Well, in the, when I was around, I think it was 19, it was, at that time there was a little bit of organization because one of the things that I became involved with was the afterschool program to teach English.
They had a teacher at Kaminsky Grammar School, which was in the corner of, I think it was 17th Street and Troup Street.
And that had been initiated by request of the people there because there were a lot of people that needed to learn English.
And so I got involved in there.
They had classes after school.
I went there every day.
And another thing was that we called it Hall House, which is now Casa Slam.
The teacher at Kaminsky Grammar School referred us to Hall House, which is really funny because we lived only a block away.
But we, basically, my parents and myself, we're kind of shy about approaching people that, because we didn't know the language that well.
So even though it was a block away, we didn't know about it until the teacher referred me there for two reasons, so that I could take another class during the weekends and Saturdays for English.
And the other was that a library bus or trailer would come in.
They had books, so I could borrow books there.
And that, as far as I remember, was kind of where I became more conscious of the community.
And that these were people that were interested in improving the lives of the members there.
During that time, a lot of the people living there were from Yugoslavia, Europe, Northern Europe, I forget, and they were very nice to us.
But we were, I guess, kind of shy about approaching them.
So this was an effort to sort of get people involved.
After a while, when I started in high school, there was a period between the late 1960s and early 1970s.
There was a lot of activity, a lot of political, where they had meetings at Kazakhstan to work out problems.
One of the problems in the neighborhood was that our garbage was not picked up on a regular basis.
Sometimes it would be two weeks, two weeks and a half before they picked up.
And it was a problem, because there were a lot of poor families there, and it was very tempting for the young children to go pick up food from the garbage and that sort of thing.
The other problem was that potholes or on sidewalks were not fixed.
And there was, particularly in the black, a big gaping hole.
We called a city, and all they did was put one of those horses with the lights.
Of course, we would go in and play there.
We thought it was neat.
And the kids would go there and play.
It took several months before they even came to put the horse in, and then several months before they even put a board on top of it, which wasn't much help.
That, even though it may seem trivial, was kind of a beginning of a turning point for the community.
Before that, people were kind of pathetic.
They felt, well, nothing's going to get done.
So it was even hard to get people to come and meet and talk about their problems.
We had people come in also to talk about immigration, which was, immigration was a very strong force, a dreaded force.
And even for people that had documentation who were residents, because they were not aware of what their rights were.
And even citizens, that was a problem, not being aware of what their rights were.
And that occurred sort of as a result.
You really don't know unless you get educated here what the United States is about and what are the rights and different things.
It was in the early 1970s that we started seeing the painting of the murals.
And I am not familiar as to which was first or not.
I don't remember.
But the ones that I liked, that I enjoyed, and that made an impact on me, were the ones that were painted at the Casa de Slam.
In their general hall, they painted ones that were kind of very individual.
I think the artist, it was just one and maybe with the help of others.
I enjoyed those because they were paintings of heroes that I was aware of that I learned in history, my history classes in Mexico.
It was exciting because to me, these were people that looked like me that were significant.
And at that time, my experience had been one where I felt like I wasn't significant.
And it wasn't only my experience, it was the experience of my family, other families that we knew.
And it was just sort of nice to have something that was positive.
And the meetings there had another added dimension that meeting elsewhere was not.
And I think it had to do with just seeing these bigger than life pictures of people that we were familiar with that were from the same place that we were.
Those were repainted with less political themes.
There was a lot of talk and controversy.
It's like, we need to work with the larger community of Chicago.
This sort of getting back to our roots is important, but being this political might turn people off.
And we had groups which wanted, let's preserve our roots and let's do this thing traditionally.
And let's just keep our segregated basically.
And there were the others who said, this is our home.
We have to work with the rest of the people that live in Chicago.
And so there was a lot of fire in the discussions in some of those meetings there.
One of the things that people agreed on were to try to do something for the children.
And there was a lot of graffiti in all the buildings.
And there was hardly any spots that had some kind of gang name or just full of graffiti.
And that was, so someone came up with the idea that if the murals inside Casa Slan, nobody had written over, and in the past they did.
It was just another place to, somehow people were protecting them.
Why not do it for the local grocery stores and they had big walls.
So they sold that idea.
I think that in an unconscious sort of way too, this was a kind of an accepted way of gathering.
I said that in that our experience during the 60s, late 60s and 70s was that we were not allowed to gather.
There was a group of people in the corner talking, especially if there were men, the police would come and disperse.
There was a lot of sense of paranoia of people gather.
It was to plot, I don't know what.
But it was kind of an experience of friends or cousins that would come home very mad that they were just talking with a few friends in the corner and the police had come and told them to move out.
Often with threats that if you don't move out, we'll call the immigration service.
It worked very well.
So this was actually a way that kids, adolescents, could get together and do something that was constructive, that was positive, that was going to stay there I think.
I saw a lot of the kids in school got involved with that.
I worked for St.
Pocoppia's during the summer between grammar school and high school.
Basically, I forget what the title was, it's some kind of supervision of children from ages 10 to 12, I believe.
Some of them worked in the mural by Blue Island, the one over P .S.
It's just different faces of different colors.
The kids liked it because a lot of them were from different colors.
We had a mixture of black, Puerto Rican, Mexican, and from Yugoslavia.
We had the full range of colors there.
The kids liked it and we always used to tease them, where did the pink faces come from? They said, we just want to say that it's different colors, that they're pretty, and that they can be together.
That was important.
Let's see, I don't know.
I know you talked to Julie and Susan about feeling a sense of outrage, and that you saw that expressed in the murals and that was something related to.
Could you talk about that, why the outrage and how you identified with that in the murals? Around the early 60s and 70s, a lot of things were happening.
There was increased police activity in the area as far as dispersing groups.
There just seemed to be that sense that blacks or anybody that looked different were very threatening.
People had to stay in their houses.
Gangs also, at that time there were a lot of gangs that were very active.
They had this appeal that most of the kids were approached to join them.
I think some of them started as a result of that sense that we couldn't gather, and they were kind of a way of protesting that.
Eventually they just started doing destructive things against the community.
But initially it was just a form, sort of a protest form.
So I felt a sense of being isolated.
My family did too.
Again, the behavior, I tell you that we just knew that little area.
That the majority of people there were poor, working in factories.
It was just a sense of oppression that you weren't going to get there.
People were driving out of school to help their families, start working soon, early, and help their families.
