When I was asked to write for South Side Weekly’s Best of the South Side, my mind immediately started racing. I was told to “walk” the reader through four to six places on the South Side that have been special or instrumental to me.
I’m from the South Side. It’s my identity, as much as being Mexican or queer. I have significant memories all across the South Side, from Mt. Greenwood to Pilsen and everywhere in-between. But once I began flipping through the mental catalogue of meaningful moments and the places that anchored them, I realized so many of those places no longer exist.
The South Side is not like downtown or so much of the North Side, which are destinations for tourists and upwardly mobile transplants and where the landscape changes all the time to cater to shifting consumerist desires and trends. Instead, for so long, one of the things I loved about the South Side is that it was reliable—I could count on it to stay the way I remember it. But I came to realize how much of that increasingly was just my fantasy of home.
Sure, it’s not Lincoln Park or Lakeview where a crop of poké bowl spots obnoxiously appeared overnight to cash in on the cultural commodification of Hawaiian cuisine. Change doesn’t happen like that on the South Side. But it does happen. So many places I remember—bars, bowling alleys, churches, corner stores, family-run restaurants, malls, music shops—have become quiet casualties of time.
I started to ask myself, “What has endured?” I began looking at the places that remain today and speculating, “What will endure?” I’d take a long hot shower and list in my head what I hope endures on the South Side.
It’s hard to imagine anything “enduring” in a world that is literally melting and where the eradication of a whole population—Palestinians—has been livestreamed for two years. Moreover, ethnic cleansing is no longer something happening 6,000 miles away but has taken hold of our streets as ICE stalks Brown people and the predominantly Mexican American neighborhoods that make up so much of the South Side.
This is what was swirling in my head as I curated my Best of the South Side. The locations I have selected are personal and I share the stories from my life associated with them. But to me, these places aren’t just personal, they are also totemic. For me, these spots are symbolic of my family, emblematic of the South Side’s Mexican American community, or incarnations of the spirit of activism, art and queerness. I go to them as a form of observance and worship.
