed up at the Santa Fe Springs Swap Meet detaining several people and detained a high school student in Massachusetts on his way to volleyball practice. ICE is not targeting “criminals,” as they claim, but infiltrating all aspects of people’s daily lives.
Miche Fest organizers created a resource page on their website equipped with information on legal aid, know your rights information and more. “When we say we’re ‘From Chicago, for Chicago,’ we mean it. This isn’t a marketing line for us. It’s what we stand for,” they posted to their official Instagram.
For over four decades, Chicago has been a sanctuary city, with laws that prohibit local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration agents, inquiring about immigration status, or detaining individuals based solely on their immigration status.
“It saddens me. Chicago has been very supportive of us being a sanctuary city, and I believe that we have done our part to support all communities, and it’s just very unfortunate what we’re seeing coming out of Washington, D.C.,” said 4th Ward Alderman Lamont Robinson. The 4th Ward was host to Miche Fest last year.
Robinson also highlighted the financial hit the Chicago Park District is taking due to the two-day festival’s cancellation—a ripple effect that’s now impacting local jobs and the broader economy.
Despite the uncertainty, organizers remain undeterred. Earlier this month, Miche Fest held its first iteration in El Paso, and its parent team continues to build community through events like the Margarita Festival in Pilsen, Michelada 5K and upcoming Mas Flow 5K.
“We’re still just South Side kids doing this event at the end of the day,” Nieto said, emphasizing that neither policy nor fear can erase their roots or their mission.
For Garcia and others, the festival may have paused, but the culture behind it hasn’t.“I don’t want to be cheesy, but la gente unida, jamás será vencida,” Garcia said. “Nothing can take us down.”
Jocelyn Martinez-Rosales is a Mexican American independent journalist from Belmont Cragin committed to telling stories from communities of color through a social justice lens. She is also a senior editor at the Weekly.