The Alternative Issue

Welcome to the Alternative Issue!

This issue is dedicated to the “other”—to the alternatives that have sprouted across the South Side to counter the mainstream and conventional.

To all who have found themselves creating alternatives in the name of survival.

The South Side has long been the city’s epicenter of resourcefulness and invention, the zone where a robust DIY scene has been fostered and nourished. Some successful “disruptors” include Casa Cafe, a Pilsen taqueria that turns into a hardcore music venue by night; and Co-Prosperity, an “experimental cultural center” and convening space that regularly hosts events centering resistance to exclusionary systems and institutions.

This issue aims to encapsulate the underground, the non-traditional and forward thinking movements pushing the bounds of what coexisting can look like, such as the community-first model of La Villita Housing Coop.

Also included is a photo essay on Pynk Portal Pole Sanctuary, and how they are utilizing pole dancing as a form of healing, highlights resilience and creative expression. We speak with Menace4Hire, an Englewood-based dual artist breaking barriers in the musical and fashion industries. And we feature Benny Hernandez, a long-time South Sider who has created a hub for freaks and outcasts at The New Rose, his new bar in Pilsen.

At the heart of the issue is us, the South Side. And through these alternative ways to build and sustain community, we affirm that we are bigger than institutions, than capitalism, and more powerful than any of systems that attempt to define, contain, and displace us.

This issue spotlights the artists, organizers and collectives that push art, politics and possibility beyond mainstream frameworks offering the rest of Chicago alternative ways of creating, consuming, organizing, living and healing.

For the counter-culture,

Jocelyn Martínez-Rosales

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